You Don't Know Me

It’s that kind of thing that answers why the Baikal was in my flat. ‘The gun of choice for gangsters’, as he puts it. I’ll be honest with you. The gun is mine. I went out and I bought it, but it ain’t like one of them things. I didn’t buy it to shoot no boy. It was because of my family.

In my life, apart from a few mates, there is my mum, my girlfriend and my little sister. They are the main people in my life.

My sister is called Blessing which is strange because really she is a curse. I’m joking man! She is a blessing for real. She is like every bad thing you can put on me, you can put ten good ones on her. We are just two years difference in age. But those two years is the only time we really ever been apart. For more than twenty years, whatever I’ve been through she’s been through and she has brought me through. That’s her sitting there with my mum. That’s who she is: my little sister. That’s who it is, if you’ve been looking, that has been crying all the way through this thing. That is just her. If anyone hurts me, it hurts her. She can’t help it. That’s just how she is made up.

I didn’t want her to be here for this, for any of it. But she is her own woman and no amount of me telling her is going to stop her doing what she needs to do. If you look in them eyes you’ll know what I mean. You can see the steel in them. But where you can see only steel, I can see something else. I can see Mum in her. Mum who can get a shoe and be beating you with it but love you at the same time. That’s maybe every mum, but it ain’t every sister.

So that is me, nearly all surrounded by women. Mum and Bless was who I grew up with. Dad came and went. That is the best thing you could say about him. When he wasn’t tripping he was okay. Sometimes he would stay for a day or maybe a week or whatever but he’d always go again. ‘I a rolling stone, son. If I don’t keep movin’ something a-happen to me.’

When he was using though, boy, that was another thing. If Mum was in, maybe we had a chance. But usually he’d come when she was out working. He would come in looking like all kinds of shit. And he would have this face, like a pleading begging face. Just give him something to tide him over. Just a lickle something to medicine him. Even when I was ten and Bless was like eight, he would be banging on the door asking for money. What kind of fucked up shit is that – we were kids – what money did we have? Other times if he was high on some other thing it was like a fire would come out of him.

This one day in the school holidays when I was about fifteen, me and Bless were hoovering up and tidying up or whatever before Mum came back from work. Trust me if my mum came back having told you to clean and you never cleaned, she would have made you pay for it later. So we were kind of arguing about who got the shit job of hoovering with this old 1920s or something hoover and who just got the dusting to do when the bell goes.

It’s Dad. His eyes are all red like he’s been to hell and just got kicked out. His patchy old beard is looking the same colour as his dirty hat and both are looking like they have been rolling around in the dirt for a few days. He is mumbling about some ‘urgent urgent’ thing and even though we know he is tripping we let him in anyway. That is the only thing to do or else he won’t go and the last thing we want is for Mum to come home and find him lying in our doorway, high.

So he comes crashing in through the door hardly able to keep upright. He is knocking over everything he comes near. There is shit smashing left right and centre. I had never seen him like this. ‘What the fuck do you want Dad?’ Nothing, no answer. Or at least nothing I can make head or tails of. Then he starts proper rooting around like he is looking for something. The leather settee goes upside down. The fat-arsed TV goes on the floor. Drawers are coming out of the kitchen cupboards. All the while he is mumbling some shit or other. ‘Where is dis ting?’ or whatever in his mind he thinks he has lost in our flat, ‘Tell me where tis.’

We are just trying to calm him down. Bless is telling him she is going to make him a coffee but he isn’t listening to anything. I am following him around either picking up some shit he has just knocked over or picking him up when he knocks himself over. If there had been a camera you could have sold this clip to the TV. It was like comedy if you could have just muted the sound off.