What Came Before He Shot Her

            “Released? Wha’s goin down wiv Joel?” Dix asked abruptly. “Joel in trouble? Ken, damn  it . . .” He ran his hand over his pate. It was an act of frustration and disappointment, with Dix not realising what his ignorance in this matter revealed to the social worker, who glanced between woman and man and made an evaluation of their relationship that Kendra could not afford to have made.

            “Cops had him down the Harrow Road station,” she told him. “I di’n’t like to trouble you with this cos you been busy and it got sorted. It di’n’t seem—”

            “How we make dis work if you keep secrets, Ken?” He asked the question in a fi erce whisper.

            Kendra answered, “C’n we talk ’bout this later?”

            “Shit.” He crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, and Fabia Bender read the movements for what they were. She made a mental note. No father figure. Another tick in the column keeping score of the children’s removal from this home.

            She said, “Under other circumstances, I’d insist on Joel’s placement in that programme I mentioned to you earlier, the one across the river at Elephant and Castle. In fact, I’d advise it for Ness as well. But I agree with you, Mrs. Osborne: There’s the distance and the fact that there’s no one to ensure either their attendance or their safety in making the journey to South London . . .” She lifted her hand and dropped it on the folder containing Joel’s information. “Joel needs counselling, just like Ness, but he needs more than that. He needs supervision, a direction in life, an interest to focus on, an outlet for his concerns, and a male role model with whom he can become involved. We have to provide him with those or we have to consider other options for him.”

            “Dis is down to me,” Dix interceded, believing he bore a certain amount of responsibility for what had happened to Joel even if he wasn’t quite sure what what had happened  meant. “I c’n do more wiv Joel than I been doing. I ain’t tried hard enough cos. . .” He blew out a breath as he thought about all the reasons he’d failed to be the father figure he’d sought to be: his responsibilities to his own family, his desire for success in his chosen field, his insatiable lust for Kendra’s body, his inadequacy in the face of the children’s troubles, his lack of experience and history with the children, the image he possessed of what a family was supposed to be. He could name some of these as reasons for his failure; the rest he could see in his mind. In any case, what he felt was guilt for all of them, and he ended up expressing them with, “Cos ’f life. I meant to do better wiv the kids, an’ I will from now on.”

            Fabia Bender wasn’t in the business of breaking up families, and she wanted to believe that commitment on the part of the two people sitting with her at what was an inadequately sized kitchen table meant a possibility existed that Joel’s trouble would serve as a wake-up call to everyone. Still, she was bound by duty to finish what she had come to say, so that was what she did.

            “We need to think carefully about the children’s future. Sometimes a removal from the environment —even for a brief time—is all that’s necessary to bring about change. I’d like you to think about this. Care is an option. Boarding school is another: a special school to meet Toby’s needs—”

            “Toby’s fine where he is,” Kendra put in. She made the declaration sound firm, not panicked.

            “—and another school to give Joel new direction,” Fabia continued as if Kendra hadn’t spoken. “With them taken care of in this way, we can concentrate on Ness.”

            “I don’t got . . .” Kendra stopped. “I don’t need to think about it. I can’t put them into care. Or send them away. They won’t understand. They’ve been through too much. They’ve . . .” She gestured futilely. Tears in front of this woman were unthinkable, so she said nothing more.

            Dix said it for her. “Jus’ now ever’one’s doing what they’re s’posed to be doin, innit?”

            “Yes,” Fabia Bender said. “Technically. But Ness is going to have to—”

            “Den you let us be fam’ly. We see to Ness. We see to the boys. We stop doin dat, you free to come back.”

            Fabia agreed to this, but anyone could see how insurmountable was the task that faced the two adults. There were too many needs to be met, and most of them were not the simple ones of food, shelter, and clothing, which required money for their procurement and time for their purchase and nothing else. As to the deeper needs of assuaging fears, quelling daily anxieties, reconciling past pain with present reality and future possibility . . . These required the participation of a professional or a group of professionals. Fabia could tell that the aunt and her lover didn’t see this; she was wise enough to know that people had to reach conclusions on their own.

            She told them she would return in two weeks to see how all of them were doing, then. But in the meantime, they were going to have to get Ness to Oxford Gardens for counselling. The magistrate would accept nothing less.

            “I don’t need fuckin counselling,” was how Ness responded to this information.

            “You need a lockup instead?” was how Kendra replied. “You need being sent away? Going into care? Having Toby put away in a special school and Joel going off to board somewhere? That what you need, Vanessa Campbell?”

            Dix said, “Ken. Ken. Go easy,” and he tried to sound sympathetic towards Ness. Just as he tried to be a father to Joel and Toby: checking on schoolwork, watching the skateboarding in Meanwhile Gardens when the winter weather permitted, carving out two hours to go to the cinema for an action-hero film, coaxing the boys to the gym to participate in a workout in which neither of them was interested. But all of this was a street upon which Dix was the only driver: Ness scorned his attempts to intervene; Joel’s cooperation was given in a silence that indicated no cooperation at all; Toby went the way of Joel as always, utterly confused by the entire situation in which he was now living.

            “You best understand this,” Kendra hissed at Joel when she surveyed Dix’s well-meaning attempts and the children’s indifference towards them. “We don’t sort everything out to her liking, this Fabia Bender’s taking the lot of you. Y’understand me, Joel? You know what that means?”

            Joel knew, but he was caught in ways that he could not afford to explain to his aunt. For his escape from the Harrow Road police station, he owed the Blade and he knew that if he did not pay when the account came due, the trouble they would face would make their current trouble seem like a springtime stroll along the towpath by the Grand Union Canal.

            For somehow, everything had gone wrong. What had started out for Joel as a simple and primeval struggle to gain respect in the street had turned into an exercise in sheer survival. The existence of Neal Wyatt receded into the background once Joel found himself a central figure of the Blade’s attention. In comparison to the Blade, Neal Wyatt was in truth as irritating as an ant crawling up the inside of a trouser leg. He was nothing at all set against the knowledge that Joel had at this point in his life: He’d come up against the hardest and most unforgiving place of all in North Kensington. He’d come up against the wishes of Stanley Hynds.

            As unrealistic as it might seem to a rational person in possession of even a small amount of history on the woman, to Joel, Carole Campbell seemed the only answer that could lead to escape.

HE HAD THE money—that blessed fifty pounds from Walk the Word— so there was no need to involve anyone in knowing that he intended to visit his mother. Joel chose a frigid day when his aunt was working, when Dix was at the Rainbow Cafe, and when Ness was at the child drop-in centre. That left him with Toby to look after, with sufficient time to put his plan for rescue into motion.

            He knew the routine. The bus appeared to be waiting just for them at the appointed stop along Elkstone Road, and it trundled over to Paddington station with so few passengers onboard that the journey seemed designed to symbolise the ease with which Joel’s plans were going to come to fruition. He bought their tickets for the train ride and took Toby, as always, to WH Smith. He kept a firm grip on his brother, but he needn’t have worried. Toby was determined to stick to Joel like a burr in a fox’s tail. With his skateboard tucked under his arm, he tripped along and asked if he would be allowed to have a bar of chocolate or a bag of crisps.

            “Bag of crisps,” Joel told him. The last thing he needed to contend with was Toby smeared with chocolate when they went to see their mother.

            Toby selected prawn crisps with surprising alacrity, which also suggested how well Joel’s mental scenario was developing. He purchased a magazine for their mother—choosing Harper’s Bazaar  because it was the thickest on offer—and on impulse he bought her a tin of sweets as well.

            Soon enough they were rolling out of Paddington station, past the dismal and dingy brick walls that separated the railway tracks from the even more dismal and dingy houses that backed directly onto them. Toby