Essex Boy: My Story (9 page)

I’m not lying, it reminded me of that house in
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
, when you see the outside of it with Jazzy Jeff being thrown out the door all the time.
It was huge.
I
went crazy running round exploring it, and Dad was showing us everything, trying to hide how proud he was, but his voice gave it away.
There was a library, a gym, a dance floor, a snooker room, and
a garage complex with another flat on top where he let one of his brothers live.
And inside the garage even his car had changed.
Where Dad used to drive a Golf GTI, a normal car that teenagers
would drive, suddenly he now had a new Mercedes.
So new, in fact, that he wasn’t even allowed to drive it on English roads.
It was like, what the fuck?!
How the hell did he have all this
money overnight?

He explained, ‘I’ve been saving over the last few years, boys, and not spending.
Where most people spend what they earn, no matter what it is, I have been sensible, and it has paid
off.
I’ve not spent out on stupid things and spoilt myself, and this is the result, I am able to do this.
Remember that for your future, boys!’

And it did make an impression.
We knew he had worked his arse off all his life, and to see it coming to something was amazing.
Daniel and I both listened and took it in.
And of course we
couldn’t help but compare it with where we were living with our mum.
It was such a world away.
We only walked ten minutes up a hill to reach Dad’s house, but it was like coming to a
different planet.
We’d leave this hostel where our whole life was in one room, walk past a fourteen year old in the corridor trying to deal with a crying baby, dodge a slap from one of the
older druggies, and pass drunken Johnny on the bench.
Walk up the hill, and bam, suddenly we were at Dad’s house, the biggest and best house in Grays!
A house for three people that was bigger
than our hostel for eighty.
Where is the sense in that?

How could my parents, once married and living together, now be living such completely different lives?
That’s when reality hit home, and stopped us being totally happy about Dad’s
new place.
I thought, ‘Fuck, man, this doesn’t seem right.’

So I said to him, ‘We’re not happy at home, Dad.
Mum needs money, can you please help her out?’

But he shook his head and said, ‘Well, come and live with us.
You know you can, any time you want.’

But I told him, ‘No way, I can’t.
Well, it’s not that I couldn’t, but I don’t want to.
There’s no way I’m going to leave my mum.’

And it was true, there was no way I was going to do that.
I didn’t care if we ended up in the street living in a cardboard box – even then if my dad told me to go and live with him,
I’d still stay in the box with my mum.
At the end of the day it was him who left her, and I watched her suffer for it, trying to be a good parent and doing everything for me.
I would never
have left her as our bond was more important than money.
No matter what has happened in my life, whether I’ve had money or not, I never let myself forget that.

And actually, while I loved visiting that house of Dad’s – who wouldn’t?
– I never felt like it was my home.
I always felt like a guest.
‘Please
can I go to the toilet, Dad?’
It was as ridiculous as that, and it was clear it was Stacie’s house and not ours.
My relationship with her, which was never good, had been on a steady
downward slope over the years, and our awkward conversations were no longer that.
They had been replaced by us ignoring each other, or arguing.

One of my biggest problems with her is that she would have digs at my mum when she was talking to Dad.
I know that’s probably normal in this situation, but I just wasn’t willing to
take it.
She would say things like, ‘Look at the state of the boys’ clothes.
Their mum clearly doesn’t look after them.’

And I’d be standing there fuming with the rage building, until I’d explode, ‘Oi, shut up you, this is my mum you are talking about!’

But then because he was so protective of Stacie and never let me talk badly to her, Dad would tell me, ‘That’s enough, don’t talk to Stacie like that.
Shut it!’

And I would be even more angry in my head, going, ‘Fucking hell, don’t talk about my mum like that in front of me!
And as for you, Dad, you won’t even let me stick up for
her!’

I was convinced in my young mind that Stacie had gone for Dad in some kind of a weird vendetta against my family, like she had fallen for him on purpose.
Why else would you get together with a
married man?
It’s only now I’m older I know you can’t help who you fall in love with.
It can’t have been an ideal situation for her either.
‘Oh, you know what, I want
to go out and find a happily married man, destroy his family and get him for myself, then have to take on his angry little kids as well.’
It obviously wasn’t her aim.
But at the same
time, I think she should have had more willpower when they first met, and thought, ‘Actually, he has a wife – I’ll back off.’
But then so should Dad.
He was the one who had
made vows to Mum to stay with her for ever, and then failed to do that so soon after, despite his strict Catholic views.
Ugh, it’s so hard, and it makes me angry thinking over it again as
I’m writing this.
You can see I go round in circles about it!
Over the years I have gone through it so many times my brain hurts.
I think the truth is that I’m never going to be OK with
it, really.

The thing that hurts, that makes me so resentful and stops me getting past it, is that I always think how different my childhood could have been, and how much better a life my mum could have
had.

Other times it seemed as if Stacie would block us from doing things, and I couldn’t understand why.
For example, although there was a swimming pool in their house, we were never allowed in
there for some reason.
Then one day Stacie went out to stock up on fuel, as there was a petrol strike about to start, and Dad said, ‘Quick, boys, have a go in the pool if you like.’

We thought, ‘Wow, this is amazing!’
and were having the best time ever, leaping in and out, swimming around, just generally pissing about.
I guess he thought Stacie would be gone for
ages, stuck in a queue at the petrol station, but suddenly my dad was saying, ‘Quick, boys, get out.
Here’s some towels, get upstairs and get dried off before Stacie sees ya.’

And we had to hide so that Stacie didn’t know we had been in the pool, because she didn’t want us in there.
I’m sure she had her reasons but as a kid I just felt as if she
didn’t want us to have fun.
And I could never understand why Dad didn’t put his foot down more.
He is such an alpha male, you would expect him to always be the boss.
The only way I can
see it is that he fucked up his first marriage for Stacie, and he didn’t want to ruin that relationship too, so he would do whatever it took to keep her happy.

It wasn’t long after they had been in that house that Dad and Stacie got married and had a baby.
I had to go to the wedding, but I can’t say I liked it.
It wasn’t something I
wanted to see.
I knew Mum and Dad were never going to get back together, but to see Dad actually get a new wife, and one I didn’t like .
.
.
well, it was like it sealed everything.
The woman
who in my eyes had set out to destroy my family had finally succeeded.
It was upsetting, especially for Mum.
I remember her crying as I left to go to the wedding.
If I’d had a choice I
wouldn’t have gone, but Dad wanted me there.
Luckily he didn’t push it and expect me to be a page boy or anything!
It was just a straightforward registry office wedding and reception.
The best bit about it was having a party with his side of the family.

Then on 5 April 2001 Stacie had their son, Mason, my half-brother, not that I can tell you much about him as a baby.
Stacie was always saying, ‘Don’t let Kirk hold him.
He’ll
drop him.
I don’t want Kirk near him.’
At first I felt like I didn’t know him.
In fact, he is twelve now, and it is only in the last few years that I have been able to spend time
with him and build a bond.

The longer we lived in the hostel, the stranger some of the people seemed to get, and the harder it all became.
In the spring Mum got some kind of virus, and was in the toilet
being really sick, and a woman just ran in and started hitting her.
She was clinging on to the toilet seat, but this woman kept whacking her.
I guess she was mentally disturbed, but it was weird.
Not that I fully realized just how weird at the time.

After nearly a year, even Daniel and I were starting to get tired of the hostel and Mum was angry we hadn’t been moved on.
This dirty, often scary place wasn’t supposed to be a
permanent home, just somewhere for us to stay while the council found us a new house.
But that hadn’t happened.

Then one day my brother, who was fifteen by then, went across the road to Maxine’s to borrow some orange squash for a school trip the next day.
I was in our room upstairs when the buzzer
went.
I answered: ‘Hello?’

‘Kirk, open the door now!’
I heard my brother gasp.

‘What’s up?’

‘I’ve been shot.’

For some reason I broke into floods of tears and couldn’t stop.
Fear of what was about to come, I guess.
We ran downstairs and he was out the front holding his chin, and the blood was
pissing out, like really pulsing out of him, and he was pure white.
Duncan and a mate of his, Phil, arrived at the same time, and someone said, ‘Wayne shot him!’

We all sprinted to Wayne’s room and Mum tried to kick the door open, yelling, ‘You shot my son, Wayne!
I will fucking kill you for this!’

We could hear him moving around inside, and just as Mum was kicking, the blade of a knife suddenly came through the door at her.
He forced it right through the wood, trying to stab her.
I
couldn’t believe what I was seeing and stood there rooted to the spot, completely terrified.

Phil pushed Mum out of the way and kicked the door in, and before Wayne had time to do anything, Phil picked him up and slammed him against the wall, screaming, ‘You fucking little
shitbag.
What are you playing at?’

He kept picking him up and throwing him round the room like a rag doll, and I could see his head banging off the furniture.
It only stopped when the police arrived to arrest Wayne.

Daniel was rushed to hospital and we finally found out exactly what had happened.
It turned out army-obsessed Wayne had turned eighteen earlier that week and immediately went and got an air
rifle.
When Daniel was coming back to the hostel and saw him, he joked, ‘Don’t shoot me, Wayne!’
But he did.

Daniel thought it was just a piece of cork that had hit him, but then he saw the blood.
The bullet had gone through his chin and into his throat, a millimetre from his jugular.
At the hospital
they realized there was too much swelling to take the pellet out, so he had to lie in bed for four days to let the swelling go down, with this thing lodged in his neck, before they could operate.
He was really brave about it but Mum was so upset.

In the meantime the police had released Wayne, saying he was mentally disturbed so they didn’t want to jail him, and the hostel was the best place for him.
Then Mum’s crying stopped
and she went mad.
She stormed to the council and refused to leave.

‘You want me and my sons to live in the same building as this mental idiot who shot my son!
There is no security, only a few shit reception staff, and you think that is OK?
You have to
take us out before someone gets killed!’

She was so angry, I think she finally made her point.
In the summer holidays a year after we had arrived, when I was twelve, we said goodbye to the hostel, and went on to the next stage of Essex
life .
.
.

The Worst Estate in Essex

To get us out of the hostel, the council moved us to an estate called Seabrooke Rise, which I can’t describe as anything other than a slum.
If you live in Seabrooke Rise
you are known to be scummy, it’s as simple as that.
Life there is like something out of the television show
Shameless
– this run-down council estate where everyone knows each
other’s business and all sorts of dodgy shit goes on.

If I was out of the area and told someone where I was from they wouldn’t talk to me.
They’d be scared to be associated with me, or of what I might do.
But it didn’t bother me.
All my pals were from Seabrooke Rise anyway – all the people I had hung out with when we were in the hostel were from that area, and let’s face it, no matter what people said about
Seabrooke Rise, it was a step up for us.

The flats were arranged in rows of maisonettes.
There were two flats on top of each other, with each family’s flat made up of two floors.
There were no road names – the whole area
was just made up of different Seabrooke Rise blocks, then you got a flat number within that.
The blocks were arranged in rows, and each row was a bit lower down the hill.
There were about eight
rows in total, with the tenants somehow seeming to get worse the further down the hill you got.
The bottom row had all the real scuzzy ex-cons and druggies living in it.
We were in flat 219, in the
second row from the bottom.

And although the flats weren’t the best accommodation in the world, as you can imagine, I thought they were pure luxury – because I got my own bedroom!
Of course, being the youngest,
I got the box room, but I didn’t care.
I had my own space for the first time in my life.

I was also happy to be physically further apart from Daniel.
We hadn’t been getting on for the last few years.
We are very different people, and the three and a half year age gap was just
a little too big to make it easy for us to be properly close when he saw me as the annoying little brother, while I saw him as the out-of-touch older brother.
I’d even go so far as to say we
hated each other at times, and our relationship could be really aggressive.
We would fight every single day, and the older we got, the more physical the fights became.
It would start off as a
stupid argument over something as small as one of us being in the other’s way, or sometimes even over nothing at all, then the abuse would get shouted louder and louder until one of us would
take a swing at the other.
And most of the time it would only stop when it had gone too far – I’d knocked Daniel out, or he had stabbed me in the arm with a chisel or butter knife, or
whatever was to hand.
If the fights had ever been filmed and shown on telly or YouTube, you would think it was so violent that one or both of us should be arrested.
But that was just the way we got
on with each other.

Mum would try to stop us, and would get angry and upset, but nothing got in our way once the two of us were rowing.
We’d be totally focused on beating the other one, verbally or
physically.
It became a world with just two raging teenage lads in it, and we could only end it ourselves after we had followed it through.

As for our neighbours, they were mostly crackers.
I soon learnt that the older kids who lived above us liked to spit.
When I left the house I’d have to run quickly to the other side of the
path, otherwise I’d end up with a minging load of flob on me.
Another guy in the row of houses above us he used to sell fags to under-sixteens who couldn’t get hold of them in the
shops.
L&Ms they were, as in Lambert & Butler, but we always used to say that stood for Lung Munchers really.
I guess he got them on the cheap somewhere, and I would go round there for a
packet, claiming they were ‘fags for me mum’ even though we both knew they weren’t.
They cost £1.20 a pack, which was good even in those days!

Just down from us was a bloke who used to sell drugs.
By drugs I mean marijuana, not anything stronger.
People always ask if there were loads of drugs where I grew up, which makes me laugh.
The
idea that poor areas are flooded with drugs is ridiculous – you need money for drugs, and when you can barely scrape together enough to pay for your weekly food, how on earth are you going to
afford something expensive like cocaine?
As far as I was concerned cocaine was a faraway drug only taken by celebrities who drove around in Range Rovers – another thing I thought was confined
to the realms of the rich and famous at that stage!

A lot of people had dogs, not all of them legal breeds, for a mix of reasons – protection, status or just plain good company.

But I was completely oblivious to the fact this wasn’t how life was for kids all over Britain.
I thought everyone apart from celebrities lived like this.

The area I grew up in, well, it was violent and poor.
I always thought it was a good thing that Bella came back to live with us after we left the hostel.
Although she was soft as shit, people
are always a bit wary of a Staffie, so she was like extra protection for us.

For me, the worst thing when we first moved to Seabrooke Rise was the walk home from the train station after school.
That is when people would be hanging around bored, looking for trouble.
And
while I did have friends there, I still wasn’t a Seabrooke Rise local, and I would get into trouble.
The area really was the ghetto of Essex.
I would rather walk through the worst streets of
London than walk through Grays.

On that walk home I would regularly get mugged or robbed.
A gang of kids would appear out of nowhere, and I’d suddenly be surrounded.

‘Take your shoes off.’
One of them would get right up in my face, and snarl.

‘Really?’
I’d be so gutted at the idea of handing them over, but I was in no position to argue.

‘Yes, I want those fucking trainers, so give them to me if you want to get past us!’

I’d have no choice but to take them off and walk home, head down, in my socks.
The worst thing was getting in and seeing Mum’s face, when she realized we were going to have to come
up with the money for new shoes.
We were still as badly off as ever.
Mum was trying, though.
She worked her arse off to make our lives better, and got a job as soon as we moved into Seabrooke Rise,
working in community care.
That meant she would go and look after old people in their own homes, helping them with their meals, or jobs they couldn’t do themselves around the house, and just
generally keeping them company and seeing they were all right.
She was good at it, as she is such a caring person.
And it was what she had trained to do before she met my dad and stopped work, so
it meant she was finally getting back to her original ambition, which was great.
But it was not amazingly paid, and we still struggled.

That was where the good side of the area came out, though.
Despite the hellish environment, the absolute crap that we had to live through, people would still help each other.
I don’t want
to make out that it was an amazing place and that everyone was one big happy family, but there was a sense that we were all in it together.
It was like a lot of the old East End mentality from
London, where everyone was poor but had each other’s backs, had moved out to Essex at the same time as the old East Enders moved out that way.
You would look out for your own and share what
little you did have.

There were days when we would knock on the next-door neighbour’s door and ask, ‘You got a loaf of bread for me mum?’
if we had run out, and Mum couldn’t afford to do a
shop.

Or someone might pop round to ours and ask Mum, ‘You got a fiver I can borrow?
The electric’s gone and I’ve got nothing left this week.’

I know that sounds like the stereotype of a poor area turned good, but that was the reality of the situation.

I always liked the start of summer as well.
Behind the houses where we lived there was a big communal garden, and each summer everyone would chip in and buy this big blow-up swimming pool from
the local Costco, that all the kids would use.
We all wanted to join together to make the sunny days that bit better for everyone.
Then over the summer people just opened their homes to all the
kids, so there was less of a divide and everyone kind of lived in all the houses, bouncing between them.

Poverty was all I knew, so I didn’t question it or resent it.
In fact I loved living there on some levels, and would never have changed it.

One of the best things about my life was my friends.
I had a really good bunch of mates in Seabrooke Rise.
There were about twenty of us who used to hang around together.

I don’t trust a lot of people.
I think I have been let down so often that I don’t like to put too much faith in people doing the right thing or looking out for me.
I know people can
shit on you when it suits them, no matter how close you think you are.
So it is better not to put them in a position where they can let you down in the first place.
That’s the way I have
always thought about it, as it’s what I learned growing up.
So while my group of mates was great, our friendship was mostly about having a laugh together.
There were just a few who were
especially close, who I did trust, and who were more like brothers to me.
They are the boys who are still in my life today.

My closest mate was called Ashton.
He was the same Ashton I was friends with at primary school, and used to smoke with behind the green container, so when I moved to Seabrooke Rise I was really
happy he was there too.
I instantly knew I could rely on him, because we had history together.

Ashton was one of nine brothers and sisters, and they were all looked after by their mum, Sarah, who was a single parent, dealing with everything by herself.
It must have been totally crazy for
her, but she always seemed to cope and keep everything going in their family the way it should.

She was on benefits, and whenever my mum was complaining about her lot in life, going, ‘I’m struggling bringing up you two, how am I going to cope on such little money?
Life is
awful!’
and all that, I’d tell her, ‘Just look at Sarah, you don’t see her crying, and she has it a lot harder than you!’

One of Ashton’s brothers, Reece, was a good pal of mine as well, and we used to hang around together.
I knew those boys would have my back no matter what, and we would stand by each other.
It also meant the muggings I had put up with when we first moved in only lasted for the first few months, until I became known as a local.
I also quickly toughened up and learned to defend myself,
so people didn’t start on me a lot, but it was nice to know that if I needed them they would be there in a second to help out.

Sadly Reece passed away at a very young age.
It is always so sad to see a good man go, and Reece really was a good man.

My other closest friends were also two brothers, called Zach and Kieron.
My mum was friends with their mum, Charlotte, and it was a bit like they were our extended family.

Mum was still really down all the time because of the lack of money, so I would do anything I could to help her.
I was only thirteen, so too young to get a part-time job at the
weekends or anything, but I would try and think of other clever ways to get cash.

I never stole from shops or houses or anything, but I guess in a way – and this doesn’t sound great – I did rob from my dad for her.
She would suggest it sometimes when she was
especially depressed, and short of cash for a bill or food.

She’d say, ‘Kirk, we need money.
Can you ring your dad up and get some somehow?’

I hated doing it, but my bad conscience over lying to my dad wasn’t as bad as this sick feeling I had inside me, watching Mum constantly suffering because she had no money.
Seeing her sink
into more and more of a depression, and not being able to do anything, was horrible for a son.
And again, that deep-rooted sense that I had to be the man of the house, and do whatever it took to
make things better, would override anything else.
So in the end I’d call Dad and think up an excuse, like, ‘Dad, I’ve got a school trip tomorrow.
Can I have some money for
it?’

And he’d say, ‘Well, not really, Kirk.
I don’t have a lot of cash going spare at the moment.
Why do you need it?’

And I’d play on his softer side, and tell him, ‘Oh please, mate, ’cos I look like a pikey if I ain’t going on the trip, and everyone else is.
Don’t make me look
like that, help me out!’