Radical (6 page)

In the days before the mainstreaming of hip-hop culture and the appreciation of artists like Banksy, this was classic counterculture stuff. No one, apart from my friends and I, knew who “Slamer” was, though his name was scrawled all over Southend. It was two fingers to the police and law and order: we were challenging their authority, and there was nothing they could do about it. That gave us the edge, credibility among those in the know, and we felt we had a way to fight back.

I also got into dancing to the tracks and MC-ing (live rapping) at nightclubs. We'd go to these under-eighteen nights at clubs down by the seafront, or “The Front” as we called it. We would jump around to the sounds of Onyx and House of Pain, then we'd get up onstage for a lyrical excursion over an instrumental. My MC name was “Black Magic.” The white kids didn't know what to do and couldn't really move to these strange new beats, so they looked to us for direction.

Our B-boy sub-community just kept growing; we would meet kids on the streets and just bond because they were into the same scene. It's like we instantly knew how to relate to each other. That's how I met people like Marc, and Chill, or Tsiluwa. Marc was a white kid, and a great rapper who was able to freestyle on the spot; his skills made him the right friends. Chill had recently moved from Zimbabwe. He was walking in the wrong direction one night after a particularly violent racist incident, an attack involving a hammer to the head of a friend—a preferred style of attack by Essex-based racists. I saw Chill walking in the direction we were running from, told him what had happened, and asked him to stick with us if he wanted to be safe. This kicked off an instant brotherhood between us, and together we got up to a great deal of mischief.

On one occasion Chill and I, both fifteen, decided to see if we could get into an over-eighteens nightclub. If anyone looked at us, at our builds and lack of facial hair, it was obvious that we were much younger. To get in we cut off some hair from our heads, and glued it with Pritt Stick to our chins. We laughed at how ridiculous we looked—Chill, who had Afro hair, looked like he had a pad of Velcro stuck to his chin—but we put our blazers on and got in. We went straight to the bathroom and washed it all off. After that, the bouncers would let us in every time.

All of this—the music, the clothes, the graffiti, the MC-ing—the hip-hop lifestyle—meant that none of us had any problems with girls. They were almost like groupies, white middle-class girls, who were into hip-hop and wanted to be a part of it. This was a time when mixed relationships became extremely fashionable, especially on the female side: there was a whole group of girls, many from nice girls-only schools, who wanted to be in mixed relationships. They'd talk to us about how mixed-race babies looked so cute. Such talk would make us laugh, and we thrived on the attention. We were just out to have a good time, and were buzzing on a sound, an identity, that we could finally claim as our own.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Stranger Stabbed for Me

While life in school was improving, the situation outside was escalating into something far more serious. Although my generation was being exposed to—and becoming interested in—music emanating from black culture, older generations remained unmoved by hip-hop and threatened by its associated culture. This was a generation who still had the mind-set of the father of the boy at primary school who had filled his son with all that rubbish about AIDS. It was these older, violently aggressive groups of white youths we had to be wary of.

The result was that when we went out, we made sure that we never walked anywhere alone. If we were out in the town, we'd be in groups of five, six, or seven to be on the safe side. We were an overwhelmingly non-white group of B-boys, and as we got deeper into the hip-hop culture, a lot of our white friends began peeling away from us. This was either from fear of attack or through feeling out of place. But Sav, the biggest boy in my school, always remained loyal to me, and was prepared to stand by my side till the end. I'd seen him take blows to his head from iron bars, yet still get back up, brush off his clothes, and walk on. It was hard to find a tougher man than Sav. The rest of our circle eventually narrowed to either West Indians or Pakistanis. We were united by the threat we all faced when the neo-Nazi skinhead group Combat 18 came into being in the early 1990s. And the guy with connections to Combat 18 was Mickey. Whenever and wherever Mickey or his crew saw us, they would draw their knives and hunt us down like animals.

How could we stand up to these guys, men really—they were much older than us—who were dangerously tooled up? It got to the point that from the age of fourteen on I began carrying a knife every time I went out. In those days, you could buy a knife as a kid without any questions asked. Crazy, really. It was a big hunting knife, six-inch steel blade and grip handle with a holder that you could strap to your back. That was very effective in concealing it—I once spent time in a police cell without them ever knowing what was hidden under my shirt. What I particularly liked about this knife was that within the design of the main blade, there was a second, hidden knife. I'd attach this one to a string around my wrist, so if the bigger knife ever slipped from my hand I'd still have the second one ready as a backup.

I bought the knife for protection, pure and simple, not to look for trouble. I'd practice getting it out, make sure I was up to speed, could unclip it and whip it out at a second's notice—the sort of moment where a fumbling could make the difference between getting stabbed and your attacker backing away. I'd sharpen it constantly, make sure the blade was in perfect nick, and learned how best to hold it in a fight. I was fully prepared to use it, but thankfully (and due to pure luck rather than good judgment) I never had to. In those days I trusted that thing more than God, and so we formed a kind of perverse bond. I would look over it from time to time, running my finger along its blade, and wonder whether it would save me or get me killed. I still keep it in a drawer next to my bed to remind me of those difficult times. I'm still not sure whether I love the thing or hate it.

In my parents' time, things were different; if you got threatened, it was all about fistfights, maybe the odd kick—it wasn't nice, but there wasn't the same level of threat of serious injury. That all changed with the skinheads and the arrival of Combat 18: knives went from being the exception to suddenly being the norm. Their favored form of attack was with hammers or screwdrivers, but they also carried clubs and butchers' knives. That started a bit of a local arms race, with everyone tooling up in response to everyone else. Suddenly everyone in Essex was carrying, in a way people hadn't been fifteen years before. Good friends of mine got badly hurt—Moe had his head smashed with a hammer and was lucky to survive. That was the climate non-whites faced in Southend, and that was why we carried knives. We were being hunted down for sport in our own streets by C18. They even had a name for it: Paki-bashing. Friends were being randomly stabbed, hammered, and clubbed just because of the color of their skin. I defy anyone to convince a teenager that he has no right to defend himself in such circumstances. If tooling up could deter such attacks, then for all the risks involved, we believed it was bloody well worth doing.

That day in the park, Chill ran to us for help, and I had ended up surrounded by skinheads. Uselessly outnumbered, I dumped my own knife in a desperate attempt to convince the skinheads that I was no enemy. Whom was I fooling? For C18, my skin color alone was a sufficient crime. Finally surrounded by them, their mouths frothing with frenzy, their eyes glazed with bloodlust, I knew that my time was up. These men had come from hell, in their white van, to Paki-bash this fifteen-year-old
kidult
. To submit to death is a strange sensation; one can only do it by finding hopelessness attractive. The mind searches for ways to console the heart, telling it: “It's OK, when you're dead you'll feel no more pain.”

And that's all I wanted really, for it to be done without much pain. But I didn't die. In fact, the strangest thing happened. It was, and remains, rather surreal. A passerby, a respectable-looking, studious type of white guy, saw my plight and entered the fray between the skinheads and me. Despite the panic of the situation, I think he managed to tell me his name was Matt. I cannot be certain about this, but I feel an urge to humanize him, so I'll call him Matt anyway.

“Don't worry,” Matt said, “I'm with you.”

I remember thinking,
What the heck? Who are you?
Instead, I cautiously thanked him.

Matt didn't look like a fighter at all. Perhaps he was one of them, I thought, undercover and trying to lull me into a false sense of security. Perhaps he was secretly tooled up and ready to scare them all off. “Maybe I won't die here after all,” I began to think. Maybe this guy is some sort of Bruce Lee; he'll be able to take them all on and extract us both from this mob.
Why else would he jump into the middle of a knife fight?

Matt turned to the skinheads. “Guys! Guys!” he said, causing them to turn around in surprise. Being white and having managed to get close enough to their circle, they had assumed he was with them. Who would be crazy enough to put themselves in the path of hammers, clubs, and knives for an unknown teenage Paki?

“Come on, leave it out, yeah?” he said, trying to pacify the situation. “Leave this kid alone.”

The skinheads looked at Matt. His intervention seemed to infuriate them even more.

“He's a fuckin' Paki,” one snarled at him, “and you're a fuckin' Paki lover!”

“Guys,” Matt said, slightly more nervous this time, yet still trying to mediate. “Come on, let's not do anything stupid here. He's just a kid, yeah?”

Perhaps it was the fact that he wasn't part of our world that made him feel he could talk the situation down. Perhaps where he came from, an honest request and a bit of gentle reasoning were enough to resolve any situation. This was my world, though, not his. As they came charging forward, from all sides, I knew they would ignore him and stab me anyway. “Thanks, Matt,” I thought, “at least you tried, mate.” An honorable thing to do for someone you don't know. And so I prepared to meet my end.

What happened next will haunt me till my dying day. In sudden horror, mixed with a perverse relief, I watched as the skinheads swiveled their attention away from me—and toward Matt. Like famished hyenas they descended upon him, plunging their knives deep into his torso, beating on his head with their clubs and knuckledusters.

“You fucking Paki lover!” they screamed.

The Paki was left by their side untouched. Matt's arms were up, flailing, shielding his head with all the strength he could muster, collapsing under the sheer brutality of their vicious assault.

With penetrating shame I instantly realized that Matt was no Bruce Lee. Matt had no weapon. Matt had no plan. He was just doing for me what I was now failing to do for him. He stood up for me, and he was being beaten to a pulp for doing so while I was forced to watch. I knew that if I joined him I would probably die. My sense of honor urged me to fight. This was my fight, goddamnit, not his! But my common sense scolded me in return: I would have no effect, I was an unarmed boy! All that would be achieved by me joining in would be both our murders. So, I watched, frozen, as the C18 thugs clubbed him, stabbed him, and kicked at his head while he lay on the floor. And not one punch, and not one kick was turned my way. In the distance, police sirens were ringing out. Thank God someone was finally coming! Come, save us! The C18 thugs heard the sirens too, gleefully appraised the damage, and ran off without so much as looking at me again. It was as if I didn't exist. And as I looked at Matt, all bones and blood on the floor, I felt like I didn't deserve to exist. C18 had left me totally untouched while a white stranger lay bleeding profusely on the floor after taking
my
beating.

As the police and ambulance approached, Matt miraculously staggered up off the floor, walking in the direction of C18 and defiantly shouting back at them. As if to say, “Here I am, I'm still standing. You did not defeat me!”

I learned later that as well as the multiple stab wounds, he suffered a punctured lung. Somehow, he still found the resolve to wave his fist and shout after them until the effort was too much, and then he collapsed again. The paramedics surrounded him instantly in a fierce effort to save his life.

The police, meanwhile, were at their worst. They looked at the white guy lying in a heap of blood on the floor, heard shouts coming from the C18 lynch mob standing off at a distance, and decided to question the fifteen-year-old Pakistani B-boy. I was still locked in my place, my feet refusing to move. The police radioed in my identity code. I wondered why they always managed to classify me as an IC 2.3, the police code for mixed white-Mediterranean and Afro-Caribbean.

“No, you're speaking to the wrong guy . . .” I tried to explain.

“I'm not going to ask you again,” the officer insisted. “I want you to tell me what your gang was doing to that man.”

I snapped out of my dazed state and quickly turned nasty on the policeman, shouting and swearing at him at the top of my voice.

“What're you asking
me
questions for, you fucking pig? They're right over there, the guys who stabbed him up! You can
hear
them laughing, you can
see
them, why aren't you going over to arrest them before they leg it?”

“I'll arrest you if you don't calm down,” the police officer responded.

So I checked myself. My main concern was to convince them to arrest the guys who jumped Matt. I suffered the interrogation in the hope that it would speed up their work. It didn't. The officer eventually saw that I was innocent, but by that time the skinheads were long gone in their white van, and the ambulance was carrying Matt to the hospital.

They left me standing right there in the street, confused, exposed, alone, and angry. I wondered if an angel had just descended to save my life.
Was Matt real or had he been sent by God to shield me from murder?
I half expected the skinheads to come back and finish the job. After failing to fight alongside Matt, I now believed that I deserved it. I had been unarmed, but so was he. Yes, I was outsized and outnumbered, but so was Matt; it didn't stop him. Since that first day at Cecil Jones, I had always thought myself brave; now I was just full of shame. I found myself wandering back to recover my knife I had so foolishly hidden. If I hadn't dumped it, maybe I could have helped him.

I never got the chance to thank Matt for intervening. I knew he hadn't died, because it would have been all over the local papers, but I didn't know his surname or how to get ahold of him. He'd just walked into my life, taken a stabbing for me, and then disappeared. The bungled police reaction may have made me more anti-establishment, but my own guilt drove me further away from my white friends.