You Don't Know Me

I tried to speak to her every now and then, when I made her a cup of tea or brought her some soup, but she weren’t really interested. I knew I needed to give her some time but all I could see was this girl that I loved just slipping away from me and the harder that I tried to hold on to her the thinner she became until I had almost no grip left on her. I was desperate. I didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t like I needed to know what happened to her in that time she was with Glockz. But I did need to know whether what they did to her was something that could be fixed. Even if not straight away, just one day, you get me?

The one thing she could bring herself to talk about was Spooks. She was still terrified that someone somewhere was going to maybe stick a shank in him for her disappearing.

‘What you care about him for anyway?’ I said to her once and she just says, ‘Don’t.’ Her eyes flashed me one of them looks and I knew that I couldn’t even go near that right then.

Later that same day she made me promise to see if I could find out if her brother was still alive.

‘I will. Don’t worry about him. Worry about you,’ I said.

‘Just do it.’

‘I’ll get a message through don’t worry,’ I said.

She looked at me and flared her nostrils.

‘Fine,’ I said, ‘I’ll go and see him. In prison.’

‘And you’ll make sure that nobody comes looking to him?’ she said, eyes wide open.

‘I’ll put a few rumours in the right places about some new gang causing a problem in those ends. I’ll say some gangster’s been causing trouble in North. Throwing his weight around. Fucking up people’s patches. Nicking their whores. Don’t worry. Spooks, that piece of shit, will be clear.’

And that is what I did. And at the same time I made sure that nobody knew Kira was with me.

Now that probably doesn’t sound all that difficult to you lot. She’s not famous. How hard can it be to keep her on the low? Well even though she’s not famous a person can still have a rep. In fact everyone has a rep. Some people have good reps. Some people have shit ones. But people round my ends know all the people round my ends. It’s like it’s their business to know. They know who is going out with who. They know whether this man has got a baby for this next girl and how many babies he’s got for how many girls. And trust me a girl like Ki is a girl that gets noticed by everyone. And not just men. In fact it’s the girls that are most likely to mark her. They want to know what all the other girls are doing because if any of them is doing it near their own mans, they will have something to say about that. And Kira, like I said, was a type of a girl who could worry a lot of other girls just by turning up.

In the end, though, it wasn’t really that hard to keep her low profile at the beginning. She basically had no desire to go out anyway. She would just sit in my room staring into space. Occasionally she would pick up a book but her eyes would glaze as if all she could read was her own thoughts.

After a few weeks had passed things were no better as far as Ki was concerned. She was still locked in her own head. I tried every known thing then to get her out of herself but nothing really had any effect. In desperation I told Mum about it. I didn’t tell her all details, just that some men had put her in a car. Mum started to freak out at first but then I managed to calm her down some. ‘You can’t tell no one about it Mum. I mean it,’ I goes. I really didn’t want to have to tell Mum but I didn’t have any other ideas and she sometimes had some good ones. In the end the best she could do was tell me not to worry and that Ki just needed some time to heal.

A day after I told Mum about her, she called me and told me that she had made Ki a doctor’s appointment.

‘You did what? I told you didn’t I? No one. You can’t tell no one about it Mum. It’s serious Mum.’

‘I did not tell anybody about it. Just I said to Blessing to make an appointment with the doctor for Kira. Just depression. Not to say about kidnapping and all of these matters.’

‘You told Bless? Mum!’ I say. I definitely didn’t want her talking to Bless about it.

‘Of course I tell your sister. You want me to have a mental breakdown all on my own, foolish boy?’

‘Alright alright. No one else Mum. I mean it. No doctors. No friends. No church people. No one,’ I said and hung up. I called up the surgery straight away and told them that it was a mistake. Fuck knows who would have seen her if she wandered over there. Plus I wasn’t sure I wanted no doctor to be finding out that her problem was that she had been kidnapped by a gang and pimped out. It was too dangerous to do that. Most likely the doctor would have called the Feds and I didn’t want no police turning up and putting blue lights over her head, you get me. So I thought of other ways.