The Estate

                                    

                                              


                          
His name is Nathan.
                          
I saw it from when he got to being a teenager, but it was coming from before that. He was at school most times, didn't miss a day unless it was for something important. Not like some of them other boys. Their mothers not concerned, just thought their own child was a burden. Don't know what day it is unless benefits coming. God knows what happens to the fathers of them children. Nathan was only four years old when his father passed.
                          
It wasn't the big men who start it, it was the ones who want be big men. They see the big men come from the same place, out on the estate, getting big cars, nice clothes, different women every day, never paying for nothing, getting respect. Left to fend for themselves like dogs. 
                          
My Nathan had upbringing, I told him, just like his father would have told him if he was still alive, and he would have been around, not like the feckless ones giving women baby then act like it nobody's problem but the woman. I see them in the street, hear how they call the women dirty names, slapping them like they some kind of animal. Ain't nobody better that nobody else what I tell Nathan when he see that.
                          
I tell Nathan that it not like where I came from. I tell Nathan that what he sees on the TV or reads about on that computer he always on can be got, and that's what I was always told when I his age, that in this country it don't matter where you come from or what your skin colour, it's all available if you willing to work for it.
                          
 I had it tough telling him that it could work for him if he keep going school and get his qualifications, even though he say what happened you and dad when you told the same thing by your parents but you still here on the estate, and I tells him back that if we can't aspire to better things then we lost like them crack whores out on the street selling them body for drugs. 
                          
He seen that, I know that he seen that, because he get older and still kept going to his school, and kept using that computer to read and read about stuff, and he read about where his family came from and why they was there in the first place, and he took a pride in who he was, and knew that it something special to be, and I swear, as God is my witness, that he became a man, even though him still a teenager, and worked and worked to get from this place.
                          
It start when he was old enough to want a bit independence of his own, like all boys do when they get to a certain age, when they want to go outside and set their foot down and be men. I used to look over the balcony and see the other boys hanging round, drinking, smoking, getting together with each other. I see them girls going off with men, making money down the alleyways.
                          
Soon came when it really started to happen though, when I think about it it makes me mad, because them older ones not brought up right, just want more and more. They start fighting and the fighting don't get them what they want so they start killing and once you bad boy who done some killing the next bad boy wanna be king comes along and he goes kill the top man and soon they all be dead and nobody get nothing. And the young ones see this and think that the way it is, and they want some too.

                          
I send him to the shop the first time, I gave him the money in his hand and watched as he shoved it deep down in his jean pocket and nodded without looking up like I telling him how to suck eggs when I say not to get it out until him at the till waiting to pay, and even then not when anyone too near, cos some people in this world ain't got right thinking, they thinking that anything anyone else has is theirs to take to do their evil with, and he had be careful even though him all grown up. 
                          
He went off like he didn't have no care in the world, and I rushed through to the balcony so I could see him come out the bottom of the block and cross over to the shop. I felt a flutter when I see him pass a group of them around the phone-box but they only look at him pass and I didn't hear anything said from so far away. They didn't have the dogs then.