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.