You Don't Know Me

38

Even after I was arrested for JC’s murder and remanded I kept thinking, she will come back. Even if not in a straight line kind of thing, I thought at least maybe the police might pick her up. I didn’t care at that point. I just needed to see her and even if I couldn’t see her like face to face, if I knew she was alive, that would have been enough for me.

But she didn’t come. It was just me. And that was maybe the hardest thing of the last year. It wasn’t the being in prison. It wasn’t even really facing a murder charge. It was Ki. Just not knowing.

The remand time I coped with. Because it’s remand and not convicted status it means that I get more or less as many visits as I want. Bless and Mum come as much as they can. In fact I seen them more in the last year than I had before. At first I didn’t want them to come. Being in that visitors’ centre with all them other prisoners is dirty, you know what I mean? You can’t even properly have time together. They should give you like a room or something so there’s a place you can, like, cry. Not me, obviously, but them. But they had to hold it all in and save it up till they left. So believe me a few times I thought about not sending them a visiting order. But then it’s been kind of a good thing I guess. It helps prepare a person. Gets them ready for prison. Not me. Them.

I did ask the Governor once why can’t we have like private rooms and shit but he said there was too many problems with that. ‘But we’re working on it,’ he said, ‘and you’re not the first person to mention it. It’s a good idea.’ It is a good idea. Maybe that’s something you lot can write to your MP or whatever about after this.

Anyway. This next bit is, well, you could say is like a really important piece of the jigsaw as the prosecution have been saying. Like the whole thing is a jigsaw that you can’t really understand what it is until the last piece goes in and then the whole thing is clear. I think that is a bullshit example, personally. I don’t know nobody who didn’t know what the picture was when the last piece ain’t gone in yet. Everyone can already see what it is. It’s just a bit annoying. So I guess this next bit ain’t a jigsaw piece. It is like an engine piece. It is like a spark plug. Without this, the engine don’t run. It don’t even start.

So I have to take you back to the start and that thing with my brief. You lot probably still think what a stupid thing to sack my brief for the speeches. He was so good in the trial, wasn’t he? Why would I sack him? I told you that it was partly because I wanted to tell the whole truth and he didn’t want me to. Well, what he didn’t know is what I am about to tell you.

Right before that meeting with my QC – the night before, in fact – prison staff told me I had a visitor. And instead of leading me to the visiting room he took me off to some small room in some different part of the prison. I never even been to this part of the block before, I thought it was all staff areas.

When I went in, the first thing I thought to myself was, shit, they did my suggestion. Private room. So I sat down and waited for Mum to come in or Bless. The guard locked the door and said he was just coming back with my visitor and I waited. Nothing to do but wait in this place. The walls even were boring. Just bricks painted white. Just one window, looking in not out. Just one table. Just two chairs. Just this concrete floor. Still, man, a private room, I thought, then I thought, shit, it’s going to be all tears.

A few minutes go by and I am getting a bit vex because all them minutes come off your visit. Screws like to delay everything so an hour’s visit becomes like twenty minutes by the time everyone’s ready. Some people don’t even get told of their visits. Screws can fuck with you like that. But at least I’ve been told about mine. And this is what I am saying to myself when the guard comes back. Keys go in the door and it opens. That’s when I see her.

Kira.

Shit the look on your faces! Trust though, that ain’t nothing to what my face must have been like. It wasn’t just that I had been waiting for long to see a girl that I loved. Or a girl that I risked my whole life for and who just disappeared on me. Or even a girl I didn’t even know was alive or dead. She was my life, blood. And later, when she left and I didn’t know whether I would even ever see her face again, I felt like what a drug addict must feel like to be told there will never ever be no more drugs for you. And then when I saw her, there after a full year, in front of me, my life just changed again.

‘Ki!’ I almost shout it. I can’t believe what I am seeing. It’s really her. They say about a person who is beautiful that she is like a picture. Kira right then was like a picture but not in them kind of ways. Yes, she was beautiful still. Those eyes were as dazzling as ever. And even standing there in just jeans and a white cotton shirt she was stunning. But she was like a picture – like she wasn’t real. Like you look at a picture and know that it’s a person in there but you also know it’s not a real person whose face you can touch or whose warm breath you can feel. It’s just like a imagining of a person. That was what she looked like to me.

‘You got twenty minutes. No more,’ goes the screw and he’s gone. The door’s locked again but he can see through the windows.

‘Hi,’ she says. Just that. Her eyes are safely behind the lids.

‘You come now?’ I ask.

I am halfway between tears and screams. I am so angry and confused and vex and all them things that I can’t even order my thoughts.

‘Sorry,’ she says and sits down opposite me and unfolds her hands. It’s been a year since I saw that face and the reality of it sitting in front of me with them eyes staring at me feels unreal.

‘I hope you got better than sorry. Where the fuck you been Ki?’

‘Away.’

‘Away?’ I go. ‘I know away! But where away? And how the fuck you get in here anyway? What’s going on?’

For a moment I’m not sure whether she is going to get up and leave and it sends a panic to my heart. She picks up her handbag and then puts it back down again. I’m surprised they even let her have it in here.

‘They arranged it,’ she says looking down at her hands.

‘They?’ I go. My heart is beating blood to my temples and I can feel my face throbbing. I don’t know if I can control myself.

‘Well, James,’ she says looking at the ceiling. ‘James organized it.’

‘Who the fuck is James?’ I say.

‘The guy. You know at the place with the black door,’ she says looking down.

‘James? You have to be fucking with me Ki, James?’ I say and laugh but it’s one of them laughs.

‘That’s his name,’ she says and folds her arms tight across her chest.

‘I don’t give a shit about his name. Who the fuck is he?’

‘He’s the one who arranged it,’ she says now looking at me. ‘He watched you when you followed me to the place, in Elephant and Castle.’

‘Watching me? Why?’ I shout out. I am vexed at the thought of this James guy watching me following her. Badly. Like I’m some kind of child.

‘Listen I am so sorry –’

‘Fuck sorry, yeah. We can chat about sorry laters. For now though, what the hell is going on? Was this the shit you was going to tell me after the shooting?’ I say getting up. The table is cemented into the floor and so cannot move when I go to stand and so I sit back down again and stare at her in anger.

She doesn’t say anything. She looks at me and then looks down at her hands again like there’s nowhere else for her eyes to go. It looks like she is wiping away a tear but right then it’s the last thing that I am concerned about.

‘Why did you shoot them Ki?’

‘What?’

‘Why did you shoot Face and that other one in the club?’ I say to her looking around to make sure no one is hearing this.

‘I had to,’ she says. ‘You weren’t going to were you?’

‘What you think I was there for fun? With a gun in my hand?’ I say.

‘You were out of it. Your eyes had glazed over. I thought you were going to pass out,’ she says and then she sighs out the next words in a half-breath. ‘I had to do it.’

‘But I still might have,’ I say but I know by then that it’s a lie. She was right. I had choked. I look down at the table. There are still questions I need to ask. I don’t know how to ask the next one because I don’t know what the answer is going to be. I just know whatever it is it’s going to change everything. But then, everything had already changed hadn’t it?

‘What about Jamil? Why him? You didn’t need to do it. Face was out of the picture. Jamil was just a boy. He weren’t no danger to nobody.’

Ki sweeps her hand across her face as if she can make it new again. Take away the pain in it or maybe the lies in it.

‘James wanted him, too.’

I almost laugh out. ‘What?! What has James got to do with all this shit?’

‘He’s an agent.’

‘An agent? What you chatting about Ki?’

‘MI5.’

‘MI5?’ And I laughed then, so hard water came out of my eyes. I knew that reading all them books was going to fuck with Ki’s head one day. But M, I, fucking 5?

‘You know what you even sound like?’ I say, but even as I am saying the words, it hits me. It comes at me like a fist into my face. It was true.

‘He wanted Face. But he said he’d take as many as we could give him.’

‘Wanted them what, dead?’

‘James uses a different word. Disconnected.’