Sour: My Story: A troubled girl from a broken home. The Brixton gang she nearly died for. The baby she fought to live for.

She was modelesque, man. She had long, glossy hair and pale skin. She was tall and slim and beautiful. Nothing like Althea in her WH Smith shirt with her silver name tag. I liked the swagger of this new person I was going to have to get to know.

At last, a breath of fresh air in our claustrophobic yard. Best of all, she worked in fashion. OK, so she was a sales assistant at an Army and Navy surplus store, but don’t matter if it’s camouflage gear. Clothes are fashion, innit?

She had her own money and her uniform, man, I’ll never forget it – she had sexy tops and pencil skirts that were cowled round the waist. I thought, wow, this looks exciting. She seemed like girly fun.

Boy, was I wrong. Melanie liked partying, she liked her freedom, and she didn’t have no time for irritating siblings. Most of all, she really didn’t appreciate taking orders from an unhinged reggae fan who liked to walk round the estate naked. Her rows with Mum were vicious. She might not have been dangled off a balcony, but soon Melanie too realised Roupell Park was not for her. She lasted about six months before storming out and slamming the door behind her, without so much as a goodbye.

“Two bulls cyaan’t live inna one pen.”

That was all I remember Mum saying about the matter of another lost daughter, and Mel was soon forgotten as quickly as she had appeared. Thankfully, she left behind at least one spangly top in the washing machine.

I’d pose in front of the mirror, with socks stuffed down my front, looking forward to the day I’d be able to get dressed, look fly and hit the dancehall scene.

“You was such a lovely-looking baby,” she used to tell us at least once a day.

I preferred Yusuf’s company to the girls’. He should have been a comedian, man. We would stay up and talk all goddamn night. When we got the car bed – all red wooden wheels and a spoiler instead of a headboard – we’d spend so long wrestling over the quilt, we’d end up falling asleep in it together. Eventually, we forgot about the nightly fight for the driver’s pillow, and just topped and tailed it together.

As all baby brothers should, he worshipped his big sister. Quite right too. Anything I did, he wanted to do too.

If I wanted to take conkers and throw them at passers-by from the balcony, he would join in.

Ice cubes, eggs, anything we could get our hands on. What’s the point of having a balcony, if you can’t throw shit at people walking by?

We’d wait for the distant explosion of rage to come from the kitchen – “Where’s my fucking eggs?” – then hightail it to the caged football pitch area we called the Pen.

Ivy, the old Jamaican lady who was our first foster carer, was a spiteful old witch. She lived in Peckham, and looked elderly and sweet like somebody’s nan, but truly was the meanest woman I’d ever met. She salted our food to stop us eating too much and keep the food bills down – even over-salted the Wotsits, the bitch.

Her house smelled medieval, like the scent of an old woman, with everything velvet. Velvet curtains, velvet tablecloth, velvet wallpaper. She beat up her grandson, poor kid. He could barely look you in the eye. Made him hoover the house every day, the mad old bat. Once he made the mistake of using the hoover to try and remove a stain from her precious velvet wallpaper, so she caught him and beat him with a stick.

I ain’t letting my little brother stay some place like this, I decided. So we packed our bags and got ready to escape. Her poor grandkid pleaded to come with us.

“Please,” he said. “I don’t have money now, but when I do, I’ll pay you, hand up to God.”

He held his right hand up to the wallpapered ceiling, just in case we didn’t believe him.

“We don’t want to leave you here, honest we don’t, but we can’t take you with us.”

I told him we had to think about ourselves. He didn’t argue much after that.

We must have told the social workers about it, because later we heard that Ivy had been shut down. Wonder what happened to that poor kid. I hope he strangled the old witch and buried her in a velvet coffin in the back garden.

The next time we were sent to Birmingham to stay with a nice Muslim family, that was much more like it.

The woman’s husband looked like a real-life gorilla, big and fat and hairy, but he was lovely. They had twin daughters who they treated real nice. It felt like the middle of nowhere, though, and we couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying, so we were glad to get back home, where we understood people. Still, I missed their garden and the pistachio cakes the mother made.

Yusuf liked the residential care home the best, well, until, that is, the others discovered he still sucked his thumb. It was just like the “Dumping Ground” in the Tracy Beaker books, but with a lot more toast. Toast, toast, toast – that was all there was to eat in between meals, but at least they let you make your own meals and do your own thing. Felt like a proper little adult.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than living on eggshells, waiting for that music to be cranked up.

Sure, there were other angry kids raging against the system and setting off the alarms, but mostly it was just peace and quiet, innit. I was disappointed the day they came to take us home from there, but like it or not all roads led back to Roupell Park.

Mum was standing in the front room waiting for us. On the glass table was a bumper pack of Squares, and steaming plates of chicken, rice and plantain. I could see she’d spent the day cleaning. The whole house was shining.

“My babies!” She put an arm round each of us and pulled us close. “De doctors say I’m better. Gonna take my medication and mi ago do much better this time.”

She hugged us tight, and pressed her face into our hair.

“What you smelling us for?”

“I missed your smell.”

It wasn’t long after we returned from the care home that Mum made her big announcement.

We were going to move. Our eyes lit up.

“For real?”

“For real.”

We spent the whole day packing up our stuff, asking questions about our new home.

“You’ll see,” said Mum, with a smile on her lips.

“How are we going to take the car bed? We can’t go without the car bed,” said Yusuf, sensibly.

“Don’t worry about dem things. Removal men will pick ’em up later.”

We took our bags outside.

“Please, please,” we begged. “Tell us where we’re going.”

“OK. You ready?”

She pointed across the Pen.

“Tird floor. Block D.”

Our hearts sank. So much for the Big Move. We weren’t even making it out of the estate. We carried our stuff in boxes 100 metres across the grass of the courtyard, to the opposite block on the other side of the estate. We were moving from the ground floor of Elmstead House to the third floor of Deepdene House. We were moving up in the world, if only literally.

No removal van ever did pick up the car bed.

Gangland

You see, gangland is a small, claustrophobic place. It exists in small, sealed bubbles, squatting in boarded-up worlds no bigger than a postcode. It doesn’t like big, wide battlefields. It’s the smallness it likes, lurking in the dead ends and shadows of shortened ambitions, conducting its business underneath stunted horizons.

No shit. They don’t call them “the endz” for nothing.

For me, gangland began in that third floor flat, flanked by the concrete blocks of Roupell Park estate.

Later, my mental map would expand along the south London bus routes to include the lawless walkways and basement garages of the Angell Town estate, and the bored evenings making trouble around Myatt’s Fields and Brockwell Park. Feuds would stretch to Peckham and Stockwell, New Cross and Brixton.

But as a young teenager, the meaning of those postcodes beyond Roupell Park simply didn’t exist. I had not yet learned that language. They were not yet “territories”. They were still simply postcodes.

I liked Roupell Park. It didn’t feel like complete poverty, not like some of the slums in Peckham and Stockwell, the ones with the dark, dismal feeling that you’re too scared to walk through.

In Roupell Park, there was still a mixture of cultures, black and white. Some people still took pride in their window boxes, spiking them with those windmill sticks and dangling chimes from their doors. A caretaker kept the Pen tidy, and the Quaker meeting house round the corner gave us a spiritual veneer.

Less than two miles away was the house where David Bowie was born. Half a mile further, Vincent Van Gogh (both ears still intact) fell in love with a South London girl, while living briefly in a house in SW9.

Even closer was Electric Avenue, the first market street to have the luxury of lighting. “Now in the street, there is violence.” That’s how the song starts. Sounds so upbeat, but listen to it properly next time. It’s about poverty and anger and taking to the street. People forget that. They think it’s about bloody lampposts.

I remember a poster campaign during the General Election, just as I was beginning life on the road. It must have been 1992. The posters showed a smiling John Major.

“What does the Conservative Party offer a working-class kid from Brixton?” they asked.

“They made him Prime Minister.”

Good for him, innit. But I couldn’t see anyone boasting about what they were offering a cute black girl, like me.

My parents had divorced in 1981, the same year Brixton went up in flames. A decade later, a new generation had grown up to hate the boydem.

Brixton had already been bombed and blasted and cleared of slums. By the time I was growing up, it was all about failed social housing and plain-clothes policemen and their hated campaign of stop and search.

Of course, I didn’t care about any of that. I had my mum to worry about.

I would learn three important lessons living on Roupell Park. First, Fireworks Night is always the best time to buss a ting in the air. Second, getting caught ain’t cool. And third, one day your luck is going to run out.

Everyone knew us as the madwoman’s kids.

There was the white kids, who lived in a smelly flat on the fifth floor. We felt sorry for them coz their place stank, man, but they was nice kids. Then there was lovely Peggy next door, always willing to lend a bag of sugar, and Shelley and Andrew, the mixed-race kids on the fifth floor. They were popular. Everyone liked Shelley and Axe, as he’d later be known. People knew each other and helped each other when they could.

There was one newsagent who served the estate. We’d go there for ice poles in the summer. We never stole from Jay. No need. He was a good guy. If you went in there and said you were a little bit short, he would say bring it in next time. There was no point defrauding him.

He got robbed once or twice. Soon after he got a big Alsatian. No one bothered Jay after that.

At night, we’d watch the flashing lights from our window. There was always running kids and commotion. It was usually Tiefing Timmy, an Irish boy with lips like a duck, who’d speed his stolen cars around the courtyard.

Datsuns, Nissans, motorbikes. There was nothing that guy couldn’t lift. When it was dark, that’s when Tiefing Timmy and his boys would come out to play. We’d watch the nightly blue light show as the boydem chased Tiefing Timmy round the Pen. We’d laugh when he got away, and we’d throw coins at the Feds when they hauled him out and handcuffed him over the battered front of whatever car he’d stolen this time.

Obviously, some of the neighbours didn’t like us. Mum took pride in her music system. The Abyssinians, Frankie Paul, Dennis Brown, Marcia Griffiths. Old skool Jamaican reggae. She played it loud and she played it proud.

It wasn’t all bad. There were the prison visits to look forward to. They were our holiday. As soon as a letter came through the post with HMPS on the envelope we got excited: it meant there was going to be a bus journey or coach trip and a fun day out to the Isle of Wight or Dartmoor or wherever Dad had been moved to this time. We’d always get a tray of cakes. Oh yeah, it was delightful.

Depending on how recently Mum had folded up the car, sometimes we would drive.

They lay waited him in the Upper Cuts barber shop in West Norwood. Yeah, people was real upset when Axe died.

They said it was a drugs connection but Axe wasn’t one of the naughty ones. Rafik Alleyne was the guy who did it. He was 21. Axe was 25. They knew each other. People saw them knocking knuckles outside before Andrew went into Upper Cuts on Norwood High Street to get his hair cut.

Guy pulled a gun from a takeaway box and shot him in the back of the head as he sat in the barber’s chair. He went running to a minicab office in a panic looking for a getaway car, begging a driver to take him to Stockwell. He got 22 years.

His mum wrote a really sad poem for the funeral. They said she stood up, wearing big dark sunglasses, to recite it.

Who is the one that took my son,

do you really know what you have done?

This is a wake-up call to all of you,

who wants to belong to the devil’s crew.

The devil’s crew indeed. I wished I had listened to her. It would be a long time before I truly understood what she meant.

One afternoon, I had been sitting by the Pen, probably not far from Shelley’s and Andrew’s flat. I’d bunked off school as usual, and had grown bored of hopscotch and the games we drew in chalk on the crumbling surface of the court. The goal nets and basketball rings were long gone – that is, if they’d ever been there in the first place – so we used to entertain ourselves inside the cage.

The only other kid kicking around that day was Jerome. He was just one of the kids around the way. I didn’t much like him, but beggars, choosers and all that.

Was it the first time I’d ever been stabbed? I honestly can’t remember. Getting stabbed is not like getting married or buying a new car, darling. It’s just not something that sticks in your mind. Shit happens.

What I do remember is that Jerome taught me an important lesson that day.

“Hey Sour!” he’d shouted over, spying me at a loose end. “Wanna play a game?”

I shrugged.

“It’s called Flick.”

He cast a quick look around and huddled me into a corner where he felt sure no one was watching. Now he had got my attention.

Then he pulled out two flick knives.

“Here, take it.”

I took it.

The handle fitted neatly into my palm. The chrome felt smooth and polished. It was still warm from his pocket.

“Look, do what I’m doing. Flick in, flick out.”

I smiled. The mechanism was quick and light.

“Let’s ramp,” he said. Let’s muck about.

We started making phantom jabs for each other’s fists.

Imagine fencing with flick knives and you’re getting close. Some kids play it with tennis racquets. Some kinds pretend they’re on Star Wars. And some kids in Tulse Hill fence with knives.

He was quicker than me to start, but I soon caught up, matching every flick of the wrist and jolt of the fist.

I wasn’t afraid.

“See? Good, isn’t it?”

I took my eye off his blade. He jabbed towards me. As he did, I went to block.

“What the fuck are you doing, you idiot?”

He had caught my hand, piercing the fleshy pad beneath my thumb.

“You folly?” he said. “S’just a flesh wound.”

“That’s how you lose.”

You’re not playing, are you, I thought. We carried on. I was angrier this time and he knew it.

It was just me and him. I started jabbing harder, more forcefully, but he was too practised, too quick.

My pride had been hurt. I needed to make a wound for a wound. The game had now extended beyond striking the other fist. Now, the whole body was in play. We pranced back and forth, dodging contact with ragged swipes of chrome.

A warm trickle of blood was streaming down my wrist. It wasn’t gushing. It was just a gash, but enough to catch Jerome’s eye.

I got him. In the hand. While he was flinching I got him again, by the knee.

“Ah, you fucking bitch! You stabbed me.”

“That’s the point, innit? You a batty boy?”

It was just a graze.

“It’s not even deep.”

This was getting boring. I put down the knife, stepped back and examined my wound. It was deeper that I thought. The rest of my hand felt tender to touch.

Jerome seemed agitated, but tried not to show it. He wiped both knives on the grass and put them back into his pocket.

“Call it quits, yeah?”

“Whatever. Next time, bring a better knife.”

I went home and told Mum some cock and bull story about cutting myself on the fence. I ended up having to get stitches.

I decided there and then I wouldn’t be play fighting again – it was annoying and inconvenient. We had only been mucking about, but if that had been a serious situation I’d have been in trouble.

But I was grateful to Jerome for teaching an important lesson. Next time, I learned, I’d better bring a bigger knife.

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