What Came Before He Shot Her by Elizabeth George

Ness replied. “Tell her I run off to join the fuckin circus. Tell her wha’ you want to tell her. Only I ain’t goin to see her again. I came this far, innit, but now I’m goin back to London.”
    “With what ticket?” Kendra asked. “With what money to buy yourself one?”
    “Oh I got money if it turns out I need it,” Ness informed her. “And plenty more where it came from ’s well.”
    “Money from where? From what?” Kendra asked her.
    “Money I work for,” Ness replied.
    “Now you telling me you have a
job
?”
    “I s’pose it depends on what you call work.” Ness unbuttoned her jacket, revealing her breasts in their plunging blouse. She smirked and said, “Don’ you know, Aunt Ken? I dress to get money. I
always
dress to get money.”
    IN THE END, Kendra knew argument was useless. So she extracted a promise from Ness. She then gave one in turn, although both of them knew their words were largely worthless. For Kendra’s part, she simply had too much to contend with already without also having to engage Ness in a battle over how she was getting money or whether she was going to accompany her aunt and her little brothers to see their mother.
    For Ness, promises had long ago become idle words of the sound and fury variety. People had been making them to her and breaking them consistently over her back as long as she could remember, so she was able both to promise and to renege on that promise with complete im-punity, and she told herself that she didn’t care when others did the same.
    The promises given in this case were simple. Kendra would not insist that Ness accompany them a step farther on their route to see Carole Campbell. In return, Ness would wait for their reappearance at the station some two hours hence. This deal hammered out between them, Kendra and the boys left Ness on the ancient wooden bench, between a notice board that hadn’t been unlocked and updated in a decade and a rubbish bin that looked as if it hadn’t been emptied in just about as long.
    Ness watched them go. For a moment altogether too brief, so relieved was she at having escaped another excruciating visit to her mother that she actually considered keeping her promise to her aunt.
    Deep inside her, there still existed the child who recognised an act of love when it was truly an act of love, and that child intuitively understood that what Kendra had in mind for her—both through the now aborted trip to see Carole Campbell and through her promise to wait and not wander off on her own—was actually in her best interest. But when it came to her best interest, Ness’s problem was twofold: First, the part of her that
wasn’t
a child was a fifteen-year-old girl-woman at that point in her life where parental directives seemed akin to torture by enemy forces. And second, that fifteen-year-old girl-woman had long ago lost the ability to transform the words of any adult into anything she could understand as having benefit to her. Instead, she saw only what other people demanded from her and what she could gain from them in turn, through acquiescence to, or refusal of, their requests.
    In this case and upon reflection, acquiescence meant a nice long sit in the cold. It meant a numb backside pressed God only knew how long into the splintery wood of the station bench, followed by an interminable train ride back to London during which Toby would annoy her to such a degree that she’d want to throw him onto the railway tracks. Worse, acquiescence meant missing out on whatever Six and Natasha had planned for the afternoon and the evening, and that meant being on the outside looking in the next time she got together with her friends.
    So at the end of the day, there really was no choice to be made between remaining at the station and heading back into London. There was only the waiting for an eastbound train. When one chugged to a halt some twenty-eight minutes after Kendra’s departure with Joel and Toby, Ness climbed aboard