The Minority Council Read Online Free PDF Page B

begin.
    “Sure,” I said. “Why the hell not?”
    There are three kinds of living in London.
    There’s living above stuff. In council flats, great blocks eighteen storeys high with views across same old same old, you live above someone else’s bedroom, you wear slippers, not shoes and lay carpet, not wood flooring. At night people navigate by your sitting room window, using your building as a marker through anonymous streets. Or you live above a shop, a pub, an off-licence, a hairdresser, in a little flat that smells of the trades carried on below.
    Then there’s living next to something. In the streets of what’s termed the inner city, terraced Victorian houses look over little brick walls or restored iron railings from sashed bay windows and white-painted porches.
    Finally, there’s living beneath something. It can be noisy neighbours walking overhead, life in the shadow of a mobile phone mast or under a flight path into Heathrow.However you look at it, this is the worst place to be. And in Nabeela’s part of town, there was one particular big thing you could find yourself beneath.
    I said, “Oh.
This
part of Kensington and Chelsea.”
    Nabeela was buttoning up her coat against the rising night wind sweeping over Westbourne Park Underground station. Not that it was underground here, where Tube trains crawled in the tail-winds of expresses out of Paddington and regional behemoths heading into London from Reading and Bristol. Houses clung to the edge of the railway cutting like chalk cliffs waiting to crumble, while on the other side, looking away north, was the West Way. It showed as dark mottled concrete just high enough that from the pavement you saw only the tops of passing vans. But you could still hear the motorway, the A40 bypass raised up above West London to carry commuters quickly from the suburbs to the city, without having to muck around with the piddling places in between. Nothing could disguise the fact that this was a beneath corner of town. It was where the expensive wine bars of Kensington gave way with a shudder to the council blocks of the Harrow Road; where municipal libraries stocking works by local authors were replaced by Wormwood Scrubs prison, and sports halls yielded to skater parks.
    “What do you mean,
this
part?” We’d turned out of the station and were marching down the nearest street crammed in beneath the overpass.
    “Well, you know, you say Kensington and I think… big houses, posh cars, shops selling organic Fairtrade baby socks, Conservative central office… you know, Kensington.”
    “Yes, because London’s so homogeneous all the time,isn’t it? I mean, let’s not go jumping out of our little boxes any time soon, shall we?”
    “You have lovely toes and I’ve stepped on them…”
    “You leave my toes out of it!”
    “I’m sure there was a point in this relationship when you wanted my help…”
    “I’m still not convinced your help is worth much.”
    “Thank you.”
    “You’re not even dressed right.”
    I stopped and looked down at myself. Charity-shop jeans going through at the knees and frayed round the bottom, a pair of worn-out trainers just thin enough to let me feel the ground beneath my feet, a T-shirt that once had invited people to Save Camley Park and was now only readable in very bright light, and a coat designed to endure all weathers and all flavours of curry sauce. I said, “What?”
    “At least the arseholes in that office were dressed like proper protectors of the city.”
    “Are you saying I don’t look much like the Mi… I mean, much like much?”
    Nabeela looked us up and down, contemplated a fluent reply, and settled for a burst of laughter. She turned, and kept on walking. We seethed; I scuttled after. A short way on lay impounds for the dubiously parked, MOT garages specialising in people carriers upwards, depots for holding concrete sacks, and the rusted funerals of unlaid train track. Beyond rose once-grand terraces with pillared