Black Sheep (13 page)

I gave her a hug. “Yes, Auntie. It makes perfect sense.”

To be honest, I hadn’t even considered the possibility that Dwayne had been less than 100% straight with me. The thought that he might have been lying to me – or at the very least
keeping things from me – scared me to death.

I had come to trust him.

I wasn’t ready to face a betrayal just yet.

DWAYNE

I’d never been a book reader. I learned to read at school, of course, and I remember liking it for a while. But then it seemed that most of the books they expected us to
read were chatting about people who were nothing like me, going on about stuff I couldn’t relate to. The world of books was nothing like my world.

Aside from the ones they forced us to read at school – and most of the time, I just skimmed through anyway – the last time I read a book on my own was when I was, like, 10 years old.
After that, books totally disappeared from my life. Anyway, who needed them when life was so much more exciting? And it was real, in your face, not some made-up fairy story.

So the early days in RDS, the days we were shotting for the elders, nicking stuff from shops, smoking our first blunts, those things took over. The music took over. I didn’t have room in
my life for book stuff: I wanted the real deal, the knowledge you can only learn by going out and doing time on the streets.

But I took that book from Tony anyway. I reckoned if Tony thought it was good, there must be something to it.

And there was.

I started reading about Malcolm X’s life when I got home that night – and I couldn’t put that book down. I was proper hooked! I mean, it was long and sometimes he used words I
didn’t know, but the story he told was off the chain. It was like he was speaking to me, to my own story, to the reality I was facing. He knew what it was like to be a black boy surrounded by
madness and badness – and to believe that the only way to survive was to jump right in and fight your way to the top.

But Malcolm survived it. He managed to come out of the madness and choose a new life for himself. He became someone people listened to, someone people admired. He got respect. And wasn’t
that what I had been fighting for all my life?

While reading the book, I found myself asking questions I had never asked before. Does God exist? What does ‘manning up’ really mean? Why were we black boys rapping about, dreaming
about and going about killing other black boys? Were white men devils? What were our original names before the slave masters gave us theirs?

That book opened my eyes.

All of a sudden, I started noticing things around me, things I hadn’t paid attention to before. I saw how many black women wore weaves and straightened their hair: Malcolm spoke about
that, said it was because we as black people had been taught to hate ourselves and want to be white. I saw how many off-licences there were around my endz – Malcolm preached against alcohol
too. I took note of the lyrics in my rap tunes – Mos Def, Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest, all Muslims, rapping about Allah and prophets and Islam.

And I wasn’t the only one.

Around that time, I started to see Muslim youth everywhere, all around South London. But these weren’t Asians or Somalis: they were West Indian boys, English girls, some of them as young
as 14, all high on this new Muslim vibe. I even heard that some of the guys from PDC, the Peel Dem Crew from Angell Town, had become Muslim in prison. Islam was the hottest thing to hit the streets
since hiphop. It seemed like every next man was wearing a
kafiyyeh
, a Palestinian scarf, or a skull cap, a
kufi
. Everywhere I went, man would be shouting out, ‘
Salaam
alaikum
, ackee! What’s good?”

I grew up going to church, innit, but by the time I was ten, I didn’t have the patience to sit through those dry sermons in a suit. My feet itched to be on road with my boys, causing
mayhem. I gave Mum so much grief that, in the end, she had to start going without me, dragging Jay behind her by the collar of his too-big suit. Of course, all he wanted to do was stay behind and
hang with me.

I talked to Tony about the book. I told him that a lot of what Brother Malcolm said made sense to me – although some bits were a bit mad, still.

“Yeah, Brother Malcolm was on the Nation of Islam for a long time, innit. So he believed that white men were devils and that black men were superior...”

“Until he went on Hajj... right?”

“Right! That was the first time he understood that the colour of your skin isn’t the most important thing in life, that it is possible for different races to treat each other like
brothers – to
be
brothers.” Tony looked at me carefully then. “But if you really want to understand what Islam is about, you have to read the Qur’an.”

“What, is that like the Muslim Bible?”

Tony smiled. “Yeah, kind of...” And he gave me a book with a hard green cover with nuff gold patterns all over it. “Let me know how that moves you, bro.”

So, for the second time in a month, I started reading another mad long book. I struggled with it at first. It was nothing like Brother Malcolm’s book which was more like a movie, all
exciting and ting. The Qur’an was serious, man, proper deep: all about God – Allah – and worship, Paradise and Hellfire, rules about how to live a good, upright life. And it
talked about prophets too. I had read the Bible, innit, so I knew all the stories and that. I was surprised to read similar versions in the Qur’an, like they were part of the same message. I
felt myself being drawn deeper and deeper into this strange new way of looking at the world.

MISHA

Wrapped in my pink terry dressing gown, hair pressed straight, I looked through my wardrobe again, mentally discarding anything that looked too middle class, too posh, too
expensive in an understated kind of way. In the end, I settled for jeans and a fitted white t-shirt and my only pair of trainers. Where I was going, I needed to blend in. I looked in the mirror as
I brushed my hair back into a high ponytail, a style I never usually wore because Mum said it wasn’t classy. A bit of mascara, lip gloss and some silver hoop earrings and I was ready to
go.

The bus ride up to Brixton was uneventful. I read a book while sitting downstairs, looking up briefly whenever the bus stopped to let more people on. A Muslim woman with a huge black scarf and
double buggy got on, struggling to manoeuvre past the other passengers. Her children were young and they looked close in age. The father was obviously black. The woman looked tired and her face was
pale, the colour of skimmed milk, as if she hadn’t been getting enough sleep. I noticed that she avoided eye contact with the other passengers, preferring to concentrate on the adverts that
lined the upper wall of the bus.

“Excuse me,” I called out, “would you like to sit down?”

The woman turned to me, clearly surprised. Then she smiled and I noticed her tiny diamond nose stud and how blue her eyes were. “Yes, thanks,” she said quietly. “I’d love
to.” Her strong South London accent took me by surprise. I had expected her to speak with a foreign accent, Eastern European, maybe – Bosnian or Kosovan.

I stood up and held on to one of the poles while the Muslim woman moved her big double buggy closer to the seat. Some of the other passengers grumbled but the lady just smiled apologetically at
them.

When at last she had sat down, she looked over at me and mouthed ‘Thank you’, before taking a little book out of her bag. When she opened it, I saw that it was full of Arabic
letters, a Qur’an. Aalia had one just like it. The woman’s lips moved silently as she read, her head bent low, biting the fingernail of her right thumb.

The next stop was mine: this was Saints Hill, my childhood home. Up ahead, the tower blocks of Saints Hill Estate loomed.

Dwayne’s ‘endz’.

I paused and looked around me when I got off the bus. I was a long way from leafy Dulwich, that was for sure. I gazed up at the uniform groups of concrete tower blocks, with
their rows and rows of front doors and their rows and rows of kitchen windows, and I shuddered. They reminded me of that old film,
Candyman,
the one I had watched with my cousins, where a
black serial killer stalked children in the inner city projects in the US. This was definitely
Candyman
territory. It hadn’t looked like this when I was eleven. I took a deep breath
and began walking.

As I approached St Peter’s, Dwayne’s building, I saw a large group of boys grouped around a car that was pumping loud, throbbing music. One of them was free-styling, spitting to the
beat. The others listened to him; some stood around, some sat in the car, others on the car bonnet, moving their heads with the music, joining in from time to time, cheering whenever he came up
with a tight rhyme. One of them filmed it all on a mobile phone while another patted the bull terrier at his side.

I was intrigued. I slowed down so that I could hear what the boy was saying. Just to compare his rhymes with Dwayne’s. But his lyrics were quite different; he had a different style
entirely. His spitting was much edgier, more staccato, laced with expletives, dissing ‘next man’ and ‘next man’s crew’. The other boys fell about laughing, pumping the
air, making faces and posing, badman style, for the camera.

They were having a good time.

One of them, a light-skinned boy with long braids and a gold ring in his ear who was lounging against the car bonnet, saw me watching and winked at me. He nodded at me, full of confidence, and
gestured for me to come over. That was when I looked away, stuck my hands in my pockets and began to walk on.

In seconds, he had bounced off the hood of the car and was walking beside me.

“Hey, girl, wassup? Why you actin’ all stoosh? Come and chill with de mandem, innit?”

“No, it’s OK,” I replied, turning and giving him a polite smile while trying to walk faster. “I’m going to see someone.”

The boy laughed and touched his hand to his mouth when he heard me speak. “Raah,” he exclaimed. “You’re one of dem posh girls, innit! What you doin’ down here
den?”

“My friend – my boyfriend – lives here.” Still trying to outwalk him.

“Ahh, safe, safe.” Then he stopped and pulled me lightly by the arm. “Teach me how to talk posh like you, den.”

“I’ve got to go,” I said as loudly as I could, even though my voice shook slightly, and I was aware of the other boys all watching, excited, amused, wondering what was going to
happen. “Sorry.”

“Ah, don’t be like that! Come on, maybe you can teach me how to talk ‘
French’
, eh?” And he stuck his tongue out and grabbed at his crotch. The others all
burst out laughing and the boy acknowledged the applause of the crowd, nodding his head. “Why not? I’m a fast learner...”

My face burned and my heart thumped in my chest, sweat prickling my armpits. How was I going to get out of this? How could I get away from here without making them angry? What if they did become
angry? Would they hurt me? Tales of gang rapes and ‘happy slapping’ echoed in my head, fed by a dozen news reports. Where was the boy with the camera? Was he on standby to film me being
humiliated?

“Yo, Dez!” I heard a rough voice shout out. “Leave her alone, man, that’s Dwayne’s girl.” I looked over the boy’s shoulder to see the one who had been
petting the bull terrier sauntering towards us. He pushed the boy’s shoulder and he stepped back, his face apologetic.

“OK, safe. Go to your man, innit.” He turned away and bounced back to the others, grabbing their attention with a furiously paced freestyle. The guy with the phone lifted it again
and all eyes were on the boy with the cornrows.

It took me a moment to gather my thoughts and realise that the boys weren’t even looking at me any more. But the dog owner was still standing in front of me, eyeing me coldly. I tried to
smile up at him. His dog growled, deep and menacing.

“I don’t think we’ve met..?”

“You’re Misha, innit?” he almost snarled. “Dwayne’s piece...”

I balked at being referred to as a ‘piece’ but I could tell that he meant to make me feel uncomfortable. I wasn’t welcome.

“And you are..?” I tried again.

“Jukkie, Dwayne’s bredren. What you doing down these sides, anyway?”

“I came to see him.”

“Yeah? Well, watch your back, yeah. We ain’t keen on strangers round here. A posh girl like you could get hurt...”

It was only then that I realised that he was playing with a small Swiss Army knife, turning it over and over between his fingers.

“Err, thanks for the warning...” I whispered and backed away, struggling to take my eyes off the knife. “I’ll tell Dwayne you said hi, shall I?”

“I don’t need you to tell him nuffin’, y’get me?” And he kissed his teeth, turned on his heel and strode back to the group of boys beside the car. His dog looked
back at me one last time and bared its teeth.

I couldn’t get into that St Peter’s lift fast enough.

MISHA

Dwayne lived on the fifteenth floor. It was a long way up and the lift stank of urine; graffiti tags and swear-words scarred its walls. I held my breath for as long as I could
and was relieved when the bell sounded and the doors opened, just as I ran out of air. ‘Dwayne comes home to this every day,’ I thought. He really was from the other side of the
tracks.