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Breaking
(published in The Penniless Press, August 2005)
Through the heatwave of a Hackney August afternoon the small gang of adolescent boys moved up Mehetabel Road like mime artists in the thick, orange air. In the east, the sky was black and closing in. I watched the boys from the side of an upstairs window.
Five boys, of different size and race, dressed in a variety of street-cred clothes: baggy jeans, baseball caps, logo T-shirts, Nikes. They rattled and shook the parking machine opposite my house.
The smallest, with skin the colour of cheap, white bread, and as thin as a Lowry figure, stood sideways on the pavement, bent his back leg and stretched his arm backwards so that it touched the ground. Then, like a Second World War grenade thrower, he hurled the egg splat against my window. The yellow yolk mixed with the white and trickled down like phlegm.
I stood now in the middle of the window. The boys laughed, and ran off.
I looked at the egg, then at the boys, and felt the inside of my head boiling black like tar.
I chased them up the heat-swell of Isabella Road and into Homerton High Street. They crossed the road, the long snake of traffic gridlocked. The boys eased into a huddle, made mocking gestures at me.
I charged across the road, into the throng of boys, and grabbed the biggest, a black boy who had jeered the most, taller than me, round faced, big limbed.
I pulled him across the road in a headlock. I hoped to drag him to the police station.
'Let me go!'
I yanked him up the incline of Homerton High Street, which felt more like a mountain now, towards the police station. My body sweated and I felt I could drown in my sweat, or at least slide away on its greasy film, until I fell out of my skin and dissolved into nothing. I tightened my arm round his neck, the other boys following us, people in cars dipping their heads in our direction, enthralled but distant.
'Racist!' one of the boys shouted at me and the word seemed to spin round the damp, hot sheet of the day. Then the word bounced around the pavements, multiplying itself, and jumping through the open windows of the cars.
The word 'Racist' unsettled me, sprang at my head, gashing open my forehead, which scrambled further my sense of self. I couldn't imagine anymore that London existed out there, the art galleries, cinemas, Soho restaurants. Only the black boy struggling, the others shouting, the traffic jam hissing beneath the hot, mad sky.
I managed to drag him further up the road, but now the boys were surrounding me, and I was gripping like a desperate animal.
'Stop that!' A tall black man with dreadlocks jumped from his car. 'Leave that boy alone!'
I let go of the boy, my shoulders dropped and I panted as the sweat dried on me.
Now the boys gathered closer round me and two of them made jerky kick shots in my direction.
'He's a fucking racist, man!' one of them said.
The large man stood behind me, and put his big hand firmly on my shoulder.
'Slow down your mouths, boys, let the man speak.'
I gabbled about the egg, the mess, and the annoyance of everything.
He took the boys aside, and said to one of them, 'I know your mother, so you stop associating with these kind of boys, you hear me?'
Then the man took me aside, 'Look, it's just hell all ways you look - why make it worse!' He patted me on the shoulder and jumped back in his car. The traffic jam had dispersed and he drove freely into the distance.
I tried to smile at the boys but my lips were glued to my teeth and the smile stuck in an ugly rictus.
'You fucking gay, man?' the small white boy asked as I tried to unstick my smile.
'Look, no more eggs, okay...?'
'Sure,' one of them said.
They sidled up the road and when they were fifty yards away, the small white boy turned and showed an egg in his hand.
They laughed and ran off.
Heavy pellets of rain began to fall from the potent sky.
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