You Don't Know Me

The club we are looking for is directly on our route and the bus makes a pass almost bang outside the front entrance.

Already the Friday night crowd is building up. A small queue has just started up and people seem to have lives that have nothing to do with shooting and gangs and raised heartbeats. It feels weird even to be out, watching people with normal lives. The bus has stopped but we don’t move even though we are right outside the club. Then after a couple of moments it lurches off again leaving the club behind and taking us with it. As we pass it I look out of the back and just catch a glimpse of Ki. She is tiny against a mountain of a man she is standing next to. Ain’t no bouncer going to turn her away looking like that, I am thinking, even if he didn’t know her. As the club fades out of view, I catch a flash of a smile that isn’t meant for me and one I haven’t seen in weeks. Then she turns and slips through the double doors into the club, the bouncers following her with their eyes.

Five stops later Curt and I get off. We are half a mile away from the club but it’s exactly where we need to be right now. The kiss on my cheek still tingles and I feel like it should feel like a good luck charm, but it doesn’t exactly. But it does feel almost, what, holy? I nearly touch it but then stop at the last moment. I don’t want to take the shine off it. It sounds stupid now but I needed it there to protect me. I still don’t know why she said she was sorry but I put the thought away till later.

The main road is busy like it always is at this time of night at this time of the week. People out, needing to wash away their week or just to celebrate the end of it. Everyone just wanting to forget their lives for just a few hours. We mingle in with them as they walk by. We could even be them. Just normal people doing normal things in a normal life.

Curt nudges me as we approach the first side street we see. We walk down it and as we do I unzip the bag I am holding and take out a black hoodie as Curt takes off his white one. I hand the black one to him and he puts it on. Then I do the same. Both white hoodies go in the bag. Next, the trainers. We change our white ones for black ones that are in the bag and put the white ones in their place. It’s all done so quickly and casually that we barely break our stride. We get to the end of the side road and turn left so that we are now walking parallel to the main road. My heart starts picking up pace again. My hands are sweating but I can’t do anything about that. I wipe them down on my hoodie but I don’t say anything to Curt. Curt strides on as if he has closed his mind to everything else. Something in his face tells me that he is going to treat the whole thing like this. One foot then the next.

In another twenty minutes or something we can see the back of the club. We pull the hoods down as we head towards it. There is a skip on one side all filled with rubble. I pull on my gloves as we near the skip, ducking under its cover, and take the gun out of the bag and put it in my waistband. I make sure nobody is looking.

I fish into the bag again and take out a smaller bag, it’s a white plastic carrier bag. It has another hoodie in it and some tracksuit bottoms and trainers. I hide the sports bag with the white clothes we had been wearing in the skip under a bit of wood panelling. I do it quickly as I am walking and I know if anybody was watching they would have hardly noticed it. As we leave the skip behind, all I have in my hands now is the white carrier bag. The sports bag, the white clothes and the white trainers are all left behind now in the skip and a part of me feels like I am leaving some of my life there with it.

We keep walking towards the club in our dark clothes. I look at Curt. The dark of his clothes and the dark of the night and the darkness of his face all merge into one. He says nothing but pulls his hood down tight over his eyes. I do the same. We know there are cameras on this road but as long as we can keep our faces hidden it doesn’t matter. As far as anybody who looks will be able to tell we were the two boys on the bus in white. We were never these two boys in black. The cameras. We can’t avoid them whichever way we approach the club. There are cameras all over London. We can’t dodge them all, so we just have to use them to our advantage. Let them tell a different story. Let them be our alibis.

In another two minutes we are at the back entrance to the club. I am starting to breathe heavy now even though I’ve only been walking. For some reason this isn’t as easy as what we did in the trap-house, which now seems a different lifetime ago, even though it’s only a couple of weeks ago. I try make my breathing normal again and then nod at Curt. I am ready.