Niven Govinden - Graffiti My Soul

This commuter, who’s walked up and down the hill, and now onto Lower Park Road proper, sings like the rest of them. He’s early fifties, and kinda fit looking, but doesn’t put up any kind of fight. Must be down to the surprise element, I suppose. Textbook scenario.

I normally have a moment on the pause button once I’ve done the U-ie with a playmate and got into their space. Probably my favourite part of the job. When you suddenly crash into their universe, become a part of their history. A second or so is all you need. Taking that time to register their face, and to clock their brains working overtime: eyes invariably widened, forehead and brows wriggling in fear like a can of worms. Looking for information that I am regrettably obliged to give.

Jase takes his spectator moment after. He says it’s because he likes to see their distress once they’ve realised that they’ve been punked. So there’s no time for niceties with the commuter, or intimate eye contact; once he’s headed in their direction, he’s strictly business. Makes out he’s grabbing the briefcase, but gets the guy on the ground, classic trip-style. Gives a push, just one, when the commuter makes his only attempt at a struggle. All this without a word being said. (Another reason why it’s better to leave out girls. They normally want to have a fucking conversation with you as you’re trying to go about your business.)

At this point, I’m in the area, phone ready on camera option. Jase holds him down — the classic foot-on-the-gas pose — and I click: one, two, one more for luck. Done.

He’s still not making a sound, this commuter. We’re all three of us united by our heavy breathing, but that’s about it. With blokes this age and build, you have to be in and out like a dynamo, before they regain their senses and start acting the hero. This one guy chased us all the way to the bypass. He only stopped because he was winded or was having a heart attack or something (couldn’t have been anything major, because we never saw it in the local paper).

He’s still on the floor as Jase gets back on his bike. I’ve stayed on mine the whole time. It’s all about the preparation. I’m silky smooth when we’re on operations. We pedal off and he doesn’t move an inch, just flat on his back with the heavy breathing. Briefcase held tight to his chest.

‘Quiet bugger, wasn’t he?’ I go, once we’re over the bypass and back in our area, where there are cars driving past and busybody neighbours who can vouch for us should a shadow of suspicion be cast.

‘Did he say anything? Before I turned up?’ I go again, because Jase has caught the commuter bug and isn’t saying anything either.

‘How brilliant was that?’ he goes. ‘I didn’t think I was in the mood, but once I’d got down the hill and saw him poncing about with his briefcase, walking so fucking slowly like some old fool, I knew I was going to have him.’

‘That hill at Auriol is steep. You wouldn’t be walking quickly either after getting up that.’

I get this knot in my stomach that lasts about a second. Something to do with the guy being older than my dad and not walking very fast. I don’t get knots like this when we punk the dweebs and the dorks. The one time we did a woman, I got the knots about a thousand times worse. They’re unexpected, and momentary; when they go, it’s like you almost imagined them. But an essence of them always lingers, like a niggle. No one wants to feel a niggle rising from their belly to the back of their throat when they’re meant to be grinning from ear to ear, trying to be as high as a kite.

‘Did you think he looked familiar? Like someone’s dad?’ I go, jumping up and down like we do after a hit, but still bowing to the niggle.

‘This is Surrey, mate. They’re all someone’s dad around here.’

‘You didn’t tell me if he said anything.’

‘It all happened so quick. He started some bollocks about “What the hell are you doing”, but once I had him on the ground, he shut his trap.’

We’re both marginally disappointed that he didn’t give us a ‘Don’t hurt me.’ They’re always a good ego boost when you’re feeling despondent and insecure about yourself. Another souvenir you can replay in your head again and again. The antidote to a persistent niggle.

‘I think we’ve seen him before.’

‘Bollocks, have we!’

Jase’s showers half a gallon of spit across my cheek, he’s so fucking excited. Spits even more when he sees the pictures: three close-ups that I like to call ‘Man On Ground In Misery’. I should be an artist, or a proper professional photographer, the way I capture the human spirit.

And fear. You could be distracted by a couple of wet leaves that have fallen across his face, but the eyes of the man are pure fear. That moment when you realise that you are no longer in control of your own trajectory. That you are old or frail or cowardly. Or maybe just the moment when you realise that there are people more powerful than you are. That when it comes down to it, it’s all about the power of the muscle over the intellect.

‘That, mate, is genius. Fucking genius! How good is that? That’s great!’

Jase never speaks faster than ten words a minute unless he’s really excited. And the excitement to word-speed ratio is at it’s most extreme, akin to Paris Hilton teleporting out of nowhere and fucking him on the spot.

Less to be proud of, however, when I show Moon the pics the next day. She says that the eyes of ‘Man On Ground In Misery’ belong to someone who resembles Pearson’s dad.

Evidence, good photographic evidence that you can carry around on your phone, is the new Top Trumps. Everyone’s doing it. The first to complete the set rules the school. What exactly constitutes a full set is yet to be defined. We pretty much make up the rules as we go along.

This is our arithmetic: a fight is worth two slaps. Getting something out of a shop is worth two fights. Hassling commuters at the train station is worth half a slap. Steaming a train, as the kids from the Rose estate do during half term, is the equivalent of ten fights.

It all has to come from your own hand, and you have to have a strong stomach for it. Making sure you’ve got at least a few of these on your phone for emergencies — i.e.: when a gang of five are about to knock a couple of strips off your awkwardly pretty face, you can show them a photo of you doing the exact same thing to a twelve-year-old and get off the hook. I’m no coward, so I don’t have to stoop so low, but it does happen. Yellow-belly kids all over this town are kicking the living shit out of the poor bastards the next rung down on the food chain, just so they won’t get mashed. We all know that it’s a sickness, but we can’t help ourselves. (Think it all started when a group of Year 12s became hung up on Darwinism in A Level Biology around the same time they started getting camera phones.)

And when you see a really good photo, you have to cough up for the privilege. (For Year 8s and below, this simply means they won’t get beaten up. For anyone my age, photo exhibition demands renumeration. Niggas gotta show me the money!)

Happened to me last week when I had to buy Moon this CD by some old woman called Julie London. She scored with a filmed piece of a bus driver losing control of his vehicle and crashing into the greengrocer’s on the Broadway. She wanted it for this song called ‘Fly Me To The Moon’, which she thought was really funny. Shelling out the twelve quid was worth it.

‘Are you being ironic?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m being pedantic.’

We played her camerawork back again and again: bus swerving and ploughing into store front, melon after melon rolling towards the road. Such a procession of melons, like Jase could only dream of. People screaming like idiots. Her battery ran out before she could see what happened to the driver. Moon would be unbearable if she had got that.