Sour

by Tracey Miller

  The one who rang moments after Tyrone had left was typical. He called himself Shaquille. I didn’t know no one by that name, but he insisted he knew me.

  “Come and meet me. I want to run something by you.”

  “Well, if you’ve got something to say, you might as well say it on the phone. That’s what phones are for.”

  “I know you’re about this ting.”

  He was letting me know the stripes I’d earned. He told me he had been watching me.

  “I know you’ve got heart. I know no one will fuck with you. How about you come and work for me?”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Why not? You’re acting like you don’t know me,” said the voice. “I’ve watched you grow. I’ve heard your name around.”

  I told him straight. I wasn’t prepared to make another older man rich. If I wanted a pimp, I’d go out on the streets.

  “Look, it’s not going to happen. Thanks but no thanks. I’m not anyone’s sendout.”

  He sounded almost offended.

  “If you come and work for me you’ll be earning crazy Ks …”

  “No disrespect intended, man, but I’m going to do my own thing. Laters, yeah.”

  I hung up.

  It was in the fug of this dark cloud of a mood that I went upstairs and took the letter out of my bedside drawer. It was crumpled and faded from re-reading.

  “Yo bloodtype, what’s popping?” Yusuf wrote. “I’ve bucked into a couple Man Dem in here from the road. I’m cool. I’ve got peeps around me. We’re good. We’ve been jamming on the wing, chilling out, playing pool. Am getting used to tings. Ain’t that bad, once man gets into the rithim, innit.”

  The rest of the letter asked about faces from Roupell Park.

  “Send Mum love from her boy. Hope she’s not giving you too much shit.”

  I hadn’t told him about Mum. Thought it best if he didn’t know. He probably had enough things to be thinking about in there. I knew how unhelpful it was hearing news from home, which you could do nothing about.

  “Later, sis. Yusuf.”

  He had drawn a doodle of a skinny boy, smoking a doobie.

  I folded the letter up and put it back into its place in the corner of the drawer.

  Maybe I was worrying too much? After all, he sounded in the letter like he was holding up OK. Perhaps he wasn’t quite as innocent as I’d like to think. Better. Maybe he’d come out stronger, harder, less naïve.

  If he truly was becoming a bit of a bad boy, he should be safe. I corrected myself. No one was ever safe in Feltham – that was well known. It was a pressure cooker for grievances across the city. No one was ever safe from harm – from rivals or themselves.

  No matter how hard I tried to look at the positives, I kept on coming back to the same feeling. This was my worst nightmare. For the first time in my life, I was heartbroken.

  David

  Shotting was proving lucrative, I couldn’t deny that, but all that activity round my house was getting bait. I’d bought myself some nice threads and a car – a sweet, sporty thing that made me feel like Brixton’s answer to Penelope Pitstop.

  As time went on, I began to think it might not do any harm, when someone asks me what I do, to have an alternative response to ‘road chick’.

  I remembered how much I’d liked doing the girls’ hair at East Sutton Park. I was master at applying false eyelashes in a hurry, and could do Sixties’ streaks of black liquid eyeliner with my eyes shut. It was decided: I enrolled on a hair and beauty course at college.

  With the help of some of Dr Chris’s contacts, I applied to college and got a place. The beginning of term, I put on my best tartan blazer and short skirt, and backcombed my beehive till it was standing tall and triumphant. Hell yeah, Amy Winehouse ain’t got nothing on me.

  “First day?”

  I nodded.

  “Me too.”

  The class had finished and I was hanging back, trying to avoid all the excited first-day chat among all the eager beavers trying to make friends.

  I assumed another class must have just finished next door at the same time, on account of all the boys hanging around in the corridor, but found out later they had come especially to sniff around the beauty students. Apparently, it’s well known that all the nice chicks study beauty therapy.

  David was studying business and computing. I’ll be honest with you, he was not my cup of tea, but over those first few weeks of college that boy grew on me like a rash.

  I mean, for starters, he had sideburns shaped like the Versace symbol. Oh my days, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Big square things that must have taken him ages every morning. But the boy had style, you had to give him that. He was freshly dressed with his designer gear, Moschino trousers and the latest trainers.

  There was one big difference between David and all the other boys I knew. All his gear was legitimately worked for, darling. A normal kid. He was the only person I knew who went to a cash machine to get money.

  His mother was a primary school teacher, his stepfather a first-aider at St Johns, and they lived in a house with a garden in Dulwich. A proper family. I had never known anyone like that before. His was like legitimate money from a legitimate family.

  Yeah, he knew some of the Ghetto Boys from New Cross and Deptford, but he was from good stock.

  Even the good boys can’t avoid the bad boys sometimes, you know.

  Maybe that was the problem. Did I fall in love with the boy or his background? Sometimes it was hard to tell.

  There was no need to be Sour with David. That didn’t impress him. I had to learn how to be myself.

  “You should come and roll with me one day,” he said one afternoon after college. He had a car. It was his mum’s, which she let him borrow.

  “Yeah, go on, come for a drive. Come and see my endz. You don’t know my endz.”

  So, I took him up on the offer. I switched the phone on silent, and crossed into SE22.

  His house was on a proper road. There were no estates nearby and the door had a number with a bell on the outside.

  There was a wheelie bin outside in the front garden, and a couple steps leading to an outer door with a stained-glass window.

  Wow.

  The hallway smelled of very fresh laundry. Everything smelled clean. There were fresh flowers in a vase, and a big open-plan kitchen led out to a patio at the back.

  The bathroom even had a shower cubicle and a bath.

  “Hello.”

  His mum was a very swanky, stylish-looking lady from the Dominican Republic. She was the kind of mum who cooked food, and froze it and stored it. It was thanks to her he knew how to make spaghetti Bolognese, and chicken and rice, and was trained in how to keep a house perfect.

  Yeah, he was raised well, man. He was neat and tidy, and knew how to fold things. You could see from their house that everything had a place.

  “Who do we have here?”

  She seemed relaxed.

  “Mum, this is my new yat.”

  “And what is a yat?” she laughed, washing her hands under the tap, and wiping them on a floral dishcloth.

  “My new girl.”

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  I smiled my sweetest smile and shook her hand. I wondered what she was thinking, of the jewel piercing in my lip, or the swirls of black Islamic script I’d just had tattooed on my cheekbones.

  But if she was disapproving, she had the good manners not to show it.

  I could feel my phone vibrating in my bag, and wished it would stop.

  “What’s for dinner?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Any preference,” he asked me, picking up the remote control and getting comfy on the sofa.

  I shook my head.

  “Any of that chicken stew left?”

  “Yes,” his mum called through. “In the pot. Help yourselves.”

  “Sweet.”

  I couldn’t imagine him being rude to his mum. In fact, I
got the feeling he was very protective of her, the way she was protective of him. That evening, watching TV together and finishing the stew, followed by ice cream, I managed to avoid most of his questions about my family.

  From then on, I was always round his way. I took pleasure in switching off my phone in the evenings, adopting his life and pretending it was my own. I was craving legitimacy, and if it was too late to get it myself, I’d just have to channel it through someone else.

  David seemed proud of his family. He talked a lot about his stepdad training the local football team at the weekends, and doing his first-aid shifts. In my world, first aid meant trying not to panic while pressing your hand on some yout’s wound. Or, more often than not, taking them to hospital and dumping them in the parking bay.

  We even walked down the street holding hands – I’d never done that with anyone. He introduced me to people who cared less about being a brand-name, and more what course you studied.

  If he said, let’s go out to get some food, he didn’t mean the kebab shop, he meant an actual restaurant. When he bought me presents, I knew he hadn’t tiefed them.

  If we walked past a new café or restaurant, he’d say things like “Should we go and try it?”

  Things like that thrilled me. I had other top drug-dealers who use to think they could woo me. Legitimacy was much more exciting.

  So I began college with two lives: the one at home, with the phone always ringing in an empty house, and the other with David. For the first few months, at least, I managed to prevent the sour bits from meeting the sweet.

  One night, I asked David to drop me off on Brixton Hill. I was about to get out, when he reached for my wrist, pulled me towards him, and kissed me. I liked the way he kissed – like he meant it.

  He stroked my face, and smiled his stupid smile. “You’re beautiful,” he said.

  “Shut your mouth!” I shot back.

  It was so much easier to respond with an insult than just accept the compliment. As soon as I said it, I wished I could take it back and replace it with something less hostile, something softer. But softness didn’t come naturally. It made me nervous.

  He stroked my cheek again, studying the tattoo.

  “When did you get that done?”

  I’d made a promise to myself I would get the tattoo on my cheekbone as soon as I got out of prison but I wasn’t about to tell Mr Legitimate about that colourful part of his new girlfriend’s past. Not yet.

  “A few months ago.”

  “And what does it mean?”

  “It says God in Arabic. Allah.”

  He ran his finger over the dark script, which swirled subtly against my skin.

  “It makes you look sexy.”

  This boy was confusing me. It was meant to make me look fierce.

  “It ain’t there for sexiness,” I growled.

  He kissed the other cheek. “Well, I like them.”

  I flinched but he pulled me into another kiss, until my guard dropped.

  “See you tomorrow.”

  I didn’t know whether to smile or scowl, but in the end I mustered just a strange combination of the two.

  I wasn’t in the mood for going straight home into the empty house, so decided to check out the road, to see who was rolling.

  I was pleased to spot Wayne, a character I knew from a nearby estate, and a few others hanging on Coldharbour Lane.

  “OK, stranger, how are you?”

  Our mums had known each other back in the day, but it had been a long time since I seen his face. He was as big and cuddly as ever. That’s why they called him Blobby. Most boys would be uncomfortable with this, but not Wayne. He wore it with pride.

  “So you out now? When did you get out?”

  “Few months back, innit. It wasn’t so bad. How’s your mum?”

  “Yeah, she’s good, man, busy with the church, y’know how it is, innit.”

  “So what’s a good mama’s boy doing out here so late?” I teased.

  “Man bored, innit. Nuttin ain’t going on. You got something going?”

  He flashed a cheeky smile.

  “You always got something going on, girl. Bet you do. Got some friends for us?” he teased back.

  His friends were now paying attention, sniggering.

  “No, I’m rolling by myself. That’s how I’m doing it right now. This is the new me. I don’t need no friends.”

  His older friend cut in.

  “So who’s the chick, Blobby?”

  “This is Sour, from Brixton Hill.”

  Why did guys always do that? Introduce you like you weren’t there?

  “Sour? But you look so cute and innocent,” he laughed. I could feel it coming. I took a deep breath and waited.

  “Why do they call you Sour? Is it coz you got a sour pussy?”

  And there it was.

  “You’re hilarious. Chris Rock ain’t got nothing on you, man.”

  He was still cracking up at his own joke.

  Yeah, I wasn’t missing anything on the road.

  My phone was buzzing again. These people were getting anxious.

  “You gonna be OK getting home?” asked Wayne. “Young girl like you shouldn’t be out this late, man. It’s dark.”

  He was a nice guy, Wayne.

  “I can look after myself, don’t worry about me. More to the point, it’s you guys who should be worried. Why don’t you guys come off the road, before the Feds come pick you up, and start bothering you?”

  Wayne shook his head, unconcerned.

  “Feds ain’t gonna bother us. We ain’t doing nuttin.”

  “OK, say no more. Make sure you roll safe.”

  “You too, see you round.”

  And I didn’t think anything more of it until I switched on the news several weeks later.

  Inshallah

  Salaam Alaikum,

  Here’s hoping all is well with you, sis. I’m fine, honest. How’s Mum? I’m missing her chicken and rice, but tell her I’ll be home soon. I’ve been training at the gym a lot, and been praying. There’s a chaplaincy here, and the other Muslim boys are teaching me lots of things about Islam.

  We got it so wrong before, but I understand it now.

  I can just imagine Mum’s face when you tell that. She’s gonna be so proud! I’m gonna know the Qur’an as well as her.

  Seriously though, I’m in good spirits. I’m hopeful about the appeal. Allah knows best. Nothing can happen without Allah’s say-so.

  It was tough at first, but since I’ve been praying, things have been making a lot of sense. Have you been fasting? Maybe you should consider coming back to Islam? Life will be better for you. We had it all wrong before. We weren’t taking it serious back then.

  They also give you courses in here. They do brick-laying, motor mechanics, painting and decorating. I’m doing mechanics. It’s going well.

  Thanks for your letter. I think a beauty salon sounds like a great idea!

  I’ll send you another VO soon.

  See when you come, Insh’allah,

  Yusuf

  He had signed off with something in Arabic that I didn’t understand.

  I lay back on my bed and put the folded letter with the rest. On my bed was a toy sausage dog, a present from David. Along the length of the dog’s body was a shiny satin slogan: I love you thiiiiiiiiiiiis much. I pulled it out from behind my back, where it was making me uncomfortable, and chucked it across the room.

  I read the letter again.

  I was proud of my little brother. I’d noticed a change in his letters. He was writing more eloquently for a start, and clearly reading a lot. He had never been the strongest at school, but it seemed like he was trying hard. He was looking on life more seriously. His praise of my beauty salon white lie felt like advice from a big man.

  It sounded like he had found peace.

  Yeah, I liked receiving his letters. They reassured me. Maybe I had been wrong? Maybe Feltham was capable of doing some good, after all?

 
Say what you like about the regime inside, but my little brother didn’t want to be a gangster no more. That was something.

  The letters that followed reassured me even more. He had started doing talks at the prison mosques, and volunteering to do readings. He was finding a new role for himself.

  Even when his appeal failed, and his parole got knocked back, his strength of character surprised me. He said he had prayed a lot, and that the anger was fading. Even when I wrote to tell him about Mum, his reply impressed me, and suggested, once more, that returning to the religion of our childhood had brought him the peace and comfort that I was now craving.

  On the real, on some level, I envied him.

  I put away his letter, and busied myself, looking for a spare space to store Winston’s latest delivery.

  The phone rang. My lifestyle was tiring me out. Not so much the work itself, but keeping it hidden from David. People were getting annoyed. Some had already gone elsewhere. It was only a matter of time before Winston started to complain.

  I looked at the clock. Where was he? David had looked at the fridge and complained it was bare. He was always complaining these days. He was spoiled, that was his trouble. I had told him, this ain’t his house. If he wanted Masterchef, he could go back to his mum’s.

  He had stormed out, real angry.

  That was at 2pm. It was almost 9pm now. The phone rang again. I couldn’t ignore it any longer.

  “Yeah? Depends. How much do you want?”

  At that moment the door opened. It was David, standing with his hands full of shopping.

  I ducked into the hallway and up the stairs so he couldn’t hear.

  “Come round in 10.”

  I hung up, and put the phone down.

  David stared me up and down. “You look skinny. You never used to be so skinny.”

  “That’s coz man been waiting on you to fill up the fridge for days.”

  He started unpacking the shopping and slamming the packets of microwave food into the shelves, not saying a word. The silence hung like a black cloud between us. He was angry. Even angrier than when he left.

  “Met Jal when I was out, a friend of someone called Stimpy … Said he knew you.”

  The name rang a vague bell, but it was the mention of Stimpy that got me worried. I pretended I didn’t care.