What Came Before He Shot Her

brought tears and tears brought more rage. She told herself she would return, she would wait outside the employees’ door—the very door he’d taken her to at last, releasing her into a side street with a pleasant “Now get along with you, dearie”—and when he came out at the end of the day, she’d kill him. She would shoot him between the eyes, and what they did to her afterwards would be of no account because he would be dead, as he deserved to be.

She didn’t wait for the bus that would take her up Kensington Church Street and then on to Ladbroke Grove. She told herself she couldn’t be bothered, but the truth was that she didn’t want to be seen, and on foot she felt somehow invisible. Humiliation—which she would not admit as even existing—was washing over her. The only way to avoid feeling it was to stalk furiously in the general direction of the drop-in centre, savagely pushing her way through the crowds while she remained in the shopping district, seeking something she could damage when those crowds thinned and she was left on the wider pavements of Holland Park Avenue where there was no one close by to smash into and snarl at and nothing to do save keep walking and trying to avoid her own thoughts.

            She finally boarded a bus in Notting Hill because it happened to pull up just as she reached the stop and there would be no need for her to wait and think. But this did little to get her to the drop-in centre so that her arrival would be timely. She was ninety minutes late as she went through the gate in the cyclone fence, where in the play area three children toddled about in the paddling pool under the watchful eyes of their mothers.

            The sight of them—children and mothers—was something that Ness couldn’t bear to look at but had to look at, so what she felt was even more anger. The effect was like air being forced into an overfull balloon.

She shoved open the door of the drop-in centre. It banged against the wall. Several children were applying white glue to an art project that involved poster board, seashells, and beads. Majidah was in the kitchen. The children looked up with wide eyes, and Majidah came into the main room. Ness readied herself for what the Muslim woman would say, thinking, Just let her, just let  the bloody bitch.

Majidah looked her over, her eyes narrowing in evaluation. She didn’t like Ness because she didn’t like Ness’s attitude, not to mention her dress sense and the reason she was working at the centre. But she was also a woman who’d gone through much in her forty-six years, not the least of which was to come to terms with profound suffering: in herself and in others. While her philosophy in life could best be described as Work hard, don’t whinge, and just get on with it, she was not devoid of compassion for people who had not yet found the way to do any of these things.

            So she said, with a meaningful glance at the Felix the Cat clock that hung above a rank of storage blocks containing children’s toys, “You must try to be on time, Vanessa. Please do assist those children with their gluing. You and I will speak once we close for the day.”

            JOEL’S CONFRONTATION WITH Neal Wyatt turned out to be a double-edged sword. One edge had Joel watching his back from that moment forward. The other edge had him writing. More words than he would ever have thought possible prompted more verse than he would ever have thought possible, the oddest feature about this process being the fact that the words coming out of his head weren’t the sort that Joel would have thought could produce a poem. They were ordinary. Words like bridge  or kneel, like fl oat  or dismay  had him diving for his notebook. He did it so often that Kendra became curious and asked Joel what he was up to with his nose bent over a notebook all the time. She assumed he was writing letters to someone and asked him if the intended recipient was his mother. When he told her it wasn’t letters but rather poems, Kendra—like Hibah— jumped to love poems and she began to tease him about being stuck on a girl. But there was a halfhearted nature to her teasing that even Joel—with all his focus on verse—could not fail to notice. He said wisely, “You seen Dix, then, Aunt Ken?” to which her response of “ Have  you seen,” took their conversation towards the importance of proper English and away from the importance of love.

            Kendra told herself it wasn’t love anyway, and how could it have been with those nearly twenty years forming a yawning chasm between them. She told herself good riddance, time for both of them to move on, but that message was prevented from working its way from her mind to her heart because  of her heart. She altered the message after a time, to one of “It was just lust, girl,” and she adhered to that because it seemed reasonable.

            With Kendra’s thoughts caught up in all this and with Joel’s concentration on his poetry, there was only Toby left to notice a change in Ness in the following days. But since the change constituted doing what she had been ordered to do by the magistrate—and suddenly without complaint—the subtlety of the situation was beyond Toby. He soothed himself with his lava lamp, watched the television, and kept mum about Joel’s run-in with Neal Wyatt.

            This was at Joel’s request. He explained away his cuts and bruises by telling his aunt that—daft as it was, since he had no skill—he’d borrowed a skateboard and tried out the skate bowl. She accepted this story and talked about safety helmets.

            For his part, Joel took the word safety  and began to fashion another poem. When it was complete, he put it in the suitcase beneath his bed. Before he shut the lid, though, he counted the number of poems that he’d written. He was amazed to see he’d crafted twenty-seven, and the logical question arose in his mind: What was he going to do with them?

            He continued to go to Wield Words Not Weapons, but he did not join the others at the microphone and he never participated in Walk the Word. Rather, he became an observer of the proceedings and a sponge for the criticism that was offered to the other poets who were willing to read.

            Throughout all this, Ivan Weatherall didn’t bother with him much, just saying hello, expressing his pleasure at seeing Joel at Wield Words Not Weapons, asking whether Joel was writing, and not making anything of it when Joel ducked his head, too embarrassed to answer directly. He merely said, “You’ve got a gift, my friend. Mustn’t turn away from it.” Otherwise, Ivan concentrated on the delight he felt at the growing attendance at his poetry events. He added a poetry-writing course to the scriptwriting course he offered at Paddington Arts, but Joel couldn’t imagine taking it. He couldn’t imagine having  to write a poem. The creative act didn’t work that way for him.

            He had thirty-five pieces when he decided that he would let Ivan see some of his work. He picked out four that he liked, and on a day when he had to fetch Toby from the learning centre, he left Edenham Estate earlier than usual, and he went up to Sixth Avenue.

He found Ivan, white gloved, working on another clock. This time, though, he wasn’t building it. Rather, he was cleaning an old one that, he explained, had taken to striking the half hour whenever the fancy came upon it.

            “Completely unacceptable behaviour in a timepiece,” Ivan confi ded as he ushered Joel into the little sitting room. There, on the table beneath the window, the parts of a clock lay spread out on a white towel in a neat arrangement along with a small squeeze tin of oil, a pair of tweezers, and several sizes of minute screwdrivers. Ivan waved Joel in the direction of an armchair next to the fireplace. Coal had once burned there, but now an electric fire sat askew and unlit upon the grate. “This is damn tedious work, and your presence brings me a distraction from total concentration on it, for which I thank you,” Ivan said.

            At first, Joel’s thinking was that Ivan meant the four poems in his pocket, so he took them out and unfolded them, not questioning how the older man knew he’d come with a purpose. But Ivan merely went back to his clockwork after reaching for a sprig of mint and popping it into his mouth. He began to talk of an art show that he’d seen on the south bank of the Thames. He said it was “the emperor’s whatevers” because one of the exhibits had been a urinal encased in Plexiglass and signed by the artist, and another had been a glass of water on a shelf mounted high on the wall with the title Oak Tree  tacked beneath it. Then, he went on, there was an entire room “dedicated to an angry lesbian who made sofas into acts of sexual congress, don’t ask. I can’t say what her message was meant to be, but her rage came through remarkably. Do you like art, Joel?”

            Ivan’s question came so suddenly at the end of his chatter that Joel didn’t take it in at first, and he didn’t realise that his opinion was actually being solicited. But then Ivan looked up from his work, and his face appeared so friendly and expectant that Joel responded spontaneously for once, giving his answer without censoring himself.

            “Cal draws good,” he said. “I seen his stuff.”

            Ivan frowned for a moment. Then he held up a fi nger and said, “Ah. Calvin Hancock. At the right