What Came Before He Shot Her

that was where Cordie found a safe footing. She said, “You been having a time of it,” as she crushed out her cigarette in a secondhand ashtray which she found on one of the display shelves. “Di’n’t ’spect motherhood to be like this, innit.”

            “Didn’t ’spect motherhood at all,” Kendra told her. “I’m coping good enough, I s’pose.”

            Cordie nodded. She looked thoughtfully towards the door. She said,

            “Their mum goin’ to take dem off you, Ken?”

            Kendra shook her head and to keep Cordie far away from the subject of Carole Campbell, she said, “Ness’s a help to me. Big one. Joel’s good, ’s well.” She waited for Cordie to bring up the subject of Toby. Cordie did so, but in a way that made Kendra love her all the more. She said, “You need help, you give me a bell, Ken. And when you ready for dancin, I ready, too.”

            “I do that, girl,” Kendra said. “Right now, though, things’s good wiv us all.”

            THE ADMISSIONS OFFICER from Holland Park School put an abrupt end to Kendra’s delusion. Although this individual—who identifi ed herself as a Mrs. Harper when she finally phoned—took nearly two months to make the call that was to shatter life as it had been bumping along at number 84 Edenham Way, there was a reason for this. By never turning up for so much as an hour at the school, indeed by never showing her face at all save on the day she took the admissions test, Ness had successfully fallen through the cracks. Since the school’s population was given to an itinerancy caused by the government’s continual placement and displacement of the country’s asylum-seeking immigrants, the fact that a Vanessa Campbell showed up on a teacher’s class register but not in the class itself was taken by many of her instructors to mean that her family had merely moved on or been moved to other housing. Thus, they made no report of Ness being among the missing, and it was seven weeks after her enrollment in the school before Kendra received the phone call about her lack of attendance.

This call came not to the house but to the charity shop. As Kendra was there alone—a common-enough occurrence—she couldn’t leave. She wanted to. She wanted to climb inside her Punto and drive up and down the streets looking for her niece, much as she’d done on the night of the Campbells’ arrival in North Kensington. Because she couldn’t do that, she paced the floor instead. She walked up a row of secondhand blue jeans and down a row of worn wool coats and tried not to think of lies: the lies Ness had been telling her for weeks and the ones she herself had just mouthed to Mrs. Harper.

With her heart pounding so fiercely in her ears that she could barely hear the woman on the other end of the line, she’d said to the admissions offi cer, “I am  so sorry about the confusion. Directly I enrolled Ness and her brother, she had to help care for her mum in Bradford.” Where on earth Bradford came from, she wouldn’t have been able to say. She wasn’t even sure she could find it quickly on a map, but she knew it had a large ethnic population because they’d been rioting during the finer weather: Asians, blacks, and the local skinheads, all set to kill each other to prove whatever they apparently felt needed proving.

            “Is she at school in Bradford, then?” Mrs. Harper enquired.

            “Private tutoring,” Kendra said. “She’ll be back tomorrow, as it happens.”

            “I see. Mrs. Osborne, you really ought to have phoned . . .”

            “Of course. Somehow, I just . . . Her mum’s been unwell. It’s a strange situation. She’s had to live apart from the kids . . . the children . . .”

            “I see.”

            But of course, she didn’t see and couldn’t see and Kendra had no intention of lifting the veil of obscurity for her. She just needed Mrs. Harper to believe her lies because she needed Ness to have a place at Holland Park School.

            “So you say she’ll be back tomorrow?” Mrs. Harper asked.

            “I’m picking her up at the station tonight.”

            “I thought you said tomorrow?”

            “I meant in school tomorrow. Unless she falls ill. ’F that happens, I’ll phone you at once . . .” Kendra let her voice drift off and waited for the other woman’s reply. In a moment, she thanked her stars that Glory Campbell had forced an acceptable form of the English language upon all her children. In this circumstance, being able to produce grammatically correct speech in an acceptable accent served Kendra well. She knew that it made her more believable than she would have been had she fallen into the dialect that Mrs. Harper had no doubt expected to hear on the other end of the phone when she’d placed her call.

            “I’ll let her teachers know, then,” Mrs. Harper said. “And please do next time keep us informed, Mrs. Osborne.”

            Kendra refused to be offended by the admission offi cer’s imperative. So thankful was she that the woman had accepted her unlikely tale of Ness caring for Carole Campbell that, short of a direct insult, she would have found any comment from Mrs. Harper tolerable. She felt relieved that she’d been able to concoct a story on the spur of the moment but shortly after she’d ended the call, the very fact that she’d been forced  to concoct such a story sent her pacing. She was still doing that when Joel and Toby stopped by on their way home from the learning centre. Toby was carrying a workbook on whose individual pages colourful stickers had been fixed, celebrating his successful completion of the phonetic drills meant to help him with his reading. He had more stickers on his life ring, declaring “Well done!,” “Excellent!,” and “Top form!” in bright blue, red, and yellow. Kendra saw these but did not remark upon them. She instead said to Joel, “Where’s she been going every day?”

            Joel wasn’t stupid, but he was bound by that rule about telling tales. He frowned and played dumb. “Who?”

            “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. The admissions officer rang me. Where’s Ness been going? Is she with this girl. . . What’s her name? Six? And why haven’t I met her?”

            Joel dropped his head to avoid replying. Toby said, “Lookit my stickers, Aunt Ken. I got to make a purchase from the comic books cos I got enough stickers now. I chose Spiderman. Joel got it in his rucksack.”

            The mention of rucksack put Kendra in the picture about what Ness had been doing, and she cursed herself for being a fool. So when she got back to the estate that evening—keeping Joel and Toby with her until it was time to close the shop so that Joel would not have the chance to warn his sister about the game being up—the first thing she did was scoop Ness’s rucksack off the back of the chair on which she’d hung it. Kendra opened it unceremoniously and dumped its contents on the kitchen table where Ness had been chatting to someone on the phone while she idly leafed through the most recent prospectus from Kensington and Chelsea College every bit as if she actually intended to make something of her life.

            Ness’s glance went from the prospectus to the pile of her belongings, from there to her aunt’s face. She said into the phone, “I got to go,” and rang off, watching Kendra with an expression that might have been called wary had it not also been so calculating. Kendra sorted through the contents of the rucksack. Ness looked beyond her to where Joel hung in the doorway. Her eyes narrowed as she evaluated her brother and his potential as a grass. She rejected this. Joel was all right. The information, she decided, must have come from another source. Toby? That, she told herself, was not bloody likely. Toby was generally with the cuckoos.

            Kendra tried to read the contents of Ness’s rucksack like a priest practising divination. She unrolled the blue jeans and unfolded the black T-shirt whose golden inscription “Tight Pussy” resulted in its being deposited directly into the bin. She fingered through makeup, nail varnish, hair spray, hair picks, matches, and cigarettes, and she stuffed her hands into the high-heeled boots to see if there was anything hidden inside them. Finally, she went through the pockets of the jeans, where she found one packet of Wrigley’s spearmint and one of rolling papers. These she clutched in the hapless triumph of someone who sees the incarnation of the worst of her fears. She said, “So.”

            Ness said nothing.

            “What have you got to say?”

            Above them in the sitting room, the television went on, its sound turned to an irritating volume that told everyone within two hundred yards that someone in 84 Edenham Way was watching Toy Story II  for the twelfth time. Kendra shot a look to Joel. He interpreted it and ducked up the stairs to deal with Toby and the television volume. He remained there, knowing the wisdom of keeping clear of explosive situations.

            Kendra repeated her question to Ness. Ness reached for her packet of cigarettes and picked the book of matches from among the other contents of the rucksack now spread across the table. Kendra snatched them from her and threw them into the kitchen sink. She followed them with the cigarettes. Gesturing with the rolling