What Came Before He Shot Her

his bodily perfection in particular, that was easy enough to ignore because of the security his presence brought them.

            The only problem was Ness. It soon became apparent that, as drunk as she had been on the occasion, she didn’t remember Dix as the man who’d delivered her from a nasty fate at the Falcon. She simply bore no liking for him despite his timely arrival during the Blade’s attack upon her. There were several reasons for this, although she was prepared to admit to none of them.

            The most obvious was her displacement. Since coming to North Kensington from East Acton, she’d shared Kendra’s bed on the nights when she’d actually slept at home, and upon Dix’s arrival she found herself removed from her aunt’s bedroom and stationed on the sofa instead. The fact that Dix built a screen to give her privacy did not ameliorate her feelings in the matter, and these feelings were aggravated by the knowledge that Dix—a mere eight years older than she and a breathtaking specimen of man flesh—was markedly indifferent to her presence and instead besotted with her aunt. She felt like a rack of cold toast in his presence, and she translated what she felt into a renewal of surliness towards her family and a renewal of friendship with Six and Natasha.

            This perplexed Kendra, who’d mistakenly assumed that Ness would be a changed young woman after the Blade’s attack upon her, seeing the error of her previous ways and grateful that a man’s protection was now available to all of them. In frustration at Ness’s continued churlishness, she pointed out to her niece that it was down to her, anyway, that Dix D’Court was moving in with them. Had she not involved herself with the Blade, she wouldn’t have found herself in the position she now was in: on the sofa at night, in the sitting room, behind a collapsible screen.

This fruitless—albeit understandable—approach to dealing with Ness possessed the unmistakable potential to make the situation worse. Dix pointed this out to Kendra privately, telling her to go easier on the girl. If Ness didn’t want to speak to him, fine. If she stalked out of the room when he came into it, fine as well. If she used his razor, dropped his body lotion in the toilet, and poured his 100 percent organic juices down the kitchen sink, let her. For now. The time would come when she realised that none of this was changing reality. She would have to choose a different course, then. They needed to be ready and willing to provide her with one so that she didn’t choose a course that would take her into more trouble.

            To Kendra, this was an overly sanguine way of looking at the problem of Ness. The girl had brought nothing but ever-increasing difficulty into Kendra’s life from the moment of her arrival, and something had to be done about her. Kendra could not, however, come up with anything beyond giving orders and making threats, most of which—out of duty to her brother, Ness’s father—she lacked the courage to carry out.

            “You keep ’spectin her to be like you,” was Dix’s maddeningly reasonable assessment of the situation when he and Kendra discussed it.

            “You get past that, you got a chance of ’ceptin her for what she is.”

            “What she is is a tart,” Kendra told him. “A truant, a layabout, and a slag.”

            “You don’t mean dat,” Dix replied, laying a finger across her lips and smiling down at her. It was late. They were drowsy from lovemaking and readying themselves for sleep. “Dat’s your frustration talking. Just like hers is talkin as well. You letting her vex you ’stead of lookin at the why of what she’s doing.”

            Mostly, they circled each other, wary as cats. Kendra walked into a room; Ness flounced out of it. Kendra assigned a chore for the girl; Ness did it only when the request became the demand and the demand became the threat and even then she did it as badly as possible. She was monosyllabic, angry, and sarcastic when what Kendra expected of her was gratitude. Not gratitude for the roof over her head—which even Kendra knew was too much to ask for, considering how it had come to pass that Ness and her brothers were living in Edenham Way —but gratitude at least for the deliverance from the Blade as effected by Dix. The second time, in fact, that Dix had delivered her from trouble, a truth that Kendra pointed out to her.

            “He was dat  bloke?” Ness responded to this news. “From the Falcon? No way.” But after learning this, Ness eyed him differently and in a manner that would have caused concern in a woman less sure of herself than Kendra.

            “Yes way,” was Kendra’s reply. “How drunk were  you, girl, that you don’t remember?”

            “Too drunk to study up on his face,” she said. “But wha’ I do remember . . .” She smiled and rolled her eyes expressively. “My, my, my, Ken dra. Ain’t you one lucky slag.”

            Her remark was a small pebble thrown into a large pond, but the ripples still made their way outward. Kendra tried to avoid attending to them. She told herself that Ness, in her present state, liked to mess with minds and didn’t care how she did it.

            Still, she couldn’t avoid a reaction deep within herself, one that eventually prompted her to say to Dix as a way of approaching the topic obliquely, “Blood, what’re you doing loving on this middle-aged body of mine? You don’t like girl flesh? Is that what it is? Your age, I’d think you’d want someone young.”

            “Y’are young,” he said promptly, a gratifying response. But he went on with an intuitive question. “Wha’s dis really about, Ken?”

            That maddened Kendra: Dix’s seeing through her indirections. She said, “It’s about nothing.”

            He said, “Don’t think so.”

            “All right, then. You mean me to think you don’t look at girls?

            Young women? Down the pub, at the gym, sunning themselves in the park?”

            “Course I look. Ain’t a robot.”

            “And when Ness walks round here with half her clothes off? You take note of that?”

            “Like I said, Ken. Wha’s dis really about?”

            Pressed to it, however, Kendra couldn’t bring herself to say more. More would have indicated a lack of trust, a lack of confidence, and a lack of esteem. Not esteem for herself but esteem for him. To take her mind off what Ness clearly wanted her mind on, Kendra redoubled her efforts to increase her list of clients for massage, telling herself that everything else was secondary to the future that she was trying to build.

            She hadn’t intended that future to include the Campbells, though, and as Ness continued to demonstrate how unpleasant life with an adolescent girl could be, Kendra understandably gave thought to ways in which life with an adolescent girl could be brought to an end. She considered the possibility that their mother might reenter their world and take them off her hands. She even visited Carole Campbell privately to assess whether her maternal instincts—such as they were—might be reawakened. But Carole, having “a faraway day” as her lapse into a fugue state was called, was mute on the subject of Ness and Joel. Toby, Kendra knew, was a topic best left unmentioned.

            The fact that Dix wasn’t bothered by the presence of the Campbells— and particularly by Ness— increased Kendra’s sense of guilt about her own feelings. She told herself that she was “good God their aunt,  for heaven’s sake” and she tried to shake the general sense of uneasiness that had her waiting endlessly for the worst.

            As for Ness, she knew that her aunt was wary and, powerless for so long, she enjoyed the fleeting feeling of supremacy she was able to experience simply by being in the same room with her aunt and Dix D’Court. For Kendra had begun to study her like a microscopic specimen on a slide, and reading her aunt’s suspicions as jealousy, Ness couldn’t help trying to give her something to be jealous about. This required Dix’s cooperation. Since, to Ness, he was a man like all men—governed by base desires—she set out to seduce him. There was nothing subtle in her approach.

            He was standing at the kitchen sink when she accosted him. He’d made himself one of his protein- packed juice drinks, and he was powering it down. His back was to her. They were alone in the house. She murmured, “Ken’s got all  the luck. You, blood, are one fine man.”

            He turned to her, surprised because he thought she’d left the house. He had things to do—primary among them his daily workout—and having a tete-a-tete with his woman’s niece wasn’t among them. Besides, he’d seen the way Ness had started looking at him, assessing and deciding, and he had a fairly good idea of where a private colloquy with her might lead. He drank down the rest of his smoothie and turned to rinse out the glass.

            Ness joined him at the sink. She put her hand on his shoulder and ran it down his arm. It was bare, as was his chest. Ness turned his wrist and traced his vein. Her touch was light, her hands were soft, and there was no mistaking her intentions.

            He was human, and if he thought fleetingly of returning her touch and if his eyes dropped even more