Catherine Bruton - I Predict a Riot

Most days I watch the film we made last summer. I’ve had a long time to try and finish it, but it still feels like something is missing. Even though I’ve cut and edited bits, changed angles, altered the soundtrack, I can’t ever seem to change the story it tells. Just like in my dreams.

‘The boys are back in town!’ Little Pea was singing.

All the other kids in the park had gone silent. Little Pea was perched on one of the kiddie swings like some kind of weird boy-bird, staring in the direction of the approaching Starfish Gang who were obviously going to beat him to a squishy pulp. But he kept on singing like a canary in a cage.

He knew what was coming. I’d zoomed in so the lens of my camera was staring right into his pupils. If you ask any film director, they’ll tell you it’s all in the eyes and, even though Little Pea had this massive crazy smile spread over his funny baby face as he sang, you could tell from his eyes that he knew he was in for a beating.

If this had been a proper film, it would be a gangster movie or maybe a Western. There’d be whistling wind in the background, or the strumming of a lone guitar as the baddies walked into view across the horizon while the little guy trembled and prayed for the hero to ride in and rescue him. Only there was no hero coming to rescue Little Pea from what I could see. Because real life isn’t like the movies, is it? That’s what my mum’s always saying anyway.

I was perched in the middle of the roundabout, cross-legged, filming everything, but trying to pretend my camera was just a mobile phone so nobody would realise. I think I knew that if the Starfish Gang caught me they’d smash my camera – and probably me too. But I thought I was invisible in those days. Invisible and safe. I was wrong on both counts.

Little Pea was acting like he wasn’t worried either. ‘The boys are back! The boys are back!’ he squawked, high-pitched, bird-like, kind of out of tune.

Little Pea was in Year 8 so I suppose that made him about twelve, but he looked no bigger than a nine-year-old. I’d heard someone say he was a fully-grown adult midget; and another who reckoned his mum had been poisoning him and stunted his growth. I’d even heard a rumour that he was an alien or that he’d been abducted by aliens who’d shrunk him on their spaceship! There were a lot of rumours about Little Pea.

Pea wasn’t his real name either, but it kind of suited him because he had this small round face and eyes that looked kind of green in the light, although they were twinkling with what looked like fear now as he stared in the direction of the Starfish Gang.

With my camera perched on my knee, I could catch their shadows as they walked across the concrete, and the white clouds scudding across the high-rise flats behind them. It made them look like they were walking in slow motion. Or maybe that was something they did – another trick to make themselves seem even scarier. Like everyone in the neighbourhood wasn’t scared enough of them already.

No one messed with the Starfish Gang. Even I knew that, and I wasn’t even from around there. Not really. I knew about the drug raps, the robberies, the street wars and stabbings and shootings. And about the army of local kids they had running errands for them all over town. Rumour had it that Shiv, the gang leader, stabbed some kid over in North London, and that Tad, his number two, carried a gun shoved down his left sock.

How did I know? Because I watched and I listened. That’s something all the great film directors do. I read it in an interview in a film magazine: you have to sit in cafes and bus stops and parks and listen to people, find stories. There are stories all around you, all the time, it said. Stories waiting to be told.

So that’s what I used to do, ever since my mum and dad split up anyway. My mum said I needed to stop filming other people’s lives and live my own, but she didn’t get it. That was exactly why I did it: to escape into other people’s stories so I didn’t have to think about my own rubbish life at all.

That day the Starfish Gang strode across the park like they owned it, their jeans hanging so low you could see pretty much all of their boxer shorts, their baseball caps resting on the top of their heads like they were far too small. And at the front was Shiv, the gang leader, skinny like a snake with a face the colour of storm clouds, wearing this long black leather coat that flapped round his ankles. It made him look like a vampire.

He had marks on his cheeks, symmetrical half-moon scars, mirror images below the whites of his pale milky eyes. I think I’d heard someone say he was only seventeen, but his eyes glared like his insides were rotting away in his belly. It made you wonder what he’d seen to make him look that way. Or what he’d done.

He came to a stop about five metres short of the swings and the rest of the gang stopped behind him. Little Pea was still chirruping away. Shiv just stood there and stared at him – totally still, like you see lions doing on those wildlife programmes when they’re about to pounce. There was a pause – it’s just a couple of beats when you watch it back on film – before Pea stopped singing and fluttered down off the swing. He was grinning as if he was their puppy dog, but I caught a glimpse of his eyes and they were bright as buttons and blinking like mad.

‘Whatcha, Shiv?’ he chirped. He was doing a funny dance thing, like a cross between Riverdance and body-popping, and grinning nervously.

Shiv stayed silent. From the railway track that runs alongside the park came a distant ringing: that sound the rails make when a train is coming close.

‘Whassup, Shiv-man?’ Pea squeaked. ‘What can I do for you, my main man, eh?’ He was doing a moonwalk on the hot concrete now, in a pair of dirty white trainers with a Nike tick drawn on in pen.

‘You, blud!’ Shiv hissed. He took a step forward and Pea stopped dancing. ‘You’re whassup!’

‘Why? What I done?’ said Little Pea, mouth still grinning, but his eyes flicking from side to side.

‘You know what you done,’ Shiv said, taking another step forward. Pea darted backwards, tripping up over his feet. His fake trainers looked weirdly big for his tiny body.

‘My cousin Pats got a beating cos of you, boy!’ Shiv went on, tipping his head to one side and staring so hard at Pea he looked like he could pin him up against the fence just with his eyes.

‘Hey, no way, Shiv-man!’ Pea protested, wriggling backwards some more. ‘I wasn’t even there when it happen, bro!’

‘ Ex-act-ly! ’ said Shiv, spitting out each syllable. His eyes were thin black slits just like a snake, poised, ready to attack. ‘You were s’posed to be on lookout, but the minute you see trouble you ghosted yourself away, innit?’

‘No way,’ said Pea, a high click of fear in his sing-song voice now. ‘I did jus’ what you tell me, Shiv-man.’

‘Yeah?’ Shiv’s eyes widened just a fraction, the two black slits dark ovals for a moment. ‘So why you do a runner when you seed the police comin’, instead of soundin’ the warnin’?’

Pea’s face was flushed and there were little beads of sweat on his pinched cheeks. ‘I never see dem comin’, Shiv,’ he squealed. ‘They snuck up on me. I dittn’t have no time to warn you!’ His eyes were sparkling like Christmas lights and it was impossible to tell if he was lying or not.

‘Not much of a lookout who don’t see nuttin’, eh?’ Shiv snarled, taking another step forward, a swaying movement in his long black coat.

Behind him the rest of the Starfish Gang were lounging up against the swings, watching. Shiv’s right-hand man, Tad, was standing on the kiddie swing, rocking gently. ‘You need glasses?’ he called out to Little Pea. ‘Or mebbe you was too busy savin’ you own self to bother lookin’ out for nobody else?’