What Came Before He Shot Her

opposite side where another garden was a torment of bushes, hedges, shrubs, and trees, all of it left to grow completely wild. Ahead of him, Joel saw Cal mounting the next wall. At the top he waved frantically for Joel to come more quickly. Joel was breathing heavily, and his chest was tight. He was soaked about the face. He wiped his arm across his forehead.

He said, “Can’t go—”

            “Fuck dat shit. Come on, blood. We got to get out ’f here.”

            So they fell to the ground and stumbled across garden number five, where they rested for a moment, panting. Joel listened for the sound of sirens, shouting, screams, or anything else from back the way they had come, but all was silent, which seemed a good sign.

            “Cops?” he asked, gasping for breath.

            “Oh, they coming.” Cal pushed off from the wall. He took a step back. He hurtled up it. One leg on one side and one on the other. Then he looked into the garden beyond and breathed a single word.

            “Fuck.”

            “What?” Joel asked.

            Cal hoisted him up. Joel straddled the wall. He saw that they’d come to the end of the line. This was a final garden, but it had no wall that gave onto a street or a mews on the other side of it. Instead, the vast expanse of an external wall from a large old building—brick, like everything else they’d come to—served as this final garden’s far boundary. The only way in or out of the patch of lawn and shrubbery was through the house that it served.

            Joel and Cal tumbled to the ground. They took a moment to assess their whereabouts. The windows on the house had security bars, but one set was pushed to the side, suggesting negligence or the fact that someone was at home. It didn’t matter. They had no choice. Cal went first and Joel followed him.

            On a terrace outside the back door, a group of plants stood, thickly growing sculpted shrubs from lichenous clay pots. Cal grabbed one of these and advanced on the unbarred window. He heaved the pot through it, reached inside past the broken glass, and unfastened a bolt that was insignificant. He leaped through, and Joel followed. They found themselves in some sort of home office, and they landed on its desk, where they upended a computer terminal that was already covered by earth, broken glass, and most of the shrub, which had fallen from the pot.

            Cal made for the door, and they were in a corridor. He headed towards the front of the house. It wasn’t a large building, and they could see the door that led to the street—a small oval window in it promising them blessed escape—but before they reached it, someone came clattering down the stairs to their left.

It was a young woman, the household au pair. She looked Spanish, Italian, Greek. She carried a toilet plunger as a weapon and she charged them, screaming like a heat-seeking missile, with the plunger raised.

Cal cried, “Fuck!” He ducked the blow and shoved her to one side. He made for the door. She dropped the plunger but regained her footing. She grabbed Joel as he tried to get past. She was shrieking unintelligible words, but she made her meaning perfectly clear. She attached herself to Joel like a leech. She reached for his face, her fingers like claws.

            Joel struggled with her. He kicked at her legs, her ankles, her shins. He jerked his head to avoid the fingernails with which she intended to mark him. She went for his hair. She grabbed a handful: hair that was like a beacon and hair that no one would ever forget.

            Joel’s eyes met hers. He thought—and it was a terror to him—Got to die, cunt. He waited for Cal to shoot her as he’d shot the darkhaired woman. But instead he heard the bang of the front door as it sprang open and hit the wall. The girl released her grip on him at the same moment. Joel dashed after Cal, out into the street.

He panted, “Cal. Gotta get her, mon. She saw . . . She c’n—”

            “Can’t, blood,” Cal said. “Don’t have the gun. Le’s go.” He started walking rapidly up the street. He was not running now, not wanting to draw attention to themselves.

            Joel caught him up. He said, “What? What?  Where . . . ?”

            Cal strode quickly. “Dropped it, mon. One ’f the gardens.”

            “But they gonna know . . . You touched—”

            “We cool. Don’t worry ’bout dat shit.” Cal held up his hands. He still had on the gloves he’d worn when he’d fetched Joel from the Holland Park School in what seemed to the boy like another lifetime.

            “But the Blade’s gonna . . . And anyways, I . . .” Joel stared at Cal. His mind worked like a dervish because the last thing he was was a stupid child. “Oh shit,” he whispered. “Oh shit, oh shit.”

            Cal’s gloved hand pushed him along the street. There was no pavement here, just cobbles and roadway. “Wha’?” Cal said. “We can’t go back. Jus’ walk and be cool. We gonna get out. Ten minutes and this place be crawlin with the bill, y’unnerstan me? Now le’s fuckin go.”

            “But . . .”

            Cal kept walking, head low, chin tucked into his chest, Joel stumbled after him, his head pounding with images. They were like still shots in the middle of a fi lm. They played back and forth in no particular order: the lady smiling as she said, “Are you lost?” Her little laugh before she understood. Cal’s arm lifted. The corgi’s waddle. The copper birdbath. A holly bush snagging his anorak.

            He hardly knew where they were. He saw that they were on a street narrower than the others they’d been in, and had he understood architecture in this part of town, Joel would have recognised it as an old mews whose stables had long since been converted to houses, which were tucked behind the much grander residences whose horses and carriages they once had protected. To his left stood plain-fronted buildings of brick, owners of the back gardens through which they’d just crashed. They were three storeys tall and all identical: a single step up to a wooden front door with a simple stone pediment making a V above it. An inch of granite served as a front step. Garage doors were wooden, painted white. To his right, the picture was much the same, but there were also businesses planted along the way: a doctor’s surgery, a solicitor’s office, a car-repair shop. And then more houses.

            Cal said tersely, “Keep your head down, blood,” but in unfortunate confusion, Joel did just the opposite. He saw that they were walking past the biggest house along the route, marked by black bollards with great swags of iron chains to keep cars away from the front of the building. But there was something more and he raised his face to it. A CCTV camera was mounted just above a window on the first floor.

He gasped and ducked his head. Cal caught him by the anorak once and pulled him forward. They fast-walked to the end of the street.

The first siren sounded then, wailing somewhere off in the distance just at the moment Joel saw that in front of them, two more streets branched off from the one they were in. The buildings here loomed like vedettes, unlike any others they’d passed. Outside of the tower blocks of North Kensington, they were the biggest structures Joel had ever seen, but they were nothing like the dour blocks of flats that he was used to. Umber brick created them— no dingy yellow London brick here—and leaded windows with pearl white moulding decorated them. Hundreds upon hundreds of fancifully shaped chimneys sprouted across their rooftops. Joel and Cal were antlike here, caught in a canyon of these structures.

            Cal said, “Dis way, blood,” and, astoundingly to Joel, he began to walk in the direction of the sirens.

            Joel cried, “Cal! No! We can’t! They been . . . They gonna . . . If they see . . .” and he remained rooted to the spot. Cal said over his shoulder, “Mon, come on. Or stay there and end up ’splainin to the bill wha’ you been doin in dis neighbourhood.”

            Another siren howled its two-note warning, then, sounding from several streets away. It came to Joel that if they walked . . . if they looked like two blokes having business in the area . . . if they seemed like tourists—ludicrous though the idea was—or dopers with the BigIssue  for sale . . . or foreign students . . . or anything . . . or what . . . ?

            But there remained the fact of that au pair, her of the toilet plunger. She’d have gone for the telephone, Joel realised, and her shaking hands would already have punched in the nines, which was all it took to bring on the police. She would have shouted out her address. She would have explained and the cops would arrive. For this was a tony part of town where the cops came running when something went down.

So where were they? Joel asked himself. Where were they?

            Wrought-iron balconies seemed to loom everywhere above him. No rusting bikes on them, no burnt- out furniture shoved out of doors and left to rot in the weather. No sagging line of grimy laundry. Just winter