You Don't Know Me

‘Your hands. Nails. There’s blood. You have to wash it. Wash it all off. There’s a nailbrush there under the sink. Do it. Do it now!’ she goes getting all frantic again.

‘Okay,’ I say, and swallow the rest of the rum and head to the bathroom. I spend the next twenty minutes scrubbing as much as I could of the whole night into the plughole. But the shit just clung on. All around me all I could see was shreds of that night.

Anyway I had just got out of the shower when the doorbell went. Ki went and let Curt in. I dried myself off and then joined them in the kitchen. Curt was a bit wired but the spliff he was toking was getting the better of them nerves. Ki still looked white.

‘Shit I am worried about the yard man. If those boys let on about the place to anyone, we are fucked. Especially you,’ Curt says passing me the spliff.

‘Why?’

‘The place is dripping with blood man.’

‘But we bleached the place down,’ I say getting up from my chair.

‘Don’t matter that we washed the fucker down. Blood and DNA has a habit of hanging about.’

‘You’re watching way too much CSI man. Anyways they don’t have my DNA on record innit? Or Kira’s.’

‘Sure enough. But they do have mine. And if those jokers Shilo and Binks get caught up in something and they name you for this murder? Any DNA in that place that matches yours or Kira’s is going to get them out of a hole and you in one.’

‘Fuck,’ I say and sit back down. I hadn’t thought about that at all. It wasn’t just what DNA the police had on record it was also about if anyone lined me up for the murder. Then I would be fucked. It was Curt’s place so he could explain his own DNA. But mine wouldn’t be so easy and I didn’t fancy having to say that I was anywhere near it. Let alone that Ki was.

‘So what do we do now?’ I say.

Ki then gets up from her chair to go and open a window to let some of the spliff smoke out. As she comes back to the table she looks at us both with something like fear.

‘There must be something you can do,’ she says.

‘What like?’ goes Curt.

‘For a start,’ I say, ‘we need to get out of London. Maybe even out of the country. I’m thinking like Spain even.’

‘And do what there? Live on what?’ says Ki raising her voice at me. ‘What are we, the Great Train Robbers?’

‘Well, we got that bag of cash that Jamil brought,’ I say. ‘Should help us all to just keep low for a few months. Just till we know that they ain’t looking for us.’

‘Which brings us back to the DNA, fam. What the fuck we going to do about that?’ says Curt taking a long drag of his spliff.

Then I get a brainwave, or half of one.

‘Get your mandems back in the flat,’ I say.

‘What the fuck for?’

‘You want it to be occupied if the police ever turn up there. If it’s empty, it’s just going to look like a crime scene. If there’s people there, it just adds more shit into the mix,’ I say.

Curt considers this for a second and then nods slowly at me.

‘I’ll get on it,’ says Curt and picks up his phone.

‘Wait. There is a better thing you can do,’ says Ki, the edges of her eyes white again.

‘What?’ we both say.

‘In a way it’s what you just said,’ she says looking at me. ‘Add more shit into the mix.’

We look at her puzzled until she makes it clear.

‘Drown the place in DNA.’

Everyone has a mate round my ends who either is a barber or who knows one, so getting hair clippings was easy although I did get some strange looks. But barbers are weird anyway so you have to be doing some proper bare weird shit before they draw the line. Anyway, once we got enough of it together, Curt and I went up to the flat the next day with a bag of clippings and scattered it around everywhere. It was disgusting, true. But if there was hair DNA to be found, there would be strange results coming up from any test you get me? Sure the police might find my DNA if they happened to look, but if there’s DNA from a hundred boys in that place then no way would they get a case to stick. I mean I ain’t no lawyer or nothing but it sounded tight to me.

Getting blood was obviously a bit more difficult but we did. At first we spent the afternoon getting bits of meat from the halal meat shop and smearing the walls with it but you can’t get much blood from butchered meat it turns out. Then Curt remembered that he knew someone who used to work in a chicken slaughterhouse and later that evening we had a gallon of chicken blood in a bucket. I asked him what he told the guy he needed it for but all he said to me was, ‘You don’t wanna even know blood.’

I tell you what though, that shit smells like dead chicken blood should smell. But we took it and even as it was gelling up, we rubbed the whole place down with it. Then, once that was done, bleached the place all over again. Trust, whatever any CSI or whatever found there, it was going to confuse the shit out of them. That was for real.