by Mark Dawson
He turned and left, the door clattering behind him. Milton rose and followed him into the street. Elijah was heading back towards the Estate, his hood pulled up and his shoulders hunched forwards. Milton was about to set off after him before he thought better of it. He went back inside and sat down again before what was left of his breakfast. He cursed himself. What had he been thinking? He had let his temper get the better of him and now he had lost his opportunity to get through to the boy. He was stubborn and headstrong and the direct approach was not going to be successful. He would have to try another way.
* * *
19.
POPS AND LAURA had gone to the Nandos on Bethnal Green Road for dinner and then had taken the bus down towards the cinema in Shoreditch. It had been a good evening. Pops was off the Estate and there was no need for him to impress anyone, or uphold his rep, or put anyone else down. He had an act, and he played it well: hard, impassive, sarcastic. To reveal otherwise would be dangerous, a sign of weakness. He remembered, with vivid clarity, the documentaries his biology teacher had shown them in middle school when she wanted to go off and smoke a fag in the playground. There had been one about the lions in Africa, the Serengeti or whatever the fuck place it was, and it had stuck in his head ever since. Leadership was all about image. The top lion needed to show the others in the pride that he wasn’t to be messed with. If he showed weakness, they’d be on him. They’d fuck him up. Pops knew that there were other elders in the LFB who would fuck him up, too, if he gave them reason.
It was different with Laura. He could relax and be himself. It was always like that with her. She loved her crack, but Pops knew she was into him for much more than just getting lickey. She was older than him, ten years older, and she had that sense of confidence that older women had. She wasn’t like the skanky goonettes on the Estate, always mouthing off, screeching and pouting and giving attitude. They were just girls where Laura was a woman. She was cool. And, man, was she fine.
The film had been running for thirty minutes when the call came. Pops felt his phone vibrating in his pocket and he had taken it out to check the caller ID: it was Bizness. His stomach plummeted and his chest felt tight. He did not want to answer it but he knew that there was no choice, not where Bizness was concerned. He had stabbed a boy before who had ignored his calls. He said it was a mark of disrespect. Respect was the most important thing in Bizness’s life, or at least that was what he said.
He took the call, pressing the phone against his ear. “Bizness,” he said quietly.
He could hear the sound of loud music in the background. “Where are you, man?”
“Watching a movie.”
“Nah, bruv, don’t be chatting breeze––what, you forgot the party tonight?”
Pops gritted his teeth. He hadn’t forgotten, far from it. He knew about the new record, and the party to celebrate its launch, and he had decided to ignore it. He had been to the party that launched the collective’s first record, eighteen months ago, and he had not enjoyed himself. The atmosphere was aggressive, feral, and there had been several beefs that had the potential to turn even more unpleasant than they already were. The relationships within the group were built on uncertain foundations. All the talk of being brothers was fine, but talk was just talk, and there was a swirl of jealousy beneath the surface that was always ready to erupt. Pops knew all of the crew, some better than others, and juggling loyalties between them was more effort than it was worth. Bizness was currently at the top of the tree, and it had been that way for the last six months. He had replaced Lambie once he had been done for possession of a firearm and sent down for four years. There were always pretenders to his crown, and his treatment of them was always the same: constant dissing that turned violent when the dissing didn’t work. Beatings, then stabbings if the beatings didn’t work, and at least two shootings that he knew about. One of those shootings he knew about from close personal experience, close enough for the poor bastard’s blood to land all over his jacket.
Pops didn’t need that kind of aggravation in his life tonight.
“You coming, then?” Bizness pressed.
There were a couple in the seats in front of him and the man turned around and glared at him, trying to act big in front of his woman. Pops felt his anger flare; he jerked his head up, his eyebrows cocked, and the man turned away.
“Nah, I don’t know, man.”
“I ain’t asking,” Bizness said. “I’m telling.”
Pops sighed. There was no point in resisting. “Alright,” he said.
“You with your gash?”
Pops looked over at Laura. She was watching the film, the light from the screen flickering against her pale skin. “Yeah,” he said.
“Bring her with you, aight? And bring that younger. What’s his name, JaJa? Pick him up and tell him I need that package he’s holding for me. There’s gonna be hype tonight, I’m hearing things, I wanna make sure I don’t get caught with my dick out. Bring your piece, too.”
And, with that, Bizness ended the call.
Pops stared at screen as it slowly faded to black. The first act of the film came to a crashing conclusion and yet he did not really notice it. He was thinking of Bizness, and whether there was any way they could show their faces at the party and then leave. He was unable to think of anything. Bizness would just see that as a diss, probably worse than not going at all, and he’d be in the shit.
He tried to put it into perspective. Maybe he was being ungrateful. He felt the thick wad of ten pound notes in his pocket, the cold links of his gold chain resting against his skin, the heavy weight of the rings on his fingers. None of that came for free. You had to do things you would rather not do. That was how you got all the nice stuff you wanted. That was just the way it was.
“Come on,” he whispered over to Laura.
“What?”
“We gotta split. There’s a party, we got to go to it.”
“Can’t we go afterwards? This is good.”
“Gotta go now, baby,” he said, taking her by the arm and drawing her down into the aisle. He held his phone in his other hand and, using his thumb, he scrolled through his contacts until he found Elijah’s number.
* * *
20.
THE PARTY was in Chimes nightclub on the Lower Clapton Road. Pops parked next to the beaten up Georgian houses on Clapton Square and they walked the rest of the way, past the discount stores and kaleidoscopic ethic restaurants, past the police posters pasted onto the lamp-posts exhorting locals to “Nail the Killers in Hackney.” The club was on the edge of the major roundabout that funnelled traffic between the City and the East End and marked the beginning of Murder Mile, the long stretch of road that had become inextricably linked with gun crime over the past few years.
The club was in a large and dilapidated old building, facing the minarets of an enormous mosque. It was a hot and enclosed series of rooms and condensation dripped from the patched and sagging ceilings overhead. The largest room had been equipped with a powerful sound system, and Elijah had been able to hear the rumble of the bass from where Pops parked his car. Lights rotated and spun, lasers streaked through the damp air, strobes flickered with skittish energy. The rooms were crammed with revellers: girls in tight-fitting tops and short skirts, men gathered in surly groups at the edges of the room, drinking and smoking and aiming murderous glances at rivals. A tight wire of aggression passed through the room, thrumming with tension, ready to snap. The bassline thumped out a four-four beat, repetitive and brutal, and the noise of a hundred shouted conversations filled the spaces between as an incomprehensible buzz.
Elijah caught himself gaping. He had never been to anything like this before and he could hardly believe he was here. All the members of BRAPPPP! were present, the whole collective, two dozen of them, each bringing their own entourage of friends and hangers-on. He recognised them from the poster in his room and the videos he had watched on YouTube. The new record had been played earlier and now the DJ was mixing old
school Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg. Pops was alongside him, his face bleak, his hand placed possessively against the small of his girl’s back.
Bizness appeared from out of the crowd, noticed them, and made his way across. He moved with exaggerated confidence, rolling his hips and shoulders, and his face was coldly impassive. He responded to the greetings from those he passed with small dips of his head or, for closer friends, a fist bump.
“Aight,” he said as he reached their group. He regarded them one at a time, his face unmoving until his gaze rested on Laura. The blank aggression lifted and he parted his wide lips, revealing his brilliantly white teeth with the three gold caps. “Alright, darling,” he said, ignoring Pops altogether. “Remember me?”
“Of course,” Laura said, her eyes glittering.
“You heard the new record yet?”
“Yeah.”
“You like it?”
“Course.”
“That’s what I like to hear. You looking fine tonight, darling. You totally bare choong.”
She did not reply, but her helpless smile said enough. Pops noticed it and a tremor of irritation quivered across his face.
Bizness ignored Pops and the others and turned to Elijah. “Come with me, younger,” he said, and, without waiting for a response, he led the way through the crowd. A tall, heavyset man wearing an earpiece was stationed at a door next to the bar and, as Bizness approached, he gave a stiff nod and stepped aside. The room beyond was small and dark, with sofas against the walls and drapes obscuring the light from the street outside. There were three others in the room, arching their backs over a long table that was festooned with two dozen lines of cocaine, arranged in parallel, each four inches long. Elijah recognised the others as members of BRAPPPP!––MC Mafia, the rapper who sounded a little like Snoop––Icarus and Bredren.
Bizness walked across to the table and took out a rolled up twenty pound note. He lowered his face to the nearest line and, with the note pressed tightly into his nostril, he snorted hard. Half of the line disappeared. He swapped the note into his other nostril and snorted again, finishing the line. He pressed his finger to one nostril and then the other, snorting hard again, and then rubbed a finger vigorously across his gums. With an appreciative smack of his lips, he offered the note to Elijah. “Want one?”
Elijah had never taken cocaine before and he was scared but he felt unable to refuse. Bizness and the others were watching them. Bizness’s face was inscrutable, and he did not want him to think he was a little boy. He shrugged, doing his best to feign nonchalance, dipped his head to the table and snorted the powder. He managed a quarter of the line, the powder tickling his nose and throat. The sneeze came before he had moved his head and it blew the rest of the line away, a little cloud of white that bloomed across the table, the powder getting into his eyes and his mouth.
Bizness laughed at his incompetence. “You ain’t done that before, have you, bruv?”
“Course I have,” he said, blushing hard.
“Sure.”
The word was drawn out, freighted with sarcasm, and Elijah cursed himself for being so green. They would think he was a baby, and that was no good. He would show them otherwise. He stood back from the table and shrugged his rucksack off his shoulder. He unzipped it, reached inside, and drew out the bundle wrapped with newspaper. “I brought it,” he said, holding it in both hands, offering it to Bizness.
“I don’t need it,” he said.
“What?”
“You do.”
“What?”
“Check me, younger,” he said. His voice was blank, emotionless. “You like what you see here out there tonight? You were having a good look around, weren’t you, I saw. You see what we got? I ain’t talking about the little things. Someone like Pops, he thinks it’s all about getting himself new clothes, new trainers, a good looking gyaldem, saving up for a nice car. I ain’t dissing him, each to his own and that, but he’s got a severe case of what I call limited horizons. He ain’t going nowhere. He’s at his peak right now, that’s it for him. You youngers look up to brothers like that, some of you might even get to his level, but others, the ones with ambition, that ain’t never going to be good enough. The ones who are going somewhere know they can do better. You get me, bruv?”
Elijah nodded. Bizness’s breath was heavy with the smell of booze and dope.
“I’m gonna give you a demonstration of what I mean later tonight. That bitch of his, the white girl, I know you saw the way she clocked me earlier. You see, younger––who you reckon she’s going home with later? That girl’s getting proper merked, and it won’t have nothing to do with him.”
The other men in the room laughed at that, a harsh and cruel sound. Elijah swallowed hard.
Bizness reached out a clammy hand and curled it around the back of Elijah’s head. He crouched down so that they were on the same level and drew Elijah’s face closer to his own. The smell of his aftershave was sickly, and, as he looked into the man’s face, he saw that his eyes were cold, the pupils shrunk down to pinpricks, the muscles in his cheeks and at the corners of his mouth jerking and twitching from the cocaine. “It’s about power, younger. Everything else follows after it. You get me?”
“Yes.”
“You want to be with us, don’t you? BRAPPPP!, right, we’re like brothers. We’d do anything for each other. But you wanna get in with us, be one of us like that, you got to show us you got what it takes. And I ain’t talking about robbing no shop or turning over some sad mug for his iPhone. That shit’s for babies. You want to get in with the real gangsters, you got to do gangster shit.”
Bizness had not removed his hand from Elijah’s neck. Their faces were no more than six inches apart, and his eyes bore straight into Elijah’s like lasers. “Younger,” he said, “I got a problem and you’re gonna help me sort it. I heard a rumour that this joker I know is coming to the party tonight. You know Wiley T?”
Elijah did. He was a young rapper who was starting to build a reputation for himself. He came from Camden where he had shot videos of him rapping on the street. He had uploaded them to YouTube and they had gone viral. Elijah had heard that he had been offered a record contract because of those videos. Everyone was talking about it at school, discussing it jealously, coveting his good fortune, agreeing it was proof that it could be a way out of the ghetto. A long-shot, but a shot nonetheless.
“I invited him,” Bizness explained, “he thinks we’re gonna shake hands and make up but we ain’t. He’s been dropping bars on YouTube about me. You probably heard them?”
Elijah nodded and, without thinking what he was doing, he started to intone––“‘You walk around showing your body ‘cause it sells / plus to avoid the fact that you ain’t got skills / mad at me ‘cause I kick that shit real niggaz feel…’” He realised what he was saying before the pay-off and caught himself, saying that he didn’t know the rest.
‘“While 99% of your fans wear high heels,’” Bizness finished with a dry laugh with no humour in it. “Ain’t a bad little diss, but bitch must’ve forgotten there’s got to be a comeback and when you drop words on me, and you better know it ain’t going to be in something I put up on fucking YouTube for a laugh with my mates. He thinks he’s a thug but he ain’t. He’s a little joker, a little pussy, and he needs to get dooked.”
Elijah’s hands had started to shake. The direction the conversation was taking was frightening him, and he knew he was about to be asked to do something that he really did not want to do. Bizness unwrapped the gun from its newspaper wrapper and checked that it was loaded. “You ever shot a gun before, bruv?”
“No,” Elijah managed to say.
Bizness extended his arm and pointed the gun at MC Mafia. He drew Elijah closer to him so that their heads touched. “It ain’t no thing. You take the piece and aim it. That’s right––look right down the sight.” He thumbed off the safety.
“Come on, Bizness,” Mafia said. “Aim that shit some other place. That ain’t cool.”
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“Safety’s off, put your finger on the trigger and give it a squeeze. It’ll give you a little kick, so make sure you get in nice and close to the brother you want to shoot. You get in close, you won’t miss. Easy, bruv.”
He thumbed the safety back on. Mafia exhaled and cracked a joke, but he could not completely hide his fear. Bizness was mental, they all knew it. Unpredictable and dangerous.
Bizness placed the gun carefully in Elijah’s hands. “I want you to keep this. Keep your eyes on me tonight, aight? When he gets here, I’m gonna go up to him and give him a hug, like we’re best friends. That’s your signal. Soon as I do that, you gonna go up to him real close and put all six rounds into him. Pull the trigger until it don’t fire no more. Blam blam blam blam blam blam. You my little mash man, JaJa. We gonna make a little soldier out of you tonight, you see.”
* * *
21.
RUTHERFORD PAID the barman, collected the two pints of orange juice and lemonade from the bar and headed back outside. It was a warm evening and he and Rutherford had found a table in the beer garden of the pub that faced onto Victoria Park. It was busy: Tuesday was quiz night and the pub was full with teams spread out around the tables. The garden was busy, too, most of the tables occupied and with a steady stream of passers-by making their way to and from the row of chi-chi boutiques that had gathered along the main road. Rutherford remembered when this area had been one of the worst parts of the East End, battered and drab and the kind of place where you could get rolled just as easily as crossing the road. Now, though? The money from the City had taken over: all the old warehouses had been turned into arty studios, the terraces had been turned into apartments and the shops were filled with butchers where you could pay a fiver for a burger made of buffalo, fancy restaurants and furniture shops. They said it was progress, and things were better now. Rutherford didn’t miss the aggravation but he did miss the soul of the place; it was as if its heart had been ripped out.
