What Came Before He Shot Her

He said, “Blood, you don’t worry ’bout dis. Shit happens to ever’one. You jus’ go on home. I’ll bring you summick on my way back.” Then he rose and said to Joel, “I got to go. I’m up in a couple minutes.”

            “Dat’s cool,” Joel told him, and Dix left them at the auditorium door.

            Joel led Toby out and down the stairs. Thankfully, they had the men’s toilet to themselves. There, Joel managed his first truly good look at his brother, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. Mucous and vomit dirtied his face, and his T-shirt was streaked with sick, smelling like the floor of an upside-down, tumbling, fun-fair ride. Toby’s jeans were little better. He’d even managed to get vomit on his shoes.

If ever the ministrations of a consoling mother were called for, this was that moment. Joel took Toby to the basin and turned on the tap. He looked around for paper towels, but there was only a grimy pulldown roller of blue cotton that looped inextricably through a dispenser and hung wetly from there down to the floor. Joel saw, then, that his efforts would have to be limited to washing Toby’s face and hands. The rest of him would have to wait until their return to Edenham Estate.

Toby stood mutely through the application of a sliver of soap to his face and his hands. He accepted the toilet tissue pressed to his skin, and he didn’t say anything until Joel had done the best he could do with the soiled T-shirt and jeans. Then what he said would have surprised anyone who knew him less well than Joel, anyone who made assumptions about the world that he felt safe to inhabit. He said, “Joel, why i’n’t Mum comin home? Cos she i’n’t, eh?”

            “Don’t say dat. You don’t know an’ neither do I.”

            “She t’inks Dad’s at home.”

            “Yeah.”

            “Why?”

            “Cos she can’t cope wiv t’inkin anything else.”

            Toby considered this, his nose still dripping. Joel wiped it with another bit of tissue and took him by the hand. He led him back along the corridor and up the stairs, surrounded by the foul sick smell of him, so strong an odour that it seemed like a palpable presence. Joel told himself it would all be better when he got Toby outside. The air—even laden with the fumes of vehicles zipping by—would make the stench less foetid, surely.

            They were out of the YMCA and heading vaguely in the direction from which Joel remembered them coming when he realised two things simultaneously. The first was that he didn’t know where the underground station was and the brown directional signs pointing every which way were not helping matters. The second was that finding the station was of no account anyway since he didn’t have enough money to buy them tickets. Dix had bought returns when they’d left Westbourne Park station, but he’d held on to them throughout the journey, and they were in his gym bag inside the YMCA locker room. It was inconceivable to Joel that he should go back there, taking Toby into that auditorium again and seeking out Dix to get to the tickets. It was also inconceivable to him that he should leave Toby alone outside while he did it. So there was nothing for it but to return to North Kensington by bus since he did have enough money to pay for a single ride for each of them.

            The problem he faced with this plan, however, was that there was no single ride that would take them from the Barbican all the way across town. When, after twenty-two minutes of wandering around the maze of buildings, Joel finally found a bus stop that was more than merely a pole sticking up from the pavement, he studied the plan and saw that no less than three different bus routes were going to be necessary to get them home. He knew he could manage it. He would recognise Oxford Street, where the first change had to be made—who wouldn’t?—and even if he somehow didn’t recognise it from the swarm of trend-seeking shoppers on the pavements, the bus they needed to take from the Barbican terminated there anyway, so when it ground to a halt, they’d have to get off. The real problem was that they didn’t have enough money to make the necessary changes after the first ride. That meant for the second two rides he and Toby were going to have to sneak on and pray they weren’t noticed. Their best hope for that would be if two of the three buses they needed were of the old, openbacked double-decker type: utterly unsafe, completely convenient, and quintessentially London. These types offered entrance from the rear, a driver and a conductor, and crowded conditions. They also offered Joel the best chance of sneaking on unnoticed and getting home on the meagre funds they had.

            As things turned out for the boys, this operation took more than five hours. This was not because they got lost because they didn’t. Rather, the journey stretched and stretched because the first change at Oxford Street resulted in their being thrown off the bus without tickets, and four more buses lumbered past them in the mass congestion of the shopping district before one suitably packed with passengers suggested that the conductor might be too preoccupied to notice them. This indeed proved to be the case, but they had the same trouble with the next change at Queensway. From there it took six buses—leaping on, riding one or two stops, getting thrown off— just to make it to Chepstow Road, where they were thrown off once again. Joel finally decided that they’d walk the rest of the way as Toby hadn’t been sick since the YMCA. He smelled no better and he was obviously tired, but Joel reckoned the air—as fresh as it could ever be in London—would do him some good.

            It was after seven in the evening when they finally reached Edenham Estate. Kendra met them at the door. By this time she had become quite frantic with worrying about what had happened to them, as Dix had arrived hours earlier—his trophy in hand—asking how Toby was feeling and setting off at once to search for the boys when he learned they hadn’t returned from the Barbican. Kendra’s mental state was evidenced by the state of her language. She cried out, “Where you been?

            Where you been? Dix’s out there . . . Ness even went out ’s well. What happened? Toby, baby, you sick? Dix said . . . Joel, goddamn. Why di’n’t you give me a bloody bell? I would’ve . . . Oh God!” She swept them both into her arms.

            Joel was surprised to find she was crying. No astute student of the human psyche at his age, he had no way of understanding that his aunt was reacting to what she’d been seeing as the incarnation of her own unspoken dream to be relieved of the burden of responsibility.

            For Kendra, it was a real case of be-careful-what-you-subconsciouslywish-for. As she ran the bath for Toby and stripped the ruined clothes from his body, she talked like a woman on amphetamines. Dix, she said, had been home for hours. He’d walked in with his bloody stupid trophy—

            “Oh yeah, he won, di’n’t he just”—and he looked round and said Boys make it all right? like he di’n’t have no worry at all dat you lot’d find your way ’cross the whole bloody stupid town though you never even been there before. I say to him What you raving ’bout, mon? Dem boys wiv you, innit? He say Toby sicked up down the front of himself and he  made you come on home.

            Here, in all fairness, Joel interrupted. He’d been sitting on the toilet watching his aunt wash Toby with a soapy flannel and shampoo, and he knew it was only just that he set his aunt straight in the matter of Dix. He said, “He di’n’t make us, Aunt Ken. I told him—”

            “Don’t tell me who tol’ who what,” Kendra said. “Oh I ’spect he di’n’t tell you to disappear, but he made his bloody feelings  known, di’n’t he? Don’t lie to me, Joel.”

            “It wasn’t like dat,” Joel protested. “He was near up before the judges. He’d’ve had to leave. And look, anyways, he won, di’n’t he?

            Dat’s what’s important.”

            Kendra turned from the bath where she was rinsing Toby. “Holy God in heaven. You thinking like him now, Joel?” She didn’t wait for an answer before she turned back. She wrapped Toby in a towel and helped him out of the tub. She used her drier on his crinkly hair, roughed him up with the towel, and patted him with powder. Toby glowed under all the attention.

            She took him to the bedroom and tucked him in, telling him she was going to make him Ovaltine and soldiers with butter and sugar, so “just rest there, baby, till Auntie gets back.” Toby blinked at her, all awe at this unexpected maternal outpouring. He settled into bed and became expectant. Ovaltine and soldiers constituted more nurturing than he’d had so far in his brief life.

            A jerk of Kendra’s head told Joel he was meant to follow her down to the kitchen. There, his aunt had him tell her the story from start to finish, and she managed to listen more calmly this time. Once he had completed the tale of their trip across town, the Ovaltine and the soldiers were ready. She handed them over to Joel and gave a nod to the stairs. She poured herself a glass of wine from the fridge, lit a cigarette, and sat at the kitchen table.

            She tried to sort out her feelings. She was an amalgamation of the physical and emotional in a pitched battle with the psychological. It was all too much for her to cope with. She sought out a focus just as a focus walked through the front door.