You Don't Know Me

16

‘For fuck’s sake, open the door, man. It’s me, Curt.’

I open the door. I’m still breathing hard but not as hard as before.

‘Shit man. You proper had me going there,’ I goes and he comes in without really asking.

‘What you doing round these ends boy? You lost?’ I say, kinda now laughing but still confused to see him. As he squeezes past me I can feel the muscles in his body slamming into my flesh. The man is a wall.

He takes a seat at my little table in the kitchen-diner and hunches over as he does.

‘Bro this is serious. We need to talk,’ he says, lifting his eyebrows.

‘Sure,’ I goes. I push the door shut and then sit opposite him. ‘What’s happening?’

He looks down for second at the table and then meets my eyes. ‘They want her back bro. You have to give her up.’

‘Kira?’ I say. ‘Blood, what the fuck makes you think I got her?’

He says nothing.

‘Was it JC? He’s full of shit. Don’t be believing nothing that comes out of his mouth,’ I say throwing my arms out wide.

‘Then tell me where she is?’ he says, not moving a muscle.

‘How the fuck do I know where she is? I was the one looking for her,’ I say and get up from my chair. I try to make it sound natural but I ain’t no actor.

‘All I know bro is that she is gone and they want her back. And if I tell ’em you ain’t got her they ain’t just going to take my word for it. They’re going find you and start asking questions innit bro.’ He still doesn’t move.

‘What questions?’

‘Like are you gay?’

‘What?’ I say sitting back down in my chair and facing him.

‘Well if you’re not gay, why does your crib smell like Selfridges perfume counter?’ he says and looks at me in the eyes once again.

I take a deep breath and wonder whether I can style it out. Then a voice comes out from behind me –

‘It’s okay. I’m here.’

I look round and it’s Kira, standing in the doorway. Her arms are hugging her body but her eyes are steel.

‘You’re going nowhere,’ I say and then I look straight into Curt’s eyes. ‘You ain’t either blood. Not until we work this out.’ Then I get out the Baikal and put it on the table.

‘What the fuck man?’ Curt says. ‘You taking a gun out to me? Have you lost your senses bruv?’

‘I can’t let you take her Curt. I cannot do that,’ I say and I know he can see from my face that I am serious.

‘This ain’t worth losing your life over man. She knows. Let her go.’

‘No.’

Curt gets up with a sigh and walks over to my fridge and pulls out a beer. He sits back down and flips the lid off with his teeth and takes a long sip.

‘She’s going to be okay. They’re taking her off the streets now. They just want her to work in the trap.’

‘Are you kidding me? She ain’t being no one’s trap bitch,’ I say and look over at Ki to reassure her. She starts to shake her head slowly.

‘I’d rather be on the streets. I’m not making drugs for anyone ever again. No way,’ she says, pale.

I take a grip on Curt’s giant arm and look straight at him.

‘No. Turn your mind, you get me. You need a plan B coz plan A ain’t flying,’ I goes. ‘And anyway, why the fuck do you care about what happens to her? You ain’t really Glockz. Why do you give a fuck?’

‘They’re coming here any day bro and I ain’t even lying to you, they are pissed. If they see you here or her, they’ll burn this whole block down, believe.’

I take another breath and look over at Kira.

‘Then we need a new plan A,’ I say, and get up and lock the front door.

The thing is yeah, it was all very well sending out the message that Jamil had Kira but the fact was that I had misjudged him. Jamil was doing so much trade for the Olders that he was now their number one boy by a street mile. He and his two boys were shifting more gear than whole crews put together. Each week he was coming back with bigger and bigger orders. And he always paid, on the nose, you get me?

Now this may not mean that much to you, but to a drug dealer, payment is everything and not everybody, believe it or not, gets paid. Let me try to explain this … If you were shifting ten kilos of gear in kilo loads, you could expect to be paid about ninety per cent of the time. And the ten per cent you maybe didn’t get paid, you didn’t get paid because you got ripped off or taxed by someone even more gangster than you thought you were.

If you were shifting shit to soldiers in twenty gram loads, you could only expect to be paid about sixty per cent of the time. Why? Because forty per cent of the time the kids you gave your shit to sell for you, smoked it. Then all you could do is punish them, but that did not get you paid. It just got you vexed. But the upside was, if you off-loaded to crews in those smaller deals, your profit was like three hundred per cent rather than the fifty per cent you might pick up dealing in bulk. You following?

The thing with Jamil was that he was buying in twenties at first but it wasn’t long before he was buying a whole kilo. But here was the other thing. He was buying bigger deals, but he was still paying twenties prices.

Okay, that must sound confusing.

Basically what you need to know is he was buying enough rock to get it at a third of the price but paying full price. Does that make sense?

So he was buying a kilo but paying for it as if he wasn’t buying in bulk, without asking for a discount. That was crazy. Why would you do that? Because as I said before, he had some brains.

On the outside he was saying that he didn’t really give that much of a shit whether he was making five grand a week or ten grand a week. To him it was all fucking pocket money anyway, he would say. Once he’d bought a ride and some garms and a few watches or whatever, there was a limited amount he could do with more cash anyway. He couldn’t stick it in a bank because people would want to know where he got it from. All he could really do with it was fill up his safety deposit boxes that he had. The rest was just hidden, literally under fucking mattresses, you get me.

He was just biding his time truth be told. That’s what he kept saying to anyone who would listen. He was making the contacts and setting himself up so when the time was right he could do it properly. For now, what he needed most was back-up. He knew he was paying top dollar for every kilo he bought. He also knew that meant that as far as the Olders were concerned, he was more or less laying golden eggs for them. And he knew that meant he was basically untouchable. It meant that he was protected.

Now it might be strange to hear that he was paying twice what he needed to. But really and truly that boy weren’t making no losses. He was still cutting, you know diluting the drug, and he was selling retail prices so he still made a margin. But for him it was worth it to be paying the extra because of who he was paying the extra to. It gave him proper protection. Ain’t nobody was going to mess him up if he was connected to them Olders as their main buyer.

This meant that whenever Jamil came across anybody who he couldn’t deal with alone, and by alone I mean using his mans Shilo and Binks, he could just pick up his phone and call in the Older tanks. This put him in a different league. Where the best the others could do if they was in trouble was to call up their mandems from their crews and cause a small-time gang fight, what Jamil could do was something else. He could face down a gang without even having to call it. Because he knew, and anyone who stood in his way knew, that if he called in the Olders they were going to settle the shit in old-timer style.

Now maybe I need to explain this a bit more to you if you don’t know about it. There is a big difference between some crew made up of boys having a stab-up in the park and a man’s crew.

In a boys’ gang, someone fronts you up and you maybe stab him. Then he goes back to his gang and his gang comes out looking for your gang. When they find them, there’s a riot. Everyone gets a good beating and then goes home. Minus teeth, or fingers or a gang member if they are really unlucky. Don’t get me wrong though, it is still scary shit. You do not want to be in the middle of something like that when it goes down because people are bringing swords and army knives and even shooters to them parties. And people do get hurt. It is serious.

But with the Olders, it was a different kind of a game. These were men as I said before who had been in prison for long and knew their way around. These were people who had actually seen hundreds of thousands of pounds in cash in their own hands. And when someone came to them and tried fronting them up, they knew it wasn’t for no feud about who called whose mum a slag. If it happened it was going to be to steal their whole stash. Drugs, money, guns, the lot. And when someone comes after you for what you have spent ten years on the block for, ten years of their life, they ain’t going to just stab you up. Nah man. These guys will torture you.

They won’t think twice about killing you. They won’t even think once about it. And believe, if your mum or your nan or your sister is in the way, they will kill them too. These guys aren’t the Krays. These are proper hard men who will kill your mum. And to them, Jamil was like a massive bag of cash and a massive bag of drugs all rolled into one. No way were they going to let any posse fuck with their bag.

So, when I started putting the word around that Jamil had taken Kira, even if the Glockz wanted to, they didn’t have the balls to do anything about it. Jamil man, they couldn’t touch him. He was protected up to the top. That wasn’t the real problem though. I didn’t need them to do anything about it, I just needed them to believe it. If they believed that Jamil had taken her they could be vex about it and then forget about it. And most importantly, stop looking for her.

As it was though, now that Jamil was getting to be a top shotter, they preferred to believe him over rumours that I had planted. I can see your faces doing that thing again, jury. Right so ‘top shotter’ is like our word for top drug dealer. Nothing to do with shooting. Better not be getting them things wrong innit.

Anyway, with him being a top drug dealer, his word was more gold than mine if you like. So they would believe him over anything that some nobody like me might be telling. And it weren’t long before Jamil started saying he had heard that I had Kira. Jamil knew about her going missing like everyone round my ends. From me. They all knew I was looking for her like a mad man. I’d been tapping everyone out over it, I was desperate, you get me, and I didn’t care in them times, who knew I was looking for her. I wanted people to know. But when I found her and then stopped looking JC got the idea that she must be back. It was just a fucking guess but when he saw me that day in the street and called me out about it, that’s when he knew. It was my fucking reaction. It told him everything he needed to know. That’s what Curt told me. ‘Your face, blood. It gave up the game.’ That was when he decided to warn me. They would rather believe that and cut me up than believe Jamil had her and risk their own lives. It didn’t basically matter whether I had her or not. It was still better for them to fuck me over just as one of them things. Just for face. They had do someone over for the shit. And if they were too scared to do Jamil then they would be just as happy doing me.

Now, obviously, to you guys it looks proper guilty on my part that I now have a better reason to kill Jamil than even Mr Prosecutor thought I had. In other words that I killed him because he was telling mans that I had Kira. Like a revenge kind of thing. And I know that don’t look good for me right now. It does give me a reason to want him dead. Fuck I probably did want him dead at that time. But this is the truth. I wouldn’t be telling you this stuff against me if it wasn’t true, is it? Besides the thing on my mind wasn’t getting revenge on Jamil. He was still a nobody really in my eyes. The thing on my mind was getting the Glockz the fuck away from Ki. The rest of the story isn’t that much better for me, I will tell you that here and now. Just remember though that my life is in your hands in a way so just hear me out innit, please.