Walking to Hollywood

Afterword

On 17 July 2008 I was making my children supper in the basement kitchen of our terraced house in Stockwell, South London, when I heard a commotion in the street outside and the demented shriek of emergency services sirens. When I opened the front door I found some of my neighbours already standing on the front steps of their houses, the street was full of police cars, and an ambulance was parked further up. Very quickly it became clear that a young man had been attacked and stabbed immediately outside the house by a group of youths; he had staggered up the road and collapsed about a hundred yards further on. Paramedics and a doctor who lived locally fought to save his life, but he died three hours later. He was eighteen years old, his name was Frederick Moody Boateng, and he was the twenty-first teenage fatality from a stabbing in London that year.

Freddy’s family lived six doors up from us, and although I’d nodded to him in the street we’d never exchanged a word. In the immediate aftermath of the murder, shocked local people said the usual things about the senselessness of the attack. It was thought the assailants might also have been at a spontaneous water fight in Hyde Park that Freddy had attended that day, and that something had happened there that caused them to lay in wait for him. The suppressed premise, of course, was whether Freddy was a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ boy.

Soon enough another narrative emerged: Freddy had been in trouble before, the doorman in the nearby flats alleged that he had been there immediately before the knifing, and someone else said that rocks of crack cocaine had been found on him. The man in the local park who does youth football coaching told me that Freddy had asked to participate in his sessions, but that ‘He was mixed up in drugs, so I told him no. I won’t take anyone who can’t stay out of trouble.’

Three young men stood trial for the killing in January 2009, all on charges of affray. It was understood that the police had been unable to get sufficient evidence for a murder charge, and besides the actual knifeman was said to have fled to Jamaica. In the event, none of the three accused received more than a three-year sentence. This barely made the news anyway — by then the focus of attention had long since moved on, and there were tens if not scores of stories with more obviously moralistic dramatic arcs to satisfy English connoisseurs of murder.

But Freddy’s killing stayed with me by reason of proximity alone: this was not murder considered as one of the fine arts, but homicide as interior decoration. The crime scene tape decked the street for a week or more. For the first couple of days we had to be escorted to and from our house by police officers. Then there was the shrine created by Freddy’s friends at the end of the block, with its blooms dying in cellophane, his name outlined in tea lights, and a sad little assemblage of cards, water pistols and handwritten poems. The kids stood vigil for him, at first every night, then weekly, then monthly. There was the funeral, a memorial service — the family were active in a local church — and a march protesting against the epidemic of knife crime. All of these gatherings forced an awareness of community on the inhabitants of this very typical — and typically polyglot — inner London residential street.

I felt an obscure shame about the murder — or, rather, about my detachment from the immediate environment, let alone the wider world. I wasn’t remotely interested in the morality tale used to impose ‘sense’ on this young man’s death; I thought instead of the city, its anonymity, its crisscross currents of physical mortality and psychic violence. Over the preceding few years I had a growing sense of the room where I typed being encircled by homicides: the woman whose smouldering corpse was found in the local park — the victim of an ‘honour’ killing; the young woman strangled in her workplace shower down the road in Vauxhall; the kid shot in his flat at Clapham North by gang members; the doorman of a club on the Wandsworth Road shot in a driveby; and, of course, the young Brazilian electrician shot by police seven times at point-blank range in the nearby tube station.

All works of fiction represent terrains across which characters travel, and while the writer maps these he is down there on the ground, orienting by compass — whether moral or otherwise — and the familial resemblances of faces, landmarks and geographical features. Only towards the end of the journey, when he climbs the last hill, does he look back to survey the entire territory; only then does he understand the nature of the particular route undertaken.

When I reached the end of this book — so contorted, wayward and melancholic — I looked back and saw my father-in-law’s death from cancer in November 2007, Freddy Moody’s murder in July 2008, and the death of J. G. Ballard in April of 2009. The mental pathologies that underlie the three memoirs — obsessive-compulsive disorder for ‘Very Little’, psychosis for ‘Walking to Hollywood’ and Alzheimer’s for ‘Spurn Head’ — are themselves displacements of a single phenomenon.

W. W. S., London, 2009