In Our Mad and Furious City

by Guy Gunaratne

  I take out my phone and pass through a playlist. Look at these names. I got Lethal B., got Jammer. Bit of Wiley, bit of Bashy. Now these donnies are bringing it hard, Giggs and Scratchy and that. I need suttan early like D Double E, Ghetts, or Akala. Original street fighters, road rappers, champions. I skip back and find Kano. Kano it is for now. I tap for Home Sweet Home and move through banger after banger, P’s & Q’s, Typical Me, Mic Check, and then settle my thumb on How We Livin’. Press play. A slow one, melodic and conscious. The tin intro starts where he has nuttan to say and I listen on.

  Proper tune, understated.

  Most man tho, even Selvon and Yoos, they still on their Yankee-made hip-hop. Allow that. Why be on that gas when London’s got our own good moves? Even if. Even if it sounds ugly, cold, and sparse. Even if the beats are angry, under scuddy verses, it’s the same noise as on road. Eskibeat, ennet. Why would any man keep listening to Americans with their foreign chemistries after that? Nobody from Ends been to Queensbridge, get me?

  I thumb the tracks and skip back to Skepta and tap a random track to hear them coarse, snarling bars. Gingerbread Man starts and I pass under the entrance to Estate. I hear it as a soundtrack. I see the lads playing in Square in front of me. The four blocks against the sky. Under Skepta’s clarity this place assumes a bashiness that makes the court come off like it’s a battle dome. A place of ill purpose, full of sketchy humor and distinction. Square played to meaning, ennet. Our meaning. My own.

  I come up pulling Max along, scoping the scene and wary of any eyes on me. I see the Estate lot cotching in court. Richard and Omar by the fence. Had trouble with them before. Them idiots from East Block see me as a dickhead. Allow them. I shake it off, check my creps, and make sure I’m looking fresh. Best not slip today. Best not say anything stupid or gay. They’ll call me a pussyo or say suttan about my mums, else. Just shut up and play, ennet, I tell myself. I pull Max closer. It looks like them Eastern European lot are here to play too. That’s good. At least I can deflect to them if I need to. No one likes them off-Estate Polish lot, so it’ll be easier. Yoos and Selvon are on the other side of the court passing a ball between each other. I walk toward them. I listen to Skepta’s final verse and roll into a bop as soon as it ends. I open the gate. I nod at Yoos and Selvon and walk through.

  Yes, you man, I say. Selvon looks up at me and I grin.

  Proper on that jogging shit ain’t you? I say. Why you running around Square for tho? I saw you. You asking to get robbed, blood? You off-Estate fucker.

  I laugh like it ain’t nuttan, like I didn’t mean anything.

  He shakes his head and digs in his bag, brushing it off. Richard and Omar are laughing too, watching me. They know I was joking. Selvon is just as Estate as me and Yoos and the rest. Selvon gets respect from everyone. What I said doesn’t stick anyway. Nuttan sticks to Selvon. Everyone laughs it off, meaning it as a joke, which it was. I’m glad about it and Selvon looks at me. He shakes his head and takes water from his bottle. I laugh back at him and the others laugh like it’s just banter.

  Yeah, I’ll let you off. I’ll let you off, I say, and that’s the end of it.

  I throw my bag next to his. I take the leash and tie Max to the fence. He sits and sniffs at the other bags and clothes. Take my earbuds out and pause the music. Unclip the wires and dash it at my bag. I keep my phone in my back pocket. I step over and use my BBK hoodie as a cover. It’s the black one with the white print that Ma got me for my sixteenth, ennet. She had to save for it. Worn now. I brush off some crust from the sleeve as I kneel down.

  Them Polish lot today is it, we playing? I ask Selvon. He crouches next to me and looks out at the court.

  Yeah. They’re Serbian, he says and spits.

  I look at the spit stain on the concrete ground by his feet. His spit always darts out his mouth like the way you see footballers do in matches. I can never do that with my teeth. Maybe you need a gap like Selvon has. I stand up and stretch my arms. I think about the court and concrete and the goal on the far side. I go through the same motions as the others. I find space and raise my hand for a pass. Darren sends me the ball. I watch as it skids across the concrete to feet. I take my left foot and step back so my right foot can tip it up. I do a few kick-ups and catch the ball with my arms. I look up and see Yoos. He is stepping back, waiting. I let the ball drop from my hands and I send it high over to him. It drifts all the way up and everyone follows the ball and Yoos catches it with a nice touch. It’ll be two–nil in no time.

  I lose them for a mo as I stare up at West Block rooftop. I think about how I feel good when I’m with this lot but I am never myself, like. I think about being careful and not saying anything unless it’s suttan everyone has heard before. Unless it’s safe and I’m safe and they think that I’m safe. I scratch my head in the sunshine and I feel the breeze growing on the back of my neck. Got bare issues, swear down.

  Look at Selvon. The ball comes to me and I chip it to him who collects it easily. How can I be more like Selvon? I see him, tall and broad. I remember what happened that time one of my chains got nicked from my bag. Selvon had my back, ennet. We were all first-years at St. Mary’s. All them fresh school uniforms and shoes too squeaky for them corridors. Truesay, them casual bullies from older years gave me a source for the odd rhyme later on, still. But it was one of them PE classes when I come back and seen my chain gone. Bare confounding drama if I told a teacher or counselor or suttan so I stayed zipped about it. Ain’t no snitch, obviously. It was only Selvon and Yoos I told about how it was the chain my dad had given me. I’d worn it since Dad left and I was secretly brewing about it. Shit, we even knew who took it as well. It was all the same breddas in that year’s strata. Alex Mpenzu most likely or one of the other black-boy crews. Alex was the despot that first year, ennet, French-speaking Congolese or suttan else African equatorial. Anyway. Within a week my chain appeared back in my bag, proper bafflement. I felt like a donut thinking maybe I missed it when I was searching for it but I knew I never did. The dots weren’t worth connecting at the time but I remembered later that Selvon had mentioned once that he knew where Alex lived. Selvon. He was the one that reconned it and got my chain back for me. He must have snuck it back into my bag. Fuck knows why he did it honestly but I was grateful. Selvon was one of them ones where you never knew what happened to him in the hours when you weren’t with him. Always on his own ting as if he weren’t really part of the scene we were all part of. Either way, we never really spoke about it after that.

  My ears twitch hearing suttan familiar.

  Oh shit, they playing Roll Deep’s When I’m ’Ere. I look over to the corner of South and North Block. Where? The sound blaring out of Charles’s car. Roll Deep yuno. That Charles knows his tunes, man. Making my brain nod to it. Proper tune mate. Head starts flowing to that Danny Weed tune. My neck looser, my eyes narrow and hazing watching the football ping around. I hear myman Wiley’s voice and to my eyes the tune dictates the play. Listen. I feel the wave pass over their faces, the brap-brap cannon light them up. All heads start going but none sway as hard as mine, going to the beat. The rest of them feel small to me now, distant and tamed. Right now I feel like a king between the posts, only my hands left and the Estate blocks around me buzzing. I remember what this music does to my bones, fam. I’m bait about it too. My feet start moving on the goal line. The tune holds me as I watch the game play and I feel the echo of the music around the Square.

  Someone kicks Selvon’s ball over the gate and the game stops mid-flow.

  Now the music swells as if it just won a battle. I close my eyes and think of nuttan except the music, hearing my own voice come back to me. I’ll make music like this one day, swear down, and I’ll press all the fuckery I’m feeling into it.

  Wa-gwan, blood.

  I open my eyes and look up at the silhouette in the sky blocking the sun. It’s Yoos. He’s sweating and grinning at me from above.

  Yes, fam. I smile and he sits.

  YUSUF


  Of all the things that I loved, I loved the time spent playing. It was respite for me, ennet. I knew that the Muhaji would soon be told of my absence and I’d be sent for, it was certain. I’d be handed over to mosque and my brother soon enough. All I could hope to do that morning was take as much time, cotch as normally, and steal as much love from my breddas, from Square and football, as I could.

  Football for us meant glory. In the patch of level grass in the Square between the four Estate blocks we often played into the night. Youngers would lean in on the sides of the cage or watch from the banisters. The olders would look down at us too as if up in the stands, watching us play like scenery. There was a lightness to these collective moments, I see that now and miss it badly.

  We kicked off with the Eastern Europeans on the ball first. Selvon would be center-mid and Ardan was back in goal. I was on the wing and the others pitched up in a familiar four-four-two. Square was always packed with rabble during matches, Estate faces would swim in and out, simply to spend the long days with each other. Charles from West Block would arrive, parking his car by the court. His boot housed a speaker that plugged into his phone and anyone else’s. Music would be passed through ten different playlists like a permanent noise cloud bouncing off our bodies. The rest of the crowd were made up of girls from around the Ends, weed bunners, mixtape shotters, and those Chinese gamer kids from off-Estate.

  I was at peace among the football lot. My shoulders, my peers. Some I knew, some I didn’t, not as well. I wanted to remember their faces and their garbs that afternoon and paid more attention. Ben, Stephen, Alex, and Sunil all munching on food and watching the ball. Olli and Eday were using their fingers to pick chips out of a plastic box, jutting each other with their elbows. Richard and Omar by the gate. The Sikh lads Gurpreet and Gushal were mixing in with the Graham Park lot smoking rollies. Soft drugs passing between cliques like bubble gum. Lydia and Charlene had dropped in on their brothers Eric and Cesar. Their hair was screeched back and slicked down over their foreheads in spirals, all flirting with Cesar’s boys. Dipesh, Ruks, and Amar were handing out flyers promising grime fusion and bhangra nights at local clubs. Hasan and Ruben and their crew had no time for bhangra. They were stony-faced leaning against the gate, watching the game play on. Ishmael and Rene had brought the Eastern Europeans in that day. Their capo was Lukasz, like “lou-cash.” He wore a gold chain that the bunners would eye up every time the ball took him to that side of the pitch. They felt football as seriously as we did, those Eastern Europeans. But they were semi-skimmed and lacked heart. We weren’t playing for the Ends or anyone else. We were playing for ourselves, assuming mantles and imitating gods. We imagined ourselves as those we idolized. I was Zidane during those games. Ardan, in goal always, was Van der Sar. With his woolly Man United gloves that we would dark him out for. Selvon was Patrick Vieira from his beloved Arsenal, dictating play with his long passes to feet. There were no Tottenham fans for miles. For us, the city, the Square, the Estate, it was all our fortress. The game was pure form and primitive. A clash of talent and technicians, flair and power play, cartilage and scrappy flourish. For a few hours the Square would cast us at the Nou Camp with our Gerrards and Ronaldos, Figos and Rivaldos, and a few Cruyffs. These names, ghosting through our movements as we played, the cage with its concrete turf and cracked center circle, made us free.

  It was easy to forget with the lads. Laughing at the banter and taking the clear piss with a nutmeg. But I kept glancing back at East Block hoping for a few more hours away. Away from my amma and Irfan and those Muhaji watchmen. So instead I focused on the beautiful game. It was as if the motion and breath was all that mattered in that moment. I would pick up the ball on the left and ping it over the top to Naveed. Switch. Nav would pass a low one across court to Selvon, wearing his Arsenal replica and Nike Mercurials. The defenders would rush him, Selvon would parr them easily and dink into the penalty area. Tackles would slide in. Selvon would skip, look up, see me. I remember belting a call to feet and he would chip one inward. Too languid, I threw a boot at the ball and scuffed it. The ball was rising high over the bar until Ardan made a showy thing about collecting it, leaping into midair. I watched him make the save and his tense body drop to the ground.

  Move was over.

  Laughing then, exhaling, and zinging each other with exaggerated frustration, we fell back into our positions. Ardan would always kick high and long even if everyone was on his side of the pitch. It was as if he was practicing his own game, as if he had anything to practice for. I was already out of breath and decided to go sit by Ardan on the goal line. As I walked up I glanced above at East Block behind him. A row of empty closed doors. I scanned the figures near our flat on the third story. I knew the longer I stayed down here the more likely they’d come for me. But I still had time.

  Ardan and I could not be more different on the surface. But that didn’t matter when our common thread was footie, Estate, and the ill fit we felt against the rest of the world. After Abba’s funeral, he was the first one from Estate to come ask after me. Probably because he knew what it was like to be fatherless. He came by and didn’t even ask how it went. He was just casual, ennet, and asked if I wanted to go shoot some fucking monsters. I did want to do that, believe. So that Tuesday we took the bus down to Trocadero and spent the whole day at arcades. Ardan did most of the talking that day. We held up plastic clacking guns, spending two hours laying waste to writhing zombies amid buzzes of neon machines and money boxes. We then pooled our winnings to catch a film at Staples Corner. It was an Odeon back then, before it became a Cineworld, started playing Bollywood, and then closed down. Ardan managed to sneak a bag of Minstrels into an eighteen, he was good like that. Afterward though, there was a point where he struggled to find things to talk about and around. I just sat there and listened, laughed at times but generally felt exhausted. It was strange but it felt to me that I was doing him a favor rather than the other way around. Perhaps it was Ardan who needed a friend, ennet, to let him just help out and tell jokes to.

  I remember we both got back late after taking the last bus in from Cricklewood. I never spoke to Ardan about my dad, my grief, my fucked-up brother, really any family shit. Instead I just listened, smiling along to stories, allowing him to be there and be a mate. But Ardan was a friend for life after that day at Trocadero.

  On the goal line we crouched together chatting. While the others were up the pitch, we spoke casual about the only things myman knew how to talk about at any length. Football, gear, music, girls. It was the obsessions we dealt with. Keeping banter to the things that matched our safe and ready formulas.

  Pac is better than Biggie for bars. End of.

  Who gives a shit about bars though? Biggie made you bounce bruv.

  Ardan was having nothing of what I was saying. Shaking his head and screwing the side of his mouth at me.

  Blood, it’s beside the point anyway. I’m on that homegrown shit now, get me? What we should be talking about is my gee Akala versus that Jehst for lyrics, or like road rap versus grime. Have you even seen the comments under Serious blood? JME is a national treasure fam.

  Anyway.

  I rolled my eyes at him and looked out toward the far side of the cage. I spotted Selvon necking on some girl. I nudged Ardan and nodded over at the scene. Ardan saw and scoffed, shaking his head.

  Game ain’t even half-done and myman’s already on suttan, he said.

  Get me.

  We both watched and saw how he moved. How the girl looked at him and our eyes glazed over the other girls with her. All so perfectly set in the sunshine.

  Swear down man, said Ardan still gawping, Selvon gets so much gash.

  Yeah I know, I said.

  On that final day the sky was still bright, the music played and we played. Breaks in the game devolved into a halftime asides. Someone would always call it during those lulls in matches where legs slacked and the heat begged an easier pace. Onlookers would crisscross the court. Amar and his crew started t
oting flyers. Others sold cigarettes, games, some weed. Everybody had a side hustle for something. It was the same busy wagers between the girls there. I watched as the ballers matched eyes with the birds, selling them lustful ideas. I never went for that. Those girls were the type who were only prospecting for the black boys on Estate anyway. I was busy hiding out under the haze.

  I knew it would have to end though.

  When I glanced back over to the entrance I saw them coming. Riaf and Kassim, my cousins, in their Muhaji topi and kameez, searching the Square and then spotting me. I murmured fuck under my breath and glanced at Ardan who looked over to the two figures approaching. He understood well. We both stood up, slow and calm, as they crossed the Square between oblivious players and the crowd.

  The only thought that pinched me more than the sight of Riaf and Kassim was the feeling that my brother Irfan was behind them. They were here for both of us, these Muhaji. They were going to take us both back to mosque, to the new imam who would tell us what was to be done about my brother.

  NELSON

  Maisie, she tuck me in. She smooth my pillow and pat me down. She give a kiss and leave me now. Alone, resting, and the room so quiet. And I look around, this home what have all the dusty life what struggle has won we. Sheet soft and smell of soap. Flowers by the window, set in a water, fresh and clear with color. Maisie’s amber hairbrush by the mirror. She makeup bag, she bracelet box, and all them small tubs of buttercream oil what make she dark skin shine all the day. This little house on Carrion Road, Lord, it was all I ever wanted for we. How many years did it take to achieve this ordinary thing?

  My heavy eyes close again. The medication come free me from the world, oh mystery. All earthly weight fall off me then, when the memories come, take me off into them distant spaces and a different time. All I ever want for we was this.