When I get off the tube at Kilburn Park, Mazey bells me and when I pick up he says blood have you seen the Evening Standard today and I say Gotti, and he says I know it’s a mad ting innit. Thirteen moves fam, and then I say brudda I wish I’d been there, and Mazey laughs and says you man woulda been unstoppable.
Couple years later, I stop shotting coke when Capo gets shift. Capo’s been dropping me some banging bits of white on the regs and I don’t trust anyone else to be my plug. So when feds run up on him in his flat one evening and catch him while he’s in the middle of bagging up the soft and then they find big bits of cro and a bag of bullets in the yard, I just know that it’s time to stop. Or at least to take a break. Anyway, my mother recently found a whole bunch of capsules full of coke and stacks of tens and twenties in my sock drawer at home – I know what you’re doing Gabriel, I went to put some socks that I’d washed in your sock drawer. Unblinking stare. But it’s not as tense as it used to be. It’s like my life has worn down her thresholds over the years, it doesn’t shock her really, although I can see she’s doing her best to be shocked. I say well I ain’t got a job and I gotta eat somehow and she says so do something proper with your life before it’s too late.
The thing is my life has brought her into certain realities that she can’t change, that she’s had to accept even though she might not want to. Just like it’s become normal to me that most of my bredrins have been to pen and certainly everyone I’m friends with has been arrested at some point. And it’s normal that we’ve all seen at least a couple of stabbings in real life, it’s normal that everyone’s known people who died way too young, who died violently. That’s just how it is. Anyway, stupid of me to be stashing food and p’s in my parents’ yard. I’m not living in South for now coz I’ve been arguing with my girl – love ain’t easy forreal – but at least she’s burning sage and praying to her ancestral spirits. She always tells me she lives in hope. But I can’t be living at my mum’s like some wasteman, especially when I’ve stacked p’s by trapping hard. Need to find somewhere else to stay and last time I checked, Uncle T’s still got that spare room. Not long after Capo gets sentenced to five years, I arrange to move back into my old room in Blake Court.
I pack some garms, grab some books and then I have breakfast with Mama and Tata. When we finish breakfast, Mama is talking about how one of her friends thinks everything is a joke and how she can’t stand people being like that and my father laughs and she says yes laugh, laugh, that’s what you always do, I don’t know what there is for you to laugh about and I say I don’t know what there is for you to be so sour about. She says no one needs your comments, with her eyes all sharp. No one needs your comments either, I say. Don’t talk to me until you’ve eaten your breakfast, she says. I’ll talk to you whenever I want, I say and she says no you won’t and I say yes I will, I’ll say what I want and I’ll do what I want, you can’t control me. And she says one phone call, one phone call and I’ll show you and I’m thinking here we go again, whatdafuck is she on about? The only phone call she could be talking about is calling the feds on me. I say whatever, you can’t do anything, I’ll do what I want just like I’ve always done and she says no you won’t, there’ll come a time when I show you how you can’t and I say no, you won’t ever show me fuck all, you’ve been tryna control me since I was a child and it never worked and it never will. She says are you threatening me? I say threatening you? How am I threatening you? I’m simply telling you that you won’t ever stop me from doing whatever I want. She turns to my father and says he’s threatening me and my father says to me just stop shouting.
I can’t take how they act like if I shout it’s unnatural, it’s wild, it’s crazy, as if people don’t shout and get angry, as if it’s not a normal human emotion. This is how I’ve always been – do they still not realise that there was nothing anyone could ever do to stop all of this, to stop everything that happened? Never in a million years could they have imagined having a son like me. But it happened.
Later, I’ve packed all my bags and I’m sitting at the kitchen table having a glass of water before I go. There’s still that framed drawing on the wall of the crocodile approaching the rabbit and it’s like we all know the crocodile’s gonna eat the rabbit but no one’s gonna stop it, the artist wouldn’t draw it another way coz that’s life – ah so it go as Uncle T would say – and my father comes into the kitchen and sits down at the table opposite me. He’s survived a quadruple heart bypass and cancer in the last five years, he’s not as big as he used to be and he moves more gentle now like he’s carrying something fragile which he can’t drop, coz if it breaks, no one will be able to fix it.
He leans forward and says I must tell you Gabriel. Real life it’s only contact between people and we must find a way because life is not easy. You are angry with all your lovers, you are angry with all your friends, you are angry with your mother, with your brother, sisters – of course you haven’t sisters but you are … anger is a part of humanity.
Yeah exactly, I say.
But to find a way not to shout, to be a more – of course this is need training. I am now clever man because I had five years of depression so I done generally nothing. No really, because I was out of life, I feel a bit like what this name of, you know this man whom Jesus Christ take him from his death?
Lazarus, I say.
Oh exactly, Lazarus. I am little bit like Lazarus, of course if you read Lazarus you know when Jesus Christ returning him to the life, Lazarus was little bit smelly, his body was start to decomposing, so I am in better situation, but you realise life is too short for all this anger, all the time these violent feelings. You know, life is brutal.
My mother comes downstairs. I don’t say anything, I just hug her and she holds on to me, laughs a bit to herself, almost sad like, and says I know you want to be good.
I say I love you Mama.
She leans back to look at me and says oh that’s a new one.
Then she hugs me back and tells me that when I was born I was so small I could fit in the palm of her hand. She walks over to the fridge and gets a box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates out and says do you like these?
I say yeah, why not.
She says so let me give you one, so that your last memory of your mother is something sweet, so you can’t say I’m not a good mother.
I laugh and say you’ve always been a good mother. I take the chocolate from her and she gives me three more.
Less than a week before I moved back to South Kilburn, a twenty-year-old girl called Mohanna Abdhou got shot and killed right in front of Uncle T’s block. She was standing with her bredrins in front of Dickens House right next to the playground, it was a warm Friday evening at the end of May and bare little youts were playing in the playground as summer crept in. Two brers on pedal bikes rode into the estate and the first thing everyone probably noticed was that they had ballys over their faces and hoods pulled up and black puffer jackets and gloves on, even though it was warm and everyone was out in sweatshirts and T-shirts. Maybe Mohanna was just catching jokes with her bredrins before going home to her family after a day of working at the shop where she had a job, or maybe she was chatting to some brer from SK who she liked – maybe some brer was even chirpsing her, tryna get her number, telling her friends oi your bredrin’s kinda peng still, what’s she saying? Laughter and sun and that freshness in the air when summer’s coming and even the concrete towers look okay when sunlight spills gold all over them. But then the brers on bikes slowed down in front of the group jamming next to Dickens House and one of them pulled out a strap and fired a shot. The heat of the day shattered. Everyone scattered. He fired three more shots and then the two brers on bikes pedalled out of the estate, down Malvern Road, cameras catching them at every moment and Mohanna dropped to the ground at the foot of the block and the children in the playground screamed and ran and all the SK brers who were there with her and her friends ducked out long time, they started running as soon as they saw the brer in the bally p
ulling out a strap – the mandem who were blatantly the intended targets probably quicker to run coz they were prepared for some shit like this – and Mohanna lay on the ground, bleeding from her belly. Half an hour later she died, surrounded by paramedics and armed police and some of her bredrins who came back. It’s mad coz it’s basically exactly the same spot where Chicken got shot in the head by Bugz Bunny after jumping off his balcony.
When I move in to Uncle T’s there’s a small pile of withered flowers at the spot where Mohanna died, and stuck in the door of the shop, just across from Uncle T’s block, a murder poster with her face on it. Because round here some things never change never change never change.
It was probably some Mozart youts or some KG youts, tryna score points by licking down some SK brers, because that beef just never stops, although it used to be much worse. There were way more shootings here back in the day and on a real level, when all the balconies were full of mandem posted up, those two youts could never have just rode their bikes into the estate without getting challenged. Mandem woulda been shooting back forreal. So although it’s bad, it’s nothing like it once was.
When I walk through now I don’t see anyone I recognise and no one recognises me. Walking past people on Malvern Road, it’s as if they barely notice my existence. On a real I barely see anyone at all. It’s as if everyone is hiding indoors and the only sign of life is the constant accumulation of rubbish next to the rubbish chutes, right under the sign that says STRICTLY NO REFUSE TO BE LEFT IN THIS AREA. Black bin bags, bursting with rotten food and nappies and plastic wrappers and fuck knows what else, piled next to broken chairs, old TVs, metal poles and wooden boards; the driftwood of hidden lives in these blocks. The only other thing that tells you there are still people, families, heartbeats within these blocks, is when night yawns over the place, submerging the buildings in a gloom that only gets darker and darker, and then you see lights in windows. But the strange thing is that I’ve never seen a light go on, no matter how many times I’ve stared out of my window as night falls, it’s like everything happens in secret. I’ve never seen anything as lonely as those windows, looking as if someone left the lights on before abandoning their home.
Sometimes I see some of the new mandem on one of the balconies, bunning zoots and chatting shit, but in general, silence runs the blocks now, silence is posted up on the balconies and lurking on the dirty staircases and in the pissy stairwells. The lift in Blake Court still breaks down and some of the lights on the stairs are still broken and the walls are even more stained and peeling. But I never bump into any nittys or mandem lurking on the stairwells with straps poking through their jeans, although one time I come down the stairs one morning and I see a machete stashed on a little ledge just above the rubbish chute like it was put there to be readily available at a moment’s notice. The walls are scratched up, paint coming off in huge sections revealing pink concrete beneath, and often one of the lights on the staircase doesn’t work so sections of stairs sit in darkness. Someone has written Fuck Da Feds in blue marker on the ceiling of a stairwell. And there’s no one on D-block no more, no one posted up or anything, like all you ever see now at night are the empty balconies and rows of doors and low yellow lights soaking the concrete in loneliness. Some of the flats are even boarded up now coz soon, all the blocks are gonna get knocked down to make way for new homes.
So I’m back at Uncle T’s, in the same room I lived in for two years when I was eighteen. There’s still not enough hot water every day but there’s one of those plastic shower hoses you attach to the taps on the bath, so instead of the bucket baths I used to have, it’s showers. Uncle T rarely cooks now, rarely ever makes curry goat or stewed chicken and usually it’s fried eggs and bacon that make the corridors smell of oil and burnt grease. He’s always saying I’m just gonna lie down to rest me knee, and then I hear him snoring, coughing and choking in his sleep. When he gets up, he goes into the kitchen to sit on his dusty black office chair and he smokes cigarette after cigarette, shouting at the TV which never answers him back. Then it’s night and he goes to lie down again, and soon he falls asleep. Sometimes I wake up at two or three in the morning and I can hear him in the kitchen, rolling about on that office chair with the TV bubbling away and the smell of cigarette smoke drifting into my room, turning the air bitter and harsh. The yard is never as noisy as it used to be. More times the only noise in the flat is the TV in the kitchen and the TV in Uncle T’s bedroom and the TV downstairs in the music room. They’re always on, even though the only person watching TV in the whole flat is Uncle T. At night he sleeps with his TV on, the whole night through, game shows chatting away, bursts of clapping, explosions and car chases, canned laughter from American sitcoms in the early hours. His buzzer doesn’t go off like it used to. Business isn’t popping like it used to. Sometimes his door knocks and it takes him a few minutes to get down the stairs coz he can barely walk now. Then he sits downstairs, tryna catch his breath, smoking a cigarette before coming upstairs. Sometimes his oldschool bredrins pass through, but they rarely play the sound system, most of them just sit in the kitchen with Uncle T and bun couple zoots before going back to wherever home is.
One night I wake up and I can feel bassline pumping from downstairs. It’s one of the first times I’ve heard the sound system in ages. The walls are vibrating. I check the time on my phone and it says 1.45 a.m. I sit up in bed, listening to roots bouncing up the stairs and through the walls, hoping that none of the neighbours are gonna knock his door and ask whatdafuck he thinks he’s doing on a weekday blasting music after one in the morning. I listen to the whole set. At 2.30 a.m. it stops and my ears are filled with the cooling breeze of silence. Then I hear Uncle T come shuffling up the stairs, breathing heavy as he walks past my door to go into his bedroom. He turns the TV on, voices chattering through the wall, and after a few minutes I can hear his snoring. But I don’t feel tired at all and I only fall asleep when the light behind my curtains starts casting a pale shade of morning blue onto the ceiling.
Taz, his eldest son who I used to move with, is in a care home, stuck on a ventilator, completely paralysed after collapsing and falling into a coma one day, which no one can explain coz only he knows what he did. The only thing he can move are his eyelids to blink. Man can’t even breathe on his own. One day they have to do a special operation on him coz he’s having complications with his digestive tract, which is connected to a tube in his stomach, and using a system of blinks which the nurses have developed with him, he communicates to the doctors that he doesn’t want to be resuscitated if his heart stops on the operating table. He survives the operation and I go to see him. His face is all puffed up and raw-looking and there’s a tube going into his nose and a big tube sticking out of his throat and a white bib spread out beneath it and there are other tubes going into his stomach and legs and machines beeping and his mouth is hanging open all crooked and dry and his lips are crusty and his hair has grown long and it’s kinda picky. I lean over him and put my arms around him and whisper into his ear it’s all right Taz, everything is all right, just forget everything, forget it all and I hear the rasping of his breath through the tube in his throat and when I stand back up I see his whole face has gone bright red and he’s crying. I go out into the hallway and his half-sister Ayesha is there and Ayesha sighs and says it’s just the same old Taz, with a smile like she’s remembering something distant. I say no it’s not, it’s not the same old Taz. It’s never gonna be the same old Taz, and then I turn round and walk out of the building and wait for Uncle T and the others to finish the visit because I know I never want to see Taz again.
Uncle T’s other son, Reuben, has been locked up for ten years now, seven of those in Broadmoor, and no one knows when he’ll be out. Silence stretches out its tired limbs through the flat and Uncle T sits in the kitchen bunning a zoot and playing a game on his iPad while the ten o’clock news flickers on the TV. The Father of the Year Award in the living room is still there, but years of sunlight have bleac
hed away the signatures of his children and his own name, so now it looks like an empty certificate waiting to be filled in. It’s as if the details have been erased by the sun working hand in hand with time, as if the father of the year has been defeated by the removal of his sons from this world, both of them lost in a twilight of existing without being seen.
One morning I decide to walk to the shop in Precinct, just opposite where Bimz used to live, the shop where Mazey used to buy Skittles and I used to get cans of KA Black Grape and where we all used to cop chip n Rizla. But when I get to the precinct, the whole place is boarded up. I mean literally every window in every block is boarded up and there are no shops. Where the shops used to be is surrounded by walls of corrugated metal and there’s not a person in sight. I walk up to Bimz’s block, looking for something, past the boarded-up flats, and I climb the stairs we all used to sit on ten years ago. On the first-floor landing I find it. Scratched into the wooden door of a storage space next to one of the flat entrances is the name SNOOPZ. I touch the letters and for a moment I feel like I want to rip the door off and take it with me. Then I’m like whatdafuck am I even doing and I go down the stairs and start walking back to Uncle T’s.
There is scaffolding all over Blake Court now. A giant ribcage with decaying concrete lungs and collapsed electric veins in rubber skin, throbbing within it. Just ahead of me, walking up to the entrance is a brer in an orange hi-vis boiler suit with a little girl. He’s telling her to wait as he digs in his pocket looking for keys. I pull mine out with the fob ready and shake them so he hears the jingle and he turns to look at me, his face cracking into a smile which floats into his eyes. I lean over, tap the fob to the metal pad, the door does its high-pitched whine as it opens while we stare at each other and I smile back but I can’t place the face.
Who They Was Page 29