Breaking Out

by Janice Nix

For months, that scene filled my mind. I saw its horror and violence again and again. Each time I longed to be there – to be with her, to be able to protect her. But it had happened. It could never be undone. As time went by, I could sometimes feel my energy and cheerfulness returning. But next day I’d be paralysed with despair all over again, barely able to get out of bed.

  I couldn’t bear to set foot in the West End. But a little while later, I agreed to go up to Knightsbridge with Suzi Q. I hadn’t seen her for months, and I hoped that it might be like old times, working as friends. Still, as we set out, unease hung over me. I thought it would be good to distract myself with work. I decided to push on.

  We went to Harvey Nichols for a browse, checking out the marks. I tried to feel it like I used to in the old days. But it didn’t take me long before I realised I was done. I had no concentration. Nothing would be happening today. Then I noticed a store detective watching. She was dressed all in black – a leather jacket, expensively cut trousers, a couple of carrier bags in her hands, and eyes locked on me. Damn it. I must have been recognised.

  I paused at one of the confectionery counters and bought a few loose chocolates, trying to decide what I should do. The detective stopped too. She was tracking me for sure. But since I’d taken nothing and made no attempt to do so, I was still in the clear. I could leave. I headed for the street.

  Outside on the pavement, I quickly picked up speed and strode away. On the island in the middle of the road, I looked back. The detective was already at the kerb, giving chase. Tense and disorientated, I broke into a run. As I reached the Hyde Park Hotel, she came racing up behind me. I felt her hand grip onto my arm.

  I panicked and resisted, forgetting that I had nothing on me. She must have radioed before she came out after me, because now two other detectives were approaching. She was trying to keep hold while I pulled away, kicking out at her to make her step back.

  Then suddenly, I stopped. I’d no more energy to fight. The surge of panic ebbed from my body. I gave up. In a haze I remember the police van pulling up and being taken to Bow Street. I was charged with resisting arrest. The woman only followed me because she knew my face, not because I had committed any crime. Nothing would have happened if I’d managed to stay calm. Where had my judgement gone?

  Because I had no history of absconding, I was quickly given bail. Later that night, I got a phone call. Q had been arrested too, at her home. We were both due in court in two days.

  On the day of my appearance, I still felt completely overwhelmed. I knew a warrant could be issued if I didn’t show up. But I couldn’t leave the house. I just wanted to hide. Then my solicitor phoned.

  ‘Janice? Listen, there’s been a change of plan. I’m sorry to have to tell you this – Suzi’s gone QE on you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes. I’m afraid she’s turned Queen’s Evidence. She’s giving information about your involvement in the dipping squad in exchange for a lighter sentence.’

  I remembered all the evenings Q and I hung out, the laughs we’d had, the times I’d babysat her kids. The crazy day she’d helped me lift the leather pouch in Soho – how I’d legged it like mad with a gang of angry Christmas shoppers in pursuit. How could she turn QE?

  ‘What do I do now?’ I asked the solicitor.

  ‘Present yourself to court next Monday morning. We’ll try to get probation for you – so you’ll need to make sure that you meet your conditions. No excuses at all. If they give you a work order – you’ll have to find a way to attend. No childcare problems – nothing. Otherwise –’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know. I’ll make sure I’m there.’

  My solicitor’s plan worked. I escaped with probation. But I couldn’t feel relief. I had acted like a fool. And in the dock, my former friend blamed everything on me. I would have given my last penny to that girl, yet she had tried to bring me down to save herself.

  Pepper’s funeral was held on a cold, bright day in Thornton Heath. Scorcher came to the church with a couple of his heavies. There he was – the grieving widower, dressed all in black, in his crocodile skin shoes. I felt sick at the sight of him. He was wearing his screw face – his bad man face, the one he wore when he was trying to look powerful and scary.

  Pah – him tink him such a gangster. I felt nothing but contempt. As Pepper’s body was lowered into the ground, I was consumed by hate.

  After the service, he tried to approach me. I don’t know what he wanted to say. I wouldn’t look at him. I couldn’t speak a word. If it wasn’t for this lying, cheating bastard, my girl would still be here.

  This is all your doing, Scorcher. She died because of you. I will never forgive you. I will never forget what you have done.

  8

  You’re a different cat, Mama J

  MARCH 2017

  WHEN I LOOKED AT my work diary for the day, my heart sank. My first client appointment was with John, a young chef. I very much doubted he would make an appearance. He’d missed our previous two meetings, and was very close to breaching the terms of his probation. If he didn’t show up today, I would have to take action.

  John worked shifts in a west London restaurant – long, tense hours under pressure. That was the reason, he told me, that he started to use cocaine. It was a way to unwind and decompress after his hot, demanding kitchen shifts. But then he did some dealing, and that got him arrested. His community service order was 120 hours.

  I asked him to give me his restaurant rota, so that I could structure his hours for the days that he was free. Probation would never disrupt a steady job. It’s a service user’s best chance of making progress and avoiding offending in the future. But John was evasive and unhelpful.

  ‘My shifts keep changing at short notice! We’re busy – I can’t keep bothering my boss to let me know about next week!’ Weeks went by and still I didn’t have the rota.

  When I finally managed to set up a schedule for John, he didn’t attend the first two sessions. He’d had to do overtime, he said – it was Christmas. He came to the next one and I thought things were improving, but by the start of March, he’d done less than thirty hours’ work.

  I tried ringing him, but John dodged my calls. When I managed to get through, he brushed me impatiently away: ‘Yes, yes, I know, I know, next week, next week.’ To him, his probation wasn’t a serious matter. And I was clearly not a person whom he needed to take seriously.

  He was due for his appointment at 10.00 a.m. By 10.15, I knew I had a problem. I was going to have to breach him.

  Regretfully, I filled in the form, detailing everything I’d tried to encourage him to do, the dates and times of our contacts and the endless excuses he had offered. One of his comments – a text he had sent me – summed up our whole relationship. ‘Leave me alone,’ the text read, ‘you miserable old lady.’

  Two weeks later, John’s case was heard at breach court. We adjourned, waiting for the judge’s consideration, and I went to take a seat in the waiting room. As I stepped outside, I overheard a comment by the clerk. ‘They’re sending for the jailer,’ she said. That was when I knew – although I’d guessed it already – that John was going down.

  I felt sick. He wasn’t an unlikeable young man – just rather cocky, determined he knew best, but not quite as smart as he imagined. And this was where it started unravelling for him. Up until then, he’d kept his job – a good one with a future that might even be exciting, with his talent for cooking. But his sentence would soon put paid to that. A few weeks from now, he’d be facing unemployment, with a prison record as a blight on his prospects. While he was inside, he wouldn’t make his rent. Then he would be homeless. It would bring about the total collapse of the purposeful life that he’d built. All because he wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t think, wouldn’t face up to reality.

  I was once like that. I identified with him, in that place of wrongful certainty that comes before a dreadful crash to earth. My job was to use what I knew to persuade him to listen. To cut through all t
he attitude and stop this situation from spiralling far further – before it was too late. And this time, I had failed.

  I wondered what it was I hadn’t done – what words I hadn’t spoken, what understanding I hadn’t managed to show. If I’d reached him, perhaps he could have conformed to the system – for all the flaws I knew that system contained. He might have fixed things before it was too late. There must have been a way. I believe very strongly that there is, in almost every case. But right here, the fact was stark – I hadn’t found it.

  I didn’t want to hear his sentence handed down. I couldn’t bear to see the misery and shock dawn on his face. I did something that day that I very rarely do – I slipped away from court. I couldn’t sit there and listen as a young life fell apart because I hadn’t found a way to prevent it.

  My eleven o’clock appointment looked more positive.

  Brenda was an unusual client – a middle-class lady not far from the age of retirement who worked in an office in Canary Wharf. She’d been convicted of benefit fraud. Following the death of her husband, she took sick leave from her job and signed on to receive her benefits. But when she went back to work, she forgot, or so she claimed in court, to sign off again.

  It was hard to be sure what had happened – and easy to demonstrate that Brenda must have known she was receiving her sickness benefit payment. But grief does awful things to the mind, distorting reality, leaving people struggling and bewildered. Brenda also, perhaps, was not accustomed to tracking her income and bank account in detail. She’d been married a long time and for a woman of her generation, it was common for her husband to take charge of all financial matters. I felt the explanations she gave were quite likely to be true. Her employer thought the same, and happily, Brenda kept her job.

  Most of all, I didn’t think she would ever have risked the shame of standing in the dock. She pleaded guilty in a trembling voice that could barely be heard. Her whole body shook. The entire experience was a horror. For her, the fairly small amount of money would never have been worth it. I was very, very sorry for Brenda.

  But she did make my life easy. She was the most co-operative probation client you could ever wish to meet. She turned up promptly for our meetings, smiled and chatted about what she’d been up to that week. But I knew she couldn’t wait until probation was over. As soon as it was, she would never want to see my face again.

  In the end, it didn’t take her very long. Brenda booked annual leave and completed her community service – eighty hours – in a month. Afterwards, she even kept on working Sunday shifts at the charity shop where I had placed her. As a widow, she felt lonely and lost every time Sunday came around. Working at the shop meant someone to talk to and somewhere to go where she felt valued.

  For Brenda, one mistake wouldn’t ruin her whole life. And that’s how it should be. Everyone deserves a second chance. When people see the best in you – the fullest potential that you have – it’s more likely you’ll become that best self. For at least one client this morning, the story would end happily, with hope for a better day tomorrow.

  Then there was my twelve o’clock, Christina.

  As I waited for her to arrive in the waiting room downstairs, I leafed through her file, reading back my notes and trying – again – to work out the best way to help her deal with her problems. I hadn’t found anything that worked yet, and I knew that time was running out.

  She came from a well-to-do family. She owned a large house in Wimbledon Village where she lived a very comfortable lifestyle without the need for work. She was privileged in background and education too – it showed in her clothes and voice and manner. With all those advantages behind her, I’d wondered at first what on earth she was doing on probation.

  But she had eighty hours of community service to complete, following a conviction for drunk and disorderly behaviour. When I asked her about it, she said she’d been having a bad time when she’d committed the offence. She wouldn’t tell me anything more. I noticed her attention span was very short indeed – within seconds of being asked a question, she was chattering away about some completely different matter. She talked at length about caring for Pepe, who I thought at first must be her son. His multiple food allergies and health problems seemed to dominate her life. But looking after Pepe also gave her days some structure – a positive sign. I expected a good outcome to her probation, and arranged for her to work in a shop run by the charity Oxfam.

  But she didn’t turn up. It happened three times. I tried to talk to her about it, but heard endless excuses – Pepe’s health again – that never identified the reason. I sent a formal letter, explaining that if this went on, she’d have to be breached and sent back before the court. In response, I got a long and frantic text. Pepe was seriously ill. She couldn’t leave him for a moment. She attached a photo. Pepe was a Yorkshire terrier – and one that looked quite healthy and well.

  Christina was in trouble, I realised. She just couldn’t find a way to tell me. I decided not to breach her – not yet. I wondered if the long working day at the Oxfam shop might be her problem. After all, it was a struggle for her to concentrate on anything for more than five minutes. The shop agreed to split her weekly hours into several shorter sessions. Surely now she would find the work more manageable. I also noticed that she talked to me more easily by phone. Face-to-face contact overwhelmed her. So I started ringing regularly, just to check in. I asked her what was happening, and listened to the details of her day.

  That was how I learned about her problems. Christina believed that she had friends, but in reality, these friends were abusing and exploiting her. They treated her lovely house in Wimbledon Village as a place to hang out, but gave her nothing in return. To them, she was just a source of free booze. They held parties in her living room. The atmosphere she lived in was highly alcoholic, with lots of people drinking day and night. They stole her money. Her possessions kept on disappearing. Caught up in all of this, Christina’s problems with addiction were growing worse and worse. But it was difficult to get her to see that there was anything wrong with these ‘friends’, or that their behaviour wasn’t really very friendly.

  ‘Does anyone bring anything for you?’ I’d ask her gently. ‘When they come round to see you? Perhaps some food to share? Or maybe some flowers, to say thank you for all your hospitality?’

  Christina sounded puzzled. She was needy and confused, terrified of being left alone. She also seemed depressed, in need of treatment and support. She couldn’t fulfil her community service order, I realised – the whole thing was unworkable.

  So I’d applied to the court to revoke the order. I completed a form that stated why I believed it was impossible for her to do it. But sometimes applications were pushed back and the reasons we gave were not accepted – a terribly frustrating situation. Unless I was certain that my client was in crisis, I wouldn’t have applied for revocation in the first place.

  In Christina’s case, I’d been met with a ‘no’ from the court. I felt strongly that this ruling wasn’t right. But still, at this meeting, I was going to have to tell her that she must complete her order as directed. I knew how she’d respond – puzzlement at first, and then distraction. But if she failed to complete, she would be breached and sent to prison. And if she ended up there, I didn’t think she’d cope at all.

  And – as if all this was not enough – an even bigger shadow hung over our meeting. Change was coming to the way probation worked. It wasn’t change that I welcomed. As our working practices were altered, I would soon be moving away from day-to-day involvement with my clients. In future, I’d be speaking to more people, but less often to each one. What that would mean in practice was an end to the very careful listening which identified a problem like Christina’s in the first place. It took up too much time.

  She needed positive engagement. Someone to go round to her house, take an interest in what she was eating and drinking and doing and the lifestyle she was living. It helped her feel supported, and also said t
o anyone who might be hanging round her that somebody responsible was watching. If the so-called friends could see this, they might leave her alone.

  Christina did manage to stay out of prison. But just as I’d feared, I lost touch with her. When Christmas came around, a card arrived for me, signed from her and Pepe. His picture was stuck onto the front. He looked bright-eyed and healthy as ever. The two of them were out there, still surviving. I only hope they go on doing so, until maybe one day, the real help they need can be provided.

  SEPTEMBER 1985

  10 September 1985, Knightsbridge Crown Court.

  Shoplifting charges. Resisting arrest. Failing to attend probation appointments.

  This court appearance was different. I’d been breached. I knew that I was facing time.

  The night before the sentencing, I had a talk with Nadia, trying to explain what would happen tomorrow in a way she could understand.

  ‘You’re going to a school for naughty girls, Mummy?’

  ‘Yes, baby. It’s because I was naughty at work.’

  ‘Were you a lot naughty?’

  ‘Yes,’ I told her. ‘I was very, very naughty.’

  She was nearly six by now, and logical.

  ‘But Mummy – if you knew you would be sent there, then why were you naughty?’

  I tried to keep on chatting, struggling to make this seem okay. But it wasn’t okay. When I thought of tomorrow, dread rolled over me. When Sabrina phoned me to offer words of comfort – ‘Babe, if they do send you down, it won’t be long. We’ll all look after Nadia, don’t worry.’ – I choked as I tried to speak to her.

  Now I blessed Emmanuel for taking me to see my mother in Leicester. Thanks to him, we’d partly mended our relationship. Mummy had agreed that she would live in my flat and care for Nadia during my sentence. But when she arrived, though she hugged and kissed her granddaughter as always, she barely spoke to me. She was bitterly angry.

  Next day, I got nine months.