Brixton Bwoy Read online

  ‘Good. Then what?’

  Pupatee gathered his thoughts, not wanting to get it wrong, but he took too long to answer and another slap startled him.

  ‘Fry the onions and garlic after cutting them up and placing them in the Dutch pan with seasoning like curry and salt.’ He thought he was doing pretty well.

  ‘And?’

  His mind was blank.

  ‘And? And? And?’ Slap! ‘Put the fish in with the cabbage!’

  ‘Yes, fish with cabbage.’

  For all the slaps, Pupatee had to admit the smell was now delicious.

  While the food was cooking, Joe told him to get a bottle of Guinness from the bar.

  ‘And now go and take the eyes out of three eggs.’

  Pupatee felt completely lost. How did you take the eyes out of eggs? Out of chickens, yes. But eggs?

  ‘Why are you standing there holding the eggs like you are a statue, bwoy?’ Joe shouted, putting his head round the kitchen door. ‘Give them to me.’ He cracked the eggs in a bowl and pointed to the small white dots in the egg. ‘Those are the eyes,’ he said. ‘They are the beginning of what would have been the hatched chicken.’

  Pupatee took out the eyes.

  ‘Now add vanilla and whip them up good,’ Joe said. When Pupatee had done this, Joe added half a tin of Nestlé’s milk and nutmeg and told him to whip the mixture up again. Finally, on Joe’s instruction, Pupatee poured the Guinness into the bowl and whipped it all up one more time.

  ‘That’s punch,’ Joe said. ‘Get a pen and paper and write it all down. You can cook this for dinner on Mondays.’ Pupatee found a pen and wrote some notes as best he could. He could still barely write, but the slaps had written the recipes into his memory. And by the end of the following weekend, Joe had taught him how to cook a different dinner for every day of the week.

  Sunday was always the culinary climax. For breakfast, Pupatee would cook fried eggs, bacon, tomatoes and fried dumplings or plantain with porridge of either oats or corn meal. He would already have cleaned and seasoned some chicken, lamb or beef the previous day and soaked peas in water with thyme and garlic. Around noon he would put the peas on to cook and start browning the meat in the Dutch oven. When it was brown all over, he would add onion, pepper, garlic and water and leave it to simmer on a low fire until a tasty gravy formed. Dinner would finally be served with rice, sometimes washed down with a drink made from carrot juice, Nestlé’s milk, nutmeg, eggs and vanilla, mixed with ice.

  And so Pupatee soon fell into the routine of keeping house for Joe. When he came home from school he would clean all the rooms and then start cooking the evening meal. On Saturdays he would go down to Brixton to get the ingredients for the week’s meals, as well as toiletries and other essentials. The West Indian shops there sold many of the foods Pupatee had eaten in Jamaica, and he came to love cooking as it took him back to his parents’ house and the smells of the meals his mother made. Although the place was quiet now with just the two of them in it, Pupatee preferred this tasty food to Miss Utel’s meals, and he enjoyed being master of the kitchen. Even Joe seemed to appreciate the food, though he would never say so.

  Joe and Pupatee were never able to finish all of the Sunday dinner, so on Monday Pupatee would simply add a bit of fish or corn meal to the leftovers, with perhaps some green bananas and a few boiled dumplings rolled out of plain flour and water, with a touch of salt. On Tuesday he would cook a tin of mackerel, with onions, garlic and seasoning, accompanied by white rice and pineapple punch. Wednesday would be ackee and saltfish and West Indian vegetables – yams, green bananas, plantain, dumplings and pumpkin. On Thursdays, he generally made corned beef and cabbage with white rice and Mackeson punch, and on Friday it was strictly fried fish with hard dough bread. On returning from the shops on Saturday, Pupatee would put on a big pot for chicken, beef or mutton soup, first boiling the meat, adding salt, thyme, fresh peppers, garlic and onion, and later, when the meat was tender, also putting in yams, green bananas, coco, dasheen, dumplings, pumpkin and a touch of black pepper and butter. He would let it all simmer away on the stove for hours, until its mouth-watering smell permeated the whole house.

  Joe had turned Pupatee into a fine cook. But each evening when he came home from work, he would not touch any of his dinner until he had seen his young brother eat some first. It wasn’t until years later that Pupatee understood why. Joe’s cruelty to the boy had made him paranoid, and he was convinced Pupatee would try to poison him. Pupatee didn’t realise this at the time, but he did get his own back in a small way. Whenever Joe told him to taste what was on his plate, he would cut off the juiciest, leanest bit of meat to eat in front of him, winning a small skirmish even as he was losing the war.

  It was not long after Miss Utel had taken the six kids and walked out on Joe that Pupatee started going to evening classes organised by his school. There were classes in cookery, art, woodwork, metalwork and dancing, but it was the boxing classes which attracted Pupatee. He had already had plenty of practice fighting outside the ring, and he took to the sport like a duck to water. After a couple of lessons, his teacher said he showed promise. He gave Pupatee a form for Joe to sign, to show that he had permission to keep up the training, and Pupatee hurried home with it, flushed with excitement. He was certain in his heart that if he worked hard he could be like his hero Muhammad Ali. How proud Mama would be of her wash-belly son when he became the next world champ.

  Eventually Pupatee plucked up the courage to show the form to Joe. ‘If you sign this,’ he told him, ‘the teachers say they will train me into a boxer.’ Joe’s only response was to bite his lip as he always did when he was about to inflict a lashing, and order Pupatee upstairs to strip off. He was barely undressed before Joe stormed in and first a right and then a left fist slammed into his body, followed by a head-butt which landed him on the floor in a daze. As Joe kicked Pupatee with his heavy boots, he yelled, ‘You couldn’t punch your way out of a wet paper bag.’ Then he pushed the bruised and aching boy downstairs to scrub the kitchen floor.

  Pupatee’s excitement about becoming a boxer had disappeared. His only ambition now was to grow big and strong enough so that one day Joe couldn’t hurt him any more. With each wring of the floor cloth, Pupatee’s determination to make something of himself receded. So long as he could survive, he didn’t mind what became of him.

  Not long after this, Joe told Pupatee he had found a job for him, working each morning for Bill the milkman. Early every morning, Bill would knock on the door and Pupatee would run out to help him.

  Bill was a big fat white man who sweated as he ran from his float to the doorways to deliver the milk. ‘One red top and one gold top at number ten, Pupatee,’ he would shout as he ran in one direction, expecting Pupatee to run in the other. ‘Two gold and one silver to number fifty-six.’ Bill covered a large area, from Camberwell Green up past King’s College Hospital. He was fit for a fat man, and never paused for breath until the milk round was finished. By then, Pupatee was already tired and even less inclined to pay attention at school. And although at the end of every week Bill gave Pupatee his ten bobs’ wages, Pupatee had to give this straight to Joe. He wasn’t allowed to keep a single penny for himself.

  One morning, when Pupatee went to a particular house to deliver the usual milk, he found a note saying the family had gone away on holiday and had left Bill the money they owed. Wrapped inside the folded paper was a crisp one-pound note and a few coins. ‘Three red tops at number twelve and one gold and a silver at number thirteen,’ Bill called. For a moment Pupatee hesitated, and then he slipped the money into his pocket.

  From then on, Pupatee made sure he got a bit of pocket-money every week. Sometimes Bill would even be expecting people to leave money and he would send Pupatee to look for cash inside a bottle or under a mat.

  ‘What you got?’ he would ask.

  ‘Nothing,’ Pupatee would say as he artfully pocketed the money.

  Bill would mutter and curse under his breath.
Then he would say, ‘OK, put three red tops at number twelve and one gold and a silver at number thirteen.’

  Sometimes, if Pupatee smashed a few bottles by accident, or Bill felt his assistant wasn’t working hard enough, the milkman would lose his temper. And he had some horrible habits, such as easing his backside off the driving seat to let out an almighty fart, which would boom like an explosion while he commented, ‘Cor, that ‘urt!’ But Bill was usually smiling and happy by the time they delivered the last bottle and were on their way home.

  Nevertheless, Pupatee carried on stealing Bill’s money, and would sometimes lift a bottle of orange or a pack of sausages from the cart before leaving.

  One morning, after Joe had given Pupatee a really bad beating, Pupatee was in such pain that he could barely walk. ‘Run, can’t you,’ Bill shouted at him. ‘You’re slower than my crippled granny.’

  Pupatee couldn’t go any faster. His arms and legs and back were all black and blue with bruises. When Bill and Pupatee got back to the float, the milkman stopped to look at him properly for the first time, and noticed his swollen eyes and lips.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ he cried. ‘Who did that to you?’ He had a look of total disgust on his face and he started muttering about calling a policeman. Pupatee was surprised at Bill’s concern. He had suspected that what Joe did to him was unearthly, but seeing the horror and disgust on Bill’s face he realised for the first time quite how wrong it was. Bill’s reaction reminded Pupatee of what his mother and father showed to him back in Jamaica whenever he was hurt or ill. It was affection, or even a sort of love, perhaps. But he still couldn’t tell Bill that it was Joe who had beaten him.

  ‘Some skinheads,’ he said finally.

  ‘Mother of Jesus,’ Bill said. ‘What did they hit you with? How many of them were there? Where did it happen?’

  ‘Er, round de, round de green.’

  ‘Christ,’ Bill said. ‘What did your brother do? He must have blown his top, innit?’

  All this suddenly made Pupatee feel very confused. Bill seemed to care for him more than his own brother. Back in Jamaica, there had been beatings, but not like the ones Joe delivered. If Carl and Pupatee had been expecting a beating they would stay out after dark until Pops forgot about it. Sometimes, in the years before Pops stopped beating him altogether, Pops would even call out, ‘Pupatee, if you worry dat we ah go beat you fe de wrong, you do no badda hide. Come, we na go beat you again. We will feget it, come in, Pupatee.’

  For a while Bill treated Pupatee with real gentleness, but Pupatee was too foolish to welcome this affection and he continued to steal from Bill, pocketing the money left in milk bottles and raiding Bill’s ice-box. Eventually, the milkman could not fail to realise what his assistant was doing.

  At first, he tried questioning the boy and when Pupatee denied everything, he would curse him. When that didn’t work, he tried to clout Pupatee a couple of times, but Pupatee lashed back at him, jabbing at his face and huge belly, and he backed away. In the end, Bill decided he had had enough and one morning he gave Pupatee three weeks’ wages and told him he was sacked.

  Joe was furious when he found out, but fortunately Bill had been kind enough not to mention his suspicions and simply told him he thought Pupatee was old enough to get a better-paid job. Joe might have been a violent and intolerant man who fell far short of being any sort of father figure, but he was always scrupulously honest, and any hint of thievery would have brought the full weight of his anger down on Pupatee.

  Even when stealing from Bill, Pupatee never saved much money – certainly not enough to buy a bicycle, which was what he wanted more than anything. But shortly after Pupatee lost his job on the milk round, Joe bought himself a car and stopped using his own bicycle to go to work.

  One day during the holidays, Pupatee worked up enough courage to borrow the bike in Joe’s absence and soon he was sailing round the block to meet up with the other boys. At first they laughed, because Pupatee’s bike was old-fashioned and heavy, but they soon changed their tune. It might not be any good for doing wheelies, but it was fast and powerfully built, and Pupatee won many of the races.

  Flushed with his first day’s success, Pupatee dared to borrow Joe’s bike for a second day of hanging around with the other boys, racing up and down the road. In the lead in one race, Pupatee turned to see the others hard on his tail and he started to pedal furiously, picking up so much speed that he took the corner too wide. The next thing he knew he was crashing into a new car belonging to one of the other bikers’ dads. Pupatee was OK and even Joe’s bike showed no signs of damage, but one side of the car was badly scratched and dented.

  The car’s owner hurried out, took one look at it and said, ‘Someone will have to pay for this.’ He turned to Pupatee. ‘Where do you live, boy? Come on, we’ll go and sort this out with your family.’

  ‘No, Dad,’ Pupatee’s friend protested. ‘His brother will kill him.’

  ‘Shut up, boy. Who is going to pay for the car, so I can go to work and feed you?’

  Pupatee had no option but to take him round to Selborne Road. When they found the house empty, the man fumed even more. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Tell your brother I’ll call back another time to discuss the damage to my car. You hear, boy?’

  Of course, Pupatee had no intention of telling Joe anything. But when his brother came home Pupatee could barely hide his nervousness. He kept peering through the curtains to see if his friend’s dad was on his way round. He considered telling Joe the truth, and getting the beating over and done with, before dismissing this again. He tried to work out where he would be able to hide. Every time he heard footsteps on the pavement outside his heart would thump. It grew later and later and he was beginning to think he might escape that evening when there was a knock at the door.

  ‘Who is that?’ said Joe.

  Reluctantly, Pupatee went to answer it. His fears were realised: his friend’s dad stood on the steps.

  ‘Your brother in, boy?’ he asked, in a voice that suggested it was the end of the world for Pupatee.

  Joe came to the door looking confused. ‘Didn’t he tell you what he did to my car?’ asked the man.

  ‘No.’

  So he told Joe how Pupatee had scraped up his car and he wanted money to pay for the damage. Joe attacked Pupatee there and then, punching him and picking him up by the scruff of his neck to head-butt him, all in front of the man who stood there with a fearful expression on his face. He now saw what his son had warned him would happen.

  The man shouted at Joe to stop, telling him that beating Pupatee would not pay for the car. Joe did stop, saving the rest of the beating for later. He went and found some money for the man who quickly left. Pupatee hadn’t wanted his friend’s father to come, but now he was there he didn’t want him to leave. The minute the door closed, Joe’s orders boomed through the house. ‘Get up the stairs and strip. I’m going to give you a beating you’ll never forget.’ After the first ten licks with the flex wire, Pupatee was still not reacting, so Joe stopped for a moment. ‘You turn a big man now,’ he said, and then he brought his arm down with all his might, lashing him as if his life depended on it. Pupatee screamed now all right, calling out for Mama and Pops, half expecting in his delirium that they would come through the door and say: Enough is enough. How the next-door neighbours didn’t report Pupatee’s screaming he never knew.

  Soon after he lost his job with Bill, Pupatee was made to get another, this time on a paper round, but when he started delivering to the wrong houses, he lost that job too. When Joe had finished beating him and calmed down a bit, he said, ‘Boy, listen to me, go around all the shops and ask them for a job, even if it is sweeping and mopping up and cleaning their toilets. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, bredda,’ Pupatee said quickly.

  The next day he went around the greengrocers and he didn’t have to ask many before one offered him a job. It was mentioning cleaning the toilets that did it. The greengrocer was a Greek man called
Mr Memmet. Pupatee’s duties included sweeping and mopping the shop, disposing of the empty boxes and keeping the cellar clean and tidy. Pupatee worked at weekends and sometimes after school and he got on fine with Mr Memmet.

  Pupatee’s place was out of the way at the back, but as time went on he would help Mr Memmet in the shop, and his friends like Flego would drop by. Flego lived with his two brothers, his sister and his father; his mother had gone off before Pupatee met him. His father was friendly but liked a drink, and so Flego was often left to his own devices.

  One day, Pupatee was cleaning Mr Memmet’s cellar when he came across a potato bag full of smaller bags of coins. Decimalisation had just been introduced, and there were hundreds of coins, five-pence, ten-pence and fifty-pence coins, all carefully bagged up. At first Pupatee didn’t dare touch them, but the thought of all that money lying there began to prey on him. He was still not getting any pocket-money from Joe, so it was not long before he started to raid Mr Memmet’s cellar.

  Pupatee had to be careful, because as far as Joe was concerned his brother had no money, and if Joe ever discovered him with so much as a couple of pence jingling in his pocket he would have something to answer for. So he gave the new-found money to Flego for safe keeping. Sometimes Pupatee used it to buy better clothes than those supplied by Joe, but he only wore them when Joe wasn’t around. At other times, when the coast was clear, the two boys would go down to the amusement arcades and play on the gambling machines. There were many of these arcades in Camberwell. They were warm, noisy places, with loud music and the chinking of coins, and multicoloured lights flashing in the gloom, full of young and old all busily trying their luck on the one-arm bandits and fruit machines. Pupatee and his friend were drawn to them like moths. There was one machine with a ledge that moved backwards and forwards; if you dropped your coin in and it was lucky enough to land at the very back, then on the next shove all the money at the front would fall to the player. If you weren’t so fortunate, you could try pushing a bit of wire into the machine – but this was a tricky business, as the staff who ran the places were always on the look-out for wise guys. Sometimes Pupatee and Flego were lucky, but in the end they always lost more than they won.