You Don't Know Me

What surprised me though was that she didn’t stop at no building that looked to me like any mosque. She was outside a building with nothing to see but a black door. I saw her then check her phone and then ring the bell.

I waited hidden in a doorway and watched. My heart was going for some reason I couldn’t explain. A few seconds later the door opened and she walked in. I was a blank. I couldn’t even guess what the hell she might be doing there. Maybe this was where the girl lived? Could it be that? Could it actually be a mosque? I know that sometimes a mosque is just a person’s house that has been like converted. I waited a couple of minutes and then made up my mind to knock on the door. If she was there, this girl, then maybe I had a few questions of my own to ask her. I walked up to the door that Ki had just walked through and took a breath. I pushed at it but it was locked. I looked up at the building to see if there was anything interesting about it but I couldn’t find anything that stood out. It just looked like one of those places that you could walk by without even noticing. That was the weird thing about the place. There was nothing about it told you what it was. It definitely didn’t look like no mosque. And then there was the people. There weren’t any. The place was deserted. There was nobody queueing up to get behind this door.

It didn’t feel right to me. So I walked past and decided to wait at the bottom of the road. Maybe it weren’t such a good idea to go into a place without knowing what is inside it. I keep watching for twenty minutes or something but nobody walks in or out the whole time. Just then I see right at the end of the road, squeezed between a silver VW Golf and a black BMW X5, almost out of view, is a thing I recognize. That ice-blue Alpina. I just have time to register it when the door to the building opens again and I see Ki. She steps out, sorting out her burkha, and goes back up to the main road. She doesn’t even turn back so I don’t even have to hide. I ain’t even sure whether I even would have hid to tell you the truth. I was so confused. This couldn’t be no mosque that she’d just come out of, and that ice-blue Alpina, what was that about?

I can’t work it out. It’s too weird to make any sense. Anyway I am about to go and follow her when I see the door open again. I half expect another burkha to walk out. But I’m wrong about expecting that. What comes out is some white man. Six-foot-odd. Short blond hair. Grey suit. He turns the same way that Ki has gone but then stops halfway up the road and fishes for something in his pocket. The lights on the Alpina flick twice and he gets in and drives away. It must have been this fucker that had dropped her off to that other estate. But why? And who was he?

I should have realized then. But I didn’t. I swear. I didn’t even have a clue.

Look I know that this speech is long. It is bare long. But I feel like I need to tell you all the details of the thing so that you can feel me. And so now this Judge is telling me with his huffing and what have you and the snide looks he is giving me that I need to speed this shit up. It was the one thing my QC says to me just before I sacked him. He said keep the speech short enough to keep the jury’s interests up. An average speech, he goes, should be like two hours max. But I can’t do no two-hour speech for this. Even he couldn’t do a two-hour speech if he was being charged with murder himself. It’s like a thing you only get to know when you are in it. So I take it all on board. And I will speed it up. But it’s not a kind of thing like I want to skip stuff out. I don’t. But I don’t want to lose you either.

But what I will tell you is that I did have it out with her when I got back to my yard. I looked at that Alpina pull away, and my head was full with just this one repeating thought. What is going on? What is going on? I walked back to where my ride was parked up and got in. I drove back to the flat in a daze. What could she even say to all this? This was not a thing she could lie her way out of. Too much needed explaining.

I went in and waited for her. She wasn’t even that long behind me and when she came in she had that smile for me that she had shown me before and which had stopped me then from saying what I wanted to say. But this time, I wasn’t having it. She shut the door quietly behind her and whipped her burkha off and hung it on a chair by the table.

‘Hi,’ she goes, ‘everything alright? Any food going?’ She is cool as she has ever been and I don’t know how she can do it.

‘What the fuck is going on Kira? I know about the other guy,’ I say from behind a cup of tea I am drinking.

She freezes in the middle of rooting around in the fridge. I see her take a breath like she is considering her options. Finally she goes, ‘It’s not what you think.’

‘How do you know what I’m thinking?’ I say standing up so I can look right at her face when she turns around.