Black Sheep
Authors: Na'ima B. Robert
Just so long as you know
That these roads
Are our roads,
So we will fight for these streets,
Yes, we will die for these streets
Because they are the only thing
That have ever given us a place
In this monarchy,
The closest thing I have to an identity
So yes, I will die to be me –
I may have been born a pauper
But ya dun know I’ma die a king.
Extract from
Monarchy
by Indigo Williams
Black Sheep
DWAYNE
“Yuh wort’less, Dwayne!” Mum’s shrill voice cut through my sleep. I rubbed my eyes, all confused. What was with the harsh wake-up call? “Yuh
wort’less, just like yuh father!”
Then I remembered. Mr Douglas from the school had called the night before: just a short, hurried phone call to tell my mum, Alicia Kingston, that I was failing at school and that, at this rate,
I wouldn’t even get enough GCSEs to drive a dump truck. Mr Douglas had said that they would be entering me for the lower-tier exams in as many subjects as possible but even then I would be
lucky to pass. Screw him. Who cared anyway?
Mum was vex’ and refused to speak to me all evening, making sure she scraped the pot out before she went to bed so that I’d have to eat peanut-butter sandwiches for dinner. Please!
Hadn’t she ever heard of ordering pizza? But I guess as far as she was concerned, I didn’t have money for take-away. Which was fine by me. The less she knew about my finances, the
better, y’get me.
Mum kicked the pizza boxes to the side and glared down at me, her hands on her hips. But as I looked across at her, I caught sight of my new kicks. They hadn’t come easy but, damn, they
looked good. I was gonna wear them on stage at the club on the weekend – they were the fiercest piece of footwear I’d seen in a long time.
“And take yuh shoes off me sofa, y’ hear me, boy?” Mum sure knew how to pull an angry face. Frowning, her light-brown eyes blazing, she glared at me, her black, black son,
lying on her sofa, her hard-won, highly prized leather sofa that she had bought in instalments from DFS. I didn’t move.
“Dwayne!” she barked. “Yuh no hear good? I said get yuh blasted trainers down from me sofa!”
I rolled my eyes and let out a loud sigh and cussed – but only under my breath. I wasn’t in the mood for a slap so early in the morning. I took my feet down from the sofa and looked
up at her, trying to look like I didn’t care, one eyebrow raised. That was the most I dared.
“There,” I said. “Happy now?”
But Mum just kissed her teeth and stomped out of the room, muttering, “Only God knows where he got the money to buy dem tings...”
Mum? Happy? Of course she wasn’t happy. She was never happy with me. As far as she was concerned, I couldn’t do anything right. I was wort’less, as she said, just like my
father.
And true say, I was just like my father in so many ways. For a start, I was just too fly, y’get me, the hottest thing to hit the streets in 2005. I turned 16 that year and I just knew it
was going to be a good year for me. I was a sweet boy like my dad, with the silky smooth tongue, all the lyrics, all the lines. But that was probably why Mum hated me so much. My looks, my dark
skin, my street style all reminded her of him. When she looked at me, it was as if she didn’t see me, Dwayne. She saw someone who was gonna break hearts, just like my dad broke hers.
Even sixteen years later, she hadn’t forgotten how he made her pregnant at seventeen, then left her standing at the altar. Ruined her life. Left her with me, growing inside her, making the
white dress that she borrowed from Nan too tight around the middle. All the neighbours could see, she says, and they talked about her for ages.
Allow them, man, why should you care if people ain’t got nothin’ better to do than chat yuh business? Free that. I didn’t know my dad. Didn’t business about him, where he
was, what he was doing. I had my life, he had his, y’get me. It’s just that Mum’s cusses always brought him back up in my face: they were like a soundtrack, as regular as her
going to church on a Sunday.
But my soundtrack was way, way more than the beef between my mum and me. My soundtrack had rhythm. My soundtrack had rhyme. My soundtrack had
beats
. Man, when the beats got inside me, I
didn’t think about Mum, or the bruck-down council estate we called home, or my mad teachers, or the Larkside mandem from the estate across the way. All I thought of was the beats and the
rhymes and the way they came together to create something lyrical, powerful,
magical
. I would spit anywhere: in the school playground, on the estate, at raves, house parties, MC battles,
anywhere where they would pass me the mic. I wanted to make my mark, y’get me. I was Boy Wonder, future star.
Oh, yeah. Then there was Misha, that piece of chocolate-fudge-coloured, sun-kissed sweetness: my girl. She was part of my soundtrack too, for sure.
I had met her at a rave six months before, in West London. In a crowded room full of man flashing cash, sweating in their silk suits, and gold-diggers trying to score a play, Misha stood out as
a class act. I don’t know if it was the way her smile lit up the room or the way she turned away from big players like my main man, Tony, to talk to me. Whatever it was, I couldn’t keep
my eyes off her. I felt myself being pulled towards her, magnetised, mesmerised,
hypnotised
, like the whole party was nothing but a mixtape of bodies and movement, noisy, unreal, making no
sense. It was like we were the only two people in the world, that we were all there was. I know it sounds crazy, but that’s how it felt, for real.
That was the beginning.
She gave me her number.
“I don’t normally do this sort of thing,” she said, scribbling the mobile number on the back of a taxi-cab card.
I could feel myself getting well into her, man – she was just so different. The way she spoke – all posh and proper, but a bit naughty at the same time; the way she looked straight
into my eyes, not all shifty; the way she asked me about myself as if she really wanted to know.
Down my sides, girls don’t talk much sense, not the ones I know anyway. Chirpsing them is like playing a soundtrack on a loop: you say the same tired chat-up lines and they respond with
the same tired responses, loving themselves too much, trying to play hard to get. But you can always get them in the end, if you still want to after listening to their foolishness for most of the
night.
Girls can be divided into two groups: skets and neeks. The skets are just plain nasty – and I
don’t
do nasty – and the neeks aren’t worth bothering about. But
Misha? She confused me; I just couldn’t place her. She was like a girl from another world.
“So why’re you breaking your own rules?” I had to ask, with a cheeky grin.
You know what she did? She looked me in the eye and smiled. “You seem like a nice guy,” she said – just like that! Then her friends pulled her away, out to the cab that was
waiting to take them back to where they were staying.
I was in shock, for real. Almost one hundred per cent sure that no one, no girl, had ever called me a ‘nice guy’ before. I shook my head and smiled.
‘This one’s going to be interesting, blud.’
‘Ya dun know!’
Then I felt a heavy arm across my back and caught a whiff of
Paco Rabanne:
it was my mate, Jukkie.
“Oooh!” he growled. “Get a load of that t’ickness, bwoi! Man’d like to mash dat, one time!” Jukkie was proper drooling as he watched Misha and her friends get
into the cab.
“I beg you shut up, man!” I sneered, shaking his arm off. I was proper vex’; I didn’t want Jukkie and his nasty self getting in my way. And I didn’t like the way he
was eyeing Misha up either. “No girl in her right mind would want you and you know it, man. So fall back!”
“What you sayin’, blud?” Jukkie’s eyes were bloodshot and the whisky on his breath was so strong that it made my eyes water. Not the best time to pick a fight.
Then Tony, Jukkie’s older brother, stepped to us and put a hand on each of our shoulders. “Easy, man, easy! No point getting into a fight about it. They’ve gone now,
anyway.”
That was Tony, man, always there to take the edge off things, to calm things down. Tony was a don, a proper don. I had bare respect for him. I’d lost count of the number of times I had
wished he was my brother as well as Jukkie’s. But then, being in RDS meant that he
was
my big brother, still. And it helped that he took my side against Jukkie, at least some of the
time.
“And where’s your girl, anyway?” Tony asked Jukkie. “How come you’re stepping on Dwayne’s toes, entering his
territory
?”
Jukkie grunted and took a drink from his plastic cup. “Allow her, man. She’s been takin’ bare liberties lately. Had to slap her up, teach her a lesson, y’get
me.”