Pops didn’t need that kind of aggravation in his life tonight.

“You coming, then?” Bizness pressed.

There were a couple in the seats in front of him and the man turned around and glared at him, trying to act big in front of his woman. Pops felt his anger flare; he jerked his head up, his eyebrows cocked, and the man turned away.

“Nah, I don’t know, man.”

“I ain’t asking,” Bizness said. “I’m telling.”

Pops sighed. There was no point in resisting. “Alright,” he said.

“You with your gash?”

Pops looked over at Laura. She was watching the film, the light from the screen flickering against her pale skin. “Yeah,” he said.

“Bring her with you, aight? And bring that younger. What’s his name, JaJa? Pick him up and tell him I need that package he’s holding for me. There’s gonna be hype tonight, I’m hearing things, I wanna make sure I don’t get caught with my dick out. Bring your piece, too.”

And, with that, Bizness ended the call.

Pops stared at screen as it slowly faded to black. The first act of the film came to a crashing conclusion and yet he did not really notice it. He was thinking of Bizness, and whether there was any way they could show their faces at the party and then leave. He was unable to think of anything. Bizness would just see that as a diss, probably worse than not going at all, and he’d be in the shit.

He tried to put it into perspective. Maybe he was being ungrateful. He felt the thick wad of ten pound notes in his pocket, the cold links of his gold chain resting against his skin, the heavy weight of the rings on his fingers. None of that came for free. You had to do things you would rather not do. That was how you got all the nice stuff you wanted. That was just the way it was.

“Come on,” he whispered over to Laura.

“What?”

“We gotta split. There’s a party, we got to go to it.”

“Can’t we got afterwards? This is good.”

“Gotta go now, baby,” he said, taking her by the arm and drawing her down into the aisle. He held his phone in his other hand and, using his thumb, he scrolled through his contacts until he found Elijah’s number.

20

The party was in Chimes nightclub on the Lower Clapton Road. Pops parked next to the beaten up Georgian houses on Clapton Square and they walked the rest of the way, past the discount stores and kaleidoscopic ethic restaurants, past the police posters pasted onto the lamp-posts exhorting locals to “Nail the Killers in Hackney.” The club was on the edge of the major roundabout that funnelled traffic between the City and the East End and marked the beginning of Murder Mile, the long stretch of road that had become inextricably linked with gun crime over the past few years.

The club was in a large and dilapidated old building, facing the minarets of an enormous mosque. It was a hot and enclosed series of rooms and condensation dripped from the patched and sagging ceilings overhead. The largest room had been equipped with a powerful sound system, and Elijah had been able to hear the rumble of the bass from where Pops parked his car. Lights rotated and spun, lasers streaked through the damp air, strobes flickered with skittish energy. The rooms were crammed with revellers: girls in tight-fitting tops and short skirts, men gathered in surly groups at the edges of the room, drinking and smoking and aiming murderous glances at rivals. A tight wire of aggression passed through the room, thrumming with tension, ready to snap. The bassline thumped out a four-four beat, repetitive and brutal, and the noise of a hundred shouted conversations filled the spaces between as an incomprehensible buzz.

Elijah caught himself gaping. He had never been to anything like this before and he could hardly believe he was here. All the members of BRAPPPP! were present, the whole collective, two dozen of them, each bringing their own entourage of friends and hangers-on. He recognised them from the poster in his room and the videos he had watched on YouTube. The new record had been played earlier and now the DJ was mixing old school Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg. Pops was alongside him, his face bleak, his hand placed possessively against the small of his girl’s back.

Bizness appeared from out of the crowd, noticed them, and made his way across. He moved with exaggerated confidence, rolling his hips and shoulders, and his face was coldly impassive. He responded to the greetings from those he passed with small dips of his head or, for closer friends, a fist bump.

“Aight,” he said as he reached their group. He regarded them one at a time, his face unmoving until his gaze rested on Laura. The blank aggression lifted and he parted his wide lips, revealing his brilliantly white teeth with the three gold caps. “Alright, darling,” he said, ignoring Pops altogether. “Remember me?”

“Of course,” Laura said, her eyes glittering.

“You heard the new record yet?”

“Yeah.”

“You like it?”

“Course.”

“That’s what I like to hear. You looking fine tonight, darling. You totally bare choong.”

She did not reply, but her helpless smile said enough. Pops noticed it and a tremor of irritation quivered across his face.

Bizness ignored Pops and the others and turned to Elijah. “Come with me, younger,” he said, and, without waiting for a response, he led the way through the crowd. A tall, heavyset man wearing an earpiece was stationed at a door next to the bar and, as Bizness approached, he gave a stiff nod and stepped aside. The room beyond was small and dark, with sofas against the walls and drapes obscuring the light from the street outside. There were three others in the room, arching their backs over a long table that was festooned with two dozen lines of cocaine, arranged in parallel, each four inches long. Elijah recognised the others as members of BRAPPPP! — MC Mafia, the rapper who sounded a little like Snoop — Icarus and Bredren.

Bizness walked across to the table and took out a rolled up twenty pound note. He lowered his face to the nearest line and, with the note pressed tightly into his nostril, he snorted hard. Half of the line disappeared. He swapped the note into his other nostril and snorted again, finishing the line. He pressed his finger to one nostril and then the other, snorting hard again, and then rubbed a finger vigorously across his gums. With an appreciative smack of his lips, he offered the note to Elijah. “Want one?”

Elijah had never taken cocaine before and he was scared but he felt unable to refuse. Bizness and the others were watching them. Bizness’s face was inscrutable, and he did not want him to think he was a little boy. He shrugged, doing his best to feign nonchalance, dipped his head to the table and snorted the powder. He managed a quarter of the line, the powder tickling his nose and throat. The sneeze came before he had moved his head and it blew the rest of the line away, a little cloud of white that bloomed across the table, the powder getting into his eyes and his mouth.

Bizness laughed at his incompetence. “You ain’t done that before, have you, bruv?”

“Course I have,” he said, blushing hard.

“Sure.”

The word was drawn out, freighted with sarcasm, and Elijah cursed himself for being so green. They would think he was a baby, and that was no good. He would show them otherwise. He stood back from the table and shrugged his rucksack off his shoulder. He unzipped it, reached inside, and drew out the bundle wrapped with newspaper. “I brought it,” he said, holding it in both hands, offering it to Bizness.

“I don’t need it,” he said.

“What?”

“You do.”

“What?”

“Check me, younger,” he said. His voice was blank, emotionless. “You like what you see here out there tonight? You were having a good look around, weren’t you, I saw. You see what we got? I ain’t talking about the little things. Someone like Pops, he thinks it’s all about getting himself new clothes, new trainers, a good looking gyaldem, saving up for a nice car. I ain’t dissing him, each to his own and that, but he’s got a severe case of what I call limited horizons. He ain’t going nowhere. He’s at his peak right now, that’s it for him. You youngers look up to brothers like that, some of you might even get to his level, but others, the ones with ambition, that ain’t never going to be good enough. The ones who are going somewhere know they can do better. You get me, bruv?”