What Came Before He Shot Her

said, “Damn,” and stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray on her bedside table. It had always been a risk that one of the kids would see, but she would have preferred the seeing child to be one of the boys, for reasons she could not have articulated at the moment. She said unnecessarily to just Geoff, “That’s my niece. She sleeps in the sitting room. Down below.”

            “Beneath . . . ?” He gestured at the bed.

            “She must’ve heard.” Which was hardly a surprise, considering how they had gone at each other. Kendra pressed her fingers to her forehead and sighed. She’d got what she wanted but not what she needed. And now this, she thought. Life was not fair.

            They heard a door shut. They listened for more. In a moment, the toilet flushed. Water ran. The door opened and footsteps receded down the stairs. They waited four interminable minutes before just Geoff returned to what he’d been doing. At this point, he decided that he didn’t need to comb his hair; he just needed to leave. He slipped on his shoes, donned his jacket, pocketed his tie. He looked at Kendra, who’d pulled the sheet up over her, and he nodded. Some sort of leave-taking was called for, obviously, but nothing seemed appropriate. He could hardly say, “See you later,” since he had no intention of doing that. “Thanks” seemed ghastly, and any reference to the act itself seemed untimely post Ness’s arrival on the scene. So he fell back on a combination of public school manners and costume dramas of the Edwardian period. “I’ll see myself out,” was what he said, and he quickly did just that.

            Alone, Kendra sat up in the bed and stared at the wall. She lit another cigarette, with the hope that smoke could obliterate sight. For what she saw was Ness’s face. There hadn’t been judgement upon it. Nor had there been caustic knowledge. Rather, there had been surprise, quickly replaced by a world-weary acceptance that no fifteenyear-old girl was ever meant to possess. This prompted in Kendra a feeling she had not expected when she’d invited just Geoff into her bed. She felt ashamed.

            She finally roused herself and went into the bathroom, where she filled the tub with water that was as hot as she could stand it. She stepped inside and scalded her skin. She sank back and raised her face to the ceiling. She wept.

            Chapter

      18 Kendra was being far harder on herself than was necessary when it came to Ness, who had more pressing concerns than reacting to her aunt’s inviting some strange white man into her bed. True, finding him there had been something of a surprise. Ness had heard the commotion and had assumed that Dix was back. But, to her wonder, she didn’t feel what she’d earlier felt when listening to the rousing creak, bounce, and slam of Kendra’s bed from the floor above her. Instead, she’d awakened, heard the noise, grimaced, and realised she needed to use the toilet. Reckoning it was Dix with her aunt—which meant he’d stay the night and she’d run little risk of encountering him when she used the facility—she’d climbed the stairs, only to find a stranger emerging from Kendra’s bedroom.

At one time the sight of any man coming out of Kendra’s bedroom would have filled Ness with jealousy only thinly disguised as disgust. But that was before she’d shared a pappadum with a Pakistani woman she’d thought she didn’t like. It was also before what sharing a pappadum with that Pakistani woman had led to:

When Majidah informed her they’d be closing the drop-in centre early one day, not long after Ness’s visit to her flat, Ness thought it meant she was free from further obligation for the rest of the afternoon. But Majidah disabused her of that notion in short order, telling her that they were meant to be picking up supplies in Covent Garden. Ness was to go and assist.

            At this Ness felt completely ill-used. Doing community service surely didn’t mean she was intended to traipse all round London like a servant, did it?

            Majidah informed Ness that she was not the one whom the magistrate allowed to determine what constituted community service. “We will leave at precisely two o’clock,” she told Ness. “We shall take the tube.”

            “Hey, I ain’t got—”

            “Please. Ain’t got?  What sort of language is this, Vanessa? How can you hope to make something of your life if you speak in this way?”

            “Wha’? Like I’m s’posed  to make summick of myself’? Dat it?”

            “Good gracious, yes. What else are you thinking? Do you believe that you are entitled  to whatever it is that you want and that you need do nothing to achieve it? And what is  it that you want, precisely? Fame, fortune, additional pairs of silly high-heeled shoes? Or are you one of these foolish young girls who have ambitions solely of celebrity? Famous actress, famous model, famous pop star? Is that it, Vanessa? Celebrity alone when you could do whatever you want, a young woman like you with no man determining your fate as if you were a farm animal, mind you. There is no question that you could choose a career right out of the sky, and yet you have no gratitude for this. Only the wish to be a pop star.”

            “Did I say dat?” Ness demanded when Majidah was finally forced to take a breath. “Did I f ’r one minute say any of dat? Hell, Majidah, you got a one-track mind, anyone ever tell you? An’ how’d we get on dis anyways? I ain’t got money—” She saw Majidah’s thunderous face and she relented. “I haven’t got money in my possession to purchase a ticket,” she said primly.

            Majidah held back her smile at Ness’s posh accent. She said, “That is all? Good gracious, Vanessa, I do not intend you to pay for the journey. This is work, and work shall recompense me for supplying you with the ticket you require.”

            That detail established, two o’clock saw them setting off from the drop-in centre, whose cabin Majidah locked and then rechecked three times before Ness took her by the arm and dragged her out of the chain- link gate. They walked the short distance to the Westbourne Park underground station. Majidah made much of studying the map to determine the best route to their destination, clucking and tutting and counting stops while Ness stood by and tapped her foot. The decision ultimately made, they embarked for the journey, alighting finally at Covent Garden at which point Majidah led the way not to the market— where one might assume some sort of supplies could be purchased albeit hardly economically—but north to Shelton Street. There a doorway between a minuscule bookshop and a coffee bar opened onto a stairway. This in turn took them up four flights—“The cursed lift in this wretched building does not work and never has,” Majidah informed Ness—and, breathless when they finally got there, into a loft where bolts of colourful linen, silk, cotton, velvet, and felt lay across wide worktables. At them four individuals worked in silence while Kiri Te Kanawa went through Mimi’s death throes on a CD player that sat atop a bank of containers holding everything from sequins to seed pearls.

            Two of the workers were women dressed in shalwar kamis; one of them was a woman in a chador; the fourth was a man. He wore blue jeans, trainers, and a white cotton shirt. The women were sewing and gluing. He was fitting a headpiece onto the fifth person in the room: a sloe-eyed Mediterranean beauty who read from a magazine and muttered, “Bloody stupid warmongering idiots,” to which the man said, “Truer words and all that. But mind the position of your head, please, Miss Rivelle. The fit’s not right.”

            He, like the women at work, was Asian. Miss Rivelle was not. She raised her hand to feel what he was affixing to her heavy dark hair. She said, “Really, Sayf, this is  impossible. Can you not make it weigh less? It’s extraordinary you should expect me to be able to make an entrance, do the aria, and die dramatically, and all of it without this . . . this thing  dropping to the floor. Who approved the design, for God’s sake?”

            “Mr. Peterson-Hayes.”

            “The director doesn’t have to wear  it. No, no, this absolutely will not  do.” She took the headpiece off, handed it over to Sayf, and saw Majidah and Ness across the room. As did Sayf, at that precise moment.

            He said, “Ma! Bloody hell if I didn’t forget.” And to Ness, “Hullo. You must be the convict.”

            “Sayf al Din,” Majidah said sternly. “What sort of greeting is this?

            And you, Rand,” to the woman in the chador, “do you not stifl e beneath that ridiculous counterpane you’re wearing? When will your husband come to his senses? This is outdoor clothing