What Came Before He Shot Her

            “Well, so did he,” she cut in. “Got murdered in the street. Got knifed cos he was walking home from work and two bloods di’n’t think he showed ’em enough respect. Course they high, so whatever he showed wasn’t going to matter much, but they cornered him and they knifed him anyway. And the cops . . . ? Just ’nother dead blood. Nignogs ridding the world of each other, according to them. And he, Dix, my husband Sean, he had intentions just like you. Property management.” She laughed shortly, bitterly, a laugh that said the nerve ofthat man to have his dreams. “He wanted the ordin’ry things in life, too. Adopting the kids we can’t have on our own. Setting up house. Buying things like furniture, a toaster, a doormat. Simple stuff like that. And he dies cos the knife slices through his spleen. It cuts all the way cross his stomach and he bleeds out, Dix. That’s how he dies. He jus’ bleeds out.”

            He sat on the edge of the bed, her side of it, near but not touching. He raised his hand, his intention of caressing her an obvious one. She tilted her head away from him. He dropped his arm.

She said, “And number two, Dix? He looks like he got his dream made, and it’s humble enough. Car-parts business wiv me helping by doing the books, a man-and-wife sort of thing, just like your mum and dad in their cafe. Only I don’t get that he’s stealing cars ’s well. So damn good at it—moving ’em in and moving ’em out—you can’t blink cos you miss the action. So we lose everything, he go inside, and I just barely escape the same thing. So you see, I ain’t . . .” She realised how badly her language was slipping at the same moment she realised she’d begun to weep, and the combination of these two pieces of knowledge created within her a pool of humiliation so deep that she thought she might drown. She lowered her head to her upraised knees.

He said nothing because what, indeed, does a twenty-three-year-old male—so new to adulthood—say to assuage what looks like grief but is so much more? Dix still possessed that youthful vigour which declares that anything is possible in life. Untouched by tragedy, he could see but he could not relate to its depth or its capacity to colour the future through fear.

            He could love her back to well-being, he thought. To him, what they had was good, and its goodness possessed the strength to obliterate anything that had gone before. He knew this and felt it at a level so atavistic, however, that no words came to him to express himself. He felt reduced to nerve endings and desire, dominated by the intention of proving to her that things were different when it came to him. His inexperience limited him, though. Sex was the only metaphor he could grasp. He reached for her, saying, “Ken, baby, Ken.”

            She jerked away and rolled onto her side. For Kendra, everything she was and everything she had tried to become was fast collapsing as the Kendra she presented to the world was crushed by the weight of the past, which she generally managed to hold at bay. Acknowledging, admitting, speaking about . . . She had no reason to do any of this when she was living out her daily life and simply pursuing her ambitions. To have done it all now, and in the presence of a man with whom she’d no intention of experiencing anything more than the basest sort of pleasure, added to her sense of degradation.

            She wanted him to leave. She waved him away.

            He said, “Yeah. But you comin’ as well.”

            He strode to the bedroom door, which he opened. He called out,

            “Joel? You hear me, blood?”

            The sound on Pumping Iron lowered, Arnold expatiating on some topic or another, mercifully muted. Joel called out, “Yeah?”

            “How fas’ you get ready? Toby, too?”

            “For what?”

            “We goin out.”

            “Where?” A slight pitch in voice, which Dix took for excitement and happiness: a dad giving his boys some good news.

            “Time you met my mum an’ dad, bred. Toby an’ your Aunt Ken ’s well. You up for dat? They got a caff up the Harrow Road and my mum . . . ? She do apple pie wiv hot custard. You lot ready for dat?”

            “Yeah! Hey, Tobe . . . !” The rest Dix did not hear, as he had shut the door and turned back to Kendra. He began to sort through the clothing she had strewn around the floor, wispy bits of lace that were knickers and bra, tights, a skirt that skimmed her hips, a V-necked blouse that was cream on her skin. He found a thin T- shirt in a drawer, as well, and this he used gently to blot her face. She said, “Oh Jesus. What d’you want wiv me, man?”

            He said, “Come on, Ken. Le’s get you dressed. Time my mum and dad met th’ woman I love.”

            Chapter

      9 Any reasonable person looking upon the Blade—let alone spending one or two hours in his company— would have been able to draw a few conclusions about what entering into an extended relationship with the man would be like. First there was the matter of his tattoo and what decorating one’s face with a venomspitting cobra suggested about his inner issues as well as about his potential for lucrative—not to mention legal—employment. Next there was his size, so suggestive of a Napoleon-in-the-making, without benefit of the designation emperor  to give reason for the less salubrious aspects of his personality. Then, there was his place of abode and all the inconveniences offered by a squat destined for the wreckers’ ball. Finally, there was his line of work, which involved nothing that promised even the semblance of longevity. But for someone to look upon the Blade and have time to consider all these facts about him and what they might imply, that person would also have to be capable of rational and extended thought. The night that Ness met the Blade, she was capable of neither, and by the time she might have been able to look at him more clearly, she was too involved to be willing to do so.

So she told herself that there were elements in her relationship with the Blade that indicated she’d been chosen  by him, although what she had been chosen for was something she wasn’t able to identify. At this point in her life, she couldn’t afford to be a deep thinker on the topic of male-female liaisons, so what she did was to leap to premature conclusions based on superficial information. This information was limited to three areas of her life: the sexual, the commercial, and the drug oriented.

She and the Blade were lovers, if such a word could be applied to the Neanderthal manner in which the young man approached the entire sexual act. There was no pleasure involved in this for Ness, but she neither expected nor desired pleasure from it. As long as it continued to happen, she was one step closer to the baby that she claimed she wanted, at the same time as she was reassured that her place in the Blade’s life was as secure as she needed it to be. Thus, his demands on her—which women with a greater sense of self might have found degrading—were transformed in her mind to the reasonable exigencies of “a man wiv his needs,” as she would have put it had someone asked her about the pounding to which she regularly acquiesced without having experienced anything resembling either foreplay or seduction. Since they were lovers and since he continued to behave in a fashion that suggested an attachment to her, she was, if not content, then at least occupied. A woman occupied has little time to question.

When he gave her the mobile phone, she had that which her girlfriends so desired, and this commercial aspect of her relationship with the Blade allowed her to believe in his romantic intentions towards her, every bit as if he’d presented her with a costly diamond. At the same time, it gave her a dominance that she quite liked, raising her in the eyes of her associates.

            She remained there—above Six and Natasha—because of the Blade as well. For he was the source of the weed she smoked and the coke she snorted, removing her from having to depend solely upon the neighbourhood’s delivery boys for a handout, as Six and Natasha had to do. To Ness, the fact that the Blade shared substance with her freely meant they were a real couple.

            Having all these beliefs, then, and clinging to them because, indeed, she had nothing else to cling to, Ness tried to forget what Six had said about the Blade. She could cope with his past. Good God, he was “a man wiv needs,” after all, and she could hardly have expected him to remain celibate, waiting for her. But she found that within all the information about the Blade that Six had so cruelly passed along in Kensington High Street, there were two facts that she could not dismiss no matter how she tried. One of these was the fact of two children fathered by the Blade: a baby on Dickens Estate and another in Adair Street. The other was the fact of Arissa.

            The babies constituted a terrible question Ness couldn’t bring herself to form in her mind, let alone to ask outright about herself. Arissa, on the other hand, represented an easy topic for thought at the same time as she