CHAPTER 2
It was my fault that Walid got involved in what was going on in Park Road. All of us, except Walid, had known one another since school, but after he’d arrived from Syria, he’d fitted into the team so seamlessly it was as if he’d been around the place as long as we had.
To explain Walid’s late arrival requires me to explain why I’d moved away from Park Road and found myself living in North London. You must realise I need to handle this sensitively to preserve my reputation, but I’ll be as truthful as I can.
***
I was in London and on one of my secret vigils to find a bit of peace and tranquillity when I met Walid. He’d been sleeping on the grass in Pymmes Park in Edmonton. We got chatting, and Walid seemed keen to talk. He’d just arrived in London after a heroic trip, hitching and walking all the way from Syria.
“So are you legal?” I asked him in a kind of whisper.
“I’m English, bro’” he said, though I could tell he was trying to enhance his London accent to impress. It wasn’t quite normal, but nonetheless, I was mightily impressed for an Arab-looking guy with a wispy stash and acne spots.
“I started off in Catford, South London,” he said. Then he added, “Catford, mate. Know it?” as if to impress me further.
“You walked to Syria from Catford and back again?” I said, astonished. “Did you need the exercise?”
“Nah, nah,” he said without appearing to appreciate my wit. “I went out there with my mum. We stayed there a while and then . . . and then she . . .”
And then he stopped. So I guessed something had happened, but I didn’t like to pry. I now knew what happened but we all need a few secrets. I certainly had a few that I was not too keen to talk about to a guy I’d just met in a park.
Anyway, he told me he’d been on the move for a year when he met a Polish truck driver called Herman at a truck stop north of Dusseldorf. Herman had told him he could get him all the way from there to England on the ferry from the Hook of Holland to Harwich for a fee.
Neither did I like to pry into the fee he’d paid or where he’d got the money or bring up the thorny matter of people smuggling because Walid seemed an OK sort of guy. He had a certain look in his eye that I put down to determination and a bit of cunning. And I’d spotted a greasy, curled-up copy of The Lord of the Rings in his backpack, which suggested he had a worthwhile brain. I was sort of impressed despite his accent.
Looking back, I was right about the determination. Walid’s done OK, but it was my fault he ended up in Park Road.
“I still got some good mates around Park Road,” I told him.
And why had I moved from Park Road to Edmonton?
You see, my mother is not exactly the settling down sort. I’d already moved several times while I was at school with Cass, Kevin, and Winston. We never moved far. It was mostly the next street or around the corner so that my mother could pursue her vocation of providing comfort and solace to various male acquaintances for us to pay for the rent arrears that had accumulated from the last place we’d lived at.
With all that’s going on, there’s not much I remember about school. I went along every day; I diligently did my homework, and then I went out. Messing around by the weed-filled concrete playground with its broken swings and cracked basketball court is what I remember most from around age eleven to sixteen. I remember going to a church once when I was about nine. I can’t remember why I was there, but it was a big place on the main road, with big colourful windows, and it was packed out with West Indian men in big suits and big women in fancy hats. I’m Nigerian, I think, but at age nine, it felt cool to say I was from Jamaica until someone asked for details. Then I’d run away. At that church, I still remember wearing my tight school shoes and best jeans. Winston was there too. I remember us playing outside. We poked sticks into cracks around the tombstones to try to wake the dead and wondered what would happen if one of them got annoyed and woke up.
Anyway, one day, when I was about sixteen, my mother decided to move again—this time from the two-up, two-down Victorian terrace in Park Road that we rented from Mr. Khan to a similar one in the backstreets of Tottenham, North London. This was a really big move with a hired van for two beds and the TV. It was also when I got introduced to the man my mother said was my father. She was giggling as she told me, and the guy was laughing. So I just shrugged and carried on. As this was about the fifth father and the sixth uncle I’d met, I decided to move out when I got the chance.
The chance came when I met Coolie outside Burger King.
“A bit of peace and quiet. Know what I mean?” was what I told Coolie I was looking for. Coolie said I could bed down at his place if things got too bad at home. It was an attractive offer because Coolie was highly respected in the area. Coolie was from Abuja and was already nineteen, so he’d been around and knew a lot more than me.
“I need no altercations and fuss. Know what I mean, Coolie?” I said in explaining my need for a move. “I need some mutual toleration and no friction.”
“This is the place, man,” Coolie confirmed like he was selling some upmarket real estate. “Guaranteed tranquillity.”
Now, unbeknown even to Cass, Kevin, and Winston, I’d always sought out tranquillity. I like reading. I’d go to the library for tranquillity. I think that’s how I developed the style, wit, and nice turn of phrase, which they say I’ve got.
You know why I liked peace and tranquillity and still do? It’s because loud noise was the only stimulation that I remembered from being strapped in my stroller at age two. It was the domestic noise, the arguments between my mother and various Caribbean and African lodgers she took in that affected me, and there were signs things would only get worse the day we moved to Edmonton. I can picture this guy even now.
This latest guy was not Rasta like most of the previous ones. Don’t get me wrong. I like Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, and King Tubby in moderation, but this guy looked Arab. He definitely wasn’t Rasta, Jamaican, or even Nigerian and definitely not my father. Besides his paler colour, his hair was straight. But he was still very noisy.
If it wasn’t his angry, booming voice, then it was the sound of his fist banging on the front door at night or the sonic boom from it being swung in the direction of my head or my mum’s.
He never actually connected with my mum’s head because he was always off balance, and anyway, she had a long history of giving as good as she got. She could get really angry and point and then wave a kitchen knife at a guy’s nose with great effect, so perhaps he’d heard about her reputation and missed her head on purpose.
He never connected with my head because I was too quick, but I can still feel the rush of air past my ear.
And instead of King Tubby, grotesque Arab music would echo through our house—wailing women singers like cats on heat as I tried doing my school homework and watch TV in the kitchen.
Despite everything, I did OK in that new school in Tottenham, even though I didn’t like it there. Just like Woodlands School back in the Park Road days, there were too many women teachers.
The exception at Woodlands School, where I was with Cass, Kevin, and Winston, was Mr. Wilkins, the math teacher. Winston especially liked Mr. Wilkins. Willie Wilkins was a bit special.
Willie would divert from the set syllabus into far more interesting areas such as a whole lesson on how long it would take to travel to Manchester and back if we took a train and a bus one way and walked all the way back. I won’t explain the fun we had, discussing whether the guy doing the walking was a paraplegic who could only crawl, a ninety-year-old David Beckham with a walking stick or Usain Bolt sprinting backwards dressed like a black Dame Edna Everage. But I can still remember Willie’s joke about a one-legged hitchhiker.
“What do you say to a one-legged hitchhiker? Hop in.”
And, do you know, I can still remember how to calculate travel time from A to B via C and back to A via D from a list of mixed speeds and distances. Willie had the most amazing tricks to improve memory and do mental arithmetic.
On the other hand, I was thrown out of Ms. Edwards’s psychology lesson at Woodlands when I told her fifteen-year-old boys don’t fucking care whether psychology helps to understand social phenomena. I told her that just living out there did that. If she got out more, perhaps she’d understand that learning stuff like that from textbooks was a load of crap and would one day turn a whole generation into rioting psychopaths.
I didn’t care. Whatever she thought, I wasn’t stupid or dim. I knew I could shine if I had to. Someone once wrote, “Never dull your shine for somebody else.” That was me. All I needed was some peace and quiet and an opportunity to show what I could do.
So, at the age of sixteen and a half and living in Edmonton, a hundred miles from Park Road, I’d had enough. By then, I’d done some of my own shouting just to make my opinions known, but it was useless. So, some nights, I’d walk over to Coolie’s place for somewhere to go. Coolie, whose own folks had gone their separate ways leaving the place empty, would open the upstairs window and look down.
“Been a bad boy again then, Kurtie?” he’d shout down. “Ma smacked your little bad boy ass? The old man landed one on your ear? Been crying?”
But even at Coolie’s place, the noise didn’t stop. It was definitely not tranquil. Coolie played Afro beat—Fela Kuti, Lucky Dube, and Ska non-stop on volume 9 until someone gave him an old collection of Def Leopard and Alice Cooper. The noise didn’t abate. It just changed.
I had grown so used to noise that a few moments of silence hurt my ears. I’d look up, thinking something was wrong—that the world had stopped or I’d suddenly gone deaf. But it also showed me that silence was a chance to sit and think without distractions. Silence was nicer than noise. Silence was golden. Noise obliterated thought, but silence encouraged it. I discovered that despite my full-on act, I was a bit of a thinker.
But I still couldn’t avoid noise.
Another mate, Basher, had a cool way to get tickets to watch Spurs, so I used to go with him to watch the soccer and come away with my ears ringing and a list of new adjectives to describe ineptitude. Afterwards we’d meet up with Stacker at the Crown Inn and then go to Deci Belles, where we’d meet Coolie, and I found out why Coolie never came home on Saturday nights.
As I’ve said, Coolie was highly respected around Edmonton. He was already nineteen and from Abuja, so he’d been around and knew a lot more than me.
He wore brown Nike Manoa boots, tight black jeans, and a belt with a brass buckle like a skull the size of a dinner plate, and whether it was raining or snowing, he’d top it off with a grey Superdry vest with Chinese writing and a medallion nearly the same size as his buckle hanging around the neck. Coolie looked the part. Most days, he worked in a pub in Tottenham, but he always seemed to have more money to spend than the pub was likely to pay. I never asked how or why, and he never said anything to me, but I think he always knew I was a bit of an oddball so not entirely to be trusted with bad news. I once mislaid an old Portishead CD, and Coolie found it in the kitchen stuck in the toaster like a slice of bread. No wonder I’d not spotted it. I think one of his mates, probably Snaz, must have put it there for a joke. “What the fuck is this crap?” he said before lobbing it in my direction.
“Yeh, weird stuff,” I said though I often played it through ear plugs with my head under the pillow.
But I was grateful to Coolie for the shelter over my head despite the endless stream of noisy North London traffic outside. And then I got a job as a binman for Haringey Council, where the banter, shouting, and bin rattling began at 4:00 a.m. It all explained why I was often in bed at 10:00 p.m. with a pillow over my head listening to soft Irish Celtic music on my phone. Not that I could admit this was my kind of music, of course.
My point is this. My search for a bit of peace and tranquillity in Pymmes Park not only turned out lucky for Walid but it then helped Cass with his problems.