Tony looked at Trigger for a long minute, then shook his head and sighed. “Juks, let’s go.” He turned to leave.
“Nah, man,” said Jukkie, all quiet-like. “I’m gonna roll with da mans.”
Tony looked at him, kinda hurt and surprised-looking. Then he shrugged and walked off to his car. He didn’t look back once.
Heavy. Jukkie told me later that Tony had gone home and packed a bag, telling his mum that he was going to the Midlands to stay with ‘the brothers’, to ‘clear his head and decide what’s what’. I think he couldn’t stand to see everything he had built being jeopardised by Trigger. Or maybe he just needed to get himself into the zone so that he could ‘do’ his Muslim ting properly, as he kept saying. All I knew was I was going to miss him, no doubt. I tried to write some rhymes when I got home but, true say, I wasn’t feeling it. I felt mad jumpy, as if I could hear a timer ticking somewhere, the bomb about to explode any minute.
Walking into school that day, my mind was working overtime. What happened between Tony and Trigger was major, y’get me. We RDS boys had always respected Tony, always trusted him. Even if you didn’t like something Tony did or a decision he made, you’d go with it out of respect. Coz you knew that, any time anything went down, Tony had your back. But now that Trigger was top dog, things were changing in RDS. Trig wanted to prove himself, innit. I knew one thing for sure: Tony would never have let things get this bad with Larkside. He wasn’t about beef, no way. He just wanted to live good: make money and have girls.
But Trigger? He was on a different flex. It was as if he wanted to prove to everyone how bad he was. Trigger wasn’t interested in partying. For him, it was all about control and respect, making man fear him, know what he was capable of. The garmz and the cars were a side thing. What really got him off was the power. And I could see Jukkie becoming the same. Or maybe he had always been that way but just couldn’t express it too tough with Tony in charge....
I was so busy thinking, I didn’t watch where I was going. Suddenly I felt something bang into me.
“Are you blind, rudeboy?”
I staggered backwards, my bag weighing me down. When I looked round to see where the voice had come from, I saw Leon Mackay glaring at me. Though he was short, Leon was a champion boxer with the biceps and six-pack to prove it. He was in Year 11 too, but in a different class from me. I didn’t really know him too tough but I knew better than to get into a fight with him. He was standing with his boys, some of them from our school, others in hoodies and green bandannas.
Green bandannas.
Larkside boys.
Leon looked me in the eye and snarled, “You’re Jukkie’s best mate, ain’t ya?”
I nodded, not saying anything, trying to figure out what they wanted with me, what they wanted with Jukkie.
But then Leon was up in my face and I stepped back until I could feel the school wall behind me. It was hard and rough, and I thought to myself, ‘Anyhow this damages my leather jacket...’ But before I could tell Leon to take it easy on the garmz, he grabbed my jacket and hoisted me higher up against the wall. “He’s goin’ down for what he did to my cousin,” he hissed, and his breath stank like he hadn’t brushed his teeth in at least two weeks.
“Your cousin? Who’s your cousin, man? I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“He knows.” Leon clenched his jaw and brought his face so close to mine that I could see the blackheads on his nose. “You tell your mandem,” he growled, “that we’re coming for them. They picked the wrong crew to mess with.” Then I felt something cold and sharp press into my cheek. I couldn’t stop myself shuddering as I realised what it was. It was a tiny switch-blade. “Do I need to give you a little reminder, blud?”
I shook my head, trying not to show how scared I was. “Nah, man, it’s safe,” I said hoarsely. “I...I’ll pass the message... I’ll pass the message!” Gathering up my strength, I shoved Leon off me and the boys all shifted, ready for Leon’s signal. But Leon just smirked and put his knife into his pocket.
“Yeah,” he sneered. “I know you will. Coz you’s a batty man like that best mate of yours, Jukkie.” The other boys all sniggered as I scrambled for my bag. “Go on, run, run like a bitch!”
Boy, I wasn’t about to stick around! I grabbed my bag and legged it, in through the school gates and all the way to the toilets, where I spent a few minutes heaving. Knives, man. Knives and I just were not meant to be together. If I didn’t know better, I would think I was allergic to them.
As I washed my face and looked in the mirror at the water dripping down on to my school shirt, I heard Leon’s voice: ‘You’s a batty man, like your best mate, Jukkie.’
I shook my head and wiped a tissue over my face. This beef with Larkside was getting proper ugly.
Circles
DWAYNE
Third lesson was Maths with Mr Dawson, my worst teacher. I actually wasn’t too bad at Maths but I couldn’t stick that Mr Dawson. I’d started off the year all right, but there was just something about him that put me right off. By the third week, I was like everyone else in the class: sending text messages, throwing spit balls, drawing tags in their Maths books or bustin’ joke behind Dawson’s back.
But that day, I just wasn’t in the mood for the madness. I was thinking about Misha and what she would think if she saw this crappy classroom with its busted chairs and graffiti carved into the desks. Misha’s school sounded proper posh. I imagined it all big and stately-home-looking, with green lawns all around it. All the girls would be wearing them old-fashioned blazers and be able to speak at least three languages.
Misha was always asking me about school – what could I tell her? That I hated it and couldn’t wait for the year to be over so that I could hit the road and make some serious Ps? Nah, that would be a disaster. Misha believed in school. She believed them when they told her that all she had to do was study hard, go university, get a good job and buy a house. And maybe it was true – for her and people like her. As for me, I knew that it was all a big lie.
“School’s just a holding cell for us black boys,” Tony used to say. “Just a place for them to keep us until we’re old enough to go jail. But not us, eh, guys? We’re smarter than that. We ain’t never gonna get so cocky that we let the 5-0 take us down.”
But what was it Misha had said? ‘Rewrite the script, Dee. If you don’t, who will?’
I looked up to see Mr Dawson handing out sheets of paper for a pop quiz.
I cracked up when Mr Beanpole himself, Greg Tiller, screwed up the piece of paper and threw it into the bin. “Oh, look, sir!” he called out. “Pop goes the quiz!”
Mr Dawson shook the hair out of his eyes. “Any more of your nonsense, Tiller, and you’ll be going to see Ms Walker, d’you understand? Now go and retrieve your quiz and get yourself back to your seat!”
I looked at the paper in front of me: circle geometry. I smiled. Circle geometry made total sense to me. While I looked over the questions, it was as if I could feel my brain getting to work, connecting things, making sense of things – I got it.
‘Rewrite the script. Ace the test.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t act dumb, man, you heard me: ace the test.’
So I did. I answered every question, double-checked, found a couple of careless mistakes, corrected them, and then sat back, grinning.
‘You did it, blud. Nice one.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Shut up.’
Silence.
‘That’s better.’
Mr Dawson told everyone to stop writing. The time for the quiz was up. Then he asked Stuart ‘Swottie’ Henderson to read out the answers. I could feel my heart start to beat fast as I reached the end of the paper and looked back at the row of ticks along the side. I had aced the test. I really had!
Mr Dawson called out, “OK, who got full marks?” I swear, he sounded so bored, I wondered why he had given us the quiz in the first place. He was looking towards Swottie and the other k
ids in the front row, Azad, Miranda, Kwesi and Suad. They all raised their hands, like they always did.
Then I did something crazy, something I would never have done before: I raised my hand, from all the way at the back of the class. Mr Dawson looked up and saw me – and his mouth just kinda fell open. Then he pulled himself together and frowned.
“Mr Kingston,” he whined, as if he was talking to a retard, “is there a problem? Did you not complete the test?”
I forced myself to speak even though I was regretting ever having raised my hand. “I...I did, sir.”
Rashad was looking at me, all screw-face, as if to say, ‘What you doing, bro, raising your hand in class? Are you out of your mind?’
Mr Dawson flipped his hair out of his eyes and sighed loudly, saying, “Mr Kingston, we shall all have the opportunity to ask questions later. Right now, we are trying to see who passed and who failed!”
“But that’s why my hand is up, sir.”
“What?”
“I passed, sir. I got full marks. Remember? You told the people who got full marks to raise their hands...”
Mr Dawson’s jaw dropped for the second time and he shook his head a couple of times, looking from the swots sitting in front of him to me, the tall black boy with the expensive trainers in the back row. Then he narrowed his eyes and marched over to where I was sitting. He snatched up my paper and looked over it. Then he looked down at me and his lip curled.
“You didn’t do this, Mr Kingston,” he said, just like that. “This is not your work.”
“What?”
“You don’t expect me to believe that you actually understand anything about circle geometry, do you? I mean, let’s face it, Mr Kingston, you’re no whizz kid!”
Oh, then I started to feel the rage build up inside me and my face began feeling hot.
Mr Dawson continued, “I suppose it’s to be expected, a desperate attempt to get some passing grades so near the end of term but the trouble is, it’s too late. Do you understand? It’s too late. Anyway, I know your lot; you’ll never amount to anything...”
“What d’you mean ‘your lot’?” I asked. I was proper bubbling now.
“Yeah, man!” said Rashad. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Racist!” someone shouted at the back. Everyone started talking at once.
“Can you believe he said that, though?”
“He’s out of order, mate!”
“Bang the teacher! Bang the teacher!” The other kids starting banging on the desks and drumming their feet on the floor.
Mr Dawson stepped back, anxious now, his eyes flicking about the room. “All right, everyone, calm down! I didn’t mean it like that, there’s no need to make a big deal out of it!”
After a while everyone calmed down, but they were still grumbling.
“Now, Kingston, the sooner you confess to cheating on the pop quiz, you sooner we can get on with the lesson.” And he turned to walk back to his desk.
“But, sir, I didn’t cheat!” That was when I pushed my chair back from my desk. “I didn’t cheat!”
Mr Dawson didn’t even turn to look at me. “Save it, Mr Kingston, you can either admit to cheating on the test, in which case I will award you an ‘F’ grade, or you can continue to deny it and be awarded an ‘F’ grade and a visit to Ms Walker.”
I felt the pressure build up inside me and I heard the whistling, whistling in my head, like the sound of a really fast train on a massive collision course. Just then, it was more important to me than anything that the teacher admit that I had passed, that I wasn’t a waste of space, a loser.
I stood right up and my chair went flying, clattering to the floor. I was so mad, I was shaking, my nostrils flaring like crazy. I held my paper out towards Mr Dawson. “Sir!” I called out. “Test me again if you don’t believe me. Go on, test me!”
The others backed me up: “That’s right, Sir! Just test him, innit.”
Mr Dawson turned slowly to look at the class. “I’m afraid that would be a waste of class time. Now, kindly take your seat, Mr Kingston, or you will leave me no alternative but to issue you an official warning.”
“Allow this, man!” I shouted. I could feel my eyes start to burn. I tore the test paper in half, threw it on the floor, grabbed my coat and bag, and charged out of the room. What a waste of time, man!
“Mr Kingston! Mr Kingston, I’m warning you!” But the slamming door cut off Mr Dawson’s voice.
Outside the school building, I stood in the car park, my shoulders heaving, the heat pounding in my head. I was proper vex’– what was the point of trying if they never gave you a chance?
I looked out into the car park, trying to find Mr Dawson’s dark blue Fiat. It was right at the end, near the fence. I didn’t have to think twice.
‘Don’t do it, blud!’
‘Shut up!’
‘Don’t do it, man, he ain’t worth it!’
‘I said SHUT UP! No one disrespects me like that, yeah? No one!’
‘It ain’t worth it, blud.’
‘Yes it IS!’
My house keys jingled in the silent car park as I pulled them out of my bag. Then, slowly and carefully, I pulled one of the keys along the side of Mr Dawson’s car, again and again. The sickening screech of metal on metal hurt my ears but I didn’t stop until I had left a whole heap of silver lines in the dark-blue paint work.
Then I heard a voice shout out, ‘Kingston! What the hell d’you think you’re doing?’
That’s when I ran.
Ms Walker
DWAYNE
“Dwayne, Dwayne Kingston, isn’t it?” Ms Walker, the new head-teacher who struck fear into even the baddest students, was glaring down at me.
“Yes, Miss,” I mumbled. I looked down into my lap and hunched my shoulders. This was the last place I wanted to be, sitting in the head’s cluttered office with my mum huffing and puffing next to me.
Mum poked me, hard. “Speak up and sit up straight, boy!” she hissed. She was vex’ that she had had to take the morning off work to come and speak to Ms Walker about her wort’less son.
“This is just a waste of my time,” she had grumbled, as we got on the bus.
I glanced up and saw Ms Walker looking at Mum. Then she pursed her lips and sat down, turning to me. I looked down straight away.
“Mr Dawson says you were rude and disruptive in his class yesterday,” she said quietly. I was surprised – I was expecting her to yell at me, go crazy and that. But she didn’t. She just kept on talking. “He says you caused a scene. And another member of staff said that they saw you vandalising Mr Dawson’s car. What do you say?”
‘Tell her!’
‘What?’
‘Tell her exactly what happened!’
‘Nah, man, I ain’t telling her nothin’!’
‘You’d better tell her, mate, or your chances of getting out of this will be even less than they are now. You’re already on a losing streak. Speak up now, before it’s too late.’
Silence.
‘OK, suit y’self. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
Then Mum spoke up. “Ms Walker, I don’t mean to be rude but this really is a waste of time. Dwayne doesn’t care about school. He doesn’t care about exams or teachers or any of that. So you might as well just give him whatever punishment you like and send him back to class – and let me get back to my job. I don’t get paid for taking time off to talk about Dwayne’s bad school record – can’t you tell a hopeless case when you see one?”
“Jeez, thanks for the vote of confidence, Mum.” I felt a lump in my throat and I turned away from her. She really had given up on me; I could hear it in her voice. I don’t know why I cared but, right then, I did.
Then Ms Walker turned to Mum. “Well, Mrs Kingston, although it might seem the sensible thing to do, I am not ready to write your son off just yet. I would still like to hear his version of what happened with Mr Dawson.” She looked over at me, obviously expecting me to co
me up with my side of the story.
So I told her about the test, about getting everything right, about Mr Dawson refusing to believe me, accusing me of cheating, refusing to let me take the test again.
“I was vex’, Miss, proper vex’. It’s not fair to accuse someone and not even give them a chance to defend themselves. Do you know what he said to me, Miss? He said that my lot – boys like me – will never amount to anything! But how can we if even our teachers don’t believe in us?”
Ms Walker nodded. “You have a valid point there, young man. Black boys in this society face many obstacles as it is and low expectations from teaching staff just add to the problem. Don’t you agree, Mrs Kingston?”
“To tell you the truth,” replied Mum with a sour look on her face, “it all sounds like excuses to me.”
Ms Walker raised an eyebrow and gave me a look. “Well,” she said, “there can be no excuse for damaging a teacher’s property, no matter how angry you are. That was a stupid thing to do – Mr Dawson could choose to press charges. It is vandalism, as I’m sure you know...”
“Press charges, Miss?”
“Yes, Mr Kingston! The man’s car is a mess! You didn’t seriously think you would get away with it, did you?”
I scratched my head and looked down. Coz I hadn’t been thinking at all, y’get me.
Mum spoke up then. “But Ms Walker, why can’t these boys just show some respect? Why can’t they just put their heads down and work hard? We did it! But all they want is easy money; all they want is to look like badman out on the street. Then they get involved in all sorts of things: stealing, gangs, drugs, knives, guns, all that madness! Who taught them all that? Not me! Not their parents! They went out there and looked for it, that’s what I say! That’s why I give up, Ms Walker. There’s only so many times your heart can break, yuh see. This boy here, he done broke my heart a hundred times. Whatever yuh want to do to him, it’s fine by me. Maybe you’ll succeed where I failed.” And she sniffed and wiped a tear from her eye.
Black Sheep Page 5
