You Don't Know Me

26

So the next day Curt comes by the flat so that we can sort out a few things. For one there was all this money in my yard we had to do something with. I didn’t really like the idea of it being there to be honest. I wanted it gone and as far as I was concerned it was Curt’s money to do what he wanted with.

I got the money all tied up in elastic bands while Ki made us all some breakfast. As I was laying it all out on the table I squeeze a look at her and she seems beautiful again. I mean she was always beautiful, just she seemed to have got her shine back. She wasn’t even wearing anything special, just some grey leggings and a silky purple top which left her arms bare. But I tell you her face in the window-light, for just one minute looked like an old painting. Beautiful I mean. Not old.

I let Curt in and he came and joined me at the table.

‘Shit. I almost forgot about that,’ he says nodding at the piles of money.

‘Yeah well you decided what you going to do with it? That’s enough paper right there. I can source you some phat wheels bruv if you’re interested. M3, RS4 whatever you like.’

‘Nah man. I got plans for that.’

‘Like?’ I say, intrigued.

‘I’m buying my freedom, blood. Get the fuck outta this life you get me.’

‘What the fuck you chatting about freedom for? You ain’t a slave are you?’ I say and grin at him.

‘Nah man. That’s the price. Sure I told you this. I told Guilty last year that I wanted out and he goes, “Sure nigger you are free to go. For fitty thou,” ’ he says and makes five lots of tens with his huge fingers.

‘I don’t get it,’ I say and truly I didn’t. ‘You got to pay to leave?’

‘Shit yes you got to pay,’ he says and levers himself up from the chair to get a beer from the fridge even though it’s like ten a.m.

Pay to leave? This was sounding more Mafia than Camden to me but he knew shit I didn’t. I leave him to his beer and I go and dig out an old rucksack I can put the cash in and then start loading it up. By the time I am finished I am surprised at how heavy it is. But the process of slowly loading the money into the bag starts me thinking.

‘Hey, one thing I never got,’ I say, walking back into the room, ‘is how you got mix up in this gang shit in the first place. I remember them days when you’d rather take a knife than get all ganged up.’

Curt takes a glug and then sighs all heavy. ‘It’s a long story man. Another time, maybe.’

At that exact minute, his phone rings and he answers it after a few rings and listens. As he nods and ‘yeahs’ into the phone, Ki comes to the table with a pile of toast on one plate and about a dozen fried eggs on another.

‘We need more food,’ she mouths so as not to disturb Curt’s call. I nod back but I’m not really paying her any notice, for all the listening I’m trying to do is to Curt’s call. I see Curt’s face changing colour. When he finally puts the phone down I get the feeling that whatever was being said on that call wasn’t going to be one of them good news bad news things. It was all going to be bad bad news.

‘Bad bad news,’ Curt says finally. ‘We are in shit.’

Ki sits down at the table as if she is in slow motion. The colour leaves her face.

‘What do you mean?’ I say trying to keep my heart from hitting my balls.

‘So that was Guilty.’

‘Yeah I guessed, and?’ I say.

‘Well, you know these Olders JC is linked up to?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well these ain’t just any Olders.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘This crew ain’t just a regular fucking Olders crew.’

I look at him blankly.

‘This is Face’s crew,’ he says and then I understand.

Ki looks at us both then, her face still innocent.

‘Who’s Face?’ she says slowly.

‘Face,’ says Curt as he puts his head in his hands. ‘You want to know about Face? Okay then let me tell you a story about this motherfucker.

‘So one day last summer Face was up at a club with his Lieutenant when some Pagan stabbed up his left-hand man while he was in the toilets.’

‘So?’ says Ki. ‘One gangster stabs another one. Standard.’

Before I can explain Curt cuts back in.

‘No man. It was a big deal. Stabbing up a man’s Lieutenant is properly serious shit. A General and his number two are basically like brothers. You know how it is,’ he says to me. ‘One will take other man’s bullet. Even his jail time if he have to.’

I nod but truth be told I ain’t really as down with all this as Curt is.

Curt takes a swig of beer and then continues his story. ‘Anyway this dude gets stabbed and Face is wild. If he had been there next to him I ain’t even sure the shit would have happened. But he wasn’t and now his two was nearly dead. And Face was on the warpath.

‘So where he might have spent some time trying to find out who had done this, this time he didn’t have to do shit. He found out the next day.’

‘How?’ says Ki leaning forwards.

‘Easy, the man himself fucking advertises it. He goes and makes a load of T-shirts with the man’s face on it with the letters R.I.P. and hands them round his crew.’

‘Shit yeah I heard about that,’ I say suddenly remembering.

‘Face though ain’t no ordinary gangster. He is like a genius you could say. He is like a strategizer. And to cut a long story up, Face guessed the guy was going to try and ambush him. And he knew that the other crew wouldn’t be starting no shit unless they thought they could win.

‘So Face played it smarter than the other man. He got a few of his young soldiers, Tinies, together and sent them on a mission to track the guy’s movements.’

You looking kinda blank at me again. Is it Tinies? Yeah okay. So ‘Tinies’ are like soldiers-in-waiting. They are just kids really but the gangs like ’em for all kinds of reasons. It’s messed up but the shit is what it is.

So back to this story Curt is telling.

‘He wanted to know where mans was on any given day. Which clubs did he go to? Where was his ride last spotted? How many people was he with? Where did he go when he left a club? Where was his base?’

‘But hang on,’ says Ki, ‘he’s using kids?’

‘Shit, yeah he was using kids. Face was the first one to use kids. “Get some respec’ or get some holes”. That was his like recruiting line.’

‘No, I mean he’s supposed to be this genius and he is using children?’

‘That was the genius man. Because they was just kids, no one gave them a second blink. They were more or less invisible. No gang expect trouble to come from ten-year-old boys in school uniform.

‘And that is how in a week Face found out where mans lived. Then one morning, very early, like before even the sun was awake, Face pulls a balaclava over his head and goes into his house with two of his men. They drag him out of bed and lash him to a chair and then they spend twenty minutes heating up the end of a wheel brace with a blowtorch right in front of him.

‘And all the time it was heating up, Face is whispering at him, “Where’s your P? Where is it at? Where’s your stash? Give it up.”

‘Then, when he don’t get no answers, and once the iron was glowing hot, he takes it and holds it like an inch away from the man’s eye.’

‘Curt,’ I say at this point knowing what is coming, ‘I think that is probably enough.’

‘No. I want to know,’ Ki says, eyes wide open.

‘Well what can I tell you? He holds the iron in front of man’s eye, slowly heating the air in front of it, until the eye goes pop. After that, with all that shit coming out of his eye socket all over his chest, man pretty much drew him a map to where the stash was. Something like a hundred grand came out of that taxing, in drugs and dollars. And guns. But that wasn’t enough as far as Face was concerned.

‘When mans stopped screaming, Face sends his boys out of the house and then he takes his balaclava off and shoves it into the tied man’s mouth. At that moment he must have known it was game over because Face had shown himself. No way could he let him live now you get me.

‘ “This is for my number two,” he goes, and takes up the blowtorch and puts it on a blue flame. Then when he had done what he needs to do, he shoots him three times through the head.

‘The very next day, every member of Face’s crew is wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a man’s chest with the letters R.I.P burned into it. Nobody from the dead man’s crew did a fucking thing to retaliate. Within two weeks the whole crew failed. The crew became basically R.I.P., you get me. That is who Face is.’

‘Put it this way, if Face finds out you and me were there when JC was taxed, we are smoke,’ I say.

‘Yeah, about that,’ says Curt before this has even sunk in.

‘What?’

‘JC has started remembering more shit.’

‘Like what?’ we both say.

‘Like how it was some links that put a hole in him, a girl. A links that had grey eyes.’

Anyway, I look over at Ki who has now gone pale. At first she doesn’t say anything. She just gets up and starts to walk in tight rows up and down the room.

‘This is not good. This is not good,’ she says over and over.

I get up and put an arm around her but she shrugs it off and carries on pacing up and down the room. I know this is bad. For one we have to bail from this place. No way can we stay here. Then there’s Mum and Bless. What if this Face brer came looking for them when he couldn’t find me?

‘Don’t worry Ki. You’re safe here,’ I say but even as the words are coming out I look around my flat and know it ain’t true. The cheap front door and the loose windows bleeding sound in from the streets below tell me I’m a liar.

‘Yeah girl. No one knows where you are. It’s still cool,’ Curt adds and looks at me with a kind of ‘sorry bruv’ look.

‘It is not cool,’ she says still pacing.

‘Listen,’ I say stopping her and taking her shoulders in my hands and looking her directly in the eye, ‘they don’t know you are here.’

‘Or you know, if it gets hot, you just jump on a plane,’ says Curt.

Ki meets my eye and holds my gaze. ‘It’s not me I’m worried about. It’s my brother. They’ll get to him,’ she says in a voice that sounds like a scream in a box.

‘What do you mean?’ I say. ‘What’s Spooks got to do with this?’ Then I realize what she means.