« The Alternative Advent Calendar ; Day 8 | Main | The Alternative Advent Calendar ; Days 9 & 10 »
December 09, 2005
Security?
We’ve always joked that this area is so rough that even the Tesco’s Express on the corner needs a doorman and not just at night either. The guy that works there has taken a shine to Littleone and calls her Princess or the like as we walk though the door. I’ve head him brag about some dodgy politics from time to time but I’ve let it pass because I’ve always thought that if Littleone or myself ever got into trouble out there then he’d be down on the assailant like a tonne of bricks.
Oh poor sheltered me.
Yesterday on the way home from school drop off I thought I needed a loaf of bread but I ducked my head in the door to the shop, took one look at the queue and decided that the need wasn’t quite so desperate as I had originally thought, so I decided to wait outside for a friend of mine who had already been lost in swirl of the crowd inside the shop.
So then it kicks off outside. Two mothers from the school and a couple of blokes shouting at each other at the top of their voices but I can’t make head nor tail of what they are fighting about. A leisurely crowd begins to gather, old, young and the security geezer are all folding their arms treating us all to a running commentary lest we can’t see.
‘Oooh she’s giving as good as she gets.’
‘Look now, he’s pulled a knife.’
‘What?’ I think, ‘Holy shit! Someone call the police!’
But still the audience stays put, not one of them so much as bothers to change their gawping expression, nope not even Mr Security geezer himself
‘Perhaps,’ he announces leisurely ‘If it was a group of blokes I would have got involved by now but when it’s women, I don’t know where to touch them. I might accidentally touch them you know where and then I’d get done for sexual harassment.’
The elderly woman standing next to him giggles like a school child.
Meanwhile the mother who has a knife pointing in her chest is mouthing off something about him putting his pathetic excuse for a knife back in his pocket before she turns round and rams it up his fucking arse.
The audience thinks this is the funniest thing they‘ve seen all day.
‘But it’s a knife’ I think ‘and it’s only a thrust away from her vital organs..’
Maybe it is the fear of having something cold and sharp pierced through the seat of his trousers but eventually the knife does go back in its hiding place and the whole kafuffle dispersed.
When my friend who has been living in this area all her life, reappears from the shop I tell her about the incident and that that someone pulled a knife on Whatshername’s mum.
‘I know who you mean.’ She laughs, ‘He’s always waving that fucking thing about but that’s not a knife, this was a knife.’*
And she lifts up her jumper to reveal stab wound, albeit a small stab wound but a stab wound all the same and she chuckles, ‘thought he was well ‘ard that one.’
And all the time I’m trying so desperately to see the funny side myself. Still she continues,
‘That was nothing. I saw someone do a Chelsea Smile once and I threw up right then and there on the spot.’
The cool rational side of my brain thinks, ‘It’s OK I don’t need to know what a Chelsea Smile is, something tells me it’s got nothing to do with a Chelsea Tractor. It’s enough for me to know that the sight of it turned the stomach of someone who laughs at the stab wound in her own chest.’
But the expression on my face must say something completely different because she tells me anyway and I know instantly that life was better before I knew what a Chelsea Smile was.
And so now I’m thinking of that little girl I just dropped off at school, those innocent blue eyes and those cheeky blonde pigtails and I know that she shares a classroom with the kids of the mothers who were threatened with a knife at ten past nine on a Thursday morning and her best friend's Mum shows off her battle wounds like some sort of trophy. I wonder how long it will be before my four year old learns that a knife isn’t just for spreading jam on her sandwiches. How long before that terrible day when she comes out of school and I look into those eyes realising that I’m not the only one who knows what a Chelsea Smile is? Then I’ll know that it will be just a matter of time before she treats sickening violence like it’s some great big joke. I just pray to God I can get her out of here before all this happens.
At least I can hope. We have both less than a year left on our degrees and Mr PE has been offered a place on an MA. I know that none of this is a guarantee that either of us will ever make enough money to move out of here but even if it doesn‘t work out, at least we were given the chance, which is a hell of a lot more than half those people congregated out there on Tesco’s forecourt were ever given.
What will happen when (not if) we live in our nice comfortable house in a nice comfortable area and my kid goes to a nice comfortable school and we share the school run with nice comfortable neighbours, (who might even own a Chelsea Tractor) whose only fear is that they might get a call from Social Services because they once used the word ‘Bugger’ in front of the kids?
Will I lounge smugly on my Habitat sofa just content that we got the hell out of here? Or will a sense of guilt occasionally pass over me as I think of those in Littleone’s class who will never be given the chance? Those who will end up left behind in this area, caught in this cycle of bunking school, wielding knives and amusing themselves with fights outside the shop, until they too have kids and start the whole process all over again.
Nope still not funny.
*I at least know enough to be able to say that that was a Crocodile Dundee reference.
Posted by purple elephant at December 9, 2005 09:27 AM