Crack dealers can't wait until we have ID cards. They'll be so much cheaper than buying a fake passport
Published 08 October 2001
I return from a break in the Scottish Highlands puzzling over the usual question. How can it be that people there are so much nicer than they are at home? The imbalance doesn't seem plausible. I experiment, therefore, with the possibility that the only person nicer north of the border is me - and that if I only bothered to be friendly at home, London would be just like Wester Ross. The experiment lasts as long as it takes to travel from Hackney to Kentish Town in a black cab. I get in, name my destination and offer a few cheery openers; as I pay, I thank the driver for the change and wish him goodbye. In the course of this, the driver does not utter a single word.
ID cards are rather like the single currency: both are issues that rotate in my head without ever resolving themselves. I am half persuaded of the case for cards until I drop in on a friend. He tells me he has just been teaching his friend G to drive in the park. G has bought a new car, but alas, it is a manual, and G only knows how to operate an automatic. Does he have a licence, I ask doubtfully. Oh yeah, my friend says. He bought it from the same man who sold him his passport. Is that right? Yes, he says. G's an illegal immigrant, a crack dealer. Had a kilo of coke in the boot, as it happens, as he's on his way to get it cooked up into crack right now. And what did the passport cost him? Well, he got two - one each for him and his wife - plus birth certificates and the driving licence, and they came to just under six grand. G is apparently totally in favour of ID cards. They can't come soon enough, G says, as they will be so much cheaper.
Trying to complete a book is very much like cutting one's own fringe. I trim a bit, then a bit more to even it up; and before long it occurs to me that, if this keeps up, I will be left with a pamphlet. There are large chunks in the middle I do not recognise at all, and have no memory of even thinking, let alone writing. As this is a book set in nightclubs, it is a surprise to find that the intruder who has obviously been breaking into my computer and typing while I sleep is of a decidedly Pooterish disposition, more Terry Major-Ball than Hunter S Thompson. By the time I have deleted all his contributions, I worry that the book is in danger of becoming a haiku.
I get a bigger fright still after I hand it in, and the publisher's marketing team introduce themselves. What we'd like to hear, they announce, is your own account of why this is a great book. I want to jump out of the window. Writing a book has felt increasingly like taking my clothes off in public, and now I apparently have to point at my naked self and say: "Pretty great body, huh?" The trend for printing damning review quotes on the cover of one's own book has not yet reached its logical conclusion. Having crafted so many unkind reviews in my head while writing it, perhaps we could put one of these on the front.
It is the funeral of a friend. He was only 28 years old, and was sitting on a wall in the sunshine outside his mother's house on a Sunday afternoon, when a car drew up and a man got out and shot him dead. Michael's was the eighth drive-by murder in two years on the stretch of road in east London known locally as Murder Mile, and the local hospital's fifth gunshot victim that month. There have been no prosecutions, and nobody expects the man who killed Michael ever to come to court. This is what is called black-on-black violence.
Sometimes when I tell people where we live, they look concerned. "Isn't it dangerous?" Then they correct themselves. "Of course, it's black-on-black violence. That won't really affect you." White-on-white violence is never described in this way. It is just violence. The distinction feels significant, for the implication of the language is that black murders occupy a special status, not quite of the same calibre as white deaths. If you live outside the catchment area of the London Evening Standard, you will probably know little or nothing of shootings carried out in broad daylight by men barely out of their teens, because they are not considered important enough to report. There must be 1,000 people at Michael's funeral, desolate with tears, yet grieving with a striking absence of cliche, seldom heard at a funeral. It is a desperate occasion, and difficult to square with the opinion that it "doesn't really affect us".
Saturday morning, and a contact phones a reporter I know with a tip-off. Something "big" will "go off" today in the West End. The contact confides that, on Friday night, a girlfriend of a friend of a friend was out on Oxford Street, and nursed a man who had fallen and hit his head. Full of gratitude, dazed with concussion, as the man limped away he warned: "Please. Whatever you do, come nowhere near here tomorrow." Shaken, the woman reported this to the police, who produced a photo album of Arab terrorists, and lo, who should she see staring up from the page but the man! All day long, people phone the reporter to tip him off with the same story. I expect it's safe to say it was being told all over the world.
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