Who They Was

by Gabriel Krauze

  Man like Bunny and next man who are just straight on wickedness raise up the youngers and show them how to live, how to be ruthless, how only money and status matters and they learn quick how in this kind of environment any act of violence, exploitation, whatever, can’t be unfair because that’s how life works.

  Life is violent, things happen suddenly. The law is just another force of power that descends on this place. And not just in raids that happen every so often, but like this one time some brer got run over by a police car as he was crossing a road in the estate, it was just a stupid accident, but the first thing to arrive on the scene was a CO19 unit, armed police jumping out of a silver Mercedes-Benz in bulletproof vests, fingers on triggers of their MP5 submachine guns and then later the ambulance came.

  And the amount of things that never get reported – especially beatings and kidnappings and robberies – like if you’re a shotter selling crack and heroin around the ends and couple man run up in your yard and rob you, gunbuck you, maybe even torture you a bit with a hot iron or a kettle of boiling water, you’re not calling the police. They won’t give a shit when they realise who you are, what you do, because in their eyes you’ve put yourself outside of society’s protection by doing crime. Not only that but you have to ride out, you have to take revenge, like if you can’t get any of your p’s or your food back you can at least get back some of your reputation. And anyway, fuck snitching. None of us trust the feds and if you talk to them you’re a snitch and if you’re a snitch you become a target, you automatically line yourself up to become a victim. The amount of scuffs and shankings I’ve seen in the ends where man get picked up off the floor by their boys after getting knocked out and getting their face kicked in, or just jump in their bredrin’s whip and go hospital, or if it’s not too bad just go to someone’s yard to clean up, stop the bleeding with a T-shirt, get some plasters and antiseptic if you got poked up but no vital organs or arteries got hit, and then numb yourself with some cro and some juice and nurse your anger. And since no one goes to the feds, man are getting wrapped up and ransomed to their older brothers who are usually the targets anyway; top shotters who make p’s but move too d-low for the eaters to rob them, so they kidnap a younger brother and then the brer they’re really after has to pay the ransom or whatever, and I know several people who’ve done this and it never gets reported, ever.

  The bus stops near South Kilburn Estate used to have posters on them advertising Operation Trident with messages about how to contact the police anonymously. There was even one poster that showed a picture of some brer in a pool of blood with a gun next to his outstretched hand and above him big white letters that said Young, Gifted and Dead. You never see any adverts like that in rich areas or in central London, only in the ends. Imagine. Seeing that shit every morning as you wait for the bus to school. Before I lived in the towers, I used to go past them on the 31 bus from my parents’ near Westbourne Park. I used to wonder about the lives in there, all those windows in the massive blocks, so many different lives. What were they all going through? You’d think a place like that would be noisy and brimming with life, but it wasn’t. From the outside it was just concrete everywhere like a low heartbeat pounding in the silence, and window after dirty blank-eye window.

  THE MASK

  Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

  James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

  I WAS SEVENTEEN and I had this African mask which a family friend gave me. It was from the Congo, made of some dark wood with shredded palm-leaf hair, a mouth and narrow eyes cut into it; I couldn’t tell if they were sleepy or sad or something else. I put it on a bookshelf in my bedroom but whenever my mother came into my room she would say I don’t like it, what do you want it for, it’s probably cursed.

  My mother’s fingers are always stained with oil paints. She bites the skin around her nails until it’s raw and tries to tidy the damage by picking away more skin but then it bleeds.

  I grew up in a flat full of paintings and drawings. Not just paintings on the wall, but canvases leaning against doors, stacked behind the sofa, taking up space in my mother’s bedroom and in her imagination. My father slept on the sofa for as long as I can remember, because their bedroom was a tiny box room and although once there’d been a double bed, one day there wasn’t and there was just a single bed that my mother slept in and finally a wardrobe and chest of drawers which they shared, and then my mother took the space over with books and papers and me and my twin brother’s baby clothes, which she couldn’t bear to get rid of. I never hugged or cuddled her as a child, even before our problems started, and so she called me her sassolino, which means little stone in Italian, like I was the one pebble she’d decided to pick up from the seashore and keep in her pocket wherever she went. My mother sometimes tells people this story about how she took me to the National Gallery when I was six. We were there for hours; in fact we only left in the end because the gallery was closing. She says that I went from painting to painting with a growing number of people following me, listening as I commented on each picture. I think the last part of the story is her exaggerating things because she was so happy to have a child who was into art. I remember I mostly liked those big battle scenes full of knights in the middle of killing and being killed.

  So I was seventeen. I came home from college and I couldn’t find the mask. I looked for it everywhere and eventually found it jammed into the broken air vent in my bedroom. It was all scratched up n shit, bits of white paint scraped onto the wood and the palm-leaf hair full of dirt and brick dust. I went into my mother’s room and said did you jam my mask into the air vent? And she said yes and I said why would you do that? And she said because I wanted to and I don’t like it and I said you can’t do destructive things to other people’s objects and she said yes I can and I said arright cool and I punched the air vent in the wall of her bedroom and smashed the entire thing so you could see the bricks behind it and then I said now we’re even. My mother started wiling out at me so I said fuck it and told her I was moving to South Kilburn that same day. Uncle T had recently let me know there was a spare room in his flat if I wanted to rent it, so I knew where to go.

  It was the right moment to leave anyway. I’d been arrested quite a few times before then, including one time for assaulting police right outside our flat after getting stopped and tryna run because I had a shank and a draw on me. And, although I’d always been far closer to him than my mother, I now resented my father for taking my butterfly knife away from me – just when I’d gotten good at backing it out and doing the whole fancy flick ting with it as well. At this point the flat only felt like a home to me in terms of memories and familiar spaces. My bed was my bed and the little wooden stool next to it and the books on my shelves and the CDs and garms in the wardrobe; those were all mine. But the flat wasn’t a place I felt comfortable in, with the living room always occupied by my twin brother Danny, practising his violin in there, seven eight hours a day coz he’d stopped going to school after GCSEs to pursue his career as a violinist and my mother said he must have the living room to himself, and even when the living room was free in the evenings, Danny and I weren’t allowed to jam and watch TV because if we tried to our mother would switch it off and stand in front of it telling us that we should be in bed, even though it was only like 9 p.m. or whatever. And all through the flat were piles of books and old newspapers and unopened envelopes and broken chairs and old toys which my mother collected for who knows what – her artworks she would say, but the piles of objects only ever got bigger – and I swear she had like three desks in the flat, all piled up with papers so she couldn’t even use them. And I couldn’t play music in my room, could only listen to it with headphones in because they hated hearing rap or grime or whatever else I was into. One time, after one of our arguments she went into my room, took all my rap CDs, snapped them in half and dashed them in the bin. When I left for school the next day she ripped all the posters of Mobb Deep and Foxy Brown and
next rappers off my bedroom wall, which is when it really started to feel less like my bedroom and more just the room that I slept in. Also the door to my room was broken – the upper panel was all smashed out – so even if I closed it it made zero difference. But it was me who done that.

  I had one of them mini basketball nets in my room, it was a Charlotte Hornets one which my mother bought me on holiday in Italy and one day, after an argument, she stretched up to reach the hoop and snapped off the entire rim with the net and then she picked up the little rubber basketball that came with it and stabbed it with a penknife that I had in my room so it sighed and collapsed, deflated, and she said now you see, now you see what happens when you disobey your mother. I was so frustrated with the whole thing that I started crying burning angry tears like some moist yout and she made a face of fake pity at me, going yes, cry, cry you poor victim, you should be ashamed of yourself, and then I punched my door bang bang bang and smashed a whole panel out of it, which only made me feel worse because my father had spent a lot of his hard-earned money doing up the flat, getting wooden doors fitted onto everyone’s bedrooms. And he really did work mad hard, practically seven days a week doing drawings for various newspapers and publications, and when I was younger I’d often never see him on a weekday unless I woke up around one in the morning or suttin and then I’d go downstairs to get a drink and find him at the kitchen table with a glass of sparkling water by his hand, popping away in the silence along with the scratch of pen on paper as he worked on some next drawing to hit a deadline in the morning. He’d stop and smile at me and say nocny marek which means night owl or night walker in Polish and then I’d hug him, smelling his sweat and tiredness, before going back to bed. In the morning he’d be up at six with all the windows downstairs wide open, even in the winter, and often he’d be gone before I’d started getting up for the day. I never got the door fixed though. On the day I packed my bag and moved out, I slammed it shut, but I could still see into my room and I hurried downstairs to get away from it.

  There was never enough hot water to wash in at Uncle T’s. It was always bucket baths, crouching in the tub and sometimes only cold water that made me flinch and gasp as I poured it down my back. But afterwards there was always a zoot packed with highgrade waiting for me and a plate of fried plantain and scrambled eggs and hard dough bread for breakfast, and dinners of curry goat and rice n peas and saltfish fritters, filling the yard with these warm salty frying smells that fought with the sweet stink of cro, smelling like sweet mouldy earth, a smell that won over everything else and brushed softly over the bridge of your nose and eyelids. Not gonna lie I slept good after them meals. Uncle T had a sound system which he was always playing, roots and reggae and lover’s rock, and his oldschool bredrins would come and drop dubplates and the whole yard would vibrate with baseline while they smoked and zoned out to tunes. When p’s were tight, lunch and dinner would be corned beef, fried with onions and white rice, but he always made sure I got fed. Full up your belly my son Uncle T would say and when his bredrins were in the kitchen while I was eating he’d say watch the boy eat deh, him nah ramp wid his food and they’d all laugh because no matter how much I ate I never put on any weight, I was always marga.

  Wagwan Snoopz, Uncle T would shout every time I came into the yard. If I walked into the kitchen while he was bagging up cro he’d give me some buds, saying go on son, something to smoke and then he’d ask have you eaten today? He used to be a dread and one day when I was living with him, he showed me his locks which he kept in a plastic bag after cutting them off when he’d stopped being a Rasta, because there’s too much bullshit in it that don’t make sense like in most religions he said. He had a cat called Scratch who was probably always high and Uncle T would pick him up while we were all bunning, drenched in punk smoke, and he’d run his hand down Scratch’s spine and the cat would push its bony back against Uncle T’s rough hand and he was missing the little finger on his right hand which he’d lost as a young man in some factory accident. He rocked glasses and he had a huge belly but it was that kind of fatness where you could tell he used to be mad built when he was younger. But life happens and things change. I’ll still box a man down to bloodclart he said as he sat downstairs with a knuckleduster in his pocket – waiting for a customer to come and buy a draw from him – coz there’d been some drama on the block recently and he was on his guard in case someone tried to rob him.

  Uncle T was Taz and Reuben’s dad, two bredrins I’d made through the music ting. I’d met them at a clash called Battle of the Mics, which I won in the Marian Centre, a brown-brick community centre in the middle of South Kilburn. It was when T-Mobile were doing these contracts where if you bought a month’s worth of credit you’d get free calls to any number after 6 p.m., and I murked this brer in the final by dropping ‘Blood, your mum’s like T-Mobile – free after six any day of the week’. It was a wrap after that, the crowd went crazy for man, I couldn’t even spit the rest of my bars and afterwards Taz approached me and said you’re sick fam, lissen man’s putting together a crew on this music ting are you interested in joining? and I was like I’m on dat. That was the first time I’d proper been in SK and before I started living at Uncle T’s, I used to go and buy draws off him and jam in his yard in Blake Court and bun it up.

  So a week after I’d won the battle we were standing outside the Marian Centre, sun pouring warm yellow over the bricks and spilling onto us, chatting about how one next MC called Bashy got chased out of SK when he’d come to do a performance the night I’d won the clash. Taz rolled up his T-shirt sleeve and showed me a cartoon Tasmanian Devil holding two smoking pistols tattooed on his right bicep, saying that’s why they call me Taz blood, I live up to my name innit, and the words came cutting their way out of his mouth with his face all stiffened up as we waited for the others to join us. He’d started organising MCing sessions at the Marian Centre. For the whole of that summer we would link up for couple hours every other day and just spit pure bars back to back over the latest grime beats – there was Malice, Predator, Mazey, Bimz, Rayla, Smoothy, Gunja and me – and Taz called the crew Secret Service. He was basically our older since most of us were still teenagers and we just wanted to spit bars while Taz had some vision of us making it in the music ting.

  Taz was one of them brers that when you walk through the ends with him he’d constantly be stopping to say wagwan to someone, olders hailing him up, next man on the block calling out yo Taz wa’um, and he’d raise a fist as he passed by and shout yes g mi deya. Sometimes we’d even be out of ends in like East or North and he’d bump into someone he knew and then he’d tell me I know that brer from pen. He’d been locked up quite a few times. He always had gyal ringing his phone off as well, even when he talked to them like shit they’d be ringing him back, I mean he had suttin about him, it can’t just have been his looks although I guess the gyaldem were feeling him like that as well; his skin had this yellow glow to it, but when he’d get vexed about suttin it would start burning as if the blood beneath his skin was literally boiling.

  One time I was jamming on the block with Taz, bunning zoots on the balcony outside Uncle T’s flat in Blake Court, looking out across the estate and the sun was setting, melting the horizon until it bled into the coming darkness above and I said rah look at that banging view fam, that would be a sick shot in a film ah lie? He barely even looked at it and said to be honest Snoopz I been seeing that view my whole life, I don’t see nuttin special, just blocks and windows so I don’t really know what you’re saying and then he spat over the balcony and went down the stairs and out the block to go shop and get chip n Rizla. But when he’d get crunk with me and we were at a chick’s yard or suttin, he’d be grinning teeth with his eyes practically closed – especially if we’d been bunning cro, which on a real we was always doing – and then he’d tell everyone in the room how I’m his brother and no one can chat shit to me. And when I’d tell him suttin interesting he’d be like Don’t Lie, as if there was nothing more inter
esting in the world to him at that moment in time than what I was saying, I mean he could really make you feel like someone special and you wouldn’t think about questioning his words or intentions. Then I heard Uncle T calling him Taswan when we went round to his dad’s one time to buy a draw and I realised Taz is really just short for Taswan, not Tasmanian Devil.

  Reuben was his younger brother. Everyone knew him as Rayla and he always had this crazy smile on his face, eyes full of shine that couldn’t stay still, every bit of him just restless energy, but the smile hid the fact that he could switch in a hot sec still. He wasn’t shook of no one and although he used to jam with all the D-block mandem, shotting work on the block and all that, he stopped moving with them because one time one of the olders told him to go shop and get some chip so that the older had some cigarette to bill a zoot and Reuben said fuck dat go shop yourself I’m not some sendout and the older switched at him like are you mad?! Reuben said suck your mum and the older went to fight him outside the block, but Reuben picked up an empty beer bottle and dashed it at the older’s head and everyone heard the conk and then he ran off laughing. The older didn’t chase him because he sensed that Reuben wasn’t afraid of getting himself killed, so he shouted watch when I get my strap like he was gonna shoot Reuben. No one else on the block backed it for Reuben so he was like fuck dat these man are snakes and he stopped cotching with them. When Taz started doing the music ting Reuben was instantly part of it, even though he’d always turn up at random for our sets, spit bars with mad energy for like half an hour and then disappear without saying anything.

  We’d get on a double-decker bus coming back from doing a set somewhere out of the ends and go to the top deck where Taz would bring out a zoot and spark it right there, passing it around, smoke climbing over seats, making people turn around all nervous before they’d quickly turn back round and then go downstairs, and we all fed off the recklessness and would start billing our own zoots and bunning them until the whole top deck was a hotbox smelling loud, everyone making noise on a mad hype, eyes glowing bloody red out of the shadows of hoods pulled over heads. More times when the bus driver clocked wagwan, he’d stop the bus, push the alarm button and we’d run off, bussin up while a metal voice announced THIS BUS IS UNDER ATTACK, CALL 999, THIS BUS IS UNDER ATTACK, CALL 999.