The John Milton Series: Books 1-3 (14 page)

It wasn’t long before they gave him the chance to make more money. He was small, with tiny arms that could fit through car windows that had been left open. He would open the locks from the inside, and the boys would tear out the car stereos and steal anything else that had been left behind: GPS devices, handbags. They would steal six or seven a night, and Elijah would be given fifty pounds. He put the cash in a shoebox that he hid under his bed. His mother never asked where he got the money for his new clothes. Elijah knew that she wasn’t stupid. She just didn’t want to hear him say it.

He watched as the door opened and the white man stepped outside. Elijah watched him make his way along the walkway and, after descending the stairs, emerge out onto the forecourt. He walked towards a beaten-up old car, pausing at the door and then crouching down at the front wheel. Elijah could tell from the way the car slumped to the side that the tyre had been slashed. He grinned as the man took off his jacket, removed a spare from the boot and started to go about changing it.

A couple of the older boys were smoking joints on the walkway.

“Alright, younger?” The boy’s real name was Dylan, but they called him Fat Boy on account of how big he had been as a young teenager. He had grown out of that now; he was nineteen, six foot tall and full of muscle.

“Is Pops here?”

“He’s inside. What do you want?”

“I need to see him.”

“Alright, bruv. He’s in the back. Knock when you get in.”

The flat had been taken over by the LFB. They had sprayed their tag on every spare wall, and a huge, colourful version filled the wall in the lounge. Boys from the Estate lounged around, some playing FIFA on a stolen flat-screen television. Others were listening to the new album from Wretch, arguing that it was better or worse than the new tracks from Newham Generals or Professor Green. Trash was shoved into the corners: empty paper bags from McDonald’s, chicken bones that had been sucked clean, empty cigarette packets, cigarette papers. Everyone was toking, and Elijah quickly felt dizzy from the dope smoke that rolled slowly through the room. A couple of the boys looked up, clocked him, ignored him again. No one acknowledged him. The room was hectic and confusing with noise. Elijah felt young and vulnerable but dared not show it.

“Look who it is!” whooped Little Mark.

“Baby JaJa,” Pinky sneered. “It’s late, younger, shouldn’t you be tucked up in bed?”

“Leave him alone,” Kidz chided.

Elijah reluctantly made his way across the room to them. Little Mark’s real name was Edwin, and he lived in a flat on the seventh floor of Blissett House with his dad. Elijah did not know Kidz’s real name, only that he lived in Regis House and had a reputation as the most prolific mugger in the crew. Pinky’s real name was Shaquille, he was usually quiet and surly and had a nasty reputation. Elijah tried to keep his distance whenever he was around.

“What you doing here?” Kidz said as he came alongside them.

“Came to see Pops,” he said.

Pinky nodded to the rucksack across his shoulder. “Afraid your mum finds out what you’ve got in there?”

“I ain’t afraid,” Elijah said.

“That’s from earlier, right? The gear from the train?”

“Yes.”

“What you bring it with you for, then? You stupid or something?”

“I ain’t stupid, either.”

“Look pretty stupid from where I’m sitting.”

Kidz smiled at him indulgently. “How you going to explain it if you get pulled by the feds?”

Elijah felt himself blush.

“Told you he was stupid,” Pinky said. “A stupid little kid. He ain’t right for LFB.”

“Lucky for him that’s not for you to decide, then, innit? Ignore him, young ’un. Pops is in the back. Go on through.”

Elijah made his way through the room. The layout of the flat was identical to his own, and he guessed that Pops was in the main bedroom. He knocked on the door. A voice called that he could come in.

The room was dark. Pops was standing next to the open window, blowing smoke into the dusky light beyond. He had removed his shirt, and his muscular torso glistened with a light film of sweat. He had a tattoo of a dragon across his shoulders and, on his bicep, the letters L, F and B. His heavy gold chain glittered against the darkness of his skin. A white woman sat on the edge of the mattress they had put in the room. She straightened her skirt as she got to her feet. She was older than Pops, looked like she was in her thirties, and dressed like the office workers from the city who had seeped into the smarter parts of the borough. Elijah had heard about her; the rumour was that she was something in the city and that she had a taste for the crack.

Pops crossed the room and kissed her gently on the cheek. “I’ll see you tonight,” he said. She ran her palm across his cheek, collected her jacket, and left the room.

Pops found his T-shirt and pulled it over his head. Elijah caught himself wondering how old he was. His brown skin was unmarked, his eyes bright and intense. Elijah guessed he was eighteen or nineteen, but he had a hardness about him that made him seem older. It was a forced maturity, a product of the road, of the things he had seen and done. It had flayed the innocence out of him. “What’s the matter, younger?”

“My mum caught me with this,” he said, shrugging the rucksack from his shoulder and letting it hang before him. “She’ll nick it off me if I have it in the house.”

Pops laughed. “Don’t fret about it, younger. We’ll look after it here.” He took the bag and tossed it onto the mattress. “Fucking day, I’m all done in.” He took a bag of weed from his pocket and found a packet of rolling papers on the windowsill. “You want a smoke?”

Elijah had never been alone with Pops before. He was talking to him, taking him seriously, and it made him feel special. “Go on, then,” he said, trying to sound older than he felt.

Pops busied himself with making the spliff. “You have fun this afternoon, blood?”

“Yeah.”

“You nervous?”

Elijah took the joint and put it to his lips as Pops sparked it for him. “A bit.”

“That’s okay,” he said. “S’alright to be nervous. Nerves mean adrenaline, and adrenaline is good. Keeps you sharp. You were quick when boi-dem came. Away on your toes.”

“I’ve always been good at running,” he said.

“That’s the thing, younger. That’s gonna be useful. You can’t never let the feds get hold of you. The thing that keeps me running, even when my lungs are burning like someone’s sparked up a spliff in my chest, even when the stubborn side of me wants to turn around and get ignorant, face them like a man, that’s when I remember I’ve already spent way too many nights sitting on a blue rubber mattress in a cell, who knows how many times it’s been pissed on, that’s when I remember getting caught by boi-dem’s a no-no. You can’t come back to the manor and big up your chest about getting shift by boi-dem. Bad bwoys ain’t supposed to get caught, JaJa. Especially not black boys.” He grinned at him. “It’s all good. You did good.”

Elijah felt a blast of pride that made his heart skip. No one had said anything like that to him before. His teachers thought he was a waste of space, he didn’t have a dad, and his mum was always nagging. He drew in on the joint, coughing as the smoke hit his lungs.

“We ain’t really talked before, have we?”

Elijah shrugged. “Not much.”

“What you going to do with your life, little man?”

The question caught him off guard. “Dunno,” he said.

“You got no plans? No dreams?”

“Dunno. Maybe football. I’m not bad. Maybe that.”

“‘Maybe football,’” Pops repeated, smiling, taking the joint as Elijah passed it back to him.

“I’m okay at it,” Elijah said defensively, wondering if he was being gently mocked. “I’m pretty fast.”

“I’ll say you are,” Pops said, taking a long toke on the joint. “You like the Usain Bolt of Hackney.”

Pops dropped down on the mattress. He patted the space next to him, and Elijah sat too. It might have been the weed, but he felt himself start to relax.

“Listen, younger, I’m going to tell you something. You won’t think it’s cool, but I know what I’m talking about, and you’d do yourself a favour to listen, alright?” He settled back so that he was leaning against the wall. “It’s good to have dreams, but a man needs a plan, too. Maybe you are decent at football, maybe you are good enough to make it, but how many kids do you know from these ends who’ve done it? Maybe you can think of one, but I don’t know any. Football is a dream, right, and, like I say, it’s good to have dreams, but a man’s got to have a plan, too. A realistic one, just in case his dreams don’t pay off. You know what I’m saying?”

“What about the street?”

“Seriously, younger? The street can be a laugh, you don’t get too deep into it, but the street ain’t no plan.”

“You’re doing it.”

“Only for now. It’s not a long-term thing.”

“I know people who do alright.”

“The kids shotting drugs?”

“Nah, that’s just baby steps, I mean the ones above them.”

“Listen to me, Elijah—there ain’t no future on the street. Some brothers do make it through. I know some who started off as youngers, like you, younger than you, then they work their way up with shotting and tiefing until they become Elders, and then some of them keep out of trouble long enough and get made Faces. But, you look, every year, some of them get taken out. Some get lifted by the feds, others ain’t so lucky, and those ones get shot and end up in the ground. Like Darwin, innit? Survival of the fittest. You want, we could have a little experiment—we could start with a hundred young boys, kids your age, and I reckon if we came back five years later to see how they be getting on, maybe one or two of them would still be making their way from the street. The others are out, one way or another. Banged up or brown bread. I don’t know what you’re like when it comes to numbers, but me, it’s like how you are at football—I ain’t too bad at all. I’m telling you, younger, one hundred to one or two ain’t odds I’m that excited about.”

“What about today? You were out with us.”

“I know—you think I sound like a hypocrite, and that’s fair enough. Maybe I am. But I ain’t saying stealing stuff is bad. It ain’t right that some people have everything they want and others—people like us—it ain’t right that we don’t have shit. That stuff we nicked today, them people was all insured. We gave them a scare, but they didn’t actually lose nothing. They’ll get it all back, all shiny and new. We deserve a nice phone, a camera, an iPod, whatever, and we ain’t going to get it unless we take it. I reckon that’s fair enough. I reckon that makes it alright to do what we did. But it ain’t got a future. You do it ten times, twenty times maybe if you get lucky, eventually you’re going to get nicked. Someone gets pulled and grasses you up. Your face gets on CCTV. The feds have got to do something about it in the end. See, what we did this afternoon is short-term. If you want to have those things properly, without fear that they’re going to get taken away from you and you’re going to get banged up, then there ain’t nothing else for it—you got to play the game by their rules.”

“How?”

“You got to study. You got to get your exams. You probably think I’m high saying that”—he nodded at the joint, smiled, and then handed it across—“but think about it a little, and you know I’m talking sense. I didn’t pay no attention at school. I was a disaster, couldn’t stand it so I hardly went at all, and I couldn’t wait until I was old enough so that I didn’t have to no more. I’m older now, I’ve got more experience, and I’m telling you that all that stuff they say about studying is true. If I’d paid attention more, did better, what I’m trying to do with myself now would’ve been a million times easier.”

Elijah was confused. “What are you doing?”

“So I said I was okay with numbers? Always have been, just something I’ve got a talent for. I’m going to night school to get my A-level. Maths. You know my woman? You know what she does?”

Elijah had heard. “Something in the city?”

He nodded. “Accountant. She says if I can get my exams, she can get me a job with her firm. Nothing special, not to start with, post room or some shit like that, but it’s a foot in the door. A chance to show them what I can do. After that—who knows? But I’ll tell you this for nothing, younger, I ain’t going to be doing what we did this afternoon for much longer.”

Elijah sucked on the joint again, stifling the unavoidable cough. The conversation had taken him by surprise. He had always looked up to Pops, thought that he was cool, and he was the last person he would have expected to tell him to stay in school and work hard.

“You did good today. Like I said, you got potential. I saw it in you right away. That wasn’t easy, I remember my first time, I was sick as a dog, they had to push me onto the bus, and then I was completely useless. None of that with you, was there? You got balls. That’s great. But just think about what I’ve said, alright? There’s no future there for you. For any of us.”

They smoked the rest of the joint together before Pops got up. “I got to breeze. Got school. My exams are in a month, and we’re revising. Equations and all that shit. Don’t want to be late.”

The night was warm and close, and the walkway was empty as they both stepped outside. Pops bumped fists with him and descended the stairs. Elijah rested his elbows on the balustrade, looking across to Blissett House and his mother’s flat, then down into the yard as Pops emerged, walking confidently and with purpose, acknowledging the monosyllabic greetings from the strung-out cats and the boys from the gang who sold them their gear. Pops was liked. Respected. Elijah nodded to himself.

He fancied some of that himself.

He wiped the sweat from his face and put the scope of his rifle to his eye, gazing down onto the plains below. The village was five hundred yards away, clustered around the river. Two dozen huts, the villagers making their living from the herd of goats that grazed on the scrappy pasture to the north and west. It was a small habitation gathered around a madrasa; children played in the dusty yard outside, kicking a ball, a couple of them wearing the shirts of teams he recognised. He took a breath and held it, the rifle held steady, the stock pressed into the space between his shoulder and neck. He nudged the rifle left to right, examining each hut individually. Nothing was out of place: the women were working at home while the men tended the animals in the pasture. He moved the scope right to left until the missile launcher was centred in the crosshairs. A Scud launcher, an old R-11, Russian made. He squinted down the sight, placing each member of the crew. Three men, Republican Guard. He centred each man in the crosshairs, his finger held loosely through the trigger guard, the tip trailing against the edge of the trigger. He nudged the scope away again so that he could focus on the madrasa: five children in the yard, their cheap plastic ball jerking in the wind as they kicked it against the wall of the hut. They were happy. The launcher meant nothing to them, nothing compared to their game and the fun they could have together. He heard their laughter delivered to him by a welcome breath of air.