About an hour later, with a cup of instant coffee and some toast inside me, I went out and bought a copy of the Sunday Mirror. Rhona had invited me round for lunch and had asked me to bring along a copy of the paper so we could look over the article together, but I couldn’t wait and ended up reading it on the pavement outside Len’s newsagents. Several people passed me on the way into the shop, and I heard at least one of them say, ‘Afternoon’, but I was so engrossed in the paper that I didn’t even lift my head, much less return the greeting.
The interview came with a lot of illustrations. In the absence of photos, a sketch artist had been hired to try to capture the scenes of carnage as I had described them. The busted up carriage and the expressions on the faces of the survivors were skilfully, if melodramatically, done. I wasn’t sure why, but the images seemed the more effective, the more powerful, for being drawn. As to the article itself, Susie Lowencrantz really went to town. If she had been a bit restrained in the first part of the piece, if she had kept herself in check whilst describing the less eventful build up to the bombing, by the midpoint her voice was in full, exaggerated cry. No sentence was complete without an ‘incredible’, or an ‘astonishing’ and my efforts to help Latonya were described as ‘superhuman’. Time and again she would bring a particular piece of action to the point of climax, then drag the reader off on some tangent or other, all in the name of building tension. It was hard to tell if this was tabloid journalism at its gripping, suspenseful best, or sensationalist, manipulative worst. Certainly I was hooked from the first sentence to the last, but whether that was down to good writing, or my own vanity, I just wasn’t sure.
Rhona didn’t have much to say about the article except, ‘I found it a bit full on, to be honest.’ When I asked her to explain, she said, ‘It just seemed a bit too much all that stuff about people having their arms and legs blown off.’ She turned up her nose as though she had smelt a dead rat. I became defensive. ‘They wanted details, I gave them details. That’s what they were paying me for.’ Sensing I was spoiling for an argument, she deflected the blame on to the paper. ‘Honestly, that Sunday Mirror’s a blooming rag. Hungry?’ I nodded and she went off to the kitchen.
While she was out of the room I thought about her reaction to the article, which had been out-and-out squeamish. The irony of this was not lost on me, even if it was on her. She was obsessed with ultra-violent computer games, but went white at the thought of real violence. I saw the relish she took in hacking the heads off her virtual enemies, in gutting them like fish, but if she saw a couple of guys scuffling in the street she had to look away. I once invited her to a football match but she turned me down because she thought there was too much fighting amongst the fans. I tried to convince her that those days were over, that the violence in English football was now mostly conducted away from the stadiums, but she wouldn’t have it. ‘I’m not interested, Simon. I want nothing to do with those chavvy yobs.’
Later that week, as a thank-you for all the support they had shown me since the bombing, I offered to take Rhona and Sky out for a meal. I almost changed my mind as it took us ages to decide where to go. Rhona fancied an Indian, Sky was up for an Italian, while I wanted a Chinese. We spent a long time arguing the merits of each country’s cuisine, as though we were trying to prove a case in court, but in the end none of us got our way. We went to an Angus Steak House instead. Sky invited her boyfriend, Euan, a self-styled EMO with lank, greasy hair and a face full of spots. Throughout dinner he must have spoken two words.
On our way back from the restaurant, while he and Sky were walking hand-in-hand in front of us, I said to Rhona, ‘What’s she doing with that boy? He’s proper weird.’
Rhona stifled a giggle and said, ‘What can I say? She loves him.’
I snorted. ‘Love. She’s sixteen, for crying out loud.’
That stopped Rhona in her tracks. ‘You old cynic, you. You mean you don’t believe in young love?’
I didn’t answer but later that night, in bed, with Rhona asleep beside me, I thought some more about her question. ‘You don’t believe in young love?’ This led me to thinking about her and Trevor. She had once told me that their marriage had been made in heaven. Childhood sweethearts who wed at eighteen, they were seen by their friends and family as the golden couple. But according to Rhona, it was a façade. Almost from day one she realised she’d made a mistake in getting married. ‘I was young and in love. It seemed like the normal thing to do. After two years I was bored out my mind.’ She was ‘young and in love’. Sky was ‘young and in love’, but the question was: would the daughter make the same mistake as the mother? Would Sky get married too soon, have a child while she herself was barely out of nappies, then repent at her leisure? I couldn’t see it. She had a lot of her mother in her, but Sky just didn’t strike me as the type to throw her life away.
Maybe I was projecting my own failed hopes and ambitions on to her, or maybe I just had too many depressing memories of teenage mothers from my childhood. Like my old girlfriend, Beverly, for example. She’d had a child while still at school and her life was over before it had begun. I didn’t want that for Sky. I was horrified at the thought that she wouldn’t go on to live a full life. I wanted her to travel, to have adventures, to leave her mark on the world. What I did not want was to see her get hitched to the first spotty teenager that happened along and settle down – in Duddenham of all places – to a life of drudge. For a girl as intelligent as her, for a girl with her spark, that would have been nothing short of a tragedy. And it would have been all the more tragic if Rhona had sat idly by and let it happen, which she seemed hell-bent on doing.
* * *
Now that I wasn’t working, I had more time on my hands than I knew what to do with. This gave me ample opportunity to think. On the whole I thought things were going well. Having survived the bombing without a scratch, what did I really have to complain about? I had mental wounds, it’s true, but they would heal. Before releasing me from hospital on the day of the bombing, the doctor had warned me that, in the weeks to come, I may well experience symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress. ‘You’ll have nightmares, that’s almost a given, and you’ll sometimes feel anxious, especially in public, and that may lead to full-blown panic attacks. All perfectly normal. Your brain has received a massive shock. It will recover in time. But you must look after yourself. For the next few months I want you to take it easy, get plenty of rest and don’t do anything too stressful.’
I’d had my fair share of nightmares and anxiety attacks, as well as sudden fits of rage and insomnia, but it could have been so much worse. Unlike some survivors, I had yet to experience the intense guilt at being alive, I hadn’t suffered impotence or a drop in my libido, I hadn’t lost my hair, I wasn’t crying all the time, I hadn’t taken to my bed and refused to have any contact with my friends and family, I knew nothing of the compulsion to visit the relatives of the deceased, I hadn’t fallen victim to claustrophobia, I didn’t hate all Muslims or even some of them, and I had no desire to find a quiet place in the world where I could see out the rest of my days in peace and security. I was doing alright.
It was in this state of optimism that I decided to write to my parents. I rarely called them in Jamaica because I always struggled to get through. It seemed incredible to me that in the twenty-first-century their village was still not hooked up to the island’s national phone grid. They had a shared mobile – their first, bought specifically so Theodore and I could keep in touch – but it was very expensive to call and had a crap reception. I hardly ever got a proper connection, and when I did the line would be so faint and crackly as to make conversation virtually impossible. None of this seemed to bother Theodore. What mattered to him was the frequency of the conversations he had with our parents, not the quality. For me it was the other way around. If I took the time to contact mum and dad it was because I really wanted to talk to them, because I actually had stuff to say to them. That’s why I preferred writing. Old fashione
d it may have been, but it was the ideal way for me to express myself to them without interruption.
At a dozen pages, the letter was very long. I hadn’t intended it that way, but once I began writing, thoughts and sentiments just flowed and flowed. I imagined my parents were going to be embarrassed by my emotional outpourings, and I knew for certain that their return letter would be as brief as mine had been long-winded, but frankly I didn’t care. In the end, writing to my parents was just another way of communicating with myself. With the letter written and ready to go, I decided I would kill two birds with one stone and make arrangements with my bank to transfer some money into my parents’ account in Jamaica. The idea was for them to receive the letter and the money at roughly the same time.
On my way to the bank I popped into Len’s newsagents to buy an envelope and some stamps. I didn’t want to trek all the way into town to queue up at the post-office. It was just after ten on a Monday morning and the place would have been thick with OAPs cashing their pensions. As I entered his shop I said to Len, ‘Stick ‘em up!’ It was my usual greeting, but Len didn’t give his usual response. Instead of saying, ‘I can’t, I’m too old,’ he said, ‘Oh. Simon. I didn’t think…sorry…you surprised me…I was just…’ He did something under the counter with his hands, something furtive. He seemed very nervous and for some reason couldn’t look me in the eye. ‘Everything OK, Len?’ At that point he stopped fidgeting and our eyes finally made four. He said, ‘You don’t know, do you?’ I studied his face. His expression couldn’t have been more grave. ‘Know what, Len?’ From under the counter he brought out a copy of The Sun, which he had obviously been reading. He put it down on the counter so that I could get a good view of the front page. And there it was: BOMB HERO IS CONVICTED GANG RAPIST.
Part Two
These days Hackney is one of London’s most gentrified boroughs, but when I was growing up there in the seventies and eighties, it was the very definition of the shitty, inner-city ghetto. My family lived in a street where every other building was either derelict or unfit for human habitation. Our own house, a four-storey, rat-infested, post-war terrace gave us no protection in winter. Without central heating, the rooms may as well have been freezers. I had to sleep wearing layers of clothing, beneath layers of blankets. We had electric and Calor gas heaters, but these were so expensive to run our parents had to ration how we used them. That only left paraffin heaters, which, though cheaper to run, were dangerous and ineffective, so ineffective that I regularly got chilblains on my fingers and toes from all the hours I spent huddled over them trying to warm up.
During one particularly grim winter, I went to bed wearing a bobble hat. From the top-bunk, Theodore started teasing me and we ended up fighting. Attracted to the commotion, Dad came to investigate and had to separate us. When he heard what we’d been fighting about, he surprised me by bawling out Theodore. ‘That is anything to tease you brother about? Cold is no joke boy.’ He then told a story about his first winter in London in 1963, which he called the ‘The Big Freeze’. Straight off the boat train from Jamaica, he’d been so cold he’d caught pneumonia. The story explained why he and Mum were constantly at loggerheads with our landlord, Mr. Beresford, a curmudgeonly Barbadian who lived in relative luxury in the basement of our house while we lived in squalor on the two upper floors. Fortunately my parents were more than a match for him. Aware of their legal rights, they used the courts to force him to make improvements to the house, but in the end they got fed up with all the aggravation and started harassing the council to find us a better place to live. It took years but eventually they moved us into a recently-vacated two-bedroom flat. Though cleaner, warmer and more spacious, it had the drawback of being in a very rough area. Relieved just to have new accommodation, and at a much lower rent, and with central heating throughout, my parents either didn’t see or deliberately chose to ignore the fact that our neighbours now included pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers.
* * *
As with most immigrants who came over from the Caribbean in the fifties and sixties, my parents seemed to do nothing but work. Dad, a bus driver, regularly took on extra shifts. It was not uncommon for him to be on the job till well after eleven at night. Mum worked as a cleaner at Hackney Hospital, a job that kept her on her feet all day, swelling her ankles and leaving her exhausted. But no matter how tired she’d be, she’d always cook dinner when she came home. After we’d eaten, she’d issue instructions for me to wash up and for Theodore to put the Hoover round and take out the rubbish and the empty milk bottles. She would then put her feet up on her favourite pouf, letting out a sigh of pleasure at being able to rest her swollen ankles, reach for her packet of Rothmans and switch on our Rediffusion TV with the remote. After one cigarette she’d be snoring, the cigarette having burned down in the ashtray. We usually had to wake her up for the noise, at which point she’d say, ‘I going for a lie down’. I always looked forward to this moment because I knew she was never coming back.
I’d spend the rest of the evening in front of the TV, pigging out on post-watershed classics like Starsky and Hutch, The Rockford Files and Kojak. Theodore would take to the streets, often staying out till the small hours when he knew Mum and Dad were asleep. He made me his accomplice, bribing me with alcohol and cigarettes and even the odd bit of weed. Our bedroom was at the back of the house, so he’d whistle up and I’d sneak downstairs and let him in. Sometimes I’d sleep through his call and he’d have to throw stones against the window. One night he cracked the window and we had to invent a story about knocking into it by accident. On another night Mum woke up to go to the toilet and caught us creeping up the stairs. We swore to her that it was a one-off but she didn’t believe us. When she came home from work that evening she kept her promise and beat us: me first, then Theodore. By the time Dad came home we were already in bed but still he came into our room and warned us about our future conduct. He was especially angry with Theodore. ‘Either abide by what we tell you or haul your tail out of this house.’ That situation came to pass sooner than any of us expected. Not long after this Theodore got arrested for shoplifting. He was let off with a caution but still Mum beat him with such viciousness that I started crying from fear. I had never seen her like that, wild, with a demented look in her eye, as if she was possessed, and it was certainly not a pretty sight to see my older brother, who I adored, reduced to a blubbering wreck.
But at least it wasn’t Dad’s job to dish out the punishment. He was a huge, serious man, over six feet tall with hands the size of baseball mittens. One blow from him and Theodore might have ended up in hospital. As it turned out, Dad couldn’t forgive Theodore and started acting as if he didn’t exist. The feeling was mutual. For weeks they didn’t speak to each other. Mum tried hard to patch things up between them but failed. Matters came to a head when the police called to say that Theodore had been arrested for ‘going equipped’. He’d been caught with a hole-punch, the car thief’s main tool.
I was standing next to Mum when she took the call. She broke down and sobbed, wondering aloud about what she had done to deserve such a wayward child. Between sniffles, she called Dad at work. Theodore had no means of getting home so Dad had to clock off early to go and pick him up from Lewisham police station. When they got in, Dad marched him to our room and stood over him while he packed up his few possessions. I begged Dad to reconsider, Mum did too, but he had made up his mind. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Theodore wanted to go. When he had all his things together, Dad, who hadn’t said a word throughout, escorted him to the front door.
When Theodore left I was devastated. All of a sudden I was alone. Without his presence, our room felt too big, the space seemed too much for me. As a way to remain close to him, I started sleeping on his bunk and never went back to mine. Nights were the worst. We used to laugh and joke our way to sleep; now I had nothing but my thoughts, which jumped about and kept me awake till all hours. Weekends were not much better. On Saturday mornings, with Dad still in bed and a
fter Mum had gone shopping in Ridley Road Market, I had to watch Football Focus by myself, debating the topics in my head where I used to debate them with Theodore. Sundays meant church, but without my brother at my side, cracking jokes and sending the whole thing up, I dreaded it. Other black families in our area were either Pentecostal, Seven Day Adventists or Baptists, they got to sing gospel songs and could dance in the aisles and play tambourines. We were Church of England, which meant near-empty pews, long-winded sermons, dispiriting hymns that sounded like funeral dirges and church officials so sombre they could double for morgue technicians. In winter, most of the congregation kept their coats on and scarves and you could actually hear the draughts whistling around like sprites. There were some benefits, though.
I used to be in the choir. Theodore had flatly refused to join but I did because it was a nice little earner. For every Wednesday evening that we attended choir practice, and for every Sunday that we showed up in church decked out in our black smocks and white dog collars, we were paid two pounds. We also got to ring the church bells. Climbing the ladders up to the belfry was exciting enough, but nothing compared to bell-ringing. I used to love the feeling of being hoisted into the air while clinging on to those thick, palm-burning ropes. Another perk was the all-expenses-paid annual summer holiday at Betsanger, a converted public school in the Kent countryside. I always looked forward to going there, but not half as much as my parents, who relished the opportunity to be rid of me for a whole week during the school holidays at no cost to themselves. Because I rarely left Hackney, much less London, the place seemed to me to have all the exoticism of a foreign country.
The old school building was so huge, had so many rooms, you could easily get lost in it if you weren’t familiar with its layout. And the grounds were just as impressive, with enough space for a football pitch, a cricket pitch, a tennis court and an outdoor swimming pool. There was also a boxing gym, though it was rarely used except to settle disputes between us boys. I remember the year George Mensah and I squared up to each other in the ring. Mensah was an out-and-out bully. We’d been caught fighting, again, and the vicar, the sadistic so-and-so, insisted that we box each other. He even positioned himself at ringside to watch the bout. Mr. Kelly, an Ulsterman, one of several church officials who always accompanied us to Betsanger and who liked to rub his whiskered chin on our faces for a laugh, volunteered to be the referee. For about five minutes, without pause, Mensah hammered away at me, cheered on by the other boys. Several of them had opened books on the outcome. Mensah was a wild thing, coming at me with tremendous speed and ferocity, throwing on average three punches for every one of mine. Most of them missed. I was very light on my feet, dancing around the ring Ali-style while trying to pick my punches, trying to conserve my energy. Later, everyone told me how much I looked the part, how stylish I had been, how I had showed up Mensah for the crude brawler that he was. Pity then that Mr. Kelly declared him the winner.
No More Heroes Page 7
