They said nothing more because they did not need to. All they needed was to escape. There was no time for Joel to question what had happened. He thought only, Gun went off, just went off, and he tried not to think of anything else. Not the woman’s face, not her single
“Oh,” not the sight and the sound and certainly not the knowledge. Her expression had gone from startled, to kind, to friendly, to terrifi ed, all in the space of less than fifteen seconds, all in the time it took her to see, to realise, and to try to escape.
And then there was the gun. The bullet from the gun. The smell and the sound. The flash from the pistol and the falling body. She’d hit her head on the wrought-iron rail that ran along the chessboard top step as she’d crumpled among her carrier bags. She was rich, very rich. She had to be rich. She had a posh car in a posh neighbourhood that was filled with posh houses and they’d shot her, shot her, shot a rich white lady—posh to her bones—next to her own front door.
Another garden loomed before them, this one like a miniature orchard. They charged across it, towards the opposite side where another garden was a torment of bushes, hedges, shrubs, and trees, all of it left to grow completely wild. Ahead of him, Joel saw Cal mounting the next wall. At the top he waved frantically for Joel to come more quickly. Joel was breathing heavily, and his chest was tight. He was soaked about the face. He wiped his arm across his forehead.
He said, “Can’t go—”
“Fuck dat shit. Come on, blood. We got to get out ’f here.”
So they fell to the ground and stumbled across garden number five, where they rested for a moment, panting. Joel listened for the sound of sirens, shouting, screams, or anything else from back the way they had come, but all was silent, which seemed a good sign.
“Cops?” he asked, gasping for breath.
“Oh, they coming.” Cal pushed off from the wall. He took a step back. He hurtled up it. One leg on one side and one on the other. Then he looked into the garden beyond and breathed a single word.
“Fuck.”
“What?” Joel asked.
Cal hoisted him up. Joel straddled the wall. He saw that they’d come to the end of the line. This was a final garden, but it had no wall that gave onto a street or a mews on the other side of it. Instead, the vast expanse of an external wall from a large old building—brick, like everything else they’d come to—served as this final garden’s far boundary. The only way in or out of the patch of lawn and shrubbery was through the house that it served.
Joel and Cal tumbled to the ground. They took a moment to assess their whereabouts. The windows on the house had security bars, but one set was pushed to the side, suggesting negligence or the fact that someone was at home. It didn’t matter. They had no choice. Cal went first and Joel followed him.
On a terrace outside the back door, a group of plants stood, thickly growing sculpted shrubs from lichenous clay pots. Cal grabbed one of these and advanced on the unbarred window. He heaved the pot through it, reached inside past the broken glass, and unfastened a bolt that was insignificant. He leaped through, and Joel followed. They found themselves in some sort of home office, and they landed on its desk, where they upended a computer terminal that was already covered by earth, broken glass, and most of the shrub, which had fallen from the pot.
Cal made for the door, and they were in a corridor. He headed towards the front of the house. It wasn’t a large building, and they could see the door that led to the street—a small oval window in it promising them blessed escape—but before they reached it, someone came clattering down the stairs to their left.
It was a young woman, the household au pair. She looked Spanish, Italian, Greek. She carried a toilet plunger as a weapon and she charged them, screaming like a heat-seeking missile, with the plunger raised.
Cal cried, “Fuck!” He ducked the blow and shoved her to one side. He made for the door. She dropped the plunger but regained her footing. She grabbed Joel as he tried to get past. She was shrieking unintelligible words, but she made her meaning perfectly clear. She attached herself to Joel like a leech. She reached for his face, her fingers like claws.
Joel struggled with her. He kicked at her legs, her ankles, her shins. He jerked his head to avoid the fingernails with which she intended to mark him. She went for his hair. She grabbed a handful: hair that was like a beacon and hair that no one would ever forget.
Joel’s eyes met hers. He thought—and it was a terror to him—Got to die, cunt. He waited for Cal to shoot her as he’d shot the darkhaired woman. But instead he heard the bang of the front door as it sprang open and hit the wall. The girl released her grip on him at the same moment. Joel dashed after Cal, out into the street.
He panted, “Cal. Gotta get her, mon. She saw . . . She c’n—”
“Can’t, blood,” Cal said. “Don’t have the gun. Le’s go.” He started walking rapidly up the street. He was not running now, not wanting to draw attention to themselves.
Joel caught him up. He said, “What? What? Where . . . ?”
Cal strode quickly. “Dropped it, mon. One ’f the gardens.”
“But they gonna know . . . You touched—”
“We cool. Don’t worry ’bout dat shit.” Cal held up his hands. He still had on the gloves he’d worn when he’d fetched Joel from the Holland Park School in what seemed to the boy like another lifetime.
“But the Blade’s gonna . . . And anyways, I . . .” Joel stared at Cal. His mind worked like a dervish because the last thing he was was a stupid child. “Oh shit,” he whispered. “Oh shit, oh shit.”
Cal’s gloved hand pushed him along the street. There was no pavement here, just cobbles and roadway. “Wha’?” Cal said. “We can’t go back. Jus’ walk and be cool. We gonna get out. Ten minutes and this place be crawlin with the bill, y’unnerstan me? Now le’s fuckin go.”
“But . . .”
Cal kept walking, head low, chin tucked into his chest, Joel stumbled after him, his head pounding with images. They were like still shots in the middle of a fi lm. They played back and forth in no particular order: the lady smiling as she said, “Are you lost?” Her little laugh before she understood. Cal’s arm lifted. The corgi’s waddle. The copper birdbath. A holly bush snagging his anorak.
He hardly knew where they were. He saw that they were on a street narrower than the others they’d been in, and had he understood architecture in this part of town, Joel would have recognised it as an old mews whose stables had long since been converted to houses, which were tucked behind the much grander residences whose horses and carriages they once had protected. To his left stood plain-fronted buildings of brick, owners of the back gardens through which they’d just crashed. They were three storeys tall and all identical: a single step up to a wooden front door with a simple stone pediment making a V above it. An inch of granite served as a front step. Garage doors were wooden, painted white. To his right, the picture was much the same, but there were also businesses planted along the way: a doctor’s surgery, a solicitor’s office, a car-repair shop. And then more houses.
Cal said tersely, “Keep your head down, blood,” but in unfortunate confusion, Joel did just the opposite. He saw that they were walking past the biggest house along the route, marked by black bollards with great swags of iron chains to keep cars away from the front of the building. But there was something more and he raised his face to it. A CCTV camera was mounted just above a window on the first floor.
He gasped and ducked his head. Cal caught him by the anorak once and pulled him forward. They fast-walked to the end of the street.
The first siren sounded then, wailing somewhere off in the distance just at the moment Joel saw that in front of them, two more streets branched off from the one they were in. The buildings here loomed like vedettes, unlike any others they’d passed. Outside of the tower blocks of North Kensington, they were the biggest structures Joel had ever seen, but they were nothing like the dour blocks of flats that he was used to. Umber brick created them—n
o dingy yellow London brick here—and leaded windows with pearl white moulding decorated them. Hundreds upon hundreds of fancifully shaped chimneys sprouted across their rooftops. Joel and Cal were antlike here, caught in a canyon of these structures.
Cal said, “Dis way, blood,” and, astoundingly to Joel, he began to walk in the direction of the sirens.
Joel cried, “Cal! No! We can’t! They been . . . They gonna . . . If they see . . .” and he remained rooted to the spot. Cal said over his shoulder, “Mon, come on. Or stay there and end up ’splainin to the bill wha’ you been doin in dis neighbourhood.”
Another siren howled its two-note warning, then, sounding from several streets away. It came to Joel that if they walked . . . if they looked like two blokes having business in the area . . . if they seemed like tourists—ludicrous though the idea was—or dopers with the BigIssue for sale . . . or foreign students . . . or anything . . . or what . . . ?
But there remained the fact of that au pair, her of the toilet plunger. She’d have gone for the telephone, Joel realised, and her shaking hands would already have punched in the nines, which was all it took to bring on the police. She would have shouted out her address. She would have explained and the cops would arrive. For this was a tony part of town where the cops came running when something went down.
So where were they? Joel asked himself. Where were they?
Wrought-iron balconies seemed to loom everywhere above him. No rusting bikes on them, no burnt-out furniture shoved out of doors and left to rot in the weather. No sagging line of grimy laundry. Just winter flowers. Just pot shrubs trimmed into the shape of animals. Just thick posh curtains hanging low on the windows. And those chimneys lining up just like soldiers, rank upon rank of them along the rooftops, etching their shapes against the grey sky: balloons and shields, pots and dragons. Whoever thought there could be so many chimneys?
Cal had paused at the corner of yet another street. He looked right and left, an act that assessed where they were and where they might go. Across from him was a building different from every other they’d seen so far: It was grey steel and concrete, interrupted by glass. It was more like what they were used to seeing in their own part of town, albeit newer, fresher, cleaner.
When Joel joined him, it was clear there was no safety here. People with carrier bags were emerging from shops, and the shops offered coats with fur collars, crisp bed linens, bottles of perfume, fancy bars of soap. A grocery displayed oranges resting individually in nests of green foil, and a flower seller nearby offered buckets of blooms in every imaginable colour.
It was posh. It was money. Joel wanted to run in the opposite direction. But Cal paused and looked at the display in the bakery window. He adjusted his knitted cap, pulling it low, and he turned up the collar of his donkey jacket.
Two more sirens sounded up ahead. A heavy white man came out of the bakery, cake box in his hands. He said, “What’s going on?”
Cal turned to Joel. “Le’s check it out, mon,” he said and he passed the white man with a polite, “’Scuse me,” as they headed onward. To Joel, this seemed a lunatic activity since Cal was walking directly towards the sirens now. He said fiercely as he strode by the young man’s side, “We can’t. We can’t! Cal, we got to—”
“Mon, we got no choice ’less you see one.” Cal jerked his head in the direction of the noise. “Dat way’s to the tube and we got to get out ’f here, y’unnerstan wha’ I say? Jus’ be cool. Look curious. Like ever’one else.”
Joel’s gaze automatically followed the way Cal had indicated with his head. He saw, then, that Cal was correct. For in the distance, he made out the shape of the naked lady pouring water into that fountain, only seeing her from a different angle this time. So he realised that they were coming up to the square where they’d emerged from the underground. They were five minutes or less from escaping the area.
He took a few deep breaths. He needed to look like someone curious about what was happening, but nothing more. He said to Cal,
“Right. Le’s go, then.”
“Jus’ be cool,” was Cal’s reply.
They walked at a normal pace. As they reached the corner, yet another siren sounded, and a panda car passed. They entered the square. It seemed to them as if hundreds of people milled around on the pavements that marked the perimeter. They’d come out of cafés. They hesitated in the doorways of banks, of bookshops, and of department stores. They stood as statuelike as the bronze woman in the middle of the fountain: Venus gazing tenderly down upon a life-sustaining substance that she eternally poured from her urn.
A fire engine roared into the square. Another panda car followed. Voices buzzed. Bomb? Terrorists? Riot? Armed robbery? Street demonstration getting out of control?
Joel heard all this as he and Cal wove through the crowd. No one spoke of murder or street crime, of a mugging gone bad. No one at all.
As they crossed over into the centre of the square and made diagonally for the station beyond, an ambulance shrieked up from the south, siren blasting and roof lights twirling. The ambulance was what finally gave Joel some hope, for an ambulance meant that Cal hadn’t actually killed the lady when the gun went off.
Joel only hoped that she hadn’t hurt her head too badly when she banged it on the wrought-iron railing as she fell.
Chapter
27 The worst was Toby, which was certainly some thing that Joel did not expect. But when he finally arrived at Middle Row School to take Toby home for the day, it was to find him huddled in the February darkness just outside the locked gates, having somehow escaped the notice of the school’s administrators and teachers, carefully hidden in the deeper shadows cast by a pillar box. He was staring at a jagged crack in the pavement, his skateboard clutched to his chest.
Joel crouched by his brother and said, “Hey, mon. Sorry, Tobe. I di’n’t forget you or nuffink. Did you think I forgot? Tobe? Hey, Tobe?”
Toby roused himself. “Meant to go to the learnin centre today,” he mumbled.
Joel said, “Tobe, I’m sorry. I had to do summick . . . Look it’s important you don’t grass me up on this. It won’t happen again. I swear. You c’n promise me, Tobe?”
Toby gazed at him blankly. “I waited like I was s’posed to, Joel. I di’n’t know what else to do.”
“You did good, mon. Waitin here like dis. Come on now. Le’s go. When I take you to the learnin centre next, I’ll talk to them. I’ll ’splain wha’ happened. They won’t be vex at you or nuffink.”
Joel urged his little brother to his feet, and they set off towards their home. Joel said to him, “Tobe, you can’t tell Aunt Ken ’bout dis. Y’unnerstan wha’ I say? She find out I di’n’t take you to the learnin centre . . . She got ’nough vexin her already, innit. Wiv Ness. Wiv Dix gone. And dat Fabia Bender woman jus’ waitin for a reason to take you and me away...”
“Joel, I don’t want—”
“Hey. Dat ain’t goin to happen, bred. Which is why you got to keep quiet ’bout me bein late. C’n you pretend?”
“Pretend what?”
“You went to the learnin centre. C’n you pretend you went today like always?”
“’Kay,” Toby said.
Joel looked at his brother. Toby’s brief lifetime rose up to declare how unlikely it was that he would be able to pretend anything, but Joel had to believe it would be possible to carry off a deception about the afternoon, for it was crucial to him that life should look to his aunt the way it always looked to his aunt. The slightest deviation and Kendra would be suspicious, and suspicion felt to Joel like the last thing that he could endure.
But in all his planning, Joel failed to take into account the concern of Luce Chinaka. He failed to realise that she might have been told by Fabia Bender to keep a closer watch on Toby, that she might take matters into her own hands when Toby did not turn up as scheduled, phoning Kendra at the charity shop and asking if Toby was ill and unable to keep his regular appointment. So when Kendra arrived home for the day, she first
deposited a bag of Chinese takeaway in the kitchen and she then demanded to know why Joel had failed in his duty to see to Toby.
Here, however, a modicum of luck was on Joel’s side. He’d taken an unsettled stomach and a growing weakness in his arms and his legs up to his bedroom, and he’d deposited them upon his bed. There he curled in the darkness, and he stared at the wall on which he found— no matter what he did to try to get it out of his mind—the image of the dark-haired lady’s face floated, smiling at him, saying hello, and asking if he and Cal were lost. Thus, when Kendra flipped on the light and said, “Joel! Why didn’t you take your brother to the learning centre?” Joel spoke the truth. “Bein sick,” he said.
This altered things. Kendra sat on the edge of the bed and, motherlike, felt his forehead. She said in an altogether altered tone, “You coming down with something, baby? You’re a bit hot. You should’ve phoned me at the shop.”
“I thought Tobe could miss—”
“I don’t mean for Toby. I mean for you. If you’re sick and you need me . . .” She smoothed his hair. “We’re going through bad times round here, aren’t we, luv? But I want you to know something: You don’t have to take care of yourself alone.”
For Joel this was actually the worst thing she could have said, for the kindness in her words caused tears to well in his eyes. He closed them, but the tears leaked out.
Kendra said, “I’m going to make you something to settle your stomach. Why don’t you come down to the lounge and wait on the settee?
Have a lie down and I’ll fi x you up a tray. You can watch the telly while you eat. How ’bout that?”
Joel kept his eyes closed because he felt stung by her tone. It was a voice she’d never used before. Tears dripped across the bridge of his nose and onto his pillow. He did what he could not to sob, which meant he said nothing in reply.
Kendra said, “You come when you’re ready. Toby’s got a video on the telly, but I’ll tell him to let you watch what you want.”
What Came Before He Shot Her il-14 Page 61
