Face Read Free Page B

go there but they wouldn’t let me, said I had ta go ta Lonsdale Park, said it was nearer. What ya doing here?’
    The two other girls continued to look her up and down. Natalie expected trouble and in her mind she cursed the boys for bringing her there and for the way they had got lost in their silly conversation about football and cars.
    â€˜I’m just hanging around with me boyfriend and his mates.’
    At this point the girl wearing the West Ham shirt reached into her back pocket. Natalie swallowed hard as the girl pulled out a couple of leaflets. After separating one from the other she handed one to Natalie. ‘Dat’s the place to be, check it out, good vibes, good music. Ya like rap?’
    Natalie wanted to kick herself. She had completely misread the situation. These girls weren’t out for a fight, they wanted to find out if she liked clubbing. They wanted to find out if she was one of them, an Eastender.
    â€˜Yeah,’ Natalie replied, feeling a sense of relief. ‘Yeah, rap’s cool, I used to love MC Lucky till he got all serious. Now I’m into the Tribe and stuff like that.’
    â€˜Me too, I love the Tribe. If yu like the Tribe, you’ll like dis place, dis place is great for rap tunes. Try and make it down there if you can, see ya later maybe. It’s girls free before ten.’
    With that all three turned around and went into the fried chicken shop.
    The Gang of Three were rounding off their conversation behind Natalie. Natalie was still recovering. She began to wonder if she sometimes looked threatening and if she herself had been misjudged by people in the past. For people to be friendly, did they have to have permanent smiles on their faces?
    Martin joined her with the other two following. ‘Who were they?’
    â€˜Who?’
    â€˜Those black girls you were talking to.’
    â€˜Me friends.’
    â€˜I didn’t know you had black friends.’ Martin spoke in almost a whisper.
    â€˜I haven’t got black friends,’ she replied firmly. ‘I’ve just got friends.’
    Martin looked around and again in a whisper he said, ‘Hush.’
    Martin knew that there was no way he would get away with a racist remark here. The group they had been talking to had ethnic origins that ranged from the Philippines, to Africa and Bosnia and he was not going to upset any of them.
    â€˜Let’s make a move,’ he said.
    They walked down Green Street. Green Street was a street with two personalities. By day it was a shopping area, at night clubbers used its kebab houses,restaurants and Indian take-aways. Groups gathered on corners.
    As they walked, Martin tried to guess the smells he came across: fish and chips, curries, pizza and kebabs. Not being an imaginative eater, he got many of them wrong but it was sometimes hard to distinguish smells in places where they all seemed to meet. As they passed the various butchers, all of them played dodge the chicken heads. He remembered how Green Street was described as the heart of the Asian community in a school project that he had done on local history. He picked out Chinese shops, African dress shops, a Filipino bookshop, shops that sold jellied eels, Jamaican breads and Somalian foods. Then he saw a reminder of the sadder side of life in this area. Many of the shops had metal shutters on their windows and doors to protect them from racist attacks. But here racists had even attacked the shutters. Some of the shutters had racist graffiti painted on them and others had scorch marks left after fire bomb attacks.
    At the end of Green Street there was a massive police station that towered way above the other buildings. Martin stopped and looked up at it. ‘Forest Fortress. I hate this place.’
    Natalie quizzed him. ‘What do you hate, the place or the people in it?’
    â€˜I don’t care about the people in it, man. Just lookat that building, it’s the most uninviting