You Don't Know Me

10

What I was trying to say before I got all messed up before the break was that you can’t really understand what drugs will do to a person. Yeah you have heard about it but you probably haven’t ever seen it, first-hand, up close. When a person gets addicted, and believe, it don’t take long, it’s like nothing else. I can’t even describe it. How do I explain to you what it does to a person? Actually it does about five different things at once.

First it takes your mind. It takes everything that drives a human being out and throws them all away. Crack or heroin ain’t got no room for anything else in a person’s life. Not family, not work, not clothes, not washing, not even food. Think about it for a second, what it must be like to be like that. You wake up in the morning or afternoon or whatever and you have only one thing on your mind. You want nothing else, just that hit. You don’t want food or drink, you don’t want to get dressed, you don’t want to speak to anyone, you don’t even want to take a shit. So you hunt high and low for a hit. And then another one. Until eventually it takes your body and bit by bit destroys it.

Then it takes your conscience. You would jack your own mum on her own doorstep for some money for a hit. There is nothing you won’t do for your fix. Then when everything else is gone or ruined, crack will take your soul. When that happens, you ain’t even a person any more. You’re just some breathing meat and bones.

It makes me laugh. I heard some people on the tube once talking about prostitution, just chatting shit and that. This one woman she goes, ‘Eugh, disgusting. Why would you do that to yourself?’ when some woman I’m guessing she thought was a prostitute walked on. ‘Just think of all those horrible men you would have to have sex with,’ blah blah blah. This is why you would do that to yourselves. For a hit, a person will do much worse than that. A man would cut off his own dick for it. Trust. It is not a game. The only thing that keeps you going is the promise of another hit. Weird thing is that the only reason any of them is still alive is because they are keeping themselves alive for the next high.

That is what they were doing to Kira. I felt helpless just thinking about her. She was gone. Untold horrible shit was happening to her. And to make matters worse there was nothing I could do about it. What could I do? I am many things but I ain’t Sam L. What you would do is probably phone the police. What the police would do though as I found out is pretty much nothing.

She wasn’t missing. She was an adult. If she wanted to go hang out in the North with some bad boys and smoke a bag of crack that was up to her. Why the fuck should they do anything about it? I got nothing against Five-O for what it’s worth. Yeah some of them are low-lifes but they basically no different from like a bin man or whatever. They do what they have to do and no more. If someone empties a bin all over the street on your road, they might pick it up. If you empty one all over your own front yard, they leave it the fuck alone. If you want to live in a pigsty what business is it of anyone else’s?

That was that then. She was gone and my head had gone into some dark places. I started to think about her in like the past tense even though it had only been a couple of weeks. How she used to sit when she was reading her book. What she used to wear when she went to work. What the last thing she said to me was. What the last thing I said to her was. And that, that is what woke me up in the end. I had said some shit to her after the argument we had had about how I would allow the boy who smashed my Z3 for her.

‘I’ll let it go but only because I ain’t ready to let you go.’

Or if it wasn’t exactly them words it was something like that. Or maybe I didn’t even say it out loud, I had just thought it. Anyway the point I am making is that here I was already letting her go after just a couple of weeks. What kind of a man did that make me?

I thought about it for a long time. Of course I couldn’t just go into those estates and start shooting the place up. I didn’t even know where she was. But, I knew that if I asked around enough of the people who hung around that area I might at least find out where she was. My plan was then to hang around and wait until I saw her and then to take her.

It wasn’t a great plan. But it worked and I did find out where she was in the end. How I found her though, for that I have to tell you about Curt. He was the key to finding Kira. And the key to a lot of other shit too.

After Curt got moved schools back in the day, I didn’t see him for a while. He just kind of disappeared and I didn’t really think too much about it. Shit like that happened to kids like that. One day they were there and the next day – gone. A week or a month passed and truth be told I forgot all about him. Like I said before, we weren’t really tight. To me he was just that big kid who broke that idiot’s arm. Then one day, I must have been about sixteen then, on my way to the shops or something, I see this huge boy blocking my way on the pavement. Now this kind of shit is always a bit tense you get me. It’s basically one person’s way of fronting up the next person. Who has got the biggest balls and who is going to pussy out? I was never really the pussying-out kind you get me. Most people round my ends already knew that and after a few scrapes people knew who I was and they let me just get on my way. Even though I was never in no gang shit, people knew better than to mess me up. See, my thing was if you stayed out of my way I would stay out of your way. But if you put your face in my face, chances are I would rip yours off. Don’t get me wrong though. I hated all that. I didn’t like to have to go to war over some bit of macho bullshit but the fact was I would if I had to.

So here was this same kind of shit happening all over again. This is me, more or less the same height when I was sixteen as I am now. Here was this boy, more or less the size of a house. Shit. So my tactic with these big fuckers is to stamp on the kneecaps and then just unleash till boy’s kissing tarmac. If they are tooled up then usually I bounce. As fast as I can. Virtually nothing worth getting sliced up for man. And if there is a chance that some boy is in a gang, I swallow my pride and jet. So him and me get closer to each other. I am looking at the ground but I know we getting closer because this big lump is blocking out the light he is that big. I don’t recognize him from around these ends so I figure that he ain’t in no gang or no gang from around here. And he is alone. We get closer until there is almost no light between us. And I swear just as I am about to jump on the boy’s knees, I hear, ‘Yo blood.’ I look up and this face has cracked open and is feeding me this bright-lights smile. ‘Fuck,’ I goes, ‘Curt? Boy what they feeding you, ha ha?’

Since that day we was tight, he was a proper friend, and he was there with me from then on. As I said, I have to tell you about him because he’s important, to everything that happened. He’s part of this story.

When I first saw him again, Curt, he hadn’t changed all that much but he was definitely different. He was more serious. And these days he weren’t taking no shit from no one. At that time he weren’t in a gang either. We both had managed to sidestep that whole thing which was no small thing round our way. Usually every other week, if you were a known name, some next man from a gang would come knocking on your door trying to recruit you. There weren’t a thing they wouldn’t promise you and there weren’t a thing they wouldn’t threaten you with if they wanted you. They weren’t really that bothered about me even though a member is still a member and numbers are always important. But Curt they wanted. They were desperate for that boy and if you saw the size of him you could see why.

But the thing about Curt I soon found out was that he wasn’t really cut out for that shit. For one he weren’t really interested in money all that much. For two he hated being told what to do. Normally those two things alone would have ruled him out. A gang don’t want a person who they can’t control. Most people like to think that they won’t be controlled but then most people are liars. Most people will do any shit if the price is right and that basically means that they are controllable. Curt was different though.

I was with him one day a couple of years ago when three local boys stopped him in the street.

‘You Curt innit?’ one of them goes and when Curt nods he carries on talking, ‘I want to give you the chance of a lifetime blood.’

Curt tries to walk away because he knows what they are after but they block his path making a wall. Then the leader of these three goes, ‘I could give you a grand right now or I could shank you. Up to you blood.’

‘Shank me,’ he goes.

The three look at each other like, what the fuck is going on? If it was me I’d be maybe trying to fast-talk my way out of it, but this is some new shit to these boys. The leader, a little guy with one of them five panel caps pulls a shank out of his pocket and shows it to Curt. Curt takes a long look at the blade and then says, ‘What about you two?’ he says looking at the other two. Curt is standing there like he has been cemented into place. I, though, am on my toes, getting ready to jump in if the shit gets feisty.

The others show their weapons, grinning, but Curt doesn’t move.

‘Shank me,’ he goes. His fists are still in his pockets.

The leader comes nearer and holds his blade low. ‘We ain’t even fucking wid you blood,’ he says.

Suddenly Curt whips his hand out of his pocket and grabs the knife by the blade.

‘Shank me,’ he says, his face flat like a plate.

The boy’s eyes all panic and he’s trying to pull the knife back but he can’t release it from Curt’s grip. There is blood coming from Curt’s hand but you wouldn’t know it from looking at his face.

One of the others steps forward with his own knife and takes a swing at Curt. But this is a boy who’s never used a knife before. I can tell that because of the way it’s in his hand. He’s holding it like he’s holding a phone. I know that if you want to use a knife you hold it in your fist with the blade down, sharp edge out. This gives me enough chill to step into him and give him a couple of quick punches to the face. He drops down and I jack his knife while he’s still dazed.

Curt is still holding the blade. The boy at the other end of it is still ashy from fear. He looks at me with his boy’s knife in my hand and then runs. ‘You fuckers are dead. Dead!’ he goes as he’s running. I look around for the third boy but it seems like he went a while back. They came with three blades and left with one.

‘Fuck man,’ I say to Curt, looking at his hand.

‘It’s nothing,’ he says and clenches it shut again, blood spilling out the sides.

‘Nah man, it ain’t.’ I go and take my bandana off and tie it round. I pull it tight until the blood soaks through the cloth and then tie a double knot. Curt doesn’t flinch the whole time. I look at him for a reaction but I can’t find one.

‘That don’t make me gay,’ I say and we both start creasing.

We got to be good friends while he was in the ends. Curt would come round my yard and Mum would cook him dinner. She liked him even though he usually ate twice what she had in the house. In fact I reckon deep down she wouldn’t have liked him half as much if he didn’t eat so much. It was just one of them things. When he sat there eating, he looked like a child. There was nothing in the world at that moment. Just him and his plate.

She would pretend to moan about it afterwards. ‘The boy’s father must be a horse. Next time he comes I will give him a bag of oats.’ But there was also the mum thing that kicked in. As far as any mum is concerned when she’s feeding her kid’s friend, she’s really just feeding her own kid. And then, she also knew that Curt didn’t have a mum like I did. I mean he had a mum, but she weren’t no real mum. I think at the end of it that is the reason he kept asking if he could come round. Just so that he could get the feeling of what it might have been like to have a normal mum. And even though sometimes she would say, ‘So the horse is coming to dinner again?’ I knew that secretly Mum liked him.

In fact when he came round one day two years ago to tell us that he was moving back up to North London I remember seeing the look on Mum’s face. She had the same look in her eyes that she had when I told her I was moving out. She was trying not to cry and to style it out but a tear sneaked out of the corner of her eye anyway.

‘I hope you will still be coming back to see your friend, eh?’

Curt just looks at the floor, saying nothing.

‘I will make you dumplings if you like them,’ she says and turns back to her cooking.

Every now and then Mum would mention him. ‘Have you seen your horse friend?’ or ‘Instead of sitting in front of games all day long you should call up your horse friend and speak to a person.’ So I would call him from time to time and see how he was getting on. Anyway once I heard the rumour that Ki might be somewhere up in North London, Curt was the natural person to call. In fact he was probably the only person I even knew from North London.