What Came Before He Shot Her

agonised glance and fled back up the stairs.

            Kendra said to Fabia, “At least give me time to get her cleaned up.”

            “I can’t . . . Mrs. Osborne . . . Kendra.” Fabia cleared her throat. Involvement with the families of her clients was inevitable, but it always cost her in the end. She hated to say what she had to say. But she pushed forward. “Evidence,” was the word she used, and she hoped that her gesture towards Ness and the blood upon her would be enough for Kendra to understand.

            As for Ness, she merely stood there. Drained, spent, scheming, wondering . . . It was impossible for the other two women to tell. What they both knew—in fact, what they all knew—was that matters were finished for the foreseeable future when it came to possibilities for Ness.

            GETTING DIX OUT of the Ladbroke Grove police station was no easy matter. It involved several hours of waiting, consultations with a duty solicitor who was none too happy to have to assist, conversations with Fabia Bender via phone, and communication with the Harrow Road police. His impounded car would take several more days to disentangle from the bureaucracy. But at least Dix himself walked out of the custody area, free to go.

He’d never before had an interaction with the police. He’d never even been stopped for a traffic offence. He was shaken and trying not to be governed by hate and the need for vengeance. This required him to breathe calmly and to try to remember who he’d been before he’d seen a drunken girl in the Falcon pub and had decided to drive her home for her own safety. That had begun things: concern for Ness. It was an irony to him that concern for Ness had ended things as well.

            What he said to Kendra, he waited to say until they were back in Edenham Way. Inside the house, he climbed the stairs to her bedroom. She followed him and shut the door. She said, “Dix, baby,” in a tender voice. But it was also a voice that had always acted as a prelude to sex between them, and he couldn’t face sex, he didn’t want sex, and he was sure Kendra didn’t want it either. He went to the bedroom door and propped it open.

            “Boys?” he asked.

            “In their room,” she said. Which meant they’d hear if they were listening, but that didn’t seem to matter any longer. Two of the drawers in the bedroom chest were his, and Dix eased them out and dumped their contents onto the bed. He went to the wardrobe and removed his clothes. He said, although the saying of this was entirely unnecessary, “Can’t do it, Ken.”

            She watched him pull a duffel bag from beneath the bed, the same duffel bag that he’d brought into her house, hanging over his shoulder, and smiling smiling smiling with hope about what it meant—or rather, really, what he wanted it to mean—that he was taking up residence with the woman he loved. Then, he’d carried it up to this room and flung it into a corner because there were more important things than unpacking and making the requisite spaces in drawers and wardrobe. Those things were his woman, loving his woman, showing her, having her, and knowing the way only a twenty-three-year-old boy-man can know that this was so right, so meant to be, so here and now.

            But too much had happened and among that too much  were Queensway, Ness, and the Ladbroke Grove police and how a man could even feel  their thoughts wash over him in a cesspool tide whose waters left a stench upon him that a hundred thousand steaming showers could not wash away.

            Kendra said as he began to stuff his belongings into the duffel bag,

            “Dix, it wasn’t you. Your fault. Anything. Things happened to her. She’s been that angry. She’s felt betrayed. Abandoned. You got to look at it, Dix. Please. Her dad gets murdered in the street, Dix. Her mum goes into the crazy house. My mum fails her and I fail her next. Dix, she was little. My mum’s bloody boyfriend and his filthy mates, they took her. They did things to her. It was over and over they did things to her and she didn’t tell because she was afraid. So she’s got to be forgiven for finally snapping like she did. In Queensway. With you. Whatever she might have said to the cops about you. There’s a reason and it’s horrible and I know  you know that. I know  you understand. Please.”

            She was pleading with him, but she was beyond feeling the humiliation of having to plead. She was like one of those gypsy women one saw occasionally on the pavement, a baby at the breast, a paper cup extended for coins from strangers. Part of her—a proud woman who’d coped with a difficult life on her own—was insisting that she’d said enough, that they didn’t need Dix, that if he wanted to leave, he had to be released with a quick surgical incision directly through the heart. But the other part—frightened and out of her depth for so long that drowning seemed like the only future she had—knew that she needed him, if only to act the part of man of the house in a family that had been cobbled together by death, madness, and misfortune.

Dix finally said, “Ain’t wha’ I want, Ken, y’unnerstan? Ain’t wha’ I set out to have. I tried for a while—you got to know dat—but I can’t do it.”

            “You can. This only happened because—”

            “Ain’t listenin to me, Ken. I don’t want it no more.”

            “You mean me, don’t you? You don’t want me.”

            “This,” he said. “Can’t do it, won’t do it, don’t want to do it. Thought I could. Thought I did. Found out I was wrong.”

            Desperation made her say, “If the kids weren’t here—”

            “Don’t. You i’n’t like dat. And anyways, it ain’t the kids. It’s everyt’ing. Cos I want kids. Family. Kids. You always known dat.”

            “Then—”

            “But not like it is, Ken. Not kids I got to backtrack wiv, fi xing ’em up where someone went wrong. It ain’t wha’ I want. Not like dis, anyways.”

            Which meant, it seemed, that with another woman, with different children, with circumstances in which there appeared to be even a modicum of hope, the situation and his feelings about that situation would be different. He’d be what that woman wanted, what the children needed, and what Kendra herself had sworn she did not need, desire, or wish to have in her life.

            And if she wanted all of that now—the package represented by Man Presence in her home—was the truth that the desire grew more from panic and fear than real love? It was not a question she could either ask herself or answer in that moment. She was reduced to watching him thrust his belongings helter-skelter into his duffel bag. She was transformed into the sort of hand-wringing woman she would have otherwise despised, one who followed her man from bedroom to bathroom and watched—as one might watch emergency workers wrest a dead body from a twisted vehicle—while he scooped up his shaving gear and all the lotions and oils that he used to keep his body smooth and glistening for his competitions.

When he turned back to face her, he looked beyond her. Joel had come out of the second bedroom, Toby standing just behind him. Dix met the boys’ gazes, but then he dropped his because there was the duffel bag to be seen to. He zipped it, and the sound it made was different from the earlier sound of unzipping because it was full now, stuffed right to its seams, heavy but not so much so that a man of his strength would have trouble carrying it. He raised it to his shoulder.

He said to Joel, “You take care round here, mon. Y’unnerstan? Mind you watch out for Ken.”

            “Yeah,” Joel said. His voice was dull.

            “Dis ain’t down to you, blood,” Dix told him. “You got dat straight?

            It’s everyt’ing, mon. Lots ’f shit you don’t unnerstan. You remember dat. It ain’t down to you. It’s just everyt’ing.”

            WHICH WAS WHAT landed on Joel’s shoulders once Dix D’Court left them: everything. Households needed to be headed by a man in order to function, and he was the only man available to keep Toby safe and to get Ness out of the trouble she was in.

            That this latter challenge was insurmountable was something Joel did not intend to face. “She tried to kill him,” Hibah told him fiercely when their paths crossed near Trellick Tower. “I was there, innit .  So was that lady from the drop-in centre. So were maybe twenty little kids. A bigger knife and she would’ve  killed him. She’s mad, tha’ girl. She’s going to get it. They got her locked up and I hope they throw ’way the key.”

            Hope lay in the fact that Ness was  locked up. For locked up meant the