Bare mandem rate Rex. He’s known and feared and loved. But when he’s low, it’s like there’s never anyone around, apart from all his loyal chicks who go through phases of loving him and hating him whenever they find out about each other. But they never stay mad for long. You know Rex means king in Latin I said to him one time when we were bunning zoots while listening to Sheek Louch and Styles P mixtapes in his room, and he said yeah obviously brudda but it’s not just Rex, it’s T-Rex. King of the dinosaurs. Rex was shanking up people way before me. Like this one time, he was sixteen and some olders were watching him from across the street so he said what you watching me for blood? One of them said what, you think you’re a badman yeah? Rex crossed the road, no talking ting, plunged his wetter into the brer’s chest and walked off while the brer’s friends put pressure on the wound, everyone’s garms getting soaked in blood, someone screaming for an ambulance.
His mother didn’t treat him right. He told me there was something she must have hated about him, because before she kicked him out of the yard in Harlesden she said you know you’re only here because your father raped me and Rex punched a glass panel in the living-room door and the broken glass cut his wrist open. The scar from where the doctors stitched it up always reminds him of that moment.
His name alone is power in this one estate by Willesden bus garage, but the actual ends that he moves with is Kensal Green. There’s a lot of shooters and eaters who come from there still. It’s kinda mad coz like I said, Kensal Green is beefing South Kilburn, you’ll never catch anyone from KG walking through SK and vice versa. But at the end of the day I’m not really one of the SK mandem, I’m just a visitor with a lot of bredrins there and I’m not tryna pretend I rep SK or that I belong to the history of that place innit. And Rex is on this lone wolf shit, going wherever he chooses to go and doing his own ting, you get me.
We’ve got this bond that nothing can break. I don’t know what it is but it’s like I don’t have to see him for months and then one phone call, yo where you at my brudda? Say nuttin, I’m coming now. His face reminds me of this huge granite head of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the Underworld, which I seen in the British Museum one time.
One day I go to his new yard in Kensal Rise and he’s chopping up work in the bedroom. Razor blade – split bang, split bang – getting stuck in the table. I rip little squares of clingfilm and spread them out on the table for him to wrap the pebbles in. When he’s done and all the pebbles are ready, he picks up a screwdriver, unscrews the cover of the dimmer switch on the wall and puts all the clingfilmed rocks into the electrical cavity, screws the cover back on and sits down on the sofa with me, waiting for his line to ring. Tells me he might have to war some next mandem. He’s always hitting sells in this one block in Willesden and two twos he’s seen some next brers from Harlesden moving about his spot like they’re tryna do a takeover. Rex don’t give a fuck who they are or how many of them there is, fully ready to go to war with them, big shank down his trousers every day, ready to back it out and soak man up. I don’t give a fuck if they kill me fam, he says, raising his pharaoh face to look at me, eyes like Hennessy swimming through the bottom of a bottle at night. I can’t die anyway, my ancestors are gods. If they kill me I’m just gonna pass on to another dimension and turn immortal.
I didn’t hear from Rex for some weeks after, and then his bredrin Gavin bells me and says he got shanked up by some brers as he was walking into the estate in Willesden. As soon as I see him, about a month later, he shows me the fresh scars, three thick ones around his torso. That was one big knife that went into him and I touch one of the scars and say brudda what happened? He says Snoopz, I was walking into the estate and this whip pulls up beside me and three brers jump out with blue bandannas tied over their faces and this brer says what you think you’re a badman yeah? and he’s backed out one big shank. Obviously I’m Rex, I’m not running from these dickheads so I banged him in the face and before I know what’s happening they’re all on me tryna fuck me up. Truss me I got my own shank out and managed to poke one of them, but as I’ve done that the brer with the shank wets me in my back and then one of the other brers backs out a big fucking borer and wets me in my front and then I feel myself get poked in the back again and then they all duss back to the whip and drive off. It was mad brudda. Everyting in my vision went red, you know like in GoldenEye on the N64 when you get shot and the screen goes red; it’s like I was looking at the world through some red glasses or suttin, the whole road was red and the sky and trees and yards, all red, and then I dropped. Next ting I know I’m on an ambulance stretcher and Gavin’s crying telling me not to die, but brudda, all I could think of was how shook I was that my dick had shrivelled up – no joke Snoopz I swear down, they cut away my trousers and boxers and all my garms was soaked in blood and when I looked down at my crotch I couldn’t even see my dick, it’s like it had gone inside of itself to rahtid. My Uncle Paul was there and I was like Uncle what’s happened to my tings, is it ever gonna be big again? and then the paramedic told me it was only like that coz all the blood in my body had left all the parts of me that it didn’t need to be in to try and keep me alive. After that I lay back on the bed and frassed out.
I decide to introduce him to Gotti. It’s high time my two bruddas met, innit. Rex phones me, cracking up as soon as I answer the call, saying how Gavin had gone to shot some cro to these yardie chicks in Willesden and when he got there they were like do you know Snoopz? Talking how I was some badman making real p’s n dat, and Rex is bussin up saying my brudda, I know you’re on this ting but jus cool nuh, how can the yardie ting be saying do you know Snoopz? I tell him about the moves I’ve been doing with Gotti, clamping rich peeps for their ice in Central and I say you should meet him still and Rex says cool brudda, come tru when you’re ready, I’m in my yard all day today.
So Gotti and I are sitting in Rex’s bedroom. It’s the only decent room and more times it only looks tidy coz Rex’s gyal, Alicia, keeps the place neat. We bun zoots and Rex and Gotti chat about next older badman they both know, as if testing each other’s knowledge of the roads. I sit on the edge of the bed and bun zoot after zoot after zoot until I don’t know if I’m high or what. They’re talking about some next showerman called Magic and Gotti’s saying yeah I know Magic, and I start thinking how these names hold power, become even more than the people who actually own them when they start to live in people’s words. It’s mad how I know this world of wickedness and doing mad tings that earn respect, and at the same time I know the world of going uni and trying to write a 3,000-word essay on The Birth of Tragedy, and I also know the world that’s all about get up, go to work, go on holiday, buy this, buy that, tick this box, tick that box, box tick, box tick, box tick. But people in that uni world and in the box-ticking world, don’t know this one I’m in right now. This world where the most ordinary conversation in a room between three people is about one brer called Magic who shoots man and gets away with it and the conversation continues like this while the sun sinks and drowns in the purple distance outside and night comes creeping in.
A few days later, I’m at Rex’s on my ones. Just another summer day, sweating with the windows open and the heat from all the cars outside mixing with clouds of cro smoke. Rex has a puppy Staffordshire terrier but it keeps shitting in the hallway and I can see the novelty’s already wearing off. He comes into the room and says that dog’s pissing me off. He’s taken his T-shirt off because it’s baking and I can see the scars, like ropes that have buried themselves in him, tied around his bones or suttin. I say I’m restarting my second year of uni in September brudda. Rex says that’s good still, I’m proud of you. Then he turns to me and says you know your boy Gotti didn’t look me in my eyes once Snoopz. I say really? What makes you say that brudda? He wouldn’t look me in my eyes says Rex, I’m telling you Snoopz. Like when I was chatting to him, it’s like he kept looking past me. Maybe he was just bare charged I say and Rex says there’s suttin about him I don’t trust, just be carefu
l brudda I’m telling you and I say nah brudda, Gotti’s down for man, we’ve done a whole lotta madness together and he’s never left man to deal with anyting on my ones. Rex says Snoopz, he wouldn’t look me in my eyes. Then he says I need a juice, come we go shop. He tries to take the puppy with him but he wants it to walk down the stairs. The dog doesn’t even know what stairs are. It peers over the edge and shrinks back. Fuckssake come on man, says Rex and kicks it down the stairs. The dog breaks its leg and lies on the bottom step yelping. Wa’um to you brudda, I say. Rex says I wanted to train this dog to go for a man’s throat you know.
A month later, it’s August and Rex is in pen riding a four-year sentence. It happens like this. One brer who knows Rex is getting violated by some next mandem outside a shop in Harlesden. He phones Rex on some begging tip asking man to back it for him. Rex shows up at the shop, clocks the brers outside, says nothing and walks into the shop. He asks the bossman for a large bottle of E&J brandy, grabs it by the neck without paying, walks outside and smashes it over one brer’s head. The others cut out quicktime while their bredrin lies on the pavement with blood and brandy in a pool around his head. Bossman in the shop phones boydem and Rex ends up getting shift. The yout who phoned Rex in the first place doesn’t say shit. Rex gets bail for GBH since it’s his first ever offence on record. While he’s on bail, his gyal Alicia finds out that Rex has been beating her best friend for months. He’s even fucked her in the same bed that Alicia sleeps in with him. Alicia isn’t some moist chick who’ll just take it or hate him quietly. She loves him too much for that. So it kicks off bigtime and they end up arguing in the street outside Rex’s building. Two twos some man comes along and gets involved like he thinks Rex is abusing Alicia or some shit, so Rex wiles out and knocks the brer out with one vicious bang. But what makes it worse is when Rex boots him afterwards in the face like a football penalty and the brer’s teeth fly out all over the pavement and Alicia has to turn him onto his side coz she gets shook that he might just choke to death on his own blood.
Rex tells me all this on a phone call from the prison phone. Four years. If he doesn’t get into any more madness while he’s locked up, he’ll do two. That means he’ll be out by the time I graduate from uni. He tells me his credit is running out so I tell him I promise I’ll write to you my brudda and he says I beg you send me a pair of Bapes, size 9, and some Soulja Slim CDs, and then the phone cuts out and I almost feel like crying, which is a feeling I’d all but forgotten about.
EASTER EGGS
I START THE second year of uni again. Cans of Boost and all-nighters tryna finish essays before the morning deadline. Quotations. Linking gyal. Texting and arguing with Yinka. One chick gives me brain for fifteen minutes in an empty classroom and only stops because her jaw hurts.
Jamming at Bimz’s yard whenever I don’t have lectures. Gotti’s got bare spots on his face. Always restless. Asks if he can roll with my strap for the day. Course brudda. He screws the silencer on and tucks it down the front of his tracksuit bottoms. In Queen’s Park we see one brer rocking a Rolex Daytona. Blatantly a shotter. We go to eat him. He fights back, flips me over his shoulder when I try to clamp him. He’s bigger than both of us. Gotti pulls out the strap. The brer looks surprised. He’s not sure if it’s real. He looks around but it’s a quiet street, everyone’s at work or whatever. Then BAOW. Oh my days I can’t believe what I’m seeing, Gotti actually shot the brer in the chest. The movies lied. A silencer doesn’t actually make the shot silent. Nothing like that James Bond shit. Maybe a bit quieter but fuck me, no way could you call that quiet. We don’t even try and get the watch after that. The brer slumps against a wall, grabs a bush as he slides down and there’s already a dark red flower growing on his shirt. I run like I’ve never run before. Almost fall over. As Gotti runs he tucks the strap into the front of his hoodie. Mad bate. Luckily SK is round the corner.
Brudda. I gasp for breath as we slow down by the little park next to Precinct. You know we can’t tell no one about dat, I say. I know, he ain’t gonna die though, says Gotti. I fucking hope not, I say. I swear I can still hear the shot going off in my ear – got me feeling like I need to clean it out. The way the brer grabbed the bush, it’s like he was tryna save himself or suttin. Sirens in the distance. We go back to Bimz’s yard and close the door to Mazey’s room. Unscrew the silencer. Wrap the ting up in an old T-shirt and plastic bag. Stash it under one of the sofas in Mazey’s room. Gotti goes out and comes back in with a plastic bag. Put your gloves in here, he says, we need to dash them. You need to burn your garms, I say. I know, I’m gonna do it round the back of Little Man’s, he says and leaves. I don’t sleep for two days and Mazey says what’s wrong with you blood? Your eyes look mad tired and I say I need to go back to East, I got bare uni work to do for next week.
Christmas is the same as the previous year. Quick stop at my mum’s to eat, not really talking to anyone while my brother makes my parents laugh. Soon as the main course is done, off to Uncle T’s. Big zoot, bottle of Courvoisier and some greasy, over-seasoned leftovers. Then baseline and red eyes, me knocking into the table and Uncle T and his bredrins going him redup to bloodclart, cracking up.
I’ve been more focused on uni since I restarted and Rex went pen. In January I even miss a couple moves that Gotti tells me about. Not gonna lie I wish I’d gone and done them but I had essays to hand in. When I miss a next one in February because I had to pull an all-nighter in the library he says don’t worry brudda, there’ll be more. I hope so. Truss me Snoopz, there’ll be more.
When I’m working on essays in the library, I plug my headphones in and put on some classical music, some Rachmaninov piano concertos or some Chopin. It helps me zone into my work, but it’s also as if I’m tryna preserve something of my mother’s memory of me. Reminds me of when I used to play the piano. An hour’s practice a day. I start missing something about my parents but I don’t know what exactly it is I’m missing. I decide to go home and see them for Easter. Maybe I’ll stay for Easter Sunday lunch and do my best to talk about uni. Maybe I can make them laugh like Danny does.
I link up with Gotti in Peel Precinct. We’re standing on the balcony of Bimz’s block, trying to shield our zoots from the wind which is whipping all around us and I’m telling him how my father loves The Godfather films because they’re all about family loyalty.
Gotti says the only thing I remember about my dad is when he tried to burn the flat down with me and my mum inside.
Swear down? I say.
It’s my earliest memory Snoopz. I can still remember waking up and the yard was on fire.
Rah, you was sleeping?
It was like three in the morning or suttin when I woke up and I could smell burning because my dad had started a fire in the flat. All now I wake up certain times and I swear I can smell burning.
How did you get out?
Well my mum woke up as well and she got me out of my room, but we couldn’t get out the front door coz the hallway was on fire. He was gone, so my mum took me into her bedroom, called the fire brigade and broke the window. It was only the first floor so we jumped and then the firemen arrived and put it out, but we couldn’t live there no more.
Fuckinell.
That’s all I can remember about my pops. I remember I was sleeping under this dark brown bedsheet with a zigzag pattern on it, but I can’t even remember what he looked like.
I waiting for you, says my father on the Saturday morning before Easter Sunday. He is in the kitchen as he says this to me and I’m glad my mother isn’t there to correct his English. She always does it, especially when he’s telling a story and just as he’s about to reach the punchline, she’ll interrupt him until he repeats the correct form of grammar or pronunciation which she’s insisting upon, by which time the story’s deflated. I prefer it when he speaks Polish anyway, although my mother refuses to speak it to me since I’m supposed to be proud of being British, of speaking English and living in what I’ve been told is a better country. Not that I’v
e got anything to compare it to.
My father sits at the kitchen table, fingers moving aimlessly over the patterned tablecloth, his hands tough and pale yellow due to bad circulation. My father has been drawing all his life. He often laughs instead of using words in a conversation. But at the moment his spark is dimmed. Maybe he’s worried about me, maybe it’s something else; I can never really tell. I haven’t been back to the family home since Christmas, but I’ve come to stay for the weekend since it’s the Easter holidays and I don’t have uni next week. He looks at me as I stand in the doorway and says tomorrow we will painting eggs.
All my boys who’ve met my father proper like him and always ask after him. Sometimes I’ll be in some far-off corner of London, room floating in blue rivers of smoke, and someone says yo Snoopz how’s your pops? And then whata g, whata legend, your pops is mad safe.
Your pops is da truth, said Dario once and I always remembered that. One time Dario told me he’d bumped into his dad, completely by accident, outside a William Hill bookie. It was the first time I’d ever heard Dario mention him. I asked him how it was to see his father after all these years of not having him in his life and Dario said Snoopz, I realise my pops was just one of the mandem and now he’s just one of those older brers; always in the bookie’s, cracking jokes with his bredrins, catting for chip so he can bill a zoot or whatever. Dario’s younger brother Travis said fuck him D, you shouldn’t even have chatted to him. But all I’d heard in Dario’s voice was pity. I don’t think Dario ever saw him again.
Although Mazey’s father is a chieftain in Sierra Leone, the chief never comes to London to see his son and every now and then I can see Mazey is vexed about suttin and then he starts talking as if he’s continuing a conversation – my pops never makes fuck all effort to check for man, but he’s out there in Sierra Leone digging up diamonds n shit, telling people about his son in London when he don’t even call me. Every time I try get hold of him on one of his phones, I speak to some fuckin stranger I don’t know who tells me to call some bar in Kono where my pops is chilling and by that time I’ve run out of credit on my calling card.
Who They Was Page 17