coat wiv the big buttons,” he said later. It would be his mum’s birthday soon.) He’d slowed to look at the coat, and then beyond it, he’d seen her in the shop. That’s why he’d entered, he explained.
“Whyn’t you phonin me back?” he asked. “You not getting the messages I been leaving?”
“I’ve been getting them,” Kendra told him. “I just didn’t see a good reason to return them.”
“You ’voiding me, den.” A statement, not a question.
“I suppose I am.”
“Why?”
“I give massages, Mr. D’Court. You weren’t ringing me about arranging to have one. Least, if you were, you never said as much. Just
‘I want to see you,’ which didn’t tell me it was business you were after.”
“We got b’yond business. Wiv you as ready ’s me for what was ’bout to happen.” He held up a hand to stop her from replying, saying, “An’ I know it ain’t gentlemanly to mention dat to you. Gen’rally I like being a gentleman. But I also like history being straight, y’unnerstan, not being rewritten for someone’s convenience.”
She’d been in the midst of counting the money in the till when he’d walked in, so near to closing up for the day that in another ten minutes he would have missed her. Now, she removed the cash drawer and carried it to the back room where she stowed it in the safe and locked it up. He was meant to see this as rejection, but he refused to take it that way.
He followed her, but he didn’t enter the back room. Rather, he stood at the door where the shop lights silhouetted him in a disturbing fashion. The body Kendra had seen that night above the Falcon pub was framed by the doorway. He was a tempting proposition. But Kendra had other things in mind for her life and one of them was not an entanglement with a twenty-three-year-old boy.
Which made it all the better, didn’t it? she then asked herself. The seventeen years between them declared there was no possibility for entanglements.
“Here’s what I t’ink,” he said to her. “You like most women, an’ dat means you ’spectin dis is just a quick shag I want. I ring you to finish what we started cos I don’t like a woman gettin away so easy. I like to put ’nother notch in my belt. Or wherever a bloke puts a notch cos I don’t ackshully know.”
Kendra chuckled. “Now that,” she told him, “is just about exactly what I don’t think, Mr. D’Court. If I thought it was that—a quick shag and we’re done—I would’ve rung you back and made the arrangements, because I won’t lie and there’s no point to it, is there: You were in the room and a party to what happened between us. And what happened wasn’t exactly me saying, ‘Get your hands off me, blood.’ But I get the feeling that’s not who you are or how you are, and, see, I don’t want what you’re after. And the way I look at it, two people—man and woman, I mean—need to be after the same thing when they hook up together or one of them’s heading for trouble of the heartbreaking kind.”
He gazed at her, and what shone from his face was admiration, liking, and amusement all blended together. He said, “Dix.” It was his only reply.
“What?”
“Dix. Not Mr. D’Court. An’ you’re right wiv what you say, which makes it rougher, see. Makes me want you more cos damn you ain’t like”—he smiled and shifted to her style of speaking—“you are not like most women I meet. Believe it.”
“That,” she said tartly, “is because I’m older. Seventeen years. I’ve been married twice.”
“Two fools to let you get away, den.”
“Not their intention.”
“What happened?”
“Death to one and car theft to the other. He’s in Wandsworth. Told me he was in the spare-parts business. I just didn’t know where the parts were coming from.”
“Ouch. And the other? How’d he—”
She held up her hand. “Not going there,” she said.
He didn’t press her, merely saying, “Rough. You had tough times wiv men. I ain’t like dat.”
“Good for you. That doesn’t change the way things are with me.”
“An’ how’s dat?”
“Busy. A life. Three kids I’m trying to sort, and a career I’m trying to get off the ground. I’ve got no time for anything more than that.”
“An’ when you need a man? For what a man c’n give you?”
“There are ways,” she said. “Just think about it.”
He crossed his arms and was silent. He finally said, “Lonely. Satisfaction, yeah. But how long it last?” And before she could answer, he went on to say, “But if dat’s the way you want it, I got to ’cept it and jus’ move on. So . . .” He looked around the back room as if he were seeking some sort of employment. He said, “You lockin up, right?
Come ’long an’ meet my mum and dad. Rainbow Cafe, like I said. Mum’s got my protein smoothie waitin for me, but I ’spect she do you a cup of tea.”
“Easy as that?” Kendra said.
“Easy as dat,” Dix told her. “Fetch y’r bag. Le’s go.” He grinned.
“Mum’s only three years older’n you, so you’ll like her, I ’spect. Have t’ings in common.”
That remark went straight to the bone, but Kendra had no intention of following it. She began to head back into the shop, where her bag was stowed under the counter. Dix didn’t move, though. They were face-to- face.
He said, “You one damn beautiful woman, Kendra.” He put his hand on the back of her neck. He used gentle pressure. She was meant to move into his arms, and she knew it.
She said, “You jus’ told me—”
“I lied. Not ’bout my mum, mind. But ’bout lettin go. Dat is summick I got no intention of doing.”
He kissed her then. She didn’t resist. When he moved her into the back room of the shop and away from the doorway, she didn’t resist that either. She wanted to do so, but that desire and all the cautions that went with it were bleating uselessly from her intellect. In the meantime, her body was saying something else, telling a tale about how long it had been, about how good it felt, about how insignifi cant it was, really, just to have a quick shag with no strings attached. Her body told her that everything he’d said about his intentions towards her were lies anyway. He was twenty-three-years old, and at that age men only wanted the sex—hot penetration and satisfying orgasm— and they’d do and say anything to make sure they got it. So no matter what he’d said in agreement to her assessment of the situation between them, what he really wanted was indeed another notch on his belt, seduction brought to a satisfying conclusion. All men were like that, and he was a man.
So she allowed the moment to reign, no past and no future. She embraced the now. She gasped, “Oh my sweet Jesus,” when at last they connected. He was everything—muscular thighs and all—that his body had promised he would be.
THE FACT THAT Six and Natasha were no closer to their dream of possessing mobile phones than they’d been on the night that Ness had met them was what caused the initial chink in the relationship among the three girls. This chink was widened when the Blade bestowed upon Ness the late-twentieth-century’s most irritating electronic device. The mobile, he told her, was for ringing him should anyone vex her when she wasn’t with him. No one, he said, was going to mess his woman about, and if anyone did, they would hear from him in very short order. He could get to her fast no matter where she was, so she wasn’t to be shy about giving him a bell if she needed him.
To a fifteen-year-old girl like Ness, these declarations—despite the fact of their being made on a questionably stained futon in a fi lthy squat without electricity or running water—sounded like certain proof of devotion and not what they really were, which was evidence of the Blade’s intentions to keep tabs on her and to have her available when he wanted her. Six, who was far more experienced in the arena of unsatisfactory relationships and definitely better informed in the ways of the Blade— having grown up in the same part of North Kensington as he—greeted everything Ness said about the man with suspicion if not outright disdain. These reactions on her part were exacerbated when the mobile phone put in an appearance in Ness’s life.
The girls had ventured farther than Whiteley’s on this particular afternoon. They’d gone to Kensington
