You Don't Know Me

36

The plan is for Ki to wait until she spots Face. If she sees him she radios through. If she sees anything else, she radios through. If she sees trouble she radios through and we walk out. We cannot take more risks than we are already taking. Once we know Face is here in the club, we will wait until Ki sees him go to the toilets. If it looks safe, in other words if he goes in alone, then she calls it through and I head out of the room and up the small flight of stairs at the end of the corridor. The steps lead to the main club. The toilets are just there. The first door I come to on the left is the men’s. I go in, I do the thing and I leave. Ki only calls it in if we can get Face otherwise we are out of there.

Curt will stay where he is. We need him to make sure that the exit is clean and if it gets dirty for him to clean it up for us and make us a way out of there. Once the hit is done, I am supposed to meet up with Curt in the room where we are now and then call it through to Ki and wait for her. She comes, she changes into the clothes I have brought for her in the plastic bag. Then we all leave.

I look around the back room and try to concentrate on some detail of it just to calm me down. But it’s impossible. The room is hot even though there is no heating in it that we can see. Curt is sweating a bit but then he’s a big guy and them big guys can lose some serious water. I think he’s nervous though. I know I am. We sit there saying almost nothing for half an hour, just listening to the white noise of the radios. Even though they are turned down proper low we can hear them crackling still. I am lost in my own mind and by the look of him I guess Curt is too.

Ten minutes or an hour passes and the radio is annoyingly still giving us the silent treatment. I can’t stand the tension. I wish the fucker would just buzz with Ki’s voice now. I don’t even mind whether it comes over just so that she can call it off. I just need something to happen soon.

‘Curt.’

Curt is still sitting next to me. His legs are out and he is breathing deep breaths that shift the whole of his body up and down as if he is bobbing on a wave. The heat coming from him is powerful.

‘We have to do this, right?’ I continue, ‘I mean we got no choice innit?’

‘Yeah man,’ he says, wiping his face. ‘Way to look at it is that it’s already done. We already made the choice.’

I nod more to myself than him.

‘I’ll do it if you like,’ he then says without looking at me. ‘It makes more sense. I done this before.’

I look at him not believing I’m hearing what I am hearing. ‘You done what before?’

‘Don’t act like you don’t know.’

‘Fuck man. I thought we were brothers. Blood. You couldn’t tell me this before?’ It feels like bricks are falling on my head.

‘The fuck was I supposed to say?’ he says wiping his face again with his hand. ‘Anyway point is, I do it for you. Say the word.’

Then I look at him and say, ‘Nah man, you done too much already.’

Just then the radios crackle loudly and Ki’s voice comes travelling over to us. It sounds as if she is a world away. A call from a different planet. Like Armstrong when he calls from the moon.

‘Move,’ she says, her voice is sharp and cuts through all the static. ‘You got to move now. Face is in the toilets now. You got to move now.’

Curt looks at me and then drags himself slowly to his feet but I know he’s moving as fast as he can.

‘Fuck where’s the towel?’ I say. Suddenly I feel my head spinning in panic. My hands start to clam and I wipe them over and over across my clothes.

‘Shit it must be in the hold-all in the skip. Here use this,’ he says and pulls out the other hoodie in the bag, the one meant for Kira, and hands it to me.

I take it and wrap the gun in the sweatshirt keeping one hand on the handle of the gun.

‘Okay man. I’m about to do this thing,’ I say and step into the corridor.

I walk quickly along the darkness. I haven’t got time to use my phone for light. It’s okay though because I can see a crack of light where the top of the steps meets the bottom of the door. I head for it.

I push to open the door but it’s stuck. Shit we hadn’t checked. Why didn’t we check while we were sitting there for all that time waiting for Ki to radio? Shit. I push against it but it seems to be locked. My mind is stumbling around and it can’t think in a straight line. What the hell am I going to do, I am thinking. I pull the two-way from my pocket and talk into it.

‘Curt I need you man. The door is locked or something. I can’t get in.’

He doesn’t answer but in seconds I see the light from his door spread into the corridor as he opens it and heads towards me. He reaches me and waves me silently out of the way. He takes one step back and then crashes straight into the door with his shoulder. The door swings open. The music comes flooding into my ears. Curt looks at me raising his eyebrows and then turns back to the room that’s been spilling light into the hallway.

I take a step. It’s still dark once I get through the door but it’s lighter than it was in the hallway. The bass is pounding like a giant heartbeat and it feels as if it’s coming from inside me. I see the matt-black toilet door with a stick drawing of a man exactly where Ki said it would be. I push it open. The gun is wet in my hand from sweat and I drop it more than once into the sweatshirt that is covering it. I regain my grip and look about. There’s nobody at the urinals. The sinks are empty. He must be in one of the cubicles. I wait. I look at the floor to calm myself. It is a kind of deep green that makes me feel like it is sucking me in.

My heart is doing its thing. Bam bam bam and for a second I forget I need to breathe. The pictures aren’t coming to me. What am I supposed to do? Do I kick the doors in? Do I wait for the doors to open? We have never spoken about this part of it. It seemed unnecessary at the time. Now I think it was the most necessary part. I decide to wait. I walk to one of the urinals and stand over the bowl, the damp sweatshirt still wrapped over my hand. There is a smell of shit and piss and bleach. It is so overwhelming that I feel for a second as if I am going to pass out.

I can hear the bass coming from the club in here but it’s still low enough for me to hear the splashes coming from one of the cubicles. Then as the flush goes, suddenly the deep drum beats from the club rise in a wave and then pitch down once again. Like it does when someone has opened the door. Shit. Somebody has come into the toilets. I look round as casually as I can. How will I even know whether this guy is with Face or not? What do I do with him? Do I wait? Do I shoot him too? My eyes begin to focus and the person who has just walked in becomes sharp. Almost too sharp.

Fuck. It’s Ki. Her legs out wide over the green floor so that she seems like the Statue of Liberty. Her face is like glass, telling me nothing.

She puts her finger to her lips signalling me to stay quiet as I am about to scream out at her. Fuck.

I point at the cubicle where the flush has just gone and she nods. I don’t know why she is here. I wave one arm crazily telling her to leave right now. But instead she reaches into her handbag and pulls out a door wedge, puts it on the floor and then kicks it under the main door to the bathroom. I want to push her out but there’s no time. The cubicle door begins to rattle. I turn around to face it, my gun at waist height. The gun is doing its thing again and whispering at me. Shoot. Shoot. Shoot. The weight of it is now making my arm ache and I feel like shooting it will make it lighter. And at that moment it is all that I want to do. Just to shoot it and lighten this weight. I see the face. Then it hits me. I don’t even know what Face looks like.

The man looking at me is tall and good-looking. He has a face like a film star. He looks expensive. He looks like a man who could rule the world. He looks at me, just about registering my presence and then follows my eyes to where Ki is standing. You can see the look of confusion in his eyes before something clicks in his brain. He shouts out to the other cubicle like he’s begging it to open.

‘Face!’

Then it does. The other cubicle door opens.

Time freezes.

I see the other man. Face. Something about him jars. There is nothing special about this man. He’s just a man. Any man. This man that I am about to kill. In my mind he was a monster. He was the Devil even, maybe. But the man who looks back at me is scared. He has seen the gun. But more than that he has seen my face. He knows what that means.

There is a split second right then that I feel as if I have come out of my body and I am standing watching everyone including myself. I have a kind of smile on as if I’m interested, as if I’m wondering what I will do. Will I shoot him? Will I walk away? Will it be black or will it be white? Or is this one of them grey areas or is it all kind of colours? Right now it feels like everything has been turned over and upside down. I feel as if the sky is under my feet. I am in a new dimension it seems to me. Some upside-down place where the outside is inside and where the sky is green.

Just then it hits me all at once. The craziness of this life I am in that doesn’t even feel like my own any more. Everything that has happened in the last few months starts playing over in my mind. It is there on a spinning reel, the images flashing faster and faster. So fast now that I am dizzy and sick. I want all of these names now to be gone. All of these names for things I never knew before. All the Guiltys, the Facemen, the JCs, the crews, the guns, the life. I want it all washed out of my head. I want to go back to that time. When I didn’t even know how good life was. I don’t even know how I got here any more. I don’t remember choosing any of it. It just happened. It feels as if every last thing made every next thing happen and now I can’t control any of it.

It was for Ki, I remind myself. Everything is for her. Jamil has told this man Face who she is and that he must kill her. I am doing this for Ki.

It’s only when she screams that I come back into my body and feel the gun heavy and pointing down in my hand.

Two shots later both men are dead. They fall heavy to the ground, faces ruined by a single bullet each. Face lands face up. His eyes just staring out. I find myself looking into them. Frozen. I think I see the moment when the life leaves them and I can’t turn away.

Ki’s voice screams out my name and I look to see her turning towards the door and kicking the wedge, the doorstop, away. She pulls open the door but as she does another face stares straight back at her. She is quick though. Her adrenaline has kicked in and all of her movements are smooth and fast. Her brain is working at speeds now I cannot even track. She sees the man at the door and knows she has to keep him out until we are clear. The key is there in her eyes. Those silver flashing eyes that make cars stop in the road. She opens them wide at the man and they suck him in like black holes. His face changes. The world has vanished for him until there is only him and this girl with those eyes. She slips an arm around his neck and pushes him back out and follows him into noise of the club. Her other hand behind her back. I push through past them both and as I head to the door that leads to the steps going down I grab Ki by the wrist and pull her with me.

We tumble down the steps where Curt is waiting with the back-room door open so that there is light to see by. He leads us both into the room and leans against the door. I am bent over double trying to catch my breath and to fight off the pain that is now in my stomach. Ki though is a straight six. The power in her is smooth and effortless.

She quickly hitches her dress above her waist and pulls on the tracksuit bottoms that Curt hands her, kicking off her heels as she does. She looks at me. I look back at her. I don’t know who looks stranger. My heart is still racing which is muddling my mind.

‘Top.’

I look at her puzzled. I don’t know what she is saying.

‘Top,’ she says again this time louder, indicating my hand.

I look down and then slowly begin to fall back into the moment. I hand her the sweatshirt after unwrapping it from the gun which is still hot in my hand.

In a few seconds the three of us are spilling into the street and are free. We get our hoods up, heads down and walk along the same route that I had taken earlier with Curt. Still nobody has said anything. We can hear a bit of commotion from the club’s front entrance. I think that I can hear snatches of people shouting about police. We carry on walking though. Away from the entrance. Each step takes us further from danger and closer to safety. Every step is a step to a new life. If we are lucky it could even be a step to our old life. The noise from the crowd fades out. A siren is in the distance but is coming closer.

I turn to look behind me. A couple of people start to make their way down the side street behind us. Young men both of them. They are half running, and we can hear them as they get closer to us. They are obviously excited by whatever they think has happened in the club but they are trying to stay casual. The usual thing. Little boys wanting to be big mans. I glance around careful to keep my face hidden to check where they are and what they are doing. They are looking back to the front of the club, for the ruckus that they do not know we caused.

We slow up a little waiting to let them pass us. It’s better that we can see them than they can see us. In a few moments they have overtaken us. They are just two boys really. Skinny. Happy. Laughing. Innocent. Up ahead I see one of them nearing a car and making it bleep. Its indicators flash to life. MK3 Golf GTI, de-badged, Pico exhaust, Recaro seats, I think, even then after all that has happened I can’t help it. The boy opens it and gets in. The other stays put until the car leaves and then gets out his phone.

Curt nudges me. This is bad. We do not need this boy to be stopping in the middle of the street. We need him ahead of us. Facing away from us. Not facing us. We cannot be seen. There is still stuff to do. We need to pick up the bag from the skip and we still need to dump the nine mil. We slow to almost a standstill but we cannot avoid passing the boy. He is directly in our path. There is no choice though. We have to keep moving. We get close enough that we can almost hear his conversation on the phone. Even in this light, there is no doubt but that he will be able give to a half-decent ID of us if the Feds ask him. We have to keep our faces down. We keep walking, our heads pointed to the tarmac. All we can see are our feet.

This is why it isn’t till we were less than fifty feet away that I realize how bad this is.

‘Fuck. Curt you see what I’m seeing?’ I say when I am sure.

He raises his head a fraction and peers out from his hood. ‘Shit. Jamil! What the fuck is he doing here?’

Seeing him there is a shock. Why is he there? Of course looking back it’s not that much of a surprise. He must have been with Face or going to see him. He obviously doesn’t know that Face is dead, though, judging by the easy way he is chatting on his phone.

But what happens next is just some bare weird shit I can’t even explain.