What Came Before He Shot Her

kicked his feet against the bottom of the seat and happily munched his crisps. Joel watched the scenery and tried to think how to bring their mother home.

            They got out of the train into bitter cold, much colder than in London. Frost rimed hedgerows whose bare branches sheltered shivering sparrows, and the fields beyond them bore a gauzy cover of frozen fog. Crusts of ice skinned over standing pools of rainwater, and where there were sheep, they chuffed gustily and huddled together in a woollen mass against stone walls.

At the hospital and through the guard gate, the boys hustled up the drive. The lawns, like the fields, were white with fog that had frozen and fallen, and more fog was descending as Joel and Toby dashed towards the main building. This hovered in the mist like something from a fantasy fi lm, an object that might easily disappear before they reached it.

            Inside, a blast of hot air hit them. The contrast felt like going from the North Pole into the tropics with no stop at an intermediate climate. They stumbled through the heat that blasted from radiators, and Joel gave their names at Reception. He learned that Carole Campbell was in the mobile beauty caravan. They could wait for her right here in the lobby or they could seek her out in the caravan, which they could find in the employees’ car park at the back of the building. Did they know where that was?

            Joel said they would find it. Going back outside was, to him, infinitely preferable to having to wilt among the plastic greenery that decorated the lobby. He got Toby back into his anorak, which the little boy had already shed and dropped on the floor, and they went back outside. They slipped and slid along a concrete path. They followed it down one long wing of the hospital, where it branched at the back towards the infirmary in one direction and the employees’ car park in the other.

            The caravan in question was a small, hump-backed mobile holiday home of the type once seen widely in the English countryside prior to the days of inexpensive flights to the coast of Spain. It had been named Hair and There, a tediously self-amused pun that was painted on the caravan’s side in great chunky letters along with a rainbow that led not to a pot of gold but to a hair-drying chair next to a cartoon woman all done up in curlers and dashing through puffs of clouds to sit down. Over the door was yet another rainbow. Joel led Toby to this and up two slick steps.

            Inside, it was warm, but nothing like the hospital’s insufferable heat. There were three hair stations, where women sat in various stages of beautification at the hands of a single hairdresser, and at the far end there was a manicure and pedicure area. That was where Joel and Toby found their mother, who was being worked upon by a girl with tricoloured hair erupting from the top of her head. Red, blue, and deep purple, the locks were like the proud flag of a newly born nation.

Carole Campbell didn’t see them at first. She and the manicurist were intent upon an examination of Carole’s hands. The manicurist was saying to her, “I dunno how else to ’splain it to you, luv. You just not got a big enough base, y’see? They won’t last. First time you knock ’em about, that’s it.”

            “I don’t care, do I?” Carole’s voice was gay. “Do them anyway. I won’t hold you responsible if they fall off. It’s coming up to Valentine’s Day, and I want the jewellery as well. I want the prettiest you have.”

            She looked up then and smiled when her gaze fell upon Joel. She said,

            “Oh my goodness, look who’s come to call, Serena. Right behind you. Tell me I’m not hallucinating. I didn’t forget to take my pills, did I?”

            “You will have your joke, Caro.” The hairdresser called this out as she painted something thick and gooey into a client’s springy head of hair.

            But Serena humoured Carole, since she’d been taught to humour the patients lest they become agitated. She gave a glance in Joel and Toby’s direction, nodded a hello to them, and said to her client. “Right, then, luv. You’re not hallucinating. These little blokes belong to you?”

            “This is my Joel,” Carole said. “My great big Joel. Look how he’s grown, Serena. Darling, come see what Serena’s doing to Mummy’s fingernails.”

            Joel waited for her to acknowledge Toby, to introduce him to the manicurist. Toby hung back shyly, so Joel drew him forward. Carole had gone back to studying her hands. “’S’okay,” Joel murmured to his brother. “She got summick on her mind and she never could do two things at once.”

            “I brought my skateboard,” Toby said helpfully. “I c’n ride it, Joel. I c’n show Mum.”

            “Af ’er she’s done wiv dis,” Joel said.

            He and Toby sidled up to the manicure table. There, Carole had spread her hands upon a white towel less clean than it might have been. They lay like inert specimens under the bright light of an anglepoise lamp. Row upon row of nail-varnish bottles stood by, ready to be used upon them.

            The only problem with Carole’s plan for her beautification was that she had no nails to speak of. She’d bitten them down so far that mere slivers remained. To these unappealing stubs she was requesting a set of false nails be attached. These sat neatly in plastic boxes that the manicurist tapped her own nails against as she tried, with no success, to explain to Joel and Toby’s mother that her plan for instant nail beauty was not going to work. In this, she was an honest—albeit impractical—expositor. For Carole wanted what Carole wanted: the false nails, painted and then gaily decorated with tiny seasonal gold hearts, which waited on a cardboard card propped against one of the bottles of nail varnish.

Serena finally gave a mighty sigh and said, “’F that’s what you want,” although she shook her head in an unmistakable don’t-blame-me sort of motion as she set to work. “These’re gonna last all of five minutes,” she said darkly.

            “The five happiest minutes of my life.” Carole settled back into her chair and looked at Joel. She drew her eyebrows together, her face clouding. Then she brightened. “How’s your auntie Ken?” she asked. This caused Joel’s heart to bump hopefully. Over the years, his mother had rarely even acknowledged that there was  an Auntie Ken. Joel said, “She’s good. Dix’s back. Dat’s her boyfriend. He’s keeping her happy ’nough.”

            “Auntie Ken and her men,” Carole responded. She gave a shake to her coppery head. “She always had a soft spot for the hard spot, didn’t she?”

            Serena guffawed and lightly slapped Carole’s hand. “You mind your mouth, Miss Caro, or I got to report you.”

            “But it’s true,” Carole said. “When Joel’s gran followed her man to Jamaica and the kids’ aunt Kendra started minding them, the first thing I thought was, Now  they’re going to get some real sex education. I even said it as well, didn’t I, Joel?”

            Joel couldn’t help grinning. She’d never said such a thing, but the fact that she was pretending she had, the fact that she was aware that his grandmother had decamped for Jamaica, the fact that she knew  very well where the children were living and with whom and why . . . Before this moment, Carole Campbell had not spoken of Kendra, of Glory, of Jamaica, or of anything else that indicated she knew what period of time she was living through. So all of this—off colour or not, true or not, imagined or not—was so new to Joel, so unexpected, so welcome . . . He felt like someone at the gates of heaven.

Carole said, “And Ness? Joel, why doesn’t she come to see me? I know how much she hurts from your dad’s death, with how he died, with all of it. I understand how she feels. But if she’d just come to talk to me, I can’t help but think how much better she’d feel in the long run. I miss her. Will you tell her I miss her?”

            Joel hardly dared to reply, so difficult was it for him to believe what he was hearing. He said, “I’ll tell her, Mum. She’s . . . she’s goin through a bad patch jus’ now, but I’ll tell her what you say.” He didn’t add more. He didn’t want their mother to know about the attack upon Ness, about how Ness was reacting to that and to everything else. To give Carole anything that resembled bad news felt like too risky a proposition. It might send her back to the Nowhere Land she’d inhabited for so long.

            Thus, Joel cringed when Toby spoke unexpectedly. “Ness got in a bad fight, Mum. Some blokes went af’er her and bunged her up. Aunt Ken had to take her to Casualty, innit.”

            Serena looked over her shoulder at them, an eyebrow raised and a tube of nail glue suspended in her fingers. “She okay now?” she asked before she applied the glue to a false nail, which she pressed uselessly onto one of Carole’s stubs.

            Carole was quiet. Joel waited, breath in, for what she would say. She cocked her head and looked thoughtful, her gaze on Joel. When she finally spoke, her voice was as before. “You are looking more like your father every day,” she said, although the remark was odd because all of them knew that nothing could have been further from the truth. She clarified her statement with, “Something about your eyes. How is your schoolwork? Have you