Junglist Read online

  — 105.3 FM. The Style FM. Mage on the mic. The man like Revolver on the one and twos.

  — Do you know where your mum is at? Well I do, she’s at my yard.

  — Live cusses on air. Coming atcha… Going out to the Muppet crew, the man like Big Bird, Miss Piggy, the man like Kermit, the man like Fozzie Bear. The whole Sesame Street massive.

  — Big shout out to Jason, you muppet. Get that hand out of your arse and tell it to stop picking your nose.

  — It’s the 0956, the 123, the 321. Cusses live on air come with them.

  — Michael, your mum’s so nasty she ain’t wash her pussy since you were born. You can still see the skid mark that your head left when you were coming out.

  — Last caller call back.

  — Caller from Kensington don’t know whatcha chatting about, listen to some real Jungle. Big up your ‘chest.

  — Yo! Rupert your neck back’s so big that airplanes be mistaking you for Heathrow and trying to land on it.

  — Nah! Nah! That’s just nasty. Rupert you can’t just sit there and take that, phone the 105.3 FM on the 0956 the 123 the 321.

  — Shout out going to the Earls Court massive. All the Jungle crew. All the Bel Air crew.

  — Wheel! Wheel! My DJ… Yes, here come the rewind, back to the old skool for the Helicopter massive… Move your wais, move your wais and feel the Jungle lick your face… Hol’ tight the rest of the crew.

  — Last caller don’t know what he’s chatting about, don’t know nothing at all. I ain’t even gonna say nuttin’. Last caller wants to get a life and listen to some real Jungle.

  — You’re in the zone with Mage and Revolver. Flexing on the SL12s with the DJ Revolver.

  MR METH

  — Give me dat phone. Jesus I can’t even use my own fucking phone. I got the living cuss.

  Mercury One-2-One, the greatest invention since the vibrator. Ain’t a Black man seen without one. Press the call button and wait. Sit there half-naked on the edge of my bed and wait, listening to the Jungle pouring out of the speakers. It’s silent as the numbers light up. Then I get put on call fucking waiting. Shit I’m paying for this. I look at my little brother Elvin, with his little scrunched-up face and that skinny coltish twelve-year-old body. Just waiting to get to my phone so he can call his friends and chat about Nintendo vs. Megadrive and their quick-flowering libidos. Grab him by his neck-back and shove him out the door

  — An I keep telling you to stay out of my room, an’ if I catch you using my phone again…

  I leave the threat unsaid as I slam the door in his face and get his whiny voice out of my head. Still fuckin’ call waiting. Loath to turn it off, the cuss that’s in my head too good not to get out on air. BUT. The call’s costing me big bucks. Slip my thumb over the arrow and press it. Disconnection. Push the aerial back down and put the phone back into the recharger with a practised flick of my wrist.

  The full-length mirror hangs on my wall, between posters of Michael Jordan and pictures of myself and the posse as we grow. Young faces in smiling repose as we stretch and grin for the camera. Look at myself then and now. The mirror Mum got me from some cheap secondhand place in Brixton. Then I saw the exact same mirror in Ikea to my everlasting shame. Ikea’s for wannabe professionals, middle management and young up-and-coming professionals who ain’t got enough money to buy quality goods at Habitat.

  Look at myself in its flat reflective surface. Watch the muscles move under my skin, slide and move. Not bad, if I say so myself. Not bad at all. I’m no Schwarzenigga but hey, you make do with what you got. But I’m too fuckin’ skinny. You know. I like to describe myself as slim, but muscular. Chocolate brown complexion, regular Black features. My lips are too large and my nostrils rather wide, but I put two dogs in a bucket FUCK IT. There’s no point in being Black if your lips aren’t thick and full. Sensual, sexual, slip into that myth of Black man as sexual animal, with an insatiable lust and a big Black dick. Big like a baseball bat.

  I scratch my nuts and feel my knob through my boxers. Most white women would be surprised. I look down at it lying there in its little nest of hair, dressing to its right. AHH! Just look at the cute little fella. Mum, can I have one, can I, can I? Please I want a little penis. PLZ!

  Run my hand through my non-existent hair. Bald-headed just like Jordan who adorns my walls. Jordan in flight, soaring majestically, body arching through the thin atmosphere. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it Superman in blackface doing an Al Jolson impression? NOO! It’s Air Jordan flying through the air with the greatest of ease. I pick up the small basketball lying in with my dirty clothes at the end of my bed and start the running commentary, in a nasal commentator’s growl.

  — It’s Jordan with the ball. There’s ten seconds left on the clock. The Bulls down by 1 in the final quarter… Jordan fakes left, moves right, takes it inside. OH MY HE JAMMS! The Bulls win, the Bulls win. What a move by Jordan!

  I stand and look around at the ball swinging in the net. My room, my castle, my domain. Fuckin’ tiny place, been in it for fourteen years since my mum moved into the estate. Packed full of stuff, half of it hers. I’d need a room 3X as big to be comfortable. Not even enough room for a double bed. Rare is the time when girls have slept over, ‘cause I’m a man who likes to sleep long and deep and awkward, not for me but for those who I sleep with. All sprawled out with my butt sticking out and taking up nuff space. Twenty-yr-old chest of drawers breaking down and holding too many socks. Clothes in the built-in wardrobe and my footwear by the desk that isn’t used anymore except to be a table for the rising wall of books that sit on it. I love books, used to read four or five at the same time when I used to belong to a library. But more important than my books is my set.

  My set all matte-black and powerful, squatting beside my bed waiting to shit out powerful waves of sound. One thing I have to say about my room is that it has wonderful acoustics. It just brings the music to life. It took me four long months of heavy slog to buy it. Slogging in a friend’s butcher shop. Hefting meat, smelling like stink five days a week, hands frozen moving in and out of that fuckin’ huge freezer, with those carcasses swinging like so much… like so much meat. It was enough to turn me into a vegetarian, well at least for those four months anyway. But I got it and that’s all that matters.

  Harmon Kardon amp, Tannoy Sixes, Marantz CD-62 player and Sony TC-K570 tape deck (fuck a deck give me CDs). CDs and tapes lie across it, some in their case, some out of their cases, the CDs reflecting the soft light coming from my dimmed bulb. The speakers on their stands pump out a gutsy wall of sound, driven hard by the amp. I reach down and feel the old bones creak and groan. I’m twenty-one and I’m falling apart already. Twenty-one and don’t know what to do with the rest of it, except buy clothes, music and go out. Dad keeps getting on my back about getting a proper job or going back into education, getting a degree. That if I don’t do something he’ll cut me off, stop giving me money and for the instant he says it, it frightens me. Then I remember he’s said it plenty of times before so why should now make a difference? — and blank it out.

  I swirl the volume to the right and crank the sound even more, letting the sound run free. The bass rolls over me. Revolver’s in the mix and he’s throwing down some hardcore tunes. If they don’t play tunes like this at the dance tonite I’m gonna cuss Craig, cuss him good. But that seems an obscure possibility as they have DJs in double figures, Slipmatt, Randall, Mickey Finn, Grooverider, Hype, Rizzla, Brockie, Devious D, GE Real and a whole heap of others all waiting to roll da beats.

  Scratch my nuts again, feel the weight of my bollocks in my hand and give ‘em a good old tug. Nod my head to the bass, jump up and wine up your wais. Feet lifting off the floor, knees coming high, the floor shaking as the bass runs through it. Runs and runs. Jungle. Jesus I don’t know what I did without it. Jungle: it’s a London thing.

  Spray two deodorant on my armpit and splash some cologne on my neck over the sweat glands at the base of the chin. The cream runs smooth ove
r my skin. Don’t want any white elbows or knees, no skin flaking off in some girls’ faces. I like the feel of baby lotion all smooth and slick like sperm when you come over a girl’s bottom and rub it in, smear it over the skin. How it glistens and catches the light, until you rub it in. Yeah I like baby lotion. But the thought of coming over a girl’s bottom depresses me for an instant, slips me into a down period. I have ‘em on and off — anything can trigger them. They can last from a few seconds to a week, depends on how high I am emotionally at the time. Coming on girls’ bottoms reminds me of Erika. She used to love it when I did it. I could come on her anywhere and she’d smile and rub it in, smooth her fingers through it. Used to say it was good for her complexion, her dark skin. Haven’t spoken to her in ages. Hope she’s alright. Last thing I heard she was doing some business and finance course as all Black youth seem to do. Do a business course and I’ll succeed in the world, which ain’t saying shit. Think they’re going somewhere ‘cause they got a HND in business studies. Well, excuse me for pissing on your parade but you can all suck my big toe. Caught up in that materialistic, capitalist Got to get a BM shit, to show everyone how much money I’m making. Carry my mobile phone round and when it rings speak real loud into it like it’s something important. Yeah, if you’re so fucking important why you travelling on the bus for?

  Now I’m angry and the music fuels it, slides into me and turns up the emotional intensity and I’m stamping on the floor as if to kill it. Letting the beat course through me, trying to do what those white boys do and dance at 145 BPM instead of on the bassline. I ride high on the adrenaline rush for a few, then drop onto my bed tired. Roll over and turn down the volume. Look at the watch on my wrist, wear it on the inside, be a real man. I’ve worn it like this for as long as I can remember. Seeing people wear it on the outside looks weird and I have to refrain from pointing my finger and yelling FREAK. FREAK.

  Hope Q’s on his way, he’s usually on time. One of those be-on-time-my-life-depends-on-it types. Lie on my back and listen to the sirens wail, long and mournful. They scream of getting hook up, pulled over for doing nothing ‘cept being Black, oppression, riot gear and too much power held in mortal’s hands. Can’t look ‘em in the eye ‘cause they’ll hook you up. Lie and hear the sirens rolling closer. So loud, picture the white cars marauding through the darkness, blue lights spinning as they race down the streets looking for their prey. Hear them as they pass beneath my block, blue lighting up the night, overpowering the street lights. Then silence, that’s what you call the sound of cars tearing down the road, children crying, people arguing, playing their music too loud. Noise crowding in, so loud that to think you have to write it down and then read it back to yourself to make sense of it.

  Look at my watch again. Where’s Q? Mum starts shouting at Bridget. Oh darling Bridget. Sister dearest! Seventeen. I feel protective but she’s an individual and as sexual as anyone else, and occasionally I put the hard heavy on some youth who’s playing her, but generally I leave her to get on with her own life. All I can tell her is to steer clear of the bastards and not to get pregnant, life’s too short to be getting pregnant at seventeen. I see too many girls with child when they should be out enjoying themselves, living life to the full. She wants to come tonite, but I can’t be dealing with anxiety over her and trying to find the honeys and enjoy the music all at the same time. Just let me do one thing at a time.

  Look at my watch: still not here. Every stray noise is the lift stopping on our floor and Q stepping out. Hope he ain’t got caught in a crash or nothing. He drives like a fucker, thinks he’s indestructible once he’s behind the wheel, and that shitheap his mum calls a car is a deathtrap. I don’t know how it passes its MOT every year. I lie back and close my eyes, let the Jungle sweep me away onto other planes of existence, let it enter me like oxygen sustaining me, keeping me alive.

  ULTRAMARINE

  Towards the sky I flew in a surge of tranquillity and found the unlimited existence in the shape of ultramarine and my space was the only distance from me to knowledge, understanding and true freedom in peace: peace in freedom. The Earth disappeared as I flew and water, fire and air ceased to be. Life was not a dimension and I was not alive; I existed for the purpose of existence and it was this that taught me life. It taught me dimensions, and showed me the truth in the elements. Existence taught me freedom and peace, pure knowledge and tranquillity, she taught me ultramarine. She learned all this from me and we shared the blue until it was time for me to return to the imperfection and I fell up to the Earth with hope and remembering all I had learned, all I had taught. I found myself sharing the blue with other existers. We learned from each other and painted the Earth blue and it shone until the world took on the new form of ultramarine.

  Q

  Q’s short and stocky with a neck 2X too big for him. He’s into the perfect physique and all dat nonsense. Wants to be cut and ripped. Into discipline and denial. Forcing the body to bend to the mind’s will. Apart from all of that my-body-is-a-temple bollocks he’s OK. He’s a friend. Smart and funny, in a caustic taking-the-piss way, but a little insecure (but aren’t we all), over-compensating through the creation of this new image of his body. Thinks he’s got a smell problem, washes like a nutter — and that big ass afro makes him look like a demon.

  Open my eyes and he’s leaning over me with his fingers stretching out his nostrils. Double take, almost shit myself. Yell, and then he’s doubled over, clutching his sides like some demented hyena on speed, cackling like a witch, and when it hurts too much to laugh out loud, holding himself up by leaning again my wall, gasping out sobs, water streaming from his scrunched-up eyes.

  Q’s got a weird sense of humour.

  — So how you doing? Shit, you should have seen your face.

  — Fine.

  — HMMMM!

  A companionable silence descends as I search for a top to go with the jeans and boots I’m about to pull on. I think I’m a bit of a closet biker, just need the Harley, the leather jacket and the dirty bandana wrapped around my forehead. Q’s doing what all good Black friends do, nodding his head to the music as he searches through my collection for something else to play. I could do a Craig on ‘im and the old DJ bit pulling out tunes one after another, playing ten seconds of it before finding a next tune. But I’m hyped up, need to be moving on, getting out, doing things. Doing the mad goose juice. He’s spread all over my bed like he’s lived here all of his life. God, we are all so fucking similar yet dissimilar. Tastes in music, views on life, treatment of women. I don’t know who I’d be friends with if I didn’t have the posse. I’ve lost too many friends in the drift that comes when you leave school and reach life. You slide out of the fifth form, go off to college and lose ‘em in the reshuffle.

  They just slip away. The guys that you grew up with. The people you played patball with till it got dark, who you joked with on the school bus to playing fields out in the boonies — the only other time you saw grass apart from going into parks. The youths who you rapped Peter Piper or Bring the Noise or Raw on those tubes back into school or to your gates. All in harmony, everyone knowing the words, one man doing the human beatbox, verse after verse spitting forth. Not caring about the stares from the people sitting in their cocoons of silence, letting the sound venting from our lungs shout our defiance at them and their petty small-minded thoughts. The boys who you cussed with, fought with. Those who you envied and those that you admired and tried to be like. Trying to be confident with the girls as everyone shouted out, being suave and sophisticated at fourteen. Being good at sports, joking and laughing or cussing and swearing.

  But always growing, feeling yourself change and move, enemies becoming friends, friends becoming enemies. Hormones running wild but they’re still your class, your year. You knew them, Jason, Michael, Joe, Dean, Derek, Reggie, Morris, so many faces, personalities and they’re lost now. Five years of space between who you were then and who you are now. Wonder whatever happened to them? Do they think of you as often
as you think of them? Half remembering all that they represented, what they meant. The company they gave.

  — Who’s this? What’s it sound like?

  — What? Show it to me.

  Q holds up a CD case. Swing group — four men talking about love and sex in sweet harmonies over a sample of a thick bass line.

  — I don’t know, bought ‘em for my sister. She wants me to make her a swing tape.

  Q looks dissatisfied with the answer, but I’m busy struggling with my pants. I hate it when clothes decide to take on a life of their own and spite you by making it impossible to put them on.

  — Is Craig coming with us?

  — I don’t know. He broke up with Anna.

  Struggle some more and pull ‘em on, panting and gasping like I’ve just come.

  — SHIT! When?

  — A few weeks back I think. He told me when it happened and I sorta forgot. He’s hiding it, holding that shit inside, it ain’t good for him. I tried to get him to get out — see the world again, show him it ain’t changed — but he blew me out.

  — Craig and Anna broke up. Shit!

  The last expletive whispered softly and gently through halfopen lips. Wonder. Craig and Anna, a couple if ever I saw one. They’ve been a couple for as long as any of us can remember. You know. LOVE! Full-on no-joke let’s-get-married-andhave-a-house-full-of-babies love, love that wraps you up and don’t let go. They were tied together on a molecular level, so close it frightened me. Entwined, up each other’s arse. I’ve only been brushed by that sort of love and it frightened me into celibacy for a while.