London Belongs to Us

by Sarra Manning

  ‘Actually, I think it’s a maisonette,’ I say and she gulps again. ‘You know, Mark lives in a flat too when he’s slumming it in North London?’

  Tabitha sighs. ‘So, what are we going to do about him? We should do something, right?’

  ‘I’m going to take him down,’ I say and I’m relieved that the Sunny of before hasn’t left the building. ‘You in?’

  ‘The thing is, I’m not good at confrontations,’ Tabitha says. ‘I hate scenes and people being angry with me so I’m in in spirit, but I wouldn’t be much practical help in a taking-Mark-down scenario.’

  ‘Oh.’ That was all right. In my still-hazy plans to take Mark down I hadn’t planned on having a sidekick, but it might have been nice. ‘Well, I suppose …’

  ‘But I have the means that will help you take Mark down.’ Tab rummages in her bag and pulls out a phone. ‘His phone.’ She holds it up so I can see the Chelsea FC logo on its rubber case.

  Was she kidding me? Was this all some elaborate double bluff after all? I come to a halt. Hands on hips, scowl on my face – Jean-Luc would be suing for copyright, which just makes me madder when I think about how I dragged him on a wild good chase, and for what? No wonder he stormed off. ‘How dumb do you two think I am?’

  Tabitha looks like she might throw up. She was right about not liking confrontation. ‘I d-d-don’t think you’re dumb.’

  ‘That isn’t Mark’s phone. Mark’s phone is in an Arsenal case,’ I bite out.

  ‘But Mark doesn’t support Arsenal. He supports Chelsea.’

  Oh. Oh! Terry would say that supporting Chelsea was the worst betrayal of all, but Tabitha and I wouldn’t agree with him. We both look at the phone and then at each other.

  ‘Two phones!’ we say.

  I had wondered how Mark, of all people, had juggled two girlfriends, even two different Facebook pages with different passwords, for months and now it was obvious how. Two phones.

  It all makes a sick, dull sort of sense. ‘What a git. What a sneaky, slimy git.’

  Tabitha sniffs. ‘Takes after his father, obviously.’

  ‘What’s that? I know his parents are divorced but what’s that about his dad?’

  Tab looks like she might burst from all the secrets she knows about Mark. ‘It was a huge scandal,’ she tells me breathlessly. ‘He headed up the asset management division of a big American bank … He was involved in some kind of insider trading. Not insider enough because he ended up making some very bad investments. Very bad. He got sacked. My stepfather said he was lucky not to go to prison and they had to sell their house and Mark had to leave Harrow …’

  ‘He said his dad wouldn’t pay his school fees once his parents got divorced. Made it sound like he didn’t fit in there anyway because he was such a rebel.’

  ‘Hardly! He was captain of the rugby team.’

  ‘Mark doesn’t play rugby. He plays football.’

  We both look at each other again, then shake our heads. ‘He’s such a liar. Though I do feel a bit bad that they lost all their money. No wonder his mum is so bitter and mean.

  ‘Oh no,’ Tab assures me. ‘She was bitter and mean long before they lost all their money.’

  We carry on walking. ‘How come you even have his phone in the first place?’

  Tabitha smiles proudly. ‘I stole it out of the back pocket of his jeans. He didn’t feel a thing.’ She waggles her fingers. ‘I’m the best shoplifter at St Mary’s.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to be an accessory or a fence or …’

  ‘Sunny! If you really are on this vengeance mission to take Mark down then you need the phone.’ Tabitha shoves the phone at me so I have no choice but to take it. ‘Trust me on this.’

  I weigh the phone in the palm of my hands. It’s tempting but …’ I don’t even know his passcode.’

  ‘I do. It’s one, two, three, four.’ Tabitha rolls her eyes. ‘For that alone he deserves to have his phone hacked, and there are things on it we can use to get back at him.’

  I’m not gonna lie, I’m intrigued. ‘Yeah? What kind of things?’

  We sit down on a low wall that skirts the manicured lawns of a mansion block and Tab unlocks the phone, goes into the photos and …

  ‘Oh my days! Why has he taken so many pictures of his dick?’

  Tabitha giggles and keeps scrolling. ‘No, wait. There’s one where he’s resting his sunglasses on it. Here it is.’

  ‘Ewwww!’

  ‘We could send it to everyone in his address book?’ Tabitha suggests. ‘That includes both his grandmothers and his old housemaster and nanny.’

  I rub my hands together in delight. ‘Yeah! Let’s do that … oh, but no. That’s not fair on his grandmothers – I mean, there are some things you just can’t come back from, and he’s underage.’

  ‘So what?’

  I shudder at the thought. ‘We’d get done for circulating child porn.’ Worse than that. ‘And we’d be put on the Sex Offenders’ Register and that would totally stuff up our chances of getting into our first-choice universities.’

  ‘You’re right.’ Tabitha subsides with a little sigh. ‘Any other ideas?’

  ‘Well, I have to find him first anyway. It’s not like he’s been calling me on his Arsenal phone, is it?’

  And right on cue as we get up off the wall, Tabitha’s phone rings. My heart skips half a beat.

  ‘Mummy? Why are you yelling at me? Oh God! I am home. Well, I’m on my way home. I’m literally, like, five seconds from home.’ So not Mark, then. If my mum wasn’t in France, she’d be on the phone too, demanding to know why it was gone five in the morning and I still wasn’t in my bed. In fact, she’d probably have the police and Interpol scramble a few helicopters and drones to track me down.

  Tabitha walks as she talks and rolls her eyes in an exaggerated fashion as I hear a voice squawking at her. ‘God, it’s not that late. Yes, I suppose it is, but another way of looking at it is that actually it’s quite early.’

  It is early and nearly light outside. The sky is a beautiful pale blue. Birds are tweeting in the trees. It’s breezy but already close like it’s going to be another hot day.

  There are no signs of life on these streets with their big houses all painted fantastic colours: yolky yellow, a sea green that makes me think of the nineteen-thirties lido we went to every day when we were on holiday in France last year, a smudgy purple, Calpol pink, a deep, dusky blue that reminds me of my grandmother’s collection of Wedgwood china.

  ‘Mummy! God! I’m practically walking through the front door!’

  I don’t even know where we are and I can’t even load up Google Maps and then I wonder what people did before Google Maps existed – they must have got lost all the time. Then we turn a corner and then another corner and suddenly I know where I am.

  Not in Chelsea at all, but Notting Hill, which means that, in a way, although I’m miles from Crouch End, I’m not that far from home.

  GRANDMA PAULINE’S PINEAPPLE PUNCH RECIPE

  1 litre of full-fat milk

  1 can (400 mls) of coconut milk

  1 litre of pineapple juice

  1 pinch of ginger

  1 pinch of cinnamon

  Mix together in your biggest bowl and serve with a whole lot of love.

  5.30 a.m.

  NOTTING HILL to LADBROKE GROVE

  The first official mention of the place we know as Notting Hill is in 1536 as Knottynghull and may be a reference to a Saxon king called Cnotta. Bet he was a lotta lotta fun.

  In the nineteenth century the area was unofficially known as the Potteries and Piggeries. The local heavy clay was used to make bricks and tiles, and many pig farmers, moved on from Marble Arch, had settled there.

  The Ladbroke family, who gave their name to nearby Ladbroke Grove, built all sorts of big fancy houses in Notting Hill, but really rich types didn’t want to live somewhere so far from the centre of town. Poor loves.

  The area was quickly taken over by slum landlords who would
cram several families into one house. Then, in the Fifties, immigrants from the West Indies settled in the area, which led to racial tension and riots.

  The poor living conditions began to improve with the creation of the Notting Hill Housing Trust in 1963 and the first Notting Hill Carnival, which celebrated the culture of the area’s new residents. Now poshos and poors, Trustafarians and Rastafarians live happily (mostly) side by side.

  Tabitha and I hug it out and make plans to hang out and debrief once the Mark business is done, then she goes her way and I go mine.

  I’m on Ledbury Road and if I keep walking, then take a couple of right turns, then a left and straight on, I’ll come to my grandparents’ block of flats. It’s a fifteen-minute walk, tops. Fifteen minutes is all it takes to get from a multi-million-pound Notting Hill neighbourhood to a council estate in Ladbroke Grove.

  I’ve done this walk with Mum many times over the years. We spend ages poking about in the vintage shops so she can sneer at the mark-up. And back in the day we’d stop in at what was then my great-grandma’s flat long enough for a cup of tea, a slice of her everyday fruitcake and for her to say that we should have rung first because she was in the middle of watching Deal or No Deal.

  It’s my grandparents’ flat now and, boy, are they going to be surprised to see me on the doorstep. Like all old people, apart from Terry’s mum who lazes in bed until eleven most days, they both get up really early. Gramps works the first shift at Park Royal bus garage and Grandma is a carer who starts her round at six. Except, it’s Sunday and neither of them work on a Sunday, because it’s the day of rest. ‘If God wanted us to go to work on a Sunday then he’d never have invented the Sabbath,’ Grandma is very fond of saying, but they’ll still be up at first light even though if God had wanted us to get up early on a Sunday, he’d never have invented the lie-in.

  The night has gone on for so long that it’s hard to believe it’s morning. I’ve seen five-thirty in the morning before but from the other side; getting up to see the sunrise when Mum has one of her notions and drags us all to Parliament Hill Fields. Five-thirty in the morning has a completely different vibe when you haven’t slept: a grungy, grimy, grody vibe that can only be achieved by wearing the same pair of knickers for nearly twenty-four hours.

  Because it’s now officially morning, I try to tell myself that the occasional person I see up ahead or on the other side of the street is a virtuous early riser and not a night-dweller up to no good. I also try to tell myself that I really haven’t got that far to go, but every step takes every ounce of energy I have and lasts for at least a minute and just generally hurts.

  It’s best not to get too fixated on how many steps I have left to take (about seven hundred and fifty, by my estimation.) Instead I think about what I’ll say to Grandma. Something along the lines of, ‘Oh, so I couldn’t sleep and I thought I’d surprise you. Surprise!’ Then I’ll have to say, ‘Actually, about going to church, well, I’m not really dressed for it and I’m having serious doubts about organised religion.’

  Ultimately, my protests will be ignored. Grandma will run me a bath and Gramps will make me egg and toast soldiers, then they’ll insist I go to church with them. There is a slim chance that they might take one look at me – I have to be looking very rough by now – and send me straight to bed, or else I could go home to my own bed, which would take at least an hour. AT THE VERY LEAST.

  I come to a halt to ponder my dilemma and it’s then that the first one drives by. I stop and blink. Maybe I’m hallucinating. Then the second one slowly rolls past, and another one and I see it’s a whole procession of vehicles. Flat-bed trucks that look like birds of paradise and exotic flowers. Open-top buses bedecked with tinsel and bling. If I listen very carefully I can almost hear the steel drums, see those beautiful women who look like butterflies dancing in time to the beat.

  How could I have forgotten? It’s Carnival weekend! On Bank Holiday Monday, we’ll all descend on Grandma and Gramps because their flat is on the Notting Hill Carnival route. All my aunts and uncles and cousins and step-aunts and step-uncles and step-cousins, all my grandparents’ many friends and the little old ladies that Grandma cares for and any of Grandpa’s workmates who aren’t on shift will pile into their flat, watch the floats roll past and drink Grandma’s legendary pineapple punch and eat her jerk fried chicken.

  But that’s tomorrow and this morning Notting Hill is still hungover from yesterday’s party. The road’s empty of traffic because the road is still closed off. Most of the shopfronts have been boarded up. There’s a mountain of bulging refuse sacks lining the pavement waiting to be picked up by the binmen who must be stuck behind the stately procession of floats returning to the start of the Carnival route.

  And still they keep on coming. A truck swathed in yellow, red and green streamers. A pimped-out ice-cream truck. A lorry that looks like a tropical rainforest, steel drums mounted on either side.

  There’s something otherworldly about the floats. I gaze at them in dopey disbelief because it really feels like the universe has created this dream, this mirage, just for me, though I’m still not ruling out a hallucination.

  I smile but at the same time, for some strange reason, I kind of want to cry, and then I see a man on a silver float waving wildly, his shiny bald head gleaming in the early morning light. ‘Sun-ra! Sunny! Is that you, girl?’

  He leans forward to make sure that it is really me, then holds out his hand. I stumble towards him. I have to jog to keep up with the float but as I draw level I reach out and my uncle Dee and another man haul me up.

  ‘Sunny! What the hell are you doing hanging about on street corners at five in the morning. Have you been up all night? Stupid question, of course you have. Look at the state of you!’

  ‘Grim,’ says the guy who’d helped hoist me up. Like I need the validation. I really don’t.

  Even the sedate, slow pace of the float makes me dizzy and Dee grabs hold of my arm to steady me. He’s not looking quite so pleased to see me now. In fact, he’s looking quite a lot like my dad when he’s interrogating a hostile witness. I don’t want Dee to look at me like that, not when bumping into him is the best thing that’s happened in hours.

  ‘Can I have a hug, please?’ My voice is all wavery and I still think I might cry but then Dee’s arms are around me and I’m pressed up against his white T-shirt and he smells of fabric softener and cocoa butter and it’s almost as good as coming home without the journey of AT LEAST AN HOUR that would actually take me home.

  The hug doesn’t last nearly long enough before Dee lets go, but only so he can put his hands on my shoulders and peer at my face. My face that has had sweat, make-up, tears and lager run down it at various times during the night and now aches just from the sheer effort of blinking and breathing in and out.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Oh nothing. I couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d surprise Grandma,’ I mumble.

  ‘Yeah, right. Do you want to have a bit more time to work on that because it smells like bullshit? You’ve been up all the night, haven’t you? With that dickhead who doesn’t know who Trojan Records are? And then he just left you to wander the streets on your own?’

  ‘He left me quite a bit before that,’ I say and I sniff, but it’s weird. I don’t actually have the energy to cry any more. Which is a first.

  ‘What’s he done?’ Dee demands. He can be quite scary when he’s in demand mode. He’s a social worker who works with young offenders (‘There but for the grace of God,’ he always says) and if he gives them the face that he’s giving me then I bet they don’t dare reoffend. ‘Did he hurt you? Because if he did I will kill him.’

  Dee’s quiet voice is worse than anyone else yelling at me.

  ‘Oh, not like that. No! But he really, really hurt my inside stuff. My heart and that. Except, now I’m just really angry. Except, actually I’m too knackered to be angry.’

  I’m too knackered to go into much detail either so I just give Dee the headlines, lea
ving out details of underage drinking, bike stealing and anything else that could harm my defence. ‘And so when I realised where I was, I decided I could just go to Grandma’s.’

  ‘You can’t go to Mum’s, Sunny,’ Dee exclaims. ‘She’ll ferret the truth out of you, then make you go to church as penance, and you know that she’ll grass you up and tell your mum.’ He smiles. ‘So, what time’s your curfew again?’

  I’m too tired to glare either. Best I can do is a half-hearted pout. ‘It’s flexible during the holidays, and anyway, she didn’t say not to stay out all night. She was more concerned about Gretchen Weiner’s anal glands and that I might have a party and post the details on Facebook and have two thousand people turn up and trash the place. So really, in the grand scheme of things, staying out all night isn’t that bad.’

  ‘It’s not good either.’

  I sigh. ‘Like you never stayed out all night when you were my age. Or worse.’

  He dips his head. ‘True, that.’

  My dad might have been a straight-A student, but Dee sounded like he’d been much more fun when he was a teenager. Maybe a bit too much fun.

  My all-time favourite Dee story, which he only told me because he drank too much rum and Coke last Christmas, was about the day he ended up taking part in the Poll Tax riots in the late Eighties. I’m not sure what a Poll Tax is or how this riot differed from other riots but at the time Dee was working in Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus. At lunchtime, he popped out to get a sandwich, saw that people were rioting, decided to join in for a bit, then went back to work, where he was sacked on the spot because someone had seen him chucking a brick through one of Tower Records’ windows.

  Great-grandma had got their pastor to come round and they’d all kneeled down on the living-room carpet to pray for Dee’s soul.

  I guess the praying must have worked because these days he’s a fine, upstanding citizen but not in a dickish way. Like, now he cocks his head, thinks things over and says, ‘Well, it’s not up to me to tell your mum and you’re in no fit state to deal with your gran so you better come back to ours.’