Street Boys: 7 Kids. 1 Estate. No Way Out. The True Story of a Lost Childhood. Tim Pritchard
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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.’
She ran up to the policeman holding Naja and shouted in his face.
‘What’s he done? He wasn’t doin’ nufin’. He was just standing on the block.’
‘He was caught selling drugs. Now go away before I arrest you too.’
Chantelle just stood there shouting at the policeman, telling him to let her little brother go.
JaJa had left Wandsworth prison and was on his way back to Angell Town to meet the others. He was just congratulating himself that he wasn’t doing the drug selling shift at Marston House on such a cold day when he got a call from his mother.
‘The police have raided Marston House. They’ve taken Naja.’
She sounded frantic.
JaJa ran home. Naja was his younger brother and for years, ever since they were tiny kids, JaJa had been given the task of looking after him. His father had beaten up his mother and to stay alive she’d had to take her kids away from the family home. Since then, JaJa had taken the role of the man in the house and, although he’d been in and out of prison, he was expected to keep his younger brother out of trouble.
That’s why, when JaJa got home, his mother was furious with him.
‘They’ve taken Naja to Brixton police station. It’s your fault. You’re supposed to be looking after him.’
JaJa tried to remain calm. He knew that when he’d left the other members of the PDC earlier that day at Marston House none of them had any guns on them and the amount of gear they had could be passed off as drugs for their own use. He wasn’t worried. He believed they’d all be able to get off.
The doorbell rang. JaJa went to answer it. Standing in the hallway were three police officers.
‘Elijah Kerr. We are arresting you on suspicion of supplying class A drugs.’
JaJa wasn’t worried. I don’t have any drugs on me. I don’t have any in the flat. They can’t get me for nothing. He treated the whole thing like a joke.
‘I’ve done nufin’ wrong. You can’t pin anything on me.’
‘That’s what you think.’
‘Shut it. You’ve got nufin’ on me.’
The policemen just laughed in his face and took him away.
When he got to Brixton police station the others, including Naja, Phat Si, Ribz, Skippy and Sykes, were all there, being held in separate cells. The police were still laughing and joking around.
JaJa shouted at the others through the cell bars.
‘We’re goin’ home, don’t worry, man. They ain’t got nufin’ on us.’
But no matter how much confidence he showed, how chilled he felt, the policemen around him still seemed to react with delight whenever he protested that they were clean.
Locked in their cells, JaJa and the others banged on pipes and yelled at each other through the bars, in a potent mixture of excitement and trepidation.
‘We’ll be out of here soon.’
The police yelled back telling them to shut up.
Late that night they took JaJa into an interview room. He knew what was going on. He’d been through the same process many times before. He wasn’t worried. But when he saw the TV screen and the video camera he knew something bad was about to go down.
The investigating officer pulled out a small videotape and put it in the camcorder. He turned on the television. JaJa looked on in amazement as the screen flickered into life to reveal a shot of the balcony of Marston House. It showed figures walking up and down the second-floor landing handing over small bags and collecting money from punters. The tapes went back a whole month. JaJa cursed himself. He’d felt that something had been up for several weeks but he’d never reacted to it properly. He now realized that the police had inserted undercover surveillance teams into the empty flats in Marston House and its neighbouring blocks and had `secretlyhad `secretly videotaped them for weeks. JaJa had the sort of flash of insight that only occurs under extreme pressure.
That’s money for you. It’s the risk. It makes you do stupid things. Sometimes when you’re on the street you need it so much it blinds you. Even from obvious things.
When Ribz was taken into the interview room and