Now or Never, part one

Living in a hostel is driving me mad. No need for Chinese proverbs or anything. It’s just plain madness.
Sick kids get booted out of home by the perpetrators of the violence they were taught. Parents. Who’d have them?
Sick fuckin’ dole-cheat parents, one hand picking their nose and the other down their tracksuit bottoms while they wrestle with the problem of which hand to use to gouge out Frazzles from a family pack so they can stuff their faces. I’ll stuff their faces, with a petrol-soaked cloth.
If I’d had folks like that, I’d have made a conscious decision to kill them just before my sixteen birthday. No one likes being known as a killer, especially when the world’s his oyster.
As you can tell, I’m angry. Doors slam and voices spurt stupid new slang. Screams of false joy and the smell of stale skunk. Phone calls to dealers and little back-stabbing jibes.
One bloke keeps telling me how great Ghana is compared to England and all I want to do is tell him to fuck off back there. Apparently, he’s got a big house and lots of friends there, but when I ask why he’s here, he shuffles about and says something about a little war going on. Probably got some scam going on with his brothers back home.
It’s the young bucks that really rile me, though.
It’s hard to say no when they ask for some tobacco or bits of change from time to time, but once you say yes they never stop, and they tell their buddies. Like I’m an extension of the dole. I don’t think so.
They know I don’t like them now (I’ve had to stop giving stuff out) but time never made me a stronger person, and the longer I see them watching me with their slit eyes and dirty little smirks, I know that one day soon, I’ll stroll up the road and be clumped over the head with something hard, and then they’ll beat me to a pulp.
I’ll hear them say, ‘Get ‘im in the face. Mark the cunt!’ and the blows will fall harder and harder until I can no longer guard my face. I’ll be blinded by thick blood pulsating out from my eye-sockets, and they’ll laugh when I walk into the road with my hands reaching out for a lamp-post, only to be hit by an illegal immigrant posing as a dinner-delivery man.
It happened to Ivan so it could easily happen to me. They saw him having a tinny by the bus depot and that was that. They like vulnerability, these boys, and they’ll go to great lengths to see that pain is inflicted without mercy.
Ivan didn’t survive after A+E.
When he got back to the hostel, he just moulded away on his bed till he was dead.
No one noticed for days until the smell got too bad. If he’d been a ‘supported resident’, which means that you get help with stamps and pieces of paper and go on outings and get pats on the head, he’d have been looked after.
But he was too proud to accept the help, and I’m of the same stock. We’re the white losers. We can take the strain. We got ourselves here and we’ll get ourselves out again. Stiff upper lip shit.
When I arrived, I was all ‘I don’t need help as much as some of the youngsters here so don’t worry about me’, but now that these same youngsters are getting away with murder, literally, I can only see the pointlessness of it all. The hostel didn’t seem fazed when Ivan died.
Call the ambulance, wipe up the blood and get someone else in asap.
It happens, you get used to it, and then it happens again, just to make sure you do as much as you can to get out.
These young people are supported residents, so it only seems right that they be supported while they kill.
I asked the police to do an investigation into who beat Ivan up but they made out like it happens all the time and never comes of it, or the cameras weren’t working that night, and when I told them that I knew who did it, they looked at each other as if to say ‘here we go’ and then one of them asked me, almost under his breath, if I wanted to press charges.
I thought for a minute, but I could feel their eyes saying ‘hurry up, sonny Jim. Police time’s not for nothing, you know’.
Then, just before I was about to answer, one of them asked if I felt safe in the hostel.
What sort of a question’s that?
It only dawned on me what he was getting at when I got back to my room.
I’d said that I’d think it over, but they’d just nodded in silence, as if to goad me out of righteousness. ‘Oh yeah, not such a big guy now, are you?’
When I realised their tactics, I made the decision to stand witness and returned to the police station the next day. That’s when they got heavy with me, telling me to watch my back (wink, wink) from now on.
‘These sorts of people can smell you a mile off, mate,’ one officer had told me. Was he implying that I was a rat? ‘It’s all they know, and they don’t like vigilantes. I thought I’d better just tell you.’
‘But I’m not trying to be a vigilante, am I? These people killed someone, for chrissake.’
I was talking to brick walls, so I left.
They gave me various bits of paper and pursed their lips. They’d seen it all too often; I was just another lifelong do-gooder trying to see justice done, another arse-wipe trying to give them work to do.
That’s when I started getting worried about the police being on the side of the killers. Maybe they did little bits of business together. You can’t be too careful these days.
One guy here, another out-of-work-and-home-and-family builder like me, kept telling me about the lads on the seventh floor. He can’t get a wink of sleep because these lads are taking drugs all night in one of the rooms and they keep on laughing at him when he asks them to pipe down.
The next time I saw him, his face was all crumpled inwards with fury.
He told me that he’d gone to his lock-up to get a baseball bat and smuggled it into his room.
‘Next time they kick off, mate, I’m gonna teach the bastards a little lesson about respect.’
I told him it was a bad idea and that he’d be kicked out, but that was no daunting prospect.
‘That don’t scare me. The streets are a lot safer than this fuckin’ nuthouse.’
I’ve never slept on the streets but since I’ve been homeless I’ve met stacks of people who say the same thing.
You might be a tad miffed when I tell you that this hostel is a YMCA, a Christian association that helps the young find their feet.
As far as I can tell, the only thing it helps the young find is their next victim.
Don’t get me wrong now. I’m not a racist person at all (and here comes the but), but if you were to spend one day and night here, you’d see the whole multicultural dream for what it really is; a weeding-out process of society’s underclass, using the desperation of foreign nationals to do the dirty work, thus creating an even stronger barrier between ‘the people’ to stop them from trying to do something about the madness that the state sees fit to perpetuate.
Most of the young men here have nothing. Their faces are scarred with the abuse they suffered, and now that they’re free from it their only goal in life is to maim and beat those that seem slightly better off.
All this is done to cancel out their own terrible pain, an attempt to rid themselves of the thoughts that buzz around their heads, constantly wearing them down until they crack. And that’s when they strike out. It’s all they know. The loop of life. Number 8. Up, across, around, down, across, around, up. The abused becomes the abuser, and so on.
And I know which one did the worst of Ivan’s beating.
He’s the one that keeps on looking at me from the leather settee in the communal area pretending to watch TV or talking on his phone.
Our eyes have met plenty of times and I haven’t cracked yet, but I’m sure he’s onto me. He knows I know, and that doesn’t bode well for me.
Like I say, I haven’t cracked yet, but I wish that builder would beat him to a pulp with that baseball bat. Divine intervention.
One time, when the killer looked at me, I smiled at him in a weak moment, but he didn’t crack.
He just kept up the staring game with his little pencil moustache. He’s mixed-race, this guy, small and stocky and in his twenties, but when you pass him, you can feel a cold shiver run through you. The aura of death follows him around like the plague.
A while back, just after he arrived at the Y, I couldn’t get to the sugar for my cornflakes because he was on his phone and obviously couldn’t use both his hands to stir his tea. I leant over his tray to get to the sugar and he almost jumped out of his skin.
‘What you doin’?’
Prizes for guessing? ‘Getting sugar.’
We exchanged a few more petty words (it’s like prison here- you can’t let them know you’re a pussy) and I went on my way.
Thing is, it’s all about ‘respect’ with this type of scum, but twats like this wouldn’t know respect if it hit them in the face, preferably with a baseball bat.
His ego’s so big that he’s got himself down as a mafia boss in the making, acting out scenes from films, just like all the other numb-nuts here.

I’d love to see this guy get it. I hate to say it but that’s the way things have gone with me.
I watched ‘Harry Brown’ the other week and I kept punching the air as he slowly got closer to the bastards and killed them off.
‘Yes! Yes! Oh yes!’ Better than sex by a country mile.
Like I said, I’m not a racist person. It’s just that this is what happens when you get to see things as they really are. I’m not cocooned like before. This is my lot, and when you see how corrupt the system really is, pitting people together for an early demise so that the cocooned voters can rest in peace, it hits you so hard that you can hardly get up again. The cocooned have no need to watch the dogs fight. Reports and early-morning snippets are sufficient to steer them away from the reality of the situation.
And that leads me to the YMCA, the ultimate devil in the detail.
If there’s one thing that everyone here agrees on, it’s that the YMCA only care about the £1000 a month they receive from housing benefit for each of the seven metre squared rooms they rent to us.
They’re past caring, and we all despise them for acting as if they do. It’s enough to put anyone off religion for life.
So, just to put you in the picture of where this is going, I’ve decided to remove myself from Britain.
I have a week’s work next week and after that I’m going to Europe on a mission to find as much danger as I can possibly get.
I’ll rather go out in a ball of flames than stick about here waiting to be ambushed on the way back from the chippy. Where’s the grace in that?