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

by Imran Mahmood

  Just then it hits me all at once. The craziness of this life I am in that doesn’t even feel like my own any more. Everything that has happened in the last few months starts playing over in my mind. It is there on a spinning reel, the images flashing faster and faster. So fast now that I am dizzy and sick. I want all of these names now to be gone. All of these names for things I never knew before. All the Guiltys, the Facemen, the JCs, the crews, the guns, the life. I want it all washed out of my head. I want to go back to that time. When I didn’t even know how good life was. I don’t even know how I got here any more. I don’t remember choosing any of it. It just happened. It feels as if every last thing made every next thing happen and now I can’t control any of it.

  It was for Ki, I remind myself. Everything is for her. Jamil has told this man Face who she is and that he must kill her. I am doing this for Ki.

  It’s only when she screams that I come back into my body and feel the gun heavy and pointing down in my hand.

  Two shots later both men are dead. They fall heavy to the ground, faces ruined by a single bullet each. Face lands face up. His eyes just staring out. I find myself looking into them. Frozen. I think I see the moment when the life leaves them and I can’t turn away.

  Ki’s voice screams out my name and I look to see her turning towards the door and kicking the wedge, the doorstop, away. She pulls open the door but as she does another face stares straight back at her. She is quick though. Her adrenaline has kicked in and all of her movements are smooth and fast. Her brain is working at speeds now I cannot even track. She sees the man at the door and knows she has to keep him out until we are clear. The key is there in her eyes. Those silver flashing eyes that make cars stop in the road. She opens them wide at the man and they suck him in like black holes. His face changes. The world has vanished for him until there is only him and this girl with those eyes. She slips an arm around his neck and pushes him back out and follows him into noise of the club. Her other hand behind her back. I push through past them both and as I head to the door that leads to the steps going down I grab Ki by the wrist and pull her with me.

  We tumble down the steps where Curt is waiting with the back-room door open so that there is light to see by. He leads us both into the room and leans against the door. I am bent over double trying to catch my breath and to fight off the pain that is now in my stomach. Ki though is a straight six. The power in her is smooth and effortless.

  She quickly hitches her dress above her waist and pulls on the tracksuit bottoms that Curt hands her, kicking off her heels as she does. She looks at me. I look back at her. I don’t know who looks stranger. My heart is still racing which is muddling my mind.

  ‘Top.’

  I look at her puzzled. I don’t know what she is saying.

  ‘Top,’ she says again this time louder, indicating my hand.

  I look down and then slowly begin to fall back into the moment. I hand her the sweatshirt after unwrapping it from the gun which is still hot in my hand.

  In a few seconds the three of us are spilling into the street and are free. We get our hoods up, heads down and walk along the same route that I had taken earlier with Curt. Still nobody has said anything. We can hear a bit of commotion from the club’s front entrance. I think that I can hear snatches of people shouting about police. We carry on walking though. Away from the entrance. Each step takes us further from danger and closer to safety. Every step is a step to a new life. If we are lucky it could even be a step to our old life. The noise from the crowd fades out. A siren is in the distance but is coming closer.

  I turn to look behind me. A couple of people start to make their way down the side street behind us. Young men both of them. They are half running, and we can hear them as they get closer to us. They are obviously excited by whatever they think has happened in the club but they are trying to stay casual. The usual thing. Little boys wanting to be big mans. I glance around careful to keep my face hidden to check where they are and what they are doing. They are looking back to the front of the club, for the ruckus that they do not know we caused.

  We slow up a little waiting to let them pass us. It’s better that we can see them than they can see us. In a few moments they have overtaken us. They are just two boys really. Skinny. Happy. Laughing. Innocent. Up ahead I see one of them nearing a car and making it bleep. Its indicators flash to life. MK3 Golf GTI, de-badged, Pico exhaust, Recaro seats, I think, even then after all that has happened I can’t help it. The boy opens it and gets in. The other stays put until the car leaves and then gets out his phone.

  Curt nudges me. This is bad. We do not need this boy to be stopping in the middle of the street. We need him ahead of us. Facing away from us. Not facing us. We cannot be seen. There is still stuff to do. We need to pick up the bag from the skip and we still need to dump the nine mil. We slow to almost a standstill but we cannot avoid passing the boy. He is directly in our path. There is no choice though. We have to keep moving. We get close enough that we can almost hear his conversation on the phone. Even in this light, there is no doubt but that he will be able give to a half-decent ID of us if the Feds ask him. We have to keep our faces down. We keep walking, our heads pointed to the tarmac. All we can see are our feet.

  This is why it isn’t till we were less than fifty feet away that I realize how bad this is.

  ‘Fuck. Curt you see what I’m seeing?’ I say when I am sure.

  He raises his head a fraction and peers out from his hood. ‘Shit. Jamil! What the fuck is he doing here?’

  Seeing him there is a shock. Why is he there? Of course looking back it’s not that much of a surprise. He must have been with Face or going to see him. He obviously doesn’t know that Face is dead, though, judging by the easy way he is chatting on his phone.

  But what happens next is just some bare weird shit I can’t even explain.

  Break: 15:05

  37

  15:15

  It happens in a split second, before I even have time to think. Jamil is right up ahead of us and we can’t even avoid him now, he is too close. I reckon if we turned around now it would have just been too obvious and he would have seen us and – maybe not then but later – put two and two together, and lined us up. Truth be told though I’m not sure that I was even thinking that at the time. All I knew is that we were walking in one direction and he was there.

  We carry on walking. I remember I have got my head down still and my hood pulled low. I can see Curt, huge beside me, walking his big bear walk. Ki is right behind us just a step or two away. Jamil is getting closer. Maybe thirty feet away at most. I give Curt a nudge with my elbow to see whether he has any ideas but he says nothing. From the looks of it, his idea is to style it out and just carry on walking. This is madness though because that boy if he sees us or even if he thinks he has seen us is going to be running his mouth about having seen us there. And Ki. Shit, he’s not going to miss her, is he? Even in joggers.

  Then just as I am about to suggest turning back, even though that would be walking straight back to the club, Ki pushes past me and Curt. I look up and suddenly she has broken into a run. At first I think she is running away because she has seen JC and I almost call after her. Now this? I was thinking. Now she’s running away? Is she stupid? That is all we need, JC to look up, clock her and that’s it. And fuck, the CCTV! We don’t want CCTV to see anyone running right about now. What the fuck’s she playing at? I nearly call after her but that was just going to worsen it.

  Then I see that I have got it all wrong. She is not just running along the road that he happens to be on. No, she is running straight at Jamil. Nothing in that picture fits. It just don’t make no sense to me.

  I can only watch as she flies towards him. His face changing as he realizes he knows her. He is putting it together. It almost seems as if he is going to stop her and chat to her. Then he looks behind her and sees us. His face changes. By then though, it’s too late. The next thing he knows is the pavement. Ki is standing over him
with a gun in her stretched arms. She has shot him. I am stunned. Curt’s jaw drops open.

  I don’t know why she has done it. Even if he saw us, it didn’t matter that much that he needed to be shot. Would it have been better that he didn’t see us? For real it would have been. It would have been better that he didn’t have no stories to tell anybody who was prepared to listen to his bullshit. And better that he couldn’t tell no Feds anything if he wanted to be one of them kind of guys. But this? There was no need for this. This was the whole point of it. JC was nothing. I could have shut that fucker up in a second by myself if I had to. It was the Olders. It was the protection that protected him. We didn’t need him wasted. I look for Ki’s eyes in the darkness, as I draw up close, my heart now stopped. She looks at me. The eyes are blank. I cannot read them any more. Then she runs.

  I watch her as she carries on running to the corner of the road, where a taxi pulls up, its yellow light harsh against the black sky. I look at Curt. His face says everything and nothing. He is cemented to the ground in shock as she disappears in the cab. In the end I have to physically pull him by the arm before he wakes up.

  ‘Come on,’ I say. ‘We got to bounce.’

  Since we have no time to think of a plan B, we follow the plan we had laid out at the beginning as best as we can now that Ki has done this. The bag is collected from the skip. The white sweatshirts come back on. The trainers too. In a few minutes we are back on the main road, waiting for a bus to take us home. We are wearing the same clothes that we left the flat in. We are all in white. The men who went into the club, if they ever try looking for them, were in black. It’s still a perfect alibi.

  We burned the black clothes. We found a bit of greenery that wasn’t quite a park and not quite a verge and poured a load of petrol on them and lit them. The gun we buried. It didn’t matter that much if it was picked up since there were no prints on it and it was dirty anyway. The important thing was the DNA on the black clothes. That we had to lose and now it’s all gone into the grey sky. The ashes go up into the sky and then start falling again like dirty snowflakes. I look at Curt, as the ash settles on to his hair and his face. He hasn’t spoken a word since Ki shot JC. Nothing about this night makes sense to him any more. That much you can tell from his face even if you can’t tell a single other thing from it. It even don’t make sense to me but then Curt don’t know yet what I know.

  When we reached the flat and opened the door, I had, truth be told, expected Ki to be there. I thought she would be sitting at the table even though I couldn’t picture her expression. I needed to see her. I needed to see her face so I could know that what had happened had happened. I needed to know why she had done it. I needed to know that the right thing had been done. Only her face could tell me that.

  It was Curt who saw it first.

  ‘She’s been. And gone,’ he said and pointed to the table.

  There, on it, was the sweatshirt she had been wearing. I recognized it from the Chinese writing on the back. On top of it was a gun, Baikal. Gangster’s gun of choice. The gun I thought was missing. She had it all this time.

  Curt looked at me and then shook his head. ‘This is fucked up,’ he said.

  I started to speak but he stopped me. ‘I don’t want to know,’ he said. ‘I don’t even want to know.’

  ‘Look. This ain’t on me Curt. She did this shit by herself. And I ain’t even told you what went down in the toilets.’

  ‘Well it sure the fuck ain’t on me bruv. She’s your girl. The fuck she at?’ he says throwing his hands up in the air.

  ‘I’m supposed to know where she’s at?’ I start switching at him, ‘Why don’t you tell me where she at?’

  ‘Me?’ goes Curt coming right into my face. ‘Me?’

  ‘Yeah you. You’re the one who’s been giving her lifts to this mosque. You’re the one she splitting all this vine with bruv. All this, “Tell Guilty to get himself some fucking body armour.” ’

  ‘Fuck you bruv’ he says pushing me hard with a giant paw. ‘What I did, I did for you and your family man. Fuck is wrong with you? I’m supposed to tell Ki to fuck off when she asks for a lift to Elephant? Or when she tells me a bit of news?’

  I look at him and then I am all out of answers. ‘I don’t know man. I don’t know anything any more,’ I say and sink to the floor.

  ‘Nah you don’t. You don’t know nothing,’ he says and turns and walks out of the door slamming it as he goes.

  I waited for days for her to come back home or even to contact me but she didn’t. I even went to that building that I followed her to that day where I saw the blond guy. But nothing. The doors were locked shut. It was back to being what it had been before, just an empty building that you would walk past a dozen times in a day and not even notice that it had ever been there.

  I thought back to the conversation I had with Kira after I got back from having followed her there that day, the day before the shooting. Judge this is relevant now. I remember the shock in her eyes when I told her I followed her. Then how her expression changed when I told her I knew she weren’t going to no mosque. And how it changed again when I mentioned the blond man.

  That night. After the club. She was going to tell me then but then it all went sideways and now she had bailed. Looking back now, I should have been able to work it out for myself. I had all the clues. But I ain’t got that type of mind you get me? I just couldn’t put them Legos together. I think it was the fact that she was gone that was clouding my thinking. Where the fuck had she gone, man? Why wasn’t she calling? I couldn’t do anything without knowing where she was. It was as if I had to know before the rest of me would allow myself to go on. Till then I was just waiting.

  Curt went off to Spain a few days after the whole club thing. He left the money behind and when I called him to ask him what I should do with it, he just said, ‘Keep it, man. It weren’t ever about the money.’

  ‘But you need it. What about Guilty?’ I say.

  ‘He let me go. I told him I’d dealt with Face and he let me out. Even gave me a present.’

  I leave the words hanging, thinking of something to say. Finally I remember there is something I want to ask him.

  ‘How you even get tied up in that crew anyway, blood?’ I say.

  ‘I don’t know, man. It’s long.’

  ‘It’s okay. I got nothing but time right now,’ I say.

  ‘Glockz had Mum on the hook for some brown and when she couldn’t pay one day, they told me I had to pay in some other way. So that’s what it was. They made me collect a debt. Then over time, when the shit got heavy, they gave Mum more drugs and then they called me to collect. You know I weren’t ever really a gang type of guy. And I still ain’t. It’s just they always got a way to get you on the hook.’

  ‘Shit. Sorry bruv. I didn’t know.’

  ‘Nah. It’s okay. Then last year shit got heavy one day and some dude pulled a knife at me. So I turned it back on him. Then Guilty didn’t need to find ways of getting me on the hook no more. I was fucked. Glockz or Feds. That was my choices.’

  I then remembered what he told me at the club about how he’d killed someone. And I wondered then how many people my best friend had ghosted.

  ‘Maybe I come out there and see you,’ I go.

  ‘If you do, make sure you bring your sister. I got some explaining to do to her but I ain’t got it in me right now.’

  ‘Bless?’ I say. ‘Explain what?’

  ‘Nah, fam. It’s nothing. Just you know, say I said hi. And to your mum.’

  Like with you now, I tried to tell him about Ki and what had happened in the toilets, but he didn’t want to know. He was done with it all. He was tired. I think at the end of the day, his patience had just emptied out.

  ‘You need to leave too bro,’ he said to me finally.

  ‘I can’t man. Not without Ki.’

  ‘That girl’s playing you. Just bounce, man. It’s time,’ he says quietly.

  I had booked myself a new tic
ket to Spain that day but even as I did it I knew that I weren’t going to ever use it. Not without Ki.

  ‘I can’t.’

  I waited for Ki. I believed she wouldn’t leave just like that, after everything. So I just laid back and waited. It would maybe be a day or two more and she would come in through that door. The main heat was over now. For some reason the shootings in the club didn’t even make the news. Two men killed and nothing. But the other one did. This one, I mean. JC’s. But even that was over in a couple of days or so. The whole Brexit thing was bigger news now. So I knew she would come back. She had to. She had nowhere else to go. She was lying low. I couldn’t find her but that was just because she was clever. She’s lying so low that a person like me ain’t ever going to find her. She was definitely coming back though, I knew that. That was for sure. I just had to wait. But I tell you, it was like losing her that first time. All over again.

  So when the police came a week later and broke down the door, everything was still where it was. The Baikal, the hoodie, the money, my e-ticket to Spain, the passport, the phones. Me. After that, well you know about after that, innit. Curt was right. I should have bailed but I didn’t understand what was up or down at that time.

  Break: 15:35

  38

  15:45

  Even after I was arrested for JC’s murder and remanded I kept thinking, she will come back. Even if not in a straight line kind of thing, I thought at least maybe the police might pick her up. I didn’t care at that point. I just needed to see her and even if I couldn’t see her like face to face, if I knew she was alive, that would have been enough for me.

  But she didn’t come. It was just me. And that was maybe the hardest thing of the last year. It wasn’t the being in prison. It wasn’t even really facing a murder charge. It was Ki. Just not knowing.