Elizabeth George: With No One As Witness

“I should hope not,” Barbara said.

“Some of the boys do, actually. They stand round down the street from school. These’re the older boys. And they take their shirttails out of their trousers, Barbara. I expect they think it makes them look cool, but I think it makes them look…” She frowned, thoughtful. “…beastly,” she settled on. “Perfectly beastly.”

“Peacocks and their plumes,” Barbara acknowledged.

“Hmm?”

“The male of the species, attracting the female. Otherwise, she’d have nothing to do with him. Interesting, no? Men should be the ones wearing makeup.”

Hadiyyah giggled at this, saying, “Dad would look a sight wearing lipstick, wouldn’t he?”

“He’d be fighting them off with a broomstick.”

“Mummy wouldn’t like that ,” Hadiyyah noted. She scooped up four tins of All Day Breakfast-Barbara’s preferred dinner in a pinch after a longer than usual day at work-and carried them over to the cupboard above the sink.

“No. I don’t expect she would,” Barbara agreed. “Hadiyyah, what is that bloody-awful screeching going on round your neck?” She took the tins from the little girl and nodded at her headphones, from which some sort of questionable pop music was continuing to issue.

“Nobanzi,” Hadiyyah said obscurely.

“No-whatie?”

“Nobanzi. They’re brilliant. Look.” From out of her jacket pocket she brought the plastic cover of a CD. On it, three anorexic twentysomethings posed in crop tops the size of Scrooge’s generosity and blue jeans so tight that the only thing left to imagine was how they’d managed to cram themselves into them.

“Ah,” Barbara said. “Role models for our young. Give that over, then. Let’s have a listen.”

Hadiyyah willingly handed over the earphones, which Barbara set on her head. She absently reached for a packet of Players and shook one out despite Hadiyyah’s moue of disapproval. She lit one as what sounded like the chorus to a song-if it could be called that-assailed her eardrums. The Vandellas Nobanzi definitely was not, with or without Martha, Barbara decided. There was a chorus of unintelligible words. Lots of orgasmic groaning in the background appeared to take the place of both the bass line and the drums.

Barbara removed the headphones, and handed them over. She drew in on her fag and speculatively cocked her head at Hadiyyah.

Hadiyyah said, “Aren’t they brilliant ?” She took the CD cover and pointed to the girl in the middle, who had dual-colored dreadlocks and a smoking pistol tattooed on her right breast. “This’s Juno. She’s my favourite. She’s got a baby called Nefertiti. Isn’t she lovely?”

“The very word I’d use.” Barbara screwed up the emptied carrier bags and shoved them in the cupboard beneath the sink. She opened her cutlery drawer and found at the back of it a pad of sticky notes that she generally used to remind herself of important upcoming events like Consider Plucking Eyebrows or Clean This Disgusting Toilet. This time, however, she scribbled three words and said to her little friend, “Come with me. It’s time to see to your education,” before grabbing up her shoulder bag and leading her back to the front of the house, where Hadiyyah’s shoes lay beneath the bench in the flagstoned area just outside the door to the ground-floor flat. Barbara told her to put on her shoes while she herself posted the sticky note on the door.

When Hadiyyah was ready, Barbara said, “Follow me. I’ve let your dad know,” and she headed off the property and in the direction of Chalk Farm Road.

“Where’re we going?” Hadiyyah asked. “Are we having an adventure?”

Barbara said, “Let me ask you a question. Nod if any of these names are familiar. Buddy Holly. No? Richie Valens. No? The Big Bopper. No? Elvis. Well, of course. Who wouldn’t know Elvis, but that hardly counts. What about Chuck Berry? Little Richard? Jerry Lee Lewis? ‘Great Balls of Fire.’ Ring any bells? No? Bloody hell, what’re they teaching you at school?”

“You shouldn’t swear,” Hadiyyah said.

On Chalk Farm Road, it was not an overlong walk to their destination: the Virgin Megastore in Camden High Street. To get there, though, they had to negotiate the shopping district, which, as far as Barbara had ever been able to ascertain, was unlike any shopping precinct in the city: packed shopfront to street with young people of every colour, persuasion, and manner of bodily adornment; flooded by a blaring cacophony of music from every direction; scented with everything from patchouli oil to fish and chips. Here shops had mascots crawling up the front of them in the form of super-huge cats, the gigantic bottom of a torso wearing blue jeans, enormous boots, an aeroplane nose down…Only vaguely did the mascots have anything to do with the wares within the individual shops, since most of these were given over to anything black and many things leather. Black leather. Black faux leather. Black faux fur on black faux leather.

Hadiyyah, Barbara saw, was taking everything in with the expression of a novice, the first indication Barbara had that the little girl had never before been to Camden High Street, despite its proximity to their respective homes. Hadiyyah followed along, eyes the size of hubcaps, lips parted, face rapt. Barbara had to steer her in and out of the crowd, one hand on her shoulder, to make sure they didn’t become separated in the crush.

“Brilliant, brilliant ,” Hadiyyah breathed, hands clasped to her chest. “Oh, Barbara, this is so much better than a surprise.”

“Glad you like it,” Barbara said.

“Will we go into the shops?”

“When I’ve seen to your education.”

She took her into the megastore, to classic rock ’n’ roll. “This,” Barbara told her, “is music. Now…Where to start you off…? Well, there’s no question, really, is there? Because at the end of the day, we have the Great One and then we have everyone else. So…” She scanned the section for the H’s and then the H’s themselves for the only H that counted. She examined the selections, flipping each over to read the songs while next to her Hadiyyah studied the photos of Buddy Holly on the CD covers.

“Bit odd looking,” she remarked.

“Bite your tongue. Here. This’ll do. It’s got ‘Raining in My Heart,’ which I guarantee will make you swoon and ‘Rave On,’ which’ll make you want to dance on the work top. This , kiddo, is rock ’n’ roll. People’ll be listening to Buddy Holly in one hundred years, I guarantee it. As for Nobuki-”

“Nobanzi,” Hadiyyah corrected her patiently.

“They’ll be gone next week. Gone and forgotten while the Great One will rave on into eternity. This, my girl, is music .”

Hadiyyah looked doubtful. “He wears awfully strange specs,” she noted.

“Well, yeah. But that was the style. He’s been dead forever. Plane crash. Bad weather. Trying to get home to the pregnant wife.” Too young, Barbara thought. Too much in a hurry.

“How sad.” Hadiyyah looked at the photo of Buddy Holly with awakened eyes.

Barbara paid for their purchase and peeled off its wrapper. She brought out the CD and replaced Nobanzi with Buddy Holly. She said, “Feast your ears on this,” and when the music started, she led Hadiyyah back out to the street.

As promised, Barbara took her into several of the shops where the here-today-passé-in-thirty-minutes fashions were crammed onto clothing racks and hung from the walls. Scores of teenagers were spending money as if news of Armageddon had just been broadcast, and there was a sameness to them that caused Barbara to look at her companion and pray Hadiyyah always maintained the air of artlessness that made her such a pleasure to be around. Barbara couldn’t imagine her transformed into a London teenager in a tearing hurry to arrive at adulthood, mobile phone pressed to her ear, lipstick and eye shadow colouring her face, blue jeans sculpting her little arse, and high-heeled boots destroying her feet. And she certainly couldn’t imagine the little girl’s father allowing her out in public so arrayed.