You Don't Know Me

5

So fourth evidence. The cell-site evidence. You lot know that the phone expert said that my phone was in the same, what did he call it, vector? Anyway like in the same fifty-metre area as the deceased at the exact moment of the shooting. And that it was in the same cell area as his a couple of months before that. You know, on the day that I was supposed to be arguing with the boy?

Look, I can know from your faces that you think that looks bad. And you know what? I ain’t even going to lie to you. It does look bad. I give you that. I can’t answer the full details of that one yet though. I got to come back to this one. It’s like a thing of what I say about it right now won’t make sense until I explain some other thing I need to tell you about.

So five. Erm, the police finding a Baikal handgun in my flat. And my passport. And that e-ticket for the flight to Spain with my name on it. Oh and the thirty grand. Sorry, I’m just trying to read the notes I made last night. Yeah and the firearms discharge residue on my clothes. Okay yeah sorry. Five. That one I got to get back to you on as well. Sorry, just a bit nervous.

Okay, so number six evidence. The police saying that the bullet which killed the boy must have come from my gun. Shit. Erm I can’t do that one either at this time. Actually or number seven – the dead boy’s blood under my nails. Or number eight, the hairs in his car.

No. Don’t be doing that to me please. Don’t be looking at the ceiling. I know how it looks. I know how it sounds. It is a lot but I do have explanations. It’s just I can’t really tell you it yet because it won’t make no sense to you right now.

If I can just get a second? I just lost my thing of thought.

I got to put these papers down for a second.

You know, part of me thought if I told my speech myself then at least you get to feel a little bit of what it is like to be me. That if my QC did it then maybe you would all be thinking, ‘Yeah it’s all very well to put it over all shiny and slick but that fucker’s still a murderer.’ And I really did think that if I told my own story I could make you feel my life. But actually explaining the evidences out loud is proper hard. I know what I want to say to you in a ways but I can’t get it out. And what makes it worse is that I know my brief would have been all over it. You heard him in this trial. He’s an operator. You got to give him that. No wonder they call them QCs ‘silks’. Because he is smooth, you get me. But then he wouldn’t say what I need to say, what you have to hear, and that stuff I can’t even work out how to say to you.

But maybe it don’t matter who tells the story because there’s no way of making a person understand what it is to be you. What your thoughts are when you wake up. Why the first thing you remember is some random thing about your dad or whatever. How that random thought makes you do one thing and not the next thing. No one can explain those things. But it is those little things that answer the questions.

All the number five, number six, all that evidence, it’s not one of them things that you can just talk your way through like logically point by point. You need to like get under my bonnet and see what it is that is making my cylinders go. You have to do what they didn’t do for that hammer guy in South Africa. You got to be in my head. See what I been seeing. Hear what I been hearing. Because unless you do that, you won’t really be able to understand what I’m trying to say. It’s like, say it was a car accident you were dealing with. And someone died. All you would be able to do is to say that that car killed that man. You wouldn’t know whether it was because it was driven at him on purpose. Or whether it was because the brake fluid was drained. Or if it was one of the tyres had a blow-out. You would only be able to see the ending. That is what the prosecution is counting on. He don’t want you to look at the causes because that fucks him up innit? Whereas I am all about the causes. If I’m looking at an engine that won’t start, if I don’t know the causes how do I know if I can fix it?

It’s that kind of thing that answers why the Baikal was in my flat. ‘The gun of choice for gangsters’, as he puts it. I’ll be honest with you. The gun is mine. I went out and I bought it, but it ain’t like one of them things. I didn’t buy it to shoot no boy. It was because of my family.

In my life, apart from a few mates, there is my mum, my girlfriend and my little sister. They are the main people in my life.

My sister is called Blessing which is strange because really she is a curse. I’m joking man! She is a blessing for real. She is like every bad thing you can put on me, you can put ten good ones on her. We are just two years difference in age. But those two years is the only time we really ever been apart. For more than twenty years, whatever I’ve been through she’s been through and she has brought me through. That’s her sitting there with my mum. That’s who she is: my little sister. That’s who it is, if you’ve been looking, that has been crying all the way through this thing. That is just her. If anyone hurts me, it hurts her. She can’t help it. That’s just how she is made up.

I didn’t want her to be here for this, for any of it. But she is her own woman and no amount of me telling her is going to stop her doing what she needs to do. If you look in them eyes you’ll know what I mean. You can see the steel in them. But where you can see only steel, I can see something else. I can see Mum in her. Mum who can get a shoe and be beating you with it but love you at the same time. That’s maybe every mum, but it ain’t every sister.

So that is me, nearly all surrounded by women. Mum and Bless was who I grew up with. Dad came and went. That is the best thing you could say about him. When he wasn’t tripping he was okay. Sometimes he would stay for a day or maybe a week or whatever but he’d always go again. ‘I a rolling stone, son. If I don’t keep movin’ something a-happen to me.’

When he was using though, boy, that was another thing. If Mum was in, maybe we had a chance. But usually he’d come when she was out working. He would come in looking like all kinds of shit. And he would have this face, like a pleading begging face. Just give him something to tide him over. Just a lickle something to medicine him. Even when I was ten and Bless was like eight, he would be banging on the door asking for money. What kind of fucked up shit is that – we were kids – what money did we have? Other times if he was high on some other thing it was like a fire would come out of him.

This one day in the school holidays when I was about fifteen, me and Bless were hoovering up and tidying up or whatever before Mum came back from work. Trust me if my mum came back having told you to clean and you never cleaned, she would have made you pay for it later. So we were kind of arguing about who got the shit job of hoovering with this old 1920s or something hoover and who just got the dusting to do when the bell goes.

It’s Dad. His eyes are all red like he’s been to hell and just got kicked out. His patchy old beard is looking the same colour as his dirty hat and both are looking like they have been rolling around in the dirt for a few days. He is mumbling about some ‘urgent urgent’ thing and even though we know he is tripping we let him in anyway. That is the only thing to do or else he won’t go and the last thing we want is for Mum to come home and find him lying in our doorway, high.

So he comes crashing in through the door hardly able to keep upright. He is knocking over everything he comes near. There is shit smashing left right and centre. I had never seen him like this. ‘What the fuck do you want Dad?’ Nothing, no answer. Or at least nothing I can make head or tails of. Then he starts proper rooting around like he is looking for something. The leather settee goes upside down. The fat-arsed TV goes on the floor. Drawers are coming out of the kitchen cupboards. All the while he is mumbling some shit or other. ‘Where is dis ting?’ or whatever in his mind he thinks he has lost in our flat, ‘Tell me where tis.’

We are just trying to calm him down. Bless is telling him she is going to make him a coffee but he isn’t listening to anything. I am following him around either picking up some shit he has just knocked over or picking him up when he knocks himself over. If there had been a camera you could have sold this clip to the TV. It was like comedy if you could have just muted the sound off.

Next minute the front door rattles and opens. It’s Mum. Now with Mum, it’s one of them things. She is a proper Nigerian lady and anyone who knows a Nigerian mum knows that you don’t want to mess with an angry one. So she sees red and starts yelling at him, ‘Get out of the house, get out get out. Useless man. Get out!’ But she ain’t like read the situation. He isn’t just his usual floaty high. This was some next thing he is on. Then he looks at her like he has seen her for the first time. He is just staring for like two minutes. Then he stumbles forward until he’s in her face and she can probably smell the drink on him.

‘You jus’ a woman,’ he says and then bam, next thing he’s got his hands round her neck and has pushed her to the floor. I’m like what the fuck? And I jump on his back punching and kicking him but he whips me off like I’m some kind of little toy and throws me far off. Bless is screaming and Mum is flat on the floor. Dad is on her and then he starts punching her face like he’s hammering nails in with his fist. Again and again he is beating her with proper man punches. Mum’s face is just a bloody pulpy mess. I am just paralysed sitting there. I don’t know what to do. It’s like my mind has stopped working and my body’s broken down.

Then this next thing happens. Bless has picked up the iron and she starts to hit him with it. But she is only thirteen years old and she don’t have enough past in her to do anything serious to him. If it happened now, no doubt she would finish the job for real, but back then there just weren’t enough fight in her. She didn’t have the anger that only a lot of life can give you, you get me? So anyway she starts to hit him with the iron but it’s just bouncing off his shoulder. Dad gets hold of her. Pulls the iron from her hand and then – and then it happens. He smacks Bless in the face with it. Immediately there is blood everywhere. Bless drops to the ground like she is dead. I thought she was dead. Then he stops. It’s like he’s just woken up. He drops the iron. Walks to Mum. Picks up her handbag. Empties her purse. Leaves.

Nah. Don’t be looking at her face. Look at me. Keep your eyes on me. It was my fault. I was the man. I should have been the one to pick up the iron or a knife or something. I wanted to. Afterwards, when we were in the hospital it was all I could think about. I could have done this. I could have done that.

They were in beds next to each other. Weeks they were there. Mum had a fractured eye socket. Bless had a broken jaw and lost half a tooth. But I lost too. I lost my sister in a way. Yeah it had been shitty in that house for enough time. But it had never been like this. This time when he did what he did, he took her voice with him. She didn’t speak for years. Part of it was the injuries but mostly it was that she had run out of words. Nothing could explain it, nothing could make it right, nothing could say what she was feeling. But I could. I could feel it. It was like a feeling of someone standing on your heart and pressing down until it was just meat.

In those weeks while they were recovering something was happening to me too. I can’t explain it exactly, it was just one of them things like there was only one thing on my mind. Focus. That is what it was. I knew there was no way I was letting anything like that happen a second time. So I went out, spoke to some people, and got a gun. That Baikal. Yes, gun of choice for gangsters. But not because it’s like a special amazing cool gun. It’s because it’s cheap. They are just converted Russian or Czech or something starting pistols. They don’t make them with serial numbers. They can fit in your pocket. They take virtually any ammo. It’s a gun for a kid with no money.

So when he says, ‘Oh look at this, we have found a gun in his flat, and it’s the same type of gun that killed Jamil and it’s a gangster gun, and he must have had it for a reason,’ he is right. It is a gangster gun. But that also means that every kid in London in a gang has one or can get one. And if, as I believe, Jamil was shot because of all this gang shit he was involved with, then no wonder he was shot by one of them guns. And he is also right that I had it for a reason, ‘a deadly reason’ or whatever he said. I was going to kill my dad if he ever came near my sister or my mum again. I swear down. I would have killed him in a second.

He can do what he did, that is just a choice. He can choose to break my sister’s jaw and mess up my mum’s face. That is his choice. It is his freedom. But freedom isn’t free. In my eyes if you going to make a choice, you better start saving up for the price of it. Lucky for him he didn’t come bothering us again. But I waited for seven years with that gun in my kitchen drawer. He didn’t come. Good luck for him. Bad luck for me that the police found it in my drawer.

But here’s the thing of it, yeah, why would I have kept it if I had just shot someone with it? That is just stupidness. That is probably the thing that annoys me the most. He, Mr QC, thinks I am stupid. To him I am dumb, with no thoughts going on in my head. Shoot up some next kid and keep a fifty quid gun on me in case I want to use it again? Come on man.

In fact he is the one who isn’t thinking. Why did I walk past Jamil and tell him he was a waste man? Has he thought about that? Like I keep saying, look for the reasons. The reasons will show you the way. What he says, I’ve written it down, ‘… is all the worse for this fact. It was an apparently chance encounter with a stranger that led to this callous act.’ Chance encounter with a stranger, is that what he thinks? I will let you and him into a little secret. It wasn’t no chance encounter and it wasn’t no stranger. I knew him. I knew Jamil. I don’t mean I knew him like maybe his family did. I mean I knew him. I think it’s time I told you some shit.

I don’t know.

Look I’m tired and I’m not thinking straight. I know you lot think it’s my own fault. I should have kept my barrister for the speech. Maybe you’re right. But the fact is that when it is your life on trial you will do everything you can to save it. I’m fighting for my life right now. Yeah I can go through all the evidences like I been doing. In just a little bit of time I been through like four of them. Four rubbish points the prosecution is convicting me on. And I still want to say what I got to say about the other four. But that ain’t enough really and truly. You need to know like a fuller story of what shit went down. What was going on in my life. How can you understand it otherwise? How can you understand me if you don’t know about me? How can you judge me?

Throughout this trial, I been listening and you been listening. And you been looking at evidence and I been looking at you. I see your faces when you see a bit of evidence. You got this look like, ‘You are fucked mate.’ And I agree with you in a ways. Some of the next evidences do fuck me a bit. But it ain’t about whether I was wearing some next hoodie or using my phone near a boy. It’s about did I commit a murder. And I did not do this murder. It weren’t me. It was someone else.