It's Friday night in Kilburn, where I live, which means the air is thick with marijuana and congealing blood and the gentle lullaby of police-sirens will shortly sing me to sleep.
Ah, Kilburn. And people ask me why I don't move back to South Africa! Why on earth, when I can experience most of the attendant personal safety risks and absolutely none of the quality-of-life benefits right here in NW6?
Kilburn has a particular atmosphere unto itself which I find difficult to express using the clumsy tool of words. If you were here I'd employ a mixture of tap-dance, capoeira, and hand -puppetry to convey its heady ambience.
It's supposedly a neighbourhood rift asunder by gang violence. That's what our co-bartenders tell us. We were fascinated - particularly Cristina, whose dark past as a Chicana gang-girl occasionally manifests itself in her ability to spell out the word 'Blood' using only her fingers and thumbs. It's really accurate, as good as reading the text in Times New Roman font 18. Again, you gotta see it.
Anyway, tell us more, we said. Who are these gangs?
"Well, there's the Irish," our informant responded. What are they like? we pressed. What do they do? "Drink a lot, and sing sometimes", he answered earnestly, at which point our credulity dissipated, since this seemed more like a valid ethnographic precis of a national character than some terrifyingly niche gang initiation rite. What else do they do, this fearsome posse? Eat lots of potatoes? Believe in leprechauns?
A sozzled Paddy crooning 'Molly Malone'. I'm shaking in my boots.
So we scoff at the notion of Kilburn as a gang-land, with expertise hard-earned on the streets of LA and Hanover Park respectively. (For 'LA' and 'Hanover Park' you may want to substitute 'Gig Harbor, Seattle' and 'Rondebosch' respectively, but the point is, we know our Crips from our Bluds, our 26's from our car-guards.)
But Kilburn certainly has a dark underbelly. 'Underbelly' is not strictly accurate, actually. Just 'belly' would probably cover it. A few months ago Cristina had to step over a stab- mangled corpse on the street on the way to Tesco, which was inconvenient. And two weeks ago a man punched me on the High Street at 10am on a sunny Saturday morning.
I hadn't been expecting it, really. Neither had I been "asking for it", as yet another bartender colleague helpfully suggested. (It was probably one of the Irish. After all, I *was* draped in an Ulster flag loudly talking smack about Ronan Keating at the time. I should have checked for his secret shamrock tattoo.)
I wheeled round to face my assailant - a perfectly-normal looking middle-aged gentleman - in shock. “Soooorrrrryyyyyyy,” he sneered, in approximately the same tone in which you deliver a parentally-enforced apology to a sibling you have just viciously pinched on a car-trip, and then add under your breath: “that you're so STUPID”.
This hurtful episode has played on my mind somewhat in the subsequent days. Naturally, a number of vivid revenge scenarios have presented themselves. In the main one, I turn to him and say in a cutting yet composed manner, "Oh, *I'm* sorry, because I didn't realise we'd all agreed to entirely abandon the social contract which pettily deters us from randomly assaulting fellow pedestrians en route to an optometrist's appointment! Since we're all done with that, I trust you don't mind that I'm about to take a dump on your shoe."
Anyway, it brought home to me the alienation of deracinated urban living for us peripatetic expatriates. Because no-one helped me, you see. I feel strongly that if I'd been living in some cosy community-orientated olden-days society at least a baying crowd of vigilantes would have run him down and hacked him to death with their bare hands and farming implements. Where's mob-justice when you bloody well need it?
In the wake of this incident I have thus been considering trying to get to know our neighbours. It seems wrong that we live our isolated little pod-lives, like battery-hens, barely exchanging a nod on the stairs, when we could be getting together for jolly evenings of Scrabble and kangaroo courts.
Our neighbours directly next door seemed most promising. They are a - pardon my French - homosexual couple. One of them is a wealthy ageing German gent and the other is an unemployed young Philippino man, but I have absolutely no reason to believe it is not a relationship premised exclusively on a set of shared interests and a deep emotional connection.
For a while Cristina and I became convinced that they were running a drug-empire from their flat, due to the fact that every single day they receive multiple intriguingly-shaped packages in the post (which is deposited in a communal receptacle) marked 'adaptor'. How many adaptors can two people need, we wondered? And if you knew you would need 60 different plug-points in a single month, wouldn't you just bulk-order them to save the inconvenience of discovering at the end of every day that you needed yet another for the morrow? In short, dear reader, we smelled a rat, and not just the one which routinely shreds our cereal boxes in the kitchen.
So we launched a daring investigation, which saw me steal one of their packages and bring it up to open with Cristina. With hands trembling in anticipation of the heroin stash we would uncover and then sell to the Irish, we tore the parcel open. And discovered: an adaptor.
Never ones to allow a surface reality to mislead us, we then proceeded to smash the adaptor open in order to reach the priceless contraband which surely lay beneath its smug, plug-like exterior. And discovered: some tangled wires, as fitting the circuitry of, well, an adaptor.
Then we felt a bit bad for having stolen and destroyed their adaptor, and sheepishly left it next to the kitchen bin for the rat to munch on.
Since we resigned ourselves to the probability that they are not, in fact, international narcotics-smugglers, and instead just gays with a lot of appliances, our desire to befriend them has waned somewhat. So I am turning my attention to the neighbours opposite, whose roof garden is at exact eye-level with my bedroom window. This is occasionally awkward, as I am wont to parade around in a state of undress while miming to Bonnie Tyler with a hairbrush, but I feel like they have a LOT more to be embarrassed about.
Like the early-90s techno they blast at the flimsiest pretexts for celebration (a sunny day; a night undisturbed by an Irish drive-by spud-hurling). Or the tumultuous relationship one of the Eastern European inhabitants carries out with her (presumably English) boyfriend entirely telephonically.
"HOW YOU CAN SAY THAT?" she howls through heaving sobs, gesticulating wildly with a cigarette while striding back and forth upon the roof, cellphone pressed to her ear. "HOW? HOW YOU CAN SAY THAT?" She's doing it right now.
Upon reflection, perhaps the couple below them, whose kitchen I gain an unobstructed bird's-eye of from my current position, would be more fruitful material for a lasting friendship. They too are a gay couple. We know this because a few months ago Cristina's boyfriend saw, from the vantage-point of our bathroom, one of them administering a diligent hand-job to the other. Right there in the kitchen.
We really must have them over for wine and canapes. Assuming the Irish don't get to them first.
Friday, 14 August 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Now Bec. I am normally a huge fan of your writing, but I really can't let such shoddy reporting go in this case. You should have done your research - and not just empirical. The Public Advertiser of 1773 CLEARLY states that "this happy spot is equally celebrated for its rural situation, extensive prospects, and the acknowledged efficacy of its waters; is most delightfully situated on the site of the once famous Abbey of Kilburn, on the Edgware Road, at an easy distance, being but a morning's walk, from the metropolis, two miles from Oxford Street; the footway from the Mary-bone across the fields still nearer."
What more could one want, really?
Ungrateful hussey.
(That was, clearly, ye olde English spelling of hussy, in case you were unclear).
I feel dread for your neighbours and Kilburn, their having to live in such proximity to a South African adapter thief and destroyer, and provoker of attacks by English louts; the founder and lifetime member of that fearsome Cape Tonian gang, the Fresne Fighters.
I am very intrigued by this post.
1. Because I want to know more about the punch and how it happened. You can't just let the opportunity for detailed descriptions of gratuitous violence slip.
2. My family (because our Calvinistic beliefs got a bit warped over the years and eventually led us to think one is more holy if you are willing to live in dodgy areas) has extensive experience of really strange neighbours. My sister once had a strange man known to us only as Masturbating George, who used play with his wanger for hours on end as he watched her typing her thesis (clearly a chap with an appreciation of academia).
And in my previous flat, there was the drool-soaked Drunk James, who took a shine to my parakeet and would come and stand outside my front door at 3am, whistling discreetly through the keyhole. Of course, this would wake the bloody bird up, and let me tell you, she NEVER whistles discreetly.
Drunk James also had 2 other intriguing habits: he would a) hang over his fence and comment on the quality of my friends' cars (Meg's beamer was a hit) and b) he and the two neighbourhood bergies would have braais in my parking bay (according to James, it was the best spot because it was wind-sheltered and had a good view of the oak trees). I would often come home to a nice crackling bonfire in my parking bay, with James and his two friends happily sharing meths and bunny chow out of paper bags, urging me to "relax".
And then there was the *really* strange guy with the white bakkie, who obsessively tuned his car radio at weird hours, swearing blind he was going to one day hit a frequency that could communicate with beings on other planets. According to my friend Sally, who spent many years on the same street, he's been there for about 10 years now. No aliens yet. Hold thumbs for him, will you?
And did I mention that opposite Drunk James lived a home-run gospel choir...?
Post a Comment