Reuben stopped living at his dad’s when Uncle T found Reuben’s strap and a shopping bag full of bullets behind the panels covering the bath in their flat. Taz stopped living there before that happened after coming out of pen and moving in to a hostel for ex-offenders. But they were both still close to their dad and Taz would often bring me there and we’d cotch and bun and listen to tunes and if we were lucky, Uncle T woulda fried some saltfish fritters or cooked some of his famous curry goat. Since his sons had stopped living there he had a spare room available and when I told Taz that I needed a place to stay since my home life was choking me, he told his pops, and Uncle T said to me Snoopz, the room’s free when you’re ready.
BLAKE COURT
We live in the flicker – may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
UNCLE T LIVES on the top floor of Blake Court and it’s a proper crack block. There are two main entrances on either side of the block and the lifts are often broken, or when they aren’t, some nitty’s pissed in the lift so you have to take the stairs anyway and you come across bare cats sitting on the dirty concrete stairs, some having just piped up and smoked a rock, all zombied out n shit, others waiting to get served, burnt lips and dirty bodies and you gotta be ready in case they try suttin. So you get to the fourth floor coz it’s one of the shorter blocks, and usually there are shotters on the landing next to the lift, waiting to serve the cats with the dark n light which means heroin and crack, or as everyone round here calls it, buj and work or brown and white or brandy and champs or Bobby and Whitney.
I used to feel tense when I first started coming on the block to check Uncle T because these man would stare me in my face without blinking, that look which you know is an instant challenge and I don’t just mean a screwface – it’s a look that you don’t really see on people’s faces outside these kinds of environments – and sometimes they’d be standing around the top of the stairs, waiting for nittys, and they wouldn’t make the slightest space for me to get past, so I had to try and edge through without bumping into anyone because it was me on my ones, while at the same time tryna show that I’m not shook or anything. I didn’t ever want to get looked at like that, stared at until I’d have to look away and then risk getting violated for showing weakness. But if I didn’t look away they’d see it as a challenge and the consequences could be even worse. You see, life is ruthless. Sometimes someone would go who’s dat? bare loud and aggi and only when I’d say I’m going to check Uncle T would they ignore me and go back to whatever they were doing.
So you get to the fourth floor, you go through a heavy magnetised door that slams shut with a metal clunk, locking you into the balcony, and you walk past rows of doors, some boarded up after police raids, and there are wires hanging down from the ceiling like exposed black arteries and some of the lights are broken and they flicker endlessly. Staring out from the balcony across the estate I can see Dickens House to the left, eighteen floors high, the block where Chicken got shot and killed, and to the right Austen House, another eighteen floors of rusty concrete silence and windows repeating themselves and all of it holding the sky back from coming down into the estate. And often there’s mandem all down the balcony as well and when I first used to come here they’d turn around and clock me the second they heard the balcony door open, but after a while they recognised me and most of them would just ignore me as if I wasn’t even there. Some of them are literally Uncle T’s neighbours who live a couple doors down from him, like Warlord and Rico – two brothers who were already gunman by the time they were seventeen and eighteen and I’ve even seen them on the balcony blatantly holding burners down the front of their jeans. Sometimes Warlord says wagwan Snoopz because he recognises me and he’d heard me spit bars at one battle in South Killy, but his brother has these eyes that you don’t wanna look into because there’s suttin frozen deep inside which you might regret seeing, so I never even try and say wagwan to him because I can tell that the only thing he has for strangers is contempt.
The only time that you don’t really see all of this is in the morning when the cats are nodding off on buj and the shotters are catching some sleep after trapping into the early hours. But even then you’ll have all the reminders: broken lifts, stairs shiny with piss, sometimes even liquid shit covering a stairwell, broken miniature Martell bottles with scorched black glass scattered about coz that’s what the nittys use to bun work, and bits of empty clingfilm like little whispers going down the stairs.
It was like this day in, day out, so I got used to it all very quickly. The screwfaces on the balcony of Blake Court, stony frowns, eyes full of black fire. Mandem shotting crack on the block, diamond grillz shining in black faces like fallen gods chewing stars. Nike hoodies and £500 Louis Vuitton trainers, Gucci belts holding up True Religion jeans and shanks in pockets so they can poke up anyone who tries it, some even with straps on them and you can tell who’s holding coz they’ll have at least one glove on in case they have to beat it off, knowing that it’s only forensic evidence they’ll have to deal with coz there’ll be no witnesses round here, even if everyone sees it.
I got used to hearing greazy talk echoing loud across the balconies into the night, mandem chatting about how someone knocked out some next brer’s teeth, a snatch of conversation which goes he started crying when I shanked him and twisted the blade before pulling it out. I got used to all the cats, the nittys, fiending in the stairwells like the undead lurking in a concrete tomb.
After a few months of living at Uncle T’s I got comfortable. I’d walk through the blocks saying wagwan to certain heads I’d got to know and next man who’d got used to seeing me round the ends. I’d come on the balcony of Blake Court and nod to the mandem who’d make space casually as I passed – shank in my pocket at all times coz it’s not about slipping and you never know when shit could pop off – and certain times I’d come out of Uncle T’s for some fresh air and bun a zoot on the balcony while the mandem were trapping and doing their ting.
But still, there’s a constant sense of threat and readiness here, your heart never gets the chance to beat slow for too long because there’s always the rush and heavy throb of danger that lingers in your chest long after the sticky cro smell leaves your nostrils. You hear solitary bangs echo across the estate, which you know are not fireworks, and nighttime gets cut up by blue lights and sirens, but you become numb to it all. It’s mad how you can live in a city and never see any of this. Or you just see faint smudges of it every now and again around the edges of your existence but even then you don’t fully believe in it, because even though we live in the same city, where I’m from and where you’re from could be two totally separate worlds. Like say you hear about a shooting on a street you walk down every day on your way to work; it’s a shocking one-off occasion, a rarity, something to talk about, and every single violent incident that you hear of or read about becomes a one-off, or at least a surprise or a shock. But to others these incidents are just the punctuation of their reality.
Only a place like this can have mandem putting diamonds in their teeth, needing to flaunt something that looks like it’s from another planet. You could say it’s like a kingdom of princes and bandits in concrete towers although more times the princes and the bandits are the same thing, and the youngers grow up idolising man like Bugz Bunny, idolising killers and shotters, and my bredrin Gotti was raised by Bunny to be a eater.
I first saw Gotti at Bimz’s yard in Precinct. Actually the first time I saw him, was on one DVD that was going round the ends. It was made by some rapper from South Killy, featuring music videos, a twerking contest full of thick chicks in a club in Harlesden called Dreams, and some random footage of mandem on D-block. It was filmed at night, the dim block lights just enough to carve people out of the darkness. Mandem getting gassed on camera, shouting – D-block, Dmotherfuckinblock, free da mandem, fuck da feds – throwing up middle fingers and gunfingers, the camera je
rking up to show the word D-block spray-painted in silver above the entrance to the balcony, and as they shouted at the camera the light shivered over diamond-encrusted teeth.
I was jamming at Bimz’s after a Secret Service set in the Marian Centre when I saw this DVD. It was something to do while we sat in the yard and bunned zoots. There was a moment in the D-block footage where one brer came up the stairs and passed in front of the camera. He was wearing a black leather Avirex and a black fitted cap and he stared at the camera as if it had caught him out, moon eyes, said wagwan to the cameraman and walked out of the shot, fully uninterested in the hype that was going on around him. Mazey said oh shit, Gotti, I swear he just got out of pen after a five stretch. Gotti? Yeah that’s my cousin still. What did he get five for? I think it was some move fam, Gotti’s a madman, that guy just don’t care bout nuttin, he’ll rob anyone anytime. Then Mazey told us how Gotti would go around eating all the nittys for their food and then sell it back to them. He’d rob them as they came out of whichever block they were getting their food from and one by one he’d yack every single cat, bareface, and tell them if you wanna come back to the block you gotta cop from me. Mad ting. One next brer who was jamming with us that day in Bimz’s yard said yeah Gotti’s active, I remember when him and Bunny went and stuck it on all them Warwick man. Gotti and Bugz Bunny went to Warwick Estate, lined up all the mandem they saw against one wall and took all their p’s, phones, food, jewellery – and no one did fuck all. Bunny had mandem on the ropes like that. Of course he was always strapped and everyone knows he won’t pet to buss his gun so what could them Warwick man really do?
Later, Gotti heard about me from Mazey and Bimz when I started getting active, but I never imagined we’d end up doing all the madness we did together or how it would all go down.
ANTS
WHEN WE WERE little, my twin brother Danny had a pet hamster and then it died. We’d always loved animals; nature documentaries were about the only TV our mother let us watch – well, that and The Simpsons. When the hamster died, we were on holiday in Italy with our parents. A family friend was staying in the flat in London and he called my father to break the news. We were seven years old and I remember how we cried when we found out.
We were playing in this big garden full of pine trees and our father came round the corner of the house and as he told us he was already crouching with his arms outstretched, and he held us tight against his chest as the tears came. Afterwards, we went back to playing our game with the ants. We ripped the bark off a pine tree to make the ants who lived inside come running out of their nests and as they ran out in shiny black streams all over the polished red surface of the tree, we torched them. We made a flame-thrower with a can of deodorant and a lighter that we teefed from our mother’s handbag and the bodies of the roasted ants curled up and fell away from the tree in their thousands. When it was done we dropped our trousers and pissed all over the tree, drowning any survivors and washing away the remains of the massacre. I guess that’s what they call the innocence of children or some shit.
Then we got older and I stopped going on holiday with my family coz when summer came around I just wanted to stay in London and make sure I went to Notting Hill Carnival. Whereas Danny had decided long time that all he wanted to do was play the violin, I just wanted to jam on road with my bredrins, bunning cro and getting up to madness. In a sense he became my mother’s favourite because he never caused her any problems; she probably felt he was easier to understand. So while it seemed that they were always talking and getting along, I was always getting shouted at and slapped across my face for doing suttin wrong and that really bunned me. It hurt me somewhere deep inside like a splinter and the more I picked at it, the further I pushed it in, deeper and deeper until I couldn’t get it out. So when I argued with Danny it was bad, I mean real bad, like this one time he was pissing me off and I was pissing him off and then he started talking about how I wasn’t doing anything with my life, which felt like an echo of my mother and I couldn’t shut him up so I drew for this Moroccan dagger that my mother had inherited from her mother and held it to Daniel’s throat. But he didn’t react. He just stared back at me and said go on then, stab me, see, you’re not gonna do it, so I punched him in the head, put the dagger back on the shelf where I’d taken it from and stormed out of the flat to go and bun it up with some bredrins on road, waiting until after midnight when I eventually came back to the flat, crept upstairs and got into bed while everyone slept.
But I wasn’t doing nothing with my life like Danny said. Apart from all my efforts to make sure I wouldn’t live a Normal Life – because the idea of that scared the shit out of me – I was determined to go uni. It was like the thing I had to do for the sake of my brain. I knew I’d go mad if I couldn’t read books. As a child I quickly worked out how to turn my bedside lamp on without making the switch click so that my parents would think I was asleep coz all I wanted to do was read. Books took me to other places. And I looked after them. Books don’t deserve to have their spines broken, I mean I could read a book and afterwards it would still look brand new. In school I was always sick at English so it felt natural that eventually I’d go to uni and study it. When I did my A levels I got an A in English, but all my mother could talk about was that I got a U in Biology. The U meant Ungraded because I didn’t even get the minimum number of marks to get an F. I mean it was pretty fucking shit forreal, I’m not even sure if I got more than two or three questions right in the whole exam but fuck it, I wasn’t tryna be a doctor, I didn’t need to know how plants photosynthesise to ensure I had a promising future, like as long as you know how to fuck, that’s all the biology you need and I knew how to do that. Anyway my mother could never stop clawing away at me with her relentless expectations and criticisms, and she never once said well done for getting an A in English and a B in History, she just banged on about the U like that was what defined me. It just confirmed that I was right to move out and go live at Uncle T’s when I did, because I couldn’t be me around my mother without having to constantly fight for it.
At Uncle T’s I could be myself and no one questioned it. Here I brought my girl, Yinka – short for Olayinka, which means ‘wealth surrounds me’ in Yoruba she said – to stay with me and it helped her to escape her family and anyway, she didn’t even have her real dad around, her mum had remarried. We’d met in one evangelical Nigerian church called Jesus House. A friend of mine had invited me — one Christian girl I knew from youth club who wanted Jesus to save me or some shit — and a friend of hers had done the same. When I clocked her I was like nah, who’s this peng ting with amber skin and eyes that look as if they’ve always got the sun in them, and we spent the whole service snatching looks from each other. Afterwards we swapped numbers, jumped on the tube together back to west London and as I got off at my stop, she kicked me in the back and I almost fell over on the platform as she buss up laughing. We never went back to that church but we kept seeing each other. We used to play-fight and she was always tryna wrestle me and true she didn’t bun so she always had more breath in her lungs and I’d try act like I wasn’t making too much effort when really I’d be thinking nah this girl is strong I need to have her up, but once I pinned her down we’d start lipsing and two twos I’d be pulling her trousers and her panties down and pushing myself into her wetness. She liked rocking fitted caps and Nike tracksuits but when they came off, her body was full of curves that I couldn’t stop gripsing up and she’d laugh and say you make me feel so sexy and I’d say that’s because you are Boo.
One day after we’d been fucking in my room at Uncle T’s and her hair was all over the place and she was laughing, mouth wide open so I noticed the tiny chip on her front tooth for the first time, she suddenly went serious, her eyes got wet, she looked down at the duvet and said I need to tell you something baby. She told me how her stepdad kept trying to rape her all through her childhood, troubling her at night, coming to her bed up until she was twelve years old, beating her up whenever she
fought back and her mum had refused to believe her, had basically left her to her fate, even putting makeup on her bruised arms and legs before school, had allowed her to lose her childhood before she’d ever had a chance to enjoy it because then she ran away from home and lost her virginity – or what was left of it – when she was thirteen to some brer who was almost twenty, and her secrets tumbled out into the room and crashed into my chest while I held her close. From that day on I had to carry it all within me and accept I couldn’t change one bit of it, the knowledge of it scraping back and forth from my heart to my guts, and I knew that I could never unknow what she’d told me and even worse, I couldn’t take it away from her. You see, no matter what shit you come up with about the past being the past or whatever, you can’t fix someone who’s already broken. I mean, lemme tell you—
One time this girl who lived like eight doors down from Uncle T, one young ting, pretty and full of unseriousness and curiosity and whatever else you’re meant to have in you when you’re fourteen or whatever, she got into the lift on her own and three of the mandem who were waiting for sells followed her in. When she got out at the bottom it was a while later and she was a different person, older and not so full of the things young girls are full of when they’re fourteen. She screamed one long scream at no one in particular, a scream that ran up the block and then she chased it up the grimy concrete stairs, back to her mum’s flat. I was bunning a zoot on the balcony at the time and I remember how I saw her mother open the door and she pulled her daughter in by the hair without saying anything, then looked out of the doorway and the mandem came out of the lift which had just returned to the top floor, and they laughed and one of them said fuck dat sket anyway and the mother closed her door.
Who They Was Page 4