What Came Before He Shot Her

            And not a director because I could also never abide being the one doing the ordering. But producing . . . Ah, that was my love. Making it happen  for others, giving their dreams life.”

            “Did you?”

            “Produce films? Oh yes. Twenty of them, as it happens. And then I came here.”

            “Whyn’t you in Hollywood, then?”

            “With a starlet hanging from my every appendage?” Ivan shuddered dramatically, then smiled, revealing his tortured teeth. “Why, I’d made my point. But that’s a conversation for another time.”

            Over the ensuing weeks, they had many such conversations, although Joel kept his darkest secrets to himself. So while Ivan knew that Joel and his siblings lived with their aunt, he didn’t know precisely why. And while he knew that Joel’s responsibility was to stop by Middle Row School for Toby so that the little boy did not have to walk anywhere alone, where Joel actually took  Toby and why he did so were topics that never came up between him and his assigned mentor. As for Ness, Ivan knew that she was a chronic truant whose attendance problems had not been resolved by the single phone call made from the admissions officer to Kendra Osborne. Other than that, Ivan did most of the talking. Joel, listening, grew used to the eccentricities of the older man’s speech. He actually found himself liking Ivan Weatherall, as well as looking forward to their meetings. But this factor in their relationship—the liking part of it—made Joel even more reluctant to speak honestly with him. Should he do so, which he assumed was the purpose of their visits, he believed that he would be seen as “cured” of whatever the school had decided ailed him. Cured, he would no longer need to meet with Ivan, and he didn’t wish that to happen.

            It was Hibah who revealed a way that Joel might keep Ivan chatting in his life even if the school decided that it was no longer necessary. Near the fourth week of their meetings, she saw Joel emerging from the library with the Englishman, and she plopped down next to Joel on the number 52 bus later that afternoon to put him into the picture. She began with, “You seeing that mad English bloke, eh? You watch out f’r him.”

            Joel, working on a maths problem he’d been given for homework, didn’t at first take note of the menace behind her words. He said,

            “Wha’?”

            “Tha’ Ivan bloke. Hangs round kids, he does.”

            “’S his job, innit.”

            “Not talkin ’bout school,” she said. “Other places is where. You been over to Paddington Arts?”

            Joel shook his head. He didn’t even know what Paddington Arts was, let alone where it was.

            Hibah told him. Paddington Arts was a centre for creative works, not far from the Grand Union Canal and just off the Great Western Road. Classes were offered there—yet another stab at giving the area’s youth something to do besides head into trouble—and Ivan Weatherall was one of the instructors.

            “So he says,” Hibah told Joel. “I hear otherwise.”

            “From who?” Joel asked.

            “My boyfriend’s who. He  say Ivan got a thing for boys. Boys just like you, Joel, innit. Mixed boys, he likes, an’ my boyfriend oughta know.”

            “Why?”

            She rolled her large eyes expressively. “You can fi gger. You not thick or summick, are you? Anyways, more’n jus’ my boyfriend say it. Older blokes’s grew up in the area. Tha’ bloke Ivan, he been round here for ev er, an’ it’s always been the same wiv him. You watch yourself ’s what I’m saying.”

            “He never do nothing but talk wiv me,” Joel told her. Again the eye roll. “Don’ you know nuffink? Tha’s how it always begin,” she said.

            KENDRA’S LIE TO the admissions officer at Holland Park School comprised the reason that it took several weeks for the next level of educational concern to be triggered regarding Ness’s lack of attendance. During this time, Ness carried on much as before, with only a slight variation, leaving the house with her brothers and parting from them in the vicinity of Portobello Bridge. What made it look to her aunt as if she were actually attending school this time around was the fact that she no longer carried a change of clothes in her rucksack but rather two notebooks and a geography text pinched from Six’s brother, the Professor. Her change of clothes she merely left at Six’s.

            Kendra chose to be soothed into belief by this. It was the path of least resistance. It was also, unfortunately, only a matter of time before that path went from bumpy to impassable.

            It was late March and in the midst of a classic English downpour when several occasions conspired against her. The first of these occurred when a lithe and well-dressed black man entered the charity shop, shook off a tan umbrella, and asked to speak to Mrs. Osborne. He was Nathan Burke, he said, the education officer from Holland Park School.

            Cordie Durelle was in the shop with Kendra, on her break from the Princess European and Afro Unisex Hair Salon. As before, she was smoking. As before, she wore her purple smock, with her surgical mask slung around her neck. She and Kendra had been discussing Gerald Durelle’s recent inebriated and destructive hunt through the house for what he assumed—correctly—had to be the birth control pills, which he believed were keeping his wife from becoming pregnant with the son he desired, and Cordie had just reached the climax of her tale when the shop door opened and its bell rang.

            Their conversation ceased as if by telepathic agreement, largely because Nathan Burke was breathtaking and both of the women needed to take that breath. He spoke politely and precisely, and he moved across the shop to the counter with the confidence of a man who’d had a decent upbringing, a decent education, and a life spent largely outside of England and in an environment where he’d been treated as the equal of everyone else.

            Burke asked which one of the ladies was Mrs. Osborne and could he speak to her on a private matter. Kendra identified herself cautiously and told him he could speak in front of her best friend, Cordie Durelle. Cordie shot her a grateful glance at this, for she always appreciated being in the presence of an attractive man. She lowered her eyelids and attempted to look as sultry as a woman in a purple smock and surgical mask can look.

            Nathan Burke didn’t have the time to notice her, however. He’d been paying visits to the parents of Holland Park’s truant pupils since nine o’clock that morning, and he had five more to get through before he could end his day and finally go home to the sympathetic ministrations of his life partner. Because of this, he got directly to the point. He brought out the relevant attendance records and broke the news to Kendra.

            Kendra looked at the records, feeling the pounding of dread begin in her head. Cordie glanced at the records as well. She said the obvious. “Shit, Ken. She ain’t ever gone to school, innit.” And then to Nathan Burke, “Wha’ kinda school you got over there? She get bullied or summick dat she don’ want to go?”

            Kendra said, “She could hardly get bullied if she never went in the first place.”

            Cordie showed mercy and ignored Kendra’s choice of dialect. She said, “She gettin up to trouble, den. Only question’s what kind: boys, drugs, drink, street crime.”

            “We’ve got to get her in school,” Nathan Burke said, “no matter what she’s been doing while she’s been truant. The question is how to do this.”

            “She ever felt the belt?” Cordie said.

            “Fifteen. She’s too old for that. And anyway, I won’t beat those children. What they’ve faced already . . . They’ve had enough.”

            Mr. Burke appeared to be all ears at this, but Kendra wasn’t about to give him the bible on her family’s history. Instead she asked him what he recommended, short of beating a girl who would probably be only too happy to beat her aunt in response.

            “Establishing consequences usually does the trick,” he said. “Do you object to discussing a few you might try?”

            He went over them and their various outcomes: driving Ness to school and walking her to her first scheduled class in front of all the other pupils to cause her an embarrassment she wouldn’t want to endure a second time; removing privileges like use of the phone and the television; gating the girl; sending her to boarding school; arranging for private counselling to get to the root of the matter; telling her that she—Kendra—would accompany her to each  of her classes if she continued to avoid them. . . .