flowers. Just pot shrubs trimmed into the shape of animals. Just thick posh curtains hanging low on the windows. And those chimneys lining up just like soldiers, rank upon rank of them along the rooftops, etching their shapes against the grey sky: balloons and shields, pots and dragons. Whoever thought there could be so many chimneys?
Cal had paused at the corner of yet another street. He looked right and left, an act that assessed where they were and where they might go. Across from him was a building different from every other they’d seen so far: It was grey steel and concrete, interrupted by glass. It was more like what they were used to seeing in their own part of town, albeit newer, fresher, cleaner.
When Joel joined him, it was clear there was no safety here. People with carrier bags were emerging from shops, and the shops offered coats with fur collars, crisp bed linens, bottles of perfume, fancy bars of soap. A grocery displayed oranges resting individually in nests of green foil, and a flower seller nearby offered buckets of blooms in every imaginable colour.
It was posh. It was money. Joel wanted to run in the opposite direction. But Cal paused and looked at the display in the bakery window. He adjusted his knitted cap, pulling it low, and he turned up the collar of his donkey jacket.
Two more sirens sounded up ahead. A heavy white man came out of the bakery, cake box in his hands. He said, “What’s going on?”
Cal turned to Joel. “Le’s check it out, mon,” he said and he passed the white man with a polite, “’Scuse me,” as they headed onward. To Joel, this seemed a lunatic activity since Cal was walking directly towards the sirens now. He said fiercely as he strode by the young man’s side, “We can’t. We
“Mon, we got no choice ’less you see one.” Cal jerked his head in the direction of the noise. “Dat way’s to the tube and we got to get out ’f here, y’unnerstan wha’ I say? Jus’ be cool. Look curious. Like ever’one else.”
Joel’s gaze automatically followed the way Cal had indicated with his head. He saw, then, that Cal was correct. For in the distance, he made out the shape of the naked lady pouring water into that fountain, only seeing her from a different angle this time. So he realised that they were coming up to the square where they’d emerged from the underground. They were five minutes or less from escaping the area.
He took a few deep breaths. He needed to look like someone curious about what was happening, but nothing more. He said to Cal,
“Right. Le’s go, then.”
“Jus’ be cool,” was Cal’s reply.
They walked at a normal pace. As they reached the corner, yet another siren sounded, and a panda car passed. They entered the square. It seemed to them as if hundreds of people milled around on the pavements that marked the perimeter. They’d come out of cafes. They hesitated in the doorways of banks, of bookshops, and of department stores. They stood as statuelike as the bronze woman in the middle of the fountain: Venus gazing tenderly down upon a life-sustaining substance that she eternally poured from her urn.
A fire engine roared into the square. Another panda car followed. Voices buzzed. Bomb? Terrorists? Riot? Armed robbery? Street demonstration getting out of control?
Joel heard all this as he and Cal wove through the crowd. No one spoke of murder or street crime, of a mugging gone bad. No one at all.
As they crossed over into the centre of the square and made diagonally for the station beyond, an ambulance shrieked up from the south, siren blasting and roof lights twirling. The ambulance was what finally gave Joel some hope, for an ambulance meant that Cal hadn’t actually killed the lady when the gun went off.
Joel only hoped that she hadn’t hurt her head too badly when she banged it on the wrought-iron railing as she fell.
27 The worst was Toby, which was certainly some thing that Joel did not expect. But when he finally arrived at Middle Row School to take Toby home for the day, it was to find him huddled in the February darkness just outside the locked gates, having somehow escaped the notice of the school’s administrators and teachers, carefully hidden in the deeper shadows cast by a pillar box. He was staring at a jagged crack in the pavement, his skateboard clutched to his chest.
Joel crouched by his brother and said, “Hey, mon. Sorry, Tobe. I di’n’t forget you or nuffink. Did you think I forgot? Tobe? Hey, Tobe?”
Toby roused himself. “Meant to go to the learnin centre today,” he mumbled.
Joel said, “Tobe, I’m sorry. I had to do summick . . . Look it’s important you don’t grass me up on this. It won’t happen again. I swear. You c’n promise me, Tobe?”
Toby gazed at him blankly. “I waited like I was s’posed to, Joel. I di’n’t know what else to do.”
“You did good, mon. Waitin here like dis. Come on now. Le’s go. When I take you to the learnin centre next, I’ll talk to them. I’ll ’splain wha’ happened. They won’t be vex at you or nuffink.”
Joel urged his little brother to his feet, and they set off towards their home. Joel said to him, “Tobe, you can’t tell Aunt Ken ’bout dis. Y’unnerstan wha’ I say? She find out I di’n’t take you to the learnin centre . . . She got ’nough vexin her already, innit. Wiv Ness. Wiv Dix gone. And dat Fabia Bender woman jus’ waitin for a reason to take you and me away...”
“Joel, I don’t
“Hey. Dat ain’t goin to happen, bred. Which is why you got to keep quiet ’bout me bein late. C’n you pretend?”
“Pretend what?”
“You went to the learnin centre. C’n you pretend you went today like always?”
“’Kay,” Toby said.
Joel looked at his brother. Toby’s brief lifetime rose up to declare how unlikely it was that he would be able to pretend anything, but Joel had to believe it would be possible to carry off a deception about the afternoon, for it was crucial to him that life should look to his aunt the way it always looked to his aunt. The slightest deviation and Kendra would be suspicious, and suspicion felt to Joel like the last thing that he could endure.
But in all his planning, Joel failed to take into account the concern of Luce Chinaka. He failed to realise that she might have been told by Fabia Bender to keep a closer watch on Toby, that she might take matters into her own hands when Toby did not turn up as scheduled, phoning Kendra at the charity shop and asking if Toby was ill and unable to keep his regular appointment. So when Kendra arrived home for the day, she first deposited a bag of Chinese takeaway in the kitchen and she then demanded to know why Joel had failed in his duty to see to Toby.
Here, however, a modicum of luck was on Joel’s side. He’d taken an unsettled stomach and a growing weakness in his arms and his legs up to his bedroom, and he’d deposited them upon his bed. There he curled in the darkness, and he stared at the wall on which he found— no matter what he did to try to get it out of his mind—the image of the dark-haired lady’s face floated, smiling at him, saying hello, and asking if he and Cal were lost. Thus, when Kendra flipped on the light and said, “Joel! Why didn’t you take your brother to the learning centre?” Joel spoke the truth. “Bein sick,” he said.
This altered things. Kendra sat on the edge of the bed and, motherlike, felt his forehead. She said in an altogether altered tone, “You coming down with something, baby? You’re a bit hot. You should’ve phoned me at the shop.”
“I thought Tobe could miss—”
“I don’t mean for Toby. I mean for you. If you’re sick and you need me . . .” She smoothed his hair. “We’re going through bad times round here, aren’t we, luv? But I want you to know something: You don’t have to take care of yourself alone.”
For Joel this was actually the worst thing she could have said, for the kindness in her words caused tears to well in his eyes. He closed them, but the tears leaked out.
