You Don't Know Me

‘Man you look old,’ he goes and laughs this great big bear laugh that he has and which would have shook the table over if it hadn’t been bolted to the floor.

‘Listen blood, I need your help on something innit,’ I said and told him about Kira.

‘It’s fucked up man. I liked that girl,’ he says and looks down at his two burgers.

‘Bro I been turning London inside out looking for her.’

‘You need to forget about her man,’ he says after taking a giant bite out of his burger. ‘I hear she been caught up.’

‘Glockz?’ I say.

Curt takes a second bite of his burger and it’s gone. He chews slowly and just after he swallows he picks out another from a box on the table. Even a Big Mac looks tiny in his hand.

‘It’s what I hear,’ he says.

‘I just need to know where she is Curt.’

‘That I can help you with blood,’ he says and demolishes the second burger.

From what I gathered, Curt wasn’t exactly hooked up to Glockz but he had certain privileges. He knew the General for one and so had a way of finding shit out if he needed to.

‘Man I thought you were against all that gang shit,’ I said to him, ‘How the fuck you all Glockz?’

‘Long story,’ he says. ‘Long. But if you want to know where she is at, link me in a couple of days. I give you whatever I got.’

‘Safe bruv. I’ll check you in a couple of days’ I say, and leave.

When I link up with him two days later all the smiles was gone from his face.

‘You’ll find her working King’s Cross, Camden, them kind of streets,’ he says looking at the ground.

‘Shit,’ I say, because that is all I can think. Curt looks down as if he wants to be somewhere else. ‘I owe you,’ I say at last and touch his shoulder with my fist as I get up to go.

‘Nah man,’ he says.

‘Is she okay?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Fuck.’

‘You know who her brother is?’ he says raising an eyebrow at me.

‘Yeah.’

‘Proper freak innit.’

‘Yeah blood. Proper.’

As I turn to walk away something doesn’t feel right in what he’s telling me. She was working the streets already? Normally it took more than a couple of weeks to get them crazy for crack before they walked the streets. It just didn’t really make sense to me. I look across at him.

‘One thing though bro. They broke her down quick innit?’

‘Nah. That’s the weird thing man. She just agreed from what I hear.’

‘What?’

‘She’s clean. She just made them promise that they had Spooks’ back.’

I didn’t even bother going home after seeing Curt. I just wanted to find her and if there was a chance she could be there on a street right at that minute, I didn’t want to waste it. I jumped on the bus to Camden and got off near the tube. Camden on a Saturday night is pretty much heaving to look at it from the outside. But only parts of it are, really and truly. The Lock. Stables Market. The Canal. All them areas where the tourists go, they are rammed. But I knew that she weren’t going to be in no tourist places. That’s not what Curt meant when he said Camden. He meant the kind of places where a pimp could let a girl loose and catch hold of her if she got up to any shit, without anyone trying to step up. Deserted places. Back alley places. A place where if you went there, you went there for a specific reason.

I decided to walk down Camden High Street and head towards like where the canal is. Just behind the hospital and round the back of King’s Cross Station. It was pretty wild there still, even though there was all these new buildings coming up everywhere you looked. But these new places were just where people could see. There was still hidden places. Secret places no one wanted to see. I carried on to the towpath where a lot of the prostitutes had been forced to move. Cleaning the place up, is what they called it but in truth it was just brushing up dirt and moving it someplace else. I didn’t see her and to be honest with you I was relieved. I didn’t want to see her in them kind of places. Then just before I called it a night I decided to head up nearer to York Way. More dead space. Or nearly dead.

I found her under a bridge.

I can’t even tell you what it was like to see her again. This was a girl I had been stretching my eyes to see for the last couple of weeks. I would look at crowds of people, scanning thousands of faces like the Terminator, looking for her. If someone had her hair or was wearing something that looked like what she might wear I would run across to them and tap them on the shoulder. I didn’t mind looking like a weirdo, I just needed to find her. So when I saw her standing there in a doorway near that bridge I was so surprised that I looked straight past her. I mean, I saw her. I thought it was a face I recognized from somewhere but it wasn’t her I was seeing. Then I looked again. And it was her. She was like her own ghost. Her face which had been a face that could stop cars had lost all its light. It was just like she had gone and left her body behind on autopilot.