You Don't Know Me

The next day when we got to Curt’s old yard my heart proper sank. There was no way we could pass this place off like a den. It was just too normal. Sure it was a bag of shit, but it was a dump like a student house is a dump. It still looked like a place that someone lived in or could live in. The door opened to a big square room with steel-framed windows. There was some curtains up but curtains like you never see these days with flowers over them and made of some shiny material. There was a mattress right in the middle of the room with a duvet on it and against one wall an old table with drop-down edges which had all plates on it. There was all kind of rock posters on the walls from fuck knows when and the place smelled rotten. It smelled really and truly like the inside of my trainers.

To the left there was a small kitchen which still had like cabinets from the sixties in it with no handles on the doors just like metal tracks going along the tops and bottoms that you pull at. There was one of them ring cookers which probably once was white but right then it was mainly the same colour as the inside of the oven. The sink was probably there somewhere but you couldn’t see it for takeaway boxes and bits of rotting food.

To the right of the main room there was the one bedroom. It had a window in it but it looked out on to a brick wall so there was not much light. It didn’t matter anyway since the room was just full of random junk that you probably didn’t want more light to see.

There was an old flat-pack wardrobe which looked like it was trying to go back to being flat-pack again. An old mattress was stood up against one wall but had slipped so it looked more like it was sitting against it than standing. The middle of the room had all kinds of shit in it like a bike and one of them frame things for drying clothes and just boxes of tapes. There was even a bit of pushchair or something in amongst it.

There was a bathroom off to the side. That was it.

It wasn’t what was in the place that was the problem it was just the normality of it all. It didn’t give you the feeling that people could be cooking up crack in there. It was too boring. That’s the worst thing about council blocks, worse than all the noise you hear at all times of the day, worse than the leaking pipes and the fact that all the stairwells smell of piss. For me the worst thing was that right there. It was fucking boring. You live in a place like that and all you want to do is spend all your time out of it. In more ways than one.

‘This ain’t going to do it,’ I goes. ‘Fuck.’

We sat on the mattress on the floor, me and Curt. I was half wondering whether something was going to crawl out of the duvet so I couldn’t really relax, though. I could tell he was thinking the same thing that I was, both about the rats and the yard, and he shifted on the mattress like it was alive and then got up.

He stood in the middle of the room and stared at the yellow ceiling as if there was some writing up there that spelled out what to do next but he couldn’t read it. We was fucked and he knew it.

It was Ki though who came up with the goods. She looked around for a few seconds and then she started coming alive.

She started walking round the place quickly waving her hands in the air as if she was creating stuff out of it. I looked up at her. She had this look in her eyes that changed her face. It was the same look she always had when her brain was in gear. The whites went really white. The pale irises became dark and dangerous. I knew then whatever she was about to say, she was about to say it fast.

‘No this is perfect,’ she says. ‘It just needs work. You got pans?’ she adds walking into the kitchen. She comes out making a face and then says, ‘There are three big ones in there under all that crap. Get ’em, clean ’em and start clearing all the crap away from the stove.’

‘What, you want us to clean it up?’ says Curt with a kind of puzzled look in his eye.

‘Not exactly. Just make it look like it knows what it is,’ she says.

Me and Curt look at each other with like a what’s-she-on-about kind of look. Ki shrugs her shoulders and lets out a sigh as if she is talking to idiots, which might not have been that far off the target.

‘A trap-house isn’t just a dump for no reason. It’s a dump with a purpose. You have to think of it like, I don’t know, a building site. There’s stuff around. It’s a mess. But the stuff has to be there for a reason. So unless you got better things to do guys, you better step to it. Now!’ she says and starts walking around again with her hands making shapes in the air and shouting out orders.

Curt gets up, a little dazed. He’s never seen her like this before and even though I have a few times before, she is on fire this time.