This is what my bredrin Smurf – Uncle T’s nephew – tells me as we sit in Uncle T’s living room bunning zoots, after I’ve just told him about the first ever eat I did when I was fourteen. He blows out smoke and some game show on the TV chatters away. That’s £6,000 you can add to your total, says the host. Audience cheers. Do you want to stick with that or go for the higher offer?
Smurf continues slow and quiet, full of a seriousness that muffles the sound effects and the cheering crowd and presenter.
Then what happens is they get so deep in this ting that they don’t even realise time is passing them by, and then you get these brers who do too much and they lose their mind. Like they can’t keep taking the constant pressure of watching their backs every day, turning their mind to do wickedness every day, the only way they can sleep is to bun and juice till they frass out and hope they don’t dream coz they don’t know what’s gonna come for them in their dreams. That’s why bare killers end up smoking b. The only way they can stop seeing the face of the man they’ve licked down is to smoke buj fam. Or at least when they’re on the buj, they don’t feel afraid when they see the man they’ve killed asking them why did you do it? And before you know it, this brer who used to be a top badman in the ends – had all the gyaldem on his dick, loving him off, and no one could step to him, had all the ice and the Gucci and brand new whips – before you know it, that brer’s turned into a nitty smoking food on the block. And when it comes to them olders, the youngers don’t even remember who they was. No one even cares who they was. I’m telling you fam. That’s why I say you cannot win.
I say but fam, I know couple man who won, certain man who made bare p’s shotting and managed to escape it all and they’re doing well now.
Brudda, you think they won but they ain’t won. I’m telling you, he says. They will lose. Doesn’t matter how. I always remember people saying fuck dat Smurf, what you talking bout? Look at myman. He come out the game, he’s got his yard, he’s got his business, he don’t even touch food or straps no more. Cool. Myman was dead a year later. Then they might mention a next man. Similar. Had everyting sorted. Came out the game. Then he gets locked up for suttin else. Coz at the end of the day, you cannot fucking win. This is what I’ve come to realise fam. It’s bad blessing.
I hear you, I say, and on top of dat everyone’s disturbed by this shit. Bare man are seriously disturbed from living this road life.
Smurf nods and draws his zoot like he don’t wanna pause to breathe. He is short and the sofa he’s sitting on looks like it could do with another person. When he blows smoke out he does it slowly and watches it, eyes narrow, concentrating on its journey, as if he’s sending a message to somewhere on its back.
Even me fam, I say and stop to catch a cough in my throat as the punk burns my lungs. Certain times I find it hard to do normal shit like going to family gatherings and being around people, coz it’s like they don’t have the same frame of reference to the world that I do, you know dem ones brudda? And then say I’m in Central or Sloane Square or suttin. I’ll walk past some rich people’s yard and look through the window and see a man and woman sitting on the edge of their bed, watching TV. And as I walk past, I see there’s another room and the window’s open and it’s the next room along from where them people are jamming and I’m like rah, there’s no camera right here, I could jump over these railings, go in through the window – obviously I’d have to bally up and put gloves on n dat – but I could run up in there, stick it on them, take their shit, get them to open the safe or whatever. Like that’s a proper instinctive— I mean it’s not like fantasising about it. Everyone can fantasise about shit. I could fantasise about being a millionaire and having some sick house of my own or being famous or some shit. Fuck it I could fantasise about flying if I wanted to. But with this I’m not fantasising, I’m actually working out how to do it. Going through all the steps. Like I’d make sure to gunbuck the man before I even tell them what I want, or if I ain’t got a strap I’m thinking about where to shank him so he don’t bleed to death but he knows I’m serious. It’s like whenever I walk past jewellery shops I start thinking how thick is the glass? Where are the cameras? How many people are in the shop? How many security guards?
Smurf says that mentality’s fucked fam. It’s like you’ve been poisoned. And it’s not just the mandem. You have these gyal who won’t care that you’re living on the edge, even when the shit you’re doing is not normal. Like say you go on a move, these kinda chicks will say make sure you get me some jewellery or make sure you come back with suttin for me. But the worst ting about all this shit Snoopz, is that even after all that madness, a man won’t feel satisfied. It’s never good enough, like you still feel you ain’t gone far enough. It don’t matter if you’ve duppied man or you’ve robbed bare man or whatever. You always need to do more but you don’t even realise how nuttin fulfills you coz you’re empty all the time and there’s this hole in you that can’t be filled.
What Smurf and I don’t talk about is the constant tensing up, body getting ready for beef to pop off, ready for a screwface from someone to turn into more than it is. Because if you try and get out of this life, that’s when it gets worse. I mean just when you think it can’t get more peak, the second you relax, you drop your guard and then say you’re out shopping in Oxford Street with your girl or suttin and you run into some ops who recognise you coz you used to roll with so-and-so or you were in this gang or whatever, straight away it’s on. Right there and then, in a crowd of shoppers and tourists, man are backing out the Rambo knives to soak you up. No one gives a shit if you’ve changed, if you’re not about dat life any more, if you’ve left it all behind. And if you’re dumb enough to say some shit like that when you run into enemies, the only thing it’ll mean to them is that you’ve become weak now, that they’ve got nuttin to fear in terms of retaliation, and that just feeds them with more motivation to do you suttin right there and then. Easy stripes to earn.
Or sometimes, when you’re on your own and you’re in a part of the city where you don’t feel totally secure, you’ll see a bag of mandem coming down the road towards you or jamming on the corner ahead, and you can’t turn around or cross the road coz that would just show that you’re shook and you’re not shook, you’re not shook you tell yourself, you just have to walk through and be ready. And before you even walk past you’ve prepared for the worst, your body floods with adrenaline, the backs of your thighs feel like they’re gonna melt, your belly floats into your chest and you start planning what you’re gonna do. You start clocking if there’s anything you can grab and use as a weapon – if you’re not rolling with one already – you prepare yourself for sudden violence.
Imagine every day being full of these moments. Most of the time nothing happens, but your body and your mind keeps going through these extreme cycles of preparedness and it makes you feel mad exhausted, mad stressed, and you bun more and more cro to try and feel calm, but really it just makes you more and more parro and your imagination runs wild.
Time is a strange land to walk through. A few months of this mad life, a year, two years, can seem like forever. As if things will never change. Thinking we’re the ones who won’t be followed by a new generation that will eventually take over, as if nothing could ever come after us. As if we’re final and the world will end with us. We’ve taken over from the previous generation of badman and now this moment is ours forever. But this moment is just a whisper in the dark that everyone forgets when the new day comes.
Sometimes I’m not sure who I am any more. There’s all these masks we wear that confuse us. It’s like looking in a mirror and if you’ve worn a mask for too long, you convince yourself that it’s your real face you’re looking at. And then you can’t even recognise yourself no more. Even the truest parts of yourself can be hidden by lies. It’s like morality and belief; imagining that it’s this real natural thing that exists in you and always has, when in reality you’ve been programmed from day dot – from when you were bo
rn – to have this differentiation between good and bad.
I stumble out of my thoughts and look at Smurf who is staring at the TV without watching it. The screen shudders blue in the twilight of the front room. Indistinct quiz-show banter between host and contestant continues – Warner Brothers cartoons always ended with the phrase that’s all what? Is it A: Folks, B: Friends, or C: Kids?
But it can’t drown out the silence in the room, swelling up in the space between us, as if we’ve just gone too deep, revealing too much to each other – to ourselves even – forcing us to consider things we’ve tried to avoid. If you don’t give it words it doesn’t become a reality, but it’s too late now. I look at Smurf. Rico was one of his tightest bredrins. The other day Smurf told me he seen the brer who duppied Rico on Harrow Road. We all know who done it but ain’t no one snitching. Imagine that. Bumping into your bredrin’s killer and not being able to do anything. I could see that Smurf was itching to go and do a madness.
He’s recently started doing this personal trainer ting, even though he used to be one of those brers who never left his yard without a mash on him. Used to be a one-man army forreal. He wouldn’t pet to buss his gun and do some dirt all on his ones like a real g. But now he’s tryna be on a positive tip, tryna set an example for his youts and for the younger generation – whatever that means. But in this moment, all I can see are three gold chains hanging from his neck, and as he blows smoke out of his mouth I catch the glint of an iced-out tooth. I swear he’s rocking more chains now than he used to when he was on road. He told me earlier that since he’s started doing this personal trainer ting, whenever a client pays him by card, he goes to the ATM straight after the session, withdraws the money, takes it home and puts it in a shoebox. At least he’s into his healthy eating ting though, buying fresh coconuts and kale and broccoli and making smoothies.
One morning I go with Dario to SK to get a draw from Chris on Princess Road coz Uncle T doesn’t have anything and he’s waiting to reload. A dirty mattress leans against a wall next to the street sign. I see couple mandem jamming on doorsteps who I don’t know and who don’t know me and I keep it moving. It feels like a lifetime ago since we all had Bimz’s block on smash, spending our days in and out of his yard. I see one mixed-race brer up ahead, standing in the middle of the pavement as he talks to two women. He looks at me for a second and turns back to one of the women without making any space for me and Dario. The women are on either side of the pavement and he is in the middle. I’m thinking nah, this brer’s tryna boy man off like we should step off the pavement or say excuse me like some dickheads. I walk past and his shoulder bounces into my shoulder, but I walk through him. As I go up the steps to Chris’s door I turn and see him watching me, smiling. He doesn’t look away.
When I get the draw inside I say to Dario, blood did you see how that brer was moving? Blatantly saw man and didn’t even try make the slightest space for us to walk past?
Dario says I know Snoopz I know, he’s some eedyat, just ’low him anyway.
We leave Chris’s yard. The brer clocks me again and this time he turns around and plants himself in the middle of the pavement with his arms crossed and his legs apart. I’m thinking this dickhead. Man’s tryna g check me forreal. I’m gonna have to see what he’s really on. There’s no space for me to walk past, so this time I proper barge him up and as we carry on down the street I hear him shout fucking prick.
I turn around. What? Dafuck are you saying blood?
He says whatdafuck is wrong with you? Why you barging me for? Can’t you see man standing here or suttin?
I walk up to him and as I get close to him he starts smiling and he pushes me in my chest. The next thing I know, I can hear him screaming, my eyes are full of a red glow and nothing else, like when you look at the sun with your eyes closed, and I realise I’ve got his ear between my teeth. I’m about to rip it off. But when I hear the way he’s screaming, I let go coz I know he ain’t built for this. I don’t remember getting my teeth round his ear in the first place. I grips him up and with one hand I dip into my pocket, get my keys in between my knuckles and start sparking him in the top of his head. He falls over one little wall in front of someone’s yard and pulls me over with him. Dario comes round the wall and separates us and I get to my feet. He stands up, takes his T-shirt off and puts it to his head, little black rivers of blood coming down through his hair. He pants and stares at me. I swear he’s still smiling.
I walk off with Dario and Dario says you didn’t need to do dat Snoopz, there was no need.
I go did I fuck him up though?
Dario kisses his teeth and goes obviously bruv, but you didn’t need to.
And I go but did I really fuck him up though?
I feel shit for the rest of the day coz I keep thinking how I didn’t do enough damage to that brer.
REGENERATION
YEARS LATER, I go to South Kilburn to buy a draw from Uncle T and I see the blocks getting knocked down.
It is April. I moved to south London three years back and started shotting coke on weekends to support myself while trying to work out what to do with my life, so I haven’t been to SK in time.
When I get to South Kilburn I see what’s left of Bronte House and Fielding House, two of the eighteen-floor blocks that once towered over the estate, which are now getting demolished. They are fenced off with corrugated metal, advertising some construction company: New Homes Coming Soon in big black letters and lots of hopeful computer graphics of apartment complexes lined with trees and people holding their children’s hands as they stroll through on a sunny day – always a sunny day in those computer projections – and behind the corrugated metal walls the shattered blocks with their entrails hanging out, hearts torn out, broken ribs. The sky pours in around them. The rest of the estate; corroded by time and silence, and sprouting up on its edges are new builds. Glass and metal, flat and clean with that boredom of newness; neat courtyards, newly planted trees and shrubbery looking plastic.
I stare up and see the bare interiors of flats as cranes demolish the blocks bit by bit, floor after floor. It makes me think how from now on, anything that happened in those blocks will only ever exist in the distance of memories and other people’s stories. Soon there won’t be anything physical left, like when you see somewhere you used to live or hang around and you say that’s the block where so-and-so lived or where this and that happened, and because the building still stands, it’s like those people and incidents are still alive in some way, there’s still a physical trace, a memorial. But here it’s like the traces of lives and moments are getting erased, turned into dust and broken concrete, removed and then disposed of. In the future no one will even know that there was a Bronte House and a Fielding House in South Kilburn. It will be as if these towers never existed and who will even care about the lives and stories that took place in the flats, corridors, lifts and stairwells?
Some time later I’m on the tube, reading the Evening Standard and I see this police appeal which says: Police have released an image of a man thought to be responsible for an armed crime wave across south London. Betting shops and banks have been targeted in the last month, with officers believing the same man is behind all 13 raids. In each robbery he walks up to the counter and points what appears to be a black, semiautomatic pistol at cashiers before demanding money and in some cases he threatened to shoot staff. Anyone with information is asked to contact Crimestoppers anonymously. Beneath this is an image of a CCTV still from one of the robberies. It is Gotti. He doesn’t even look any different from all those years ago. Caught slipping by CCTV as he cut out of a bookie and pulled off the bandanna covering his face too early. He must have clocked as well, coz he’s staring right into the camera, his eyes full of that faraway darkness you’d get lost in if you tried looking for something.
It’s the first time I’ve seen him in seven years and I feel that pinch in my gut, missing our days of hunger, nights of eats. But seeing this now, it strikes me that while I’
ve been tryna think of a way to claw my way out of this world, Gotti swam to the bottom and never went back up for breath, just stayed there. Maybe the deeper he got, the more he forgot about finding a way out. No one tells you that when you’re known for being a certain way, there’s not just the pressure to live up to your reputation, but you also absorb the power of it and act upon it, fuelled by it, reinforcing and furthering it, until what’s really holding you back from getting out of this greazy life is yourself.
I put the paper down and look around the carriage thinking how mad it is that although we’re all human beings sharing the same space, we know nothing about each other and we never will. We’re just bodies, just muscle and blood, same way the blocks are just concrete and windows, and yet what we can’t see is all the life, all the things that are going on, within. And when we look at another human whose life is unconnected to our own, we sense nothing of the soul inside them at all. Like these people sitting next to me; they’ll never know how I used to eat people, shank people, do all this craziness, how I love listening to trap music and Chopin piano waltzes and I shot coke and write love letters to this girl I met calling her my whirlwind. For a moment I catch myself wishing I could put on the bally and gloves and get the strap and go and do some eats and feel my heart between my teeth beating so hard that I have to bite into it so I can swallow. But there’s no one to do it with now and I force the feeling back down like when you’re on the verge of throwing up, but with all your body focused into the strain of the effort, you manage to force the vomit down while no one notices.
Who They Was Page 28