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

by Imran Mahmood

  The next morning as he left Ki hugged him hard and told him to be safe. I looked him in the eye and asked him if he was sure he wanted to go.

  ‘Ain’t got no choice. If I don’t go back now, they going to merk me for sure. Anyway I got some friends there, proper safe mans, and if there was a real danger I think they’d have told me.’

  ‘Okay, bruv, if you’re sure.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch if and when I get some more vine innit,’ he says and then swings his travel bag over his shoulder and walks out.

  In a way I wished I didn’t have to send him back there. But it was the only thing that made sense. He had to go back there or they’d start to get suspicious that maybe he was in hiding because he had done the shooting. Then there was the inside line.

  We needed Curt to be tight with Glockz so he could give us the heads-up if things started to heat up for us. Well for Ki especially. If they were planning to come looking for us, we needed Curt to tip us off and also maybe to send them off down blind alleys, you get me. But that’s not to say we weren’t worried for his life. We were.

  The next twenty-four hours or so, Ki and me waited for news from him like we was waiting for results from the clinic. Curt had ditched his sim which meant that there was no way we could get hold of him. We just had to wait for him to find us. At the end of that day having heard nothing from him I was sure he was dead. The next morning though, he called.

  ‘Yo bruv,’ he says, ‘got to make this quick.’

  ‘Shoot,’ I say, ‘well, you know, not shoot. But. Sorry man. Go.’

  ‘Well, good news, bad news.’

  ‘What’s the bad?’ I say with my heart so deep in my mouth I can hardly get the words out.

  ‘Jamil’s got me lined up for the shooting. He ain’t remembering much but he does remember me.’

  ‘Shit. What’s the good?’

  ‘Well two goods actually. First thing is that Guilty ain’t buying it. Second is that nobody has mentioned any girls being involved.’

  ‘That is good,’ I say proper relieved, ‘so why isn’t Guilty going for it? Why he don’t got you lined up for it?’

  ‘Dunno. He thinks JC trying to play him against his own crew. Listen, I will swing by laters and catch you up. Right now though I got to bounce,’ he says and I am left looking at the dead phone in my hand, my mind all buzzing.

  I called out to Ki to tell her the news but saw that she was on her phone. Finally she hung up.

  ‘Your mum,’ she says, ‘she is insisting on dinner.’

  ‘Shit,’ I say. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll think of something.’

  I don’t want to be leaving this place if I can help it and I certainly don’t want to be painting signs for the people who might be looking for us where Mum and Bless are living.

  ‘You won’t have to because I told her we’ll be there. Tomorrow,’ she says with a half-smile. ‘Bring the hoss,’ she adds in a Nigerian accent.

  That’s all we needed.

  Actually maybe it was what I needed, some normal back in my life. I couldn’t do this much longer. These walls were suffocating me.

  Luncheon adjournment: 13:00

  25

  14:00

  Anyway this is how eight days after the shooting, me, Kira, Curt and Bless end up sitting around my mum’s table eating dinner like we are just any family.

  Except we ain’t like just any family and this ain’t just any dinner. I was paranoid about going out of the flat. We could be seen at any minute once we were out and about, and if we were then we were toast. So far nobody had come knocking but believe, as soon as they had even a slight thing about where I was, they would. Then there was Mum and Bless. I didn’t know whether anyone knew where my mum lived but so far they hadn’t been tapped so I could only hope that they didn’t. So that being the case, the very last thing I wanted was to be seen, let alone at my mum’s door.

  I wanted no part of it. Mum was cool with it. I told her we couldn’t do dinner. I told her it was dangerous for Ki but that was all I said. She didn’t ask too many questions. She knew Ki had been missing that time and deep down she would have known that whatever I was doing, I was doing to keep her safe. Mum, as I said to you, loved Ki and the last thing she would have done was put any risk on her. But it was Ki herself. She wanted it.

  We had it down like a military op. First of all dinner weren’t going to be at dinner time. It was going to be at breakfast time. You remember I said, gang-bangers don’t like being up early since they spend all night dealing. The plan was that Curt would do a drive-by in his whip round Mum’s in the morning and see what was what. If it looked hot, then the plan was off.

  If it all looked cold and nobody seemed like they was watching then he would park up round the back entrance to our flats. There was like a long alleyway there that led to the main road. He was going to park up to block the alley. We would come running down. Jump in the back and shoot off. Sorry. I didn’t meant to say ‘shoot off’.

  Curt’s ride has tints in the back so once we were in we would be invisible more or less. Then we would do a couple of loops of Mum’s house and if everything was still cold, he would drop us round the back of the house. The back gate would be open and then we’d be in.

  Although it all went to plan the shit was still tense. Kira and I had hoods pulled right up the whole journey. In the back of Curt’s Range Rover Sport I had my eyes peeled back for any sign of something. There was only working people and some schoolkids up at that time but even the postman makes me sus you get me. Even when we had done a loop of the house I wasn’t sure and wanted to do another.

  ‘Nah man, we can’t,’ says Curt with a sigh. ‘We do any more circuits and some nosy neighbour fucker’s going to be all over the phone to Five-O. We look proper shady man.’

  Only when we were all sat down in Mum’s warm kitchen did I finally relax.

  ‘Mum, come and sit down with us and eat,’ I say to her back as she fries more food at the stove. The smell of fried food in the morning feels surreal but since we haven’t eaten since lunchtime yesterday, my stomach ain’t fussy.

  ‘How can I sit down eh? If I sit down who will feed the horse?’ she says and turns back to her cooking. I think that she is smiling but I can’t see her face. I did see it though when Curt walked in through the back door and she looked as if she was going to cry.

  I look back around the table. Bless looks like she has made a special effort for me and I am almost touched. I haven’t seen her looking so, well maybe pretty isn’t the right kind of word to say about your sister, but yeah pretty. I haven’t seen her look so pretty in a long time.

  She is wearing what looks like a new dress. It’s like a dusty soft pink colour which kind of makes her cheeks glow. And Ki too. Some of that worry seems to have washed off her face and she looks at me for the first time in ages like she is glad of me. Her eyes are so intense I can’t hold their gaze. In my head I change the subject like I am changing gears. It makes a clunk in my ears as I do it.

  ‘So Curt what about Guilty?’ I say trying to make sure Mum ain’t listening too hard. I didn’t need to worry truth be told. She never listens to us. She treats us like we are an alien race. ‘You people. You don’t even speak in English any more.’ I tell you what though, just as well my mum ain’t in the courtroom at the moment. She would give me some beatings for that terrible Nigerian accent innit Bless? Oh shit. That is her coming back into the court now. So where was I?

  Yeah, at that moment Mum walks over to the table and dumps like a hundred pieces of fried chicken on the table. Curt looks like he’s choosing between speaking and eating. In the end he picks up two drumsticks and chews off huge chunks before remembering that we were talking. He wipes the grease off his mouth with his sleeve and when Mum has shuffled back to the stove he carries on.

  ‘Yeah so JC been shouting his mouth off to the Olders about how I was the one who taxed him. Word got to Guilty.’

  ‘Shit,’ I say.

  ‘Seen br
uv. Seen. But here’s the crazy thing. Guilty goes to me, “Fuck dat little Somali fucker. He’s been fucking around in our patch for long. He’s getting iced next time I scope him.” ’

  ‘Is it?’ I say.

  ‘Yeah for real. And get this, he then gives it all, “And I am pretty fucking sure that that fucker was the one who grabbed the bitch from under the bridge. No other fucker would have dared. Mans thinks he’s gangster but man’s just a pussy boy with Olders watching his back. Thinks he can fuck with mans, mans got a bullet coming for him.” ’

  ‘Shit,’ I say pushing my chair back from the table and slapping my leg.

  ‘Yeah so I go, “Fuck brother, I’ll waste him for you. It would be my pleasure.” ’

  Curt starts laughing and then before you know it all four of us round the table are laughing so much that there are tears. It feels like we can’t even stop it.

  Eventually Mum turns around from the cooker with a big spoon in her hand which she starts waving at us.

  ‘Eh eh. Stop it for goodness sake. You know what they say. As much as you laugh now is as much as you will cry later.’

  Once ‘dinner’ was over we realized that we couldn’t just leave. It was proper busy out there and too dangerous. So we stayed. It felt like a kind of lazy Christmas. We just hung back. Took off our shoes and lay on the sofa or on cushions on the floor as Mum brought us snacks and tea. It felt nice. It’s hard to explain. It felt like someone had pressed a pause button on our lives and we could escape it for a while. Be normal again. I didn’t want the day to end.

  By the time we left early the next morning to go home, I was feeling better than I had in long. I think we all did. Bless saw us to the door and hugged me and Ki goodbye.

  ‘Bruv? Come on we better jet,’ I say.

  ‘Nah man. I’m cool here,’ says Curt looking sketchy. ‘Here. Take my keys, I get ’em laters. I think I will just hang back here for a while if that’s okay with your, erm, mum. I ain’t seen her in a while. You know.’

  ‘Sure,’ I say and then look over at Bless who quickly slips off to the kitchen where Mum for some reason is cooking again.

  ‘You going be able to get back okay?’

  ‘Yeah’ he says, ‘I’ll just get a cab.’

  ‘So,’ I say drawing Curt close, ‘you think we might be in the clear?’

  ‘Yeah it’s possible. Guilty don’t believe the rumours about me being there at the trap-house. Shit I think he partly wishes he had done the taxing. He hates Jamil like you wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘And what about if the Olders get heavy? What then?’

  ‘Nah man. Glockz is proper. I don’t think they going to back down from no Olders. Yeah there’s going to be a war, but I think we are sweet, as long as we keep our heads down,’ he says and turns to go back into the kitchen.

  ‘Swing by tomorrow if you can. We still got some details to tie up innit,’ I say to his back and then leave.

  And I tell you what right now. I swear down at that moment I thought that was it. Over. We were in the clear. But I had not counted on what kind of mans Jamil was linked up to. It was that that changed everything I reckon. A man who people just knew as Face.

  Break: 15:00

  26

  15:30

  So the next day Curt comes by the flat so that we can sort out a few things. For one there was all this money in my yard we had to do something with. I didn’t really like the idea of it being there to be honest. I wanted it gone and as far as I was concerned it was Curt’s money to do what he wanted with.

  I got the money all tied up in elastic bands while Ki made us all some breakfast. As I was laying it all out on the table I squeeze a look at her and she seems beautiful again. I mean she was always beautiful, just she seemed to have got her shine back. She wasn’t even wearing anything special, just some grey leggings and a silky purple top which left her arms bare. But I tell you her face in the window-light, for just one minute looked like an old painting. Beautiful I mean. Not old.

  I let Curt in and he came and joined me at the table.

  ‘Shit. I almost forgot about that,’ he says nodding at the piles of money.

  ‘Yeah well you decided what you going to do with it? That’s enough paper right there. I can source you some phat wheels bruv if you’re interested. M3, RS4 whatever you like.’

  ‘Nah man. I got plans for that.’

  ‘Like?’ I say, intrigued.

  ‘I’m buying my freedom, blood. Get the fuck outta this life you get me.’

  ‘What the fuck you chatting about freedom for? You ain’t a slave are you?’ I say and grin at him.

  ‘Nah man. That’s the price. Sure I told you this. I told Guilty last year that I wanted out and he goes, “Sure nigger you are free to go. For fitty thou,” ’ he says and makes five lots of tens with his huge fingers.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I say and truly I didn’t. ‘You got to pay to leave?’

  ‘Shit yes you got to pay,’ he says and levers himself up from the chair to get a beer from the fridge even though it’s like ten a.m.

  Pay to leave? This was sounding more Mafia than Camden to me but he knew shit I didn’t. I leave him to his beer and I go and dig out an old rucksack I can put the cash in and then start loading it up. By the time I am finished I am surprised at how heavy it is. But the process of slowly loading the money into the bag starts me thinking.

  ‘Hey, one thing I never got,’ I say, walking back into the room, ‘is how you got mix up in this gang shit in the first place. I remember them days when you’d rather take a knife than get all ganged up.’

  Curt takes a glug and then sighs all heavy. ‘It’s a long story man. Another time, maybe.’

  At that exact minute, his phone rings and he answers it after a few rings and listens. As he nods and ‘yeahs’ into the phone, Ki comes to the table with a pile of toast on one plate and about a dozen fried eggs on another.

  ‘We need more food,’ she mouths so as not to disturb Curt’s call. I nod back but I’m not really paying her any notice, for all the listening I’m trying to do is to Curt’s call. I see Curt’s face changing colour. When he finally puts the phone down I get the feeling that whatever was being said on that call wasn’t going to be one of them good news bad news things. It was all going to be bad bad news.

  ‘Bad bad news,’ Curt says finally. ‘We are in shit.’

  Ki sits down at the table as if she is in slow motion. The colour leaves her face.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I say trying to keep my heart from hitting my balls.

  ‘So that was Guilty.’

  ‘Yeah I guessed, and?’ I say.

  ‘Well, you know these Olders JC is linked up to?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well these ain’t just any Olders.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘This crew ain’t just a regular fucking Olders crew.’

  I look at him blankly.

  ‘This is Face’s crew,’ he says and then I understand.

  Ki looks at us both then, her face still innocent.

  ‘Who’s Face?’ she says slowly.

  ‘Face,’ says Curt as he puts his head in his hands. ‘You want to know about Face? Okay then let me tell you a story about this motherfucker.

  ‘So one day last summer Face was up at a club with his Lieutenant when some Pagan stabbed up his left-hand man while he was in the toilets.’

  ‘So?’ says Ki. ‘One gangster stabs another one. Standard.’

  Before I can explain Curt cuts back in.

  ‘No man. It was a big deal. Stabbing up a man’s Lieutenant is properly serious shit. A General and his number two are basically like brothers. You know how it is,’ he says to me. ‘One will take other man’s bullet. Even his jail time if he have to.’

  I nod but truth be told I ain’t really as down with all this as Curt is.

  Curt takes a swig of beer and then continues his story. ‘Anyway this dude gets stabbed and Face is wild. If he had been there n
ext to him I ain’t even sure the shit would have happened. But he wasn’t and now his two was nearly dead. And Face was on the warpath.

  ‘So where he might have spent some time trying to find out who had done this, this time he didn’t have to do shit. He found out the next day.’

  ‘How?’ says Ki leaning forwards.

  ‘Easy, the man himself fucking advertises it. He goes and makes a load of T-shirts with the man’s face on it with the letters R.I.P. and hands them round his crew.’

  ‘Shit yeah I heard about that,’ I say suddenly remembering.

  ‘Face though ain’t no ordinary gangster. He is like a genius you could say. He is like a strategizer. And to cut a long story up, Face guessed the guy was going to try and ambush him. And he knew that the other crew wouldn’t be starting no shit unless they thought they could win.

  ‘So Face played it smarter than the other man. He got a few of his young soldiers, Tinies, together and sent them on a mission to track the guy’s movements.’

  You looking kinda blank at me again. Is it Tinies? Yeah okay. So ‘Tinies’ are like soldiers-in-waiting. They are just kids really but the gangs like ’em for all kinds of reasons. It’s messed up but the shit is what it is.

  So back to this story Curt is telling.

  ‘He wanted to know where mans was on any given day. Which clubs did he go to? Where was his ride last spotted? How many people was he with? Where did he go when he left a club? Where was his base?’

  ‘But hang on,’ says Ki, ‘he’s using kids?’

  ‘Shit, yeah he was using kids. Face was the first one to use kids. “Get some respec’ or get some holes”. That was his like recruiting line.’

  ‘No, I mean he’s supposed to be this genius and he is using children?’

  ‘That was the genius man. Because they was just kids, no one gave them a second blink. They were more or less invisible. No gang expect trouble to come from ten-year-old boys in school uniform.

  ‘And that is how in a week Face found out where mans lived. Then one morning, very early, like before even the sun was awake, Face pulls a balaclava over his head and goes into his house with two of his men. They drag him out of bed and lash him to a chair and then they spend twenty minutes heating up the end of a wheel brace with a blowtorch right in front of him.