What Came Before He Shot Her

which was worsened by the condition of what must be called her erstwhile friendship with Six and Natasha.

Six and Natasha were not unmindful of the difficulties they might face should Ness decide to name them as her accomplices in the attempted mugging for which she had been arrested. While one way of assuring that this naming did not happen might have been to encourage a meeting of the minds with Ness, neither Six nor Natasha possessed adequate language skills to effect an agreement. Nor did they possess either the ability or the imagination to see beyond the immediate moment in order to assess the consequences of any action they might take. Their way of making their feelings known—these feelings being worry over having to face the magistrate themselves, not to mention a modicum of anxiety about having to deal with their parents’ wrath in the matter— was to avoid Ness as if she were a carrier of the Ebola virus. When this didn’t suffice to give Ness the message that their friendship was at an end, they went on to tell her directly that they didn’t like the way she’d been acting, “like you t’ink you’re better’n anyone else, when all you are is a bloody stupid cow.” And that approach worked fine.

So when Ness went to face the magistrate, she went with the knowledge that she stood alone. She had Kendra with her, but Ness was not of a mind to seek succour from her, and her feelings for the social worker— whom she’d finally met and to whom she’d revealed nothing of value—were not of a sort to make Fabia Bender’s presence good for much. Thus when Ness faced the magistrate, she projected an attitude so far from remorse and humility that the only recourse he saw was to throw every available book at her.

            The saving grace for Ness was that hers was a first offence. So while another young woman evidencing the same degree of indifference to the proceedings, to her advocates, and to her life might have found herself sentenced to what the magistrate—with an antique formality that might have been endearing in other circumstances—insisted upon referring to as “borstal,” Ness received two thousand hours of community service: to be religiously documented, supervised, and signed off by the individual in whose charge this community service was intended to be served. And, the magistrate concluded, Miss Campbell would  be attending school when the autumn term began. He didn’t add “or else,” but that was understood.

            Fabia Bender told Ness she was lucky. Kendra Osborne did the same. But Ness saw only that two thousand hours of community service might take her the rest of her life to serve, and her displeasure was in exact proportion to what she believed were the inherent inequities of the situation. “Ain’t fair,” was how she put it.

            “You don’t like it, you tell them the names of your mates and where to find them, then,” was how Kendra responded.

            Since Ness was not about to do that—despite Six and Natasha’s rejection of her—she had no other recourse than to serve her time. This, she learned, would take place at the Meanwhile Gardens child drop-in centre, a site whose complete convenience to her home also did not garner from Ness any degree of appreciation. Instead she was the incarnation of a young woman put upon, and she decided to make her supervisor at the child drop-in centre aware of this at the first opportunity. That opportunity came quickly enough. A phone call from Majidah Ghafoor on the same day as Ness received her sentence informed her of the hours that she would be expected to work. They would begin immediately, Ness was informed. Since she lived less than fifty yards from the site of her community service, she could come round right now and hear the rules.

            “Rules?” Ness asked her. “Wha’ you mean, rules? Dis ain’t no prison. Dis is a job.”

            “A job to which you have been assigned,” Majidah told her. “Come at once please. I shall wait ten minutes before phoning probation.”

            “Shit!” Ness said.

            “Less than well expressed,” Majidah told her in the pleasant accent of her place of birth. “We will be having no profanities in the drop-in centre, miss.”

            So Ness went around, still in the state in which her appearance before the magistrate had left her. She let herself in through the gate in the chain-link fence and stalked across the play area to the cabin that housed all the indoor activities offered to children six years old and under. There, with the children gone for the day, Majidah was in the process of doing the washing up after a late-afternoon snack of milk, toasted tea cakes, and strawberry jam. She handed Ness a tea towel to begin drying glasses and plates (“And see you do take care, for you will pay for whatever it is you happen to break”), and she started to talk.

Majidah Ghafoor turned out to be an ethnically attired Pakistani woman of young middle age. She was a widow who, in defiance of the traditions of her culture, refused to live with any of her married sons. Their wives she deemed “too English” for her liking, despite the fact that she’d had the main hand in choosing each of them, and while she found her eleven grandchildren attractive, she also saw them as largely an undisciplined lot destined for lives of dissolution unless their parents reined them in.

            “No, I am happier on my own,” she told Ness, who couldn’t have been less interested in matters pertaining to Majidah’s life. “And you shall be as well. Happy here, that is. As long as you adhere to the rules.”

            The rules consisted of a catalogue of the forbidden: no smoking, no mobile phone use, no land line use, no heavy makeup, no excessive jewellery, no music via iPod, MP3 player, Walkman, or anything else, no card playing, no dancing, no tattoos, no overt piercings of the body, no visitors, no junk food (“This McDonald’s is the bane of the civilised world, I do think”), no revealing clothing (“such as what you are currently wearing, which I shall not allow in this building again”), no adult or adolescent person inside the fence unless accompanied by a child of six or younger.

            To all of this, Ness rolled her eyes expressively and said, “Whatever. S’when do I start?”

            “Now. Once you have finished with the dishes, you may scrub the floor. While you do that, I shall come up with a schedule for you. This I will send to your probation officer and your social worker, so they will see how we intend to work on the two thousand hours you were given for your crime.”

            “I di’n’t commit no—”

            “Please.” Majidah cut her off with a wave of the hand. “I am not the least interested in the nature of your disreputable activities, miss. They shall have no part in our business arrangement. You are here to complete hours; I am here to document that completion. You will find a mop and bucket in the long cupboard next to the sink. I require hot water and a cup of Ajax. When you have finished the floor, you may clean the loo.”

            “Where you markin down my hours, den?”

            “That, miss, is not for you to concern yourself about. Now shoo, shoo. Work awaits us both. The centre must be tidied and there are only you and I to do it.”

            “No  one else works here?” Ness asked, incredulous.

            “Which makes the day blessedly full of activity,” Majidah said. Ness didn’t think she was going to be seeing it that way. But she found the mop, the bucket, and the Ajax and she set to work on the drop-in centre’s green lino floor.

            There were four rooms in all: kitchen, storage room, toilet, and activity room, with the most serious grit and grime in the two rooms to which the children were given access. Ness mopped the activity room, where pint-size tables and chairs were scattered across a floor made sticky by various spillages. She did the same to the toilet, shuddering to think what the various spillages in there implied. Under Majidah’s supervision, she went on to scrub the kitchen. The storage room, she was told, required only a thorough sweeping out, after which she could dust the shelves and the windowsills and clean the lopsided Venetian blinds.

Ness did all of this with less than good grace, muttering and casting sidelong looks at Majidah, which the Pakistani woman ignored. At a desk to one side of the room, she instead occupied herself with two schedules: Ness’s and the children’s. She viewed Ness’s assignment to the drop-in centre as a gift from the gods, and she intended to make use of that gift. How Ness felt about matters was not her concern. Experience had shown her that hard work killed no one, nor did accepting what life threw at you.

KENDRA MET UP with Cordie for advice once Ness had received her sentence. She went to her house in Kensal Green, where Cordie was tolerantly taking part in her two daughters’ fantasy tea party in the cramped back garden. Uncharacteristically, Manda and Patia had decided upon a royal theme for this event, with Manda acting the role of monarch—ancient pillbox hat, lace gloves, and oversize handbag on her arm—and Cordie and Patia playing a grateful and decidedly nonroyal public invited to partake of Fanta orange served in chipped china cups (courtesy of the charity shop), bowls of crisps (in Patia’s favourite flavour, which happened to be lamb and mint), a bag of cheddar popcorn emptied into a plastic colander and set in the middle of the rickety garden table, and a plate of Jaffa cakes looking rather crumbly.

Manda, apparently suffering some degree of confusion over the respect demanded by the papacy and that