You Don't Know Me: A BBC Radio 2 Book Club Choice

by Imran Mahmood

  The prosecution is saying that they don’t really have to prove motive. Maybe that is right what he is saying. He knows the law innit? What I say though is even if they don’t have to prove a motive, you should look for a motive. Because he was shot. If you try and find what the reason for his shooting was you might end up with something. Maybe that’s why Mr QC don’t want to go there. But that don’t mean you shouldn’t go there. So what’s it all about? Who would have a reason to shoot him if it wasn’t me?

  What he didn’t mention in his speech was that the deceased, Jamil, was a gang member. Yes, he was nineteen. Yes, this gang he was in was just a nuisance nothing gang at first, dealing in a bit of weed and doing little robberies or what have you. It weren’t no big man’s gang. It was a gang though and to those kids in that gang or in any gang, it was life. This is real.

  They join these gangs when they’re just little kids and then the life gets them. They start with knives and at first the one with the biggest knife is the main man. Then it’s the one who actually uses the knife, he’s the main man. Then it’s the boy who kills someone with a knife, he’s the leader. And this is what their days become, grabbing for the top spot, who can outdo who, who can be the bigger man.

  To you, it maybe sounds stupid. Little kids stabbing each other up over a bit of grass or whatever, but this is life for them. It gets in their heads and when it’s in it’s hard to get it out again. It’s like a disease that makes you think that this thing is real, not that thing, and that killing a person is okay. It’s not like they sit there thinking these things through. Nobody does. This is just their reality, like your reality is that it’s okay to waste your life working till you’re old and then to retire just in time to die. It’s all stupidness. It’s just that when you’re in it, you can’t see it.

  What is real for these kids isn’t ordinary day-to-day life, getting up, going to school, swearing at teachers. It’s this fucked-up shit. This is what is real to them. I didn’t really know that before. I mean I could see they were travelling down certain roads. But I didn’t know why. I didn’t know it weren’t really a choice for a lot of them. These people you see on the news and politicians and what have you, they go on about this like it is a surprise to them that young boys in the life do this shit. But it ain’t a surprise. If anything, it’s a surprise anyone ever stops. These boys, their friends are like their brothers. They are the only ones they got, a lot of them, who even care they exist. Their mates are the people they go to when they’re in the shit and it’s their mates who get them out of it. And the gangs they’re in are basically families to them. And that is obvious when you think about it. A boy will be ready to take a knife in the stomach if he has to for his gang bruv and what is that if it ain’t family? I’m talking about a boy who’s got no dad. Who’s got a mum who can’t control him but who thinks that all he needs is to go to church to fix him out. An actual family who don’t give a shit about him. You take a boy like that, and trust me, they are all boys like that, then you shouldn’t be surprised he’s in a gang. The shit’s inevitable. But people don’t like to hear that. Because they want to make you pay for what you do. And don’t get me wrong, I’m all about people paying for making choices. But these kids. They ain’t choosing shit.

  At the local school, I knew kids who were like eleven years old who would have bigger kids come up to them and be all like, ‘You should join our gang’. And if you didn’t, then someone would start some beef with you. Get you shook. And if you weren’t like strong in your head, eventually you would just go, ‘Yeah I’m in’. A lot of kids don’t want to be dealing with some next beef as well as all the other shit going on in their lives. And then there’s other kids. They ain’t got no head for maths or history or whatever, so then older boys would target them. ‘Yo blood, you ain’t going to be no CEO. What you going to do for paper when you leave? Clean the streets? You should come work with us. We give you paper right now. Just go do this little pick up for me …’ and rah rah rah. So if you got that going on in your school, what you going to do? If you have got some skills and you can handle yourself, like I could, you might be okay. But what if you ain’t? You got no choices. It’s either take a beating or you join a gang and get paid and get respect. And then it just becomes part of your life. It becomes a normal thing for a kid to sell drugs in his school. It becomes a normal thing for a kid to stab up some next kid for no reason. And once it is normal for you, you don’t have any reasons to change it. It just becomes life. Your life.

  And I only realized this recently while I was in prison waiting for my trial. I been waiting a year for my case to get on. Remand they call it. And when you’re on remand that long inside four walls with nothing to do, you will do two things you might never have done before in your life. No matter who you are. Think about shit. And read about shit.

  The prison library is crap generally but occasionally you find something that is like finding a tenner on the street. It is like God just dropped something right in your hands for just you. There is this book I found called The Hammerman. I picked it up because I thought it was like a horror story or something. You know like a proper made-up story but it ain’t. This is one of them true-to-life books. It’s about South Africa in the olden days. I read it and I couldn’t stop thinking about these kids in these gangs. It’s the same thing, let me tell you.

  So, all this apartheid shit was happening. Like a few white people in charge of all the blacks. If you were lucky and you were black you might be like a servant to a white guy. But if you were in bad luck, you might even be killed just for saying some next thing to a white person. Brutal. And if I was being tried out there back then this whole case would have been over in a day. One day. And only one verdict. Guilty. Sentenced to life. Game over. But if you were white and you killed a black person – nothing.

  Anyway this one year, the white people in South Africa suddenly started getting all jumpy about their blacks. One day everything was cool and the next day they were locking themselves up behind these high, electrified gates at night shitting themselves about what was happening. See, some huge black man was breaking into their houses and smashing their heads open with a hammer. The shit was all over the papers for weeks and weeks. Everyone was hunting this guy. People were scared. And it didn’t make them less scared when people started to calling him the Hammerman. For the whites it was like a name you might give to a monster. But for black people it was a superhero name. And he was like a superhero. He was mysterious. He was uncatchable. And the rumours were saying all kinds about him. He was seven feet tall. He was built like a fucking house. He could run faster than a cheetah. He was invisible. He could fly. The crazier the rumours got the easier people were finding to believe them. They turned him into a legend.

  But you know what people were scared of the most? They didn’t know why he was doing it. And those people needed to know why so that they could maybe understand it. Understand him. Understand the monster. And then maybe the monster can become a person, and anyone can kill a person, innit. Everyone was scared – except black people. They weren’t scared.

  Black people loved it. To them it was like at last someone was getting their own back for them. One man could change a whole country. It was amazing for them. If they could have sat down and dreamed up something they couldn’t have dreamed up a better thing than this guy. Until Mandela got out, but this was ten years before that happened. This was in a time when there weren’t even riots yet. A time before there was even the hope of a change.

  It sounded like from what I was reading in that book that the whites were already a bit wary of black people. It sounded stupid to me at first. Why would they already be a bit scared of black people when most of them were like their slaves? But this is what the writer explains it like. They were scared of them because they couldn’t read them. Their faces were blank to them. When a white man gave a servant a load of shit for dropping a glass and that man just stared back all blank, that fucked with them. They didn’t know
what they were thinking. And you can see it. You’re there giving it rah rah to some servant and they just staring at you, saying nothing, not even with their faces. They must have been shit-scared about what they were thinking behind them blank faces. You want to know what your enemy is thinking.

  Then here was this massive guy like a superhero calmly walking into white people’s houses and smashing their faces in with a hammer. For no apparent reason. He weren’t stealing any shit. He weren’t raping no women. He was just smashing their skulls in with a hammer. They must have been like, ‘What if the whole country starts doing the same thing?’ The whites might have had all the money and power and what have you. But there were fucking millions of black Africans. Millions of them. All pissed off. All ready for a war. All ready for a bit of freedom and the chance to fight back. What if they rose up one day like the Hammerman and started some revolution shit?

  Anyway, they caught him. They put him on trial. He didn’t have no lawyers. He couldn’t speak English but they didn’t bother giving him no translator. Then they hanged him probably. End of that story. White people won. They could relax again and open their gates up and forget all about him. But then years down the road someone found a recording of this guy’s speech that he made in court before they sentenced him to death. It was all in Zulu or whatever he spoke and he spoke all these words but no one knew what they were, whether he was chatting shit or poetry because nobody could be bothered to get a person into this court full of white people who could tell them what he was saying.

  Well this reporter guy who had found it could tell you what he had been saying when he got it translated. This man, the Hammerman, had had one strange life, believe. He had been done for stealing a few years before and had been given a seven for it. Seven years for stealing! Trust, seven years in South Africa ain’t no seven years in England. They made him break rocks for eighteen hours a day for five years. And this is what he told the judge just as he was about to be sentenced. He goes like, there were these rocks that he had to break all day in the heat with a small hammer. White rocks the size of a person’s head. And after a time, when he looked at the rocks he didn’t see no rocks any more. He saw heads. Big white heads that he saw himself breaking open for hours in the day. Then when he was let out he just flipped and did that one thing he knew how to do.

  Now, I ain’t sorry that they hanged the man. If you go round smashing people’s heads in, people ain’t going to be happy about it. As I said before, you pay for what you do. But I was sorry about that one thing. He was trying to say his piece, to explain what was going on in his head but nobody gave enough of a fuck about him even to want to hear him out. At least I got you lot. Anyway my point is that it didn’t really make no sense that he was smashing people’s heads in with a hammer. But that was what was in his head. It was his reality. Those rocks were the heads of the white people and everything they had done to him. Or maybe the white people’s heads were just the rocks that he had been breaking for years. Whichever way it went down, it made sense to him because it got into his head and once it was there he couldn’t get it out.

  And that’s the reason I’m telling you this. What happened there to that guy, it’s the same as Jamil’s gang, The Squad or whatever they called themselves. Something like breaking rocks is going on in their heads every day. Not real rocks obviously but other kinds of shit. If you’re twelve and next boys come up to you and put a knife to your throat because you sold a bit of weed where that gang hangs out, then you get your boys and do the same back. And when you see one of them boys on the street by his own you make sure you put your knife in him, not just to him. And it sounds crazy and gangster but that is just what happens. What else they going to do? Not deal drugs? When you lot fill the TV with hundreds of gangster rappers drowning in money, what do you expect? Who is the role model for a young black kid on the street? Is it Barack Obama? Why do we have to look that far away to one man to find someone that these kids can be? Or should they be a boxer or a runner? We might as well tell them that they should want to be a lottery winner.

  Fuck that shit. You know what the most saddest thing I ever saw was? Two schoolkid girls on the bus chatting about what they wanted to be. This one girl, fat like she had burgers for breakfast, was chatting to her skinny mate who looked like she never ate a breakfast in her life. This was like ten o’clock in the morning and although they should have been in school by then, they weren’t. But it looked like they might have been on their way there, taking it casual. Anyway the fat kid in between mouthfuls of something leaned over to her mate and said this:

  ‘What I’m going be, yeah, is, number one, astronaut, number two, a fashion designer and number three, a pilot.’

  And the skinny kid went, ‘Yeah my number one is astronaut. My number two is scientist and my three ain’t pilot coz I’m scared of heights.’

  ‘What about astronauts?’ says fatty. ‘They need heights too.’

  ‘Nah,’ says the other one, ‘they don’t.’

  This is what they’ve done to these kids. They told them that they could be anything they wanted to but they lied to them. All they did was give them different dreams. But they’re still only dreams.

  So this is it. Kids are drug dealers, but they didn’t make themselves drug dealers. And when you got drug dealers, you got drug dealers doing drug deal ting: shooting people. Even kids. Live with that. In fact you don’t need to live with that. You already know this. You just don’t care that much because it’s not on your door. I don’t blame you. If it wasn’t on my door I wouldn’t give a shit either. I’m the same as you. I don’t give a shit about your shit and you don’t give a shit about mine. That is fine. I’m not trying to make you give a shit about it. All I’m saying is that Jamil was shot because he was in a gang and he was dealing drugs and people that deal drugs get shot. That’s it. And I’m sorry about that for his family. I’m sorry for his mum who is sitting in this court having to hear it all. But it is the truth.

  Break: 15:30

  5

  15:40

  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 m
urderer.’ 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?