by Alex Wheatle
All I could do was pull my clothes on and step. I didn’t even bother collecting my fat-head and drink. As I left the insults still kept flying.
‘Invite man to my gates and find out he’s a chi chi man! You secretly wanna rinse man’s bottom but you wanted to front it out with me to try and prove you’re straight. That’s a diss, man. Real men love this.’ She cupped her breasts and then squeezed her buttocks and performed that gyrating thing again. I reckoned if I was Noel I would have rode her like a sex-starved rhino. He didn’t mind too much if the face was lacking.
‘Fuck off from my gates and take your nasty, shit-caked dick with you!’ she ranted.
As I quickly hot stepped from Tania’s block, I couldn’t help but think of Akeisha and how I wished it was her I was seeing for a Monday evening wok.
I was reluctant to go to Stockwell Youth Club two nights later. Tania had a big mouth when she was vexed and I was proper shitting myself that because of our little incident she might have spread some fucked-up rumour all over Bricky that I’m a chi chi man. Some shit like that could really fuck up my shotting career… But duty called. Noel and myself were shotting outside the club and chirpsing the chicks. I was kinda relaxed ’cos we were making nuff brown sheets and there was no sign of Tania.
But then Courtney Thompson appeared. He was dressed in some weird white garms that looked too big for him. He was wearing the same stubble and walking all slow-like as if he was in some Sergio Leone western. He looked straight at me. I never really looked too hard at men’s features but Courtney was my God ugly. His eyes were close together, his ears stuck out and his face had this lopsided kinda look to it. Tania was with him. She was wearing a mini-denim skirt, black fishnet stockings, a white clingy T-shirt and a loose-fitting tracksuit top. She was chewing gum the way ghetto chicks chewed gum and she had a trailer load of attitude. On a normal day I would have cracked up laughing at the sight of this weird couple but this wasn’t a normal day. Courtney had come with a crew. Most of them were wearing skull caps, white garms and messed-up beards. It was like watching a fucked-up TV series about Jesus and those Jewish baddies in the temple.
Noel noticed the cranking up of the tension. ‘What’s gwarnin, bruv?’
‘I ain’t too sure, Noel,’ I answered as Courtney and his crew walked up to ten yards away from me and stopped. Courtney was still bad-eyeing me so I just returned his glare with interest. Others who had been in and out of the club had now stopped what they were doing and watched to see if any violence would be happening. Courtney and myself were still having our staring contest until finally he took two paces forward. I noticed Noel slipped his right hand into his inside jacket pocket and there it remained.
‘My girl says you’ve been hitting on her,’ Courtney accused.
I remembered my paps saying to me once that when you’re in a dangerous situation, never let your foe become aware of how frightened you are. Always look them in the eye and don’t look away. It’s one of those ghetto rules.
I took three paces forward and I sensed that Noel had moved in close behind me. He had my back and I’m sure he was ready with his shank. Noel owned one long bitch piece of a shank. Now there was only a couple of yards between Courtney and myself. I could feel the tension cranking. I kept telling myself, Dennis, don’t blink. Stare out this motherfucker.
‘Yeah,’ I admitted. ‘I did hit on her. But you know what? I didn’t wok it ’cos I realised she was too fucking ugly to wok… A man doesn’t wanna have a reputation that he woks any junz on two legs… Deal with it!’
Courtney looked at me as if his eyes were gonna fire off lasers. I held his gaze and I even stepped a further pace forward. My heart was thumping but this time I was ready. I wasn’t about to freeze like I did with the Peckham crew. My limbs were alive, ready for action. Why should I be scared of a brother who got jacked at school for his sandwiches? Why should I be scared of a brother who didn’t have no bredrens at school?
‘I ain’t gonna waste my energy on pussy non-believers,’ Courtney said. ‘But if you diss me again then me and you are gonna kick off.’
I sensed a hatred in Courtney’s eyes that went beyond me hitting on his girl. Since we left school I dunno what or who had influenced him but it was obvious to me some serious shit happened to Courtney.
‘So what?’ Tania yelled. ‘You’re gonna let the man walk away? After he hit on me and dissed me? Are you a fucking pussy, Courtney? Proper hardback brothers I know would have shanked a man for that shit. And you’re gonna let him just walk away? Don’t you care when men hit on me and show me disrespect? Anyone from these ends who is watching this gonna call you a pussy! Are you gonna stand for that shit, Courtney?’
The tension I was feeling was now unbearable. If anything was gonna kick off then that would be better than all this stand-off shit. Courtney’s eyes were drilling into me. I knew now that he had to save face somehow. Everybody had heard what Tania had said. I could feel their eyes switching from me to Courtney. There was no way he could just walk away and leave it or give an excuse that I wasn’t worth it to deal with. Mentally I prepared myself to fight. Mentally I prepared myself for pain. For me to have an edge I knew that I had to convince myself that the man standing in front of me was just as scared as I was. Maybe even more so… It was something Paps taught me. There would be no freezing today. I felt the breath of Noel upon the back of my neck and I knew he was probably more ready than I was. My shank felt cold to the skin inside my jacket and I wondered if I would christen it today.
‘If you didn’t dress like a ho then men wouldn’t hit on you!’ Courtney suddenly turned on Tania. ‘If you wanna walk with me go home and change your garms!’
Tania looked at Courtney with an open mouth. She kissed her teeth and then stormed off… I relaxed just a little bit.
‘Don’t think this is over,’ said Courtney. ‘Cross my path again and it’s gonna be jihad on your backside. You fucking kaffur…’
I went to step forward but Noel’s hand on my shoulder stopped me. ‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘He’s stepping. You won. He’s the one who came with a crew looking for war. Now he’s stepping.’
As Courtney and his crew turned and walked up the road, I wondered where Courtney learned words like jihad and kaffur from. He was dumb as shit at school so someone must have been influencing him, telling him shit.
‘Noel.’
‘Yeah, bruv.’
‘Any other brothers from school turned into Muslims?’
‘Yeah. Two I know. Milton Davis and Adrian Callan.’
‘Why you think them brothers are turning into Muslims?’ I asked.
‘Fuck knows,’ answered Noel. ‘The only thing that Courtney, Milton and Adrian have in common is that they are all fuck-ugly. And if you’re a Muslim don’t their girls have to obey anything what their men say? I think they do. So I reckon that if any other non-Muslim girls was thinking about linking with the three beasts, would they obey Courtney, Milton and Adrian? Like fuck they would! They’re too fuck-ugly to be obeyed, bruv. So what do they do? They turn Muslim so they can find a girl to obey them. Simple as.’
There was a strange logic to Noel’s fucked-up reasoning but I had a different theory. In my paps’ day it was all rebellious and shit to be a rasta with locks. I know that from my paps’ lectures about rastas getting it in the neck from the Feds back in the day. It was all Public Enemy Number One shit. Now, if you locks your hair you can still be a doctor, lawyer, teacher or whatever you want to be. Having dreadlocks is acceptable. Fuck! On some mornings, I see white people with dreads in ponytails wearing suits and making their way to their offices. They look fucking ridiculous but that’s not the point… So if you’re a wannabe rebel from the street you ain’t gonna wear dreadlocks. That’s too lame. If you’re a wannabe rebel you wanna do something that really fucks off your parents, your grandparents, the Feds and those Tory voters who listen to the Today programme on Radio 4. You become a Muslim. Simple as.
Chapter Twelve
THE POETRY JAM
Next Friday night. It was 8 30 p.m. and I was half an hour early standing outside Akeisha’s gates. Hip hop music was blaring out from the floor above and in the forecourt below three brothers were trying to start a car. All this was backdropped by the sound of faraway Fed sirens. My heartbeat raced as I knocked the door. I shifted uneasily on my feet and wiped my clammy hands on the back of my jeans. Remembering that Akeisha was wearing denim garms the last time we met, I decided to wear a name-brand denim shirt and denim jacket. I hoped it was gonna impress to the max…
The door opened and Akeisha was wearing black leather trousers, black leather jacket and a pair of brown cowboy boots. She was topped off by this cream-coloured Panama-style hat that she tilted at an angle to make it almost cover her left eye. She looked better than any R&B chick on MTV Base, Crystal Palace winning the cup final, and me driving through Palm Beach in a top of the range Mercedes sports.
‘You’re early, Dennis,’ she smiled. ‘You’d better come in.’
I followed Akeisha into her home and it was one of those flats where you walk down a flight of stairs to get to the front room. The place was well decorated, smelt good and there were images of leopards and tigers hanging from the walls. Where Tania’s place was cramped, Akeisha’s home was cosy. A black leather three-piece suite dominated the room and there were cream-coloured cushions placed in its corners. The mahogany coffee table looked as if it might take three people to carry it and the flooring was pine wooden tiles. There was a bookshelf that included novels by Toni Morrison and Richard Wright. A rubber plant was in one corner and propped up upon a mini-stereo was a framed picture of Billie Holiday… She was posing beside an advertisement for ‘Strange Fruit’. Davinia would have called the place proper cultured.
‘Mum,’ Akeisha called. ‘We have a guest.’
I know it’s polite to say that your potential girlfriend’s mother doesn’t look old enough to have a nineteen, twenty-year-old daughter but Akeisha’s mum really looked as if she had yet to see thirty. With her make-up neatly applied and her hair all straightened and shit she reminded me of one of those thirty-something chicks who appear in black American sitcoms. For some reason I imagined Noel making embarrassing attempts to chirps her.
‘This is Dennis, Mum,’ Akeisha introduced. ‘He’s taking me to the poetry jam at the Arches tonight.’
‘Good evening,’ I greeted in my best English.
‘Good to meet you, Dennis,’ she said. ‘But you can call me Myrna… I hate all that Mrs and Miss thing. My husband would have been glad to meet you but he’s in Jamaica for a while.’
‘OK, Myrna,’ I said.
‘You don’t find too many young black men who are interested in the arts and performance poetry so it’s reassuring to meet a fine young black man who does,’ Myrna smiled.
God! I felt such a fake. Myrna spoke very well. Even better than my mum when she puts on her proper English voice when she’s chatting business on the phone or talking to white people. It’ll be cool to see Myrna and Mum trying to out-English each other if they ever meet.
‘Yes,’ I finally replied. ‘Rhymes and stuff has always given me a neat vibe.’
‘Would you like a drink while you are waiting?’ Akeisha offered.
‘No, I’m alright.’
My nervous tension had left me thirsty as a celeb on a chat show but in these situations I didn’t want to be any bother to anybody.
‘OK, Dennis. I’m just gonna look in on Curtis and then we’ll be away.’
‘He’s still sleeping,’ Myrna said.
‘I’ll kiss him goodnight then,’ Akeisha insisted. ‘Dennis, you’re standing to attention like a Coldstream Guard. Sit down and relax, man.’
Those minutes when I was parking my butt on that black leather sofa are probably the most nervous of my life. There I was sitting opposite Myrna who was occasionally glancing and smiling at me. Any bad remark or wrong word here and my promising romance with Akeisha would be fucked like a chav orphan girl on a casting couch. I thought Myrna was expecting me to start a conversation but I couldn’t think of anything to say. She seemed too sophisticated for me to deal with and I wondered what she did for a living. After ten minutes of me feeling this strange heat in my head, Akeisha appeared. No-one had looked so wokable since Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes did her sexy thing in the ‘Unpretty’ video.
I’m gonna try it tonight, I said to myself. Later on. He who dares gets between the crotches. I’ll try it when we come back to her gates and Myrna and Curtis will hopefully be sleeping. It was a duty to mankind to try it. Damn! Did she look good in her leathers. I wondered how many woks the black couch had witnessed. I glanced at Myrna and guessed none.
‘Ready, Dennis?’
I shot out of my chair like a Yardie hearing the customs and immigration people were approaching…
‘I’ll be back after midnight, Mum,’ Akeisha said. ‘Don’t wait up.’
The feeling was good walking alongside Akeisha through Angel Town. There was an extra boing in my step and as brothers shot me envious glances I said under my breath, ‘Look and shed tears, motherfuckers!’
‘So how long you’ve been going to poetry jams?’ I said after a while.
‘About three years,’ Akeisha answered. ‘It was at a poetry jam where I met Curtis’s father.’
‘What? Your eyes kinda met when you were both checking out the performances and the audience?’
Akeisha laughed. Every time she done that her big eyes just sparkled and it brought her cheeks to life and made her mouth look kinda filthy. I liked that. ‘No, it wasn’t like that,’ she explained. ‘Curtis’s father was a performer.’
‘What was his name?’ I asked. ‘I might have heard of the brother…’
I faked maturity talking about Akeisha’s ex. I was proper jealous of him because he woked Akeisha and I hadn’t. He even had a child to prove it even though he don’t seem to be around. Burn him.
‘You don’t need to know that, Dennis. Sorry for being so evasive but Curtis’s father has no place in my life now. He could preach a good game but when it came to being a father he didn’t want to know.’
That made me feel better. ‘OK, let’s burn his memory.’
Akeisha giggled but just for a fleeting moment her eyes revealed some kind of pain and despair. Burn her baby-father like Guy Fawkes.
The Arches venue was beneath a railway line very close to Bricky High Street. Whoever had taken over the building had done the best they could with little money. The brown brickwork was mostly covered in banners and fabrics that had been painted and graffitied upon; the Egyptian ankh seemed to be the artists’ choice of design. The wooden seats looked like they had been borrowed from a local school and there was only a single light bulb that hung from a long stretch of wire above a black painted wooden box that acted as a stage; to me it just looked like a soapbox big enough for three people and a skinny sister to stand on.
Upon the stone floor in front of the stage rested beanbags, large cushions and two multicoloured armchairs that had been rebuilt untold times. On the ground along the walls, candles placed in cup saucers provided another source of light. For me it was all a bit New Age, dying celebrity icon shit gone over the top but the candles did make Akeisha’s big eyes look even more sexy. Akeisha herself was in her element, nodding and smiling to people she knew on our way to our seats. I just glared at the brothers, making sure with my body language that they knew Akeisha was mine so don’t even think about chirpsing her.
The chairs were quickly filled by confused hippies, disillusioned rastas, strange brothers with mad afros and fucked-up sideburns, single ugly brothers who came with no brethrens and sat alone, French students who were showing off their anti-war badges and big boots, other foreign students who didn’t appear to have come for the show but came to score drugs, black women decked out in African robes, beads and all the bangles their wrists could carry, rich white people who had dressed down for the occasion and had a
cocaine-zonked-out look about them. I guessed they were rich ’cos what kind of people would try and pay their entrance tax at a venue like the Arches with a Visa card? There were chi chi men who were wearing baggy jeans, baggy sweaters and fucked-up hats and a couple of white goth chicks who sat in the corner with all their black make-up shit and black-netted hand accessories… Sitting to my right was this white couple and judging by their gossip they were members of the Liberal Democrats. It was then I realised, as I watched Akeisha standing up and waving to a friend of hers, that I was in a fucking nightmare.
I said to myself, keep cool. You are doing this for a good cause. To wok the seriously wokable Akeisha. Don’t fuck it up. Don’t flop. Act like you actually get on with chi chi men. Pretend that you like brothers with fucked-up sideburns. Try not to think about the P’s I could have made if I was shotting my skunk in this place. Ignore and don’t get turned on by the lesbos behind me who are making out and pay no mind to the bewildered brother who was wearing a Ku Klux Klan kind of robe thing and yellow striped sandals…
‘How long does the show go on for?’ I asked Akeisha.
‘Just enjoy the vibe,’ she replied.
The white woman beside me, who was now building a skinny roll-up with hash sprinkled in it, answered the question for me. ‘About two hours, maybe three or four if the vibes are really hot tonight. This place is sooo cool, don’t you think?’ I wanted to give her a hard slap.
Four hours! There was no way I could spend four hours with this crowd without going insane… ‘I have to get us something to eat at some point, Akeisha,’ I said. ‘Maybe we can go to that new chicken place in about an hour? I hear that they do some serious hot wings.’
‘Maybe,’ is all Akeisha managed.
Ten minutes later this fat black woman appeared on the stage. She was the mother of all salad dodgers. Suddenly the stage looked tiny. She was wearing the obligatory African robes, beads, bangles, Nefertiti head-wrap and a giant pair of silver earrings that could have fitted around a tractor’s wheels. ‘Greetings to everyone,’ she welcomed. ‘My name is Queen Manashmanek from the golden and prosperous lands of Nubia and I am your hostess and priestess for the night.’
