You Don't Know Me

11

I met him up just after ten o’clock in the McDonald’s on Seven Sisters Road. I had forgotten how big the boy was. That or he had grown since I last saw him. He was sitting at one of the tables and I walked over and checked him. He stood up while I sat and then sat again and put his huge hands on the table in front of me.

‘Man you look old,’ he goes and laughs this great big bear laugh that he has and which would have shook the table over if it hadn’t been bolted to the floor.

‘Listen blood, I need your help on something innit,’ I said and told him about Kira.

‘It’s fucked up man. I liked that girl,’ he says and looks down at his two burgers.

‘Bro I been turning London inside out looking for her.’

‘You need to forget about her man,’ he says after taking a giant bite out of his burger. ‘I hear she been caught up.’

‘Glockz?’ I say.

Curt takes a second bite of his burger and it’s gone. He chews slowly and just after he swallows he picks out another from a box on the table. Even a Big Mac looks tiny in his hand.

‘It’s what I hear,’ he says.

‘I just need to know where she is Curt.’

‘That I can help you with blood,’ he says and demolishes the second burger.

From what I gathered, Curt wasn’t exactly hooked up to Glockz but he had certain privileges. He knew the General for one and so had a way of finding shit out if he needed to.

‘Man I thought you were against all that gang shit,’ I said to him, ‘How the fuck you all Glockz?’

‘Long story,’ he says. ‘Long. But if you want to know where she is at, link me in a couple of days. I give you whatever I got.’

‘Safe bruv. I’ll check you in a couple of days’ I say, and leave.

When I link up with him two days later all the smiles was gone from his face.

‘You’ll find her working King’s Cross, Camden, them kind of streets,’ he says looking at the ground.

‘Shit,’ I say, because that is all I can think. Curt looks down as if he wants to be somewhere else. ‘I owe you,’ I say at last and touch his shoulder with my fist as I get up to go.

‘Nah man,’ he says.

‘Is she okay?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Fuck.’

‘You know who her brother is?’ he says raising an eyebrow at me.

‘Yeah.’

‘Proper freak innit.’

‘Yeah blood. Proper.’

As I turn to walk away something doesn’t feel right in what he’s telling me. She was working the streets already? Normally it took more than a couple of weeks to get them crazy for crack before they walked the streets. It just didn’t really make sense to me. I look across at him.

‘One thing though bro. They broke her down quick innit?’

‘Nah. That’s the weird thing man. She just agreed from what I hear.’

‘What?’

‘She’s clean. She just made them promise that they had Spooks’ back.’

I didn’t even bother going home after seeing Curt. I just wanted to find her and if there was a chance she could be there on a street right at that minute, I didn’t want to waste it. I jumped on the bus to Camden and got off near the tube. Camden on a Saturday night is pretty much heaving to look at it from the outside. But only parts of it are, really and truly. The Lock. Stables Market. The Canal. All them areas where the tourists go, they are rammed. But I knew that she weren’t going to be in no tourist places. That’s not what Curt meant when he said Camden. He meant the kind of places where a pimp could let a girl loose and catch hold of her if she got up to any shit, without anyone trying to step up. Deserted places. Back alley places. A place where if you went there, you went there for a specific reason.

I decided to walk down Camden High Street and head towards like where the canal is. Just behind the hospital and round the back of King’s Cross Station. It was pretty wild there still, even though there was all these new buildings coming up everywhere you looked. But these new places were just where people could see. There was still hidden places. Secret places no one wanted to see. I carried on to the towpath where a lot of the prostitutes had been forced to move. Cleaning the place up, is what they called it but in truth it was just brushing up dirt and moving it someplace else. I didn’t see her and to be honest with you I was relieved. I didn’t want to see her in them kind of places. Then just before I called it a night I decided to head up nearer to York Way. More dead space. Or nearly dead.

I found her under a bridge.

I can’t even tell you what it was like to see her again. This was a girl I had been stretching my eyes to see for the last couple of weeks. I would look at crowds of people, scanning thousands of faces like the Terminator, looking for her. If someone had her hair or was wearing something that looked like what she might wear I would run across to them and tap them on the shoulder. I didn’t mind looking like a weirdo, I just needed to find her. So when I saw her standing there in a doorway near that bridge I was so surprised that I looked straight past her. I mean, I saw her. I thought it was a face I recognized from somewhere but it wasn’t her I was seeing. Then I looked again. And it was her. She was like her own ghost. Her face which had been a face that could stop cars had lost all its light. It was just like she had gone and left her body behind on autopilot.

I was all set to just walk over and get her when I saw a car pull up and wind its window down. Some next man was talking at her but she was looking straight into the distance. Then a guy comes over, one of these Glockz boys probably, and takes some money off of the driver and then pushes her in the back seat. And just like that she was gone. Again.

I waited all night for her to come back but she never came back. I didn’t know where she’d gone or whether she was alive even. By the time I went home it was light and I felt worse than I did before I saw her. I went back the next day and then the next day after that but nothing. One time there was a different girl there but not Kira. I even spoke to her but she didn’t know who Kira was and then I ran as a Glockz boy had come running over. He was shouting that he’d shoot me and whatever for wasting his time but I didn’t care about that.

After that I linked up Curt again and asked him to find out what the score was. They moved these girls around a bit, he told me. You couldn’t leave a girl in one place. It was bad for business. Punters wanted new faces and if they saw the same old face day after day they would go elsewhere. And then some of the others would grow too attached and that also caused problems of a different kind.

Curt gave me a list of other places to try so I tried them but I didn’t find her again. I had some wheels that I was finding it difficult to sell on and started driving round to look for her. You could only cover so many miles on foot and bus so I knew I needed to drive. The wheels made it easier even though these weren’t my ends and I didn’t want to be tagged for my car. Boys recognize your ride and the kind of ride I was rocking weren’t no Ford Fiesta that you could be invisible in. This one was an Audi A3 with some bad alloys on it and for the first time in my life I wished I was driving some old man’s car that wouldn’t attract any attention. It might sound stupid to you but there are kids out there who know who owns every car in their area and who will ring out the bells if some phat car turns up scouting the estate.

Even so, I went from place to place, looking and looking. In one night sometimes I went to six or seven different spots in King’s Cross, Swiss Cottage, Angel, Tottenham, everywhere on my list. Then about five days after I first saw her, just as I was losing hope, I saw her again. The same place I saw her the first time. Just by a small doorway under the steel bridge at King’s Cross. Though it was her if you looked hard enough, it still wasn’t really her. It was just a shadow.

I told myself that next time I saw her I’d be ready for whatever. I didn’t want to see her and then have to run off when some Glockz gang-banger came bouncing up. So I took along a gun, the same gun that I kept for seven years waiting for dad to turn up. I had it with me now in my waistband even though I thought it was unlikely that I would actually need it. I pulled up to near where she was standing to think about how I was going to play it.

I still couldn’t believe it was her. You don’t know what it’s like to look for a person you love for so many hours in so many days and nights and not find her. And then suddenly she is there. It proper made my heart go.

Just then though, some other car pulled up in front of me and parked next to her. The driver had wound his window down and was talking to Kira’s ghost. Please don’t get in, I was saying to myself, just don’t get in. It looked as though she was about to though so I started up my car and pulled up immediately behind and started beeping my horn. I was hoping that the noise might spook the other driver or something but it didn’t. All it did was make him get out of his car and shout over at me to fuck off.

I get out and walk over to where they are both standing. I’ve got my hand over the gun which is covered still by the bottom of my hoodie and as I get closer I start to check out this guy’s face. Is he a hero type or is he a see-a-black-man-and-run type? I can’t tell exactly but I need to test this one out before I do anything. I get to about three feet away and Kira sees me for the first time. She almost smiles as if she has forgotten where she is and has seen someone she recognizes but then just as quickly a look of panic fills her face.

‘She’s coming with me bruv,’ I say and go to take Kira by the arm. The guy looks like he is going to back off but he is still thinking about it you can tell. No guy likes to be fronted out by another guy especially when there’s a girl around – even if that girl is a prostitute. I turn my back to him to give him a chance of leaving without having to get into a row. Kira is still holding on to me. She is shaking a bit but I don’t know whether it’s the cold or whether it’s me trembling that’s making her shake. For sure my heart is going bam bam bam.

We are at the car door when the pimp guy or whatever comes pelting across the road with his arms out. ‘What the fuck you doing with my girl?’ he shouts as he’s running. I can’t run off now without causing a massive beef so I stop. I want to just take her away like a normal punter or whatever, peaceful, just another paying customer. I do not want to start something in the middle of North London with some Glockz soldier. My heart is getting loud in my chest. Boom boom boom now. It is so loud I swear he can hear it.

‘What’s up blood?’ I say. ‘Just looking for a bit innit?’

‘He was here first,’ he says and points his face at the other guy who is now trying to get back in his car.

‘Yeah but he’s going innit.’

‘He ain’t fucking going anywhere. Oi bruv. You was here first,’ he says to him holding his arm. The guy was already white but now he has turned into a sheet. No doubt this wasn’t any kind of shit he’d planned for either.

‘Yeah, well I’m here now though. What’s wrong with me?’ I say quickly adding a bit of volume to put the first punter off.

‘She don’t like you though pussy boy. So, you best fuck off.’

‘She wants to come with me,’ I say and by now I am shitting myself. This guy is a big guy. Not muscles or nothing just big and solid like a punchbag. If it hadn’t been for Kira, I would have fucked off a long time ago.

‘What this clapped-up bitch wants is what I tell her she wants,’ he says coming right into my face. He is so close some of his spit lands on my lip. It is disgusting but I can’t wipe it off.

‘I got enough dollars man,’ I say and take a wad of cash out my pocket to show him.

He snatches the money straight out of my hand and says, ‘I said fuck off. I ain’t going to tell you again, blood.’

I let go of Kira. The gun is still there in my waistband. It feels heavy. It’s too heavy for these bottoms I got on and it feels like any minute it’s going to drop down my leg. He turns to leave with Ki and all I can think is that I need to keep him here somehow. I need to do something. The punter guy runs off. He’s left his car there and just run off. Now there’s just the three of us. It feels like we are nowhere.

‘If you ain’t giving me the bitch,’ I say as cold as I can, but the word bitch sticks in my throat, ‘then you giving me back my paper, blood.’

The guy spins around with his eyes on fire and arms out wide. ‘You think you can fuck wid me bruv?’ he says and steps right into my face. ‘Fuck wid dis, yeah bruv. Fuck wid dis.’

I suddenly feel a hard object up against my stomach and I look down.

It’s a gun.