What Came Before He Shot Her

top to bottom. She shook her head and held them up for Joel to see. A greasy stain dripped down the front of them, elongated into the shape of Italy. She tossed them onto the floor, saying, “Why do people think poor equals desperate when what it really means is wanting something to make you forget  you’re poor, not something to remind you you’re poor every time you put it on?” She went back to the pile of clothes and snatched up a skirt.

Joel watched her and had an overpowering desire to tell her everything: the Blade, Cal Hancock, the gun, the lady. Indeed, he had an overpowering need just to talk. But when she looked up, the words wouldn’t come to him, and he moved away from her, restlessly prowling the length of the shop. He paused to examine a toaster that was shaped like a sausage in a bun and next to it a cowboy boot that had been fashioned into a lamp. It was odd, he thought, the objects that people bought for themselves. They wanted something and then they un wanted it once they saw its effect on themselves and the rest of their possessions, once they knew how it actually made everything else look, once they realised how it eventually made them feel. But if they’d known in advance, if they’d only known, there would have been no waste. There’d have been no rejection.

            Kendra spoke. “Did you know about them, Joel? I’ve wanted to ask you, but I didn’t know how.”

            For a moment, Joel thought she was talking about the toaster and the cowboy boot lamp. He couldn’t imagine what sort of answer he was meant to give.

            His aunt went on. “Afterwards . . . Could you tell something was different with her? And if you could tell, did you not think of going to someone?”

            Joel looked from the lamp to the toaster. He said, “What?” He felt hot and queasy.

            “Your sister.” Kendra applied pressure to the iron and it sizzled as some of the hot water within it came out upon the garment she was working on. “Those men and what they did to her and Ness never telling. Did you know?”

            Joel shook his head, but he heard more than his aunt was actually saying to him. He heard the should of it all. His sister had been messed with by their gran’s boyfriend and all of his mates and Joel should have known, he should have seen, he should have recognised, he should have done something. Even as a seven-year-old or whatever he’d been when those terrible things had begun happening to his sister, he should have done something,  no matter that the men always looked like giants to him and more than giants: potential granddads, potential dads, even. They looked like anything but what they were.

            Joel felt his aunt’s eyes fixed on him. She was waiting for something seen, something heard, something felt, anything. He wanted to give that to her, but he couldn’t. He dropped his gaze. Kendra said, “Miss her?”

            He nodded. He said, “What’d they do . . . ?”

            “She’s in the remand centre now. She’s . . . Joel, she’ll likely be going away for a while. Fabia Bender thinks—”

            “She ain’t going nowhere.” The declaration came out more fiercely than he’d intended.

            Kendra set the iron to one side. She said kindly, “I don’t want her sent away, either. But Miss Bender’s trying to work things so she gets placed somewhere they can help her instead of punish her. Somewhere like . . .” She paused.

            He looked up. Their glances met. They both knew where that explanation had been heading, and it brought no comfort. Somewhere likewhere your mum is, Joel. She’s got the family curse. Wave good- bye to her.

            The edges of Joel’s world kept furling up, like a drying leaf detached from a tree.

            He said, “Ain’t gonna happen, dat.”

            “‘Isn’t,’” his aunt patiently corrected.

            She picked up the iron again, applying it to the skirt spread out on the board. She said, “I’ve not done right by any of you. I didn’t see that what I had was more important than what I wanted.” She spoke with great care. She ironed with great care. The task did not require the concentration and attention she was giving to it. Joel said, “You miss Dix, innit.”

            “’Course,” she replied. “But Dix’s something separate from what I’m talking about here. For me, this is how it was, Joel: Glory dropped you on me, and I decided okay, I’ll cope ’cause you’re my family, but isn’t anything going to change the way I’m leading my life. Because if I change the way I’m leading my life, I’ll end up hating these kids for making me change things round, and I don’t want to hate my brother’s children ’cause none of this is their fault. They didn’t want their dad getting shot and they sure as hell didn’t ask to have their mum flitting in and out of the nuthouse all their lives. But we all still got to— have to—follow our separate paths. So I’ll get ’em in school, I’ll feed ’em and put a roof over their heads, and when I do that, I’ll be doing my duty. But there was more ’n duty that needed to be involved. I jus’ didn’t want to see it.”

            Joel realised at the end of all this that his aunt was apologising to him, to all of them, really, through the person of him. He wanted to tell her that she didn’t need to. Had he been able to put it into words, he would have told her that none of them had asked for what they’d had handed to them, and if they bollixed things up as they tried to cope, whose fault was it, really? His aunt had done what she’d thought was right at the time.

            He said, “S’okay, Aunt Ken.” He ran his finger the length of the cowboy boot lamp and then took it away. Like everything else in the charity shop, it was clean and dustless, ready to be purchased and taken home by someone who wanted something quirky to act as a distraction from the rest of their lives. Toby, he thought, would have loved the lamp. Simple, quirky things were enough for him.

            Kendra came to his side. She put her arm around his shoulders and she kissed him on the temple. She said, “All of this is going to pass. We’ll get through it. You and Toby and I. Even Ness. We’re going  to get through it. And when we do, we’ll be a family to each other the way we’re meant to be. We’ll be a proper family, Joel.”

            “Okay,” Joel said in a voice so low that he knew his aunt couldn’t possibly hear it. “That’ll be real nice, Aunt Ken.”

            JOEL FELT DRAWN to Crimewatch like a spectator to the scene of a roadside disaster. He had to watch, but he didn’t know how to watch without drawing attention to what he meant to do.

As the time for the programme drew near, Joel tried hard to think how to wrest control of the television from his little brother. Toby was watching a video—a young Tom Hanks involved with a mermaid—and he knew that he could not switch off that fi lm without Toby raising the roof in protest. Minutes trickled by. Ten, then fifteen, with Joel racking his brains to come up with a way to separate Toby from his video. It was Kendra’s commitment to improved parenting that finally gave him the opening he needed. She decided that Toby’s bath needed supervising and she told the little boy he could watch the rest of the fi lm once he was bathed and in his pyjamas. When she took his brother off to the bathroom, Joel dashed to the television and found the proper channel.

Crimewatch  was nearing its conclusion. The host was saying “. . . a look at that footage a final time. As a reminder, it was taken in Cadogan Lane, and the individuals in it are suspected of having been involved in the shooting that occurred in Eaton Terrace a short time earlier.”

            What followed—just as Joel had hoped—was some five seconds of very grainy footage, typical of the kind from a CCTV camera that loops the same film through its system every twenty-four hours. This depicted the narrow street that Joel and Cal had burst upon when they’d crashed through the house attached to the last garden on their escape route. Two figures approached, one of them made featureless by virtue of what he wore: knitted hat, gloves, markless donkey jacket with its collar turned up. The other figure, however, was more memorable, a function of the hair that sprang around his face as he walked.

When he watched this, Joel felt a moment of blessed relief. He could see that the hair—even uncovered as it was—would not be enough, con  sidering the quality of the film. His anorak was like so many other anoraks in the streets of London, and his school uniform, which would have narrowed the field considerably, was not visible aside from the trousers and the shoes. And these told no tale at all. So since Cal’s face was completely hidden from the CCTV camera, it stood to reason that—