Uncle Pat

Patrick McCann. Everyone had written him off by the time I knew him properly. I was very close to him. He was a boxer by trade. The News of the World put him on the front page in boxing gloves and blamed him for starting the E and acid rave generation. The authorities believed the story. They set him up for commercial burglary. In court he got the maximum — ten years. Revenge for legacy media lies, as he and the people around him saw it. The front page and the sentence sat together in his life the way other contradictions sat in mine.

For all his faults no man could match his loyalty to his family. He never took his problems home. His house was beautiful. That fact mattered. In a life full of temporary and damaged rooms, a beautiful house kept by a man who refused to bring the street into it was a kind of statement. We robbed people together, mainly by deception. We started selling heroin together. He was my first link to Tiny, Merlin and Lefty from NW10 — the new breed who flipped food for fun while looking respectful and legitimate. The rise of Black people with money made them an enemy of the state in the eyes of certain people. I got to become very close to two brothers I met on the Stonebridge Estate who had just got involved in the only option they had to get money. One was still in school. The other had just finished. I was about twenty. Those estate boys eventually became known as the Usual Suspects Gang — USG — one of the most famous and deadly in the UK. Led by a magician of lyrics in K Koke. That was the start of the commercialisation of our rap, called grime. It became a police target. The police immediately attacked them like they once went after Chuck Berry, pointing to the music as proof they had serious intent. Gang members were quickly profiled and filed. I wanted to make loads of K Kokes. I thought it was great. From an eight-ball to a bedroom studio and it should have been welcomed. I first started writing grime in 2001 inside Highpoint. It was just a different style of poetry. My art was all stolen later. Now a sore subject. None of my life has ever had any privacy. The theft of the writing sits in the same category as the other thefts — of childhood, of safety, of the right to an ordinary emotional life.

Pat remained the constant. Written off by everyone else. Still the man who showed me loyalty that did not bend. I learned more from him about how to move through the world than I learned from most of the adults who were supposed to be raising me.