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

by Imran Mahmood

  ‘I’ll let it go but only because I ain’t ready to let you go.’

  Or if it wasn’t exactly them words it was something like that. Or maybe I didn’t even say it out loud, I had just thought it. Anyway the point I am making is that here I was already letting her go after just a couple of weeks. What kind of a man did that make me?

  I thought about it for a long time. Of course I couldn’t just go into those estates and start shooting the place up. I didn’t even know where she was. But, I knew that if I asked around enough of the people who hung around that area I might at least find out where she was. My plan was then to hang around and wait until I saw her and then to take her.

  It wasn’t a great plan. But it worked and I did find out where she was in the end. How I found her though, for that I have to tell you about Curt. He was the key to finding Kira. And the key to a lot of other shit too.

  After Curt got moved schools back in the day, I didn’t see him for a while. He just kind of disappeared and I didn’t really think too much about it. Shit like that happened to kids like that. One day they were there and the next day – gone. A week or a month passed and truth be told I forgot all about him. Like I said before, we weren’t really tight. To me he was just that big kid who broke that idiot’s arm. Then one day, I must have been about sixteen then, on my way to the shops or something, I see this huge boy blocking my way on the pavement. Now this kind of shit is always a bit tense you get me. It’s basically one person’s way of fronting up the next person. Who has got the biggest balls and who is going to pussy out? I was never really the pussying-out kind you get me. Most people round my ends already knew that and after a few scrapes people knew who I was and they let me just get on my way. Even though I was never in no gang shit, people knew better than to mess me up. See, my thing was if you stayed out of my way I would stay out of your way. But if you put your face in my face, chances are I would rip yours off. Don’t get me wrong though. I hated all that. I didn’t like to have to go to war over some bit of macho bullshit but the fact was I would if I had to.

  So here was this same kind of shit happening all over again. This is me, more or less the same height when I was sixteen as I am now. Here was this boy, more or less the size of a house. Shit. So my tactic with these big fuckers is to stamp on the kneecaps and then just unleash till boy’s kissing tarmac. If they are tooled up then usually I bounce. As fast as I can. Virtually nothing worth getting sliced up for man. And if there is a chance that some boy is in a gang, I swallow my pride and jet. So him and me get closer to each other. I am looking at the ground but I know we getting closer because this big lump is blocking out the light he is that big. I don’t recognize him from around these ends so I figure that he ain’t in no gang or no gang from around here. And he is alone. We get closer until there is almost no light between us. And I swear just as I am about to jump on the boy’s knees, I hear, ‘Yo blood.’ I look up and this face has cracked open and is feeding me this bright-lights smile. ‘Fuck,’ I goes, ‘Curt? Boy what they feeding you, ha ha?’

  Since that day we was tight, he was a proper friend, and he was there with me from then on. As I said, I have to tell you about him because he’s important, to everything that happened. He’s part of this story.

  When I first saw him again, Curt, he hadn’t changed all that much but he was definitely different. He was more serious. And these days he weren’t taking no shit from no one. At that time he weren’t in a gang either. We both had managed to sidestep that whole thing which was no small thing round our way. Usually every other week, if you were a known name, some next man from a gang would come knocking on your door trying to recruit you. There weren’t a thing they wouldn’t promise you and there weren’t a thing they wouldn’t threaten you with if they wanted you. They weren’t really that bothered about me even though a member is still a member and numbers are always important. But Curt they wanted. They were desperate for that boy and if you saw the size of him you could see why.

  But the thing about Curt I soon found out was that he wasn’t really cut out for that shit. For one he weren’t really interested in money all that much. For two he hated being told what to do. Normally those two things alone would have ruled him out. A gang don’t want a person who they can’t control. Most people like to think that they won’t be controlled but then most people are liars. Most people will do any shit if the price is right and that basically means that they are controllable. Curt was different though.

  I was with him one day a couple of years ago when three local boys stopped him in the street.

  ‘You Curt innit?’ one of them goes and when Curt nods he carries on talking, ‘I want to give you the chance of a lifetime blood.’

  Curt tries to walk away because he knows what they are after but they block his path making a wall. Then the leader of these three goes, ‘I could give you a grand right now or I could shank you. Up to you blood.’

  ‘Shank me,’ he goes.

  The three look at each other like, what the fuck is going on? If it was me I’d be maybe trying to fast-talk my way out of it, but this is some new shit to these boys. The leader, a little guy with one of them five panel caps pulls a shank out of his pocket and shows it to Curt. Curt takes a long look at the blade and then says, ‘What about you two?’ he says looking at the other two. Curt is standing there like he has been cemented into place. I, though, am on my toes, getting ready to jump in if the shit gets feisty.

  The others show their weapons, grinning, but Curt doesn’t move.

  ‘Shank me,’ he goes. His fists are still in his pockets.

  The leader comes nearer and holds his blade low. ‘We ain’t even fucking wid you blood,’ he says.

  Suddenly Curt whips his hand out of his pocket and grabs the knife by the blade.

  ‘Shank me,’ he says, his face flat like a plate.

  The boy’s eyes all panic and he’s trying to pull the knife back but he can’t release it from Curt’s grip. There is blood coming from Curt’s hand but you wouldn’t know it from looking at his face.

  One of the others steps forward with his own knife and takes a swing at Curt. But this is a boy who’s never used a knife before. I can tell that because of the way it’s in his hand. He’s holding it like he’s holding a phone. I know that if you want to use a knife you hold it in your fist with the blade down, sharp edge out. This gives me enough chill to step into him and give him a couple of quick punches to the face. He drops down and I jack his knife while he’s still dazed.

  Curt is still holding the blade. The boy at the other end of it is still ashy from fear. He looks at me with his boy’s knife in my hand and then runs. ‘You fuckers are dead. Dead!’ he goes as he’s running. I look around for the third boy but it seems like he went a while back. They came with three blades and left with one.

  ‘Fuck man,’ I say to Curt, looking at his hand.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he says and clenches it shut again, blood spilling out the sides.

  ‘Nah man, it ain’t.’ I go and take my bandana off and tie it round. I pull it tight until the blood soaks through the cloth and then tie a double knot. Curt doesn’t flinch the whole time. I look at him for a reaction but I can’t find one.

  ‘That don’t make me gay,’ I say and we both start creasing.

  We got to be good friends while he was in the ends. Curt would come round my yard and Mum would cook him dinner. She liked him even though he usually ate twice what she had in the house. In fact I reckon deep down she wouldn’t have liked him half as much if he didn’t eat so much. It was just one of them things. When he sat there eating, he looked like a child. There was nothing in the world at that moment. Just him and his plate.

  She would pretend to moan about it afterwards. ‘The boy’s father must be a horse. Next time he comes I will give him a bag of oats.’ But there was also the mum thing that kicked in. As far as any mum is concerned when she’s feeding her kid’s friend, she’s really just feeding her own kid. And then, she
also knew that Curt didn’t have a mum like I did. I mean he had a mum, but she weren’t no real mum. I think at the end of it that is the reason he kept asking if he could come round. Just so that he could get the feeling of what it might have been like to have a normal mum. And even though sometimes she would say, ‘So the horse is coming to dinner again?’ I knew that secretly Mum liked him.

  In fact when he came round one day two years ago to tell us that he was moving back up to North London I remember seeing the look on Mum’s face. She had the same look in her eyes that she had when I told her I was moving out. She was trying not to cry and to style it out but a tear sneaked out of the corner of her eye anyway.

  ‘I hope you will still be coming back to see your friend, eh?’

  Curt just looks at the floor, saying nothing.

  ‘I will make you dumplings if you like them,’ she says and turns back to her cooking.

  Every now and then Mum would mention him. ‘Have you seen your horse friend?’ or ‘Instead of sitting in front of games all day long you should call up your horse friend and speak to a person.’ So I would call him from time to time and see how he was getting on. Anyway once I heard the rumour that Ki might be somewhere up in North London, Curt was the natural person to call. In fact he was probably the only person I even knew from North London.

  Break: 15:50

  11

  16:00

  I met him up just after ten o’clock in the McDonald’s on Seven Sisters Road. I had forgotten how big the boy was. That or he had grown since I last saw him. He was sitting at one of the tables and I walked over and checked him. He stood up while I sat and then sat again and put his huge hands on the table in front of me.

  ‘Man you look old,’ he goes and laughs this great big bear laugh that he has and which would have shook the table over if it hadn’t been bolted to the floor.

  ‘Listen blood, I need your help on something innit,’ I said and told him about Kira.

  ‘It’s fucked up man. I liked that girl,’ he says and looks down at his two burgers.

  ‘Bro I been turning London inside out looking for her.’

  ‘You need to forget about her man,’ he says after taking a giant bite out of his burger. ‘I hear she been caught up.’

  ‘Glockz?’ I say.

  Curt takes a second bite of his burger and it’s gone. He chews slowly and just after he swallows he picks out another from a box on the table. Even a Big Mac looks tiny in his hand.

  ‘It’s what I hear,’ he says.

  ‘I just need to know where she is Curt.’

  ‘That I can help you with blood,’ he says and demolishes the second burger.

  From what I gathered, Curt wasn’t exactly hooked up to Glockz but he had certain privileges. He knew the General for one and so had a way of finding shit out if he needed to.

  ‘Man I thought you were against all that gang shit,’ I said to him, ‘How the fuck you all Glockz?’

  ‘Long story,’ he says. ‘Long. But if you want to know where she is at, link me in a couple of days. I give you whatever I got.’

  ‘Safe bruv. I’ll check you in a couple of days’ I say, and leave.

  When I link up with him two days later all the smiles was gone from his face.

  ‘You’ll find her working King’s Cross, Camden, them kind of streets,’ he says looking at the ground.

  ‘Shit,’ I say, because that is all I can think. Curt looks down as if he wants to be somewhere else. ‘I owe you,’ I say at last and touch his shoulder with my fist as I get up to go.

  ‘Nah man,’ he says.

  ‘Is she okay?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘You know who her brother is?’ he says raising an eyebrow at me.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Proper freak innit.’

  ‘Yeah blood. Proper.’

  As I turn to walk away something doesn’t feel right in what he’s telling me. She was working the streets already? Normally it took more than a couple of weeks to get them crazy for crack before they walked the streets. It just didn’t really make sense to me. I look across at him.

  ‘One thing though bro. They broke her down quick innit?’

  ‘Nah. That’s the weird thing man. She just agreed from what I hear.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’s clean. She just made them promise that they had Spooks’ back.’

  I didn’t even bother going home after seeing Curt. I just wanted to find her and if there was a chance she could be there on a street right at that minute, I didn’t want to waste it. I jumped on the bus to Camden and got off near the tube. Camden on a Saturday night is pretty much heaving to look at it from the outside. But only parts of it are, really and truly. The Lock. Stables Market. The Canal. All them areas where the tourists go, they are rammed. But I knew that she weren’t going to be in no tourist places. That’s not what Curt meant when he said Camden. He meant the kind of places where a pimp could let a girl loose and catch hold of her if she got up to any shit, without anyone trying to step up. Deserted places. Back alley places. A place where if you went there, you went there for a specific reason.

  I decided to walk down Camden High Street and head towards like where the canal is. Just behind the hospital and round the back of King’s Cross Station. It was pretty wild there still, even though there was all these new buildings coming up everywhere you looked. But these new places were just where people could see. There was still hidden places. Secret places no one wanted to see. I carried on to the towpath where a lot of the prostitutes had been forced to move. Cleaning the place up, is what they called it but in truth it was just brushing up dirt and moving it someplace else. I didn’t see her and to be honest with you I was relieved. I didn’t want to see her in them kind of places. Then just before I called it a night I decided to head up nearer to York Way. More dead space. Or nearly dead.

  I found her under a bridge.

  I can’t even tell you what it was like to see her again. This was a girl I had been stretching my eyes to see for the last couple of weeks. I would look at crowds of people, scanning thousands of faces like the Terminator, looking for her. If someone had her hair or was wearing something that looked like what she might wear I would run across to them and tap them on the shoulder. I didn’t mind looking like a weirdo, I just needed to find her. So when I saw her standing there in a doorway near that bridge I was so surprised that I looked straight past her. I mean, I saw her. I thought it was a face I recognized from somewhere but it wasn’t her I was seeing. Then I looked again. And it was her. She was like her own ghost. Her face which had been a face that could stop cars had lost all its light. It was just like she had gone and left her body behind on autopilot.

  I was all set to just walk over and get her when I saw a car pull up and wind its window down. Some next man was talking at her but she was looking straight into the distance. Then a guy comes over, one of these Glockz boys probably, and takes some money off of the driver and then pushes her in the back seat. And just like that she was gone. Again.

  I waited all night for her to come back but she never came back. I didn’t know where she’d gone or whether she was alive even. By the time I went home it was light and I felt worse than I did before I saw her. I went back the next day and then the next day after that but nothing. One time there was a different girl there but not Kira. I even spoke to her but she didn’t know who Kira was and then I ran as a Glockz boy had come running over. He was shouting that he’d shoot me and whatever for wasting his time but I didn’t care about that.

  After that I linked up Curt again and asked him to find out what the score was. They moved these girls around a bit, he told me. You couldn’t leave a girl in one place. It was bad for business. Punters wanted new faces and if they saw the same old face day after day they would go elsewhere. And then some of the others would grow too attached and that also caused problems of a different kind.

  Curt gave me a list of other pla
ces to try so I tried them but I didn’t find her again. I had some wheels that I was finding it difficult to sell on and started driving round to look for her. You could only cover so many miles on foot and bus so I knew I needed to drive. The wheels made it easier even though these weren’t my ends and I didn’t want to be tagged for my car. Boys recognize your ride and the kind of ride I was rocking weren’t no Ford Fiesta that you could be invisible in. This one was an Audi A3 with some bad alloys on it and for the first time in my life I wished I was driving some old man’s car that wouldn’t attract any attention. It might sound stupid to you but there are kids out there who know who owns every car in their area and who will ring out the bells if some phat car turns up scouting the estate.

  Even so, I went from place to place, looking and looking. In one night sometimes I went to six or seven different spots in King’s Cross, Swiss Cottage, Angel, Tottenham, everywhere on my list. Then about five days after I first saw her, just as I was losing hope, I saw her again. The same place I saw her the first time. Just by a small doorway under the steel bridge at King’s Cross. Though it was her if you looked hard enough, it still wasn’t really her. It was just a shadow.

  I told myself that next time I saw her I’d be ready for whatever. I didn’t want to see her and then have to run off when some Glockz gang-banger came bouncing up. So I took along a gun, the same gun that I kept for seven years waiting for dad to turn up. I had it with me now in my waistband even though I thought it was unlikely that I would actually need it. I pulled up to near where she was standing to think about how I was going to play it.

  I still couldn’t believe it was her. You don’t know what it’s like to look for a person you love for so many hours in so many days and nights and not find her. And then suddenly she is there. It proper made my heart go.