Anyway, Kira was home but she wasn’t by no means safe. Actually she was safer than we thought at that time, but we didn’t know it then. At that time, the way we saw it, the biggest danger to her was herself. The drive back home was a long one. Although she started off dazed and spaced out it wasn’t long before she turned into a maniac. She started banging on the windows and screaming to be let out. I didn’t get it at first. What the fuck was the problem? I wasn’t expecting no hero’s welcome or nothing, but I definitely wasn’t expecting the abuse that came out of her mouth right then. But the truth is that was my own fault. I hadn’t thought the shit through at all.
When I found her, I was so like consumed by how to get her out I hadn’t thought about what to do with her once I had her. I was making this shit up as I went along. Find her. Oh, I found her – what now? Get her out. Oh, I got her out – what now? Take her home. No, don’t fucking take her home that is the first place they will come looking. That is how my mind works. In a straight line.
Kira thought differently. If my mind was a pencil drawing of a stick-man, hers was a Michael Angelo. She had what you call it, perspective. And all that other stuff, colour, 3D, the lot. I had a big head and stick arms. Eventually after the screaming had died down and I managed to persuade her not to open the car door and try and run off every time I stopped at a light, she told me what was on her mind. If she wasn’t there when they came looking for her, they would off her brother, she says. Simple as that.
I hadn’t even thought about that for a second. In my head as long as she was gone from that place, from them, she was safe. Tell the truth I didn’t really give a shit about Spooks. He was a nobody crack addict. If I had thought about it beforehand though I would still have done it but I would at least have been prepared for how Kira reacted.
I managed to calm her down after a while and get her to my yard without her jumping out. ‘I’ve got a plan,’ I kept telling her, ‘I’ve got a plan’, even though I didn’t. Big head and stick arms remember. On the way though, I thought of something that might become a plan, even if it wasn’t an actual plan yet.
‘Nobody knows you’ve been taken by me innit? As far as any of them Glockz is concerned, some next man, a gang member maybe, took you at gunpoint for no better reason than to fuck with them.’
She stared ahead at the windscreen and I knew I was in for one of them long silent treatments.
‘And I shot one of them innit so they have to be thinking that it’s some gang thing. No boyfriend would have pulled anything like that. As far as that guy knew I was a customer and I shot him up because he was giving it rah rah rah.’
She looked at me and said nothing.
When she do that silent thing anything could be going on in her head, so believe me when I say I was relieved when she finally said, ‘Okay maybe you’re right.’
When we got to my flat I put her straight into a hot bath. Even poured in a load of shampoo to make bubbles for her. She didn’t want to get in but after a bit of persuasion she finally did. It was like she didn’t have the energy to argue with me, which if you know Kira was something serious. I knew it was serious anyway. She made me wait outside while she changed. I went back a few minutes later and knocked on the door with a cup of tea.
‘Put it outside,’ she goes. ‘I’ll get it later.’
I stood outside the door listening. See maybe if I could hear her crying. ‘Can I come in Ki?’ I say at last.
‘No,’ she says so I went back into the living room and waited. TV off.
By the time she came out in my dressing gown she seemed a bit better. Her cheeks were still red from the heat of the bath and her hair was wrapped in a towel. She looked more Ki and less ghost. I got up to try and hold her but she shrugged me off and sat down with her knees to her chest and her eyes to the floor.
‘Ki,’ I goes.
‘Just give me some time,’ she says. So I did.
The next few days were really strange and a bit dream-like. On the one hand she was back and every time I remembered it, when it crept up on me, I felt like this wave of relief wash over me. But then when I looked at her, if she was sitting reading a book or just watching TV, she had this look that made me realize that maybe she wasn’t really back after all. Not in the sense that it was the same Kira who’d come back to me. She wasn’t the same. She was a different Kira come back to me.
