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 and setting off the alarms, but mostly it was just peace and quiet, innit. I was disappointed the day they came to take us home from there, but like it or not all roads led back to Roupell Park.

      Mum was standing in the front room waiting for us. On the glass table was a bumper pack of Squares, and steaming plates of chicken, rice and plantain. I could see she’d spent the day cleaning. The whole house was shining.

      “My babies!” She put an arm round each of us and pulled us close. “De doctors say I’m better. Gonna take my medication and mi ago do much better this time.”

      She hugged us tight, and pressed her face into our hair.

      “What you smelling us for?”

      “I missed your smell.”

      It wasn’t long after we returned from the care home that Mum made her big announcement.

      We were going to move. Our eyes lit up.

      “For real?”

      “For real.”

      We spent the whole day packing up our stuff, asking questions about our new home.

      “You’ll see,” said Mum, with a smile on her lips.

      “How are we going to take the car bed? We can’t go without the car bed,” said Yusuf, sensibly.

      “Don’t worry about dem things. Removal men will pick ’em up later.”

      We took our bags outside.

      “Please, please,” we begged. “Tell us where we’re going.”

      “OK. You ready?”

      She pointed across the Pen.

      “Tird floor. Block D.”

      Our hearts sank. So much for the Big Move. We weren’t even making it out of the estate. We carried our stuff in boxes 100 metres across the grass of the courtyard, to the opposite block on the other side of the estate. We were moving from the ground floor of Elmstead House to the third floor of Deepdene House. We were moving up in the world, if only literally.

      No removal van ever did pick up the car bed.

Gangland

      You see, gangland is a small, claustrophobic place. It exists in small, sealed bubbles, squatting in boarded-up worlds no bigger than a postcode. It doesn’t like big, wide battlefields. It’s the smallness it likes, lurking in the dead ends and shadows of shortened ambitions, conducting its business underneath stunted horizons.

      No shit. They don’t call them “the endz” for nothing.

      For me, gangland began in that third floor flat, flanked by the concrete blocks of Roupell Park estate.

      Later, my mental map would expand along the south London bus routes to include the lawless walkways and basement garages of the Angell Town estate, and the bored evenings making trouble around Myatt’s Fields and Brockwell Park. Feuds would stretch to Peckham and Stockwell, New Cross and Brixton.

      But as a young teenager, the meaning of those postcodes beyond Roupell Park simply didn’t exist. I had not yet learned that language. They were not yet “territories”. They were still simply postcodes.

      I liked Roupell Park. It didn’t feel like complete poverty, not like some of the slums in Peckham and Stockwell, the ones with the dark, dismal feeling that you’re too scared to walk through.

      In Roupell Park, there was still a mixture of cultures, black and white. Some people still took pride in their window boxes, spiking them with those windmill sticks and dangling chimes from their doors. A caretaker kept the Pen tidy, and the Quaker meeting house round the corner gave us a spiritual veneer.

      Less than two miles away was the house where David Bowie was born. Half a mile further, Vincent Van Gogh (both ears still intact) fell in love with a South London girl, while living briefly in a house in SW9.

      Even closer was Electric Avenue, the first market street to have the luxury of lighting. “Now in the street, there is violence.” That’s how the song starts. Sounds so upbeat, but listen to it properly next time. It’s about poverty and anger and taking to the street. People forget that. They think it’s about bloody lampposts.

      I remember a poster campaign during the General Election, just as I was beginning life on the road. It must have been 1992. The posters showed a smiling John Major.

      “What does the Conservative Party offer a working-class kid from Brixton?” they asked.

      “They made him Prime Minister.”

      Good for him, innit. But I couldn’t see anyone boasting about what they were offering a cute black girl, like me.

      My parents had divorced in 1981, the same year Brixton went up in flames. A decade later, a new generation had grown up to hate the boydem.

      Brixton had already been bombed and blasted and cleared of slums. By the time I was growing up, it was all about failed social housing and plain-clothes policemen and their hated campaign of stop and search.

      Of course, I didn’t care about any of that. I had my mum to worry about.

      I would learn three important lessons living on Roupell Park. First, Fireworks Night is always the best time to buss a ting in the air. Second, getting caught ain’t cool. And third, one day your luck is going to run out.

      Everyone knew us as the madwoman’s kids.

      There was the white kids, who lived in a smelly flat on the fifth floor. We felt sorry for them coz their place stank, man, but they was nice kids. Then there was lovely Peggy next door, always willing to lend a bag of sugar, and Shelley and Andrew, the mixed-race kids on the fifth floor. They were popular. Everyone liked Shelley and Axe, as he’d later be known. People knew each other and helped each other when they could.

      There was one newsagent who served the estate. We’d go there for ice poles in the summer. We never stole from Jay. No need. He was a good guy. If you went in there and said you were a little bit short, he would say bring it in next time. There was no point defrauding him.

      He got robbed once or twice. Soon after he got a big Alsatian. No one bothered Jay after that.

      At night, we’d watch the flashing lights from our window. There was always running kids and commotion. It was usually Tiefing Timmy, an Irish boy with lips like a duck, who’d speed his stolen cars around the courtyard.

      Datsuns, Nissans, motorbikes. There was nothing that guy couldn’t lift. When it was dark, that’s when Tiefing Timmy and his boys would come out to play. We’d watch the nightly blue light show as the boydem chased Tiefing Timmy round the Pen. We’d laugh when he got away, and we’d throw coins at the Feds when they hauled him out and handcuffed him over the battered front of whatever car he’d stolen this time.

      Obviously, some of the neighbours didn’t like us. Mum took pride in her music system. The Abyssinians, Frankie Paul, Dennis Brown, Marcia Griffiths. Old skool Jamaican reggae. СКАЧАТЬ