What Came Before He Shot Her

            “Isn’t,” Joel said cooperatively. “Tobe, this isn’t Jamaica.”

            Kendra took the boys inside the house where she set about snapping on lights as Joel brought in two suitcases, the carrier bags, and the shopping trolley. He stood just inside the door and waited for some sort of direction. As he’d never been to his aunt’s house before, he looked around curiously, and what he saw was a dwelling that was even smaller than the house in Henchman Street.

            On the ground floor, there were only two rooms in a shotgun design, along with a tiny, hidden WC. What went for an eating area lay just beyond the entry, and beyond that a kitchen offered a window that was black with night, reflecting Kendra’s image when she flicked on the bright overhead light. Two doors set at right angles to each other made up the far-left corner of the kitchen. One of them led to the back garden with the barbecue that Toby had seen, and the other stood open on a stairway. There were two floors above and, as Joel would later discover, one of these comprised a sitting room while the top floor held a bathroom and bedrooms, of which there were two. Kendra made for these stairs, dragging the massage table with her. Joel hurried over to help her with it, saying, “You takin this above, Aunt Ken? I c’n do it for you. I’m stronger’n I look.”

            Kendra said, “You see to Toby. Look at him. He’s wanting the loo.”

            Joel looked around for an indication of where a toilet might be, an action Kendra might have seen and interpreted had she been able to get beyond feeling that the walls of her house were about to close in on her. As it was, she headed up the stairs, and Joel, not liking to ask questions that could make him seem ignorant, waited until his aunt had started upstairs where the continued banging suggested she was taking the massage table to the top floor of the house. That was when he worked the lock on the garden door and hurried his brother outside. Toby didn’t question this. He just made his stream into a flowerbed. When Kendra came back downstairs, the boys were once again by the suitcases and the shopping trolley, not knowing what else they were meant to do. Kendra had been standing in her bedroom trying to calm herself, trying to develop a plan of action and coming up with nothing that wasn’t going to disrupt her life completely. She’d reached the point at which she had to ask the question whose answer she didn’t particularly want to hear. She said to Joel, “Where’s Vanessa, then? Has she gone with your gran?”

            Joel shook his head. “She’s round,” he said. “She got vex an’—”

            “Angry,” Kendra said. “Not vex. Angry. Irritated. Annoyed.”

            “Annoyed,” Joel said. “She got annoyed an’ she ran off. But I ’spect she’ll be back soon enough.” He said this last as if he expected his aunt to be happy to hear the news. But if coping with Toby was the last thing Kendra wanted to do, coping with his unruly and unpleasant sister was a very close second to it.

            A nurturing woman would perhaps at this point have begun bustling about, if not getting life organised for the two hapless waifs who’d happened to appear on her doorstep, at least getting them something to eat. She would have climbed those stairs a second time and made some sort of sleeping arrangements out of the two bedrooms that the house possessed. There wasn’t adequate furniture for this—especially in the room set aside for massages—but there was bedding that could be put on the floor and extra towels that could be rolled into pillows. Food would follow that sleeping setup. And then a search for Ness could begin. But all of this was foreign to Kendra’s way of life, so instead she went to her bag and pulled out a packet of Benson & Hedges. She lit up using a burner on the stove, and she began to consider what she was meant to do next. The phone rang and saved her.

            What she thought was that Glory—in an uncharacteristic fit of conscience—was ringing to say she’d come to her senses about George Gilbert, Jamaica, and the desertion of three children who relied upon her. But the caller was Kendra’s best girlfriend Cordie, and as soon as Kendra heard her voice, she remembered that they’d arranged a girls’ night out. In a club called No Sorrow they’d planned to drink, smoke, talk, listen to the music, and dance: alone, together, or with a partner. They’d pull men to prove they still had their attractions and if Kendra decided to bed someone, Cordie—happily married—would live the encounter vicariously via mobile the next morning. It was what they always did when they went out together.

            Cordie said, “Got your dancin shoes on?,” which introduced Kendra to a life-defining moment.

            She became aware that she was not only feeling the physical need for a man, but probably had  been feeling that need for a week or so and had been sublimating it with attention to her work at the shop and her training in massage. The reference to dancing shoes, though, made the need go deep, where it intensified until she realised that she couldn’t actually remember when she’d last spread her legs for a man. So she did some quick thinking. This involved the boys and what she could do with them so that she’d still have time to get to No Sorrow while the pickings were good. Mentally, she considered her fridge and her cupboards, for there had to be something she could rustle up to feed to them and, with the hour being what it was, they were probably hungry. A sorting out of the spare room would follow, to give them an area to sleep in tonight. She could pass out towels and fl annels and make a formal introduction between them and the bath. And bedtime would immediately follow. Certainly, she could accomplish everything and still be ready to accompany Cordie to No Sorrow by half past nine.

            Kendra said to Cordie in the style of language she adopted when speaking to her friend, “I polishing them now, innit. If they shine good enough, I ain’t wearing knickers, b’lieve it.”

            Cordie laughed. “Oooh, you one nasty slag. What time, den?”

            Kendra looked to Joel. He and Toby were standing by the door to the garden, Toby partially unzipped but both boys still wearing their jackets done up to their chins. She said to Joel, “What time d’you lot usually go to bed?”

            Joel thought about this. There wasn’t really a usual time. There had been so many changes in their lives over the years that establishing schedules had been the last thing on anyone’s mind. He tried to make out what kind of answer his aunt wanted from him. Clearly, someone on the other end of the phone was waiting to hear good news, and good news seemed to equate with Toby and Joel being put to bed as soon as possible. He looked at the wall clock above the sink. It was a quarter past seven.

            He said arbitrarily and falsely, “Half eight most nights, Auntie Ken. But we could go now, couldn’t we, Tobe?”

            Toby always agreed with other people, except when it came to the television. As this moment had no television attached to it, he nodded complacently.

            That was Kendra Osborne’s life-defining moment, and while she didn’t like it in the least, she felt it present itself so strongly that she could not assign it a more convenient name. She felt the slightest crack in her heart followed by an odd sensation of sinking that seemed to go on in her spirit. These two things told her that smoking, dancing, pulling men, and shagging would have to wait till later. Her grip loosened on the phone, and she turned to the night-blackened kitchen window. She pressed her forehead against it and felt the pressure of cold, smooth glass on her skin. She spoke not to Cordie or to the boys but to herself. What she said was, “Jesus. Jesus God.” She didn’t intend it as a prayer.

            THE DAYS THA followed did not pass easily for reasons that were beyond Kendra’s control. Having her world invaded by her young relations knotted up her already complicated life. The difficulty she had in organising just the basics, like meals, clean clothes, and enough toilet paper for the bathroom, was exacerbated by the necessity of contending with Ness. Kendra’s experience of dealing with fifteen-year-old girls was limited to the fact that she had once been one herself, a particular in a woman’s background that doesn’t necessarily give her the wherewithal to cope with another female in the midst of the worst part of her adolescence. And Ness’s adolescence—which otherwise would already have been fraught with the typical challenges a girl faces in growing up, from peer pressure to nasty spots on the chin—had so far been much rockier than Kendra knew. So when Ness hadn’t turned up in Edenham Way by midnight on the night that Glory Campbell had deposited the children on her daughter’s doorstep, Kendra set out to look for her. Her reason for this was a simple one: The Campbell children didn’t know the area well enough to be wandering around it at night or even during the day. Not only could they quickly become lost in a part of town dominated by labyrinthine housing estates whose questionable inhabitants engaged in even more questionable activities, but as a young female out and about alone, she would have been putting herself at risk anywhere. Kendra herself never felt in danger, but that was due to her personal philosophy of walk-fast-and-look-mean, which had long served her well when it came to chance nighttime encounters in the street.

            After Joel and Toby were bedded down on the floor of the spare room, Kendra went by car to try to find the girl but had no success. She went south as far as Notting Hill Gate and north as far as Kilburn Lane. As the hour grew later, all she ended up seeing in her cruising up one street and down another were the gangs of boys and