You Don't Know Me

So this is it. Kids are drug dealers, but they didn’t make themselves drug dealers. And when you got drug dealers, you got drug dealers doing drug deal ting: shooting people. Even kids. Live with that. In fact you don’t need to live with that. You already know this. You just don’t care that much because it’s not on your door. I don’t blame you. If it wasn’t on my door I wouldn’t give a shit either. I’m the same as you. I don’t give a shit about your shit and you don’t give a shit about mine. That is fine. I’m not trying to make you give a shit about it. All I’m saying is that Jamil was shot because he was in a gang and he was dealing drugs and people that deal drugs get shot. That’s it. And I’m sorry about that for his family. I’m sorry for his mum who is sitting in this court having to hear it all. But it is the truth.

Break: 15:30

5

15:40

So fourth evidence. The cell-site evidence. You lot know that the phone expert said that my phone was in the same, what did he call it, vector? Anyway like in the same fifty-metre area as the deceased at the exact moment of the shooting. And that it was in the same cell area as his a couple of months before that. You know, on the day that I was supposed to be arguing with the boy?

Look, I can know from your faces that you think that looks bad. And you know what? I ain’t even going to lie to you. It does look bad. I give you that. I can’t answer the full details of that one yet though. I got to come back to this one. It’s like a thing of what I say about it right now won’t make sense until I explain some other thing I need to tell you about.

So five. Erm, the police finding a Baikal handgun in my flat. And my passport. And that e-ticket for the flight to Spain with my name on it. Oh and the thirty grand. Sorry, I’m just trying to read the notes I made last night. Yeah and the firearms discharge residue on my clothes. Okay yeah sorry. Five. That one I got to get back to you on as well. Sorry, just a bit nervous.

Okay, so number six evidence. The police saying that the bullet which killed the boy must have come from my gun. Shit. Erm I can’t do that one either at this time. Actually or number seven – the dead boy’s blood under my nails. Or number eight, the hairs in his car.

No. Don’t be doing that to me please. Don’t be looking at the ceiling. I know how it looks. I know how it sounds. It is a lot but I do have explanations. It’s just I can’t really tell you it yet because it won’t make no sense to you right now.

If I can just get a second? I just lost my thing of thought.

I got to put these papers down for a second.

You know, part of me thought if I told my speech myself then at least you get to feel a little bit of what it is like to be me. That if my QC did it then maybe you would all be thinking, ‘Yeah it’s all very well to put it over all shiny and slick but that fucker’s still a murderer.’ And I really did think that if I told my own story I could make you feel my life. But actually explaining the evidences out loud is proper hard. I know what I want to say to you in a ways but I can’t get it out. And what makes it worse is that I know my brief would have been all over it. You heard him in this trial. He’s an operator. You got to give him that. No wonder they call them QCs ‘silks’. Because he is smooth, you get me. But then he wouldn’t say what I need to say, what you have to hear, and that stuff I can’t even work out how to say to you.

But maybe it don’t matter who tells the story because there’s no way of making a person understand what it is to be you. What your thoughts are when you wake up. Why the first thing you remember is some random thing about your dad or whatever. How that random thought makes you do one thing and not the next thing. No one can explain those things. But it is those little things that answer the questions.

All the number five, number six, all that evidence, it’s not one of them things that you can just talk your way through like logically point by point. You need to like get under my bonnet and see what it is that is making my cylinders go. You have to do what they didn’t do for that hammer guy in South Africa. You got to be in my head. See what I been seeing. Hear what I been hearing. Because unless you do that, you won’t really be able to understand what I’m trying to say. It’s like, say it was a car accident you were dealing with. And someone died. All you would be able to do is to say that that car killed that man. You wouldn’t know whether it was because it was driven at him on purpose. Or whether it was because the brake fluid was drained. Or if it was one of the tyres had a blow-out. You would only be able to see the ending. That is what the prosecution is counting on. He don’t want you to look at the causes because that fucks him up innit? Whereas I am all about the causes. If I’m looking at an engine that won’t start, if I don’t know the causes how do I know if I can fix it?