What Came Before He Shot Her

between them. He looked down at her and shook his head.

            “Shit, I hate a cow dat does drugs. It’s so p’thetic. You popped your cherry yet, Jo-ell?” He looked over his shoulder. “No? We got to take care of dat.”

            We. Joel clung to that word. What it meant, what it promised, what it said in answer. He said, “Deal,” to the Blade. “What d’you want me to do, Stanley?”

            WHEN JOEL RECEIVED the call that he was to go to the small mentoring office, he knew that Ivan Weatherall would be waiting for him. He trudged off—excused from his religious-studies class, which was a relief since the teacher never spoke in anything but a monotone, as if afraid to offend God through a show of enthusiasm about the subject matter—and dreaded what was to come. He thought feverishly about what he would say as an excuse to the mentor who would no doubt want to know what had happened to his attendance at Wield Words Not Weapons. He settled on telling him that his courses this term were far more difficult than they’d been in the previous school year. He had to devote more time to them, he’d say. He had to keep his marks up. He had to prepare for the future. Ivan, he thought, would like preparation for the future as an excuse.

Unfortunately, Ivan had done what Joel had not done: his homework. When Joel walked into the conference room, he could see as much. The mentor had a file spread out, which Joel correctly concluded boded ill. In this file were his current marks from every course he was taking.

            “Mon,” Joel said to him in a greeting notable for its degree of factitious pleasure. “Hey. Ain’t seen you in a while.”

            “We’ve missed you at Wield Words,” Ivan replied. He sounded friendly enough as he looked up from the file of information. “I thought at first you’d been cracking the schoolbooks, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. You’ve slipped. Want to tell me about that?” He pulled out a chair at an angle to his own. He had a takeaway coffee cup at his right hand, and he sipped from this as he waited for a reply, keeping his eyes on Joel over the cup’s rim.

The last thing Joel wanted was to tell Ivan anything. He didn’t actually want to talk at all. Least of all did he want to talk about his marks in school, but as he hadn’t written a poem since before the barge fire, he couldn’t talk to Ivan about verse either. He kicked his toe against the shiny blue lino. He said, “Classes’re rough dis term. An’ I got t’ings on my mind, innit. An’ I been busy wiv Toby an’ stuff.”

            “What sort of stuff would this be?” Ivan asked.

            Joel looked at him, thinking about traps. Ivan looked at Joel, thinking about lies. He knew about the fire on the barge through vague community gossip that had taken a more concrete form when he’d received a phone call from Fabia Bender. Was he still meeting with Joel Campbell? she’d wanted to know. He was teetering on the edge of serious trouble, and a male role model was urgently called for. The aunt had her hands full and was in over her head—if you’ll pardon the metaphor mixing, Fabia Bender had said—but if Mr. Weatherall would once again engage with Joel, he and Fabia might together be able to turn the boy from the route in which he appeared to be heading. Had Mr. Weatherall heard about the barge . . . ?

            Ivan had let things slide a bit with Joel. He was spread rather thin— what with the poetry course, the scriptwriting course, the fi lm project he hoped to get off the ground, and his brother’s ill health in Shropshire where he was paying the price for forty-eight years of nonstop cigarette smoking—but he wasn’t a man to make excuses. He told Fabia Bender he’d been remiss, for which he apologised since he generally kept commitments once he made them. It hadn’t been lack of interest in Joel but lack of time, he said, a situation that he would remedy at once.

            Joel shrugged: the adolescent boy’s answer to every question he didn’t want to answer, a bodily expression of the eternal whatever voiced by teenagers in hundreds of languages on at least three continents and countless islands pebbled across the Pacific. Mostly it was Toby, he said. He had a skateboard now and Joel was teaching him to ride it so he could take it to the skate bowl in Meanwhile Gardens.

            “You’re a good brother to him,” Ivan said. “He means a lot to you, doesn’t he?”

            Joel gave no reply, merely kicking at the lino again. Ivan went in an unexpected direction. He said, “This isn’t the sort of thing I generally do, Joel. But perhaps it needs to be done.”

            “What?” Joel looked up. He didn’t like Ivan’s tone, which sounded like something caught between regret and indecision.

            “This burning of the barge and your run-in with the Harrow Road police . . . ? Would you like me to tell them about Neal Wyatt? I have a feeling about Neal, and I believe there’s a very good chance that a single visit to the station—a few hours being interviewed by a detective, with a social worker in attendance—might be just what Neal needs to turn him around. It might be meant, you see, that he should speak with the police.”

            It also, Joel wanted to say, might be suicide on a stick. He cursed the fact that he’d ever mentioned Neal Wyatt’s name to anyone. He said hotly, “Why’s ever’one t’ink Neal Wyatt burnt dat barge? I don’t know who burnt it. I di’n’t see who burnt it. Neither did Tobe. So givin Neal over to th’ cops i’n’t going to do nuffink but—”

            “Joel, don’t take me for a fool. I can see you’re angry. And I’m guessing you’re angry because you’re anxious. Anxiety ridden. Frightened as well. I know your history with Neal—good God, didn’t I break up the first fight you two had?—and I’m suggesting we take a step to alter that history before someone gets seriously hurt.”

            “’F I’m anxious, it’s cos everyone want to pull Neal into a situation where he don’t belong,” Joel said. “I got no proof he lit up dat barge, and I ain’t claimin he did if I got no proof. You name him to th’ cops, they drag him in . . . an’ what, Ivan? He ain’t namin no one else, he back out on the street in two hours, and he start lookin for who grassed him up.” Joel heard the degree to which his language had disintegrated, and he knew what it revealed about his state. But he also saw a way to use those things—his language and his state of mind—to turn the present moment to his advantage. He shoved his hand through his hair in a gesture meant to be interpreted as frustration. He said, “Shit. You’re right. I got anxiety climbin up to my eyeballs. Me and Tobe in the police station. Aunt Ken t’inkin she  going to sort Neal ’f she ever find him. Me watchin my back and jus’ waitin to get jumped. Yeah. I’m anxious, innit. I ain’t writin no poems cos I can’t even t’ink about poems wiv t’ings like they are.”

            Ivan nodded. This was something he understood. It was also a subject dear to his heart, an attractor to which his brain automatically veered, dismissing anything else on his mind, whenever the topic came up. He said, “That’s called being blocked. Anxiety is nearly always a block to creativity. No wonder you’ve not been writing poetry. How could you be expected to?”

            “Yeah, well I liked  writin poems.”

            “There’s an answer to that.”

            “Which’s what?”

            Ivan shut the folder in which Joel’s information lay. Joel felt a modicum of relief. He felt even more when Ivan warmed to his topic.

            “You have to work during  the anxiety to overcome the anxiety, Joel.

            It’s a Catch-22  situation. Do you know what that means? No? A contradiction in terms or available fact. Anxiety prevents you from working, but the only way to relieve the anxiety is by doing what it prevents you from doing: working. In your case, writing. Anxiety is thus always a guidepost, telling a person he ought to be engaged in his creative act. In your case, writing. Wise people recognise this and use the guidepost to get back to the work. Others avoid, seeking an external relief to the anxiety, which tempers it only moderately well. Alcohol, for example, or drugs. Something to make them forget they’re anxious.”

            This was so convoluted a concept that all Joel managed to do was nod as if in eager acceptance of its precepts. Ivan, enthused by his own attraction to the subject, took this as comprehension. He said, “You have a real talent, Joel. Turning away from that is like turning away from God. This is essentially what happened to Neal when he turned away from the piano. To be frank, I don’t want that to happen to you, and I’m afraid it will if you don’t get back to your creative source.”

            This was cold mashed potatoes, as far as Joel was concerned, but again he nodded and tried to look thoughtful. If he was anxious— which he agreed that he was—it had very little to do with putting words on paper. No, he was anxious about the Blade and what the Blade would ask of him as a proof of his respect. Joel hadn’t yet heard, and the waiting was torture since, during the waiting, Neal Wyatt still lurked, waiting as well.

            As for Ivan, well-meaning but innocent, he saw what he wanted to believe was a solution to Joel’s problems. He said, “Will you come back to Wield Words, Joel? We miss you there, and I think it will do you a world