Modify

Diary Wednesday 18^th Deecember 1996: It is getting cooler. Yesterday A.K picked me up in his bright red VW Golf and sped me to GrantsPen, where Evadney lives. We first stopped off at his mother, a lectuer at Cast who lives in one of the most dreadful apartment buildings in Kingston. The rectangual concrete boxes are sealed off front and back with thick prison-like grills. Actually the apartment blocks look exactly the same as the garbage disposal area near the entrance to the compound. After the visit we went into Grants Pen itself.. Grants pen is a narrow strip of land between Barbican and Shortwood Road and along Grants Pen Road. It is separated from Barbican Road by a deep gully full of trash and an impenetrable patchwork shield made of zinc occasionally marked by careless graffiti or deep narrow channels, mud paths with oily puddles and little pigs drinking from them. The zinc is the membrane of an endless cellular network of yards occupied by small houses, some of the half finished in concrete, but most of them a bricolage of found objects strucng and nailed together. Paint-pots with plants, young children looking at the whitee with their huge, protruding navels and kind ladies concerned about a stranger in their midst. We were looking for “Tender” a friend of Andre’s who was going to lead us throught he community. We couldn’t find him. Andre suspected that he had forgotten our appointment and that he was smoking somewhere. We went to pay our respects to the leader of the community, a young intelligent looking man called “modify” Modify is well know to Ewvadney. One of her sisters had something to do with him once. We found Modify playing a game outside a little stall on Grants Pen Avenue, the road bisecting the community. Large men on larger motorbikes and hung heavy with gold deferred to Modify. He gave me a sign of respect. We couldn’t find Tender, so we decided to come back another day. In the VW, on the way back A.K. confessed that his brother was a dealer in england. They no longer saw each other.

Soon after this entry The Grants Pen Community went through its worst spate of violence. Evadney moved out. She was too frightened. Young men would control the streets with guns, dictating who walked where and which way. “Bad Men.” Modify has been killed I believe. His brother had been killed earlier. I never saw Tender. Once, before the troubles began I was stuck in Grantspen Avenue. My battery had gone flat. Everyone was kind to me, and concerned. Modify came up to me we recognised one another and exchanged a word ro towo. After that a lorry driver was summoned and we got the car going again. Evadney wanted to know whter I had been scared. The only violence I have ever witness myself there. Was again when I picked up Evadney and I hear dsound which had an urgency to them I had never heard before. Different to how guns sound on film somehow. Looking in my rear mirror I saw a policeman waving a semi-autoamtic rifle and looking at my car with the expression, what the hell is this man doing here. The police was doing a routine check. Lining up the young men against the corrugated iron fence and checking their pockets.