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

by Imran Mahmood

  I opened the bag to take a look when Curt’s giant hand came out of nowhere and swatted me away.

  ‘Use the gloves man,’ he says and fishes out a pair of latex gloves from his jacket pocket.

  I put them on and open the bag. The gun is in there, lying fat in the bottom like a big black lump. I pick it up and feel its weight in my gloved hand.

  ‘Loaded?’

  ‘Five rounds. It’s all I could get.’

  ‘Guys, you ready? If anything’s not clear, now’s the time,’ says Ki stepping into the room from the bedroom. She is in sky-high heels and a black-and-white dress. Her hair is up and the make-up is only just there. She is beautiful.

  ‘Yeah man,’ says Curt who hardly notices her, ‘let’s jet.’

  ‘You got your two-ways?’

  We nod.

  ‘Remember, keep it on that channel. There’s no phone reception in the club,’ says Ki and holds out a sports bag.

  ‘Doesn’t really go with the dress,’ I say but she isn’t in the mood.

  I take the sports bag from her and slip the gun inside. I peel my latex gloves off and shove them in my jeans. Then we leave.

  As we walk down the steps I hang back and let Curt head out in front. I pull Ki back a little by holding her wrist. She turns and looks at me. I want to say something, anything, just to connect with her, but I can’t think of any right words to say. In the end I say nothing. She holds my eyes for a few seconds.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says and then stops and kisses me on the cheek.

  Once we are on the street we stream off in two different directions. Ki goes one way to look for a black cab. Curt and I head for the bus stop and wait for the bus. We both have on almost identical white hoodies and white trainers. We know about the cameras on the bus. We want them to get us. It’s all part of the plan that Ki has gone over and over. After a few minutes, the right bus comes and we jump on and head to the top deck and sit at the back so no one can hear us. In the end it doesn’t matter that much because for the whole journey neither Curt nor me can think of anything to say.

  The next fifteen minutes are slower than they should be. They stretch out until some part of me feels like we have been on this bus for an hour. Every now and then I catch myself panicking and then have to slow breathe until I am okay again. My brain is on a loop I can’t get it out of. This idea of doing a murder. Not someone else pulling the trigger and taking a life. And not like in a film or on Call of Duty but in real life. With blood. With a person’s face in front of mine and his smell in my nose. That kind of murder. I am going to do this thing that once it is done will stick to me for ever and be a part of me. When I get up in the morning there will be half a second where I know I will forget it ever happened. A half a second where I might think it was a dream or just even something we talked about but never did. And then that half-second will pass. And I will drag myself through the day until it ends. And then, the next day, it will happen all over again. Like a prison sentence but worse because there’s no end time. All there is is a hope. A hope that one day it will stop feeling real and become a dream. I don’t know for sure. All I got to go on is the feeling I had when Ki had been taken. That’s what it felt like to me. And that is what brings me round again. Kira. I can’t lose her. I can do this for her. I can do this for her even though it will mean that I am doing it every day for the rest of my life. Because without her, there isn’t anything.

  The club we are looking for is directly on our route and the bus makes a pass almost bang outside the front entrance.

  Already the Friday night crowd is building up. A small queue has just started up and people seem to have lives that have nothing to do with shooting and gangs and raised heartbeats. It feels weird even to be out, watching people with normal lives. The bus has stopped but we don’t move even though we are right outside the club. Then after a couple of moments it lurches off again leaving the club behind and taking us with it. As we pass it I look out of the back and just catch a glimpse of Ki. She is tiny against a mountain of a man she is standing next to. Ain’t no bouncer going to turn her away looking like that, I am thinking, even if he didn’t know her. As the club fades out of view, I catch a flash of a smile that isn’t meant for me and one I haven’t seen in weeks. Then she turns and slips through the double doors into the club, the bouncers following her with their eyes.

  Five stops later Curt and I get off. We are half a mile away from the club but it’s exactly where we need to be right now. The kiss on my cheek still tingles and I feel like it should feel like a good luck charm, but it doesn’t exactly. But it does feel almost, what, holy? I nearly touch it but then stop at the last moment. I don’t want to take the shine off it. It sounds stupid now but I needed it there to protect me. I still don’t know why she said she was sorry but I put the thought away till later.

  The main road is busy like it always is at this time of night at this time of the week. People out, needing to wash away their week or just to celebrate the end of it. Everyone just wanting to forget their lives for just a few hours. We mingle in with them as they walk by. We could even be them. Just normal people doing normal things in a normal life.

  Curt nudges me as we approach the first side street we see. We walk down it and as we do I unzip the bag I am holding and take out a black hoodie as Curt takes off his white one. I hand the black one to him and he puts it on. Then I do the same. Both white hoodies go in the bag. Next, the trainers. We change our white ones for black ones that are in the bag and put the white ones in their place. It’s all done so quickly and casually that we barely break our stride. We get to the end of the side road and turn left so that we are now walking parallel to the main road. My heart starts picking up pace again. My hands are sweating but I can’t do anything about that. I wipe them down on my hoodie but I don’t say anything to Curt. Curt strides on as if he has closed his mind to everything else. Something in his face tells me that he is going to treat the whole thing like this. One foot then the next.

  In another twenty minutes or something we can see the back of the club. We pull the hoods down as we head towards it. There is a skip on one side all filled with rubble. I pull on my gloves as we near the skip, ducking under its cover, and take the gun out of the bag and put it in my waistband. I make sure nobody is looking.

  I fish into the bag again and take out a smaller bag, it’s a white plastic carrier bag. It has another hoodie in it and some tracksuit bottoms and trainers. I hide the sports bag with the white clothes we had been wearing in the skip under a bit of wood panelling. I do it quickly as I am walking and I know if anybody was watching they would have hardly noticed it. As we leave the skip behind, all I have in my hands now is the white carrier bag. The sports bag, the white clothes and the white trainers are all left behind now in the skip and a part of me feels like I am leaving some of my life there with it.

  We keep walking towards the club in our dark clothes. I look at Curt. The dark of his clothes and the dark of the night and the darkness of his face all merge into one. He says nothing but pulls his hood down tight over his eyes. I do the same. We know there are cameras on this road but as long as we can keep our faces hidden it doesn’t matter. As far as anybody who looks will be able to tell we were the two boys on the bus in white. We were never these two boys in black. The cameras. We can’t avoid them whichever way we approach the club. There are cameras all over London. We can’t dodge them all, so we just have to use them to our advantage. Let them tell a different story. Let them be our alibis.

  In another two minutes we are at the back entrance to the club. I am starting to breathe heavy now even though I’ve only been walking. For some reason this isn’t as easy as what we did in the trap-house, which now seems a different lifetime ago, even though it’s only a couple of weeks ago. I try make my breathing normal again and then nod at Curt. I am ready.

  We are at the rear doors of the club. Curt leans his weight against the door and it opens up, just like Ki had promised. We look at
each other and then slip quietly inside and pull the door to. Ki was right about this too. It is dark. The lights, if there ever were any in there, have blown. I take my phone out, turn it on and use it as a torch. I don’t realize at that time that even as I turn it on it is sending a signal to a phone mast that will tell the prosecution in months from now exactly where I am.

  The phone gives me just enough light to see by and just as Ki had said, there is a door off to the left just before the stairs. We push it. It opens. Curt and I duck in and all around us is nothing but heavy blackness. I feel along the wall for a switch and find one. The room fills with light. I see Curt’s face, his eyes screwed momentarily against the whiteness of the light and then an almost smile. We are in.

  We slump down on the floor with our backs against the door so if someone pushes it we will know about them before they know about us. I put the carrier bag down next to me and both Curt and I take out our two-ways, turn them on low until they hiss and wait. Curt’s face is like a mask. You can’t see what he’s thinking. I reckon that if you took a picture of that moment even he wouldn’t be able to tell you what he was thinking. I wonder just then whether he is thinking anything. Just the plan maybe. Only the plan.

  Luncheon adjournment: 13:01

  36

  14:05

  The plan is for Ki to wait until she spots Face. If she sees him she radios through. If she sees anything else, she radios through. If she sees trouble she radios through and we walk out. We cannot take more risks than we are already taking. Once we know Face is here in the club, we will wait until Ki sees him go to the toilets. If it looks safe, in other words if he goes in alone, then she calls it through and I head out of the room and up the small flight of stairs at the end of the corridor. The steps lead to the main club. The toilets are just there. The first door I come to on the left is the men’s. I go in, I do the thing and I leave. Ki only calls it in if we can get Face otherwise we are out of there.

  Curt will stay where he is. We need him to make sure that the exit is clean and if it gets dirty for him to clean it up for us and make us a way out of there. Once the hit is done, I am supposed to meet up with Curt in the room where we are now and then call it through to Ki and wait for her. She comes, she changes into the clothes I have brought for her in the plastic bag. Then we all leave.

  I look around the back room and try to concentrate on some detail of it just to calm me down. But it’s impossible. The room is hot even though there is no heating in it that we can see. Curt is sweating a bit but then he’s a big guy and them big guys can lose some serious water. I think he’s nervous though. I know I am. We sit there saying almost nothing for half an hour, just listening to the white noise of the radios. Even though they are turned down proper low we can hear them crackling still. I am lost in my own mind and by the look of him I guess Curt is too.

  Ten minutes or an hour passes and the radio is annoyingly still giving us the silent treatment. I can’t stand the tension. I wish the fucker would just buzz with Ki’s voice now. I don’t even mind whether it comes over just so that she can call it off. I just need something to happen soon.

  ‘Curt.’

  Curt is still sitting next to me. His legs are out and he is breathing deep breaths that shift the whole of his body up and down as if he is bobbing on a wave. The heat coming from him is powerful.

  ‘We have to do this, right?’ I continue, ‘I mean we got no choice innit?’

  ‘Yeah man,’ he says, wiping his face. ‘Way to look at it is that it’s already done. We already made the choice.’

  I nod more to myself than him.

  ‘I’ll do it if you like,’ he then says without looking at me. ‘It makes more sense. I done this before.’

  I look at him not believing I’m hearing what I am hearing. ‘You done what before?’

  ‘Don’t act like you don’t know.’

  ‘Fuck man. I thought we were brothers. Blood. You couldn’t tell me this before?’ It feels like bricks are falling on my head.

  ‘The fuck was I supposed to say?’ he says wiping his face again with his hand. ‘Anyway point is, I do it for you. Say the word.’

  Then I look at him and say, ‘Nah man, you done too much already.’

  Just then the radios crackle loudly and Ki’s voice comes travelling over to us. It sounds as if she is a world away. A call from a different planet. Like Armstrong when he calls from the moon.

  ‘Move,’ she says, her voice is sharp and cuts through all the static. ‘You got to move now. Face is in the toilets now. You got to move now.’

  Curt looks at me and then drags himself slowly to his feet but I know he’s moving as fast as he can.

  ‘Fuck where’s the towel?’ I say. Suddenly I feel my head spinning in panic. My hands start to clam and I wipe them over and over across my clothes.

  ‘Shit it must be in the hold-all in the skip. Here use this,’ he says and pulls out the other hoodie in the bag, the one meant for Kira, and hands it to me.

  I take it and wrap the gun in the sweatshirt keeping one hand on the handle of the gun.

  ‘Okay man. I’m about to do this thing,’ I say and step into the corridor.

  I walk quickly along the darkness. I haven’t got time to use my phone for light. It’s okay though because I can see a crack of light where the top of the steps meets the bottom of the door. I head for it.

  I push to open the door but it’s stuck. Shit we hadn’t checked. Why didn’t we check while we were sitting there for all that time waiting for Ki to radio? Shit. I push against it but it seems to be locked. My mind is stumbling around and it can’t think in a straight line. What the hell am I going to do, I am thinking. I pull the two-way from my pocket and talk into it.

  ‘Curt I need you man. The door is locked or something. I can’t get in.’

  He doesn’t answer but in seconds I see the light from his door spread into the corridor as he opens it and heads towards me. He reaches me and waves me silently out of the way. He takes one step back and then crashes straight into the door with his shoulder. The door swings open. The music comes flooding into my ears. Curt looks at me raising his eyebrows and then turns back to the room that’s been spilling light into the hallway.

  I take a step. It’s still dark once I get through the door but it’s lighter than it was in the hallway. The bass is pounding like a giant heartbeat and it feels as if it’s coming from inside me. I see the matt-black toilet door with a stick drawing of a man exactly where Ki said it would be. I push it open. The gun is wet in my hand from sweat and I drop it more than once into the sweatshirt that is covering it. I regain my grip and look about. There’s nobody at the urinals. The sinks are empty. He must be in one of the cubicles. I wait. I look at the floor to calm myself. It is a kind of deep green that makes me feel like it is sucking me in.

  My heart is doing its thing. Bam bam bam and for a second I forget I need to breathe. The pictures aren’t coming to me. What am I supposed to do? Do I kick the doors in? Do I wait for the doors to open? We have never spoken about this part of it. It seemed unnecessary at the time. Now I think it was the most necessary part. I decide to wait. I walk to one of the urinals and stand over the bowl, the damp sweatshirt still wrapped over my hand. There is a smell of shit and piss and bleach. It is so overwhelming that I feel for a second as if I am going to pass out.

  I can hear the bass coming from the club in here but it’s still low enough for me to hear the splashes coming from one of the cubicles. Then as the flush goes, suddenly the deep drum beats from the club rise in a wave and then pitch down once again. Like it does when someone has opened the door. Shit. Somebody has come into the toilets. I look round as casually as I can. How will I even know whether this guy is with Face or not? What do I do with him? Do I wait? Do I shoot him too? My eyes begin to focus and the person who has just walked in becomes sharp. Almost too sharp.

  Fuck. It’s Ki. Her legs out wide over the green floor so that she seems like the Statue of Liberty.
Her face is like glass, telling me nothing.

  She puts her finger to her lips signalling me to stay quiet as I am about to scream out at her. Fuck.

  I point at the cubicle where the flush has just gone and she nods. I don’t know why she is here. I wave one arm crazily telling her to leave right now. But instead she reaches into her handbag and pulls out a door wedge, puts it on the floor and then kicks it under the main door to the bathroom. I want to push her out but there’s no time. The cubicle door begins to rattle. I turn around to face it, my gun at waist height. The gun is doing its thing again and whispering at me. Shoot. Shoot. Shoot. The weight of it is now making my arm ache and I feel like shooting it will make it lighter. And at that moment it is all that I want to do. Just to shoot it and lighten this weight. I see the face. Then it hits me. I don’t even know what Face looks like.

  The man looking at me is tall and good-looking. He has a face like a film star. He looks expensive. He looks like a man who could rule the world. He looks at me, just about registering my presence and then follows my eyes to where Ki is standing. You can see the look of confusion in his eyes before something clicks in his brain. He shouts out to the other cubicle like he’s begging it to open.

  ‘Face!’

  Then it does. The other cubicle door opens.

  Time freezes.

  I see the other man. Face. Something about him jars. There is nothing special about this man. He’s just a man. Any man. This man that I am about to kill. In my mind he was a monster. He was the Devil even, maybe. But the man who looks back at me is scared. He has seen the gun. But more than that he has seen my face. He knows what that means.

  There is a split second right then that I feel as if I have come out of my body and I am standing watching everyone including myself. I have a kind of smile on as if I’m interested, as if I’m wondering what I will do. Will I shoot him? Will I walk away? Will it be black or will it be white? Or is this one of them grey areas or is it all kind of colours? Right now it feels like everything has been turned over and upside down. I feel as if the sky is under my feet. I am in a new dimension it seems to me. Some upside-down place where the outside is inside and where the sky is green.