You Don't Know Me

9

The streets are a strange place. Always someone somewhere got a rumour to tell or sell. When Jamil was shot, the police said that they came looking for me because of a rumour. Well that ain’t a surprising thing in itself. It’s a lie, but that’s another story. But rumours are definitely everywhere, that is true. Eventually one of these rumours came my way. It was telling me that someone had spotted Kira in North London. ‘My Kira?’ I said. ‘North London? Don’t be fucking stupid.’ But Kira, as I said earlier, wasn’t a girl that you could easily mistake.

To you maybe north and south ain’t nothing but a line on a map. But to me and the people I grew up with it’s like a different country. You can go up to Camden Town with your girl or what have you for a day out but you better not be going up there with your boys unless you are fully prepared to get into something. You don’t even have to be ganged up to cause a beef. You could just be a normal guy out with your mates and people will assume you are in a gang. It’s just an age thing. I heard loads of stories of young guys being knifed up just for straying into the wrong ends. Even when they were on their own. People look out for you. And if they don’t know you and you’re on their patch, they will come after you. For no reason other than you walking on their ground, you get me. So for her to be up in North was definitely a worry, even though she was a girl. Why she was up in North was a whole different question.

It wasn’t long before everyone round my ends knew that I was looking hard for Kira and it wasn’t long before mans were coming to me with bits and pieces of information. Most of it was shit. I even went up there, Camden, Chalk Farm and them kind of places a couple of times to see what I could see, but what I saw was nothing.

Then this one guy I knew who had just come out of Belmarsh Prison told me something that sounded legit. He weren’t like a mate of mine, more just someone I knew from the area. He was like a face. People knew him. Anyway I saw him one day on the street and he stopped me to ask me if I could get him some wheels. And I was like, ‘Course fam.’ And then he starts telling me he’s heard about my Ki and I might be interested to hear what he’s heard. And I was like, ‘Shit bruv. Tell me what you know.’ Turns out this guy had shared a landing with Kira’s brother who was on the same wing doing a ten for some fucked up shit he had gotten involved in. I knew a bit about Spooks from his sister but I didn’t know the details till then.

What I heard was that Spooks had been a crack and meth dealer. He weren’t nothing high up, just a soldier. But a drug soldier is like a real soldier in one way and that is that he is usually the first one to get popped. When Spooks got caught though, it turned out he was looking at a fifteen guaranteed. Fifteen years! The Feds had gone to his yard and found the whole fucking circus there. There were scales, cutting agents, a bag of pills and a kilo of coke. They even found a nine mil. It was the shooter that was going to bury him. Five years for that and probably another ten on top for the drugs.

Now there are two kinds of people in the world. There are those who can do a fifteen-year sentence standing on their heads and there are those who can’t. The ones who can ain’t usually drug addicts. Spooks was a crack addict and like crack addicts everywhere he would have sold his mum for a draw if she’d been alive. When he found out he was looking at a fifteen, Spooks apparently collapsed on the spot. When he came round again, he did the only thing he could. He went Queen’s Evidence on his supplier. For that he got a text from the police and a discount of five years on his time. It also got him a death sentence from the supplier. Nobody likes a grass innit?

This shit is all supposed to be secret. The police tell you that they will keep your name out of it. They don’t even mention in court that a person has helped the police. The judge don’t even mention it in court. The judge just gets the ‘text’, which is basically a note, from the police and then gives a low sentence. That is what is supposed to happen. Word is what actually happened was that after the sentence the police went to see the dealer and told him that Spooks had grassed him up. Just so that they could try and get the dealer to give a confession. They basically didn’t give a shit what happened to Spooks. Far as they were concerned, he was just a low life. Which, to be fair, he was. Still is.

That first night on the wing must have been a nightmare for Spooks. It would have been bad enough that he was clucking, you know like cold turkey, but on top of that he was a grass. And you know what happens to a grass in jail or if you don’t you probably can guess. Four separate people tried to shank him that night and three of them didn’t even have nothing to do with it. They just didn’t like informers. So after that they put him on the numbers, which is like segregation, and he spent the next two years on twenty-three-hours bang-up. Twenty-three hours in a cell is some hard time, I tell you. I don’t even think they lock up zoo animals that long. But as far as Spooks was concerned he was better off there than in general population. In general pop, he knew he wouldn’t even last as long as it took for him to shit himself.

He was safe for a while but he was still waiting for what he knew was inevitable. One way or another they would get to him. He knew that.

They got to him eventually through the screws. And I know about screws, the prison guards. I been on remand for the last year waiting for my trial. I’m not supposed to tell you that I am currently in prison in case it prejudices my case. It’s like if I’m in prison waiting for my trial I must have done the crime. But I don’t mind telling you. I’m up on a murder, that’s prejudice enough. Besides, I’m bound to be on remand – it is murder, innit? Where else they going to put me? You ain’t stupid. You know that they put murderers in prison while they wait for their trial. Even if they are innocent. Like me.

When I started I thought prison was like them and us. Us, being the inmates and them being the screws. It’s not like that. What it is, is them and them and you. In fact screws and other prisoners got more in common with each other than they got with you. That sounds weird but it’s true. Because no inmate and no screw gives a fuck about you unless there’s something in it for them. And a screw will do what he wants and if what he wants is to give you up to some next villain, he will. Some do it for a few dollars on the side. Others will do it just for kicks. Anyways it was the screws that got to him. They let a boy on to the wing pushing a library trolley and just as Spooks came to pick up a magazine or something, he wet him up. It wasn’t pretty.

Maybe I should tell you lot about that. Stuff you learn in prison, man. ‘Wet-up’. What it is, yeah, is you get a cup of boiling water. Dissolve a load of sugar in it to make it stick. Then you throw it in the guy’s face. Brutal. I know. But it turns out that he deserved every second of agony he got.

Once he knew they could get to him even on the numbers, he had no choice but to make another deal. This time though he had to deal with his dealers and not Five-O. He didn’t have that much he could bargain with though. The money was all gone – what there had been of it. He didn’t have any power and he didn’t have any drugs. All he had was himself, which was basically a broke crack-addict dealer with nothing but his stones in his pockets. But these boys have a ways of getting blood from stones. And that is what they got from him. His blood. His sister. My Kira.

Okay, so I have forgotten what I am telling you all this for. This must be the reason these QCs write everything down. Well what it is yeah, is that I can write but my writing ain’t like exact for one thing and for another thing I write quite slow. For you, hearing that must be like, ‘Oh yeah he must be thick’ or whatever. Maybe I am a bit in terms of writing but not in terms of talking. Virtually no one in my school was good at writing, but most of them could chat shit for England. Then again you get what you pay for and what we paid for in that school was fuck all. I wonder what he paid for his schooling though? This prosecutor? Thousands I bet. So he can fuck off.

I mean if he went to my school and ended up where he is I’ll give him enough respect, I swear down, blood. Did he though? Or did he go to some thousands of pounds a year private school in a bow tie?

So this pisses me off, since we’re talking about him. He goes on about it was a tragedy that JC or Jamil, whatever you want to call him, was shot dead at the age of nineteen. That ain’t no tragedy, believe. You think even Mr Prosecutor believes JC’s death is a tragedy? Please … A tragedy is what happened to Kira. That girl had nothing. Nothing, you get me. She had a crack-dealer brother and that is it. She was living on her own when she was fifteen. Working in Tesco for whatever night hours she could – always with a book in her hand while other people had theirs hands in the till. And then this shit comes along and makes it worse. You show me a tragedy and I will show you her.

So yeah, I am sorry in a ways. But in another ways I can’t help feeling angry about it.

So where was I? I remember – Spooks. Spooks, sold his sister to save his own sorry-arse life. He should have rather killed himself than did anything to that girl. But that is it. You can’t change what happened. The boys he had been running with was some serious boys. They weren’t no plastic gangsters like JC and those kids. These boys were men. And they were proper hard mans. To give you an idea let me tell you what happened to some boy last year who didn’t know who he was playing with. And I know the Judge is looking at me like how many times are we going on diversion. But you need to know about this.

These guys that Spooks sold out to, ran all of North London. They sold heroin and crack on almost every corner of every estate from Camden to Seven Sisters and Tottenham. Yeah you can’t see it where you go because you don’t know your way round. If you go to Seven Sisters or wherever, you probably go on the main road and you will see the usual shit. McDonald’s, the shitty menswear shops full of some fucked up African clothing and big pointed crocodile skin shoes and you will think, ‘Oh poor fuckers, that is so deprived.’

But you need to get off the main roads to see what it is really like. Go around the back, where the roads run out and you will see these massive estates you hear about whenever they talk about gun crime on the news. They are hidden, which is a surprise considering how huge these places are, but they are only hidden from you. They ain’t hidden from us who live there.

Anyway all these estates in the North are run by this crew called Glockz. Kira’s brother Spooks was a member of this gang as it happens. Anyway Glockz don’t like strange faces on their patch. So this one guy pulls up in his Range Rover one day and starts selling draws out of his car window to anyone who wants some. It’s not five minutes before word gets round that some Pagan is on their turf.

You guys are looking at me with them blank faces again. So I’m guessing it’s something I said. Is it ‘pagan’? Okay, okay. So ‘pagan’ is like what you would call a rival gang member if you was in a gang. Which I ain’t. Obviously.

So Glockz hear about this guy and send some soldiers round to see what’s gwanning with this joker in his Range Rover on their patch.

Three guys tap on the window and the driver gets out smiling. He points a fucking MAC-10 at them and these boys run off, terrified. Big man thinks that’s the end of it. But that is not how this shit works round those ends. In another five minutes six cars pulled round and blocked off the Range Rover. Four men from each car came out and surrounded it. Then all the tyres are stabbed out and when the Range Rover drops six inches like it’s just had enough and collapsed, the guy gets back out of his car.

He holds his MAC-10 in the air like in a surrender and pulls out this cheesy grin over his face. ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘This ain’t even got no bullets man. We can share up the action bredders. Plenty to go round yeah?’

Sixteen men with wheel braces, baseball bats, big long fuck-off knives, one even had a Samurai sword, spend five minutes going to work on this guy. By the time they finished, this guy had to be scraped off the ground with a shovel.

These were the guys that Spooks had supposedly sold his sister to. My Kira! When I found out, I went white. Well you know what I mean. You might as well find out that your girl’s dead. I spent weeks feeling as if she had died. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what sort of shit they had lined up for her. But all I had was my imagination and in it, they spent a few weeks breaking her down and then when she finally got a taste for the needle she did whatever.

Sorry. Just give me a minute yeah?

In my head they got her and they drugging her and – sorry.

I can’t even believe I’m crying after everything else that happened with her later. But just thinking about it here and now brings it back. I feel like I’m back there. Living it and ––

Is it okay to have a break, Judge, for like five minutes?