Kamua Johnson had turned nine last week. He lived on the twenty-second floor of the Lambeth Towers development. A Thirty-story, horseshoe shaped tenement block that overlooked the sprawl of Brixton. Designed in the sixties as part of England’s Brave New World policy. Blue plywood window surrounds, bare concrete. Planters on the ground floor complete with stringy trees, withered from pollution and lack of nutrients.
The original artist’s impressions had shown lithe figures pushing buggies, playing ball, skipping rope. White, Asian, African. Shaded by tall Plane trees, the ground covered in freshly mown green lawn. The figures were smiling. All of them.
The reality was a crumbling urban nightmare of damp and decay. Disintegrating concrete, bare earth, puddles of rank water that never drained away. A pile of broken shopping trolleys. Without wheels. Twisted and crippled. Teenagers in hoodies. Hands in pockets. No one smiled. None of them.
Kamua shared the apartment with his parents and his grandmother, Gramma Higgins. His parents in one room, Gramma in the other. He slept in the sitting room.
Gramma suffered from Dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. She was also a type 1 diabetes sufferer. But as long as she took her pills and her insulin injections she was manageable.
The problem was that Kamua’s mother administered Gramma’s drugs and neither she nor her husband had come home last night. Kamua had tried to phone her work, using the emergency number that she had left, scrawled on the yellow post-it and stuck to the mirror in the hallway. But the phones were dead. Both the landline and the cell.
So Kamua had waited, staring out of his window. He had seen the planes come down and the fires starting. But they were not close enough to worry him. And he was not yet old enough to appreciate what was happening. He didn’t like the fact that the lights would not work. He was scared of the dark. Monsters lived in the dark. And by the time the sun was fully set he could see nothing in the stygian darkness of the streets below. It was as if he were floating on a raft above a calm black sea of emptiness. Silent. Blind.
Gramma had kept asking for water but, after one glass, the taps no longer worked. The miracle of running water ceased as the pipes ran dry and the pumps at the water towers functioned no more.
So Gramma had pleaded with him. Imploring him for water as her body tried desperately to flush the sugar out of her system. As the night progressed. Her lack of memantine pills had allowed her dementia full rein and she started to scream and swear at Kamua, flashing her withered genitals at him, licking her lips lasciviously, calling him son of Satan and begging him to defile her.
Finally the little boy had locked her in her room. By morning she had stopped banging on the door.
Kamua decided that he needed some help. Adult help. He knew that his mother always filled Gramma’s prescription for her meds at the drugstore on the corner. The man behind the counter always smiled at them and greeted mother like a friend. Kamua would go to him and ask for help.
He took the keys, closed the front door, went to the elevators and pressed the call button. But nothing happened. No lights. Nothing. So, with a child’s acceptance, he started down the stairs.
It took him fifteen minutes to reach the ground floor. He left via the front of the building. Immediately he saw that things were not right. Cars were stopped in random positions all over the road. The glass fronts to the shops were all broken or the steel shutters were pulled down and padlocked with massive brass locks. The street was littered with smashed consumer goods. A radio, half out of its retail package, a broken TV, splintered beer bottles, the pavement still damp from the spilt contents. Kamua didn’t know what looting was. He had never been taught the concept. All that he could see was that the dark had made bad things happen.
The drug store was shut. The steel doors had been pulled down and locked. There were bright shiny scars on the doors where people had tried to smash their way in. But the doors had held.
Kamua stood in front of the store for a while. Some people walked by. Mainly teenagers. Some single adults. No one even looked at the little boy. They did not know him. He was not their responsibility. Eventually Kamua turned and walked back to his apartment block, went in the front and started the laborious climb back up.
On the twelfth floor he came across a fat man lying on the stairs. His hands were curled in front of his chest and his face was bright red. He was making strange grunting noises. Kamua was scared but his politeness won out and he greeted the man.
But the fat man just stared at the little boy and grunted, his breath rasping in and out like he was drowning. Kamua stood with him for a while and then continued his upward travel.
He unlocked his front door, closed it behind him and went and sat on the sofa. He stared at the TV. Blank. Lifeless.
He would wait for his mommy.
And then everything would be all right.