ESTATE
SELVON
See the four blocks rising behind the shop roofs, red shells, and pointed arches pitched at the sky. I pick my pace up as I run through the market. Proper orphaned corner, this. Full of absent people stuck between bus stops and bookies. See them shuffling bodies. Lining up at cash machines and dole queues. Man only come around these Ends for a barber’s, canned food, or like batteries, ennet. Nuttan more. Pure minor commerce. Any real money lands in spastic corners, in some bingo joint down near Wimpy sides or suttan. Don’t make no sense to me. Every time I run past this place I feel like raggo, blessed I never grew up in Estate proper.
South Block is the nearest block to my road so I head through the market and toward the gate. Smell hits me hard as I turn into the stalls. See carrots and lemons and cabbages in boxes, piles of colored fruit stacked in blue crates. Shopkeepers putting out their plastic pap. Mobile-phone parts and baby clothes. Kitchenware hung on coat hangers. Run past it all, dodging the stools and the old dears. Maintain my breathing tho, keep a compact chest.
South Block entrance goes over my head now. Stones Estate is four gray towers around me. The square space in the center. See the walls. The graffiti is all over the brick walls, like scabby tagging reading short names in code. No one around me, just my body in motion. Adidas and vest. See the broken windows and overflowing garbage. I run past the skips, littered with needles and suttan nasty, suttan foul. It reeks of piss and harsh filth washed up under darkness. Bunn that.
Instead I make my eyes follow upward along the shape of the Estate walls against the sky, sharp and unbending corners. South Block shoots up tall and narrow and I go around the patchy grass and the court. The block’s just waking up to the day. I’ll be back here in an hour for football with the lads. If football is still on. If it ain’t been kiboshed like everything else has been this week. Yoos should be texting me soon about it anyway. Wait and see, ennet. It will be good to be among that lot. I need faces, good bants, and humor. Need to spend time with people else I’ll burn out with training. Running keeps me pressed, keeps me solid tho, still. I use this time for conditioning, pushing harder on this Estate concrete than I do on any other road. This is me running around Square. This is me fearless.
This Stones Estate got madness in it, everyone knows it. It don’t touch me tho. But every time I run here I think about my mates living up in these council flats with all this haggard muck. In my mind this place owns a part of me too tho, with its silence and gray. It’s part of me by association, ennet. Because I bus with Ardan and Yoos and they know me. And I run here. And I play footie here. Even though I live up in a proper house with a proper fam. This is where I run, where I’m known. For now.
I turn a corner and go past West Block. Shaded windows with faded red Arsenal flags and red United flags and red Liverpool flags and wet laundry. Like a hundred satellite dishes fixed to balconies. I think about taking a rest. Check my watch. I’m breaking sweat now and feeling it. So I pick up speed and extend my fingers slicing the air as I move into a sprint. I hear the motivation tapes in my earbuds: If your mind can conceive it, you can achieve it. I listen to these tapes on runs and in quiet moments. Voices of power and strength molding my ideal state. I get to the corner of West and North Block and stop. Check my watch. My fingers hang on the fenced gate and I see myself framed against this wall.
I have to continue this habit. Push myself and earn it, ennet. Earn my place and make my way out. I hold and regulate my breathing and bend down to my feet to press the sides of my running shoes. I stand again. I look up and stretch backward. The sky is a bright space above my head. Adrenaline hits me hard and I think about a hundred thoughts at once. I think about the clouds and Yoos and Ardan. Think about my body, my shape, my sweat, my muscles. I think about that lighty girl, Missy. Her body. How I need to smash it soon, else I’ll go mad. I think about my family too. My dad and his failing heart. My marge and her church. I think about what they’ll do once I’m gone. Think about the way out, the blue space above. The sky that I only see when I look upward and away from everything else around me. I’ll be out of the Ends like dust, soon enough.
Close my eyes and take the earbuds out. Listen to the sound of the cars and the wind. I hear some noise, someone scratching from West Block. I look up there. The sun peeking over the opposite block, light bouncing off glazed windows blind my sight as I look. I check my watch. I’m making good time. I’ll run on and head home.
I turn the corner into the junction and a car goes past me blaring some shit dance music. See the shutters open by the post office and police lines, running across Tobin Road. That white mob must have come through here. Them racists left bare shit on road as well. Dickheads. The whole place cordoned off, splinters of wood and white rags on road. I’ll have to cut through park instead.
Have to keep pace. I set my arms close, squeezing my fists. My body tight, my heart cold. I hear the sound of prayer from August Road. I tune it out. Imagine a tunnel with only my body running through it. Allowing the Ends, allowing the marches, allowing the aggro. This is how I perfect my technique, the trick I use to let the city drift away from me while I run through it. I run with nuttan in mind and keep myself apart from everything around me. I’m best alone and when I’m running, ennet. Obviously. What else is there to run for except my own self?
CAROLINE
Oh these filthy nails won’t grow back. Better not to catch a finger, not again after the last. I untangle the keys from under the basket of clothes. There, you. I balance the basket on my knee and feel for the lock. No use. I’ll just set it down for the moment. Dirty washing on show for everyone to see. But this door, honestly, it’s always been a bastard.
There it goes, at last.
A tug upward and in. Fucken thing.
I haul up my basket and drag the slipper with my foot. God what now, something smells right dead on the door. Another thing is it? You’d think the summer would dry up the mold. No, not even on the eighth floor of this West Block. It’d be too good for it, wouldn’t it.
Here’s me along the balcony past eighty-four. And that baby’s crying again, listen. Better get a move on before Varda that hairy melter comes out and moans about the boy. Number eighty-five. Not a sign of that George Docherty either. Usually he’s out here sucking on a dirty pipe, giving me the once-over. Number eighty-six and the smell of curry, no surprise.
I lift the basket while my feet find the stairwell blindly, careful like. I see only the black spittle and mulched receipts lining the corners the way down. I look over at the Square below minding the mildew on the banister. Nothing down there. The grounds are empty except for the carping birds and trees. Early still. The courtyard is in shadow, half a ways to morning. Kids’ swings, silver slides untouched in the shade. Oh wait look. The other side of the Square, those Lithuanian women, four of them, walking back to the East Block. Home from a shift early. Each carrying a plastic bag. Each of them alone as I.
My toe snags a liner at the bottom of the stairwell. Jesus, and it nearly throws me. I step hard on my ankle and it hurts. Stupid. I swear at it, at the door the bags of what—of nappies—it belongs to. The door opens then and it’s her. That smutty little. She has a look of amazement at me, has a cigarette on her lip, clueless.
At the foot of the stairs, see. I nearly threw my foot out!
All right keep your voice down, the baby’s asleep.
She’s young. Filthy. With her hair and pink nails, tights and trainers on. I can see her knickers through her tights. Usual sort on the ground floor. She’ll look a hundred when she’s forty.
No, I say, you listen! Every morning I’m made to step past your fucken bin-bags. I should inform the council. You’d do well to stop having so many babies if you can’t mind the nappies.
She steps out her door now and takes her cigarette in her fingers.
You better watch your mouf you old bint. Don’t you tell me how to live.
Oh you dirty little.
You’re always down here complainin about somink. Go on, jog on!
The door opens behind her and it’s her fellar. The big one with the tattoos and dark eyes that look like John’s eyes. Seeing him makes me step back a little with my basket in my arms getting heavy.
What’s all this then?
It’s that Irish woman from upstairs. Says she’s going to tell council.
What for?
Because of the bin-bags or I don’t know.
The fellar looks at the bins and then up at me.
Oh leave off today Carol, would you yeah?
I lean forward at them both, I thrust the basket at them and at the bin-bags there in the corner.
Move your bin-bags over to refuse from now on, d’you hear me?
I says it to him like that, dead-on like.
He moves out of the door then and I press my back against the banister. He points over to the skips under the arch, like a right Brit thug.
Look, he says, can’t you see the skips are overflowing? They ain’t collected yesterday’s bags because of them marches, yeah?
What?
There look, police cut off the road haven’t they, for the protests. So the collectors couldn’t pass through here on the Thursday. The skips are full Carol. When they ain’t full I’ll get rid of the bags. But until then, I’m leaving them here, all right?
He goes back inside and the girl has her head out the door staring.
See? The skips are full, so what you want us to do about it? Blame them marches, ennet. If you want somink to complain about.
I gather my clothes, sniffing, and I smell the bags and it makes me want to vomit. I scowl at her.
But you can’t move them out from the foot of the stairs? The very least.
I turn and move off. I hear the girl, dragging the bins back nearer the door, muttering to herself, calling me an old hag, an old cunt. The mouth on her. I hear her behind me, mind. But I move off anyways.
I walk quickly past the dark spot under the arch. Past more awful smell and the filth on the walls. Sure the police lines are cutting off the North Gate. I have to lift the police tape to pass under. That ugly mob. Disrupting everybody’s morning. Oh I heard them. I could barely sleep for the racket. And the road is littered with their mess come morning. A lost shirt, square signs spelling No Sharia Law, paper strips of something nasty. It’s this boy killed, isn’t it, this soldier-boy. So they say. And now they’re out here shouting. That’s another nonsense. It won’t bring the dead back will it, I know that much. Foolish, the lot of them. Pot stirrers. The council should do something about. They won’t.
I walk out of the North Gate and into the Market Street and the morning light. The way that little bitch spoke to me just now. Lord, honestly. Like all I want is to do my laundry in peace. Any sort of peace and quiet would be most bleeding welcome. Not much of it going these days. Not with raising a lad on this Estate and my John having left. My John, listen to me, fuck. Perhaps I am a difficult woman then. An old hag right, that’s what they call me. So what if I am then, difficult. So be it. It’s what the years have made of me. This place has made of me. One step out the door and there’s always some egregious shit ready to spit at your feet.
Oh here we go. Eyes down now. I pass the early men by the bookies. Each a hung bake, dirty clothes and shifty. Waiting on Jesus for their lot. Market Street is full of this sort. Hopeless stragglers, beaten-down saints huddled up against the mean road. Each as alone as I. Walk past them and walk past the Polish men filling crates of carrots and mangoes. Take a left on Lowry Road.
But they don’t notice me anyway. Good.
Now, when did I see Ma last? When the boy was six. That’s it, eight years after Father Orman settled on Pine Road by the Cricklewood Crown. Mustn’t forget that, must I? This place was meant to save me. Ma had sent me here to keep her girl out of harm’s way. Aye, how blessed am I? Just the daughter after all, a wee sister, not a fierce one like the others. And how’s that worked out? From one set of troubles to the next I suppose, seeing the violence out here in the open. Jesus, they might as well have sent me to Rome, the air is just as thick with prayer.
It’ll be July soon, Feast of the Holy Blood. I won’t go back though, for Ma’s wake. I didn’t even go back for Damian’s. Sure as they’d remind me. And the money? Where would I find the money to go? I’d ask you Ma, how am I supposed to find the money to journey back to Belfast now? No look, the boys will manage without me. As they have done since you packed me off to Father Orman. I’ve the boy now anyway. And the laundry to do.
I pass under the bridge where the launderette is tucked behind. I hear my steps against the tunnel walls and the empty road. I reach for my packet of cigarettes. The darkness always reminds me of her somehow. Ma, that aul doll. She would stand in the corner back when, wouldn’t she? She’d stand there and watch, her black eyes on me. Like I’d peek from behind my hair until she was satisfied I’d nodded asleep. In death as in life I’m sure, Ma will stand there in the shadows and watch.
I push the door. The launderette is open. Aye, small mercies.
ARDAN
Last time I was up here was after Mehdi’s house party months ago. After them lot called me faggot for not fingering that Shelly girl. I just dussed out. Drank bare spirit that night as well, I was mad depressed and mangy. Came up here to look at the Ends at night because the view from West Block is as nice as it is dismal in the daytime.
Looked like it was on fire, this place. Yellow windows and lights in distant black and planes flashing red and white in the sky. Looked sick. Wrote enough bars that night too. Bare rando lyrics that would just roll out of mind like a mad one. Easy, like. Easy-peasy to write anything when I’m up here. I can see them streets all spread out in front of me. I can breathe and allow any dumb fuckery that’s on my mind. But then daylight comes. Shows me everything don’t no one want to see. The Ends, Stones Estate, Neasden. This drab and broke-down place. Better if the sun stayed buried, ennet, leaving us to the blackness to disappear inside, still.
I clock the sun peeking over East Block now, dragging shadows across Square below. Reminding me of where it is I’m at, breathing in the air from the scattered trees and the line of low smog bringing in the morning. People talk about Bronx. Like in Brooklyn and them American estates, them projects, they talk about them spots like it’s got some kind of road beauty. Even though they places of pain. Just cause bare rappers were born there, ennet, managing to turn their basic living into loot.
But there’s a few hours when these Ends can rival that kind of romance too. The mornings for starters. When bodies wake up, start the day, and sort the grind. Then it’s them deepest nights when the lights sketch out the scene and the sounds of cars ripping wet streets and all you hear is buses gassing up and sirens fire.
Rest of the day is bleak as fuck tho, standard.
I look down at my Biro rolling between my finger and pad. I’m staring down at this new verse like I ain’t feeling it. No, I ain’t feeling these bars. I just wrote them and I know there ain’t nuttan there.
I read them aloud:
North Block rooftop spitting early
Nobody sees me, nobody hears me
So I drop my shoulders like
The city gives the roads their light
My fingers ease. Raise my head from my papers and itch my ears with the chewed part of the pen. Ah, bunn this. I turn around. Poke my pockets for the rest of the bars I wrote. Unfold the paper. I crush it, both my hands hard. I rip it. I throw it over the wall, watch the pieces fall into the dead Square below. Ain’t about them dead lyrics. I brush my hands off and rub my bleary eyes. My mouth feels gummy like I’m parched. There’s some flat Coke downstairs. I’ll go down in a mo and swig it.
I clock Max sniffing around the roof, flicking his mutty tail like he’s on a mission. That dog always calms me. It’s just the tiredness, ennet, pressing me down and making me feel like a pauper. Fingers feel rinsed and my head is dense with wrangled wording. I ain’t slept, ennet, and my mouth is dry and my skin is dry around my eyes. I collect my other papers in a rough order, bars first and loose notes. I take my phone, stop the recording, stash it away. Back pocket. That’s enough for today.
I give a stretch and I feel the cool air touch my bare stomach under my shirt. I look out over the view. Estate looks contained, small from up here. The court is barren and the other blocks only got a few lights switched on still. The morning tempo is changing and the sky is graying up. The sounds is what I like. Ends noise. I listen and hear some distant po-po go by, doors clatter closed, and leaves rustle. A bird crows at me. My eyes catch it flying off. I follow it over to the windows in the opposite block. East Block railings running across red doors. I look to my right and all the green ones on South Block, to my left blue doors on North. All these colors are washed away now and streaky. All four blocks look like they about to crumble any day. I squint to see if I can make anyone out in one of them windows. I wonder if they can see me. Making circles and spitting rhymes up here. Probably not tho. If they did they probably think I’m some crackhead or suttan. Might as well be, ennet, hiding out, like, on a rooftop on my jays.
I look over past East Block. There’s the High Road and the striped police tape that runs near it, whipping up every time a car goes past. The only bit of bright color in these Ends, that police tape, swear down. I switch my eyes over to South Block. See the spire of the mosque some ways behind it. I lean forward against the metal piping on the wall and crane my neck at the long drop below. West Block entrance. Seven stories down. I make a spit. Brown phlegm trails out my mouth. I watch as it falls past the open balconies and hits the concrete below. Up here I’m left alone. It’s me with only the sky and its phases. The Square and the people down there, they don’t know me. I owe them nuttan. Invisible, ennet, how I like.
I hear a sound of someone running.
My eyes move down to the Square below and I search for feet on concrete. A runner in a gray hoodie, big frame. He comes in through South Block arches.
I see him. It’s Selvon.
He’s proper on his training gas this summer. Head down and massive. I go to call his name but don’t. I think about Selvon. What’s he going to do? Stop in his tracks and say wa-gwan to me? No, Selvon ain’t the sort. He ain’t the type to chat breeze when he’s on suttan. Instead I just clock him as he runs past West Block.
Watch if he steps on my spit.
He don’t.
He goes on. Known this bredda since year seven yuno. Face still looks like it’s carved out of stone. Never smiles and never slips. Whereas me? Slipped too many times this year, for real. Can’t keep my mouth shut, ennet. Say the wrong thing, wrong time. At school, if you slip you get darked out. Man learns that early. I think about them boys who are bottom of the order at school, boys like James T. or Hamdi. They get darked out every day for their hair or their accent and whatever shit music they listen to. Only reason it’s not as bad for me is because I’m safe with Selvon and them. Plus I listen to grime so I’m fine. Selvon tho. He’s off-Estate but don’t act like it. He’s just Selvon. More of a ghost around here than I am, still. Even though he’s dark as a cunt.
I watch him reach the corner of East and sprint past West Block entrance below me. Running like a mecha. Then he stops by the gate, nearly smashing into it. Selvon never slips tho. He just mimes on like he don’t feel the pressing. As if he don’t feel the fuckery from all sides of the Square, the Ends, this city. He’s blessed not to care about the world he’s in. Rest of us are casualties, ennet.
I push off the wall and call Max to me. His duppy head turns, he sees me and trots over. I’ll grab that Coke now and text Yoos in a bit. I need to scrape the mud from my creps before I go footie tho. Ma will be out. I’ll go back, drink suttan, and then cotch, read comments, walk Max around the block, and then go footie. That’s all the day demands.
Come we go Max, come. I whistle and he comes.
YUSUF
I hadn’t slept for more than an hour even. I could hear him crying through the wall. Kept seeing him in my dreams, my brother, lying there in the room next to mine in his loopy, medicinal funk. It had been four weeks now. He had arrived home with his eyes hollowed out and shameful. But by now Irfan was a husk, abandoned to his room, drugged up with pills, and silenced with prayer. My amma was down the hall wrapped in her duvet, same place she’s been ever since. She was not coping well with my brother. None of us really were.
I prayed though. Prayed for my abba to be alive. For his hands to come lift us away from Irfan’s wreckage. Abba would have dealt with it in the only way he knew how, ennet, switch from being just our father to also being imam. He’d have us recite scripture. Find our way together with prayer under mosque. But he had been dead a year and three months now. I missed the mornings most, when the sound of his bare feet woke us, when he opened the door to bring us tea and toast before school. Abba would’ve known what to do with Irfan.
Under this cloud I left, swiping my boots still caked in mud from park. I made the decision to sneak out that morning. If only until afternoon. I needed to get out, ennet. I was sullen and deprived of my breddas and easy banter. I decided to walk down to chickenshop and join the football in Square. I would text Ardan in a bit and see what he was on for the rest of the day and I’d return and make sure everything was okay.
The front door closed quiet behind me and I rested my head against the red paint. I hesitated, asking myself whether I should leave at all. I’d miss morning prayer. Amma would be worried for sure. And Irfan hadn’t woken up. Allow it though. I’d only be gone a few hours. Mosque could wait. I felt the morning breeze offer me some lightness and new air. I turned to leave.
Up ahead I saw four, five faces, all Muhajiroun, standing sentry wearing kameez and trainers and soft topi. I fumbled for my own cap and covered my head. Should have known. The new imam had both Irfan and me under the watch of this lot. These Muhajiroun breddas had been in and out of our flat on orders from mosque, checking up on us and chatting with Amma. And now with blood soaking up the streets and bricks being thrown into shop windows, there was even more reason to keep us under Muhaji eyes.
I recognized Murtaza and another was Yasir.
As-salaamu alaykum bruv, Murtaza went, nodding at me solemnly. He had pockmarked skin and Yasir had his black eyes on me.
Wa alaykum as-salaam, I said looking down. I walked past casual. Once I got to the banister I glanced back on the sly and saw them talking. I’d have to avoid that lot when I got back from footie. Our lives were not our own, that much was clear. I headed down.
Stones Estate blocked off the light on Market Street. The surrounding shops, the colors of the signs and billboards looked rained on and faded. Road was empty save for the market keepers and early-morning faces. Their heads like rock, backs bent forward like mine. I looked past the bus stop and saw the tip of the white arch of Wembley Stadium bending the sky behind it. The white looked out of place next to the brown and the gray.
I felt like everything was changing around me that summer. As if I’d caught the Ends in the middle of a depression. Everything was spilling into everything else and it was difficult to make out familiar marks. I wanted to look past all the new road signs and the plastered-over billboards, ads that sold dreams for other people. I noted the things we youngers could only see, the road knowledge that proved still useful. The barbershop on Broadway where Rodrigo would give you a cut for pennies if he knew you. The French lad on Minster Road who sold long boxes of fags out the window. The one cash machine near the Polish shop where you could get notes out in fivers. Every corner still had marks of battle. I knew the places to dodge and the safer routes to and from Estate. The bridge for example, a no-go. How many times did I get rushed under that bridge? Older hoodrats would dive out and rush you before you knew what was what. On occasion you’d get the shotters but mostly it would be the usual dickhead who’d want your phone or pocket change. Me being so slight, easy pickings for those olders. I remember once when two mean-bodied Somalis from South Block grabbed Ardan and me as we were walking to school. We were only year sevens. Didn’t know anything at the time and hid our coinage in our socks.
They made us jump.
Jump boy! they would say and we’d jump. They’d tell us to jump again and listen to our loose change jingle and watch our cheeks flush red. Made us un-sock and hand over the pees, made us wipe clean the sock stink before doing it. This was routine for us. It wasn’t that I was nostalgic about that sort of thing, but now the Ends seemed darker and more corrupt. The city’s edges, the everyday scrapes that had given us tense hearts as youngers, it had all gathered some new foul manner I couldn’t place.
Abba used to say that we would leave Estate as soon as he was done being imam. Things weren’t so clear anymore. Not now he was gone. The mosque where he spent most of his time was no longer a place I saw as ours. And with Irfan’s issues at home and these marches that everyone expected would spread across the city, it felt like anything could happen. Nothing was left so sure.
Anyway. That’s why I had to seek my breddas for peace. As I approached the chickenshop, Ray’s Chicken Paradise, I realized I hadn’t eaten properly in weeks. This chickenshop shut late, like at four a.m. That would be late enough for the drunken club crowd to stagger in with their busy hunger. For us Estate lot though, we’d pack the place all hours. Regular civilians had to push past our uniforms and lairy clamor. The oil made greasy streaks of our ties while we ran our mouths outside about the week’s hallway cataclysms. Salty chicken and chips was our staple, ennet. There was the number-six bucket or the number-four, a burger and chips, or the number-eight, fried long sausage and spicy wings. It was the first stop after school.
Stepping through the chickenshop that morning felt different. I saw glass splinters in front of the window, cardboard taped against shattered glass. Remnants of St. George’s drapery scattered all over the road outside. The place was open though, and manned. I stepped inside and nodded at the brown face behind the counter. I recognized him. His name, at least the name everyone called him, was Freshie Dave. His name tag said something like Devshi Rajagopalan. To save expense us youngers would just call him Freshie Dave. He spoke in a clipped Indian accent—fresh off the boat. I guess the name stuck, ennet.
All right brother? he goes, leaning his bony elbow on the end of his mop. Bum fluff mustache and dark rings around his eyes.
What’s going on here bruv? I nodded at the swept scene out front.
Ahm, it happen during off hours. Bloody racist those guys.
This made me glance over at the glass and cardboard. With everything that was going on with Irfan these anti-Muslim marches had somehow felt peripheral. But standing there, seeing the shards of swept glass and hearing Dave talk about it, it felt closer. I had seen it on TV, obviously, white faces holding up white placards, their open mouths and shuffling feet. It seemed at odds to me, almost dumb funny, having grown up in Estate where we told crude racist jokes for fun. That was a youngers’ game though, Freshie Dave and his sort were the front line now. They had come here on student visas with their silly smiles and were now serving up fried fat to sons of England. I’d have seen those white faces in here bare times too, ordering their own portions of chicken and chips. And they weren’t just racists, those faces. I knew that much. Nothing could be explained away so easily.
Why they smash a chickenshop window? Bit random, I said.
Our owner a Paki too. Got our faces, no?
Dave offered this as kinship, plugging his thumb at my face and his own.
To Freshie Dave there was no difference between me and him. Pakistan was the linkage. That faulty logic revealed the gulf between us.
This ever happen before? I asked flatly.
He shrugged. First time for me. But no matter anyway, man. We open. We always open. Freshie Dave swept his hands on his apron and went back behind his counter. Chickenchips?
Yeah chickenchips, please. I leaned in, hands in pockets fingering my change. Three pounds forty this would be and a feast. A proper English breakfast. My trainers gave out a squeak against the newly mopped lino while Dave was out back shunting fries into a small paper bag.
You want mayo yeah? Salt?
Nah, don’t worry. Yeah saltvinegar.
I watched the back of his head and saw only differences. Bollywood music, Pakistani cricket, ear warmers, and international phone cards. That shit had nothing to do with me mate. Home for me was Estate. Pakistan was some place in fragmented memory, involuntary smells and misplaced colors. A world away. I thought of Pakistan as being stuck in dusty rooms, mounds of strange food, vague relatives, mosquito bites, and half-understood Urdu, proper periphery. The last time we were there was with Abba. I remember how boring and foreign it all was. Irfan and I spent it mostly sagging about in trishaws, unwilling to adjust to the dry air.
But then I think more on it.
There were nice parts to Pakistan too. Bara Gali, Nathia Gali, and Shogran, when I was small we’d visit all the usual sites. There’s even a photograph that exists of me aged six, standing with my brother who was eight, with two uncles posing with tall trees and colossal mountains in the distance. We were standing on a split glacier, a huge ice shelf with the clearest water I had ever seen trickling through a system of veins underfoot. I remember the glacier but could never remember when the photograph was taken nor who the uncles were. But the mountains, the underground stream, and the resemblance between myself and my brother, the smiles he and I used to share, reminded me of how similar we once were and how separated we became in the end.
Anyway, how could I explain this to Freshie Dave? He knew nothing of our high school sieges, road banter, Premier League football, or anything else that made Estate living what it was. A world away for him. I watched Dave salt my chips. I had more in common with the goons that broke his window in truth.
Somewhere between my time growing up and this, one world had buckled into another. I used to know what the menace looked like. I’d see it on road or in a flinch from a bully. But words were never dangerous. Now suddenly everyone had stopped telling borderline jokes for fun. Now we had Paki Terrorist spray-painted on the wall outside, burning cars on the news, smashed shop windows and dead soldier-boys on road. These words like Paki, which we did our best to pacify at school, had come back sharper and took chunks out of faces like my own and Freshie Dave’s. That was how we were really linked, ennet, by the threat of smashed-up windows and pictures of our mums crying in the Guardian.
Ahm. Here you go mate. Dave’s happy teeth pronouncing his hard Ts. Both his hands pushed the box of grease toward me.
Three pound fifty, please mate.
A gyp, the price had gone up by ten p. Austerity chicken, ennet. I slid over the change anyway and sidestepped the Wet Floor sign by the cardboard window. I would text Ardan on my way back to Square for footie. I stepped out, crushing the broken shards of glass and bits of flag under my feet as I left.
NELSON
Memory come.
Sorta duff-duff, sorta slide. It come loose and fall out of my mind like that. Come thick. Come thick with a spongy pressure does my memory. I must touch it with a finger and see. Like a children touch. Like they do with any sorta thing, they poke it with a stick, does a child. I must do the same with my memory. Something there. Something nagging. I do not know what it means as yet, but is all I have so I must.
At least I have Maisie, my light. She knows I am moody, she see it, she hums to calm me. I listen. But maybe she hums to hear some other sound in the house, you know. She lonely? Must be. We son does not speak to she and she husband cannot speak to nobody. Maybe she hums from a loneliness. Maybe she hums for the same reason I listen, and think, and speak to my own memory.
She tight the scarf around my neck. We are to go outside into the light. I am awake and she smile at me, touch my scarf, and touch my cheek. She see my eyes are open and she lean in to me. Smell of lavender flower. Close enough to kiss. I want whisper I love you my dear, even after all these years. But my arm too weak, my tongue too dumb to call she name.
Handsome man, she say.
And she wink at me. I try smile and wink back. But I cannot. Maisie goes round my side and give a gentle kick to the wheel. I feel it go, the judder of the lock. The wheelchair tilt and I can see my legs move with it. Maisie have me out the front door and the daylight come sharp. I close my eyes and I see red. Feel the air blow past. Hear the car drive next to we. The morning bright. See the sky have a cloud and the bird sing in the tree. But something is wrong. Is too bright a morning. So bright that a muggy night is sure to follow. Lord, listen to me.
The day only begun and I already worry what it bring.
She push. She speak to me.
Only a quick outing today my dear, the police have block off the road.
The easy downslope path we normally take is off, she say. So we go around the other way. I do not like this way. Along the grubby Rabindranath Road what have all the fat pile of garbage what hang out of the side of the street. Is not straight going and I feel it on my arse and bone elbow. I would complain if I could. But it clear up once we get on the High Road. Supermarket on the far side. See them Polish, Arab faces. Filling them trolley full up with bounty. Look at all them bags full up with food. Lord, this new lot do not know how good they have it here, you know.
Maisie have no business in them supermarket. She want go to the old grocer by the lane. The one what fill she bag for she. She acquainted with the man. In my day, the fellar what give you your weekly bag, you know him like a cousin. Nothing like that nowadays. Nowadays is all a bloody mystery unless you live a lifetime like I. Old bones like we what stick together in good times and bad.
This outing make me tired already. Does nothing to ease me off my worry. Seeing this side of the worn-out patch only make me worry more. And my side hurts from the wheelchair. I give a moan. Maisie hear it. She touch the shoulder to let me know she hear it. She know how I feel. She know I think of him. We boy, my son.
With all the upset and strife in this place. See it in the paper, on the telly. The city burn again. See it on the road, full up, teeming with rab and ruin. What sorta man my son become under this sorta tide? I know is all my fault. That the boy is out there now because of my pride. I wanted the boy to grow up in a home we own, a property proper, to raise him right, so we waited. But it was too many years too late. The boy is growing up now in a city we barely recognize, road what feel familiar in only the worse ways. And me, the infirm father. How I can raise the boy when I cannot raise my own arm?
Grocer man take out a brown bag. He fill it with a fresh cucumber, some bread, and green tomato. The man look a Indian. Short, round with a puffed pouch under him eye. Like sleep is a stranger to him. He have a red teeth. Chewing on a red fruit, make him own language mix with the juice when he speak to she.
It is terrible, madam. I shall have to close early the shop, just in case.
Lord, they come through this way too?
Well, you never know, now. The week just gone, these bloody racists were all marching across the park, you know. Near the Neasden mandir? This is the place my family go to pray, madam. Go to find peace.
Lord, hear it.
And with that kind of mosque nearby? That is the thing that is very worrisome.
The man shake the head like they do. He talk weary about the racist mob. That lot behind Tobin Road who make a howl over the Muslim man. I feel worked up about it. Like a bell go off when I hear him talk about it. A ringing in the ear. Some memory, is it? A memory nag at me, come slow and heavy like the others come, tumbling into my tired head. I try listen. Try feel my memory so I can make sense of it. Listen to them.
You see it on the news, no? They break shop windows and burn the cars?
Yes, I seen it. Is all over the papers, my husband and I watch it.
Madam, I am here only three years. How can people be so cruel?
I seen it before, I want say to him, I have. The paper, the flame. But this Indian fellar is too recent here. He cannot understand. Back, back. Before I learn how this city brush you aside. How I learn that if your heart not steady, you out. I want tell him that. Tell him all of this is nothing new. All this tension, all this low tide. Even if the road here change, the people is the damn same forever.
The door open wide. It makes a sound like many bells.
A pack of black and white boys enter. One boy brush my knee as they come through. Who is this new generation? They walk like crabs with them backpack and long limbs. And do they know my son? Do they attend the same school as he? They stand there choosing a color drink from the counter. Loud and lairy with them bop-bop head patter. Them backs arched like a hook. They are like small catastrophes to me. I watch the boys while Maisie pay for the brown bag.
And see. One of the black boys look like my son. But small, thin with a shave head. No, wait. Is not my son he remind me of, is me. He look like I did at that age. Back when I was a young fool like that, how I drag my feet the same way, him brash cut, the way he hold himself up. Broad and angry and proud. I was angry at the world, was I. When I was young. Have cause to be. All the swirling mood of rebellion around me. That summer what have London thrown into stupid madness. I feel my hand shake as the memory take me. Come thick. I see the faces of my old friends—but it goes. The memory gone. I feel anxious and flustered by it, my mouth dry. I see Maisie. She come carrying the brown paper bag. She see that I am upset. She touch my scarf, touch my cheek. How them memories come, I want tell her.
Come my dear, we’ll go home now, she say. She hums for me as we leave the shop. We will go home now. She will put me to bed.
We outside again. The air make me feel better. Is all right. My heart ease as she wheel me free. We exit the shop and we turn right. We do not head back the same way we come. We go past the Stones Estate. Four tower block what blot out the sky. And there look, see more youngster crabs running about that brick square. This gray, miserable place what hold the young in like a pigpen. Is this where he is, my son? I cannot see him. The boy’s face come to me now, to mind, him face like my own. Lord, I wish I could tell my son what I know. All that I know about how the city raise a young man’s fury. How it bend him back, beat him down with so much hard rain he want shelter with whoever will carry him. Boy, I want say, you make one or two big choice what determine your little life. Rest of the mess, you leave it. You pay no mind to the tide. You go on and prosper, go on despite it. I want say so much. But I cannot. My heart too weak. Arms not strong, not enough to keep him from running into it. Just like I had when I was young, I ran into it faithless and bound. All I have now is Maisie, and these surging, fearsome memories what come and go, sending me back like a echo.
Copyright © 2018 by Guy Gunaratne