The Nine Night

Read the Prologue of my book, Cut Short (2021)

Illustration by Raj Dhunna

The Nine Night: July 2018

A teenage boy sprints through the front door of the community centre, darting into the foyer. Seeking a hiding place, his momentum carries him to the far side of the main room, where he dives beneath a defunct pool table.

The atmosphere is buzzing. People have gathered for a Nine Night: a Caribbean funeral wake on the ninth night after a death, a chance for friends and relatives to say their goodbyes in binding catharsis. Dancing, storytelling, singing, feasting and praying are commonplace. Tonight, people are remembering an elderly woman who lived a stone’s throw from the centre’s front door. The Nine Night has drawn a crowd.

Sat on the table in the main room is a framed, smiley photograph of the fallen, next to a cross and some tea lights. Reggae music plays from an old sound system. Some guests – children, grandchildren, friends, young and old – stand recounting fond memories and whispering short prayers; others queue up at a foldaway table to write messages in a book of condolences. In the kitchen, pots of Jamaican dishes like stew chicken and rice-and-peas sit on the counter. A circle of older men sits outside in the small garden, under the night sky, beside painted wooden pots filled with growing vegetables planted by local teenagers. They play dominoes while smoking, holding cups of white rum and bottles of Dragon stout.

A few seconds after the boy’s entrance, with people beginning to stir, wondering who has burst the night’s ritualistic bubble, another boy enters the building. He heads through the foyer, stopping on reaching the main room. He is dressed in black tracksuit bottoms, a black-and-green Deliveroo jacket and a black moped helmet, its tinted visor clicked shut. From the look of his slight frame, he can’t be much older than sixteen or seventeen. He has a sawn-off shotgun. He holds the weapon awkwardly. His hands are bony, their bareness the only evidence of his dark skin.

Conversations stop. Like an audience at the theatre watching the arrival of a new character on stage, everyone turns in unison to face the intruder. The door to the men’s toilet bursts open and slams shut as someone dives inside to take refuge. Elders glare, angry at this ultimate violation. The boy wrapped in shadows beneath the pool table remains hidden from view, his life spared by the power of his community.

Two Days Earlier

Tony arrived at the community centre at 10 a.m., wearing jeans and a light-blue polo shirt. At five foot nine inches, having recently turned fifty-one, he was well-built, filled out with a combination of natural strength and desk-bound middle age. His grade-1 hair was cut neatly, with clean, straight lines around its edges, faded to his bare skin on the sides. As Managing Director, he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the centre, which had served local young people for the best part of half a century.

Tony had seen on the BBC ten o’clock news that there had been a murder nearby. A seventeen-year-old boy had been stabbed and left on a road in Camberwell. Still alive, he was found by a member of the public and taken to King’s College Hospital a few hundred metres away. He died in the night.

Tony turned on his computer and opened his emails. The morning sun peered over the distant housing blocks and into the office windows, lighting up his keyboard. At 11 a.m. he received a phone call from a police inspector. Because of the blood trail left along the backstreets, the police believed the murdered boy was stabbed somewhere near the community centre before being carried to his death on the back of a moped. An investigation was underway. The inspector requested a meeting with Tony to get hold of the centre’s CCTV footage. Tony mentioned that Nike had been filming an advert out on the astroturf the day before and the inspector said he’d need to contact them for footage they’d captured. He wanted to speak to Tony about how they could keep the local community as safe as possible. They both knew this murder was not a stand-alone event. It would have roots in the past, and further ramifications in the future.

The rest of the morning was quiet. Tony took calls from concerned members of the community. Other staff members sat at their desks completing paperwork and talking to one another, speculating about what might have happened. The gardener came. A few young men, regulars at the centre, passed by to greet Tony through the windows from outside in the car park. They didn’t stay for long, before walking up the road to leave, glancing over their shoulders self-consciously as they went.

The inspector arrived with two police officers in the late afternoon. They sat opposite Tony on chairs in the classroom at the side of the building. On the purple walls next to them were stencilled, in green, the words ‘Respect’, ‘Loyalty’ and ‘Time’. Because the victim of the murder was from Kennington, roughly two kilometres north of the centre, they agreed that a retaliation was likely, and that the centre should therefore stay open as a place for young people to feel safe. At the end of their meeting Tony showed the officers out into the car park, where they got into their car and pulled away. Gravel crunched under tyres, then silence fell.

Tony hadn’t eaten yet, so his stomach growled. He pulled out a cigarette from its pack, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief and closing his eyes. On the other side of the centre was a mechanic’s, where the scrape and hammer of metal would occasionally rip through the hum of local life.

On the far side of that stood brick railway arches. A low chug echoed, signalling the approach of an overground train. At rush hour, full carriages would trundle by every few minutes, taking people from the leafy southern suburbs to and from the city centre. The train moved lethargically, as if slowed down by muggy heat. Tired, sluggish commuters were returning to their homes, leaning against one another and the doors and the windows in tight formation, tutting, cursing in their minds’ racket, sweating.

Tony took long tokes on the cigarette tucked between curled fingers. His eyes focused on a faded bouquet of flowers leant against the black metal fence across the road. A tattered red T-shirt had been wrapped around the railings nearby to commemorate another son – brother, nephew, grandson, friend, aspiring footballer – murdered years before. Glancing up the road, Tony saw the SOCO team, scene-of-crime officers, removing the red-and-white tape from between two lamp posts. They’d closed the road to wipe blood samples from the tarmac.

Tony’s mind was jumping from concern to concern. His stomach growled again and he thought about walking to get a patty. He needed to sort this month’s payroll, ensure the safety of his young people, prevent local parents from panicking and maintain the easily tarnished reputation of the centre. He wondered who was responsible for the murder, taking another long drag on his cigarette.

A white BMW drove past, playing the new anthem of popular Harlesden rapper Nines, ‘I See You Shining’. Over the summer, the song’s title had become a subtle catchphrase for London’s teenagers to uplift one another in conversation. The driver nodded at Tony through his open window. Tony feigned a smile, taking the final draw of his cigarette. The car sped off, slowing for the road bump. The buzz of a fly in his ear caused Tony to swat it away, then he heard a small child crying in a pram and the furious mother yelling, ‘Be quiet!’

Tony threw his cigarette to the floor, stubbing it out with the bottom of his black Nikes. He grabbed his phone to start making some calls.

The Next Day

In the late afternoon Carl picked up his younger brother from a football tournament taking place on the astroturf pitch out the back of the community centre. Sometimes he didn’t like his brother hanging out at Sawyer. It was a safe place for him to use the recording studio, get fed and see his friends. But right now the centre felt different to normal Friday nights. Everyone was on edge because of the murder earlier in the week.

Carl was wearing black tapered tracksuit bottoms and a black T-shirt. His hair was longer than usual, forming a thick Afro. His friends arrived and sat with him on the pink chairs in the main room. Their group talked about what they could do later that night because it was the birthday of one of their friends.

When football finished, the centre closed for the night. As Carl and the other boys were leaving, Tony told them all to be careful over the weekend. Carl left with his brother, announcing to his friends that he’d come back in a couple of hours. The pair walked north to go home, where they ate a plate of food that their mum had prepared, before Carl went back out on his moped to meet the others. It was getting dark.

When Carl arrived, he parked his moped. One of his friends held his phone up high to record the group in a selfie video on Snapchat. Carl was leaning against a brick wall. In the corner of his eye he saw two more of his friends approaching through the driveway. They were walking quickly, glancing backwards over their shoulders. Then they started sprinting.

‘OI, IT’S PAIGONS! IT’S PAIGONS!’ one yelled.

Two mopeds carrying two passengers each, all of them wearing helmets and Deliveroo jackets, like an army in uniform, mounted the kerb. They entered the car park, their engines buzzing loudly.

Carl saw that one of the passengers was cocking a gun. He ran with everyone else in the opposite direction. A gunshot fired behind him. A bullet whizzed past Carl’s ear, smashing into the block wall, shattering a brick. As he passed his parked moped, its lights flashed and its alarm started ringing.

Carl’s heart thumped loud and fast in his ears. He could hear the footsteps of the others running away and the intruders giving chase. He darted round a hedge and sprinted towards the alleyway that led into the estate. He hopped over the metal bars and his trainers hit the concrete hard on the other side. He stumbled and almost fell. Another gunshot sounded from behind him. Carl thought about his other friends who weren’t so fast. He thought about his mum and his brother. He thought he might be about to die.

Carl was sprinting – nobody could catch him – but he felt like he was floating. He weaved through the estate’s warren, round the grass area with the swings and pull-up bars, and then past the music studio. When he arrived at the football cage, he stopped. He bent over, panting and speechless. His T-shirt was damp with sweat, but he was safe. Why did the person chasing him only have two bullets? Carl was lucky that he didn’t have more.

He walked home, thanking God that he was still alive. He took out his phone from his tracksuit pocket and called one of his friends.

‘This road ting is long, fam! I nearly just got burst!’ Carl explained. His friend at the other end of the line, who lived in one of the nearby blocks, replied that he’d heard the gunshots.

When Carl hung up the call there was a notification showing on his screen. He’d received a Snapchat message. It showed them all hanging out, ending with the loud bang of the first gunshot.

Later that night, Carl kept checking Snapchat every few minutes to figure out where his opps were. One of his friends had gone back to where the gun was fired and captured another video. It showed a bullet shell resting on the floor of the block stairwell.

The Nine Night

‘Rah!’ the faceless intruder blurts out. Thirty, forty pairs of eyes stare back at him. His helmet wobbles as he looks left, then right, as the cackle of an idle moped engine cuts into the room from outside. He holds the shotgun in his sweaty hands. He starts to walk backwards, turns round and comes face-to-face with Andre, a security guard standing in the foyer. Andre moves forward to tackle him, but another guard grabs Andre before he gets too close.

The intruder bursts out of the front door. Andre walks over and peers out. The boy’s trainers thud on the concrete before he jumps on to one of two mopeds, both carrying other masked riders. Andre grabs his phone and writes down the details of the moped, including its registration number.

White moped. Black helmet. Black and green jacket.

The mopeds speed off, revving their engines as they go, flying over the speed bump. Andre watches their red rear lights zoom off into the night.

It has taken roughly ten seconds from the moment the first boy hiding under the pool table ran into the community centre seeking refuge until the exit of the intruder. The same reggae song plays from the sound system in the main room. The same tea-light flames sway on the table.

Andre walks briskly into the staff office to ring an alarm to alert the police. In the main hall, whispers return to normal conversations. A few people hover by the pool table trying to comfort the boy underneath it, who remains knotted into a foetal position.

Andre heads outside. After a couple of minutes a police car with its sirens off turns into the road and whizzes towards where the men are standing.

‘Which way?’ the driver asks through the window.

Andre points north. The police car speeds off, slowing for the road bump.

Seventeen minutes later, during which time the stroke of midnight passes, an officer arrives at the centre in his car with a police dog. Andre is confused as to why there is a dog present. He tells the officer what happened. The policeman calls for backup, taking out his notepad to record the details.

Twenty-five minutes later, another police car arrives. Andre explains what happened again. Two of the officers walk inside and help to coax the boy out into the open from under the pool table. Looking like he has seen a ghost, the young man walks with the police silently through the foyer and out into the car park, where one officer opens the back door of their car for him to get in.

Some guests say their goodbyes and leave. But for others, the Nine Night cannot end. Family members and friends begin their remembrance again.

A little laughter, peace and prayer return.

---

Buy Cut Short

Read about Cut Short in the London Review of Books

Watch the Penguin short film