You Don't Know Me

29

So Curt was going to drop her to a mosque. Sounds messed up right? I mean a mosque? Something about it felt shady to me. All that weirdness you read about. Now since I been locked up in jail I know a bit more about Islam. Except in here we call it Prislam. Most people just join it to get better food. Other people join it so they can hook up with their mans in a bit of peace and quiet. A few do it to get their shit together. It was only really the odd Pakistani or Somalian that joined it for real, you know to actually pray for salvation.

Back then though, I didn’t know anything about it really. I knew the basic stuff like prayer mat and Mohammed but nothing more than that. As far I saw it then, it was just a thing that terrorists and guys with them long beards and no moustaches did.

But was I happy about Ki going to a mosque to find some peace and quiet as she called it? Not really truth be told. It was way too dangerous for her to be out at all. I mean I get it. She was cooped up in this tiny flat with only me to look at. It was horrible. I didn’t know it then but it was worse than prison in some ways. In prison you get out for some air every day at least. But back then in that flat, it was bare claustrophobic. Bare claustrophobic.

And then the mosque of all places. That didn’t seem to me to be a safe place for a person. In my head it was going to be one of them places with the minuets or whatever they call them. You know with the towers and the wailing. And men. For some reason in my head it was only men in them kind of places. Where there are only women when they are made to be there by the men. Like the opposite of a church innit, where the men are only there because they been dragged there by their mums and wives.

On the other hand there weren’t no chance that she could be recognized in a mosque since we didn’t really know any Bangladeshis or whatever.

Anyway long story short Ki leaves with Curt and before I know it she is sitting in a mosque doing some of her thinking. I am left by myself again in the flat. Checking my phone every minute. Looking out the window every two. I feel sick every one of them minutes that she is not there. How she even getting back? I don’t even know whether Curt is picking her up or what.

In the end I get so bored of just waiting I do what any guy would do. I pick up my PS3. I did have Call of Duty in my stack and although I was pretty good at that, I felt like I’d had enough of guns and all that shit to last me a lifetime. So it was FIFA. My Chelsea team was hench, trust, it had the best players money could buy. I had Ronaldo, Messi, Agüero, Bale, Silva, Suárez, Neymar, you name it. I had so many strikers that I didn’t really have much room for defenders so I had people like Fàbregas and Touré in the back. It weren’t like any team you’d see in real life, but who wants real life when you’re trying to escape it?

The thing I noticed though when I played it that day that I didn’t notice before was that you can only properly play it when your head is clear. I don’t mean that you need to concentrate. You don’t. It’s just that when you’re like worried about something, you can’t use it to run away from your life. It’s only good for getting out of your life when there’s not that much in your life in the first place. I reckon that’s why, when you are doing your time, after your trial is over, people play PlayStation. Yeah, believe. It is true, there is PlayStation in prison. But like I say, it’s only good if you got nothing else to do and you need your life to move on as fast as it can.

I turned it off and walked around the flat looking for something to do. I had already washed all the dishes. The cooker was clean. There was nothing to do but wait. After a while I walked into the bedroom and poked around. On Ki’s side of the bed there were books stacked in a pile on the floor and I picked one up. To Kill a Mockingbird. I flipped it over and read the back. A few words jumped out at me. Kindness and cruelty. Love and hate. It looked like the kind of book that she would read. A book of opposites. Like me and her. I opened the first page and started to read but I couldn’t get the story going. It was the same thing as the PS3. My head wasn’t clear enough to hang on to the words. Every time I got hold of something, my mind started to slip back to Kira. In the end I can’t do anything except to stand by the window just to watch out for her or anyone else I need to worry about. I don’t like the idea of her being out so long. I worry that it might happen again. She might get taken. And I ain’t sure I can live through another one of them dramas again. Then it gets dark and I start getting edge. I can’t stay in here much longer so I decide to go out. Just for a bit of air. The darkness probably give me enough cover I reckon.

When I am outside, I decide to cut through the back. That place I saw her the last time she came back. I don’t know why exactly, I guess I was just curious about it still. It didn’t sit right with me and I just wanted to get my eyes on it. I weren’t even sure any more if there was a cut through to the other estate. It had been ages since I went round that way. I get to the bins and there is a low wall there which I jump. And then I’m like in some kind of waste grounds around that other estate. There’s nothing really there but some old faded cans and bottles and random bits of rubbish. It looked like a kind of place where they thought about having a garden when they made it but then couldn’t be bothered. I cross it in about five minutes of fast walking and then think about what I do now. There is nothing to see here. Then suddenly there is.

A car.

Now the thing with me is that I know most of the cars that go up and down my ends. It’s not that I know every car, obviously, it’s more that I know when a car is there that doesn’t seem right to me. It kind of just throws me off a bit like when you walk downstairs and you think there’s an extra step but there isn’t but your foot moves like there is. Anyway I see this one car pulling up directly outside but on the far side of the street and to me it doesn’t look right. Or maybe it’s not even that. Maybe that is whatever it’s called, hindsight, that I’m saying it. But thing was I noticed that car. I noticed it but my guess is that not many people would have. Not even people who are quite interested in cars would have noticed it. You would have to be really, really proper interested to have noticed it because it’s a kind of car that is designed not to be noticed.

What it was: a late-model ice-blue Alpina D3 two-litre bi turbo estate. What that basically is to anyone looking at it is a BMW 3 Series Touring. Just a normal BMW estate to look at. If you saw it, you wouldn’t notice anything about it. But what it actually is, is a company called Alpina; they take a BMW and change it.

The main thing they change is under the bonnet. So they take a naturally aspirated engine and turn it into a supercharged engine. It’s all about creating high torque at low revs. Anyway the point is you can’t really tell unless you get up really close and check for the badge that says Alpina on it. But if you know about them, like really know about them like I do, you can tell from the wheels. They put twenty-spoke alloys on it. Nineteen inches on this one. This car was a car for someone who knew cars. So I noticed it. And in my head I was just going, I reckon that’s probably worth twenty-five thousand pounds or whatever. But what shocked me was that after a minute of being parked up, the back door opens. And Kira gets out. She leans in to get something from inside and then starts to head in my direction. I can’t see what it is but it looks like a black sheet or something, which confuses me. I quickly duck in behind a van that’s parked up in the car park before she sees me.

I crouch down and watch her pass me by. My eyes follow her as she fiddles with the black sheet thing and then starts to walk in the direction of the front of my block. Shit. I think, I need to get back before she does. Something in me needs to see what her face is going to tell me as soon as she walks in that door.

I realize I only got about five minutes to trace back the route I came from and beat her home. But it’s only when I start to run that I remember that I haven’t had to run for years. I make it to the flat in about two minutes, my lungs pumping hard.

I open the door to the flat and my mind is still running even though I’m not. What the fuck is going on? Why she in a car like that? I poke my head round the door and see that I have beaten her back. Now I just need to think of what to say to her. So I wait. And then after a few minutes I hear the door.

When she comes in she is a changed person. And I don’t mean spiritually speaking. I mean she was a proper changed person. I didn’t even recognize her. In fact I almost screamed. I thought for half a second like I was maybe in a nightmare. It was only when she took the head bit off that I realized it was Ki. In a burkha. I swear down. The full Darth Vader.

‘Oh fuck,’ I go as soon as I see her face. I feel like I almost had a heart attack. She smiles at me like one of them smiles like don’t I look silly and I ain’t even sure whether to laugh.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ she says, cool as and takes off the rest of it. ‘Besides, I thought you’d be happy.’

‘Happy?’

‘What’s a better disguise than this? I can go out every day,’ she says hanging the whole shimmery black outfit on a peg by the front door.

‘Well I ain’t sure if –’ I say but she cuts me off by showing me a palm.

‘Shut up anyway. Listen I think I’m on the way to finding a way out of this mess,’ she says and those eyes are back, gleaming. This is like the old Ki coming back and right then for that moment I completely forget the whole Alpina thing. I can’t make it make any sense right now so I park it up.

‘Shit, a way out already? You are good Ki. I give you that. Smart. Always said it. Hit me. What you got?’

‘Got? Nothing yet. I said I am on the way to finding a way. I just need some time. Give me a few days just to think it through properly. After that I will tell you what I got. Now to change the subject. What do you think is going on with Bless and Curt?’ she says smiling one of them smiles. You know the ones.

‘What you chatting about gal? Ain’t nothing going on. He just dropping in to see Mum. Eh stop that smiling I swear down,’ I say and at that point I push her on to the sofa, both of us laughing like little kids.

Well that was really the turning point right there. The day she came back from the mosque. From that minute everything changed. I should have been on it. If I had a brain like hers I would have seen it but as I told you before I ain’t got one of them kind of minds. Black and white my brain is. Hers … hers is all kind of colours.