Anders was developing a steady hand. He didn’t mess anything up, the paint didn’t bubble, the lines came out even, without wobbling. He applied the silver spray paint without letting it drip onto or dust the black, while still keeping the colour even and filling in the whole picture.
But one day somebody openly mocked Morg on Egertorget. Mocked his inflated ambition. His boastfulness, his exaggerated hip-hop walk and the way he wore his trousers back to front to be cool. Trousers that were to be as outsized as those worn in music videos.
The taunts continued the next time he came along. And the next. Morg seemingly took no notice. Ahmed wasn’t there any more. He had been expelled from Ris for making trouble and now hung out with friends and relations in the East End. Spok and Wick found themselves caught in the middle. They didn’t play an active part in the bullying, but took an imperceptible step back whenever it started. They didn’t want to risk being dragged into anything. On the way home, Anders tried to make a joke of the whole thing.
It didn’t take long for the big taggers to show Morg that he was no longer welcome. They didn’t say it outright, just went from openly ridiculing him to totally ignoring him.
‘I didn’t have the balls to do anything,’ admitted Spok many years later. ‘I just stood there like a moron and hoped they wouldn’t start on me.’
Anders had committed a cardinal sin. He hadn’t known his place. He was a toy but had behaved like a king. In other words, like a wannabe.
Anders fought tooth and nail to keep his place in the community. But the bullying spread to his own little clique and his friends deserted him.
A pitiless panel composed of Wick and Spok delivered the coup de grâce.
Morg was thrown out of the gang.
At a much later date, when Wick was called in to be interviewed by the police about the friend with whom he had broken sixteen years before, he reverted to the value judgements of a teenage tagger: ‘He belonged to the cool gang for a while, even though he wasn’t cool. He was basically a fifth wheel. In the end we wouldn’t put up with him any longer.’
The logic was clear. ‘We soon realised we wouldn’t get anywhere with Anders in tow, so we had to make a choice. Either stand up for him or join one of the top taggers.’
With Anders gone from the Writers’ Bench, both Spok and Wick were recruited by good crews and went on tagging.
Cool or not cool, that was the question.
But Anders didn’t give up tagging. If he just carried on, if he just got better and better, they would have to acknowledge him and he could be a king after all.
He started tagging with boys younger than himself. Boys who hadn’t picked up on the fact that Anders wasn’t hip any more.
One of them was a skinny little kid from one of the biggest houses in the neighbourhood, whose parents were away a lot. He was in the year below Anders at Ris, did a bit of tagging and was dumbfounded by the sight of the arsenal of aerosol cans neatly stowed under the veranda. Anders used to spend a lot of time considering the colours he would use, weighing the cans in his hand before he covered up his palette along the wall so it couldn’t be seen from the path.
The top taggers were obsessive about having all their equipment in order, while the small fry went round aimlessly, without a plan.
One evening Anders pointed out a place he wanted to tag. He had his eye on a piece done by one of the big names. The younger tagger protested.
‘No way. You can’t write over that!’
‘I tag where I like,’ said Anders as he took the first paint can out of his bag.
In addition to the countless understandings about what was cool, the graffiti community had two absolute rules that should not be broken: don’t tell on anyone, and don’t tag over other writers’ pieces.
There were subtle, fluid exceptions. A king could write over the tag of a toy, but not the other way round. Someone good could write over someone bad. A big, coloured piece was permitted to cover a simple tag. A piece that was starting to fade could be written over, if you asked the permission of the person who had put it up. You could make the judgement yourself, but it had better be a good one.
‘Let’s find a bare wall instead.’
‘No, I want to tag here,’ insisted Anders in the darkness of the bus station.
‘You gotta ask first!’
Anders turned to the wall. He flicked the cap off the spray can and raised his hand.
He pressed the button.
The spray hit the wall, spreading over the other tagger’s name.
MORG it said, for the passengers to read the next morning.
MORG, it informed the tagger whose signature had been obliterated.
A king could do what he wanted.
Not a toy.
He had thrown down the gauntlet.
Just before Christmas when he was in Year 9, Anders went by himself to Copenhagen to replenish his stock of spray cans. He bought all the colours he needed, put them in his bag and caught the train home.On 23 December, when he got to Oslo Central, he was stopped by the police. They confiscated the contents of his bag – forty-three cans of spray paint – and sent him to the child welfare duty officer, who informed his home. The officer wrote the following report: ‘Mother not aware he had been in Denmark. He went to Denmark once before without telling his mother. The records show the boy received two previous warnings for tagging and vandalism in February and March 1994.’
The child welfare office conducted interviews with Anders and his mother in the new year and logged that the latter was concerned her son might be turning to crime. There was ‘genuine concern about his involvement in the tagging community,’ wrote the child welfare officer. ‘Such communities are known for activities and behaviour bordering on the criminal. The boy himself claims he no longer spends his time with any tagging community.’
Anders was certainly right about that. He no longer had a community.
The child welfare log ended as follows:
02.02.95: Letter from Anders that he no longer wishes to cooperate with the child welfare authorities, as a result of ‘disclosures’ at school.
07.02.95: Meeting scheduled with the boy at the office. Did not attend.
13.02.95: Meeting scheduled with mother and son at the office. Neither attended.
Not turning up to a pre-arranged meeting was an effective tactic for avoiding the spotlight of the child welfare office. The case was not pursued because it was ‘not judged serious enough to warrant intervention and support on the part of child welfare officers’.
‘Morg’s squealed.’
At Egertorget, the boys sat talking. Net wasn’t surprised when word spread. Nobody knew what he had said, who he had informed on, or whether anyone had been arrested as a result. It didn’t help. Once the rumour was out, you were marked.
Backs were all that Anders saw now. No one wanted anything to do with him.
School became an extension of the nightmare. As soon as Anders appeared, whether it was before lessons or in the evening, kids ganged up on him. And these were people not remotely connected to the tagging community. He had turned into someone everybody could trample on. His favourite phrases were circulated and mocked, and his big nose was caricatured.
Anders started lifting weights, ideally twice a day. He developed quickly, from thin and weak to broad and strong. His classmates wondered if he was on steroids. At Ris, weight training was seen as far from cool; it was only years later that it became trendy.
Anders was left sitting alone now. Well, not invariably. Sometimes he sat with a couple of others from the fourth group: the losers.