You Don't Know Me

Next minute the front door rattles and opens. It’s Mum. Now with Mum, it’s one of them things. She is a proper Nigerian lady and anyone who knows a Nigerian mum knows that you don’t want to mess with an angry one. So she sees red and starts yelling at him, ‘Get out of the house, get out get out. Useless man. Get out!’ But she ain’t like read the situation. He isn’t just his usual floaty high. This was some next thing he is on. Then he looks at her like he has seen her for the first time. He is just staring for like two minutes. Then he stumbles forward until he’s in her face and she can probably smell the drink on him.

‘You jus’ a woman,’ he says and then bam, next thing he’s got his hands round her neck and has pushed her to the floor. I’m like what the fuck? And I jump on his back punching and kicking him but he whips me off like I’m some kind of little toy and throws me far off. Bless is screaming and Mum is flat on the floor. Dad is on her and then he starts punching her face like he’s hammering nails in with his fist. Again and again he is beating her with proper man punches. Mum’s face is just a bloody pulpy mess. I am just paralysed sitting there. I don’t know what to do. It’s like my mind has stopped working and my body’s broken down.

Then this next thing happens. Bless has picked up the iron and she starts to hit him with it. But she is only thirteen years old and she don’t have enough past in her to do anything serious to him. If it happened now, no doubt she would finish the job for real, but back then there just weren’t enough fight in her. She didn’t have the anger that only a lot of life can give you, you get me? So anyway she starts to hit him with the iron but it’s just bouncing off his shoulder. Dad gets hold of her. Pulls the iron from her hand and then – and then it happens. He smacks Bless in the face with it. Immediately there is blood everywhere. Bless drops to the ground like she is dead. I thought she was dead. Then he stops. It’s like he’s just woken up. He drops the iron. Walks to Mum. Picks up her handbag. Empties her purse. Leaves.

Nah. Don’t be looking at her face. Look at me. Keep your eyes on me. It was my fault. I was the man. I should have been the one to pick up the iron or a knife or something. I wanted to. Afterwards, when we were in the hospital it was all I could think about. I could have done this. I could have done that.

They were in beds next to each other. Weeks they were there. Mum had a fractured eye socket. Bless had a broken jaw and lost half a tooth. But I lost too. I lost my sister in a way. Yeah it had been shitty in that house for enough time. But it had never been like this. This time when he did what he did, he took her voice with him. She didn’t speak for years. Part of it was the injuries but mostly it was that she had run out of words. Nothing could explain it, nothing could make it right, nothing could say what she was feeling. But I could. I could feel it. It was like a feeling of someone standing on your heart and pressing down until it was just meat.

In those weeks while they were recovering something was happening to me too. I can’t explain it exactly, it was just one of them things like there was only one thing on my mind. Focus. That is what it was. I knew there was no way I was letting anything like that happen a second time. So I went out, spoke to some people, and got a gun. That Baikal. Yes, gun of choice for gangsters. But not because it’s like a special amazing cool gun. It’s because it’s cheap. They are just converted Russian or Czech or something starting pistols. They don’t make them with serial numbers. They can fit in your pocket. They take virtually any ammo. It’s a gun for a kid with no money.

So when he says, ‘Oh look at this, we have found a gun in his flat, and it’s the same type of gun that killed Jamil and it’s a gangster gun, and he must have had it for a reason,’ he is right. It is a gangster gun. But that also means that every kid in London in a gang has one or can get one. And if, as I believe, Jamil was shot because of all this gang shit he was involved with, then no wonder he was shot by one of them guns. And he is also right that I had it for a reason, ‘a deadly reason’ or whatever he said. I was going to kill my dad if he ever came near my sister or my mum again. I swear down. I would have killed him in a second.

He can do what he did, that is just a choice. He can choose to break my sister’s jaw and mess up my mum’s face. That is his choice. It is his freedom. But freedom isn’t free. In my eyes if you going to make a choice, you better start saving up for the price of it. Lucky for him he didn’t come bothering us again. But I waited for seven years with that gun in my kitchen drawer. He didn’t come. Good luck for him. Bad luck for me that the police found it in my drawer.