Who They Was

by Gabriel Krauze

  Just then, he comes back into the shop going why did you bang me blood, why did you bang me? His mouth is bloody, I musta split his lip on that spiky golden grill he’s rocking, and I’m like why did I bang you? Are you fucking mad? Why did you try rob me you dickhead? He backs out of the shop going watch blood, watch what happens, and then some next brer comes into the chicken shop, picks up the Wet Surface sign that’s by the door – you know them plastic yellow signs that they set up when the floor’s slippery – and dashes it at me. But the sign doesn’t even come close to me. All them Grove man are crowding into the doorway now, going come outside pussy, watch what happens to you, so I pick up the sign and start walking towards the shop entrance, even though I don’t wanna fight them in the street coz they’ll be able to get me from behind. Dario says don’t go outside Snoopz, but I move towards them like I’m ready to do suttin and they all back out of the shop.

  An ambulance shows up. Paramedics walk into the chicken shop and say are you all right, do you want to go hospital? I’m like nah. They’re like what happened to you? I’m like I fell over innit, I’m cool, I’m cool. They’re like but you’ve clearly been assaulted, you could have concussion. I’m like nah I don’t have concussion, I literally just slipped on the floor and banged my head on the counter, it’s nuttin, and they’re like so you’re not willing to receive medical attention? I go medical attention for what man? Fuck off. They leave the shop, get back in the ambulance and drive off. Literally twenty seconds after that, feds show up. Three officers come into the shop, going we heard someone got assaulted by a gang, are you the person who just got assaulted? I say I don’t know what you’re chatting about, I’m just tryna buy some chicken n chips. They say, why’s your head all bruised up then? I say coz I fell over innit, and they’re like why’s there blood on the floor then? I’m like I don’t fucking know, it’s got nuttin to do with me. And they’re like so you’re not willing to press charges? And I’m like go suck out about press charges. They give up on me and try talking to some of the other people in the chicken shop but no one says anything so they leave.

  I check my wrist and see that my watch is gone and as I run my tongue across my front teeth I realise that my grillz must have fallen out of my mouth at some point during the fight and someone’s taken them as well so now I’m really pissed. That’s the one thing that upsets me the most, losing my grillz. I lean across the counter and say lemme get a next chicken n chips bossman – coz the first one I’d ordered is scattered all over the floor. They make me a fresh portion and give it to me on the house. That kind of shit happens in chicken shops all the time, for them it’s just a case of mop the blood off the floor and go back to serving customers.

  I leave the shop with Dario and the strip is empty, everyone’s ghosted. We walk back to the block in Latimer Road and all I can think about is how I need to get my revenge, no matter what. My desire for it is the darkest part of the night.

  Later, we’re cotching on the stairs inside the block and I’m bunning a zoot with Dario, zoning out with anger gripping my insides. Dario goes brudda you held it down like a g, you were banging man like crazy, truss me you held it down. I go I swear there was like ten man rushing me and Dario goes there was at least twelve man rushing you, at least twelve. Dario says Snoopz all I know is I was arguing with Toxic outside the chicken shop and suddenly I see Charged Vibes come flying out the door with his mouth buss, spitting blood onto the pavement, legs all wobbly n shit and when I looked in the shop I see all them man rushing you innit, and I say I shouldn’t have shot my tazer to that Filipino brer, I shouldn’t have shot it but I was hungry and I wanted to get some chicken n chips.

  All I can think of is revenge. It’s a knot in my chest that keeps getting tighter and tighter, pulled by my thoughts. Gotti woulda been on riding out with me if he hadn’t snaked me. Fucking pagan. Nah man that shit hurts my heart forreal. I bell my boy Flipz like yo brudda I just got rushed by a whole bag of man in Grove and he’s like rah bruv I’m on this ting, lemme know when you’re ready, but he’s not around that night and he doesn’t have transport. I phone couple next heads but I can’t get hold of anyone. Stitch is on holiday in Dominica with his family for the rest of the summer, so I can’t even get through to him. Rex, who woulda come down on his ones with the strap on his bike and licked down at least one of them for me, is in prison. Seb is in prison. Couple next man who I know would ride out are in pen as well. I go back to South Killy.

  Everyone at Bimz’s is feeling it for me like they’ve got my back n shit, giving me buds to bill, asking me if I want suttin from shop, but none of them say come we go down to Grove right now. I don’t want fuck all from the shop. I want mandem to ride out with me on these pussyoles who rushed me. I go and jam in Mazey’s room for the rest of the evening because I don’t wanna see none of them man’s faces, like fuck the buds of cro n shit, although I take them coz it’ll help me sleep tonight. I know Mazey will be on it if I sort out a whip and a burner, so once I spark my zoot I start making phone calls to try and get a strap. How I wish I had the Star 9 right now. I’m gonna duppy that Charged Vibes brer, no question in my mind, I’m gonna bun his skin and get away with it, exactly how Not Nice showed me to.

  I call Yinka. She picks up my call and straight away I tell her what happened. I can tell she still cares, but her voice has this distance in it, threatening to drift out of reach. She starts asking me questions like she wants to know all the details so I start telling her, but then I stop and say Boo come we go hotel tonight and she says Gabriel – doesn’t even call me Boo or anything and the way she says my name makes it sound all hard and unnatural like I don’t even like the sound of it in her mouth – we’re not even together any more, I’m not going hotel with you. I say whatdafuck, I just got rushed, how can you be so coldhearted? She says I’m not being coldhearted, I’m protecting myself. Silence like a scarf getting carried away on the wind. And then, you can come and see me next week Thursday after I finish work if you want to talk. I put the phone down.

  My head starts pounding and I notice I’ve nearly done my zoot so I start billing a next one but my hands are shaking and I spill the crushed-up cro onto the floor of Mazey’s room and I shout fuckssake and Mazey comes in and says wagwan Snoopy and I say brudda I’m so fucking vexed and he says make yourself at home broski, my room is your room and I say love for dat fam. I look down at my chest and I swear I can see my top just over my heart actually jumping a tiny bit, real talk, jumping as my heart pumps boom boom boom and I swear it’s not supposed to be beating this fast and I feel like suttin’s crawling inside my belly and I wanna get it out.

  I wake up mad early on the sofa in Mazey’s room and watch the sun rising through the window, peeling away the skin of the previous day. My shoulders hurt and I can’t get back to sleep. When I sit up, I pick my AV off the floor and clock that there’s bare scuff marks and scratches on the leather sleeves and collar. It’s like it went from being fresh to being used in one night. I need to duppy that brer. I need to— yo Maze I’m cutting I say and Mazey mumbles safe Snoopz from his bed on the other side of the room and turns over.

  I go to my parents’ yard because I need to get some fresh garms. When I get there, Tata has already gone to work, but my mother is in the bathroom, folding clothes into a pile on a wicker chair. I walk into the bathroom and say hello Mama. I don’t hug her or anything. I haven’t for so long that it just feels unnatural, difficult, easier to maintain the distance between us than to try and cross it. She looks at my forehead. What happened to you? she says. I got rushed by ten people in a chicken shop in Ladbroke Grove I say. She carries on looking at my forehead without saying anything, holding a black T-shirt in her right hand. Her fingers are stained red from dyeing her hair. Then she starts folding the T-shirt in half and says why didn’t you run away? I’m about to say something about how you can’t run away when someone’s tryna put it on you, but instead I tell her the other truth, which is that I was surrounded with no way out and there
was too many of them. She finishes folding the T-shirt and adds it to the pile of clothes before picking up another top. I wait for her to say something else – I want her to say something else – but she doesn’t, so I say I’m gonna grab some things from my room and she just continues to fold clothes without looking at me. I look in the bathroom mirror and watch my mother’s reflection. She looks hunched and small and then I feel the world outside disappearing so I quickly go to my room to get some clothes and what’s left of my p’s. When I’m ready to leave, I stand in the hallway, washed in shadow coz the lightbulb in the corridor has gone and there are no windows to allow daylight in. I say I’m going now Mama and she says okay bye in a flat voice without coming out of the bathroom and I can hear the snapping creak of wicker as she adds another item of clothing to the pile. I head back to SK.

  For days I sit in Bimz’s yard, smoking cro with the mandem while my bruises start to fade, checking my phone obsessively in the hope somebody might have hollered at me about the strap so I can go and do the madness. But I don’t get any texts or missed calls. I just sit on the sofa in Mazey’s room, getting faded, eating chicken patties and Skittles, crushed beneath my thoughts.

  Couple days later, some of the brers who rushed me start ringing off Dario’s phone, going yo tell your bredrin sorry, we didn’t mean to touch him, because they got shook of repercussions, thinking that I might bring down a whole bag of SK mandem to light up the strip, and this brer Diddy who was one of the main brers who rushed me, kept belling Dario, going tell your bredrin I’m sorry innit, I didn’t mean for dat to happen, I didn’t know – like he was shook forreal. And the funny thing is two twos, Dario tells me how he’s gone to some white brer’s yard in Grove to get some dro and as he walks into the yard he sees Charged Vibes there and practically straight away Charged Vibes goes yo tell your bredrin it’s done, the beef’s squashed, it’s over. And the white brer who’s chopping up a zed of light to shot to Charged Vibes, goes haaa you got fucked up by that Snoopz brer, I heard myman rocked your jaw, and Charged Vibes just keeps saying to Dario, tell your bredrin it’s squashed, tell your bredrin it’s squashed. When Dario tells me this I laugh. Of course he’s gonna say it’s squashed. If I was swinging it out with all them man on my ones, what’s it gonna be like when I catch him slipping on his ones? Dario says truss me Snoopz, they don’t want this smoke. I say it’s squashed when I say it’s squashed and he says dun know my brudda.

  July. Summer sun strips the sky naked blue and makes the concrete hum. The bruising on my forehead is gone and while all them man wanna go park and draw gyal, I just wanna stay indoors. Man are already talking about going carnival but that’s not even suttin I’ve thought about. It’s almost been a month since I got rushed and I can tell I’ve become someone different since then. The idea of beef with one or two man seems like nuttin to me now. You’d need a whole gang to kill me.

  Jamming on the staircase of Bimz’s block watching the day roll by, smell of punk and cocoa-butter sweat mixing with voices all around me, fresh polo shirts, sunlight running up and down mandem’s chains, sunglasses covering eyes. Two chicks walk past in vests and little dresses too small for the curves and yo draw dat ting, oh my days that ting’s got backoff. Excuse me, hello, says Bimz all sweetboy, gassed up coz he’s got his hair done in fresh canerow, can I talk to you for a sec? Mandem laugh when he jogs back without the digits, kisses his teeth and says she’s got a man and Mazey says I swear that’s Reese’s cousin and Spooks says yeah I hit dat last summer still. What about the bredrin someone asks. Nah the bredrin was fully clapped says Bimz, didn’t even have a backoff and you know man can’t be dealing with a lack of backoff, and he sits down to spark his zoot, cartoon laugh. Mini bottles of Cherry B and Alizé on the dirty concrete steps. Mazey plays a beat off his phone and I start spitting:

  Me and my co-d blacked-out ninjas,

  Made a living kicking doors off hinges,

  Inspired me to spit poems about it,

  Flowing like heroin out of syringes.

  and man are like yo you’re killin that beat. Sly says man like Snoopz. Later I drink a whole bottle of yak, get mad waved, feeling like I can fight the whole ends. I don’t even remember frassing out but I wake up on Mazey’s sofa with a bad back and my head pounding, blood all metal in my temples, thinking I need to get a proper good night’s sleep.

  Considering all the shit that I’ve done to people, I got away pretty lightly; the fact I didn’t get shanked, I was really surprised about that. I mean this was a long time coming, it was practically inevitable. Because that’s the reality; once you start doing all this fuckery on road, it’s not like bad karma will come back to you because of suttin specific, like if you go and shank some yout his brother or his mandem will come and even the score on you – I mean that can happen as well – but what I’m saying is that if you go around shanking up people and eating people and all of that, you create a negative energy that surrounds you and it attracts madness to you. It’s happened to everyone I know who lives in this way. Like if you’re rolling with a strap on this gunman ting for example, the next time you have an argument with a stranger they’ll pull a gun out on you, someone’s suddenly gonna try shoot you, someone’s gonna try come for you, and it’s all coz you’ve created this power that’s stronger than anything, a magnet that pulls all this darkness that reflects your own lifestyle towards you. So at the end of the day I feel like I got away. I got away without anything too serious happening to me. But true what bunned me the most was losing my iced-out grillz.

  I can’t sleep another night on Mazey’s sofa. I need to let my body stretch out instead of sleeping all itched up, so I decide to go to my parents’ yard again. I’m sure my mum will let me stay a few nights as long as I talk about how I’m looking forward to going back to uni in September. I make sure I’ve got my shank on me coz I know that as soon as I start going past Westbourne Park station, I’m gonna be thinking about that first time I encountered Charged Vibes and the thirst for revenge will come rushing through my blood and my stomach’s gonna do that clenching ting it’s been doing recently when I think about it and I’ll be on the lookout for any of them man who rushed me. If I see them it’s gotta be On Sight, no talking, no thinking, just straight wickedness. I take couple zoots pre-rolled for bedtime so I don’t have to trouble myself tryna bill it on the d-low while I’m at my parents’. Since the bruises have gone I won’t have to answer any more awkward questions. Still, I get home after midnight when they’re both in bed.

  I stay the night in Westbourne, in my old bed, fresh sheets that smell of another time, space to stretch my legs out properly. But I decide to leave the next day, coz in the morning my mother tells me how last night she heard me shouting like mad, saying all sorts of things, swearing. You were saying things I can’t even repeat, she says, it sounded like you were fighting someone. And she tells me that when she came running into my room to see what was going on, she found me fast asleep in bed, shouting my head off. And she couldn’t even wake me up.

  RED GIANT

  WHEN YOU KILL a wasp it releases a pheromone, which sends a message to other wasps that one of them has been killed. It’s a signal that calls other wasps to come and attack. This is what the screw tells us before he locks us in for the day and that if we kill any wasps in our cell, we should try and throw them out of the window or flush them down the toilet. Otherwise more will come and try to sting you, he says and slams the door.

  It is August and I am spending the summer holidays before my final year of uni locked up. Summer is just a glimpse of sunburnt sky through the barred window of my cell. The only real part of summer that we get in here are the wasps and the heat.

  In July I finally went to trial for that fight I had on the tube more than a year and a half ago. I met my barrister on the first day at Southwark Crown Court. He was like something from a typical English courtroom drama: middle-aged, posh, pink, a bit fat, sweating under his wig. He asked why I hadn’t just pleaded guilty, said the
evidence against me was pretty overwhelming and that a jury won’t be sympathetic once the prosecution brings up my previous. I was lucky not to have done proper time already he said. We were standing in the corridor outside the courtroom and he said it’s a shame they can’t just give you ten lashes.

  I laughed.

  I mean you’ve seen what it’s like, you’ve been to Feltham, it didn’t kill you. You’re clearly an intelligent chap, but you might just have to do your porridge. Read some literature, he added.

  Crime and Punishment, I said.

  Yes, very appropriate, he said and chuckled.

  Or The Trial, I said – we’d recently read it in one of my modules.

  Yes, Kafka. Or perhaps something more penitential, like The Pilgrim’s Progress.

  Or A Rake’s Progress, I said and he laughed again.

  I didn’t really know what A Rake’s Progress was about, but I knew it was some oldschool story which had something to do with a brer who lives the highlife and ends up losing everything and going to prison.

  My mother and father were on holiday in Italy so they didn’t even know I was on trial. But I did let Yinka know what was happening. You see, feelings are a spiderweb that your heart flies into and gets trapped in. Then something big comes along and starts eating you slowly from the inside out. After a few months and a few texts later, we started linking again. The first time I saw her after all them months apart, we went for a walk in these woods near Hounslow. I gave her a rose and later doggied her out against a tree.