So for another ten days, she worked upon the problem. It should have been simple: There were primary schools in every direction from Edenham Estate, and there were a number on the route that Toby’s siblings were taking to get to their bus. But between there being no places and there being no suitable situation in these schools for someone with Toby’s “obvious special needs,” as it was generally termed upon one minute’s conversation with the boy, Kendra had no luck. She was beginning to think she would have to keep the child with her permanently rather than enroll him somewhere —a horrifying thought— when the head teacher at Middle Row School directed her to the Westminster Learning Centre in the Harrow Road, just up the street from the charity shop. Toby could attend Middle Row School, the head teacher told her, as long as he had special daily instruction at the learning centre as well. “To sort out his difficulties,” the head teacher said, quite as if she believed an academic tutorial had a hope of curing what ailed him.
This all seemed meant. While it was a bit of a stretch to think Middle Row was on the direct route to the bus for Ness and Joel, they could still get to a stop in Ladbroke Grove from Toby’s school in a fiveminute walk. And after school, having Toby nearby at the learning centre meant Kendra would be able to keep tabs on Joel and Ness as well, for his siblings would have to walk him there every day. Kendra’s plan was that they would take turns doing it, stopping in to see her on the way.
In all of this, she failed to take Ness into account. Ness allowed her aunt to think and plan whatever she wished. She’d been growing quite adept at pulling the wool over her aunt’s eyes, and like many adolescent girls who think themselves omnipotent as a result of successfully running wild for a period of time with no one the wiser, she’d started to assume she’d be able to do so indefi nitely.
Naturally, she was wrong.
HOLLAND PARK SCHOOL is an anomaly. It stands in the midst of one of the most fashionable neighbourhoods of London: a leafy, redbrick and white stucco area of individual mansions, and blocks of costly flats and exorbitantly priced maisonettes. Yet the vast majority of its pupils trek in to the school from some of the most disreputable housing estates north of the Thames, making the populace of the immediate area decidedly white and the populace of the school a gamut skewed to the colours brown and black.
Joel Campbell would have had to be blind or not in possession of his wits to think he belonged in the immediate environs of Holland Park School. Once he discovered that there were two distinct routes from the number 52 bus to the comprehensive, he chose the one that exposed him least to the blank and uninviting glances of cashmere-garbed women walking their Yorkshire terriers and children being transported to schools out of the area by au pairs driving the family Range Rovers. This was the route that took him to the corner of Notting Hill Gate. From there, he made his way west by foot to Campden Hill Road rather than ride the bus any farther, resulting in a walk that would have taken him down several streets in which he belonged about as comfortably as a pork pie nestled next to beef Wellington. From the first day, he made this journey alone after leaving Toby at the gates to Middle Row School. Ness—cooperatively dressed in her drab grey uniform and carrying a rucksack on her back—went with them as far as Golborne Road. But there, she left her brothers to go on their way while she pocketed her bus money and went on hers.
She continued to say to Joel, “Better not grass, y’unnerstan? You do an’ I go af ’er you, blood.”
Joel continued to nod and watch her walk off. He wanted to tell her that there was no need for her to threaten him. He wouldn’t grass. When had he ever? First of all, she was his sister and even if she hadn’t been, he knew the most important rule of childhood and adolescence: no telling tales. So he and Ness operated on a strictly don’t ask/don’t tell policy. He had no idea what she was up to aside from playing truant, and she didn’t reveal any details to him.
He would have preferred her company, though, not only in fulfilling their assigned duty to Toby each morning and afternoon but also in having to navigate the experience of being the new kid at Holland Park School. For the school seemed to Joel to be a place fraught with dangers. There were the academic dangers of being seen as stupid rather than shy. There were the social dangers of having no friends. There were the physical dangers of his appearance, which, along with having no friends, could easily mark him as a target for bullying. Ness’s presence would have made the going easier for him, Joel decided. She would have fi tted in better than he. He could have ridden along on her coattails.
No matter that Ness—as she was now and not as she had been in her childhood —would not have allowed this. The way Joel still saw his sister, if only periodically, made him feel her absence at school acutely. So he sought to be a fly on the wall, attracting the attention of neither pupils nor teachers. To his PSHE teacher’s hearty question of “How’re you getting on then, mate?” he always made the same reply. “S’okay.”
“Any troubles? Problems? Homework going all right?”
“S’okay, yeah.”
“Made any friends, yet?”
“’M doing all right.”
“Not being bullied by anyone, are you?”
A shake of the head, eyes directed to his feet.
“Because if you are, you report it to me at once. We don’t tolerate that nonsense here at Holland Park.” A long pause in which Joel finally looked up to see the teacher—he was called Mr. Eastbourne—intently assessing him. “Wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Joel?” Mr. Eastbourne said. “My job’s to make your job easier, you know. D’you know what your job is at Holland Park?”
Joel shook his head.
“Getting on,” Eastbourne said. “Getting ed-u-cated. You want that, don’t you? Because you have to want it in order to succeed.”
“Okay.” Joel wished only to be dismissed, free from scrutiny once more. If studying eighteen hours a day would have allowed him to become invisible to Mr. Eastbourne and to everyone else, he would have done that. He would have done anything.
Lunchtime was the worst. As in every school that has ever existed, boys and girls congregated in groups, and the groups themselves had special designations known only to the members. Those teens deemed popular—a label they gave to themselves, which everyone else apparently accepted without question—hung about at a distance from those considered clever. Those who were clever—and they always had the marks to prove it— kept away from those whose futures were obviously limited to working behind a till. Those with advanced social agendas stayed clear of those who were backward. Those who followed trends remained aloof from those who scorned such things. There were pockets of individuals, naturally, who didn’t fit anywhere within these designations, but they were the social outcasts who didn’t know how to welcome anyone into their midst anyway. So Joel spent his lunchtimes alone.
He’d done this for several weeks when he heard someone speak to him from nearby his regular eating spot, which was leaning out of sight against the far corner of the security guard’s hut at the edge of the schoolyard near the gate. It was a girl’s voice. She said, “Why d’you eat over here, mon?” and when Joel looked up, realising that the question was directed at him, he saw an Asian girl in a navy headscarf standing on the route into the schoolyard, as if she’d just been admitted by the security guard. She wore a school uniform that was several sizes too large for her. It successfully obscured whatever feminine curves she might have had. Since he’d managed to avoid being spoken to by anyone save his teachers, Joel didn’t quite know what to do.
The girl said, “Hey. Can’t you talk or summick?”
Joel looked away because he could feel his face growing hot, and he knew what that did to his odd complexion. “I c’n talk,” he said.
“So what you doin here, then?”
“Eating.”
“Well, I c’n see that, mon. But no one eats here. ’S not even allowed. How’d you never get told to eat where you s’posed to?”
He shrugged. “I ain’t hurtin no one, innit.”
She came around and stood in front of him. He looked at her shoes so that he wouldn’t have to look at her. They were black and strappy, the sort of shoes one might find in a trendy shop on the high street. They were also out of place, and they made him wonder if she had trendy
