Graffiti My Soul (4 page)

Like fruit pickers, we're seasonal. Summer is no good for our fun. We work better in the darkness of winter. One kid's terrifying gloom is another kid's safety net.

We trawl until we come across a suitable player. If it's someone from school, great. Someone from the upper years, even better; usually a Year 12 muppet who still hasn't passed their driving test, and is too much of a dork to go out drinking.

Tonight is a night like any other. It's seven-thirty. We've been on the road for twenty minutes and haven't passed anyone of value. A man with a briefcase who's on his way home from the station; an old woman who looks like she's heading for the bus stop at the top of Auriol. Neither of them are right.

We can lap four or five times until we find what we are looking for. We're pros. We're fussy about our playmate. We could go onto the high street, where there is guaranteed to be all-night action, but
we prefer it here, on these streets. Catching people only yards from their houses only adds to the fun. Another bonus point if we can get them under a Neighbourhood Watch sign. There is minimal over-eighteen activity round here after dusk. Adults with any sense know that they need to drive everywhere, even if it's just down to the Tesco Metro at the bottom of the street for a pint of milk. The muppet kids don't have that luxury, and this is when we strike.

There's no one in our houses to give a shit where we are. Mum is on another block of late shifts, this week it's been seven out of seven, and Jase's mum has gone to her group meeting where she talks to other depressives who've lost children and eat too much cake to get over it. Jase says it's a kind of AA for grievers. Apparently they know everything about each other except their real names. I tell Jase that people have to give a name for everything these days, that they won't be happy until every aspect of human nature has been labelled or explained; that soon there'll be a support group for people who still can't come to terms with the end of the
Lord of the Rings
trilogy or something, but he's cycled so far ahead I don't know whether he heard me. Racing off and ploughing up the hill that leads into Auriol at the first mention of his mum and her group.

This kind of picking on people comes naturally to us. If I didn't run, and Jase didn't smoke all the time, I guess this could be our second careers.

Jase is on his way back down. He's almost flying down the hill, hand off brakes, feet elevated from pedals, but even at those speeds the prospect of take-off isn't pleasing him. I suddenly think that if a car pulled out of one of these side roads any moment now, Jase would go the way of his sister. I feel like the biggest loser to be thinking it, but can't help it. That thought, that death, is always there.

He's already back in my face before I stopped thinking my horrible thoughts, luxuriously picking the scab. Looks pissed off.

‘This is stupid. There's no one about.'

‘Give it some time, eh? There'll probably be some action after eight.'

We always make sure we have our fun before ten-thirty. Any playfulness that coincides with closing time can lead to situations with older kids that are out of our depth. I speak from experience.

‘Fuck that. It's too cold tonight. Let's go back to that commuter, and then we can go indoors.'

Jase is the only person I know who calls home ‘indoors'. His family aren't even cockneys. We're all pretending to be something round here.

I agree that this commuter's our boy, and we black up: caps on, hoodies up, scarves wrapped tight around our faces, so that all you can see are the eyes. I make sure mine is pulled so tight that it feels like its been stitched into my head. It wouldn't take the police five minutes to knock on our door if the scarf fell and the commuter got a full-frontal mugshot of a local Paki wearing Nike. There's only about five of us in this town. Finding the right teenage darkie is no needle-in-a-haystack exercise.

Jase is on fist duty tonight, we take it in turns, leaving me to be the cameraman. He leads, a head-start set at a standard thirty seconds. Means potential playmates let down their guard as they see the lone cyclist riding past, until, that is, he does the sharpest of U-ies, arriving at a point too close to their personal space for comfort. (Early on we made a decision not to go after the girls, unless we chanced across one of the school bitches who needed to be taught a lesson. Bad karma otherwise.)

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.

10

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.

There was a nasty rumour going round last term that one of the South Efrikan supply teachers was confiscating the worst evidence he could find. Rather than taking it to Year Head or whoever, he was flogging downloads onto some bogus website he'd set up. A kind of lucrative cyber-looting. We all do a bit of swopping on MSN from time to time, but it's harmless stuff. A fiver here and there, or some Smirnoff miniatures if that's your poison. Not PayPal.

Old Mandela milked the Year 12 punks. Bled every violent experience from them until they were weak and white. And being the first, they were the best of the bunch. They were dedicated to the cause, merciless and without fear. You could almost feel for those
unrelenting bastards, until you remember that none of them had any heart to begin with. He only got found out when some other teacher, a non-supply, non-South Efrikan, was ‘browsing' the web and came across them, which is suspicious in itself. How does someone browse a child-slapping site innocently? Only Year Head knows the answer to that one. The South Efrikan was shipped out before the end of term. Deported, we'd heard. Back to J'burg or whatever fucking township he came from. The creepier browser stayed on, but only to teach those over sixteen. Hmm …

This is Surrey, where nothing bad ever happens.

11

Moon wears five hundred bracelets under her school cardigan. Rolls up the sleeves at breaktimes to give everyone a flash of quartz and rubber. She isn't bothered about having skirts that are short or shoes that are high. Says it's a waste of time, another uniform.

‘I'm not interested in turning up to school looking like one of Charlie's Angels,' she goes. ‘I've come to school 'cos I wanna learn stuff. Looking like a slapper is bollocks.'