You Don't Know Me

‘Fill them with water, get them on the stove. We need that water boiling. Add some bleach. You got some bleach right? That table, put it in the middle of the room. You need a big space around it. That table is your workshop. Everything else in the room – and I mean everything – must go. Get it into a different room. Just pile it up. No, leave the mattress. Windows. Pull those curtains off. They don’t look right. Tape the glass all up with newspaper instead. Tape up that ventilation brick up there. Now powder. You need something that looks like it’s a cutting agent. Vim. Curt, run down the shops and get some Vim. If there’s no Vim get something called scouring powder. And some baking soda. As much of it as you can get. We need lots of white powder. Epsom salts. Anything like that.’

‘Fuck babe,’ I says properly stunned. ‘Where the hell is all this coming from?’

‘There’s a shop down the road, I saw it when we were driving up.’

‘Nah babe. I mean all this. Like how do you even know what it should look like?’

‘You don’t want to know,’ she says straight away. Then after a pause she sighs and says, ‘I got taken to a couple of traps when I was with those bastards.’

‘Why they take you there?’

Ki ignores me as if she hasn’t heard me and then says just as Curt is out of the door, ‘You need some girls. In masks.’

‘Okaaay,’ I say, ‘maybe I can find a couple.’

‘No clothes.’

‘What?’

‘So they don’t steal nothing,’ she says and looks at me dead in the eyes.

Shit.

‘Ki. I’m so sorry,’ I say, and I am.

Break: 15:05

19

15:15

So just before the break, I was telling you about the trap-house we were making.

Anyway the trap-house we made wasn’t no trap-house that would fool anyone who had ever seen a real one, but we were counting on Jamil never having seen one. Of course he was picking up a kilo from the Olders when he had to, but word had it that he met them in their Mercs in a car park. They trusted each other by now so it wasn’t really a problem for them to do business like that. But they weren’t about to let him into their factory.

For this to work though, we needed to persuade Jamil it was a legit set-up. It didn’t have to be perfect but it had to be good enough to pass a casual look. The plan was to get him through the door, past all the powder and the operations, and into the back room. As long as it felt right, he wouldn’t ask no questions we reckoned. He was still a boy after all. He was still a plastic.

When the day came we had the yard looking like it was a den. The place smelled of bleach and all other kinds of chemicals and there on the table in the middle of the room was a pile of white powder, soda mainly, some scales, some little plastic bags, a few razors, that kind of shit. The windows were all covered and the single bulb in the middle of the ceiling made a giant glow on the table but shadowed out edges of the room. I thought it looked the part, but then I’d never seen the inside of a crack house before. Curt was happy with it though. And Ki. And they knew what was what, though for different reasons of course, even if I didn’t.

The only problem was the girls. There weren’t no girls we could count on who we wanted to bring into this shit. We thought about all the girls we knew but the only ones who would be willing to do this kind of shit were basically drug whores and they were too fucking unpredictable. There was no telling what the fuck they might do. I decided that we would just have to do without them. There was no other choice.

‘We could just say they’re on a break or something innit?’ I say.

‘A break? This ain’t fucking McDonald’s man. Those bitches don’t go on no breaks. And they definitely don’t go on no breaks at the same time,’ says Curt as he gives the place a once over.

‘Well there ain’t nothing we can do now is there? He’ll be here in about ten minutes. Ki you better make tracks. Now Ki!’ I shout out at her in the kitchen where she is boiling up some pans of water.

‘And give me them masks,’ I go, ‘at least maybe we can have them lying around or something.’ These were the mouth masks that if this was a real trap-house, we would be wearing to stop the powder getting into our lungs while we were cutting it up. I had bought them for the girls to wear but as I say, we couldn’t find no girls.

‘And the aprons,’ I add.

I spend a few minutes trying to get the plan straight in my head in the little time I have got. We got the room ready. We got masks and aprons though we got no one to go in them. I got the gun.

The Baikal makes me feel a bit like I don’t know who I am but at the same time I feel almost complete with it. A part of me doesn’t know how I will be able to live without it in a way. The fucker is still whispering to me but me and it have come to an understanding about it. I ain’t going to use it. It’s just there as a back-up, like a third man. Although it is possible I might give him a whack on the head with it. You know, if needs be.