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

by Imran Mahmood

  ‘What do I want to know your name for?’ she says.

  ‘So you can shake my hand innit coz you don’t shake hands with strangers. And you got my digits there in case you want to call me,’ I say and laugh. ‘See I got you. Little smile but still a smile,’ I add.

  ‘Whatever,’ she says and rolls her eyes. But she kept the paper though and even an idiot knows that that was a good sign.

  It was a full two months though before she agreed to let me take her out. And even then she made it sound like she was doing it out of pity. ‘You look like you need a good meal in you,’ she had said. ‘Be round at mine at seven sharp. If you’re late, you will be.’ Ha. Still remember them exact words.

  She happened to live not that far from me and so I walked it. Although it was already well into October, it was still warm enough for people to be in the streets drinking and hanging out. I had just bought these new trainers so I was giving them a spin and truth be told I was looking alright. I walked past a group of kids by the stairs at the main door to the block where she lived. This kid Jamil was there even though at that time I didn’t know that’s what his name was. To me he was just some kid hanging with his boys. I did know one of them though and I checked him. He nodded back at me and turned back to his boys so I slipped past them all and bounced up the concrete steps to her door.

  She opened it looking like a Hollywood movie star, long dress, bare shoulders and still smelling of chocolate. ‘Come in,’ she goes and turns into the hallway. I follow her in.

  I didn’t really know what to expect. Sometimes you go round a mate’s flat and it could be the exact same everything as your own flat, same windows, same doors, same rooms, same layout but at the same time it could feel like you had just stepped into another world. Someone would have like everything modern in their yards, all the gadgets, flat-screen whatever. Someone else would have like the same shit that they had in the eighties, you get me, with all like nest of tables and big soppy posters on the walls in black plastic frames. So I had no idea what I was about to step into, but I thought I would be prepared for whatever and take it in like it was just normal.

  Kira lived by herself since she was like fifteen. She had no mum, the dad was wherever and the one brother she had, Spooks, was always in and out of jail, so it was just one of them things. Her place though was a complete surprise to me. It was the same shit, as I say, square rooms, low ceilings, iron-framed windows, old radiators. Just your standard council thing. But the thing that made her place different was the books. Every surface had a pile of books on it stacked as neatly as they could be and as high as they could get without toppling down. I don’t mean just the tables and chairs and what have you, but the floor too. Except for a space that made a path from the doors, it was basically books all the way round. They went round the sofa, the table legs, round the TV, everywhere you could see. It was like she’d robbed a library.

  ‘This place is alright, you know,’ I say because I really couldn’t think of anything else to say. My heart was going a bit if I’m honest with you. She didn’t say anything but shrugged her shoulders a little as if to say ‘whatever’ and sat down on the leather sofa. There was a space for her legs but nothing more than that.

  ‘You got enough books innit?’ I say. She reaches over to what was probably once a small table but what was now just a high pile of books and hands me a beer.

  ‘You got one chance to impress me,’ she says flashing them grey eyes at me.

  I took that as my cue to start babbling and I do just that for the next four hours. To this day I am not sure what I said to her, but something I said seemed to do the trick because after that night as far as anyone was concerned she was my girl.

  Break: 10:55

  7

  11:05

  When Mum and Bless met her for the first time, they both loved her. Kira loved them too. Sometimes a good thing can happen to a person for no reason. She was the good thing that happened to all of us. Don’t get me wrong, she was no angel by any means. She could have these dark moods that would stretch out for weeks. She could snap at you for the tiniest thing and she could rage at you like it was the end of days and she was there to judge you. But underneath all that and underneath all the pretty features and the wide eyes, she was a good person. When she came round to the flat she would always make some food up for Mum and Bless and clean up the place a little before she left. And even though Bless was more or less silent, when Kira was around, she picked up a lot and sometimes you even got the feeling that she was on the verge of coming back to us.

  Over the seven years we been together Bless and Kira became more like sisters than anything else. Bless liked being round her. She liked the quiet that she came with. They would sit together sometimes. Ki would read her books and Bless would just be Bless. She could just ‘be’, you get me. And sometimes you got the feeling that they didn’t need words to say what they were saying. But as for me and Kira, in my mind, we were Romeo and Juliet, well maybe Romeo and some girl who was like Juliet but could be a bitch and if she wanted to could probably knock you out, especially if you called her a bitch, which I only did very rarely. Seriously, though, we were tight.

  We clicked but it’s hard to see why we did. We weren’t exactly similar. In fact you could say that we were like chalk and cheesestring. I was sixteen and I left school. She went to college. I was eighteen and was just starting with the whole buying and selling cars thing. She got her A levels and signed up to one of them Open University things. I loved cars. She loved books. I hated books then. She hated cars. You couldn’t even say that we looked at things the same way.

  This will give you an idea of what she was like. About a year and a half ago, she was still living in her flat with the books but she came round my yard every now and then to stay over but mainly I stayed at hers. She didn’t really feel my place if you get me, but I always made a point of ‘How comes it’s always me round at yours and you never like to come to mine?’ so from time to time she came. Anyway this one Saturday afternoon she comes round to mine and starts to make herself a cup of tea. I’m playing on my PS3 or whatever and she comes and sits next to me drinking her tea. Anyway, maybe fifteen minutes go by and eventually I get the hint and feel like I should close down the game. I’m like, ‘Just let me finish this level off and save it’ but she ain’t really that bothered. She just seems to be chilling.

  So when I finally switch off the game she goes, ‘You know that boy who’s so and so’s little brother?’ and I go, ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘He’s just broken into your car.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The red one. The convertible.’

  ‘What the fuck you talking about? He’s just broken into my Z3?’ I get up and start looking for the keys.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s the red one.’

  ‘What and you saw him doing it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why the fuck didn’t you say something?’

  ‘I did. I’m saying now.’

  ‘Fuck Kira. Didn’t you stop him? Did you call the police?’

  ‘No! Why would I call the police?’

  ‘Ki he’s just jacked my car and you don’t do nothing? What is wrong with you man?’ I say and run out of the door to my car.

  Fucking thing has a smashed window and the glove compartment has been cleaned out and even the little coins or whatever I had in the ashtray are all gone. But it’s the window man. Fucking window’s smashed. And you might think I’m overreacting and that but windows on a car, they are almost impossible to replace properly. You can never get that factory finish thing right. The seals ain’t ever the same again and in the morning the fucking thing will steam up every time. And all the little fucking shitty pieces of glass everywhere that you keep finding for the next ten years. Shit. Sorry, just thinking about it rages me.

  So Kira has followed me into the street and I’m all vex still and I’m shouting at her. What the fuck is she thinking of, you know what I mean?


  ‘Where you going?’ she says when she sees me get in the car.

  ‘I’m going to murder him,’ I go.

  ‘You ain’t going nowhere,’ she says and gets in the other door and leaves it open so I can’t drive away.

  ‘Give me one fucking reason why not?’ I say looking at her.

  ‘You don’t know what’s going on with him,’ she says. ‘There could be a hundred reasons he had to jack your car.’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck Ki,’ I say, shouting. ‘That boy has to pay one way or another.’

  ‘You go round there and we are over.’

  ‘What? What the fuck you talking about? Why do you care about that little shit?’

  ‘Do you even know that boy?’ she asks. ‘He could be starving. He could be on drugs. There could be anything going on with him.’

  ‘So fucking what?’

  ‘So people don’t do shit for no reason,’ she says and gets out of the car.

  I didn’t speak to her for a week after that but I didn’t go round and sort out that boy. I never really understood what the hell she cared about him for, she didn’t even know him. But she didn’t want to talk any more about it. All she said was, ‘You don’t know what you would do if you were in his shoes.’ And that was good enough for her. Although I never said it to her, I think I worked out later what it was all about. At the bottom of it, it was all about her brother Spooks I reckon. He was inside on a long stretch for some drug shit and the way she saw it, was the way only family would see it. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. As far as she saw it this kid was just the same as Spooks. Victim of circumstances. I didn’t see the shit the same way. You don’t go past jail and straight to Go or whatever. If you do your crime and you get caught. You pay up. Simple as that.

  I let it go though, for her sake. I really didn’t want to and I really wasn’t taken in by how she laid it down. Her brother was a waste man too as far as I could tell but she loved him and I loved her. So it was what it was. And I tell you this, I wouldn’t have let this go for anyone but her. I needed her in my life. I had no doubt that she would have left me if I had gone that day and given the boy a taste of something. Whether it was because she believed in what she believed or whether it was because she was born stubborn, she would have walked out. I didn’t exactly respect that, it was more that I couldn’t do without her in my life. She was like the roof over my head. I needed her to keep me dry. It seemed like she had been around since for ever and I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it would have been like if she hadn’t been there.

  So when she went then, that first time, it proper knocked me out.

  Break: 11:50

  8

  12:00

  I know to you guys, this seems like another one of them bus replacements. Proper long. But if you just stay with me you will see why you need to hear all this.

  See, Kira, she literally just disappeared. It was only a week after this whole car thing so at first I thought she was still pissed off about it. She had no reason to be pissed off though because I had dropped it, like I said I would. But you know how it is with some women, they can be pissed off at you even when you do exactly what they want you to do. No offence to the jury ladies you get me. And the worst thing is that they expect you to know why you pissed them off even when as far as you are concerned, it’s you that should be pissed off at them.

  I had been expecting her to drop into my place that Saturday and help me with picking out some paint and stuff. It was kind of a surprise for her. I had just sold a car and I was a bit flush and I thought if I maybe did the place up more in like a ways that she would, she might be happier to stay round more. She didn’t turn up though. Which was weird because this girl was never late. I mean never.

  I waited for an hour maybe before trying her mobile but it rang dead. But then she was always changing her digits as we all were. You’d get a sim with a deal on it, use it and then move on to the next sim with the next deal. That was standard. So when I couldn’t get her on her phone to me it was just one of them things. Nothing to stress about. She was pissed off for no reason but as I knew, she didn’t always need a reason. She sometimes did that. She would get on one about something that I never even knew I had done and then the next day I would hear all about it. So even though I was worried I wasn’t really. I was more angry by then. I was doing my usual thing, racking my brains trying to work out what shit I might have done wrong. I checked my texts – did I say something wrong in one of them? I checked her birthday and other days for if I had missed any ‘special’ ones. I couldn’t work it out.

  I didn’t hear from her all that day. The whole day was wasted. I didn’t get no paints. I didn’t get anything done in fact because I was stressing about why she was mad at me. By the time I went to bed, truth be told I was angry. In my head I was wishing all kinds of shit on her. I was screaming at her, I was having these imaginary conversations with her, everything. I’d be doing her voice in my head and then I’d come back at her with my own voice. Like a proper row. It was fucked up.

  The next morning I woke up and checked my phone. Nothing. I called Mum and Bless who were still living together then, but they hadn’t heard from her either. Then I thought about trying her friend, Maria. She had this one friend who, to tell you the truth, I didn’t like all that much. Whenever I saw her she always gave me this look like I weren’t good enough for her friend. She might have been right about that but I didn’t think she really needed to make it that obvious. Ki was like, ‘Leave her alone, she’s just looking out for me’, but I reckoned maybe she was into her herself. But the problem was I didn’t have her number. I mean, why did I need her mate’s number? Except I did need her number at that moment. Then I remembered that she worked in some women’s clothes shop in Elephant and decided I would just have to go there and speak to her face to face.

  It was one of them shops that had a name like Uniqueé and which only someone like my mum might go into. I jumped on the bus down there thinking that if I didn’t get no joy from Maria, I could go back via Kira’s flat and see if she was maybe there. I pushed open the door and it made this kind of clanging sound to tell the till people that someone had come in. The place was darker than it should have been because some of the ceiling lights had gone and it smelled like those rolls of cloth my mum bought to make clothes out of. There were these round rails full of patterned blouses or whatever and I squeezed past to get to the counter. No one was there so I waited until eventually some old lady shows up and makes a face at me.

  ‘Is Maria here?’ I go trying to act like I don’t feel too awkward in this place. She shouts out at the back and then Maria comes through, stone by stone. I don’t mean to be you know, fattist, but she was so fat that it was like she came through in instalments. She looked at me and crossed her arms in front of her.

  ‘You seen Ki?’ I say as cool as I can.

  ‘Why what you done to her?’ she says, because she was always suspicious of me for some reason.

  ‘Nothing man! Just wondered if you’d seen her?’

  ‘I haven’t seen her or heard from her. But tell her why she not replying to my texts when you see her,’ she says and turns back to where she came from.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say to her back and then duck back out the shop, worried that Ki hadn’t even contacted her friend. Maria didn’t look like she was covering for her. She didn’t even seem that bothered. But why would she? To her, she wasn’t even missing.

  So I jumped back on the bus to get to her yard. I walked the short distance from the bus stop and straight away started having that row with her in my head again. By the time I knocked on her door, the argument was in full flow. I was still expecting her to be there, you see. I waited. I swear I could almost see her walking to the door, her face pale from no sleep. Her eyes maybe fat from crying. But she wasn’t there. So I sat on the floor outside her door for maybe half an hour not knowing what to do next. I needed to call somebody who knew her, knew where she might be.
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br />   Spooks as I said was in prison so I couldn’t ask him where she was, not that I would even know how to get hold of him. I didn’t even know his real name because even Kira called him Spooks. There was no other family so that was a dead end. And Ki wasn’t really a person for loads of friends so there was nothing to check there after I had tried Maria.

  On the second day when she weren’t there I started worrying properly. No texts or calls on my phone. I tried her yard again but there was no answer. I went to the phone shop where she was temping, but they hadn’t heard from her even though she was supposed to be there that day. By then I was getting so para I even considered going to the Feds. But that would have made it into something else I wasn’t ready for so I didn’t. I tried Mum and Bless again but they hadn’t heard anything either. What had happened? I checked my phone every two minutes hoping for something. By then I wasn’t even angry any more, I just wanted to know she was somewhere and alive. Then, when I had basically run out of hope, I tried all the hospitals in the area. Nothing. Thank God though, you get me?

  That night I put away my pride and went to the Feds. They did their thing and took a few details but as far as they was concerned I wasn’t really anybody who could be asking them sort of questions. A parent, maybe a brother even, but some next boy like me? Nah they weren’t interested but at least they did tell me that as far as they knew she weren’t dead. I swear down, I was besides myself and baffled at the same time. Where the fuck, sorry Judge but I need to say it, where the fuck was she and how was I going to find her? It was like she’d just gone up in smoke.