London Belongs to Us

by Sarra Manning

  My mum and Terry have a lot of friends who live in Stokey.

  Anyway, we’re not at the hip, arty, Hoxton end of Kingsland Road and we’re not at the free-range, organic Stoke Newington end either. We’re in Dalston, which is somewhere in the middle and it’s actually kind of rough and bleak and there’s lots of kebab shops and chicken shops and convenience shops that stay open all night.

  Grizzled old men slump on the pavement, nodding off over cans of extra-strong lager. Three girls have a loud, shrieky fight with a lot of hair tossing and handbag hitting outside a minicab office. A gang of hoodies huddle and congregate on a corner, but they stop talking as we walk past.

  Maybe it’s because it’s late and I’m wired from drinking espresso that tasted three times stronger than espresso should, but there’s a sense of menace in the air and I’m glad I’m not on my own, even if the silence between us is awkward. Sort of spiky too.

  ‘Don’t be mad at me,’ Vic suddenly says after three minutes of us not talking. ‘That thing with Audrey. I can’t help it.’

  ‘Can’t help what?’

  ‘Don’t even ask,’ Jean-Luc mutters and I turn my head in time to catch his extravagant eye roll. ‘Don’t encourage him.’

  ‘I can’t help falling in love with beautiful women. I fall so easily and so hard. But there are so many beautiful women, Sunny, and another one comes along and I fall in love with her and then I forget about the beautiful woman I was already in love with. I don’t mean to.’ Vic shoots me a sidelong, sultry glance. ‘I guess I have the soul of an artist or a … a poet knight … I guess I wasn’t made for these times. I can’t be in love with only one person at a time.’ He sighs. ‘It’s just so plebeian.’

  I don’t really know what plebeian means – I think it’s something do with being a bit pikey – but I know when someone is talking absolute utter bullshit.

  ‘Whatever !’ I breathe and I forget that Vic is cool and sort of French and out of my league and mysterious. Those things don’t really count when he’s also being a massive tool. ‘What a load of rubbish. You don’t actually fall in love with them.’

  ‘I do! One look, one smile, one snap of their fingers and I’m gone! My heart is theirs and theirs alone.’

  ‘Until you see a prettier girl the next day and decide you want to sleep with her instead,’ Jean-Luc says.

  ‘So when you say “fall in love” what you really mean is “get into their pants?”’ Typical! Boys are all the same. Total skeeves.

  ‘You say potato, I say potarto. You say tomayto, I say tomarto,’ Vic sings, like this is actually funny. ‘Potato, potarto. Tomayto, tomarto. Let’s call the whole thing off.’

  Vic is no longer a sharp-suited enigma to me. He’s starting to remind me of my little brother, Dan. Though Dan is only eleven, so he’s got some time to go before he starts acting all skeeve-like, but he and Vic are both equally irritating. ‘I am so close to smacking you right now,’ I say.

  Jean-Luc grins. ‘That’s a good idea. Do it. Go on. I won’t stop you.’

  ‘You don’t understand what it’s like to be ruled by your heart. To be a slave to your passion. A prisoner of your desires.’ Vic draws himself up and sweeps out a hand to encompass his desires. He really is quite the drama queen. ‘The problem with you British is that you’re so cold. And you, Jean-Luc, you’re too uptight.’

  ‘I’d rather be uptight than un imbécile ridicule …’

  ‘Actually, you’re just being a player,’ I say before they can have another jostling, snarky argument and also because this needs to be said and, for some bizarre reason, I’ve suddenly found the guts to say it. ‘You can dress it up like what you’re doing is beyond your control and that you’re an incurable romantic, but really you’re just hooking up with random girls. Then you don’t even have the nerve to dump them. To say, “Oh, it was just a bit of fun, but let’s not make this into anything more than it is.” You don’t even do that – you just disappear on them. It’s well shady.’

  ‘I don’t do that!’ Vic does a nifty quickstep that puts him in front of me so I have to come to a stop. ‘It’s a good thing to have a heart open to love.’

  ‘Sounds like the only thing that’s open is your flies,’ I mutter. ‘How do you think those girls feel when you give it all the chat, all those pretty words, sleep with them, then not even text? I bet each one of them feels like crap.’

  ‘No! Sunny, no!’ Vic tries to take my hand, but I yank it away from him. We’re not talking about me and Mark. Not at all. But in different circumstances, if that girl hadn’t turned up, if there’d been no kiss, I could be losing my virginity to Mark at this precise moment. So although I don’t know what it’s like to have sex with a boy – which is just about the most intimate thing you can do with another human being – and then get tossed aside, I’m beginning to understand what it’s like to love someone who thinks of you as something less. Yeah, I know exactly what it’s like to have a boy make you feel like shit.

  Vic is still walking backwards in front of me. ‘I only fall in love with girls who won’t love me back. Believe me, they make that quite clear. I don’t even get coffee or breakfast the next morning it’s all, “Don’t let the door hit you on the arse on your way out,”’ he says. ‘Most times we don’t swap numbers so I can’t text them. Audrey laughed when I asked for hers.’

  ‘If I was a girl, I wouldn’t give him my number,’ Jean-Luc says. ‘Look at his face! So untrustworthy!’

  All this time, we’ve been making short work of the long, long stretch of Kingsland Road. But we still haven’t cleared the dodgy-looking part and now I’m aware of three guys on bikes behind us. Like, really behind us. If I slowed down, I’d have tyre tracks down the backs of my calves.

  I speed up. Vic and Jean-Luc speed up too, like we have some kind of hive mind thing going on, but maybe it’s because they can hear the hissing too. Not so much hissing as a collective kissing of the teeth and that never leads to anything good.

  ‘Yo! Why’s a lighty hanging with a white boi?’ Chills ripcurl down my spine. ‘You too good for a brother?’

  Jean-Luc stops, jaw tight. ‘Don’t say anything,’ I whisper so quietly that I’m not sure he can hear me but then he takes my arm and Vic takes my other arm and we march down the road so fast that we almost skip.

  ‘Yo, bitch! You wanna see what I’m packing? Once you go black, you never go back.’

  Both Jean-Luc and Vic stop again. ‘Come on!’ I pull them along. I know it’s not right for people to say those things. They might be black, but they’re still being racist. Like all I am to them is the colour of my skin. Which I’m kind of used to but usually from the other side of the fence.

  Still, both Mum and Dad agree that I should never engage when I’m in a tense situation. ‘Walk on by,’ Mum sings like Dionne Warwick because she always tries to inject a little light humour and musical stylings into her dire warnings, while Dad just lectures me on knife crime statistics.

  Besides, someone at school’s cousin was totally stabbed to death on the 29 bus when he tried to break up a fight. It was on the news and everything.

  ‘Keep moving!’ I force the words out between gritted teeth and they’re riding in circles around us now, hoods pulled down low over their faces.

  ‘Hey, baby girl, you want a real man?’

  I can tell that we’ve now left the bad stretch of Kingsland Road because I see a guy with a pointy beard in a bowler hat riding a unicycle, but we’re still being harassed by the hoodies who get nearer and nearer each time they cycle round us.

  ‘Bitch, you need to suck on my dick!’

  ‘Assez! Ferme ta gueule! ’ Jean-Luc snaps and he grabs the handlebars of the nearest bike. ‘That’s an unforgivable way to talk to someone.’

  ‘Just leave it,’ I whisper fiercely because his two friends have stopped and I wait for the flash of a blade, a pool of blood, but all six of us, three on one side, three on the other, are still. Watchful. Waiting.

  ‘You
should apologise,’ Vic says thoughtfully. ‘Then you should probably go home. How old are you anyway? Eleven? Twelve?’

  I tense up, shoulders hitting my ears. Try to remember what I learned when I was earning my Brownies first-aid badge, though I don’t think we covered multiple stab wounds.

  ‘I’m not twelve. I’s sixteen, innit.’ He’s indignant. Draws himself up to stand on his pedals. ‘Course I am.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Vic and Jean-Luc say in unison. They’ve picked a great time to get over their snit.

  ‘Are you going to say sorry?’ Jean-Luc asks. He and Vic are tall, wiry even, but they’re pastry chefs and baristas by trade and I really don’t fancy their chances. ‘Or are we going to have to make you?’

  ‘You can’t make us do shit, man,’ one of the others says but his voice is all squeaky like a) he really is eleven and b) he’s secretly bricking it. ‘You disrespect my blud and I cut you.’

  ‘Yeah, right. If you were going to cut us, you’d have done it by now.’ My God. That was me! Like my subconscious has decided it doesn’t care about getting knifed. That it’s fed up of doing nothing while I let yet more boys make me unhappy. Yay for my unconscious! Now it’s my turn to draw myself up. ‘For the record, I don’t want anything to do with your penises, whatever colour they are. I mean, rude!’

  ‘OK.’ The smallest one immediately wilts like a week-old lettuce. His head hangs down. ‘Sorry.’

  Jean-Luc and Vic step off to the side like they know I’ve got this. That I have to deal with these three, if there’s ever any hope that I might be able to deal with Mark when I finally catch up to him.

  ‘Fuck that! I ain’t saying sorry to no half-breed bitch,’ the taller one spits and his two friends immediately shuffle their bikes away from him.

  ‘Shut up!’ one of them yelps and he gives me a wary side-eye, before he nods to his friend and they pedal off. ‘We got to go now, innit.’

  I hold out the broom in front of me, like it’s an ancient fighting stick, and I can feel my hair ripple in the faint breeze and maybe for once in my life I’m being a bit of a badass. ‘So, you calling a sister a half-breed bitch now, are you, bruv?’

  ‘I ain’t your bruv,’ he says, but his voice has got all squeaky now too. I actually feel a little bit sorry for him. ‘And I ain’t apologising for shit.’

  But not that sorry. ‘Oh yeah, you’re still a big man, even without your mates, aren’t you?’ I take a step nearer and I scrape his chest ever so gently with the bristly end of the brush. He gives a panicked cry, backs away onto the road and tries to do a wheelie but can’t quite manage it.

  ‘Bitch!’ he shouts one last time as he pedals like his very life depends on it.

  I turn back to Jean-Luc and Vic, who makes an ‘I’m not worthy’ gesture. ‘I can’t believe I just did that!’

  ‘You know that we’d have been there if anyone went down,’ Vic says. ‘But you looked like you could handle it.’

  ‘Yeah! I did handle it! One brush with my broom and he totally caved.’ They fall into step beside me and we start walking again. ‘Just so you know, though, Vic, I still think you’re a dick for the way you treated Audrey.’

  ‘And I think you’re a dick for giving girls my name. Despicable! Sunny, how do you say, er, véreux?’

  ‘Er, you what?’

  ‘You know, um, louche?’

  ‘Oh, right! It’s well shady. You knew you were doing something wrong, which is why you pretended you were Jean-Luc.’

  ‘Well shady,’ Jean-Luc says but it sounds ridiculous with a French accent, which Vic points out as we come across a crowd of people throwing serious shapes outside a convenience store that’s pumping out deep, deep, deep house.

  ‘At least I am French, not like you, le rosbif,’ Jean-Luc is saying and they’re obviously going to be at it for quite some time.

  ‘This must be the place I was telling you about,’ I say but they ignore me.

  ‘For the last time, I am French! I’m as French as you are!’

  ‘N’importe quoi! ’

  I leave them to get on with it and squirm my way through the people having it large outside. I can’t quite believe what I’m seeing with my own eyes.

  As advertised, it’s a rave in a convenience store.

  There are people queuing up at the counter to buy smokes and chewy and bottles of water, but in the aisles, amid the loo roll, the bags of crisps and packets of biscuits, and the cold cabinet full of milk and cans of fizzy pop and Polish sausages, people dance.

  Like, really dancing. Like they’re in a club with strobe lights and a smoke machine and the floor is heaving. Except they’re dancing in a shop, under a flickering fluorescent strip, and having to sidestep people wanting a packet of Hobnobs and a jar of Nescafé.

  There’s even a DJ on the decks by an open doorway hung with plastic strips, which must lead to a stock-room.

  It takes a while for my brain to buffer. Then I do a quick sweep of the store but Mark isn’t here. I glance towards the counter and then I see her and my heart doesn’t just sink, it plummets to the floor, then crawls somewhere to hide.

  Sitting behind the till is Jeane Smith.

  TV star. Newspaper columnist. Lifestyle blogger. Queen of Twitter. Empress of Instagram. Mad, bad and thoroughly obnoxious. I can’t stand her.

  She was two years above me at school, thank God she’s left now, and she’s friends with Emmeline, which means that even when she’s talking to Emmeline, she ignores me. I haven’t amassed enough cool points for someone like Jeane to acknowledge my right to breathe the same air as her.

  But then again, Jeane has nearly a million followers on Twitter. She knows everybody. Or she knows everybody in London and I really need the services of somebody who knows everybody in London.

  I pick up my heart, shove it back in my chest and join the queue at the counter.

  Vic and Jean-Luc are still outside. They’re jostling. Again. On a purely objective level, I can appreciate the hotness of the two of them jostling. I’m heartsore but not dead.

  Then the couple in front of me pay for their Rizlas and a mountain of snacks because they’re obviously going home to skin up. They reek of skunk. Just standing behind them is enough to get me second-hand stoned, but I’m not. I wish I were because it would be easier to act all cool and nonchalant as I smile at Jeane.

  I say smile; what I mean is a forced facial grimace that I’m sure makes me look like a rhesus monkey. ‘Hey, Jeane.’

  ‘Hey,’ she says, all narrow eyes and suspicion writ large, like I’m some kind of stalker when I don’t even follow her on Twitter. I did but she didn’t follow me back (not even after several three-way chats with her and Emmeline about everything from The Great British Bake Off to what Emmeline’s roller derby name should be), so I unfollowed her. Like Jeane would even notice. ‘What can I do you for, then?’

  Maybe Jeane’s career as a professional gobshite has crashed and burned because she seems to be working behind the till. I try another smile. I don’t think I’ve ever despised myself more. ‘We used to go to school together. I mean, you were two years ahead of me but, well, I’m best mates with Emmeline. You know, Roller Derby Emmeline.’

  ‘Oh? Oh!’ Jeane nods. She frowns. ‘Hunny? Bunny?’

  ‘Sunny!’

  ‘Sunny!’ says Vic’s voice in my ear. He and Jean-Luc nudge past me. ‘Get some chocolate, we’ll get some crisps. Oh, Jeane! Looking quite lovely as ever.’

  What I can see of Jeane, because most of her is obscured by the till, is wearing a blue check polyester overall. She also has most of her hair tied up in a scarf, but the hair I can see is aquamarine.

  It’s a whole lot of look.

  I catch Jean-Luc’s eye and his lips twist a crucial three millimetres. He waves at Jeane. ‘Enchanté,’ he murmurs, then turns back to me. ‘Crisps?’

  ‘Doritos, if they’ve got them.’

  ‘So, you’re hanging out with the Godards,’ Jeane says. ‘How very interesting.’r />
  ‘Not that intere—’

  ‘You managed to find the only two boys in London with hair almost as big as yours. Your hair is really big,’ she adds accusingly. ‘I wish I could get my hair that big.’

  If I had a pound for every time a white girl told me that she wanted hair like mine, then I’d have about a hundred and fifty pounds more in my Post Office savings account than I actually do.

  ‘Actually, I only met them tonight. They’re helping me find my boyfriend, Mark.’ I thought I was becoming immune but just saying his name makes my insides lurch the same way they do when my mum texts me to tell me that we need to have ‘a talk’ when I got home. It’s like my digestive tract has prophetic powers. Nothing signals doom, heartache and possibly being grounded like your stomach lurching.

  It lurches now but Jeane just says, ‘Yes, I know Mark. Boring. Emmeline loathes him. Says you could do so much better.’

  It’s nothing Emmeline hasn’t said to me before but her taking those thoughts and sharing them with other people like Jeane makes my stomach lurch again. It’s a minor violation of the girl code.

  ‘Yeah, well …’ I try to bluster, but the thing is, Emmeline was right about Mark. All those months when I’d pined for him from afar, she’d been all pursed lips and ‘Really? Him? You don’t think he’s kind of basic?’ but I’d been too besotted to listen. Besides, Emmeline was gay, what did she know about what made a good boyfriend? A lot more than I do, it turns out. ‘Maybe I can do better. But first I have to find Mark so I can … y’know. I’m going to find him and then …’

  ‘And then what?’ Jeane leans forward on her elbows and all but shoves her face into mine. ‘Is this about those photos that did the rounds earlier?’