Samantha took a front seat, delicately perching herself beside the window, sliding her bag off her shoulder, and staring out at early South London, with the rubbish from last night spilling out of street bins and foxes trawling through communal waste and street sweepers stretching in the cold sun, shrugging on hi-vis jackets to start their shifts, and school kids leaning against bus stops, some in crushed uniforms, others in own-clothes like Madisun and Samantha. The bus was empty at this time of morning. Madisun scrambled on the bus and marched to the back seats. “Your dad still about?” she asked Samantha.Īfter an impossibly long wait, the Number Two-Two-Five finally chugged down the road and parked up at the bus stop. So silent that she had been able to do her homework well into the night, talk on the phone to her friends without apologising for “them lot upstairs”, and wake up in the mornings refreshed. It was only now that Madisun realised she hadn’t heard anything from the Ritchie family from floor thirteen for at least a month. New,” said Madisun, feeling self-conscious. She had on white plimsolls, a cream summer dress, and her hair was brushed into a thick bundle of hay over one bare, creamy shoulder. Samantha was her brother’s opposite with mousy brown hair, a greying complexion, and blue eyes that were so pale, they almost looked white. Tall, with a glint of handsomeness evident in black, raven-like eyes. Her brother, Aaron, was dark haired and talkative. Samantha Ritchie’s family was the loudest of the lot: a father in a permanent drunken rage and a mother who was absent. It was as if the council had segregated them from the rest of the estate’s occupants as some cultural mercy, and the families in question acquiesced by keeping to themselves. It looked like Samantha from floor thirteen, the final floor of Beethoven and home to three white families. But the girl had already seen her.Īgainst her will, Madisun faced the girl. She fiddled with her hair to mask the surprise, then looked away to pretend to look at the timetable on the bus sign. It was only when the other girl turned around did Madisun gasp. It looked like a girl about the same age as her, and her sluggish gait alluded to Beethoven, but Madisun didn’t know her.
The type of places white people escaped to after years in the city to settle down and raise chickens. She spent hours a day fantasising about misty country lanes in sleepy medieval villages where the post office and the pub were the local social haunts. Far away from Beethoven, out of London, away from her family and from anyone who could know her. Her hopes were high: on course to achieve a healthy mix of A’s and B's, there was a chance she would make it to uni after all. Her satchel was packed because GCSEs were coming up and there was a lot of revision to do.
Madisun left her flat near the top of Beethoven, which was on the twelfth floor, and made her way down the stairs to the bus stop because the lifts were broken again. The rest of the week was rife with the stench of weed and piss. It stank of all sorts: Sundays was for the hot spices of various curry goats, pepper pots, jerk chickens, rotis, chapattis, curries and the milder tinge of roast dinners. It meant that the tower block was almost surrounded by a moat of rotten cardboard, mottled fabric of old sofas, charred and damaged IKEA tables that knotted together like the bony remains of some old whale, and outdated white goods that had melted and warped with exposure.
Beethoven Hill Estate overlooked the wreckage of Surrey Quays recycling centre.
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