THE RIVER ITCHEN, YUSUF AND THE FUTILITY OF RACISM
Jordan Pearce was sixteen when the River Itchen nearly killed him.

Yusuf Ali was twelve when it happened.

That is where this story begins.

Not with politics.

Not with some shite argument about immigration.

Not with a bloke shouting at a television or somebody banging on about how the country isn't what it used to be.

It begins with two kids on a council estate beside a dirty tidal river.

One had learned to hate.

The other had learned to help.

And neither of them understood, at the time, where that would lead.

The estate stood hard against the muddy edge of the Itchen. There was nothing picturesque about it. This wasn't the sort of river you put on a postcard.

It was a working river.

Brown water.

Silt.

Broken timber.

Plastic caught in the reeds.

Old bits of rubbish turning slowly in the tide.

When the water pulled away, it left behind thick mud and the stink of rotting weed. The smell got into your clothes and stayed there.

Jordan knew every inch of that estate.

He knew the cracked paving slabs outside Thornbury House. He knew the burnt patches of grass, the broken communal gates and the stairwells where older lads stood smoking beneath flickering lights.

He knew what it was like to be skint.

His dad had been laid off from the yard. His mum had packed a battered suitcase and walked out.

She didn't come back.

Jordan didn't have the words for what that did to him.

He was sixteen.

He was frightened.

He was angry.

And anger is a cheap disguise for pain.

It makes you feel ten feet tall when inside you're falling to pieces.

Then somebody gave Jordan something else to blame.

The Ali family moved into flat 14B.

Yusuf was twelve.

A skinny kid with a wide grin, a gap between his front teeth and an old football permanently tucked beneath his arm.

He laughed loudly.

He made friends easily.

He wasn't frightened of people.

Jordan hated him almost immediately.

Not because Yusuf had done anything to him.

He hadn't.

That was the whole bloody point.

Jordan didn't know him.

He didn't know what music Yusuf liked. He didn't know what made him laugh. He didn't know whether the kid was frightened at night. He didn't know what he'd left behind or how much he missed it.

He didn't know a single thing that mattered.

But he'd already decided what Yusuf was.

Different.

An outsider.

Not one of us.

That is where prejudice gets its grip.

You stop looking at a person and start looking at a label.

Once you've turned somebody into a label, you don't have to think about them anymore.

You can shout at them.

Humiliate them.

Blame them.

Hate them.

Because you're no longer looking at a human being.

You're looking at the cardboard cut-out you've created in your own head.

So Jordan started on Yusuf.

Day after day.

He told him to go back where he came from.

He told him this was a British block.

He told him his family had no business being there.

He repeated things he'd heard from older lads, from blokes in pubs and from loudmouths online.

Dean laughed.

Ricky-Lee joined in.

Jordan laughed louder than both of them.

They called it banter.

It wasn't banter.

It was bullying.

It was racism.

And somewhere underneath all the noise, Jordan knew it.

Then one afternoon Yusuf's mum, Amina, came downstairs.

She asked Jordan politely to stop his dog fouling the grass outside her window.

It was a reasonable request.

Jordan could have apologised.

Instead, he looked her straight in the face and told her to go back to the desert and take her stink with her.

He saw her flinch.

For one horrible second, Jordan felt powerful.

That's the trick hatred plays.

It convinces you that cruelty is strength.

It isn't.

It is weakness wearing a big coat.

And what did Jordan's hatred actually achieve?

Absolutely bloody nothing.

His dad was still unemployed.

His mum was still gone.

The plaster was still peeling from the walls.

Jordan was still skint.

His life was still falling apart.

Yusuf hadn't taken any of it from him.

Not one penny.

Not one job.

Not one roof tile.

Not one scrap of happiness.

Jordan had simply found somebody smaller than himself to carry the blame.

Then came the evening everything changed.

The sky over the Itchen had turned purple and grey.

The tide was running hard.

Jordan and his mates were drinking cheap cider beside the concrete slipway, sixteen years old and full of the sort of confidence only young lads with no understanding of consequences can possess.

Jordan wanted to show off.

He climbed onto the slimy edge of the river.

He spread his arms.

"Watch this," he shouted. "Proper English lad, me. Scared of nothing."

His trainer slipped.

His feet disappeared.

Then the river took him.

One second he was standing there.

The next he was gone.

Cold water punched the breath from his lungs.

He swallowed filthy river water.

His clothes became heavy.

The current grabbed him and pulled.

He kicked.

He clawed.

He screamed.

But the river didn't care.

It didn't care that Jordan was British.

It didn't care that he was white.

It didn't care that he was poor.

It didn't care where his parents were born.

The river had no politics.

No prejudice.

No favourite.

It was simply water.

Cold, powerful water.

And Jordan was drowning.

For the first time in his life, all that loud talk meant absolutely nothing.

Then Yusuf saw him.

The twelve-year-old was walking home along the towpath with his football tucked under his arm.

He saw Jordan disappear.

He dropped the ball.

And ran.

Yusuf could barely swim.

But he jumped in anyway.

Think about that.

The boy Jordan had spent two years abusing.

The kid he'd told to leave the country.

The boy whose mother he'd humiliated.

That same boy saw somebody drowning and didn't stop to ask whether he deserved saving.

He didn't think about revenge.

He didn't think, "Good."

He didn't walk away.

He saw a human being in trouble.

And he went after him.

Yusuf grabbed Jordan's jacket.

The current pulled at them both.

The cold water tore at Yusuf's thin body, but he held on.

Jordan panicked.

Yusuf held tighter.

Then Dean dropped onto his stomach on the riverbank, reached down and grabbed Jordan by the collar.

Between them, they dragged him out.

Jordan collapsed onto the concrete.

He vomited river water.

His lungs burned.

His knees were torn open.

He lay there shaking, sucking in air and trying to understand why he was still alive.

Then he looked around.

"Where's Yusuf?"

Nobody answered.

The Itchen rolled past them.

Quiet on top.

Deadly underneath.

They found Yusuf's body two days later.

Downstream.

Jordan was in hospital when they told him.

He could hear his dad crying in the corridor.

And somewhere inside Jordan, the whole rotten lie finally collapsed.

The boy he'd spent two years treating as an outsider had given his life trying to save him.

The boy Jordan had called names had shown more courage in sixty seconds than Jordan had shown in sixteen years.

Yusuf hadn't taken anything from Jordan.

He hadn't stolen his father's job.

He hadn't broken up his family.

He hadn't caused his poverty.

He hadn't caused his pain.

Jordan had simply needed somebody to blame.

And racism had given him the easiest answer in the world.

A lie.

A convenient lie.

A lie that demanded nothing from him except that he stop thinking.

Jordan went to the mosque on the day of Yusuf's funeral.

He stood outside the gates.

He didn't think he had the right to go in.

Amina saw him.

Jordan expected anger.

He expected hatred.

He expected her to tell him exactly what she thought of him.

Instead, she walked towards him.

She looked him straight in the eye.

"He talked about you," she said.

Jordan couldn't speak.

"Every week."

He stared at the pavement.

Then Amina told him what Yusuf had said.

"That boy is sad, Hooyo."

Jordan looked up.

The words hit him harder than anything anybody could have said.

Yusuf had understood him.

The twelve-year-old he'd hated had seen something Jordan couldn't see in himself.

He wasn't tough.

He wasn't powerful.

He wasn't defending anything.

He was a miserable kid carrying pain around and throwing it at somebody else because he didn't know where else to put it.

Amina stood quietly in front of him.

"My son forgave you before you ever asked him," she said.

Jordan broke down.

"But I don't know if I can forgive you yet."

She paused.

"But I won't let you destroy yourself with guilt either. That would mean my son's kindness bought nothing."

Then she walked back inside.

Jordan stayed on the pavement and cried.

He cried for Yusuf.

He cried for his dad.

He cried for his mum.

He cried for the frightened kid he'd been and the horrible young man he was becoming.

But most of all, he cried because he finally understood the con.

Racism had promised him pride.

It had given him nothing.

It hadn't brought his mum home.

It hadn't got his dad's job back.

It hadn't put money in his pocket.

It hadn't repaired the family.

It hadn't made him stronger.

It hadn't made him better.

It had simply handed him an enemy.

An enemy who had never actually been his enemy.

A few days later, Dean tried to start the old routine outside the lock-ups.

"Go on, Jord. Do the voice."

Jordan looked at him.

"No."

Dean laughed nervously.

"What you on about?"

"I said no."

"Since bloody when?"

Jordan stared straight at him.

"Since Yusuf."

Dean looked down at his trainers.

For once, there was nothing funny to say.

Jordan walked away.

It didn't bring Yusuf back.

Nothing could.

It didn't erase the words he'd shouted or the humiliation he'd caused.

It didn't make him innocent.

But he could stop the poison travelling any further.

Because that's how this stuff spreads.

One person hears a lie.

They repeat it.

Somebody younger hears it.

They repeat it again.

Soon you've got a group of people raging about strangers they've never met, blaming people they've never spoken to and defending a version of Britain that exists mostly inside their own heads.

Hatred gets passed down like an inheritance nobody ever asked for.

Jordan decided his line was going to be different.

Years later, he still walks beside the Itchen when the light begins to disappear.

The river hasn't changed much.

The tide still comes in.

The tide still goes out.

The mud still stinks.

Rust still clings to the old ironwork.

The water still moves past the estate as if none of it ever happened.

Sometimes an old football gets caught in the reeds.

When Jordan sees one, he stops.

He looks across the grey water.

And quietly says the name.

"Yusuf."

Not a foreigner.

Not an outsider.

Not an immigrant.

Not a label.

Not a headline.

Yusuf.

A twelve-year-old kid with a gap between his teeth, an old football under his arm and enough courage to jump into freezing water for somebody who hated him.

That's the thing about racism.

It promises you strength while making you smaller.

It promises you somebody to blame when your own life hurts.

It tells you that another person's existence is the reason you're struggling.

And if you believe it long enough, you stop seeing people.

You see categories.

You see enemies.

You see "them".

And once you've stopped seeing another human being, almost anything becomes possible.

But the river doesn't see "them" and "us".

Neither does death.

Neither does grief.

Neither does a frightened twelve-year-old boy watching another kid disappear beneath the water.

Yusuf saw a human being.

That's all.

And perhaps that is the simplest lesson of the whole bloody story.

Hatred is heavy.

You carry it around thinking it makes you strong.

Sometimes you carry it for years.

Then one day you discover it was never protecting you at all.

It was weighing you down.

And if you aren't careful, hatred will drag you under.

Just like water.