Sour: My Story: A troubled girl from a broken home. The Brixton gang she nearly died for. The baby she fought to live for.. Tracey Miller

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ first two babydaddies had been and gone before she met the man I have the misfortune to call my dad.

      I’ve only ever known my mum as a medicated woman but she must have been an attractive lady. She could get the boys.

      Althea’s dad was young too. His family were having none of it, and he soon scarpered.

      Melanie’s dad, he was rich. He had money, but he was married, so Mum was his sidepiece. Not that she knew that at the time. He left her heartbroken and went back to the wife.

      But me and Yusuf’s dad? Woah, Mum really hit the jackpot there.

      In Brixton they called his crowd the “Dirty Dozen”. They travelled in a pack.

      Marmite liked to play dominoes. Runner, Sanchez and the rest liked drinking. Irie was a school bus driver by day, getaway driver by night. There were rumours he used to lock up girls in the bathroom at parties and assault them. Charmer. Monk was sweet, the quietest of the lot, so it took them by surprise when he ran his babymother down and stabbed her one night on the way home.

      Then there was ’Mingo. Short for Flamingo – when things got naughty, that man could fly away and never get caught. And, finally, in his knitted Rasta hat and moccasins was Pedro, aka Wellington Augustus Miller. Or, as I no longer call him: Dad.

      He’d break Mum’s nose and black out her eyes, gamble away the wages she earned as an admin clerk in an office. He lost me a baby sister too. Kicked Mum in the belly till she dropped her in a toilet. She once ended up jumping through a glass door to escape him. Doctors said she only had a 50–50 chance if they tried to remove the shards from her skull, so they left them inside. They must have done the right thing, coz she’s still here.

      The X-rays revealed a freshly fractured skull, and a long, unhappy marriage’s worth of broken bones and damaged organs. I was six weeks old.

      Oh yeah, he was a proper nuisance, my dad. And you know the irony? With the stepdads who followed, I still remember Mum as being the violent one.

      She was working in two jobs – clerk during the day, a cleaner in the evenings – living for the weekends when she and her friends would follow the sound systems round south London, stealing drinks and befriending bouncers.

      The Dirty Dozen weren’t Yardies. They weren’t in that league. Sure, they’d beat up an ice-cream van man with a chain, but their crime wasn’t organised, not in the way the Yardies’ was.

      Still, anywhere they got to was pure war.

      The first night my parents met, Mum watched Dad beat up a bouncer so bad they took him to the hospital. He had taken offence at being asked to pay an entry fee.

      Next time they met in the Four Aces nightclub in north London.

      “He had cut off his locks, he looked like a proper gentleman,” she recalled.

      Not quite gentlemanly enough, of course, to hang around for my birth.

      “Not one of those fathers was by my side when I was pushing dem babies out,” she still complains, as if that was the worst they did.

      He popped in and out of our lives.

      We lived in and out of mother and baby units, as she moved in with him and moved out again. I remember a garden, a Housing Association house in Tooting, with pears and apples and strawberries. But the council got a bit fed up with Mr Miller’s illegal gambling nights in the front room, so we lost that too.

      The punches went both ways. Dad was once lay waited outside a club, after bursting a chain off this girl’s neck. Her friends tried to attack him with a samurai sword. They were the ones who ended up in the dock. Would you believe that it was poor, innocent Wellington who took to the witness stand to testify as the victim?

      It wasn’t long before he was in court again.

      I still remember the day those blueshirts stampeded into our house to take him away.

      “BATH RAPIST GETS JAIL TERM” it said later in the News of the World.

      Let me share it with you. It’s enough to make you proud.

      “A man was jailed yesterday for raping a woman in her home, after a court heard his victim was so terrified she allowed him to have a bath and scrubbed his back. Wellington Miller, 33, unemployed of Dulwich, denied raping the woman.”

      She was 24. It was a summer’s day in June, 1983, when my dad broke into her home in Tooting.

      He told the Old Bailey he only intended to rob the place, but insisted that this kindly housewife had offered him a coffee and ran him a bath.

      Because that’s what women do when men’s robbing them, ain’t it? Offer them a bath!

      What actually happened was that he forced the woman to scrub his back then raped her once in the bathroom and again in the bedroom, in front of her four-year-old son. His defence lawyer blamed his drinking.

      You know what he said?

      “When he drinks, he goes for walks early in the morning and can’t remember what he’s done.”

      I ain’t never heard of that drink – y’know, the one that turns you into an amnesiac rapist.

      The judge called him an “insensitive bulldozer”.

      I can think of other words. He got three years and three months.

      So why is he still in prison now? Because two weeks after being released on parole, no word of a lie, he left his bail hostel in Islington and in the early hours of the morning battered down the door of a house just a few yards away, and tried to rape the mother and three girls who had barricaded themselves in a bedroom. The police arrived just in time.

      He’s still in jail for that one. I’ve lost track where – he’s been moved around that much.

      He got life. Could have been out by now if he’d admitted his guilt. He still insists he is innocent. Deep down I think he’s scared. I don’t think he wants to come out.

      He wouldn’t be able to use a mobile phone. He wouldn’t be able to drive, or use a computer. Hell, the year my dad went down, Alan Sugar was bringing out his Amstrads. The first cool ones with the computer games, remember them? But the world has moved on while he’s been inside and my dad knows it.

      So maybe it’s easier to lie about being innocent, than face the world outside.

      He wrote to me when I became a bad girl. “Heard you become a gangster,” he said. “Whassat all about?”

      There was no lecture. No judgement. Not even disappointment. It sounded like he was simply curious. Maybe he wanted to know what kind of gangster his daughter had become.

      If I’m totally honest, for most of my young life it felt glamorous to have an incarcerated dad. No one said “rapist”, of course. It would be a long time before I found out exactly what he had done. I didn’t trouble myself to find out. All I knew was that having a dad in prison felt like something to boast about. It felt cool and rebellious. It felt like an assertion of status.

      The last time СКАЧАТЬ