No More Heroes

by Stephen Thompson

  I’ll always remember the day he and Django clashed. Django, a recently-arrived Yardie who was generally accepted as the baddest man on the Front, started goading the Ras by suggesting that his faith was demeaned for having Selassie as its godhead. But just as no Christian would ever accept that Christ wasn’t the Messiah, and just as no Muslim would ever dream of denying Mohammed his status as the Prophet, so no true Rasta would seriously entertain the heretical notion of Haile Selassie being anything other than God incarnate, or a Prophet, or, as Ras Malachi called him that day, ‘The King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the Conquering Lion of the tribe of Judah.’

  He was leaning against a piece of corrugated iron covered with posters featuring some of the biggest reggae artists of the day – Dennis Brown, Gregory Isaacs, Black Uhuru – and the backdrop seemed to add weight and authority to his arguments. When Django tried to challenge him, saying that Selassie had been given his titles falsely, Ras Malachi laughed, fingered his beard which tapered down to his chest like a wizard’s, and said, ‘You don’t know your scripture, me I-dren.’

  Django became more and more animated, even confrontational. While he spoke, he kept his ratchet knife in his hand the whole time. His finger was looped in the ring and he kept spinning and catching it, spinning and catching it, like a gunslinger. He was wearing a red beret perched on one side of his mini-afro, a black silk shirt, drain-pipe trousers with the legs turned up to show off his diamond-patterned socks and Clarks desert boots with the laces removed. Like all the other Yardies, he thought he had a great dress sense, but he just looked gaudy. Eventually he and Malachi drew quite an audience. Malachi had his sympathisers. A few of his Rasta friends were standing nearby and to almost everything he said, they added, often in unison, ‘Rastafari’. Django had his own supporters, Yardies all, about ten of them in total, including a few women. The rest of the crowd were supposed to be neutral, but were obviously rooting for Malachi. I know I was. Django was all noise and posturing, playing to his people, whereas Malachi spoke with a calm authority. I could have listened to him all day. The man was not only a natural orator, he had charisma to spare, and much of that was down to the way he looked.

  On that day, his locks were piled high on his head in coils, the weight forcing him to keep his neck straight to avoid drooping. It had made him aware of his posture, which was regally erect. A strict vegetarian, non-alcoholic diet and had given his body a trim, youthful look that belied his fifty-odd years. He was wearing a pair of ironed khaki trousers and a short-sleeve khaki shirt with the collar buttoned up, the outfit enhanced by a beaded necklace and a wooden pendant carved in the shape of Africa. He seemed to ooze knowledge and wisdom. I was drawn to him, began to see him almost as a substitute father. If there was chance to pick his brain, I jumped on it. He knew a thirsty person when he saw one and did what he could to slake my thirst. Over time we became very close, in a teacher-pupil sort of way. It was almost inevitable that he’d end up trying to convert me.

  I didn’t become a Rasta, not in the strictest sense, but I was a ‘fashion dread’ for a while, meaning that although I had the dreadlocks and smoked the chalice, although I accompanied Ras Malachi to Jah Shaka’s dances and wore the weatherman tam and the red, yellow and green clothing, although I knew a little something about Nyabinghi and could quote a few passages of scripture, I just couldn’t bring myself to ‘bow’ to Selassie or give up pork or accept Ethiopia as my spiritual home and the birthplace of mankind or look upon Bob Marley and Marcus Garvey as holy prophets. It’s not nice to be called a false anything, but, to borrow from Marley, the cap fitted me and so I wore it. Ras Malachi was sympathetic. ‘Following Jah is not a easy road. Babylon make it hard for the youth. Like you, many of them get the call but only a few answer.’ He was certainly right about that. I wasn’t the only ‘fashion dread’ in the neighbourhood. There were plenty of my peers who knew the recipe for Rastafarianism but couldn’t cook the meal. Like me, they would pepper their speech with Rasta-isms – Jah know, Jah bless, Rastafari, Selassie I, Ital, Irie, Bal’head, Livity, Babylon – without any real understanding of what they were saying.

  Even so, some of the things I learned from Ras Malachi have stayed with me ever since. For instance, it was he who encouraged me to question the accepted version of who Jesus was. Christ, he said, was not born of a virgin, and was most certainly not a blue-eyed, blond-haired Caucasian, but in fact a black man, or at the very least a man of dark complexion. It’s hard for me to describe the feeling I had when I first heard this said. The image of a white Christ was so embedded in my consciousness that it felt almost blasphemous for me to try to think of him in any other way. I realised that I’d been so conditioned into regarding anything black as negative that I couldn’t picture Christ as a black man without experiencing a pang of fear, as though I expected to be struck by lightning. This reluctance to question accepted truths, particularly those which, deliberately or not, directly or otherwise, put black people in a position of inferiority, was something I had to work hard to eradicate from my subconscious, and there’s a good chance that had I not been exposed to Rastafari, had I not met Ras Malachi, I might never have begun the process.

  * * *

  I met Beverly on the Front. She used to buy weed from us. Tall, thin and athletic, with close-cropped hair that she often dyed blonde and with a boho dress sense that made her look like the popstar she had once dreamed of becoming, I fancied her as soon as I saw her. Pregnant at fourteen, while still at school, she lived on benefits in a high-rise council flat on the Berry Street Estate. When I met her she was sixteen and had just split with her daughter’s father, Rickie, who, unable to handle the responsibility of being a dad, had bolted. The whole experience – getting pregnant and giving birth, dropping out of school, moving out of her parents’ place, being abandoned by her boyfriend when she needed him most – had left her bewildered. A lot of her child benefit went on weed, which she used as a kind of self-medication. Aside from playing with her daughter, nothing gave her more pleasure. She slept a lot and cried even more, silently, often while we were having sex, which she liked to do in the dark. I guess she was depressed, but at the time I was ignorant of such things and thought she was being self-indulgent.

  Other teenage mothers I knew were getting on with it, making plans for the future, taking evening classes, working part-time and drawing on the support of their relatives to babysit so they could get out and now and then and let their hair down. Not Beverly. She was proud and stubborn, Miss Independent. After what had happened to her, she was reluctant to ask for help, least of all from her parents, who, she claimed, had unmasked themselves during her pregnancy. ‘They couldn’t wait to get me out the house. As soon as I told them I was pregnant they made me register for a council flat.’

  I once made the mistake of suggesting that she try to make things up with Rickie so he could become more of a regular feature in his daughter’s life. ‘You must be joking. He can go to hell. Him and his bitch sisters.’

  The reference to the sisters was telling. It turned out that Rickie had been thinking of making a go of things but had been persuaded from doing so by his two sisters. They had never liked Beverly and believed she had deliberately gotten herself pregnant (she was supposed to have been on the pill) to trap their brother. They went to her house and accused her of it. ‘I told those two slags where to get off. And I told Rickie that he should think for himself and that if he couldn’t, I didn’t want him in my life.’ That ended things between them. It was, she said, the excuse Rickie had been waiting for. Now, their only contact was when they ran into each other in the street.

  I dreaded being out and about with Beverly when that happened. The situation was just too awkward. Beverly never had much to say to Rickie and so he was forced to talk to his daughter. Picking her up, you could almost predict what he was going to say. ‘Who’s my little girl, eh? God, you’re getting so big. You being a good girl for mummy? Give daddy a kiss.’ On one occasion I said to Beverly, ‘I�
�ll catch you later babes, give you guys a bit of time alone,’ and she said, ‘What you on about? I don’t need no time alone with him.’ I didn’t know where to put my face. Neither did Rickie.

  We’d been seeing each other for about six months when Beverly asked me to move in. I’d been spending more time at her place than the squat, which had become too much of a ‘spot’ to have any kind of privacy, so it made sense. Mitch thought I was crazy, or, as he called it, ‘pussy whupped’. He saw the situation for what it was: I was a sixteen-year-old boy who was giving up his hard-earned freedom for a ready-made-family and bills. Benjy didn’t feel strongly about it one-way or the other, but he wondered whether I wasn’t allowing myself to be exploited. ‘Don’t let my girl bleed you dry. That’s all I’ll say.’ I wasn’t worried about that. Beverly had never asked me for money, not for herself, not for her daughter. I contributed to the rent, gas and electricity bills but never felt under any pressure to do so. The truth is we got on really well.

  I couldn’t keep pace with the speed of the changes happening in my life. I missed my brother. He was the one person I’d had always been able to talk to, but now I could never pin him down as he was hardly ever around, he was too busy running around London robbing people. He had always been into petty crime, but after he left home he got into some really heavy stuff, the sort of thing we had grown up watching on programmes like The Sweeney, the kind involving balaclavas and saw-off shotguns.

  I don’t know how or where he met them, but at some point he got involved with a serious set of white guys – proper villains who could trace their criminal roots back to the Krays – and became an armed robber. For about three years, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, he and his gang went on a crime spree that made his name ring out in the neighbourhood. And how he lived up to his image. He wore nothing but designer suits and animal skin shoes, ostrich being his particular favourite. On the rare occasions that I saw him, he would take me on shopping sprees to the west end and buy me the most expensive outfits. On the way back, he would make sure to cruise along the Front so everyone could see all the designer shopping bags we had stuffed in the back seat of his Bimmer. I got a lot of respect just from being his brother. My only regret during this period was that I didn’t see enough of him, a few times a year if I was lucky. He’d go missing for months at a stretch, usually after he’d pulled one of his jobs, and then, out of nowhere, he’d show up, looking sharp and dripping in jewellery. He’d never hang around for more than a day or two and, constantly worried about being grassed up, could never stay in one place for more than a few hours at a time. He was a Londoner through and through, but he seemed to spend most of his time hiding out with his gang on the continent. I believe I still have a few of the postcards he sent me from places like the Algarve and the Costa del Sol. Even now I don’t think he appreciates just how much I looked up to him and just how saddened I was by his swift, surprising and spectacular fall.

  By the mid-eighties, almost without warning, crack cocaine had arrived in our midst. It felt as though I’d gone to bed one night and woken up the next morning to find the world had changed beyond all recognition. Recreational drugs like weed and hash had become old hat. Everyone was now either sniffing Charlie or freebasing it. Cocaine had become the trendiest drug in town. The demand for it was such that it quickly became readily available and cheap.

  In the media there were endless doomsday predictions about Britain’s inner cities going the way of America’s, that is to say awash with crack addicts who would turn to crime to support their habits. The prediction proved to be accurate, but not to the extent that some had forecast. Britain’s inner cities were not destroyed by crack in the same way that America’s had been. But it didn’t matter, for in as much as it galvanised the police and the courts, the scaremongering did its damage. I knew people who served long stretches in prison for being caught in possession of a few crack rocks, and not all of them were dealers. I used cocaine occasionally, as did Mitch and Benjy, but whilst there was a fair amount of money to be made from selling it, we didn’t have the stomach for what was a vicious, cut-throat, kill-or-be-killed business. We were weed sellers and stuck to that.

  Theodore, on the other hand, had no such qualms. As well as his regular work holding up building societies, he had diversified into selling cocaine. At first he restricted himself to dealing wholesale, driving around in his car with kilos of the stuff in his boot, but then he made the classic mistake of getting high on his own supply. Soon he could be seen hustling rocks on the Front like any common street dealer. His habit skyrocketed as rapidly as his reputation plummeted. In less than a year, he became a wreck. It made me deeply ashamed to see him shuffling around the neighbourhood, looking dirty and unshaven, begging, borrowing and stealing in an increasingly desperate attempt to maintain his habit.

  Daily, he would pester me for money to buy drugs; over time I lost all respect for him and began cursing him openly in the streets. I would use the most foul and abusive language in the hope that he might be humiliated into getting his act together. I was wasting my breath. I lost sleep worrying about him, as did my parents, who, to my surprise, had taken him in when he had nowhere to live. He and they were constantly arguing, mostly about the fact that he was stealing money from them and slowly selling off their possessions. Eventually they lost patience with him and, for the second time in his life, threw him out.

  It was then that he moved in with me and Beverly. The place was barely big enough for one person, never mind four. Beverly was not happy at all when I asked her if my brother could stay with us for a while, and when she discovered he was on crack, she flatly refused to put him up. I had to beg her, and even then she only relented on the strict agreement that Theodore never smoked crack in the flat and that he’d be gone after a month at the longest. Not only did he smoke crack in the house, he stayed with us for over six months. In that time we became almost like parents to him. We had to make sure he ate, washed and slept a little now and then. We had to buy him clothes, which he would wear until they were literally stiff with dirt and grime. Very occasionally, he’d have a lucid moment and the horrible reality of what he’d become would dawn on him. Often with tears in his eyes, he would talk to me about his desire to get clean and, as he put it, ‘get back in the game’. But nothing ever changed. Lacking the will to get better, he couldn’t find the way. His nightmare continued, month after depressing month. And then, out of the blue, everything came to a head. One night, long after I’d left the Front and gone back to Beverly’s, Benjy came round to our place with the news that Theodore had been repeatedly stabbed by Django for trying to exchange a fake gold chain for a couple of crack rocks.

  When I went to see him in hospital Theodore could neither open his eyes nor speak. I started crying. For something to do, I picked up his limp hand and held it in mine. He had been given a massive blood transfusion but still looked close to death. The doctors expected him to make a slow but full recovery. Looking at him, it didn’t seem possible. Mum and Dad showed up a while later. For several minutes they did nothing but stand and stare, as if they couldn’t quite believe their eyes. Mitch and Benjy had come with me to the hospital and were hovering in the background, trying to be discreet. I remember that Benjy kept shaking his head and that Mitch was grinding his teeth so hard his jawline was rippling. None of us spoke.

  No-one said anything. They didn’t need to. I knew what was expected of me and was deeply afraid, both of what I had to do and the person I’d be going up against. Django was a killer. By all accounts, most of them his own, he’d been killing since he was in short pants. I’d heard him bragging about the amount of people he’d murdered, often for the most trifling reason. I’d listened, open-mouthed, while he and his boys gave gloating details of all the people they had gunned down in the slums of Kingston, laughing and joking about how their victims had begged for their lives before being shot, usually in the face. His reputation alone made it difficult even to look at him. Most people
on the Front, including some of his own gang, were terrified of him.

  Even assuming I had the courage to take him on, which I didn’t, how was I going to do it? I’d seen my fair share of violence, had grown up around it, it was nothing new to me, yet apart from the odd fight at school, I’d never personally been involved in anything serious. Mitch often used to talk about stabbing people’s guts out, laughing about how he would leave their innards in their lap like a bowl of spaghetti. Just thinking about the image was enough to make me nauseous. And yet I carried a knife, we all did, more as a deterrent than anything. If people knew you were armed they’d think twice, or so the theory went. In any case I felt fortunate that so far I’d never been tested, never been backed into a corner to the point where I felt I had to use a knife on someone. As for guns, I didn’t know the first thing about them. I’d never seen one in my life, much less handled or fired any. I wouldn’t have known where to start if I wanted to get hold of one.

  Despite all the gangster films I had watched, it was only after my brother had been stabbed that I properly understood the attraction of putting a contract on someone’s head. You could have your way without getting your hands wet, so to speak. But I knew no-one in that line of work and even if I did, how would I pay them? And suppose for argument’s sake say I managed to find someone and was able to pay, could I then live with myself knowing that I had financed the killing of another human being, even one as vile as Django? You don’t go from being a choirboy to a killer in two years, unless you’re a psychopath. I knew which side of the divide I lived on I was keen to remain there. There was, I believed, such a thing as wickedness.

  What I wanted to do to Django was wicked and yet, if I stopped to think about what he had done to Theodore, if I pictured my brother on his drip, if I ever stopped and thought about how close he had come to dying and how he must have suffered while he was being stabbed over and over, if I dwelt on the fact that he’d been left bleeding on the street, I could actually feel the evil rising in my body. I hated Django. Deep down inside I throbbed with the desire to get even with him but to do that I’d have to become another person. Someone like Mitch. He had violence in him. It was only a matter of time before he gave full vent to it. I pitied the person who eventually fell victim to his rage and I pitied him for having to contend with it night and day. Benjy, who had once taken a kitchen knife to his own father for slapping his mother, was like a tree-hugger in comparison. They wanted to help me. They’d known me all my life and knew I didn’t have it in me to take Django down, not by myself anyhow.