Extracts From The Novels

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CRUMPLE ZONE (Sceptre 2000)

Her flat is burgled; her brother is missing; it's the last day of term: the thin ice of a part-time teacher's life is about to crack as a hot London summer begins

STANKY
killer stink in the house

Stanky have the whole place tagged. STANKY: BIG, it says on the Bevington Road public convenience. STANKY: FLYING 4, it says on the window of Ootie's Late Nite Store. STANKY: MASSIVE, it says in skull logo green on the firedoors of Trellick Tower, a concrete slab that looms over Golborne Road like a giant gravestone. And if you look up to the thirtieth floor of Trellick near where the walkway from the main block joins the stairwell, you'll see STANKY: CHONGA LOCO. My guess is as good as anyone's what that means.

Only thing I know is that all their tags and all the other versions of their tags like S:RY (STANKY: RUFF YOOT) have got the same characteristic: a colon. That colon, those two little dots, they're my contribution to yoot and yoof culture. I taught them that on one of the rare times the Stanky 4 bothered showing at school. They wanted tags with impact, tags that would blow the opposition out of the water. Tags that would stay on the walls of the old toilets at school. Well, it's given them an edge, and seeing their tags is the nearest most people get to seeing them at all, being as they are no more than a handful among a million truants.

So I'm always kind of surprised when I run into them anywhere. But today they ain't just anywhere. Today they've got real face. They're standing - hangin' more like - bang on my home run. I mean, see the picture: half seven, sun setting on west eleven and the summer term, and there they be, cool and big, living large in fresh trainers like they had daddy's standing order allowance propping up their lifestyle, like they were straight-A guys with careers mapped out all the way to the golden horizon. Instead of being the flakiest all-in under-sixteen bullshitters ever to skank off school and munch out on junk food.

As I'm approaching The Ridge, Big C and W, also known to parents and police as Ridgecroft, Clarke and Witter, they all look to their number one. Number one, who mostly responds to the name Stanky B but is down on the register at Kensal Grove as Burston, is way too busy to notice shit. He's backing his twelve stone of teenage protein nice and slow out of Golborne Kebabs and Burgers. He's unnaturally large in a yellow ski jacket, looming mean, and brandishing a leaky kebab:

- Hey you, binnissman: I ain't payin' for this cos it stink of poo. Get me? Look at that red smelly shit man. It's poo. Ain't takin' my peas for this. Look at it man: poo meat innit. Killer stink in da house. Get me? Nobody move nobody get hurt...

There's silence inside. Not even meek protest. Nothing. Burston hops out the store, holds up his free kebab and takes the biggest bite he can, then looks to his crew for acknowledgment. The boys fold with fake laughs, keel about with wailing street laughs that get right to the core of an enemy's ego. Diss 'em good. Tuff 'em down. Be first with the backchat. Then they're all banging and slapping fists with Burston, congratulating him on his pioneering sense of humour.

When Burston finally spots me I'm no more than twenty feet away, lugging my shoulder bag of books and marking. Suddenly eight smirky eyes with insider knowledge are scoping me hard, which is really what the Stanky 4 like best. Hangin' an' scopin'. Only they should know better than to wrongside me on my home run, especially when all I want is to skin up a monster spliff, mark some delinquent drama projects, and kick back for the night. Burston shifts the food to one side of his mouth so that it swells out. Making sure I can hear, he drawls in a real showtime voice:

- Check Miss Thing boppin' down the street... One day she gonna be my ex. Y'na mean.

The Ridge and Big C fold over each other's shoulders, their faces screwed with hysterical laughter.

- Wicked, wicked, W's mumbling.

Burston pulls on his bumfluff whiskers, barely ten years younger and with a mouth too big for any age. I stop in front and give them one of my double-edged smiles, nice and sweet with the lips, nasty and sour with the eyes, a smile for which I'm famous and feared at Kensal Grove, a smile which has kept abuse and chair legs from flying in my direction. Burston clicks straight away and sticks out his chin trying to face me down. So I go:

- Say Burston: when you're absent you're meant to stay absent. Yet here you are, feasting on the fat, a real presence on the street and hey... dressed to kill...

Burston falls for it and puffs up like a designer pigeon. The Ridge slaps himself on his freckly orange forehead. Bic C flips his wrist so that his thumb clicks. W copies both in turn. And all together again they fold laughing. So I go:

- What's the story? You just had to hang out here specially to see me right? And there I was hoping for another of your love letters...

Burston's jaw hits the pavement. His crew turn bug-eyed.

- Wha' you sayin'? I ain't never wrote you no love letter. I ain't-
- Don't explain. I understand...

I swing my bag onto my shoulder and I'm walking, sassing it up like a schoolgirl. It hits the spot. Burston takes a full three seconds to get a reaction together.

- Wha'? he goes stepping after me followed by numbers two, three and four. Wha' you dissin' me for in front of my homeboys? This is streetside now. This ain't no schoolyard.
- Burston, I say over my shoulder, you wouldn't know the difference.
- Needa would you innit, goes Burston throwing his free hand out at me then standing in front so I have to stop. You ain't even scoped them poh-lice boys down Trellick. Yeah workin' over your own yard.
Then he pauses, screwing his face with mock confusion, the corners of his mouth turned down.
- Or is they up Trellick? Ridge?

The Ridge has been trying to scratch his peepee which he cannot locate inside very baggy jeans. Now he's thinking up an answer. I can't help glancing over towards Trellick. Sure enough, past the bric à brac store, past the Lisboa café and the Moroccan advice centre both crowded with people looking for a way out, past the gutted salt fish and iced squid of Sisson's Seafood, and over the railway bridge past the lighters and matches man on his fold-out chair, there are a couple of bright white police vans, parked at odd angles, one still flashing blue, like they were props in a movie.

- It's go'a be up Trellick, says The Ridge with a sly bonehead smile. Things is goin' down up Trellick innit.
- Yeah, goes Burston looking at me then W, high up. Like around maybe floor number three oh innit...
- Could have been two nine, says W, could have been the roof terrace...
- Bus maybe ten fifteen hard stone stair between innit.
- Hundred per cent between boy, says W.
- Yeah, goes Burston, and we's all been wonderin': wha' could be goin' down so high up Trellick between two nine and the roof terrace? Innit...
- Yeah, says W, and like usual we ain't got no answer to wha' we been wonderin'. Innit crew.
- No answer, grins Big C stepping right in front and slouching down from six three to human size. But we got this theory...

And that's the cue for a four-way hysterical fold. I mean their laughter is so rehearsed you could dance to it. So ok, I'm thinking, they know where I live. But whether they're winding me up or trying to psyche me out I can't say. Either way there's a teenage hysteric in my stomach doing step aerobics. It'd be useless to pick their brains about their theory. You couldn't torture it out of them. Information like that is power. They trade it. They use it to lever open people's heads and put the fear inside. For a second too long I don't know how to react. Act mean. Act tough. Smile honey sweet. Teachers always react. Most of them anyway. Should've been a maths teacher: fuck with me and I'll kill you. Ones and zeros. Keep the message simple.

In that second of hesitation, they see me, see everything I am, know everything I can say or can't, know even better than me what I will say. I have to come back at them with something, anything. It's always about last words.

- Burston: you better have a good excuse for not showing today...

Stanky clutch their guts and hold their breaths, their expressions frozen on the edge of the Almighty Fold. I walk off knowing full well I've just uttered the term's most pointless sentence. Burston throws it back at me, exaggerating my Manchester accent. So much for discipline. I'm ten steps away when their street laughs break. The wails ride high above the heads of grim, stubbly men slumped out in smokey groups, above shopping-laden old women arguing the price of dodgy toilet cleaner with shifty stallholders weighed down by 50p's, and above oily slicksters double-parked in tinted mercs in front of the Jerico cake shop. Everyone seems to look up in an instant, searching the air for The Joke, then following the collective stare of the Flying 4 down the street... to me.

I have to make sure I stroll, not fast not slow, neither carefree nor uptight, just strolling strolling strolling till I'm well away, till everyone decides there are better things to figure than the mysteries of teenage humour. Besides, nobody's putting in requests for a punchline. Skanky fuckers.

Stanky M chalk up another mental victory, busting out with made-to-fit wisdom, big with untold streetside Re-speck, and smug as fourth years with sick notes that they ain't never growin' up.

The late sun washes orange over Trellick, marking out hundreds of windows. Red velour curtains flapping on floor twenty. Toothy kid hanging a shoe out of the window ten floors below. Wideload mother in floral pink eating biscuits in front of the tele, corner of floor six. Trellick Tower in big red letters like an international hotel, like an international warning. And the poh-lice still flashing blue by the propped open fire door.

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