What Came Before He Shot Her

            Massage and tanning—booths and beds—were what she actually intended, and in that she revealed a fairly good understanding of her white-skinned countrymen. Living in a climate where the weather often precludes the possibility of anyone’s having the healthy glow of naturally bronzed skin, at least three generations of white people in England have fried themselves into first-and sometimes second-degree sunburns on a regular basis on those rare days when the sun puts in an appearance. Kendra’s plan was to tap into those people’s desire to expose themselves to ultraviolet carcinogens. She would lure them in with the idea of the tan they were seeking and then introduce them to therapeutic massage somewhere along the way. For those regular customers whose bodies she would have already been massaging at her own home or theirs, she would offer the dubious benefits of tanning. It seemed a plan destined for sure success.

            Kendra knew all this would take enormous time and effort, but she had always been a woman unafraid of hard work. In this, she was nothing like her mother. But that was not the only way in which Kendra Osborne and Glory Campbell differed from each other. Men comprised the other way. Glory was frightened and incomplete without one, no matter what he was like or how he treated her, which is why she was at that very moment sitting at an airport boarding gate, waiting to jet off to a broken-down alcoholic Jamaican with a disreputable past and absolutely no future. Kendra, on the other hand, stood on her own. She’d been married twice. Once a widow and now a divorcee, she liked to say that she’d done her time—with one winner and one utter loser —and now her second husband was doing his. She didn’t mind men, but she’d learned to see them as good merely for relieving certain physical needs.

            When those needs came upon her, Kendra had no difficulty finding a man happy to accommodate her. An evening out with her best girlfriend was sufficient to take care of this, for at forty years of age, Kendra was tawny, exotic, and willing to use her looks to get what she wanted, which was a bit of fun with no strings attached. With her career plans in place, she had no room in her life for a love-struck male with anything more on his mind than sex with appropriate precautions taken. At the point when Kendra swung her car right to the narrow garage in front of her house, Joel and Toby—having returned from their outing to the Meanwhile Gardens duck pond—had been sitting in the frigid cold for an additional hour, and both of them were numb around the bottom. Kendra didn’t see her nephews on her top front step, largely because the streetlamp in Edenham Way had been burnt out since the previous October, with no sign of anyone’s having a plan to replace it. Instead, what she saw was someone’s discarded shopping trolley blocking access to her garage and filled to the brim with that person’s belongings.

            At first it seemed to Kendra that these were goods meant for the charity shop, and while she didn’t appreciate her neighbours dropping off their discards in front of her house instead of carting them up to the Harrow Road, she wasn’t one to turn goods away if there was a possibility that they might sell. So when she got out of the car to pull the trolley to one side, she was still in the good humour that sprang from             having had a successful afternoon giving demonstration sports massages at a gym built under the Westway Flyover in the Portobello Green Arcade.

            That was when she saw the boys, their suitcases, and the carrier bags. Instantly, Kendra felt dread surge up from her stomach, and realisation followed in a rush.

            She unlocked the garage and shoved open the door without a word to her nephews. She understood what was about to happen, and the understanding prompted her to curse, her voice soft enough to ensure that the boys couldn’t hear her, but loud enough to give herself at least a modicum of the satisfaction that comes with cursing in the first place. She chose the words shit  and that goddamn cow, and once she said them, she climbed back into the Fiat and pulled it into the garage, all the time thinking furiously of what she could possibly do to avoid having to deal with what her mother had just thrust upon her. She was able to come up with nothing.

            By the time she’d parked the car and gone around to the back of it to drag her massage table from the boot, Joel and Toby had left their perch and come to join her. They hesitated at the corner of the house, Joel at the front and Toby his usual shadow.

            Joel said to Kendra without hello or preamble, “Gran say she got to fix up a house first, for us to come to live in in Jamaica. She sendin for us when she got it fixed. She say we’re meant to wait for her here.”

            And when Kendra didn’t answer because, despite her dread, her nephew’s words and his hopeful tone made her eyes smart at her mother’s base cruelty, Joel went on even more eagerly, saying, “How you been, Aunt Ken? C’n I help you wiv dat?”

            Toby said nothing. He hung back and danced a bit on his toes, looking solemn and like a bizarre ballerina doing a solo in a production involving the sea. “Why the hell’s he wearing that thing?” Kendra asked Joel with a nod at his brother.

            “Th’ life ring? It’s wha’ he likes jus’ now, innit. Gran gave it him for Christmas, remember? She said in Jamaica he c’n—”

            “I know what she said,” Kendra cut in sharply, and the sudden anger she felt was directed not at her nephew but at herself as she abruptly realised she should have known right then, right on Christmas Day, what Glory Campbell intended. The moment Glory had made her airy announcement about following her no-good boyfriend back to the land of their births as if she were Dorothy setting off to see the wizard and things were going to be as simple as tripping down some yellow brick road . . . Kendra wanted to slap herself for wearing blinkers that day.

            “Kids’ll love  Jamaica,” Glory had said. “An’ George’ll rest easier there ’n here. Wiv dem, I mean. ’S been hard on him, y’ know. T’ree kids an’ us in dis tiny li’l place. We been living in each other knickers.”

            Kendra had said, “You can’t take them off to Jamaica. What about their mum?”

            To which Glory had replied, “I ’spect Carole won’t even know dey gone.”

            No doubt, Kendra thought as she hauled the massage table from the back of the car, Glory would now use that as an excuse in the letter that was surely to follow her departure at some point when she could no longer avoid writing it. I’ve had a decent think about it, she would declare, for Kendra knew her mother would use her erstwhile appropriate English and not the faux Jamaican she’d taken up in anticipation of her coming new life, and I remember what you said aboutpoor Carole. You’re right, Ken. I can’t take the kids so far away fromher, can I?  That would be an end to the matter. Her mother wasn’t evil, but she’d always been someone who firmly believed in putting first things first. Since the first thing in Glory’s mind had always been Glory, she was unlikely ever to do something that might be to her disadvantage. Three grandchildren in Jamaica living in a household with a useless, unemployed, card-playing, television-watching specimen of overweight and malodorous male whom Glory was determined to hang on to because she’d never once been able to cope for even a week without a man and she was at the age where men are hard to come by. . . That scenario would spell out disadvantage  even to the base illiterate.

            Kendra slammed home the lid of the boot. She grunted as she hoisted up the heavy folding table by its handle. Joel hurried to assist her. He said, “Lemme take dat, Aunt Ken,” quite as if he believed he could handle its size and its weight. Because of this and although she didn’t want to, Kendra softened a bit. She said to Joel, “I’ve got it, but you can pull down that door. And you can fetch that trolley inside the house, along with everything else you’ve got with you.”

            As Joel complied, Kendra looked at Toby. The brief moment of experiencing softness deserted her. What she saw was the puzzle everyone saw and the responsibility that no one wanted because the only answer that anyone had ever managed—or been willing—to glean about what was wrong with Toby was the useless label “lacking an appropriate social filter,” and in the family chaos that had become the norm shortly before his fourth birthday, no one had had the nerve to investigate further. Now Kendra—who knew no more about this child than what she could see before her—was faced with coping with him until she could come up with a plan to divest herself of the responsibility. Looking at him standing there—that ridiculous life ring, his head a chopped-up mess, his jeans too long, his trainers duct-taped closed because he’d never learned to tie his shoes properly—Kendra wanted to run in the opposite direction.

            She said shortly to Toby, “So. What d’you have to say for yourself?”

            Toby halted in his dance and looked to Joel, seeking a sign of what he was meant to do. When Joel didn’t give him one, he said to his aunt, “I got to pee. S’this Jamaica?”

            “Tobe. You know  it ain’t,” Joel said.

            “Isn’t,” Kendra told him. “Speak proper English when you’re with me. You’re perfectly capable of it.”