In Our Mad and Furious City

My head had a temper

Was educated in books, and angry, it seem to me, at the whole world because of it

It was strange but it felt to me that I was doing him a favour rather than the other way around. Perhaps it was Ardan who needed a friend, ennet, to let him just help out and tell jokes to.

I thumb the tracks and skip back to Skepta and tap a random track to hear them coarse, snarling bars. Gingerbread Man starts and I pass under the entrance to Estate. I hear it as a soundtrack. I see the lads playing in Square in front of me. The four blocks against the sky. Under Skepta’s clarity this place assumes a bashiness that makes the court come off like it’s a battle-dome. A place of ill-purpose, full of sketchy humour and distinction. Square played to meaning, ennet. Our meaning. My own.

I take out my phone and pass through a playlist. Look at these names. I got Lethal B, got Jammer. Bit of Wiley, bit of Bashy. Now these donnies are bringing it hard, Giggs and Scratchy and that. I need suttan early like D Double E, Ghetts or Akala. Original street fighters, road rappers, champions. I skip back and find Kano. Kano it is for now. I tap for Home Sweet Home and move through banger after banger, P’s and Q’s, Typical Me, Mic Check, and then settle my thumb on How We Livin. Press play. A slow one, melodic and conscious. The tin intro starts where he has nuttan to say and I listen on.

These words like ‘Paki’, which we did our best to pacify at school, had come back sharper and took chunks out of faces like my own and Freshie Dave’s. That was how we were really linked, ennet, by the threat of smashed-up windows and pictures of our mums crying in the Guardian.

I had more in common with the goons that broke his window in truth.

And they weren’t just racists, those faces. I knew that much. Nothing could be explained away so easily.

His name, at least the name everyone called him, was Freshie Dave. His name tag said something like Devshi Rajagopalan. To save expense us youngers would just call him Freshie Dave. He spoke in a clipped Indian accent – fresh off the boat. I guess the name stuck, ennet.

But this door, honestly, it’s always been a bastard.