Breaking Out

by Janice Nix

  ‘Nadia!’ I yelled again.

  They marched me down the corridor and into the living room. Then I saw her and Terry, both face down on the carpet in handcuffs, their arms dragged painfully behind them. Nadia’s head was on one side, her right cheek pressing hard into the carpet. Her eyes bulged with terror.

  ‘What the fuck? Why is she in cuffs?’ I screamed.

  ‘Shut it, you dirty drug dealer!’ snapped the officer who had me by the arm.

  ‘Get the cuffs off my daughter, you bunch of cunts! Can’t you see she’s a child!’

  They yanked open the cupboard in the corner of the living room. It was full of video cassettes. They pulled them out and threw them on the floor. I know they’d open every case. They’d open everything. Eventually, they would open the shoebox.

  ‘She’s twelve years old, you bastards! Get her out of handcuffs!’ I was shrieking with fury.

  Finally, the officer in charge seemed to hear me.

  ‘How old is she?’ He looked at Nadia.

  ‘Twelve! Get my child out of handcuffs! Let her stand up!’

  He spoke into the radio. There was so much background noise in the flat, and so much hissing and crackling, it was hard to hear the words. I caught something about a minor child – confirm?

  ‘Confirm,’ said the radio. ‘Confirm. The daughter’s twelve.’

  He and his colleague exchanged glances.

  ‘She doesn’t look it,’ he replied. He didn’t really care. But they lifted Nadia to her feet and unlocked the cuffs. Her arms dropped to her sides. She stood there motionless, frozen with shock.

  ‘It’s okay, baby,’ I said to her. Her blank expression scared me more than it would if she was screaming and crying.

  They put me in cuffs too, and bundled the three of us into my bedroom. They pushed us onto the bed and we sat there in a row. Terry looked furious, but he wouldn’t make eye contact – he just lowered his head and kept shaking it slowly. I said Nadia’s name a couple of times, trying to connect with her. She wouldn’t look at me either. She hadn’t made a sound since that first shriek. From every room we heard the sounds of searching – scraping and clattering, objects falling to the floor. From the kitchen came the noise of breaking glass.

  I knew that they would find what was in the Kurt Geiger shoebox. And when they found it, it was going to be my fault. As I waited for their discovery, the pain in my cramped arms felt almost welcome – a distraction from my all-consuming fury. I cursed myself to hell. How could I be so stupid? It was the first rule Scully ever taught me, the simplest law of safety. When he heard about all this, he wouldn’t believe I broke it.

  Always go home clean.

  They marched into the bedroom and opened my wardrobe, throwing all my clothes onto the floor. Before they did, they checked the pockets, and rolled each garment tightly to make sure there was nothing hidden in the lining. They dragged out all my shoes and searched inside them. They opened my dressing table drawers and tossed my underwear onto the bed. ‘Very nice, love. Very attractive.’ Their tone of voice was mocking. They ran their hands right to the backs of the drawers to make sure that they were empty, then pulled the drawers right out and looked behind.

  Keep looking in here, I thought. Go on. Go through everything. Make all the mess you like. Search the kitchen and the bathroom. Just don’t look in the hall.

  At last I heard the hall cupboard door swinging open. The handle bumped against the wall – it had happened so many times before that there was a deep scuff in the paint. I heard the clunk of box lids falling, then shoes dropping onto the lino. The empty boxes being flung to one side. Any second now – it was coming. And it was all my own doing. I held my breath and closed my eyes.

  ‘BINGO!’ shouted a voice. It was full of triumph. I’d been caught in possession of cocaine.

  3.6 ounces is not a large amount. It’s large for personal use, but it doesn’t prove a dealing operation. That was what my brief said. Gilles Toussaint insisted there was doubt – and doubt was all we needed. So expect a custodial sentence, he told me, but it won’t be a long one. Between five and seven years, with half of it to serve with good behaviour. I began to have some hope.

  The first blow came when bail was refused. The second was the news of Scully’s sentence, which came through while I was on remand. He’d been given sixteen years. We had known it would be bad – but this was worse than we’d thought. The third blow was finding out how much the cops knew. They’d been following me – I had no idea how long. They were aware of the syndicate’s bank accounts too – or at least aware of some of them – and knew that we held money offshore. That helped the prosecution. They would use the bank accounts to convince the jury I was a bigger player than I was admitting.

  Still, the case against me, Toussaint said, wasn’t likely to succeed as well as they were hoping. ‘There’s not enough evidence. What they’ve got – it’s conjecture. There’s not a good enough case. With the quantity of cocaine you had, there’s no real proof that you’re supplying.’ I clung to his reassuring words. My careless mistake might also help me, he went on. ‘A major dealer never keeps their drugs at home. Only lower level people do that. But that’s where yours were found.’ As if I needed telling.

  As the trial date approached, I thought it might not be as bad as I’d been fearing. I told Nadia when she came for her next visit, but she didn’t respond. She seemed detached, not looking happy to see me, or upset when it was time to leave. But if she couldn’t talk to me right now, I understood. I kept smiling and tried to reassure her that my sentence wasn’t going to be too long.

  DECEMBER 1992

  I dressed smartly for the trial at Kingston Crown Court. I wore a pinstriped Gucci suit, and carried a black Gucci handbag. To me, these were ordinary things. I intended to show the court respect with my appearance. But the judge saw things quite differently. His summing up was rough.

  ‘You are clearly an intelligent woman,’ he told me. ‘I will never understand why you continue to commit crime. You come to court in your designer wear. You present yourself as a minor player. I’m not convinced by that. You have important connections in the drug dealing world. One of those connections has just received a substantial sentence. I must protect the public from your criminal activities.’

  The jury found me guilty. Then the judge passed his sentence. It was much, much longer than Gilles Toussaint had told me it would be. I was completely unprepared. How could these barristers, these experts, have got all this so wrong?

  I began my sentence burning with anger. I raged against my brief. I raged against the judge. I raged at the informant who’d grassed up Scully and put me in the spotlight. But most of all, I raged against myself for my bad judgement. I knew that it was I who’d brought my whole world crashing down.

  18 December 1992, Kingston upon Thames

  Crown Court. Possessing controlled drug with intent to supply – Class A. Imprisonment – nine years.

  12

  Green channel

  OCTOBER 2015

  IZZIE WAS STILL TERRIBLY thin. She thought she looked great. I thought it was time she had some dinner.

  When she started coming to our women’s group meetings, she took the sandwiches we gave her and put them in her bag. She told me she was going to eat them later. But it grew clearer and clearer as the weeks went by that she wasn’t eating anything much. She was going to have to eat them in the meetings, where I could see her.

  I thought she’d make a fuss, but she didn’t. Whenever I set her a boundary, she liked it. For all her smart talk, she was young in her thinking, still in need of direction. If someone would mother her, this girl would respond.

  ‘Izzie,’ I said one afternoon at our meeting, ‘where’s your mum?’

  ‘Ohhh …’ Izzie said with a frown. ‘She never listens. She doesn’t understand.’

  ‘Does she call you?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, but there’s no point in talking to her. She just goes on and on. And all that s
tuff with my stepdad – you know. That was her fault.’

  ‘In your notes it says that when you went to court, your mum was there.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, she was. She turned up.’

  For some people, family is everything. For others, it’s nothing but a nightmare. For so many in the criminal justice system, families are where misery begins. There’s abuse, there’s addiction, there’s violence. But Izzie’s mum was trying to stay in contact. And when her daughter was in trouble, she had been there. Izzie needed to make this relationship stronger. Her mum might be a positive person in her life.

  When I suggested contacting her mother on her behalf, she told me she’d never speak to me again if I did. A week later, she’d had a think. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘let’s talk to her.’ A short while after that, she was angry all over again. She wanted her mother – and yet, at the same time, she didn’t. She was terribly confused.

  I thought of Nadia. How much she’d been prepared to forgive me. And the difference it made to my life. I picked up the phone and I rang Izzie’s mother.

  JANUARY 1993

  My nine-year sentence changed everything. When the judge spoke the words, I knew it meant the end of the life I had been living. It felt like the end of the world.

  Facing those nine years meant big decisions – most of all, about Nadia. Emmanuel’s father was American, and back in 1990, he’d moved to the States to be closer to the rest of his family. He got a good job with New York Transit. He did well for himself. But he was still a loving father – exactly as I’d known from the beginning he would be. He made regular trips to see his daughter in London, and I paid for Nadia to fly out every two or three months.

  A few days after I was sentenced, he flew over again – but this time, everything was different. He came to see me in Holloway. Our conversation was blurred with stress and shock, and afterwards I barely remembered what either of us said. But Emmanuel insisted that our daughter should move to the States to live with him while I served my time. It was dangerous for her to stay in London. As my child, she was exposed out there on the street. Both her grandmothers were kind and devoted, but they couldn’t keep her safe.

  How could I argue? I knew he was right. I had no choice, but still I barely ate and barely slept as preparations were made for Nadia to leave. I was terrified of losing her, but even more afraid of what might happen if she didn’t go away. Nadia herself said almost nothing. When she came to visit me, she stared at the floor. She seemed to have drifted to a place where I couldn’t reach her.

  The day she left, I lay alone on my narrow prison bed, staring through the window of my cell at a tiny square of cloudy London sky. I imagined her plane high and lonely in those clouds as it carried her away. As she flew, I felt the life-giving cord that stretched between us pulling tighter and tighter till it dragged three thousand miles.

  All these years ahead, while she would be far away. A few minutes on the phone would be all that we had. The length of that time was unbearable. Daggers of pain shot through my belly. I thought my flesh would split and tear wide open. And then the cord broke. Its frayed ends went spinning through the sky, scattering drops of my blood that fell like rain on the roof of Holloway prison. My Nadia was gone.

  NOVEMBER 1997

  Happy birthday to you!

  Happy birthday to you!

  Happy birthday, dear Nadiaaaa!

  Happy birthday to you!

  My sentence had seemed endless, but now it was finished. There she was. I stood in front of her, holding my breath.

  The face that I had pictured every day had changed. She was beautiful, a radiant and smiling young woman. It was wonderful to see the friends and love that my daughter had around her – but utterly impossible to me that she could be eighteen.

  Nadia’s party was in New York City – her home now, with her father. The trip was a gift from Emmanuel. With my criminal record, I thought I might be stopped at the airport and prevented from entering the country, but everything went smoothly.

  It was two weeks since my release from prison on licence. I’d been in the States for three days, staying in a nearby hotel, trying to adjust to the time zone change and the strangeness of freedom. I hadn’t spoken to Nadia yet. Emmanuel had warned me to hold back.

  ‘Janice – you need to understand what she’s been through. Please give her time.’

  I longed so much to see her, but what difference would it make to wait for just a few more days? Now her eighteenth birthday cake felt very heavy.

  ‘Can you manage, Jan?’ Emmanuel asked me as I picked the plate up. I nodded. Suddenly I was too nervous to speak.

  Her friends had tied a blindfold on Nadia, and I was to carry the cake over to her. As the last strains of singing died away and she blew out all the candles in one go, someone loosened her blindfold. It fell from her eyes and cheers and whistles filled the room. She looked straight at me.

  ‘Happy birthday, baby,’ I whispered.

  ‘Mommy?’ Her face held disbelief. ‘Mommy?’

  ‘Yes, baby. You didn’t think I’d miss your big birthday?’

  I couldn’t hold the cake any longer. I lowered it carefully onto a table. My hands were trembling.

  ‘Oh, Mommy,’ she said. I held out my arms and she took two steps forward. I’d waited five years to hold her close. Carefully, as though we were trying not to break something, the two of us embraced.

  Three days later I was sitting in Emmanuel’s kitchen. I felt agitated and unhappy.

  Once the party was over, they’d invited me round. I met Emmanuel’s American wife, Nadia’s stepmom, who was welcoming and kind. Whilst we all chatted, I couldn’t help staring at Nadia. I stared so much, I realised I was making her uneasy.

  The family had a lovely home, but my daughter’s bedroom shocked me. Somehow I’d expected it to look the way it used to – full of her old things. But there was nothing in it – not one single item – that I recognised. The clothes in her closet, the pictures on the wall – all of them belonged to a person I didn’t know at all. The teenage Nadia who’d done her homework here at this desk, gone to school in these sneakers and brushed her hair in front of that mirror wasn’t the south London schoolgirl I’d held in my memory every day since December 1992. That girl had grown up to be a stranger – one with a definite American accent.

  A gulf of not-knowing had opened up between us. Once we had chatted without thinking, but now, as she came into the kitchen, I nervously considered what to say.

  ‘Are you going to make some lunch, babe?’

  ‘No. Why – are you hungry?’

  ‘No – no. Not at all. I thought you might be, that’s all.’

  ‘I’ll wait for Dad to get in, and see if he’d like a sandwich.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Oh – he went shopping.’

  My God – this terrible formality between us. I didn’t know how to make it stop. How could I get close to her again?

  ‘Does Dad always do the shopping?’ I asked, just filling silence.

  ‘Yeah – he drives past the store on his way home from work, so …’

  ‘That’s nice of him.’

  But it turned out there was something much worse than an awkward conversation. As I was getting ready to leave for London, I upset her. She asked if I’d like her to drive me, but it was late in the afternoon already. I said no. Our understanding of each other turned out to be so shallow that we could argue about a lift to the airport.

  ‘I’ll get a taxi,’ I said. ‘I don’t want you taking risks like that.’

  My words touched off something in Nadia. She stood still in the middle of the room.

  ‘Mom – really? Oh my God. Are we going to go there? You don’t want me taking risks? Did you just say that?’

  ‘Baby, I mean – it’s quite far. It’ll be dark before you’re driving back.’

  ‘And you don’t think I can manage it? You do know I drive every day?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know. I just thought
–’

  ‘No, you didn’t. You didn’t think. Not ever. Not about me. If you had –’

  Her voice died away.

  ‘Nadia, sweetheart. I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  ‘You don’t get to decide what I do, Mom.’

  ‘Of course not. I was just worried. I’m your mother.’

  I tried to smile, but she didn’t smile back.

  ‘Do you think so?’ she said. ‘Because I don’t. You weren’t my mother when I was sent away and you were put in prison. A voice on the phone isn’t a mother. You kept on asking me – Are you okay, baby? Are you okay? What was I supposed to say?’

  She closed her eyes and shook her head.

  ‘I wasn’t okay. But there was no point telling you. What could you have done? A mother is someone who is there.’

  I’d already decided that when I made it home to London, I’d get straight back to business. What did I have to lose, now that Nadia was barely a part of my life? My work was all that I had left.

  As my plane took off from JFK, I leaned my head against the window. We climbed up into the night, away from Emmanuel and his family, away from the new life my daughter had made without me. The million sparkling lights of Manhattan Island ended, replaced by the blackness of the sea.

  I’d gone into prison angry. I came out angry still. And when I realised how badly I’d lost touch with business, it made me feel much worse. It was hard to take my place again when I’d been out of the game for years. There’d been a shift in the landscape of the street. Some major loyalties had been broken.

  You gotta sit back, Scully’s partner Glen said to me. The street miss good people like you. But the street ain’t stayed the same. Although I didn’t want to listen, I knew that he was right.

  I contacted Nana, an old contact from Ghana, just to get a feel of how things were. Nothing prepared me for the hostile voice on the phone.

  ‘One of your people robbed me two ki!’

  One of my people? This had nothing at all to do with me. I had an A-grade reputation with all my working links. So who would pull a stunt like this? I tried to explain to Nana that this person had only claimed to know me, giving one or two details that anyone listening to the word on the street might have heard. It was some small-timer, bigging himself up.