CHAPTER ONE
According to Cass, his problem started on one of those cold, wet and windy Saturday afternoons that characterised everything about the area around Park Road.
Number 43, Shipley Street with its weed-strewn cobbles and council-owned trash bins had been Cass’s home for as long as he could remember. However, on that Saturday afternoon two years ago when he’d crept downstairs, opened the front door, and wandered away it had changed his life forever. In many ways it changed our lives, too.
When he turned the corner onto Brick Street, the only movement had been the dirty brown gutter water sweeping urban debris downstream. Plastic bags, cigarette ends, dead leaves, and other detritus from the maze of inner-city streets of Victorian brick terraces where we lived floated past to gather in soggy piles at the first blocked drain. On Park Road, strip lights shone inside the Cash for Clothes shop and behind the steamy front window of Osman’s Launderette. The dismal streets around Park Road were always like that.
Such was his mood that if he’d found me, Winston, Kevin, Mo, or Shafiq sheltering like wet pigeons in the doorway of Raja’s Store or Hussein’s Money Exchange like we often did when we had nothing better to do it was unlikely things would have turned out differently.
If we’d called out, “Where’re you going, Cass?” he’d probably have said that he was heading down to Mootalah’s because Moo would sometimes ask him to help unload his van for a free bottle of Coke or a couple of quid. But Cass hadn’t known where he was going. He’d just wanted to get away from everything and everybody. He was fed up, he said. He’d had enough of the stifling square mile of familiarity locally known as Park Road with its mosque, backstreets of broken pavements, builder’s rubble, abandoned cars, boarded up properties and shabby corner shops like Mootalah’s that smelled of wet cardboard, overripe fruit, and wilting vegetables.
Even if he’d passed Bushra and Javeria hiding beneath a tattered umbrella in their tight jeans and make-up who always smiled, giggled, and held onto each other when they saw him, he might have said something different.
“Hi, Cass. Going somewhere nice?”
“Pushing weights down at the centre.”
That would have been a Cass joke because, like us, he’d only ever looked through the plate glass window at the city’s sports centre and watched those who could afford the membership fee running, sweating, and going nowhere in their Lycra.
Perhaps it would have been better if he’d admitted he didn’t know what he was doing or where he was going but honesty demanded self-confidence. At age sixteen or seventeen, we all suffered the same. Bullshitting and a kind of false swagger was what got us through. It’s pathetic looking back.
When Cass went for his stroll, I wasn’t amongst those sheltering outside Raja’s Store because I’d recently followed my mother and moved to London. If I hadn’t, I’d probably have been left to fend for myself around Park Road just like Smithy and Hopper and others I could mention. Cass and I had messed around together since we’d started school ten years before. There was a small gang of us who at age twelve ad-libbed bullshit and told jokes that only ever amused us but proved we were the real cool dudes on Park Road. No-one had better jokes than we did.
Cass’s best mate, though, was Kevin. Kevin was the quiet one who missed school a lot for reasons which we never asked about back then. Looking back now I can see that Kevin’s confidence was rock bottom. In fact, his jokes were so bad we’d look at each other wondering if he was really from this planet.
Perhaps, if, on that dismal Saturday, Cass had passed Bashir’s Asian Store and Kevin happened to be outside stacking boxes of oranges or cucumbers for pocket money, things might have turned out differently. If he’d seen Kevin, it’s likely he would never have stopped outside the shabby front window of Faisal World Travel on Park Road. But they hadn’t met, and so Cass had walked on and stopped, distracted by coloured stickers advertising cheap flights to Dublin, Paris, and Amsterdam. Not only that but he’d gone inside and met the owner Mr. Khan. It was Mr. Khan who’d then sold him a cheap air ticket to Turkey, which he bought in cash with savings from his part-time jobs.
At the last minute, Mr. Khan also gave him a parcel to give to his brother in Istanbul. The only other person who knew about the parcel was Kevin because Kevin was the one who’d waved Cass off on the bus to the airport.
CHAPTER TWO
My name’s Kurt.
It’s actually Courtney Lemar Delmont Learner, but Cass, Kevin, Winston and the others stopped laughing about that when we were about twelve so I’m relaxed in their company.
Rightly or wrongly, though, they think I’m good with words, but it was Roger, Gordon, and Willie who suggested I was the one to write this. We’d gathered in Gordon’s old garage tucked down the back alley off Park Road and, for a while, all we did was sit and listen to the three old codgers debating whether we were up to writing about what had happened whilst they slurped tepid milky tea.
“It’s finished. Nothing to do with us anymore,” Gordon said. “Let these young ‘uns write about it.”
“There’s no harm in giving them a chance, I suppose,” said Willie.
We thanked them for the enormous trust they’d bestowed on us and told them we’d head to the Queen’s Head pub to discuss it because milky tea made us puke.
Now anything that’s said about the Queen’s Head must take the form of an apology for Queen Victoria. If she knew her shabby portrait now hung, squeaking on a rusting bracket over the door, I’m sure she’d turn in her grave.
Perhaps it was a good thing that the Queen’s Head would soon close. Even Gabby, the Polish guy who owned it, had failed to make a profit on this sad, dilapidated shell of Victorian history that still smelled of the thousands of cigarettes smoked there before the ban was imposed. But it was good-enough for us.
All five of us were there that night.
Four of us - Cass, Kevin, Winston and I - had been at school together so we’d known one another for years. Walid was the exception. Walid had arrived from Syria about a year ago, had been looking for somewhere cheap to stay, passed through London, came across me by accident and made the terrible mistake of taking my advice to check out the area around Park Road. I reckoned he’d have moved on already if it hadn’t been for Gordon offering him a job in his garage.
So, we found a corner, ordered lagers from Gabby and tried to look cool.
“You can do it, Kurt,” they said as we discussed who would write what Roger had called a final report.
“Yeh, well, talking comes easy enough,” I said. “It’s putting stuff down on paper that’s the problem.”
We argued about it for a while. “But you’re the literary genius, Kurt. You even beat that Chinese guy from the Golden Gate takeaway who reckoned he spoke English like Prince Charles. Remember him? Fu Manchu?”
“Plus, you had more style than Fu, Kurt,” Kevin said.
“And a real cool haircut,” Cass added.
I agreed wholeheartedly with these observations and in the end, said, “Yeh, OK, then. I admit to my superior intellect. It’s my ethnicity. Intelligence flows through my veins. It’s in my African genes.”
I told them my vocabulary had improved exponentially after I’d moved from the cess pit around Park Road to Edmonton, North London.
“You should visit Edmonton some time,” I said. “It’s light years ahead of Park Road. It’s so much more culturally and ethnically diverse. We even allow Jews, Aussies, white South Africans and Mormons in. And there’s a whole street for those who still haven’t worked out who they are or where they come from. And as a change from attending the Park Street Mosque, you could always try the Ministry of Mountain, Fire, and Miracles run by Pastor Jerry.”
To further illustrate my claim of North London’s diversity, I told them about a guy from Vanuatu who’d taught me a whole lot of new phrases. I could tell no one had ever heard of Vanuatu, but Walid was the only one to admit it. I told him it was the island in the Pacific Ocean, where Robinson Crusoe got washed up. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it didn’t matter because he then wanted to know who Robinson Crusoe was. I told him to call in at the library and check the kids’ book section.
“It’s closed,” Kevin said. “Council cuts. And they think everything’s too colonial.”
“Yeh,” Winston said. “And Robbo was a white guy.”
“They’ve now cancelled history,” Cass said. “Nothing good ever happened. It was all bad, so why depress people even more? It’s social engineering.”
“And white supremacists like Gordon.” Kevin laughed.
“Gordon’s never moved from Park Road, let alone been a slave owner,” Walid said, defending his boss.
“He employs you,” Winston retorted.
“Yeh, but I needed a job,” Walid said.
Of course, we then talked about slavery and exploitation and rape and pillage and decided that modern slavery still continued except it was now run by the children of old slaves and that the new colonialists were the Chinese and that rich Arabs in the Gulf used Bangladeshis and Pakistanis as slaves and that the Pakistanis in Park Road had enslaved Kevin, who was neither black, white, yellow, or brown but a sort of light beige with long eyelashes.
Going round in circles like that made us so dizzy I reverted back to Vanuatu. “I reckon he was the guy who taught Bear Grylls how to light a fire with sticks,” I said, reverting back also to Robinson Crusoe. “And it’s got a real cool motto.”
“What has?” Winston asked.
“Vanuatu,” I said. “Keep up, man. They’ve got this high-profile black guy in a loin cloth and a spear called Long God Yumistanap.”
“Is that the guy who taught you how to speak?” Kevin asked.
“If he ever existed at all, then Long God Yumi’s long gone, Kev. No, I mean the guy I met in Edmonton. Now that you’ve got your freedom from homegrown slavery by your own relatives, you really need to get out more, Kev.”
“Go on then. Prove you can speak it,” Walid said.
“Speak what?” I asked.
“Vanuatu or whatever,” Walid said.
I had to think about that for a moment. “Proses fud mak causem plenty sik,” I said.
The four dumbasses stared at me, as if I was making it up, so I had to translate it for the uneducated. “Processed food makes you sick,” I said. “Don’t you understand Vanuatu lingo?”
Winston was the only one who understood. Winston was from Lagos, you see, and he often spoke in a version of pidgin. “Speaking pidgin so no one understands is a black guy’s privilege,” I said.
“I thought you didn’t have any privileges, Kurt?” Kevin said. “That the white supremacists and slave traders had stolen everything.”
“Not true,” I said. “I got plenty of privileges. I’m not like you mixed-race heathens. I’m a true black with genuine African roots that go back to Voodoo days. It was us who invented religion by prancing around fires waving sticks with ostrich feathers stuck in our curls and wearing more organic make-up than you find in Holland and Barrett’s. Life was simple then and more fun. Now look - everyone’s totally confused. Have you ever seen a more miserable bunch of untidy-looking wretches than those that emerge from Park Road Mosque on Fridays? They’re supposed to look happy and fulfilled, man. They’re supposed to emerge looking content and motivated and set up for the weekend with plans for shopping at Tesco and evenings watching Simon Cowell.”
“When they come out, they’re deep in thought, Kurt,” Walid said.
“If they came out dancing, singing, and waving black flags and Kalashnikovs like the guys I met, you’d be right to be worried,” Cass added. Coming from Cass, who had had some recent hands-on experiences of Kalashnikovs and black flags, that line of conversation stopped dead.
Like me, Winston had done a bit of Christianity when he was about seven, His mom used to drag him along to the church on Midland Road. That was before the Archbishop of Canterbury ruined everything by spouting shit about God not being a celestial insurance policy.
So, what is he then if he’s not an insurance policy to keep you sane and on track? But let’s not go there right now; otherwise, I’ll ruin the rest of this story.
What I will say, though, is that it was Kevin who had the big personal problem when we were all much younger.
We all knew he’d missed a lot of school when he was a kid, but we didn’t know why and we didn’t care. Kids are selfish. What kid really cares about anyone else but themselves? They think their own problems are the worst ever. I once knew a kid who dropped a plastic Homer Simpson toy, he’d found in his Shreddies down the toilet and flushed it away with the poo before he could snatch it. He cried for a week but when his dad left home and shacked up with a miniature Somali woman from Cardiff he laughed about it for a week.
I digress. I might digress a lot.
When we got to understand Kevin’s background, we told him we were sorry, but by then, it was too late. He’d already gotten over it, and he didn’t care either. Instead, he told us to look at our own lives. Had we been better equipped to face the future? We shook our heads at that.
We’d known nothing about Kevin’s problems until Roger came on the scene. Roger was a truck driver who saw something worth saving in him. Whoever thought an old truck driver could turn out better than the Archbishop of Canterbury? But I supposed that’s not difficult.
Somehow, Winston moved the conversation onto the subject of cremation versus burial, Cass mentioned Buddhism, and I decided to opt for promoting the benefits of Voodoo.
“You might stick with one God for your inspiration,” I said, “but I’ve always gone for pick ‘n match.”
“Like picking up Jessie after school and matching her assets against Aisha’s. That what you mean?” Winston asked.
“Don’t be flippant,” I said. “I’m talking about picking and matching from the table of delights we call black magic. Get to choose your ideal witch doctor, ghost, or genuine spirit. Sort the wheat from the chaff, separate the good from the bad, and check out those you’ve never heard of before. Look at me and Winston,” I said. “Black as night. You know why? It’s because of our sun God. It’s not like we prostrate ourselves before him. We stand tall, stand firm, and salute like soldiers. Standing up shows genuine respect, and he reciprocates by giving us a decent sun tan. He ignores all the false sun worship from your average white Anglo-Saxon because anything that fades within a week can never be the genuine article, man.”
That caused more discussion, of course, because while Winston was as black as me, Cass and Walid were brown, and Kevin was, as I mentioned, a sort of off-white beige with long black eyelashes.
We returned to discussing North London and the need to experience new horizons but Cass laughed. Cass’s horizons had been enhanced by being abducted in Turkey and getting mixed up with ISIL.
You’ll eventually learn about that but when I caught up with Cass for the first time in two years, I barely recognised him. He was thin and dirty like a starving refugee, and smelled terrible. That’s enhancement.
Walid reminded us he’d hitched all the way from Damascus which was a lot further than Edmonton. Of course, he then had to remind them it was my fault he’d ended up in Park Road.
“But then you met Gordon, and Gordon offered you a job,” I replied.
We then needed to discuss Gordon, who definitely hadn’t been anywhere much. In fact, he’d not moved from Park Road since he was born, fifty or so years ago and was now the only white face still there. But he’d taken Walid under his wing. Walid had no need of a sun God or, indeed, the mosque. Walid had Gordon.
Kevin, on the other hand, had Roger. Kevin was a thinker and still sensitive about things, but with Roger behind him, he had changed. Roger opened up Kevin and showed him the sky.
And who showed Winston the sky? There was no doubt about that. It was Willie Wilkins - our old math teacher from school.
And what about Cass and me? Well, I suppose you’ll need to read on to find out, but that night in the Queen’s Head, we took a vote on who should write this. The result was unanimous. I, Courtney Lemar Delmont Learner, more widely known as Kurt, was to become an author.
