In Our Mad and Furious City

by Guy Gunaratne

  I’m pushing in past people moving from one side of the Square. It’s like the whole crowd is being squeezed into itself. I’m scanning them people’s legs running to see my dog, thinking about how long I can keep searching before I have to make a dash for the stairs and get back to Ma. I keep forcing my way through tho. Max! Max!

  And then I see him running to me and my heart settles for a minute in the middle of all this madness. I go down to hug him and see if he’s good. He’s good tho and I put my arms around him and look past to where he came from.

  I see the spot past people’s legs and there’s a body on the floor. People are just running past it and over it. My breath catches as I see it. And it’s all silent. As if the volume cuts out and all I hear is muffled cries and see only the picture of his face, bloodied up and staring at me from the concrete ground.

  CAROLINE

  Fire from the Square drowning out the rest. The noise now, Jesus, the police. I can’t see their faces pushing me back through the door, pushing Varda and the baby.

  The baby! I scream at them. She is pushed inside and all I see is the black of the police helmet and a loud voice shouting.

  Back! Back!

  And then he comes. God, I see him. He runs in just like he did when he was a child, a wee child, bent over as if to collapse onto me, running in from the smoke. He collapses into my arms he does, collapses and the red—Oh Christ it’s blood!

  Blood on his clothes and all over me. He says through loud moans and tears that it isn’t his blood but he’s crying.

  Ma! he says. Ma!

  We fall onto the floor together, by the door, he’s thin but heavy and the only light pitching through the anarchy of the morning is coming in from the open, broken place outside. The police, their helmets a swarm. They’re screaming at us from outside our balcony.

  Ardan speaks into my ear, clawing at me with his red hands.

  He’s gone, they took him away—

  He says this and I cradle him on the floor, speaking into his neck. Speaking quiet and slow, hold him tight against me. He’s scared, crying hot tears into my chest. This boy, my own.

  Shhh, shhh, there you are now. It’s all right, it’s okay. It’s all right, come now.

  He’s dead.

  I can smell the blood. He cries into me and he will for more hours. I press my cheek against his head, holding close, holding him away from the carnage outside.

  I’m here now.

  I tell him so.

  I’m here for you my love.

  YUSUF

  Then, softly again.

  Irfan—

  I heard my voice echo back his name. Was it a djinn that I saw?

  Then the world rushed back in wild senses. The shouts and the screaming flooding my ears, and my eyes came back to clarity. I frantically looked around for a way out, holding my forehead in pain.

  Suddenly a crash sounded behind me. I was thrown.

  A window somewhere shattered and I heard screams. Facing the floor, I saw my hands were covered in red. I turned and saw hundreds of people running toward me, a crushing, swollen mass of frightened eyes.

  They didn’t see me lying there in front of them. They stepped on my hands. I felt my bones break. They ran over my neck. I felt my jaw snap. They stomped onto my legs and my back. No sound came from within me then. My ears could not figure which sounds came from my breaking body and which from the falling world outside. I called for him again. I wanted him to save me, to reach out to me, my brother.

  With the last of my energy, I turned and rolled onto the dirt, my arms wildly wrapping themselves around a broken curb. I held it weakly, pressing my beating head against the cold concrete. My breath collapsed, yet with a happiness coursing through my veins, I thought only of my brother. I might be alone but he would be with me. My throat filled with something I hadn’t ever felt before, as the lost anger and suffering rose up from my stomach. I called out to him once more, his name again. Irfan. This time silently. My sight began to fade as I watched, as though from a distance, the carousel of shoes kick dirt into my face, the frightened crowd clambering away to safety. A white dog. His muddy paws, his sad eyes watching me. I saw the clouds still in the thick air. The weight of my last breath pushing my eyes closed.

  I felt my small life pass. The sound of someone screaming a name that was not my own. The feeling of my body being plunged under hard, heavy waves. Faded inside. My last sense was of the blood draining from me, slowly seeping out of my mouth and onto the broken ground. I lay there then, lost and alone in this pointless, torn-up place.

  ECHOES

  SELVON

  See there empty hollow. See the peach color of the hospital walls. See the lights and arrows and color lines, elevators and corridors and doors with no windows. See the room where they kept him. See the flowers and the tubes and the respirator and the worn, lost faces around his bed. See his marge by the window on a chair and her hair behind her scarf and her face screaming. See them Muslim man holding her down as she beats her chest. See them Muslim man standing with their hands hidden around her.

  I couldn’t see him, doctors wouldn’t let me through. There was nobody there to see tho. He can’t be saved they said. His lungs lost and his bones broken. His blood spilling inside where there was no place to go. See my eyes cry for my bredda. See my anger at the places and the people that took him. I would beat the doors down with my fists to find him. See the world get dark. See the world get darker still. There is nuttan more to say than this tho, nuttan more to see. The thoughts keep coming back but I hold it down and keep running, ennet. What else am I supposed to do? Find myself looking up at the sky when I run. I see them blackbirds in the clouds.

  I never used to run for no one before.

  But now I run for him.

  ARDAN

  Read them messages. Read them signs. Notes from his fam, from around the Ends and the banners his cousins placed here. Arsenal flags pinned to the side, papers in plastic reading Justice4Yusuf and Mashallah You Are Free. Like this pile of people’s memories, sorries, and prayers, gathered here for him. It’s all stacked into a pile with all the other wet candles and that. For the memory of him. For Yoos. And this Square now. Wipe my cheek and look to see that no one sees me.

  Seen your mum now and then, ennet. But she don’t say nuttan. She gives me a hug tho, and like, squeezes my arm because she knows me, ennet. I look about. I worry someone hears me talking to you here. Suttan in the air makes it okay tho. Like it’s a thing you do when it happens like this, ennet. You go about alone and talk to random spots on road because what else does man do? Where else can I be, and talk to you and remember?

  I kneel down.

  With a loose pebble I scrape out your name in the concrete. Look upward at the gray. Blackbirds against the sky. I look around Square. There’s no one.

  Yoos. I hope you hear this bruv.

  I hope you hear me.

  CAROLINE

  What are the words to say? There are none. Grief is a new thing for the young. I know it’s not the same but we just carried on without his da, didn’t we? Just the two of us. Sure, now this is different. Suppose he’ll need me to say something to him. But Jesus, what are the words? Sadness should be ours to bear, the parents, not the child. But we pass it along all the same, don’t we? It’s not up to us like. So what’s there to say? All I can do now is to hold the boy, tell him he’s tougher than he feels. Tell him that a day will come where he’ll look around and notice the world is still moving, that he’s survived in his memory. And the day’s to get on with after all.

  I look out at the street and the sky. I’ll tell him that outside it’s the same, look. The weather’s just as cloudy. The trees and the brick walls, the blackbirds still fly past our old window. Oh he’ll be fine, this boy. Like he’ll see now what it takes to survive here. His eyes like his da, his hands like mine, and something of his nan in him too. His blood is stern, I’ll tell him. He needn’t know why. What was it Ma used to say? As we deser
ve the rotten so’s we deserve the good. She used to tell me that when I was his age. So we must be deserving for the good to come. Well, I don’t know if I believe that. But then again, I didn’t know if I could believe in anything anymore.

  Well, I’ll believe in him. I’ll tell him that.

  Best to carry on Ardan, I’ll say. Look on wee wonder.

  NELSON

  Memory come. Sat in a cab rumbling along Bone Hill. Under my arm I hold my suitcase, the tag fluttering in the fast wind from the window. The road from Plymouth dock into town was long and loving, smelling all the way of mud and wet grass. Lord, this was the island I remember, my home. Maisie here and was waiting for me a short ride away. The boat-train journey back leave me plenty long hours to shape the memory of this place. I conjure up the smell, the buzzing motorcycle, the beachfront and all that. After I arrive, I just take it in. The dirt road, the quiet morning, the Soufrière Hills, Gages Mountain in the distance, the grass field and red roofing, the long line of poor tin abode. Nearly two year since I leave here. And now I was back for what I leave behind. My Maisie.

  I remember we turned and the cab wheel dig in, throwing up sand against the beach road. I gather my case and I pay the man. I turned then and looked out across the sea. I want soak it in, this moment. So I go slow. I make it out in the distance, Maisie mother’s roof by the lighthouse, next to the pier where the fishing boat was moored. I make my way past the grass toward the beach. I bend my shoe into the sand and kick them off one, two. I remembered that I walked this way barefoot as a boy.

  Up ahead I see some people down by the shoreline. There was a old man holding him trousers by the knee, lifting them high so the waves lap him feet. A young girl in a yellow dress running with a liquid black arm stretch wide, flying a circle around some other small boy sat poking a crab. And above, the blackbirds flying in a spiral.

  When I remember the day I went back to fetch my Maisie, I feel that nothing else matter in the world. The life we end up making together, the son we raise, and all the high and low tide that come and go between the years, the trouble we had. In the end, what do it matter when you have a moment like this to reminisce about? I remember how the wave sweep in and wash the dry sand around my feet. How I splay out the toe and dig into the sand. It was as if the pale light twinkling in the clear water was trying to offer me comfort.

  The beauty of the place lift my spirit then and for a moment I catch myself getting the pull back. There was something Plymouth could offer Maisie and me that London could not. The way this land simply exist on its own terms. Is a place more gentle. See the trees. The gigantic mountain beyond it. I think of all the hardness in London. The narrow road, the cold block tower, and the fool temper what have people push this way and that. So easy to get lost in the strangled madness of it. But Lord, as plain as the sand under the foot, I can live no other way. No matter how tempting the charm of island life, I was a islander no longer. And in London, it was worth the fight, if I can fight it with Maisie.

  I wondered if Maisie was waiting by the window. Maybe she had already spot me walking with my shoe in my hand. What will I say when I first see she? Dear Maisie, I will say, pack them bags, the future lie on a colder island.

  When I look up I see she. I hear the girlish call. Stood by the porch, reaching out like some angel to me. Heart raise higher than it ever have. Maisie Stewart, the pastor daughter. She barefoot in the sand like I. Want run toward the house, want sweep the girl up into arms, and take she back, in haste, across the sea. To live, to have a family in the city. We can know the storm of the place, I will say, fight the tide together, and someday, raise a Londoner of we own.

  EPILOGUE

  It’s a cracked road. A tangle of fragile points on a map. The Square, the Ends, our Estate. I think about that often. How easily a place like this can be torn to pieces. The smallest of lit flames or a single spark can reduce a playground to rubble. See us youngers, eyes cast high, brave-faced and shining. When the soldier-boy was bodied, when the mosque burned, when the riots came and the old hatreds bent the gates at the Square, the fury found us all dumb and able. We recognized the hard faces of the bad-mind breddas, the Muhajiroun and others. But it was our own hearts that buoyed us, made us thoughtless for the city, starved of feeling and any way to defend it, ennet.

  Abba would have told me that there was wisdom to be found in seeing cruelty so close and finding violence in the daylight. History, he said, is not a circle but a spiral of violent rhymes. We were meant to bear the foul mess, live on with our voices tied to verse, and those that could survive it would be worthy. This is the truth that our olders knew. Familiar with the echoes on road, they sensed the fury come but stepped back to let us learn our own frailty. That’s the deep strength that survives in this place, and now it’s our wisdom too.

  See the lights. After the rains swept the road clean, before the blood settled over, this place was aglow. It’s in that passing of time that people find themselves again. I watch the autumn leaves fall and the winters come and go. I see the faces I knew change and begin to grow older. See how time draws a margin, between my life and theirs, and how they all keep a part of that day with them.

  All that’s left now is to listen.

  After the riot tore down the Estate, I saw Ardan walk on. His were big dreams spent on a frightened mic, scattered and formless, letting his pen be brave for him. It remained his dream, though, for the better. He stopped trying to look for himself in the corners of a city that offered nothing for the wide-eyed. He drew a frame around it and I watched myman’s light fade from afar. Instead, Ardan found another way. He found a path where he could walk without stooping, hold his head up, live for smaller graces, and be happy. Happy enough, ennet. Those that seek it seldom find it.

  I think about Irfan. Time never felt more like an enemy to my brother, losing his battles by acre to some ceaseless djinn. My father’s light never touched him as it did me. So now I only think of our youth together, wrapped in imagination and early love. I know that we were happy then. The years were unkind, the burdens were ours, and in the end we grew unwound and far from our roots. But like my city I mourn him with all the love I can gather. Nothing in these Ends can last so easy, not even love. Nothing so tender can be left to fall alone. Those glimmers of our childhood ease my sadness though, with the hope that one day I will look up and see him again, unscarred by a world that never cared, just a boy with a brother on the floor by our bed. Maybe I never will, but I’ll have those memories still.

  Then Selvon emerges, myman who saw the pattern early and made moves to run through it. There are parts of this city that create the form of a person, molds them with its hard wisdom and distant cruelty. They see with the eyes of the city lights and measure their backs to the walls here. They drink the rain to tighten fibers and harden themselves against its many madnesses. Selvon was one of those that learned the relevance early, and held himself up to it. He took only defiance from the day the Square burned, refused to let the heavy air weigh him down. I still see him running, except now he wears the navy blue and red colors of his nation. His mother cheers him on. His father too, silently. He was the greatness, the blue calm. The best version of them all when he ran, a vessel for all their struggles. But I know Selvon ran faithless. A cool heart in a cold city, a place that rejected him and that he rejected. In that inescapable fight was his bravery, I suppose, since he beat away the hate in the same way he beat his own path out these Ends and to glory.

  Sometimes I’m angry for falling, at the fixed circumstance in which I fell. Other times I remember the summers previous where I’d ping the ball across the Square for Selvon to smack it past Ardan in goal with a worldy. The moments I miss most, and am angry for having lost, are the ones I spent with them. The anger subsides though, as it must. And then to clarity. My father shines through telling me that it’s not the city but us. We let ourselves be beaten. We allow it, ennet, and yet we’re all so surprised when our names are read and our ages with it. But
in this city, to be a younger is to survive the hard knocks, survive only. So here it all is, this London. A place that you can love, make rhymes out of pyres and a romance of the colors, talk gladly of the changes and the flux and the rise and the fall without feeling its storm rain on your skin and its bone-scarring winds, a city that won’t love you back unless you become insoluble to the fury, the madness of bound and unbound peoples and the immovables of the place. The joy. The light lies in the armored few, those willing to run, run on and run forever just to prove it possible. The only ones that can save us in the end are the heroes.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank all those who gave me the space to explore what I needed with this book.

  Thank you to Sophie, who found me. For your unwavering support and advice. I lucked out. Thanks to all at my U.S. publisher, MCD x FSG Originals. Foremost to Danny, for your courage. For all the faith, Sean McDonald, Debra Helfand, Logan Hill, Nina Frieman, Thomas Colligan, Richard Oriolo, and Chloe Texier-Rose. All those at my U.K. publisher, Tinder Press and Headline; Mary-Anne Harrington, working with you has been a dream. As it has been with Amy Perkins, Georgina Moore, Yeti Lambregts, Joe Yule, and Mark. To my first readers, whose feedback was invaluable, here’s to you: Adam, Linda, Katherine, and Nilesh. I am eternally, deeply thankful to all of you. Thank you to my mother and father for their patience in raising a wayward boy. I think of you daily. My brother Saliya for your hugs that mean more than you know. To Charlotte, friends, and family who are always there to provide good will with yays. Finally to Heidi. Your believing in me, when the world wouldn’t, made this possible. As always, you were right. To anyone else who needs the strength to keep on: start with love, as above, and go from there.