You Don't Know Me

37

It happens in a split second, before I even have time to think. Jamil is right up ahead of us and we can’t even avoid him now, he is too close. I reckon if we turned around now it would have just been too obvious and he would have seen us and – maybe not then but later – put two and two together, and lined us up. Truth be told though I’m not sure that I was even thinking that at the time. All I knew is that we were walking in one direction and he was there.

We carry on walking. I remember I have got my head down still and my hood pulled low. I can see Curt, huge beside me, walking his big bear walk. Ki is right behind us just a step or two away. Jamil is getting closer. Maybe thirty feet away at most. I give Curt a nudge with my elbow to see whether he has any ideas but he says nothing. From the looks of it, his idea is to style it out and just carry on walking. This is madness though because that boy if he sees us or even if he thinks he has seen us is going to be running his mouth about having seen us there. And Ki. Shit, he’s not going to miss her, is he? Even in joggers.

Then just as I am about to suggest turning back, even though that would be walking straight back to the club, Ki pushes past me and Curt. I look up and suddenly she has broken into a run. At first I think she is running away because she has seen JC and I almost call after her. Now this? I was thinking. Now she’s running away? Is she stupid? That is all we need, JC to look up, clock her and that’s it. And fuck, the CCTV! We don’t want CCTV to see anyone running right about now. What the fuck’s she playing at? I nearly call after her but that was just going to worsen it.

Then I see that I have got it all wrong. She is not just running along the road that he happens to be on. No, she is running straight at Jamil. Nothing in that picture fits. It just don’t make no sense to me.

I can only watch as she flies towards him. His face changing as he realizes he knows her. He is putting it together. It almost seems as if he is going to stop her and chat to her. Then he looks behind her and sees us. His face changes. By then though, it’s too late. The next thing he knows is the pavement. Ki is standing over him with a gun in her stretched arms. She has shot him. I am stunned. Curt’s jaw drops open.

I don’t know why she has done it. Even if he saw us, it didn’t matter that much that he needed to be shot. Would it have been better that he didn’t see us? For real it would have been. It would have been better that he didn’t have no stories to tell anybody who was prepared to listen to his bullshit. And better that he couldn’t tell no Feds anything if he wanted to be one of them kind of guys. But this? There was no need for this. This was the whole point of it. JC was nothing. I could have shut that fucker up in a second by myself if I had to. It was the Olders. It was the protection that protected him. We didn’t need him wasted. I look for Ki’s eyes in the darkness, as I draw up close, my heart now stopped. She looks at me. The eyes are blank. I cannot read them any more. Then she runs.

I watch her as she carries on running to the corner of the road, where a taxi pulls up, its yellow light harsh against the black sky. I look at Curt. His face says everything and nothing. He is cemented to the ground in shock as she disappears in the cab. In the end I have to physically pull him by the arm before he wakes up.

‘Come on,’ I say. ‘We got to bounce.’

Since we have no time to think of a plan B, we follow the plan we had laid out at the beginning as best as we can now that Ki has done this. The bag is collected from the skip. The white sweatshirts come back on. The trainers too. In a few minutes we are back on the main road, waiting for a bus to take us home. We are wearing the same clothes that we left the flat in. We are all in white. The men who went into the club, if they ever try looking for them, were in black. It’s still a perfect alibi.

We burned the black clothes. We found a bit of greenery that wasn’t quite a park and not quite a verge and poured a load of petrol on them and lit them. The gun we buried. It didn’t matter that much if it was picked up since there were no prints on it and it was dirty anyway. The important thing was the DNA on the black clothes. That we had to lose and now it’s all gone into the grey sky. The ashes go up into the sky and then start falling again like dirty snowflakes. I look at Curt, as the ash settles on to his hair and his face. He hasn’t spoken a word since Ki shot JC. Nothing about this night makes sense to him any more. That much you can tell from his face even if you can’t tell a single other thing from it. It even don’t make sense to me but then Curt don’t know yet what I know.

When we reached the flat and opened the door, I had, truth be told, expected Ki to be there. I thought she would be sitting at the table even though I couldn’t picture her expression. I needed to see her. I needed to see her face so I could know that what had happened had happened. I needed to know why she had done it. I needed to know that the right thing had been done. Only her face could tell me that.

It was Curt who saw it first.

‘She’s been. And gone,’ he said and pointed to the table.

There, on it, was the sweatshirt she had been wearing. I recognized it from the Chinese writing on the back. On top of it was a gun, Baikal. Gangster’s gun of choice. The gun I thought was missing. She had it all this time.

Curt looked at me and then shook his head. ‘This is fucked up,’ he said.

I started to speak but he stopped me. ‘I don’t want to know,’ he said. ‘I don’t even want to know.’

‘Look. This ain’t on me Curt. She did this shit by herself. And I ain’t even told you what went down in the toilets.’

‘Well it sure the fuck ain’t on me bruv. She’s your girl. The fuck she at?’ he says throwing his hands up in the air.

‘I’m supposed to know where she’s at?’ I start switching at him, ‘Why don’t you tell me where she at?’

‘Me?’ goes Curt coming right into my face. ‘Me?’

‘Yeah you. You’re the one who’s been giving her lifts to this mosque. You’re the one she splitting all this vine with bruv. All this, “Tell Guilty to get himself some fucking body armour.” ’

‘Fuck you bruv’ he says pushing me hard with a giant paw. ‘What I did, I did for you and your family man. Fuck is wrong with you? I’m supposed to tell Ki to fuck off when she asks for a lift to Elephant? Or when she tells me a bit of news?’

I look at him and then I am all out of answers. ‘I don’t know man. I don’t know anything any more,’ I say and sink to the floor.

‘Nah you don’t. You don’t know nothing,’ he says and turns and walks out of the door slamming it as he goes.

I waited for days for her to come back home or even to contact me but she didn’t. I even went to that building that I followed her to that day where I saw the blond guy. But nothing. The doors were locked shut. It was back to being what it had been before, just an empty building that you would walk past a dozen times in a day and not even notice that it had ever been there.

I thought back to the conversation I had with Kira after I got back from having followed her there that day, the day before the shooting. Judge this is relevant now. I remember the shock in her eyes when I told her I followed her. Then how her expression changed when I told her I knew she weren’t going to no mosque. And how it changed again when I mentioned the blond man.

That night. After the club. She was going to tell me then but then it all went sideways and now she had bailed. Looking back now, I should have been able to work it out for myself. I had all the clues. But I ain’t got that type of mind you get me? I just couldn’t put them Legos together. I think it was the fact that she was gone that was clouding my thinking. Where the fuck had she gone, man? Why wasn’t she calling? I couldn’t do anything without knowing where she was. It was as if I had to know before the rest of me would allow myself to go on. Till then I was just waiting.

Curt went off to Spain a few days after the whole club thing. He left the money behind and when I called him to ask him what I should do with it, he just said, ‘Keep it, man. It weren’t ever about the money.’

‘But you need it. What about Guilty?’ I say.

‘He let me go. I told him I’d dealt with Face and he let me out. Even gave me a present.’

I leave the words hanging, thinking of something to say. Finally I remember there is something I want to ask him.

‘How you even get tied up in that crew anyway, blood?’ I say.

‘I don’t know, man. It’s long.’

‘It’s okay. I got nothing but time right now,’ I say.

‘Glockz had Mum on the hook for some brown and when she couldn’t pay one day, they told me I had to pay in some other way. So that’s what it was. They made me collect a debt. Then over time, when the shit got heavy, they gave Mum more drugs and then they called me to collect. You know I weren’t ever really a gang type of guy. And I still ain’t. It’s just they always got a way to get you on the hook.’

‘Shit. Sorry bruv. I didn’t know.’

‘Nah. It’s okay. Then last year shit got heavy one day and some dude pulled a knife at me. So I turned it back on him. Then Guilty didn’t need to find ways of getting me on the hook no more. I was fucked. Glockz or Feds. That was my choices.’

I then remembered what he told me at the club about how he’d killed someone. And I wondered then how many people my best friend had ghosted.

‘Maybe I come out there and see you,’ I go.

‘If you do, make sure you bring your sister. I got some explaining to do to her but I ain’t got it in me right now.’

‘Bless?’ I say. ‘Explain what?’

‘Nah, fam. It’s nothing. Just you know, say I said hi. And to your mum.’

Like with you now, I tried to tell him about Ki and what had happened in the toilets, but he didn’t want to know. He was done with it all. He was tired. I think at the end of the day, his patience had just emptied out.

‘You need to leave too bro,’ he said to me finally.

‘I can’t man. Not without Ki.’

‘That girl’s playing you. Just bounce, man. It’s time,’ he says quietly.

I had booked myself a new ticket to Spain that day but even as I did it I knew that I weren’t going to ever use it. Not without Ki.

‘I can’t.’

I waited for Ki. I believed she wouldn’t leave just like that, after everything. So I just laid back and waited. It would maybe be a day or two more and she would come in through that door. The main heat was over now. For some reason the shootings in the club didn’t even make the news. Two men killed and nothing. But the other one did. This one, I mean. JC’s. But even that was over in a couple of days or so. The whole Brexit thing was bigger news now. So I knew she would come back. She had to. She had nowhere else to go. She was lying low. I couldn’t find her but that was just because she was clever. She’s lying so low that a person like me ain’t ever going to find her. She was definitely coming back though, I knew that. That was for sure. I just had to wait. But I tell you, it was like losing her that first time. All over again.

So when the police came a week later and broke down the door, everything was still where it was. The Baikal, the hoodie, the money, my e-ticket to Spain, the passport, the phones. Me. After that, well you know about after that, innit. Curt was right. I should have bailed but I didn’t understand what was up or down at that time.