You Don't Know Me

But was I happy about Ki going to a mosque to find some peace and quiet as she called it? Not really truth be told. It was way too dangerous for her to be out at all. I mean I get it. She was cooped up in this tiny flat with only me to look at. It was horrible. I didn’t know it then but it was worse than prison in some ways. In prison you get out for some air every day at least. But back then in that flat, it was bare claustrophobic. Bare claustrophobic.

And then the mosque of all places. That didn’t seem to me to be a safe place for a person. In my head it was going to be one of them places with the minuets or whatever they call them. You know with the towers and the wailing. And men. For some reason in my head it was only men in them kind of places. Where there are only women when they are made to be there by the men. Like the opposite of a church innit, where the men are only there because they been dragged there by their mums and wives.

On the other hand there weren’t no chance that she could be recognized in a mosque since we didn’t really know any Bangladeshis or whatever.

Anyway long story short Ki leaves with Curt and before I know it she is sitting in a mosque doing some of her thinking. I am left by myself again in the flat. Checking my phone every minute. Looking out the window every two. I feel sick every one of them minutes that she is not there. How she even getting back? I don’t even know whether Curt is picking her up or what.

In the end I get so bored of just waiting I do what any guy would do. I pick up my PS3. I did have Call of Duty in my stack and although I was pretty good at that, I felt like I’d had enough of guns and all that shit to last me a lifetime. So it was FIFA. My Chelsea team was hench, trust, it had the best players money could buy. I had Ronaldo, Messi, Agüero, Bale, Silva, Suárez, Neymar, you name it. I had so many strikers that I didn’t really have much room for defenders so I had people like Fàbregas and Touré in the back. It weren’t like any team you’d see in real life, but who wants real life when you’re trying to escape it?

The thing I noticed though when I played it that day that I didn’t notice before was that you can only properly play it when your head is clear. I don’t mean that you need to concentrate. You don’t. It’s just that when you’re like worried about something, you can’t use it to run away from your life. It’s only good for getting out of your life when there’s not that much in your life in the first place. I reckon that’s why, when you are doing your time, after your trial is over, people play PlayStation. Yeah, believe. It is true, there is PlayStation in prison. But like I say, it’s only good if you got nothing else to do and you need your life to move on as fast as it can.

I turned it off and walked around the flat looking for something to do. I had already washed all the dishes. The cooker was clean. There was nothing to do but wait. After a while I walked into the bedroom and poked around. On Ki’s side of the bed there were books stacked in a pile on the floor and I picked one up. To Kill a Mockingbird. I flipped it over and read the back. A few words jumped out at me. Kindness and cruelty. Love and hate. It looked like the kind of book that she would read. A book of opposites. Like me and her. I opened the first page and started to read but I couldn’t get the story going. It was the same thing as the PS3. My head wasn’t clear enough to hang on to the words. Every time I got hold of something, my mind started to slip back to Kira. In the end I can’t do anything except to stand by the window just to watch out for her or anyone else I need to worry about. I don’t like the idea of her being out so long. I worry that it might happen again. She might get taken. And I ain’t sure I can live through another one of them dramas again. Then it gets dark and I start getting edge. I can’t stay in here much longer so I decide to go out. Just for a bit of air. The darkness probably give me enough cover I reckon.

When I am outside, I decide to cut through the back. That place I saw her the last time she came back. I don’t know why exactly, I guess I was just curious about it still. It didn’t sit right with me and I just wanted to get my eyes on it. I weren’t even sure any more if there was a cut through to the other estate. It had been ages since I went round that way. I get to the bins and there is a low wall there which I jump. And then I’m like in some kind of waste grounds around that other estate. There’s nothing really there but some old faded cans and bottles and random bits of rubbish. It looked like a kind of place where they thought about having a garden when they made it but then couldn’t be bothered. I cross it in about five minutes of fast walking and then think about what I do now. There is nothing to see here. Then suddenly there is.

A car.