Nothing Is Impossible: The Real-Life Adventures of a Street Magician (3 page)

IT WAS AROUND
that time that my dad went into prison for the first time. He would remain inside, off and on, for the next fourteen years. He did time for loads of different things: petty crime, gang crime, drugs. He was a small-time criminal.

I remember very, very little about him because he was barely around for those first four years, and since he has come out of prison I’ve only seen him once. I don’t even know his name. My mum and I rarely, if ever, speak about him.

My granddad tells me that when my parents first got together, my dad used to come round to my granddad’s to see my mum. He’d arrive with loads of bikers – Bradford’s equivalent of the
Hell’s Angels. My granddad said they were nice enough, quite polite despite their leather jackets and long hair, but he’d never be able to get them out of the house. They’d stay there all night. My dad wasn’t a biker, but I think he hung out with them because they protected him in some way. I don’t know. I’ve no idea what the truth is. I hear lots of different stories from lots of different people. To me, he’s become a myth. I don’t know the truth about him, and I don’t really want to know.

I had a lot of resentment towards him, particularly when I was a teenager. I know he was in jail and that he couldn’t be around at certain times, but he could have sent me a birthday card or a Christmas present. No matter how small. On the few occasions he was out of jail for a month or two, I didn’t see him because he’d be up to his old tricks. He very occasionally pops up now and then, but whenever he does try to come to find me, he asks for Dynamo, not Steven. I think that says a lot.

People say that I look a lot like my dad. I’m mixed race; my mum is white and my dad is Asian. That’s as much as I know, because I’ve never met my dad’s family and they haven’t tried to get in touch since I was very young. They wanted to take me away for a few days not long after my dad first went to prison, but my mum said no because she was worried that they’d never bring me back.

Growing up in Bradford in the eighties and nineties was an interesting time. I was quite an anomaly in many ways. Most estates in Bradford are very racially divided; you have Asian people in one place and white people in another. Being mixed race and living on a largely white estate had its challenges.

Bradford was a tough place to grow up

AFTER MY DAD
went into prison, we moved around different estates in Bradford, including Wyke, Wycoller and Markfield Avenue. Mostly, though, I spent my childhood and teenage years on an estate called Delph Hill. I grew up with my mum, her mum and stepdad (Nana Lynne and Granddad) and my mum’s grandparents, my great-grandparents (Nan and Gramps). Apart from my aunty and some cousins, that was the only family I had.

Delph Hill is surrounded by countryside, so in theory, it could be a beautiful place. Back when I grew up, you didn’t have to look too hard though to see the burnt-out cars, broken glass and dilapidated houses. It was your typical low-rise estate; lots of terraced houses crammed together on a hill. It was much neglected.

The estate is quite far from the city centre, so it’s hard to go anywhere. It’s a long bus ride to get to the train station and the buses come when they feel like it. Once you’re in Delph Hill, you rarely ever leave. Growing up there left me feeling very isolated. I had the sense that real life was being lived far away from the patchy grass and streaky concrete that was my everyday view. It’s been done up a lot since I was a kid. Nowadays, mostly older people live there, so it’s much safer. They’ve cleaned it up considerably.

Back then, though, Delph Hill was a tough place to grow up. There were a lot of kids running around, selling drugs, taking drugs, robbing and fighting. With packs of young gangs roaming around, it wasn’t safe to walk about – especially when you’re a small kid with a young mum and no dad. It was safer to stay indoors because I was such an easy target. I was born small and I stayed small. Because of my size, I was picked on, both on the estate and at school. I’m hardly the biggest guy now, so you can imagine what I was like as a kid.

Even though I was tiny for my age, I had no idea that something was medically wrong with me. I played football like the other kids, I went skateboarding, and I ran around the playground – though that was mostly trying to escape from the bigger kids!

I was skinny and, no matter how much I ate, I found it hard to put on weight. Sometimes I would find blood in the toilet, but I thought all that was normal. My mum became concerned when I was thirteen. Until then, she assumed that I’d have a growth spurt when I hit puberty, but as my friends shot up around me, I stayed the same size.

My mum took me to the doctors and they started running a lot of tests – there were tubes up and down my body, cameras in and out of every place imaginable, and all types of horrible things. I had to have loads of barium meals, which are these rancid powdery drinks that help doctors see what’s wrong inside of you. You can’t eat anything the night before, so you can imagine how nice it is that the first thing you have to drink the next day is this disgusting, salty, acidic powder mixed with water. You have to do it, though – the barium is radiopaque, which means that whatever is wrong inside shows up clearly on an X-ray. After weeks of tests, the doctors eventually told me I had Crohn’s Disease.

I’d never heard of Crohn’s and I had no idea that it would mean a lifetime of discomfort, pain and, when it got really bad, lengthy hospital visits. Crohn’s is a form of inflammatory bowel disease. It’s classed as a chronic illness because it’s very difficult to manage. The thing about Crohn’s is that it’s incurable. Each person has different symptoms, which makes it hard to treat, and therefore, I presume, cure. The exact cause is also unknown. It could be genetic, it could be the immune system or it could be affected by environment. It’s more commonly found in Europe than, say, Africa.

Because it affects the stomach and digestive system, many sufferers of Crohn’s tend to be very small, which explained my size. You can’t eat certain foods and the food you can eat, you have trouble digesting.

As it is an inflammation in the digestive system, it means pretty much every time you eat, there are complications. Eating can sometimes be an uncomfortable experience. Imagine you’ve got a big, deep cut on your arm or your leg. Whenever you eat, it’s like rubbing dirt into the wound.

Having Crohn’s – so I’ve been told – can be similar to what women experience once a month; cramps, discomfort, blood loss and mood swings. Except it’s what I have every day. I’m in pain all the time. I try to keep on top of it by not eating things that make it worse. There’s a lot of stuff I can’t eat, like sesame seeds, the skin of vegetables, peanuts, sweetcorn and beans. I can eat carrots though; they’re good! Popcorn, on the other hand, is not my friend. That put me in hospital for two weeks a couple of years ago. Sometimes I don’t know if certain things are going to make me ill. So I could plan to do lots of things the next day, but I actually can’t because I’ll end up ill in bed.

I’m in a relationship now, but it used to be awkward taking girls out. I’d usually take them for some food and I’d be eating and suddenly realise I needed the toilet. The worst time to go the toilet is when you’re on a date with someone you don’t know very well. Leaving her waiting for half an hour isn’t the greatest look.

My condition also means I’ve also got weak bones. I’m anaemic which makes my teeth and bones brittle and my body aches a lot. It makes my eyes water sometimes. My back kills all the time. I’m often very tired and I find it hard to sleep. I can’t lie on my stomach because I have an operations scar there and I find it hard to sleep on my back, so I have to really tire myself out
before I can fall asleep. I wake up every morning in pain and I have to sit in a hot bath to try to loosen up my body. As a kid I found living with Crohn’s difficult. Not just because of the physical symptoms, but because it was another thing that made me an outsider. I was different. It made me small and I couldn’t run as fast as the other kids – easy prey for the bullies. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve learnt how to manage it better, and more importantly I don’t dwell on it. I’ll never let it stop me doing anything I want to do.

Medication used to help, but the ones that worked best also had the worst side effects. And the side effects weren’t worth it. I felt so drugged up when I was on them that I didn’t feel like me. For that reason, I don’t really drink alcohol and I’ve never done drugs. I don’t like not feeling myself.

Of course, I wasn’t the only kid on our estate with problems. I wasn’t the only one trying to control something uncontrollable. Life throws a lot of weird stuff at you – some good, some bad, but as I’ve grown older I’ve realised you just have to find a way to carry on and do what you want to do. No matter what it takes. And, after being diagnosed with Crohn’s, it wasn’t long until I found my own secret to getting through those dark times.

I WENT TO
Wyke Middle School and Wyke Manor Upper School, which I suppose were your average comprehensive schools in the nineties. Culturally, there was a rich mix of Indian, white, Jewish, South-East Asian and black students. The school, like all comprehensives, was mixed ability, so you had all types of kids there. It wasn’t particularly huge – maybe 500 pupils – but it was pretty rough. Some kids would show up to lessons, some wouldn’t. There would be a lot of smoking, and some kids used to bring in booze, others something stronger. Bullying was rife. It was the sort
of place where you had to look after yourself. You would never have gone to the teacher to tell them someone was picking on you.

Initially I learnt, as a defence mechanism, that if I was willing to laugh at my own expense, then other people would laugh too. It was degrading, but I was just trying to fit in, trying to make friends by being what I thought was ‘cool’. It was only years later that I realised people were humouring me and taking the mickey out of me most of the time. They weren’t laughing with me, they were laughing at me. Guys like Paul and Ben would pretend to be my friends, but then they’d demand my dinner money. No dinner money, into the dustbin I went. So, to try to get out of trouble, I talked too much and I talked a lot of rubbish. Little Steven thought he was very cool but, looking back now, I probably wasn’t as cool as I liked to think.

The teachers didn’t help much either; they didn’t seem to understand. ‘Shut up and sit down, Steven,’ they’d say. ‘Keep on like that and you’re straight for detention.’ Some teachers don’t know how to communicate with kids and then you totally lose their attention. In my opinion kids would take someone who they relate to, like a music artist much more seriously in the classroom than your average, out-of-touch teacher.

I wasn’t brain of Britain, but I was perhaps quicker to grasp what was being taught than the other kids. It looked like I was acting out, but really my mind wasn’t being challenged enough. I knew I could do the work quickly so I’d doss about, distracting the other kids and driving the teachers mad in the process.

I tried being the class joker, I tried being top of the class, I tried being friends with the bullies, but nothing I did helped me to fit in. I was an awkward little boy; trapped between the gaps of all these different worlds.