So Big D and Gotti are talking, frowns cutting up their foreheads and as I walk over I hear D saying nah Gotti we have to get a next whip right now. Big D hunches over, leaning in, Gotti sticking his hands down the front of his tracksuit bottoms, turning away whenever Big D leans in as if he doesn’t want the words coming out of D’s mouth to get too close to him and I can’t catch what’s being said. Gotti goes fuck dat blood I’m not doing that kinda bateness after what just happened, no way, and he starts talking about how the only thing he trusts is his own instinct and it just don’t feel right to go out there again. And D is rushing to get words out his mouth but Gotti turns away like nah I ain’t doing that, that’s mad bate. He draws his cigarette hard and dashes it. I say wagwan D? And he starts breaking it down; that we need to buy a next whip if we’re gonna do more moves, so he wants one of us to run up in a clothes shop in Golders Green where there’s one saleswoman who’s always rocking a Daytona Rolex and pop the watch off her wrist so that we can use the p’s from shotting it to buy a new getaway whip. Obviously we’re all gonna eat a lickle p off it for ourselves as well, he adds quickly and then looks away to spit into a bush. And Gotti’s turning to me like nah Snoopz, fuck dat, I just have this feeling like I know suttin’s gonna go wrong – and I can hear cars passing on the road beyond the bushes but it’s all distant as if the world is drifting away from me.
It’s never been a problem before. Big D always cops our getaway whips just like he bought the one we were driving in this morning; I mean he’s the one who put this team together in the first place so it shouldn’t be an issue. He knows me and Gotti are certified eaters, knows we’re on this ting, if anything this is the first move that’s proper gone wrong, he should know that we’ll make back the loss and more next time. But now he wants us to go and do a proper madness – I mean going back to Golders Green which is basically where we just came from – and all just to get money for a next whip. Gotti’s right as well, it’s gonna be bate round there now, feds are definitely gonna be looking for man. And then running up in a shop in broad daylight? Robbing a sales assistant inside a shop? No creep up, no stealth, no nothing. Just straight in there, rago, clamping her up all scatty n shit, and I won’t be able to rock my bally coz I’ll probably get noticed before I even get in the shop and I don’t know where the cameras are and alladat.
I look at Gotti and Big D puts his arm around me and walks with me to the side, away from the others, but his arm feels too tight around my neck and the sleeve of his leather jacket creaks like a snake shedding its skin and he smells of stale cigarettes and aftershave, and he goes Snoopz I know you’re on it, it’s nuttin, all you have to do is go in the shop; when you see the woman, walk up to her on a calm ting and then quickly pop the watch off her wrist.
I’m always hungry, even though I’ve got p’s stacked, but I always want more so I let him walk me to the side, although his arm across my shoulders feels heavier and heavier. So I ask D how do I do it exactly? He starts showing me on his Rolly how I have to grab the watch face and jerk it at an angle, explaining how the sudden pressure will break the bit where the strap is attached to the face. I’m trying out the way he’s shown me to do it on his wrist but then I think fuck dat, if Gotti’s not doing it, nah, this is how I’m gonna end up getting shift for all the madness I’ve been doing. I let go of his watch and say nah man this shit seems too bate to me, too many tings that could go wrong, I’m not doing it.
I turn around so I don’t have to see Big D’s face and walk over to Gotti. For a moment, behind me is only silence and then the world drifts back in, noisy, rushing, constant. I get close to Gotti and he already knows I’ve said no and his face is all calm now and the blackness of his eyes has melted and he says trust me Snoopz, it’s better to listen to your instinct and don’t watch face. Don’t watch face. Who gives a fuck what them man think, you ain’t got nuttin to prove brudda, man already know you’re on this ting. It’s a bad idea to do that shit brudda, I just know it’s gonna go wrong.
I don’t really notice how we leave them. Big D says something about how he’ll phone us later and we spud Ghost and Tyrell. Tyrell walks off towards Cricklewood, Big D and his nephew drive off in the Porsche and me and Gotti make our way back to South Kilburn. I tell him what I was thinking, that Big D shoulda just bought a next whip so we could go out there again and wagwan with dat fam? I thought my man’s supposed to be on some boss shit organising the whole ting and instead he’s moving like he ain’t got p’s, fuck dat I say. And Gotti’s nodding his head going forreal forreal, and I think we both know – although we don’t say it – that we won’t be doing moves with Big D ever again.
Grey clouds like heavy sponges tug on the sky’s skin and the sun hides its face from the city as we get close to South Kilburn. I give Gotti his half of the seven hundred that I slipped out of the wallet, which raises his spirits a bit, and he tells me to dash the black American Express card as we walk down Kilburn Lane. I crouch next to a drain and pretend to drop the card down it, tucking it up into my sleeve instead. I want something to remember this day. No way can it be used to trace us unless it gets found and I’m not planning to let that happen. We carry on back towards South Kilburn, back to the blocks, to go and cotch in Bimz’s yard. We can buy a draw or two now, or maybe we’ll get a q, get proper faded, and then jump on the tube all high and numb and go back to east London. As I told Gotti this morning when we set out to do the mad ting, I have to make sure I’m up nice and early tomorrow, full of energy for my 9 a.m. uni lecture.
SOUTH KILBURN
THERE’S LIKE TWO or three shops in the estate and whenever I go to get a juice or Rizla or whatever, there are white posters stuck in the shop window with MURDER in big red capitals running across the top and underneath a grainy photo of one brer called Bloogz and something about a reward, £20,000 for any information, you will remain anonymous, whatever.
What happened was that Bloogz owed his best friend Creeper some money – a bag or suttin. The mandem were all out in the sun, cotching by D-block and Bloogz was there, fresh out of pen after a year and a half on a possession with intent to supply charge, and the thing is he owed Creeper the p’s because Creeper had looked after his girl while he was locked up – gave her p’s for shopping, bought the baby a new buggy, took her on prison visits – so now the way Creeper saw it, Bloogz owed him. So that day, when everyone was out in the sun by D-block, Creeper comes over and asks Bloogz when am I gonna get my money? And Bloogz says you ain’t getting no money pussy, do what you gotta do, so Creeper, who had his gun on him, shoots Bloogz and walks off. It was a hot day in July, everyone was out on the block – just by the park that stretches out in front of Wordsworth House – and Gotti was there too and he tells me how Bloogz clutched his chest right over his heart where he’d been shot and walked around in a circle for like ten seconds without making a sound before dropping. Nuttin like the movies fam says Gotti. Maybe Creeper wouldn’t have done it if all the mandem hadn’t been out on the block, soaking up the sun. But they were and Bloogz talked greaze, he didn’t show man the slightest bit of respect, so Creeper had to do suttin. Now murder posters are stuck up in the shop windows because there were no witnesses, no one gave evidence to the police, everyone who was there that day wouldn’t talk to the feds, but everyone knows who did it. Even Bloogz’s mother and sister.
Later, I heard something about how Creeper went on the run to Jamaica, but then he got into one mad car accident and he was all fucked up from it and had to come back for treatment, like if he’d stayed in hospital out there he’d have ended up fully paralysed. So he flew back to London and the feds were waiting for him, they arrested him right as he got off the plane at Heathrow. But still, in the end there was no case. No witnesses ever came forward and I’m guessing he didn’t end up paralysed or anything, because I seen him in Queens Ice Bowl last week with some chick, although my boy who saw him too said that one side of his face is fucked up like Two-Face. It’s not like anyone outside South Kilbur
n could have witnessed it. I mean imagine: you come out of your block one morning, walk over to the opposite building where everyone is jamming out in front, smoking and talking and whatever, and you see an enemy and you argue, so you kill him on the spot and then you go home, which is a minute’s walk, twenty seconds if you run, and that just tells you how shut off and enclosed this place is.
It’s between Maida Vale, which is all red-brick Victorian mansions and houses with columns on tree-lined avenues, and Queen’s Park train station where streets bleed off into areas full of lifestyles that contradict each other. Coming from the Maida Vale side, walk straight up Malvern Road, past the bookie and a chicken shop and two Chinese takeaways and the green corner shop on your left and small dirty houses with satellite dishes stuttering all over them and the post office in the little square on the right that always has its shutters down, tagged up with black spray paint, and you’re basically right there at the beginning of South Kilburn Estate. You kind of know you’re there before you’re there, because you see these rows of low-rise flats that you walk past and beyond them the high brown blocks looking like they crashed down from the sky, solid enough to break into the Earth. You know you’re in a different kind of place because just ten seconds of walking up Malvern Road and you see a camera right in the middle of the pavement on top of a pole covered in anti-climb paint and under the camera a Jesus crown of sharp metal spikes just in case. And the camera actually moves, it swivels around and looks up and down the road and I’ve seen it watching me before, following slowly as I walked by.
Further up Malvern Road there’s another camera on top of a pole and then you get to the blocks, starting with Blake Court and next to it Dickens House, which is eighteen floors high. They tower above, pouring blue shadow all over you if you get too close and you can feel the coldness breathing off the rusty concrete and the silence straining to burst from all the windows. Carry on past the blocks and you come to a little park, just an open stretch of grass really, with the brown towers staring across from the right and another one of these surveillance cameras on top of a pole connected to some invisible control centre somewhere. Cross the park and you get to Carlton Vale, which is this long road that cuts the estate in two with a stream of cars going up and down, everyone on their way to somewhere else, since no one ever stops here. Back in the day there was a concrete walkway, like a bridge that connected one side of the estate to the other, as if to give people the chance to spend their lives without having to set foot outside of it, so you could always be within the estate, even when crossing a long road full of traffic and other lives passing by.
On the other side of Carlton Vale is Peel Precinct, a little concrete square surrounded by blocks covered in blue and grey cladding with white balconies, and in the centre of the precinct, in front of a next row of dusty shops and low-rise blocks, another camera with metal spikes beneath it and a sign saying ‘CCTV in operation. This camera is active.’ I always see this camera moving, following mandem as they walk across the precinct, and this side of South Kilburn we call Precinct and the other side – with the rusty colour blocks down by Malvern Road – we call D-block.
When I first came to South Kilburn I was seventeen. I lived at Uncle T’s on the D-block side in Blake Court, a five-storey block next to Dickens House, and there were always nittys waiting at the entrance to Blake Court, damp and sticky-skinned with rotten black mouths and yellow eyes and clothes smelling sour, catting to get some b and work, and a lot of the South Kilburn mandem would jam on the open landing of one block called Wordsworth House next to Dickens House which looked out across the stretch of park, and no one really walked past that bit, even though there’s a path cutting through the park that goes right past Wordsworth to save you time when crossing from one side of the estate to the other. But most of the time there were mandem on the balconies all hooded up, on the lookout for nittys and feds and enemies, and you wouldn’t want their focus to turn on you. It’s mad because only when I started doing my English degree did I realise that all the concrete towers on the D-block side of South Kilburn are named after great English authors: Blake Court after William Blake, Austen House after Jane Austen, Bronte House after the Brontë sisters, Dickens House after Charles Dickens and Wordsworth House after William Wordsworth, the block where all the mandem jam and the actual building they call D-block.
Whenever you enter one of the blocks you’re already under surveillance. Like apart from all the cameras on poles that watch anyone who walks up and down the roads near the estate, and the big camera in the middle of Precinct and in the children’s playground in the centre of the estate – apart from all that, say when you’re going into Blake Court, there’s a camera just above the entrance. Then once you’re through the door, there’s another camera watching from a corner, stuck up in the grimy ceiling and a yellow plastic sign on the wall says These premises are under CCTV surveillance, and under it BRENT HOUSING PARTNERSHIP HELPING TO PREVENT CRIME AND PROMOTING PUBLIC SAFETY. When you get into the lift there’s a camera in there as well and a mirror, scratched up all over with names so that when you look in it your reflection gets cut to pieces.
There was this brer called Chicken who had a house party one summer night in his flat in Dickens House. Chicken wasn’t on stuff, wasn’t involved in any of the wickedness, he was just some next brer from South Kilburn, but his cousin and couple next man robbed some top brers from South Kilburn for their jewels and ghosted. No one could find them in northwest London but the problem was that these man they’d robbed were Bugz Bunny’s people. So at about two in the morning, in the middle of Chicken’s house party, Bugz Bunny runs into the flat masked up, blacked out, with a Glock 9 and shoots Chicken in the chest. Chicken tries to get away, high on adrenaline, runs out onto his balcony and jumps off. But the flat is on the second floor of Dickens House so he breaks his legs when he lands. Someone turns the music off in the party and they can hear Chicken crying for help. People come running out the block, everything is screams and voices and the loud silence of shock shivering through the warm night air. Then Bunny comes out the block, walks over to where Chicken is lying and shoots him three times in the head before disappearing into the night. Chicken dies in the shadow of the block, holding on to his broken legs, not knowing anything about Charles Dickens, no moon or stars looking down on him because light pollution from the city at night burns the underbelly of the sky into an oily haze.
No one ever got arrested for it. No witnesses. And now, if you try and find anything out about it, it’s like Chicken himself never existed. If you Google his name you won’t find shit. When feds release their lists of unsolved murders in the capital, Chicken’s name is never on there. It’s almost like it never happened. But it was one of the first things I heard about when I moved here; I heard Uncle T say you mean dat block deya where the boy did get shot and jumped off the balcony – he was just making sure that whoever he was talking to meant Dickens House, it’s the standard reference point to that building for people like Uncle T who’ve lived here for most of their lives. And mandem in SK know what happened, plenty of people who live here remember; I mean most of the residents only had to go to their windows after getting woken up by the gunshots and they’d have seen Chicken, watched the drama of ambulances and fed cars arriving, the quicker ones might even have watched his last moments before Bunny ran off and got swallowed up by the night.
It’s kinda fucked up but then again to the mandem round here it’s really not, it’s actually totally accepted, if anything it sets a standard for the young g’s to live up to and you can see it in how the violence becomes the inspiration for everyone’s lyrics when they spit rap and grime bars about bussin guns and murking man. Because round here, for certain man it’s all about securing a reputation, you absolutely can’t show weakness, you can’t be seen as a pussy who lets shit slide. If you’re nothing without your reputation then violent revenge can be like salvation and deliverance. Even though Bunny didn’t actually duppy any of the bre
rs who robbed his people, he knew that Chicken’s cousin – and them man who Bunny was really after – would get the message and probably never show their faces round Northwest again. If you can’t hit the enemy directly, you hit a relative or a friend because the thing is you’re making a point, you’re not doing something that is necessarily final and decisive, something that ends a cycle of violence or a feud. You’re sending a message that you’re ruthless and nothing is safe and don’t even start to fool yourself that there are any rules to this shit.
When you leave the ends, say you’re going to central London or anywhere else that’s more normal, you find that no one’s heard about those unsolved murders – grainy photos in shops that sit in the shadow of blocks – you take a bus ride or a trip on the tube and suddenly you’re out of one reality and into another, but you still carry all this knowledge with you. And the mad ting is how these murder posters are located in the one place where people won’t cooperate with the feds. Here it’s all fuck the law, get paper by any means, rob, shoot, trap, spend the profit on some diamond grillz for your teeth or an iced-out Rolex or whatever, fuck gyaldem, bun cro till you zone out, ignore the nittys lurking on the concrete staircases looking half mummified, live life at a hundred miles an hour and just don’t stop to think because you never know which day could be your last.
Who They Was Page 2