You Don't Know Me

Or if it wasn’t exactly them words it was something like that. Or maybe I didn’t even say it out loud, I had just thought it. Anyway the point I am making is that here I was already letting her go after just a couple of weeks. What kind of a man did that make me?

I thought about it for a long time. Of course I couldn’t just go into those estates and start shooting the place up. I didn’t even know where she was. But, I knew that if I asked around enough of the people who hung around that area I might at least find out where she was. My plan was then to hang around and wait until I saw her and then to take her.

It wasn’t a great plan. But it worked and I did find out where she was in the end. How I found her though, for that I have to tell you about Curt. He was the key to finding Kira. And the key to a lot of other shit too.

After Curt got moved schools back in the day, I didn’t see him for a while. He just kind of disappeared and I didn’t really think too much about it. Shit like that happened to kids like that. One day they were there and the next day – gone. A week or a month passed and truth be told I forgot all about him. Like I said before, we weren’t really tight. To me he was just that big kid who broke that idiot’s arm. Then one day, I must have been about sixteen then, on my way to the shops or something, I see this huge boy blocking my way on the pavement. Now this kind of shit is always a bit tense you get me. It’s basically one person’s way of fronting up the next person. Who has got the biggest balls and who is going to pussy out? I was never really the pussying-out kind you get me. Most people round my ends already knew that and after a few scrapes people knew who I was and they let me just get on my way. Even though I was never in no gang shit, people knew better than to mess me up. See, my thing was if you stayed out of my way I would stay out of your way. But if you put your face in my face, chances are I would rip yours off. Don’t get me wrong though. I hated all that. I didn’t like to have to go to war over some bit of macho bullshit but the fact was I would if I had to.

So here was this same kind of shit happening all over again. This is me, more or less the same height when I was sixteen as I am now. Here was this boy, more or less the size of a house. Shit. So my tactic with these big fuckers is to stamp on the kneecaps and then just unleash till boy’s kissing tarmac. If they are tooled up then usually I bounce. As fast as I can. Virtually nothing worth getting sliced up for man. And if there is a chance that some boy is in a gang, I swallow my pride and jet. So him and me get closer to each other. I am looking at the ground but I know we getting closer because this big lump is blocking out the light he is that big. I don’t recognize him from around these ends so I figure that he ain’t in no gang or no gang from around here. And he is alone. We get closer until there is almost no light between us. And I swear just as I am about to jump on the boy’s knees, I hear, ‘Yo blood.’ I look up and this face has cracked open and is feeding me this bright-lights smile. ‘Fuck,’ I goes, ‘Curt? Boy what they feeding you, ha ha?’

Since that day we was tight, he was a proper friend, and he was there with me from then on. As I said, I have to tell you about him because he’s important, to everything that happened. He’s part of this story.

When I first saw him again, Curt, he hadn’t changed all that much but he was definitely different. He was more serious. And these days he weren’t taking no shit from no one. At that time he weren’t in a gang either. We both had managed to sidestep that whole thing which was no small thing round our way. Usually every other week, if you were a known name, some next man from a gang would come knocking on your door trying to recruit you. There weren’t a thing they wouldn’t promise you and there weren’t a thing they wouldn’t threaten you with if they wanted you. They weren’t really that bothered about me even though a member is still a member and numbers are always important. But Curt they wanted. They were desperate for that boy and if you saw the size of him you could see why.

But the thing about Curt I soon found out was that he wasn’t really cut out for that shit. For one he weren’t really interested in money all that much. For two he hated being told what to do. Normally those two things alone would have ruled him out. A gang don’t want a person who they can’t control. Most people like to think that they won’t be controlled but then most people are liars. Most people will do any shit if the price is right and that basically means that they are controllable. Curt was different though.

I was with him one day a couple of years ago when three local boys stopped him in the street.

‘You Curt innit?’ one of them goes and when Curt nods he carries on talking, ‘I want to give you the chance of a lifetime blood.’