Tim Pritchard - Street Boys - 7 Kids. 1 Estate. No Way Out. The True Story of a Lost Childhood

‘Go and find out what is going on.’

Inch was closest to the stairwell. He headed along the landing towards the stairs. He was small and stocky. That’s how he got his street name. He was sure that it was just some of the ‘cats’ causing a commotion. He suspected that there was another gang nearby trying to muscle in on the action by stirring up the punters to take their custom away from the PDC.

Too much noise was never good for business. On a good day they could each make several hundred pounds, but some days the punters just didn’t show up and they were left with unsold bags of weed or wraps of ‘B’ and rocks of crack cocaine. Those were the days when ‘shotting’, as they called it, felt like hard, boring and cold work. The laws of supply and demand for ‘B’ or ‘Brown’, more commonly known as heroin, were the hardest to predict. The customers for heroin tended to be real addicts who turned up at any time of the day or night demanding their fix. The money they used to buy the brown powder was always ‘dirty’ money, stolen generally, perhaps from a mugging that might have happened just a few hours previously. All the gang recognized that with addicts you could never be sure where the money came from. It came from ‘God knows where’. But as long as they got the cash they didn’t mind. The addicts preferred to operate in the shadows. That’s why Inch had to get the commotion sorted out. If necessary he could get hold of some pistols or a MAC 10 sub-machine gun stashed away with friends, but he didn’t believe it would come to that.

He headed down the stairwell of Marston House and got a waft of the familiar, bitter smell of dank concrete impregnated with ammonia and disinfectant. He was going to tell whoever it was to go away and that they didn’t want them standing around there. I’m going to tell them to breeze .

Above him, on the second-floor walkway, Ribz leaned against the wall and drew on a joint. He felt chilled and temporarily released from his main preoccupation. Recently he’d tried again to find out more about his dad whom he hadn’t seen since he was five years old. He’d heard that he was in America. Several years ago, when he’d visited his mum in prison, she had told him that his dad had fathered lots of children by different women and consequently Ribz had unknown numbers of brothers and sisters living on the estate. A constant anxiety of his when he was chatting up some girl was that she might be his sister. It was something he tried not to think about.

A car drove past, blasting out the beat of Sean Paul’s latest dance hall reggae hit, ‘Gimme the Light’.

Suddenly there were two loud bangs and an explosion of raucous yelling. Naja and Skippy looked round to see undercover cops appearing out of doors at either end of the block. Four cops were running towards them shouting and screaming.

‘Don’t move. Don’t move. Police.’

Naja was stunned. He was caught on both sides. Two of the cops jumped on him, pushed him against a wall and jerked his hands up behind his back. Sykes was thrown to the ground.

Ribz tried to run but was immediately surrounded. One of the cops grabbed him by the throat, hauled him along the block and pushed him to the floor. Ribz fell on his chest. He felt all the air being squeezed from his lungs and everything went black.

Skippy was pushed to the ground, a knee pressed into the small of his back, his arms yanked behind him and his wrists snapped into cuffs.

Inch was half way down the stairwell when he heard the shouts and the cries on the landing behind him.

‘Stay where you are.’

He saw everybody running in different directions. He didn’t stop to think. He blasted down the stairs and out into the road and just kept running. Out of doors and alleyways more plain-clothed and uniformed police appeared, but Inch wasn’t pulled over. He hurdled a police car and sprinted along Overton Road and disappeared out of Angell Town onto Brixton Road. He hardly noticed Phat Si walking towards him.

Phat Si was ambling back across Brixton Road towards Marston House carrying some takeaway jerk chicken for Inch when he got a call on his mobile phone that there was a dog unit hanging around Angell Town. He turned into the estate and saw the amazing sight of Inch sprinting away from Marston House chased by a posse of policemen. Phat Si stopped and watched in astonishment as Inch leapt over a police car and disappeared through an alleyway out of the estate with the group of desperate policemen pounding after him.

That’s when Phat Si realized how institutionalized he’d become. He was slow. He was so stuck on his feet. Nearly ten years of prison and young offenders’ institutions as well as the mind-numbing effects of years of drug taking had caught up with him.

He carried on walking up the road towards Marston House, his mind in such a daze that he nearly knocked over Pastor Samuels, Angell Town’s feared but respected Christian preacher, who was returning home with bags of shopping.

‘Simon. I wouldn’t go up there. The police are arresting all the kids.’

Phat Si nodded but didn’t stop.

‘Listen. Don’t get involved with what’s happening. Stay here with me. The police will get you too.’

Phat Si didn’t listen. It had been a long time since he’d listened to anybody. Ever since he was eight years old he had done just as he liked. That’s how old he’d been when his mum had walked out on him, leaving him in the care of a father who was rarely there. Since then the only person Phat Si listened to was Phat Si.

Even though the streets now seemed to be howling with the sound of police dogs and police sirens, he continued walking through the police cars and police cordons right up to Marston House. He climbed the stairs and emerged on the landing to discover his friends were getting handcuffed and twisted up. In his best voice he approached one of the cops.

‘What’s going on, officer?’

‘Go away.’

‘What do you mean go away? You go away.’

‘Just fuck off right now. Fuck off.’

Phat Si looked down on the ground to see one of his posse squirming under the grip of a hefty plain-clothed cop. Skippy was looking up at him, half mouthing, half whispering at him.

‘Blow, you dummy, blow.’

But Phat Si didn’t get out of there. Instead he looked down from the balcony at the commotion below. A policeman looked up, saw him and then looked at his colleague as if to say ‘You fucking idiot.’ That’s when both of them got up and ran for Phat Si. Phat Si was so slow that he had hardly moved before they jumped on him.

When Ribz came to he found himself sitting on the stairs, hands in cuffs with a sergeant yelling in his face.

He’d been out of it for about five minutes. Ribz still didn’t understand what was going on.

‘Look, I ain’t done nothin’.’

‘Shut it.’

‘What’s going on? Why are you holding my neck?’

‘The chief is coming down, he’ll explain to you.’

A cop was yelling in his face.

‘We saw you throw twenty rocks over the balcony.’

‘They never came out of my pocket.’

Another cop arrived.

‘It was you. I saw you. It was you.’

Ribz, Naja, Sykes and Skippy sat on the floor, dazed and handcuffed. It was as though the cops had come out of the doors and windows of every empty flat on the second floor of Marston House.

* * *

Neighbours were now congregating at windows and doorways watching the running battle. Chantelle, JaJa and Naja’s sister, came out of 124 Marston House, only ten doors down from where the PDC were getting handcuffed. She had heard the shouting and screaming and seen the police running up to the second-floor landing and grab her younger brother Naja.

Now she came out of the flat ready to ‘give the feds hell.’