What Came Before He Shot Her

through the carriage? What if you forgot to buy a ticket? What do you do if you have to pee?

            Joel replied cooperatively to each question. Ness sulked and flipped through Hello!  Toby bounced his legs against the seat, watched the scenery, and asked Joel was he going to eat his chocolate bar. Joel nearly said yes, but then he registered the hope on his brother’s shiny face. He handed the chocolate to Toby, and he continued to fi eld his aunt Kendra’s questions.

            What’s the name of their stop? she asked. Where d’they go once they reach the right station? What do they say? To who? If it’s outside, where do they go? What about if it’s inside?

            Joel knew some of the answers, but he didn’t know them all. When he faltered, Kendra asked Ness, whose reply was consistent: “Don’t care, do I?” to which Kendra would say, “Don’t think I won’t sort you later on, Miss Vanessa.”

            In this manner, they travelled west, miles and miles from anything resembling London. Even so, the three Campbells couldn’t help being familiar with this place, since for years they’d been making this journey, alighting in the countryside and walking the mile and a half to the tall brick walls and the green iron gates, either in the company of their grandmother or, before that, with their father leading them along the verge to a spot where it was safe to cross the road.

            “I ain’t going farther ’n this.” As the train pulled off, Ness made her declaration from inside the station, a tiny brick building about the size of a public toilet, identified near the tracks only by a white sign pitted with rust. There was no platform to speak of, nor was there a taxi rank out here in the middle of nowhere. Indeed, the station itself —surrounded by hedges beyond which fields lay fallow for the winter— was unmanned.

            There was a single bench in front of the station, faded green with large patches of grey where the paint had worn away over the years. Ness plopped herself down onto this. “I ain’t goin with you.”

            Kendra said, “Hang on. You won’t be—”

            But Ness cut in with, “And you can’t drag me there. Oh you c’n try, but I c’n fight you, and I bloody well will. I mean it.”

            “You got  to go,” Joel told his sister. “Wha’s she goin to say when you ’n’t there? She gonna ask. Wha’ m’I sposed to tell her?”

            “Tell her I’m dead or summick,” Ness replied. “Tell her I run off to join the fuckin circus. Tell her wha’ you want to tell her. Only I ain’t goin to see her again. I came this far, innit, but now I’m goin back to London.”

            “With what ticket?” Kendra asked. “With what money to buy yourself one?”

            “Oh I got money if it turns out I need it,” Ness informed her. “And plenty more where it came from ’s well.”

            “Money from where? From what?” Kendra asked her.

            “Money I work for,” Ness replied.

            “Now you telling me you have a job?”

            “I s’pose it depends on what you call work.” Ness unbuttoned her jacket, revealing her breasts in their plunging blouse. She smirked and said, “Don’ you know, Aunt Ken? I dress to get money. I always  dress to get money.”

            IN THE END, Kendra knew argument was useless. So she extracted a promise from Ness. She then gave one in turn, although both of them knew their words were largely worthless. For Kendra’s part, she simply had too much to contend with already without also having to engage Ness in a battle over how she was getting money or whether she was going to accompany her aunt and her little brothers to see their mother. For Ness, promises had long ago become idle words of the sound and fury variety. People had been making them to her and breaking them consistently over her back as long as she could remember, so she was able both to promise and to renege on that promise with complete impunity, and she told herself that she didn’t care when others did the same.

            The promises given in this case were simple. Kendra would not insist that Ness accompany them a step farther on their route to see Carole Campbell. In return, Ness would wait for their reappearance at the station some two hours hence. This deal hammered out between them, Kendra and the boys left Ness on the ancient wooden bench, between a notice board that hadn’t been unlocked and updated in a decade and a rubbish bin that looked as if it hadn’t been emptied in just about as long.

            Ness watched them go. For a moment altogether too brief, so relieved was she at having escaped another excruciating visit to her mother that she actually considered keeping her promise to her aunt.

            Deep inside her, there still existed the child who recognised an act of love when it was truly an act of love, and that child intuitively understood that what Kendra had in mind for her—both through the now aborted trip to see Carole Campbell and through her promise to wait and not wander off on her own—was actually in her best interest. But when it came to her best interest, Ness’s problem was twofold: First, the part of her that wasn’t  a child was a fifteen-year-old girl-woman at that point in her life where parental directives seemed akin to torture by enemy forces. And second, that fifteen-year-old girl-woman had long ago lost the ability to transform the words of any adult into anything she could understand as having benefit to her. Instead, she saw only what other people demanded from her and what she could gain from them in turn, through acquiescence to, or refusal of, their requests.

In this case and upon reflection, acquiescence meant a nice long sit in the cold. It meant a numb backside pressed God only knew how long into the splintery wood of the station bench, followed by an interminable train ride back to London during which Toby would annoy her to such a degree that she’d want to throw him onto the railway tracks. Worse, acquiescence meant missing out on whatever Six and Natasha had planned for the afternoon and the evening, and that meant being on the outside looking in the next time she got together with her friends.

            So at the end of the day, there really was no choice to be made between remaining at the station and heading back into London. There was only the waiting for an eastbound train. When one chugged to a halt some twenty-eight minutes after Kendra’s departure with Joel and Toby, Ness climbed aboard without a backward glance.

THE OTHER THREE made an odd sight walking along the verge: Toby wearing his seaside life ring, Joel in his ill-fitting Oxfam clothes, and Kendra dressed in cream and navy blue, as if she intended this visit as a substitute for afternoon tea at a country hotel. When she had admittance past the guard gate, Kendra led her nephews along a curving driveway. This skirted a broad expanse of lawn on which oak trees stood—bare of leaves—near flowerbeds that were colourless in the winter weather. In the distance sprawled their ultimate destination: the body, wings, spires, and turrets of an unwashed Gothic revival building, its facing stones streaked with mould and grime, the nooks and crannies of its exterior a nesting place for birds.

Crows cawed and hurtled upward into the sky as Kendra and the boys reached the wide front steps. There the building’s windows looked blankly out at them, hung outside with vertical iron bars, inside with crooked Venetian blinds. Before the massive front door, Toby faltered. Armed with his life ring, he’d trotted along so easily from the time they’d left the railway station that his sudden hesitation took Kendra by surprise.

            Joel said to her hastily, “’S okay, Aunt Ken. He don’t know where we are ’xactly. But he’ll be fine once he sees Mum.”

            Kendra avoided asking the obvious question: How could Toby not know where they were? He’d been coming here for most of his life. And Joel avoided giving her the obvious answer: that Toby had already retreated to Sose. Instead, Joel pushed open the front door and held it for his aunt. He urged Toby to follow her inside. Reception was to the left of the entrance, black and white lino squares over which lay a doormat that was tattered at the edges. An umbrella stand and a wooden bench were the only furniture in the foyer. A small lobby with a wide wooden staircase opened off this. The staircase made sharp turns as it climbed to the first and second floors of the building.

            Joel went to Reception, Toby’s hand in his and their aunt following. The woman at the desk was someone he recognised from his earlier visits although he didn’t know her name. But he remembered her face, which was yellow and lined. She smelled quite strongly of smoked cigarettes. She handed passes over automatically. She said, “Mind you keep them pinned to your clothes.”

            Joel said, “Cheers. She in her room?”

            Reception waved him off with a gesture towards the stairs. “You’ll have to ask above. Go on with you, then. Doesn’t do anyone good with you lolling round here.”

            That wasn’t supposed to be the case, however. Not in the broader sense. People came to this place—or were put here by their families, by magistrates, by judges, or by their GPs—because it would do them good, which was another way of saying that it would cure them, making them normal and able to cope.