What Came Before He Shot Her

the sort of gauntlet that Ness had thrown before her, she also wasn’t a fool.

            She said, “Le’s go, Tash. Ness’s got a man wiv needs  she got to see to. Ness got a baby  she desp’rate to produce. No time for slags like us, anymore.” And to Ness, “Have fun, bitch. You one sorry cunt.”

            She spun on the spiked heel of her boot and took off in the direction of Kensington Church Street, where a ride on the number 52 bus would return her and Natasha to their own environment. Ness, she decided, could use her bloody mobile phone to ring the Blade and ask him to fetch her home. She’d find out soon enough just how willing he was to accommodate her.

            KENDRA FOUND HERSELF, in very short order, exactly where she had not wanted to be. She had long despised women who went soft inside at the thought of a man, but that was where she began heading. She ridiculed herself for feeling what she soon felt about Dix D’Court, but the thought of him became so dominant that the only way to put her mind at rest was to pray that the curse of her own sexuality be lifted in some way. Which it was not.

            She wasn’t so foolish as to call what she was feeling for the young man love, although another woman might have done so. She knew it was basic animal stuff: the ultimate trick a species plays upon its members to propagate itself. But that knowledge didn’t mitigate the intensity of what was going on in her body. Desire planted its insidious seeds within her, desiccating the previously fertile plain of her ambition. She kept at it as best she could —giving massages, taking further classes— but the drive to do so was fast disappearing, overcome by the drive to experience Dix D’Court. Dix, with all the vigour of his youth compelling him, was happy to do what he could to please her since it pleased him so much as well.

            It didn’t take long, however, for Kendra to learn that Dix wasn’t as ordinary a twenty-three-year-old as she’d thought the first time they coupled in the back room of the charity shop. While he eagerly embraced the carnality of their relationship, his background as the child of loving parents whose relationship had remained constant and devoted throughout his life demanded that he seek something similar for himself. This secondary desire was bound to come out sooner or later, especially since, because of his youth, Dix —unlike Kendra—did associate much of what he was feeling with the idea of romantic love that permeates western civilization.

What he said about this was, “Where we headed, Ken?” They faced each other, naked in her bed while below them in the sitting room, Dix’s favourite film was playing on the video machine, to entertain Toby and Joel and to keep them from interrupting what was going on when their aunt and her man had disappeared upstairs. The film was a pirated copy of Pumping Iron. Dix’s god starred, his sculpted body and wily mind acting as metaphors for what one determined man could do.

            Dix had chosen to ask his question in advance of their mating, which gave Kendra an opportunity to avoid answering in the manner she knew he wanted. He’d asked in the midst of mutual arousal, so she lowered herself—snakelike—down his body, her nipples tickling him on the way. Her reply was thus nonverbal. He groaned, said, “Hey, baby. Oh shit, Ken,” and gave himself to pleasure in such a way that she thought she’d succeeded in diverting him.

            After a few moments, though, he gently pushed her away. She said,

            “No like?”

            He said, “You know dat ain’t it. Come here. We got to talk.”

            She said, “Later,” and went back to him.

            He said, “Now,” and moved away from her. He tucked the sheet around himself for a further shield. She lay exposed, the better to keep him engaged.

            This didn’t work. He averted his eyes from where she wanted them— on her breasts—and showed himself determined to have his say. “Where we headin, Ken? I got to know. Dis is good, but it ain’t all dere is. I want more.”

            She chose to misinterpret him, saying with a smile, “How much more? We doing it so often I c’n hardly walk.”

            He didn’t return the smile. “You know what I’m talkin ’bout, Kendra.”

            She flopped on her back and gazed at the ceiling, where a crack from one side into the middle curved like the Thames around the Isle of Dogs. She reached without looking for a packet of Benson & Hedges. He hated her smoking—his own body was a temple undefiled by tobacco, alcohol, drugs, or processed food—but when he said her name in a fashion simultaneously impatient and minatory, she lit up anyway. He moved away from her. So be it, she thought.

            She said, “What, then? Marriage, babies? You don’t want me for that, mon.”

            “Don’t be tellin me what I want, Ken. I speak for myself.”

            She drew on her cigarette and then coughed. She shot him a look that dared him to remonstrate, which he did not. She said, “I walked that road twice. I’m not doing it—”

            “Third time’s the charm.”

            “And I can’t give you kids, which you’re going to want. Not now maybe cause you’re little more than a baby yourself, but you’re going to want them and then what?”

            “We sort dat out when we come to it. An’ who knows wha’ science’ll be able to—”

            “Cancer!” she said and she felt the anger. Unfair, unaccountable, a blow at eighteen that had not really affected her till she was thirty. “I don’t have the proper parts, Dix, not a single one. And there is no coming back from that, all right?”

            Oddly enough, he wasn’t put off by this knowledge. Instead, he reached out, took her cigarette from her, leaned past her to crush it out, and then kissed her. She knew he wouldn’t like the taste of her but that didn’t deter him. The kiss went on. It led where she had wanted to go moments earlier, and when it did so, she thought she had prevailed. But when they were finished, he didn’t separate from her. He gazed down at her face—his elbows holding his weight off her body—and he said, “You never told me ’bout the cancer. Whyn’t you never tell me, Ken? What else you not saying?”

            She shook her head. She was feeling the loss for once, and she didn’t like what she was feeling. She knew it was merely a trick of biology: that ache of wanting which would fade soon enough, as her mind took over from her body once again.

            He said, “It’s you anyways. I c’n live wivout the rest. An’ we got Joel and Toby for our kids. Ness ’s well.”

            Kendra laughed weakly. “Oh yeah. You want that kind of trouble.”

            “Stop  bloody tellin me what I want.”

            “Someone’s got to, cause you sure as hell don’t know.”

            He rolled off her then. He looked disgusted. He turned, sat up, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. His trousers—the same sort of harem trousers he’d been wearing that night at the Falcon—lay on the floor and he scooped them up. He stood, back to her, and stepped into them, drawing them up over the nicely muscled buttocks she so liked to admire.

            She sighed, saying, “Dix, I been  there. It i’n’t the paradise you’re thinkin it is. ’F you’d just believe me, we wouldn’t even need to have this sort of conversation, baby.”

            He turned back to her. “Don’t call me baby. Now I know how you mean it, I don’t like how it sound.”

            “I don’t mean it—”

            “Yeah, Ken. You do. He a baby, dat boy. Don’t know what he wants. T’inks he’s in love when all it is is sex. He come to his senses soon enough, he will.”

            She sat up in the bed, resting against the wicker headboard. She said,

            “Yeah well . . . ?” and looked at him meaningfully. It was a schoolmarm look. It said she knew him better than he knew himself because she’d lived life longer and experienced more. It was, in short, a maddening look, designed to set on edge the teeth of a man who had what he wanted in front of him, just out of reach.

            He said, “I can’t help what it was like for you with the other two, Ken. I c’n only be who I am. I c’n only say it’d be different wiv us.”

            She blinked the sudden, surprising pain from her eyes. She said, “We don’t control that. You think we do, but we don’t, Dix.”

            “I got my life headin—”