The Big Read: We need to talk about Tommy

29 July 2016 - 02:39 By Darrel Bristow-Bovey

There's a kid in my neighbourhood I've been worrying about for a while. I moved here four years ago and he was about 13 then, a skinny kid living in a small flat above the mattress shop. The entrance to his flat is on a small side road around the corner from my house and when I walked down to Main Road I'd often see him there, sitting on the stairs after school or kicking a tennis ball. He was a lonely kid, so I noticed him.I've never spoken to him. There are some grown men who can strike up friendships with lonely teenaged boys without it being awkward and creepy - I know there are, because I've seen it happen on TV and in the movies - and they go on to be mentors and positive influences, but I don't know how to be one of them. I don't think he has ever noticed me - the only interaction we've ever had was the time he was playing cricket in the road with some younger kids and the ball hit my windscreen as I drove down the road. The kids all scattered and I wanted to call after them that I wasn't angry, that tennis balls and car windscreens are made for each other, that roads are built for after-school cricket not cars, that I'm the one who's sorry for breaking up their game.He lives with his mother, I assume, in the tiny flat over the mattress shop, and she works long hours and is gone in the early morning and doesn't come home till late. If he reminded me a little bit of myself when I first noticed him, soon he started reminding me of Tommy A, who lived with his mom in a small flat over the tearoom when I was a kid on the Bluff. "Tearoom" is what Durban people called cafés, and somehow I absorbed the message that by living in a small flat over a tearoom, Tommy A was at greater risk than the rest of us.My family wasn't poor compared to most black families in South Africa but we were poor compared to other white families. We moved every year or so, from one small rented house to another, but we were a clear social rung above Tommy A and his mom, who never moved from their tiny flat above the tearoom.Tommy started sweet and we were friends, but as the years passed he grew harder. No one expected him to do well at school so he didn't. He hung around with older kids. He started taking coins from younger kids to play Scramble and Asteroid. We still played together sometimes but when things didn't go his way he became mean. No one wanted to fight him, not because he was strong, although he was, but because you sensed that his threshold for the acceptable infliction and endurance of pain was different to yours.I watched Tommy A closely because we had started out the same but now he was clearly marked by something. Something dark and hard hung over him, and he would never be happy or make anyone else happy. I escaped because I could read well and I knew how to write exams. I learnt how to stay safe from the world but Tommy only ever learnt to fight. By the time I went to a high school in town, Tommy had stolen his first bike. I think Tommy's dead now.So when I saw the kid in the flat above the mattress store start to turn like Tommy A, I was worried. I only just made it out and Tommy didn't, and we were white in a society that gave white kids a hand if they knew how to take it, so what chance did this kid have? I saw him start hanging with some older kids and ranging further afield in the neighbourhood. I saw him smoking on the promenade; another time he was talking to some guys drinking from a bottle. I wanted to do something. I thought about how if Woke Twitter knew I wanted to do something they'd sneer at me for my White Saviour complex, and that made me realise how little I care about Woke Twitter.Anyway, intentions mean nothing and I didn't do anything. Then last month I went to the gym and he was there in a red shirt behind the counter, standing taller than I've seen him stand, the way people do when they have a job and they see a way, however hazy, opening ahead of them. He has bought himself a mountain bike, I see, and he plans to become a personal trainer. I overheard him lecture someone about the evils of smoking...

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