In Our Mad and Furious City

by Guy Gunaratne

  Racist bastards! he’s shouting. Nazis, bastards! They burn our mosque! They burn our mosque!

  I stand there fixed to the heat watching the pieces of falling sky around me. Ash lands on my cheeks, my mind creased and aching. Take my sleeve to wipe my face and stinging eyes but my heel stubs at suttan. I turn around and see a phone box. My fingers feel the hot glass and I want to speak to someone, anyone. Now. I open the door and I get inside, wet charcoal in my mouth and chaos everyplace else. My sleeve wraps around the receiver and I hold it to my ear, desperate like. The door closes and I pull the leash inside with me while Max is outside barking at the sky. The sound of the crowd drowns to my feet and I think of Selvon and Yusuf and the entire day behind me. Think about the roof where I met the morning with bars. Them Muslim pricks from Square. My shattered phone in my pocket. Selvon making me box. Me bodying that lad on bus. Me marking my moment.

  Then I see my mums. I can see her face waiting for me at home. My fingers come up to the numbers. My ma. I dial for our landline. I listen, pressing my ear, but I can only hear my fast breath. I wait as the ringing comes, staring at the silver keys and scratched clawing of sharp pens on the board in front of me. I hear shouts and police orders outside and sirens and cars speeding in. The ringing in my ears surrenders to the noise and then switches to the voice of the answerphone. Please leave a message. My breath catches and my eyes dart under my lids paranoid, finding suttan to say.

  Ma. Ma, it’s me—you probably asleep so—I’m—I’m on my way home, Ma. There’s police around blocking the roads and—there’s a fire. Don’t worry tho—I’m fine. But—

  I search for suttan more. Looking to the dials to guide me. I snatch at the glass window and I’m looking across the street at the reflection of flames in the houses opposite the mosque. I think of my ma’s face, my nan’s eyes in hers, and my own eyes on the flames rising into the night.

  Listen, Ma. I love you, yeah, Ma? I’m—wait, I’ll see you soon anyway—

  Jerk the phone away from my ear and breathe. Empty plastic and metal in my hand. I hang the thing up and step backward leaning against the door, half-open. I look out again at the chaos. The mosque is burning. I catch two police who see me, they start jogging toward the phone box. I open the door and Max hides behind my legs. We duss, running out into the lit darkness toward Estate.

  NELSON

  When the riot come it was them what bring it. But it was we drums that summon them come. Hear that fearsome drum. Someplace on the upper roof a man beat the floor with him fists sounding a rhythm for the rest. See them shaven head and white shirts outside. Bare arms and wide stride in the street. Them faces of hate. See the Association we, jeering the racist mob to get off before they get what for. See the white horde stream into the narrow road with them own placards and nailed wood. Them faces out, flesh with shirtsleeves rolled and rubber boots storming into the territory from them own.

  I was behind my brothers cowering. On the second floor of Chapman’s we was looking down at it. See the street lit with the yellow of the torches they carry. Loud shouts from inside and outside the building. The noise come hard and rowdy. From where I stood I could see the dark window opposite. See them tiny frightened faces caught up in it all, children it looked like and a mother, watching the world burn below. Beside me, my Association brothers and sisters here, pressed to the window and waiting for the moment to do what we must. I was numb. I could not speaking to nobody. I was standing where I was told, helping to do whatever was ask of me, scared stiff about what was happening below. Then I hear the smack of stone against the glass. Another smack. I pull away from the window in case the glass shatter.

  They throwing rocks at window glass.

  I say it almost to myself. I feel like I was the only one standing still, everybody else rushing to get upstairs or down again, carrying bottles, giving orders to prepare for what was to come. Then I see that Derrick push one of them blue crates up next to me. Six brown bottles a box. Jimbroad then clamber up the stairs holding long strips of cloth that he then gave out to the fellars. As the noise from below began to shake the room, I see them all slide open the windows one by one. Claude come over with a cloth dripping with oil and wrapped in a naked flame. I stared silent. One after another Claude bring the flame to light the white cloth stuffed into the bottles. I watch cold still and see them do it. They all launch the lit paraffin bottles into the crowd below. Hear the smash. Hard glass and water and a roar of light erupting from below. It light the room in a flash. Then a scream. More bottle-bombs fly out. Rocks and stone and metal come crashing back in from below. One fly past my head and I shout. I hear them all, people I knew and took to be friends boil them own reason to join the smoke and disappear. Clive, Keith Jacob both stripped to them trousers and a bare chest. They yell down and throw fire into the rabble below.

  Take it! Take what you come here for!

  In that moment I did not know where I was or what to do. I did not know whether to run or help my brother burn the bastards in the streets. Shouts, screams, and crashing flame. I cup my ears and watch the cataclysm shake the walls around me.

  Suddenly somebody grab my arm. It was Jimbroad. He shove me next to him by the window.

  Hand me one of them bottle-bombs boy, quickly!

  I see him hands open and wet with sweat and oil. My mind gone, I bring the crate closer to me. I pick a bottle up. Then I stop. I looked back at my brother Jimbroad’s hand open and grasping, demanding a thing I did not want give him. I looked up at Jimbroad. Him face of wild anger, as if this was the last desperate thing he would ever do and to hell with what would happen next.

  Give me the bottle-bomb Nelson! Now!

  See the two clouds swirl together around and around with the beating of flesh and torn cloth. Closed fists cleaved and grasping to burst the skin and cause blood to spill over. Pipes and wood beams dragging low across the ground and torches thrown toward we. Bricks thrown over my head. The falling glass catching my cheek. All the while the drums sound and them cries of openmouthed hate clashed in the air between bodies. And I run away. From the window. From Jimbroad. From everybody. He yell after me but I was gone. See the sirens sound and the Black Marias arrive to block them off. See the police haul the faces I know, Keith Jacob, Curtis John, them heads pressed against the road under boot. See that once kind and gentle Shirley, who was now clawing mad against the police baton, the memory of she Dicky Boy seared across she face. All them faces boiling in them own hurt, being beaten into the police wagon under the sound of sirens and a whistle what thin out the air.

  Home never feel so far away as I ran. After all that we give for the cause, when the riot come, it was just the same as any other human collapse, the same loose and pointless frenzy. I not never understand the mind of furious men. The hard at heart, all them hasty scrawled placard. For what? How we go from talking about we rights and decent living to being march out like foot soldiers bent and unthinking and hollow? We dusty group of angered blacks, my brothers and sisters them. How quickly honest talk is exchange for speeching, screaming about we numbers and we bodies and not we needs or means to live? How we plunge and grapple and seize all them loose ideas of unbelonging and offense. Leave all them, I thought. Leave all them behind me. I will abandon them, for me, my Lord, for I. Call me a coward. Call me a soft heart then. For the cruel world is too close in this city. Them madmen like Mosley, the violent stories, them images of torn faces in the tabloid paper. It suffocate we own sense and have it replace with some lower code. For see all them who I called my blood, see them lost to it, lost to a city what hate them.

  I call out to anyone what listen to me that night. I will leave this Grove behind, I shout, I will find another patch to finish what I began. I will begin again. And I will bring Maisie to me. I will keep the promise I make. Even if there is not a London left to bring she. Call me a coward, I shout. Call me a coward then. And may the devil take my brother without me.

  YUSUF

  Hours had passed. He w
as gone. I had been running along the streaming vein of the North Circular Road. A thousand cars shot past on the carriageway, the long orange bend of twin lamplights stretched along the middle barricade between the rush of cars, lorries, and motorcycles, and I was alone. The gigantic boards reading Edgware, Luton, Hanger Lane, The North lit above me. The rhythmic pulse and the blinding headlights were all I had as a guide. But I couldn’t see him behind all this. The frenzy of the lights plunged everything else into the dark. Irfan was gone.

  I stopped and thought about my mother. Imagined all that she had suffered, her face so lined with sorrow in the brief glimpses I’d seen of her in recent days. I thought about my brother running into the night feeling abandoned and hateful. I thought about the tower blocks of Estate and the torn walls, the people living behind the gates.

  I thought about my father. And he made me calm.

  I remember after Irfan or I had a nightmare Abba would tell us stories. Once he told me about Abu Bakr and Omar, our early caliphs. They spoke about Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. The dark and light of ages.

  One means peace and the other is chaos, he said, and you must do all you can to overcome one and expand the other.

  I used to think he meant inside. That I should try and remain chill, calm, and not be so ready to anger. But then, looking out into the sky above that gave no stars, I wondered if he meant that the world outside was split this way. Between everything good and everything ill. Had I known anything else, honestly? I asked myself whether there was a time when I hadn’t felt the grinding pressure on my back, the helplessness, everywhere I turned there was a memory of something taken away. Something of mine. A simple childhood thread, suddenly cut and wrought into a tether wire. Like this city, a place where these constant, punishing memories are left to spill into one another. Abba’s words, all the beauty and light he had taught me, now mingled with the dark.

  The sound of blaring sirens filled my senses as a fire engine passed, flushing the motorway into blue and white. I felt my heart pound fast and watched it speed off the other way. I sat down under an overpass to catch my breath. I was in the shadow against the lamplight.

  Is this what my brother had found in this place? The awful vision that was revealed to him in that instant before he ran? In his lurid delusion had he found some solid ground after all? I felt a knot give way inside me. All that remained was a deep loss and then relief. A relief at no longer trying. I had no breath left, like. I looked down at my palms, my dusty, muddied boots. I turned to my side and watched the red and yellow lines that had resumed their rush in both directions. Then I looked up at the black sky. I remembered Abba on the last day I saw him. He was sat at his desk alone as I was then, quietly contemplating the beauty, magnificence, and love of God while the world was falling apart around him. I saw the door slowly close to his room. The light from his lamp no longer visible to me.

  It felt like dawn though it was night. I turned and walked in the direction of home. To Stones Estate, to my door and my amma. I would leave the road behind and sleep instead. I heard more words as I walked. His blood is your blood. I thought of Irfan and our time as children. Evil breeds in a nest that has no discipline. I felt the roadside fury and wanted to be protected from it. Virtue and goodness come only from Allah. These were Abu Farouk’s words. I thought of mosque and the domed hall that I’d return to in the morning. It was as if I were being carried home, back to Estate on a benign wind, toward walls that would provide a sanctuary, toward Muhajiroun who would offer me brotherhood, and into an embrace that would finally make sure no harm would come to me.

  IRFAN

  Irfan stumbles over a broken paving stone. As he falls his arms shoot out to brace himself. His knees hit the ground hard and he winces from the pain. His eyes shut tight. As he hunches over the road he breathes in, wheezing. He lowers himself slowly and places his forehead against the ground. In his mind the voice of his brother echoes.

  He lifts his head now as the road lights blink fast switching on for the evening. He is on his knees now, facing east on Chapter Road as if in reverence. He takes a deep breath in again. Wheezes again, coughs, and then spits onto the ground. It has been hours since he ran away from the park. He hasn’t eaten, he is hungry, his stomach empty. Clawing at his stomach then, he stands and presses against it. Slowly he begins to walk. Scanning the road he glances behind his shoulder, and staggers on.

  He makes no eye contact as strangers near, watching only their clothes or feet as they pass. A boy holding his mother’s hand goes by. The child’s eyes finding his own for a brief moment, then away. Irfan turns a corner and realizes that he has walked in a circle. The wall of August Road Mosque stands across the street. The gates are locked. He stares, the green dome is bathed in dusk light. Here I am. Standing at the foot basin of Allah as Abba taught me. He looks up at the darkening skies and he feels an urge to strike at the dome, rip out the girders and plunge his fist inside. Irfan walks toward the gate.

  Cars pass him sounding their horns but Irfan does not hear them. He crosses the road with his eyes fixed. The smallness of his feeling. The taste of metal in his mouth. His tongue is heavy with thick saliva. His path leads him to a back entrance. The door his abba used to enter the mosque after hours. His eyes dart from the path to the clattered old shed by the refuse. He bends into it, knows it well, touches the peeling color that he and his brother helped paint when they were younger. He opens the door, drags the bottom end across the ground. Inside it smells of stagnant rain. His hands are searching, find the plastic canister by his feet. He picks it up, a dull green can filled with liquid. He gathers it into his chest and turns toward the back door, feeling the familiar lock and finding the combination.

  He enters the mosque shielding his eyes from familiar objects. Memories that reach out to him from his childhood. Patterns on the walls where he played shadow puppets against the light, the wooden banister on which he played a pirate to his brother’s laughter. I am not a djinn, he thinks, I am the one you let perish.

  In front of him Irfan sees the slender arches of the great hall. He steps forward and stares upward into its farthest point. His mouth opens at its fierce, voluptuous beauty. He looks down at the green canister in his right hand and reaches to uncap it. The smell strikes his nostrils instantly. He looks again at the cavern above. He throws his arm in a great circle around himself. The shining liquid petrol splashes onto the carpet floor. The fumes sting the air like violent perfume. He makes a great dark slash across his feet. Irfan then walks to the walls draped in mystic patterns. He pulls his wet forearm and rains petrol onto these walls, onto the pillars, the mattresses and cushions, the tables and cabinets. The prayer mats are piled behind him. Irfan empties the remaining petrol across them.

  He turns now and looks over the hall, imagining the room quiver, frightened and alone with him. He arches his back, stretches his arms wide, and then walks over to the cabinet. He knows there are matches in the lower drawer. Irfan takes out a box, picks out two matchsticks, and strikes twice. A tiny flame sparks violently between his fingers. He walks to the pile of dripping carpet and holds his match to it. Then a sound like a furious wind sweeps over the pile. The hall is flooded with orange light. Irfan takes a few steps backward and watches the fire spread over the pile of rugs and toward the wet floor.

  A surge of torrid fantasy grips his body. He feels the warmth. Feels the danger but watches the flames begin burning into the walls of the hall. His eyes water, smoke filling the air. The flames grow, spreading across the black spaces. He feels his lips curl open. Spit falls from his chin. He looks down at the floor and sees his saliva land on a pool of petrol on the carpet, glistening against the flames that begin to reach over his head.

  He unzips his fly then. Pulls himself out into the hot air. He looks down and makes a second slash, his piss crossing the line of petrol. When he is finished he tucks himself away and looks at the fire above. He exhales a deep moan into the orange haze. Mashallah my father, I am free. And just
as the wave of euphoria had swept over his body, it leaves him.

  Irfan moves toward the exit, his eyes fixed to the smoldering wood and burning floor. An arch begins to splinter at the far end of the hall. He looks upward then and a beam engulfed in swirling flames begins to creak. His eyes widen as shining tears fall down his cheeks. He stops there by the doorway. He smiles at the falling arch above him. An anguished, hateful smile.

  part three

  BLOOD

  FREEDOM

  SELVON

  Bring the white bowl into the sink basin and turn the warm tap on. I watch the water splash and the bowl tilt to the weight. The kitchen is proper dirty, dishes still stacked with the rice and beans. Waitrose bags still left open on the counter. My marge is out in the garden, tending to her plants and flowers.

  I’ll just clean the counter myself, ennet. Do my part. I switch on the kettle and the red light flickers for the boiling. Arms feel heavy and sedated, swear down. Like I been doped asleep and just now waking to the Saturday, proper groggy. Need to run this off. Do a sit-up or two, boost my energy or suttan.

  I rub my eyes and look out the window still sleepy. Kiss my teeth. The morning is slow-covered clouds and blackbirds. My eyes follow down from the clouds. See the tops of Estate pillars in the distance. See the back garden closer. See trimmed and cultured bushes from Mum’s green fingers outside. My bench there on the patio for workout sessions. Bare time spent lifting this summer, but my arms still feel achy on Saturday mornings. I turn the tap off and a few bubbles settle on the surface. I take out two boxes of balm from the drawer by my head. Set them as usual in a line by the dishcloth. Medical prescriptions, Epsom salts, and Jenkins foot balm. I take the first box and mix in two taps of powder with my finger, checking for the temperature. The salts make a swirling trail after my dipped finger. The water is still tepid to touch. I flick off the red switch and lift the half-heated kettle. Pour the water into the bowl. The second box now, yellow powder. These salts smell of flowers or suttan and makes a soapy foam. I stir it with a wooden spoon, take the soft cloth and soak. I’m meant to wait two minutes but I leave it in to soak all the way through. I gather the boxes and return them to the drawer with the rest of Dad’s pills. Check my watch. 8:50. I bring the balm with me and take the bowl into my arms.