The London Pigeon Wars

by Patrick Neate

  ‘Yes, my good people!’ Kwesi began. ‘Back in the days of the Boogie Down Bronx, hip-hop music was the jungle telegraph for black folk; a poetic communication, the CNN of the street! That's my philosophy of ghetto storytelling and this one goes out to all my bredren and sistren because you know what I'm chatting about! It's called “Babylon on My Tail”. Word!’

  Kwesi paused and his chest heaved. He closed his eyes for a moment. He was clearly taking this (and himself) very seriously.

  Babylon on my tail. Goodness me!

  Wailing sirens

  Trying to see

  Another brother

  Who never knew his mother…

  Kwesi kept his eyes shut. Which was a good thing. Because, as soon as he launched into the poem, the audience was silenced in embarrassment like they'd been floored by a punch. The hippies looked at the floor, the Jamaicans tried to suppress their snorts and sneering, and the ethnocentrics shook their heads in astonishment. The social worker sighed, the student reminisced about one off the wrist and the music teacher tried to hear only the drum beats. The cab driver wondered if he'd be home in time for the football and the journalist tutted. Tom, Tariq, Freya, Ami and Karen exchanged glances that said ‘It's not that bad, is it?’ and ‘Yes, it is’ and they avoided looking at the stage. Only Murray was watching and the smile was fixed on his face as if he'd been caught laughing at the moment of a car crash. ‘Fucking hell!’ he breathed. ‘What's he doing?’

  It wasn't Kwesi's poem itself that was so gut-twistingly awful but his delivery, manner, accent and vocabulary. He told a fairly standard scarytale of -isms and injustice (all revolutionary catchphrases and unity fantasies); but he repeatedly dropped off beat as if squabbling with the rhythm, he threw out his arms in bizarre, uncoordinated movements that looked like piss-takes of LA gang signs and his accent lurched unconvincingly between New York rapper, ragga MC, sit-com cockney and privately educated son of a Ghanaian diplomat. Slowly the crowd began to fidget and mutter. He described a character in his poem as a ‘bitch’ and he imbued this insult with such sudden and unexpected misogyny that some of the hippies laughed while others wanted to walk out in protest. ‘Booyaka!’ he exclaimed and the Jamaicans kissed their teeth and packed up because he sounded like a politician trying to be down with the kids. ‘Do we remember Armistad?’ he pleaded and the ethnic ethnocentrics looked at one another and said things like ‘Well, you certainly don't’, while the whites among them thought that, but for an accident of birth, they might have expressed this shit, this pain, this disappointment, a whole lot better.

  It is a delicate and sensitized kind of skill to represent other people's protests with sincerity. But Kwesi? He was fronting issues about which he knew nothing; ditching his own identity in favour of cardboard cutouts from TV and movies and music. He may as well have boot-polished his African face and sung a Gershwin blues with the Black and White Minstrels. At nineteen, he'd once been stopped by the cops for speeding. Sure. But they'd eventually waved on his diplomatic plates. His only experience of drug culture was an infrequent eighth of weed from the glove compartment of Lucky's Jag and the only thing he ever shot was an occasional amber light. And he visited his mother once a year in a comfortable suburb of Accra.

  With his eyes squeezed tight, Kwesi could picture himself as a rebel poet but, up on stage, he came across as half a dozen contradictory black caricatures all at once: an Uncle Tom gangsta, a bush African B-Boy, a crack-dealing Golliwog. He came across as a caricature of himself.

  ‘Babylon on my tail. Goodness me!’ he bellowed.

  Police officer officer

  Oversee

  Me?

  At last Kwesi opened his eyes as ‘Babylon on My Tail’ built to its intended climax. But now, seeing the faces of the crowd twisted in various combinations of suppressed amusement, awkwardness and irritation, he found that the words were caught somewhere in the piping between his mind and his gob. His gaze lifted above the audience's heads and his mouth dropped open and he began to blink very fast. It was a sudden, gaping moment of self-realization that couldn't have been more painful if every person present had offered their critique in turn. He was briefly the Jesus of all their disappointments and the instant seemed to stretch as his shoulders slumped and his chin fell and the embarrassment in the café was so tangible it could have been packaged and given out to adolescents shopping with their mothers in fashionable Kensington boutiques.

  Murray stood up. He was chuckling noiselessly and he began to applaud very slowly. Nobody joined in.

  Tom looked up at him, bewildered. ‘What are you doing?’ he hissed.

  ‘Rescue mission, china.’

  He strode confidently towards the stage and his clapping gradually synched to the rhythm from the sound system. Kwesi's eyes were wide and agonized and starting to blur when he picked out Murray climbing on to the stage and an expression halfway between terror and a smile began to play on his face. The audience was transfixed and silent. Their stomachs still churned with vicarious humiliation but they recognized Murray as the man who'd confronted Paul the previous poet, and they wondered what game he was playing now. And was K in on it?

  Murray stopped clapping, slipped his hands in his pockets and stood with his back to the room. Somehow, without his accompaniment, the drum beats seemed to gather pace (or was it just the growing tension?). And when he spoke, he spoke quietly; his tone simmering with soft, controlled contempt. But his voice reverberated around the café without the benefit of a mic.

  ‘What kind of a black person do you call yourself?’ Murray said. And the hippies, the Jamaicans and the ethnocentrics all glowed at the sight of somebody who might just be one of their own asking the question.

  ‘What are you saying?’ Kwesi sounded bemused, sheepish, broken.

  ‘What I mean to say…’ Murray's voice came quick.

  What I mean to say

  What does the officer oversee?

  What are you going to be today?

  What kind of black are you going to be?

  Murray's improvised scansion was far from perfect and his sentiments far from deep. But the way he spoke, it was as if the recorded bass and snares dropped in with his every word and, to the audience, his every word was exactly the way they'd have put it themselves and they were suddenly on the edge of their seats. Tariq's elbow was frozen, the beer midway to his mouth. Ami's hand was fixed to the side of her head where she'd been tucking her hair behind her ear. Freya and Karen held nervous hands on the tabletop and their thumbs were pink and their knuckles were white. Tom noticed their interlocking fingers and it surely would have bothered him but he too was hostage to the action on the stage.

  Kwesi's brain slowly ground into action and he answered with a dull, almost sleepy inflection. But at least the voice was his own. ‘The only black I know how.’

  ‘And what kind of black is that?’ Murray asked, dragging K with him like a chip wrapper that snags your foot on the Camden Road.

  ‘It's the black I am now,’ K said and he too was beginning to find the metre.

  Slowly Murray began to build new poetry out of the rubble of Kwesi's own, firing fundamental questions of race and identity that his would-be accomplice answered with growing wit, confidence and an uncanny capacity for the rhyming couplet. What's more, in the context of K's woeful polemicizing that had gone before, this showdown had a new and political poignancy that was utterly compelling.

  ‘What a set-up!’ whispered one hippy under her breath that smelled of clove cigarettes.

  ‘What a devastating conceit!’ agreed her boyfriend.

  The Jamaicans snapped their fingers in appreciation of Murray's every comment – because didn't it take a Jamaican to express the contradictions of black Britain? – and they glocked their tongues at K's sharp retorts. And the ethnocentrics were dumbfounded at such a brazen confrontation of the issues of diaspora, colonialism and multiculturalism and they wondered whether these two might consider performing at their celebration of Diw
ali next year (between the Ivorian drummers and the Peruvian panpipes, perhaps).

  As the dialogue unfolded, so it heated and sparked as Murray snapped K and K tried to snap him right back (and the cab driver thought, So this is what happens when two clever black geezers get together). Initially Murray had the best of it and the audience started to wince aloud and chuckle with each biting phrase. But as Murray gathered momentum, so K seemed to find assurance, as if biding his time for a killer blow, and he deflected each jibe with skill and irony. The snaps flew and were parried; they were returned with interest and swatted away. And when Kwesi's backing tape ran silent and the speed of the exchange built further into a rolling wave of theses, antitheses and syntheses, some of the crowd didn't notice and the rest figured it was all part of the show. Finally Murray appeared to lose his temper and he strode up to K and shouted at the top of his voice: ‘What kind of black are you going to be?’

  ‘Why? What kind of black will you sell me?’ Kwesi sneered.

  ‘When you look in the mirror what do you see?’

  Kwesi lifted his head a little and spat out the last word: ‘That I don't need some white guy to tell me!’

  With perfect timing, Murray finally turned to face the audience and there was an audible gasp from every corner of the café as if they were seeing him for the first time. Because Murray, who moments before had been an ethnocentric Jamaican hippy (and a few things else besides), was suddenly, indisputably and unforgivably white.

  A single heartbeat was followed by a spontaneous roar of applause. Murray immediately stepped off the front of the stage and the crowds parted to let him through. They barely acknowledged him as they were too busy acclaiming K, who milked their esteem like he'd had five years' practice for just such a moment. White and black and everything in between, they cheered; because Kwesi had won and so redeemed their every disappointment and come to represent them all.

  At his table, Murray flopped into a chair and the expression on his face was unreadable. Wordsworth took the stage and asked the crowd to show their appreciation for the performers once more and, at the mention of ‘the incomparable K-ster’, they again erupted into unselfconscious cheers. Freya and Ami stared at Murray, awestruck. Even they now suspected that the whole show had been some secret plan between Murray and K. But Tariq, Karen and Tom, who remembered their times with Murray at LMT? They knew what he was capable of all too well. Tariq nodded at him shyly and Karen leaned across the table and smiled. ‘That was a good thing, Muz,’ she said. ‘A good thing.’ In her head, she compared the whole episode to a movie. Kevin Bacon at the end of Footloose, she thought.

  Tom ducked his head into Murray's shoulder and whispered, ‘Nice one.’ And the smile vanished from Murray's face and the muscles of his jaw seemed to tighten a little. For the third time that evening, Tom sensed that Murray was vexed with him but he still didn't know why and he didn't like it. So he leaned forward again and held him by the elbow. ‘What's up with you?’ he asked.

  Murray turned slowly towards him and the stone of his eyes chilled Tom to the gut. He spoke slow and precise and too soft for anyone else to hear. ‘You told me about you and Karen,’ he said. ‘You told me about her new job; about how she was ambitious, how you got left behind.’

  Tom nodded. He didn't like the direction this was going.

  ‘You didn't tell me you played her.’

  Tom licked his lips. ‘So?’

  ‘So much for the superhero. You're a fool, china; a fucking fool.’

  Murray shook his head and looked away. Tom felt sick. Kwesi was approaching the table wearing a smile that spanned the city.

  7

  The art of conversation is dead

  When a person's drunk, they talk sense or they talk none; and you can listen to them or not. It's the same as when they're sober.

  After Per-Verse, they all went back to Tariq and Emma's house, off Lavender Hill. It was pushing midnight by the time they left the CCC café and it wasn't a good idea but Tariq kept saying ‘It's just around the corner’ and ‘It'll be fine’ and ‘I'm telling you, it'll be fine’. He was topsy-turvy plastered so his feelings were upside-down. He knew there was fault in there somewhere but, in his drunkenness, he'd managed to transfer it to his wife for making him feel guilty in the first place. Kwesi was on a high and he wanted to keep on drinking so he said, ‘Yeah. Let's go to Tariq's. What do you reckon, Ames?’ Ami didn't know Emma too well and she didn't want to get involved so she just shrugged a whatever. Tom was buried in his own thoughts; sneaking occasional glances at Murray, wondering what Karen had told him and in no mood to take a decision. Murray was quiet. He looked half-asleep. Karen and Freya did both ask, ‘What about Emma?’ but Tariq shook his head irritably. ‘It's not late,’ he said. ‘I'm telling you, it'll be fine.’

  It wasn't fine.

  The others stood shyly on the pavement while Tariq struggled with the latch key to the small maisonette. It was an ex-council terrace of railway workers' cottages but now one of Clapham's more fashionable addresses. Audis and Mercs lined the narrow street and there were Neighbourhood Watch stickers on every window that looked in on uniform Venetian blinds concealing lacquered wooden floors in open-plan kitchens with Agas and breakfast bars.

  Tariq rested one hand on the doorframe and bent over the lock, fiddling uncoordinatedly and muttering, ‘I never usually have… What the fuck? Fucking thing.’

  Tom said, ‘Do you want me to try?’

  But Tariq growled, ‘I can open my own fucking front…’

  When Emma flung open the door from inside, she was already in midstream of a garbled and incoherent invective (half rekindling their earlier argument and half complaining about the hour). But she hadn't expected Tariq to have company – surely not even he was that insensitive – and she was brought up short by the sight of her friends, fidgeting and embarrassed, on her doorstep. She was wearing only knickers and a T-shirt that barely brushed her thighs and she pulled the thin cotton down self-consciously and tried a welcoming smile. She stood back to wave them inside but Tom said, ‘Sorry, Em. We should just go home.’

  ‘No, it's OK,’ she muttered unconvincingly. And then she stiffened it with, ‘Really. I'm awake now anyway.’

  They shuffled past her, single file, Tariq leading the way into the small living-room. Emma dug him in the ribs as he passed and screwed up her face when she smelled the beer and fags on his clothes and the cheese-and-onion crisps on his breath. Hovering at the back, Freya and Karen glanced at one another. Of course they knew Emma had been suffering from this mystery illness ever since little Tom was born and in the past they'd noted how she was looking drawn and had lost weight. But now, seeing her bare-legged in a T-shirt, they realized the full extent. It didn't look possible that Emma could have had a baby – what? – not much more than six months ago. She was all ribs and elbows and hips and knees; her body was like four coat-hangers in a bin bag. Her complexion was translucent and her hair was lank and thin.

  Emma caught their expressions and pulled a wry face. ‘Heroin chic's making a comeback, didn't you know? At least I've stopped breastfeeding. Poor Tommy. It was like he was trying to suck on a condom.’

  ‘Shit, Emma,’ Karen murmured. ‘You look terrible.’

  Emma sniffed. ‘Yeah? When your friends stop lying to you, you know you're in trouble.’

  In the living-room, Kwesi was Carnaby Street; all stilted banter and facial expressions and posing. He was still vibing off his night's success and he chattered to no one in particular while Tariq poured the drinks: ‘That was, like, an important lesson for me, know what I mean? Like, Murray, man, you've really, like, taught me something, you get me? It was a reality check. Serious. A reality check; that's what it was.’

  Karen pulled the door behind her as she came into the room and she said, ‘Do you want to keep your voice down a bit, K?’ But it was too late and the baby monitor crackled into life as Tommy's gurgles turned to snivels and then tears and then screams.

  Em
ma looked daggers at Tariq. He shrugged and handed Kwesi an oversized Scotch. ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘I'll go.’

  ‘You're drunk.’

  ‘I'm fine,’ Tariq protested and lumbered out of the door.

  His footsteps were heavy on the stairs and everyone was listening and embarrassed and Emma threw out ‘You see what I have to put up with’ expressions that the other women picked up. At one point they heard a stumble and a loud curse: ‘Fuck!’

  Tariq reappeared with his son nestling against his chest and a roll-up hanging from his bottom lip. Emma flipped.

  ‘What the…’ she exclaimed. ‘What the hell do you think you're doing?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Give him to me!’ She lunged towards him but Tariq span away. The baby began to cry again.

  ‘What's the matter with you?’ he drawled.

  ‘Look at you!’ Emma's voice was beginning to waver, strung out and twanging like a high wire. ‘Blowing smoke in our son's face, Riq? Jesus!’

  Tariq went cross-eyed trying to see the cigarette that protruded from his mouth and, when he spotted it, his face opened up in an expression of comic surprise (as if to say, ‘How did that get there?’) and then, equally suddenly, dropped in remorse.

  ‘Sorry. I didn't…’ he began. But Emma wouldn't meet his eye and she stormed out of the room. Freya looked at Karen and Karen looked at Freya. But it was Murray who went after her.

  Tariq's drunken arrogance – always a fragile state – had collapsed into drunken mortification and he looked like he might burst into tears. Tom put his Scotch down above the fireplace and reached out for his namesake.

  ‘Can I say hello to my godson?’ Tom asked and Tariq willingly gave up the baby. ‘Come to Uncle Tom.’

  The baby's face was scrunched up like scrap paper but Tom soon calmed him down. He had a way with kids and he talked to the baby in a kind of tiptoeing adult voice that sounded light-hearted and happy and reassuring.