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

by Imran Mahmood

  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 th
is 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.

  Long adjournment: 16:45

  IN THE CENTRAL CRIMINAL COURT  T2017229

  Before: HIS HONOUR JUDGE SALMON QC

  * * *

  Closing Speeches:

  * * *

  Trial: Day 30

  Wednesday 5th July 2017

  APPEARANCES

  For the Prosecution:     Mr C. Salfred QC

  For the Defendant:         In person

  Transcribed from a digital audio recording by

  T. J. Nazarene Limited

  Official Court Reporters and Tape Transcribers

  6

  10:15

  Okay, so do I just carry on from yesterday then?

  As I was saying yesterday. I knew the dead boy, Jamil. But on the street people never called him Jamil, they called him JC. Maybe because he was thin or maybe it was his Jesus beard. But JC is what I knew him as. He was one of them plastic gangsters. He was skinny as a twelve-year-old girl but he was always acting like he was a big man. I knew him from around the area and that but I also knew him for another thing. He knew Kira, my girl. You could say that everything that happened to me – this case, the murder – it all goes back to Ki.

  What can explain to you lot about Kira? Kira is like the most beautiful thing you ever saw. She is the sort of person who if she walks down the road ten boys will be staring at her like Rihanna just walked past them. She has these grey eyes that lock on to you when she looks at you. And if she is looking at you, doesn’t matter that she has these long legs and a walk that makes you think she is swaying in the wind, you be looking her right in those eyes. Locked in. Wide grey eyes that reach all the way to the edges of her face. Grey eyes are quite unusual anyway but on a black girl, doesn’t matter that she’s mixed race, they stand out like cat’s eyes. On her though, they don’t jump out like that, they just kind of fit. They match her wide mouth and her high cheeks. They match her skin. The eyes belong to the face and the face could have no other eyes but those.

  I saw her for the first time eight years ago during the time that Bless and Mum were in hospital recovering after Dad. I had just been in for visiting time and I was feeling proper low. The specialist had just been and said that Bless would always have that thing where the side of her face drops. Don’t look at her man, please!

  They said maybe it would get better all on its own but probability was that it would always be more or less like that. But he said at the end with a half-smile like he was offering up hope, ‘There’s nothing to stop her from talking. Nothing physical that is. Just see if you can get her to come out of herself.’

  He says it like that. Like it’s the easiest thing in the world. Like there is some door that she can open in herself that can let her leave and speak again.

  I had just got on the bus from the hospital and was still probably thinking about some nasty shit that needed to be done to Dad. Bless was still locked up in her own world. She still hadn’t said a word. She had been there in the hospital for a few weeks by then but still not a sound out of her. She just shut out the world and shut herself down. I didn’t know what was going to happen to her and so I was just as you would expect. Face down; lost in my own head.

  The back of the bus, upper deck is my spot, or as near as I can get to the back. But because of all this, all that old shit didn’t seem to matter to me any more and I just chucked myself down stairs at the back and stared out the window. It was maybe fifteen twenty minutes later that I looked up and saw her sitting opposite me. She had her earphones in and was nodding quietly to the music that was buzzing out of them. She was just wearing this white vest and jeans but I couldn’t stop staring at her. Her eyes were closed and made it seem like she was dreaming. She was just there, eyes closed, a slight smile on her face and just, nodding to a beat in her ears.

  I stared at her for maybe ten minutes. It felt kind of weird like I was looking through a keyhole at her. But I carried on looking. I couldn’t help it. I remember thinking that I would be okay as long as her eyes stayed shut. But just as I was finishing that thought her eyes snapped open and locked me down. Shit. Busted! Them eyes. Dazzling grey. Almost silver. When they on you. You can’t do nothing.

  I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t say anything because them earphones was doing all the chatting. So in the end I just laughed. She raised her eyebrow and hooked a finger through the leads and released the buds.

  ‘What you laughing at?’ she goes. She definitely wasn’t impressed.

  ‘Nuffing man,’ I say, still laughing. ‘You proper caught me though innit?’

  ‘Ain’t you got nothing better to do than eyeing up girls?’ she goes and sticks her earbuds back in and snaps her eyes shut until it’s time for me to get off.

  Ten minutes more she keeps them closed. There is no expression on her face at all. It’s just a blank. I almost nudge her to say goodbye to her when I finally had to get off, but I didn’t have the balls at that time.

  On the walk home I couldn’t stop thinking about her though. She was hot but that wasn’t it. I just felt like I recognized her, or something like that. And that was how it was fo
r the next few days. My mind was somewhere else. Even when I was in hospital I was thinking about her most of the time. Every time I got on the bus home, I sat on the lower deck, hoping maybe I would see her. I did that for ages without a single sighting even. I can’t tell you how depressing it was. One day though, my luck changed.

  I was already sitting at the back of the bus when she gets on like the wind carried her. It was sunny and she was wearing the summer like it was clothes. Her skin was glowing, she had on this little checked shirt. She was fit no doubt. And, no lie, she kind of smelled like chocolate. This time I was ready for her though. I stuck out my hand and said hi. She looked at it like I’d just offered her a fish. ‘I don’t shake hands with strangers,’ she says, and put her buds in and shut her eyes.

  I got off before she opened them again. I was proper gutted. She had been on my mind for days, then when I saw her I blew it. Shit. So I’m not like a kind of guy who just gives up so I spent a lot of time thinking about a plan so that if I saw her again I wouldn’t mess it up this time.

  What I did was I kept this bit of paper on me in case I saw her. Truth be told I had this paper on me for ages on the off-chance. Then one day finally I saw her again when she got on my bus. This time I knew what to do. Only thing was that she was sitting two seats away from me and some great big fat thing was sitting next to her and I couldn’t get near her. I waited and waited though and when the other one gets off I make my move and rush in next to her on her two-seater. She didn’t even seem to see me but I turn towards her and give her the paper. She takes it, opens it and looks at me at last. Trapped in again. Them eyes.