by V E Rooney
“You’ll make a good little factory worker one day,” said Janice through a haze of smoke one evening as I deftly produced a line of wraps. I couldn’t tell if she was taking the piss. Did she really think I’d go from helping to run a cottage dope outfit to working in the fish finger factory up the road? Did I really think I would? Had I already chosen my path in life at that point?
Very occasionally, when Janice and Mum were out for the evening, I would reluctantly try a few puffs from a particular batch for quality control purposes. Never mind getting high, all I got was a really bad case of the voms and the squits. I hated the stuff personally, I could never understand what all the fuss was about. Maybe I’m allergic. In any case, my aversion to getting high off my own supply was to prove a big advantage in the years to come, meaning I had an advantage over other dealers, amateurs the lot of them, who were too monged to realise they were losing business to me.
When Mum and Janice weren’t working the factory floor or out on the town, they’d slob out in front of the telly getting high and watching videos of all sorts of shite. Their absences left me plenty of time to do some unauthorised overtime, where I’d help myself to the cut-offs and discarded buds that littered the floor of the small bedroom. However indifferent Janice and Mum were to me helping them to grow cannabis, it was a definite no-no for me to actually sell it, which was understandable. That was for the grown-ups. But as my teenage years loomed on the horizon, it was a combination of curiosity, opportunity and greed which steered me onto the path.
I was settled into senior school. I could have gone to Saint Gregory’s, the Catholic all-girls comprehensive, Brookfield, a mixed comp, or another mixed comp, Ruffwood, which at that time was the largest school in Knowsley borough with over 2,000 pupils. Mum opted for Ruffwood. Unbeknown to me at the time, going to that school was the first baby step for me in going into business for myself.
I had somehow managed to pick up a couple of friends, girly swots like me – Gillian and Debbie. We had all arrived at Ruffwood from different primary schools, unlike the bulk of our classmates who already knew each other. We had our own girly swot clique, away from the bigger cliques of girls who were all oestrogen-oozing back-combed hairstyles, rolled-up skirts and woolly legwarmers, and whose main topic of conversation was frenzied gossip about which lads were fit and which were mongs. I didn’t really have much in common with those types, truth be told, and had no interest in being part of the in-crowd. That meant our trio became a target for bullies as the different cliques became apparent, and it became apparent that Gillian, Debbie and I were fending for ourselves. Easy prey for the big herds.
First they came with the catty insults, and the first few times I ignored it, as I was still becoming acclimatised to the place and didn’t know the laws of this particular jungle. One time in the canteen dinner queue, this scraggy frizzy-permed gobby cunt by the name of Laura Penrose stood behind me and she decided she was going to show everyone who was Queen Bee in the place by wiping her dirty dogshit-caked shoes down the back of my skirt. I felt something scraping me and turned round. She smirked at me with a ‘what are you gonna do about it’ look on her face and her mates fell about cackling while I stood there gobsmacked, not knowing what to do.
I stupidly let it go that time, more out of embarrassment than anything else. I turned the other cheek, kept my gob shut and walked away with their laughter and their taunts burning my ears. When I got home after school ended, I was still blushing hot with shame and anger and ran through all sorts of revenge scenarios in my mind. Set the bitch’s lacquered hair on fire and watch her go up like a firecracker. Stab her in the face with my maths compass. Shove a ruler down her throat, that sort of thing.
Sure enough, come lunchtime in the canteen the next day, she did it again. Cackles from her mates. Echoes of the time that I was beaten and raped in the jungle by those lads suddenly flashed across my mind and drove a shard of steel through my heart. Instinctively, I spun around and whacked her in the throat with my best karate chop. I knew those early lessons would come in handy one day.
The bitch dropped to the floor like a sack of wet shit, clutching her throat and gasping for air. Me? I stood there, feigning innocence. “Oh my Christ, is she alright? Think she’s having an epi,” I said to her mates, who soon shut the fuck up when they realised what had happened, and they had to help her up off the floor and drag her away, still wheezing. She never bothered me again. No one bothered me after that and nor did they bother Gillian and Debbie in case I went all ninja-bitch on the perpetrators. Gillian and Debbie thought I was a hero. Well, who am I to fly in the face of public opinion?
At that age, I didn’t really think about the future. I hadn’t given a thought to what I would do when I left school, what kind of job I wanted, how I would live. But the framework of my future life had already been assembled around me and it was just a matter of time before I devoted myself to it fully.
In the meantime, and despite the rough backdrop of my environment, my head was full of the usual fanciful childhood dreams and fantasies and pastimes. I would watch stuff like Wonder Woman and imagine myself as a crime-fighting superhero. I know, the irony. I would come home from school and join in the odd game of footie in front of the maisonettes. I would sing along to my favourite tunes on the radio and read my favourite comics. A normal kid, if a bit more detached and reserved than the others.
I did well at school – a solid A/B student. I kept my head down, did my homework and paid attention when I needed to. I revised diligently for exams. My school life stood in stark contrast to my other life, the life in which I would help to grow cannabis plants and sell the produce to people twice my age. I was simultaneously bridging two very different worlds and as I got older, I was becoming more aware of the vast differences between them. I’ll admit I found it bemusing and exciting at times. It was like I’d been let in on some big secret universe that other kids had no idea about. Not only did I know about it, I was helping to shape it.
When the other kids at school were poring over football stickers and magazines like Jackie and Just Seventeen, I was studying gardening magazines and horticulture books with the same vigour I used for my schoolwork. I treated school as an adjunct to my other studies, like a complimentary activity that would help my future endeavours. I knew all about different kinds of soil, the difference between acidic and alkalic soil, the temperatures different plants best thrived in, what kind of light they needed and for how long, how to fertilise them, when to cut them and dry them, and how to package them. Thai, Jamaican, Turkish, Afghan, Moroccan, an eighth, a quarter, an ounce and every variation in between. I picked up the lexicon of cannabis just as easily as I picked up grammar and arithmetic.
I applied myself to the sideline business with such dedication that it became as natural as breathing. But I still had no idea of the realities that would face me further on down the line. I was cocooned in our homegrown bubble of cannabis production, approaching it with what I know is a now-laughable childhood cocksureness. Although I had some idea of distribution, Janice and Mum wouldn’t let me sell directly – that, they forcefully reminded me on more than one occasion, was not for kids. They handled the customer-facing side of the business and I was content to run the back office – sourcing, growing, pricing, packaging. I already knew more than they did about growing cannabis so it made sense. The actual realities of distribution had been shielded from me and I was to learn a painful lesson when my cocksureness caught up with me.
Janice and Mum had no idea that I’d been hoarding cast-offs and overspill from the production line. If they had found out, they would have slapped the shit out of me. Not just as a lesson to me not to steal, but as a warning that recklessness could lead to the lot of us getting into some serious shit with the law if our little cottage industry became public knowledge. I wasn’t stupid enough to try and sell it at school. No way would that have been kept secret. Word would have gotten around fast and I couldn’t take the risk.
It was Debbie who provided the opportunity for my first true stand-alone deal. Gillian and I had gone round to Debbie’s for the night to watch some horror videos. Stay up late, gorge ourselves on chocolate and scream ourselves hoarse, that kind of thing. Debbie’s brother David, older than me by a year, was there when we arrived. Nice lad, a bit gormless, but gentle and calm. Their parents were out for the evening, and he was on his way out to a party and was on the phone making arrangements with his mates. Gillian and I mooched about in the kitchen while Debbie hurried round the house cleaning up. Gillian skulked off upstairs to try on some of Debbie’s clothes so I hung around in the kitchen helping myself to snacks. I could hear David’s voice becoming louder.
“Are you fucking messing me? I asked him ages ago…No, I haven’t got any…No, I don’t know anyone…” A few huffs and puffs as he listened to the other end of the conversation. “What about Spence? He’s always a got a stash…oh, for fuck’s sake…”
My antennas pricked up, sensing a need for something I was able to provide. That trusty old cliché, supply and demand. David’s voice tailed off to a series of grunts before he finally hung up. I sidled down the hallway and made to go up the stairs, and then paused.
“Problem?” I enquired with as much I-really-couldn’t-care-less-ness as I could muster. David turned to me, looking like he wanted to slit his wrists. “Oh, going to this party and my mate’s let me down on something,” he replied, obviously wanting to shield my ears from whatever teenage shenanigans he was planning.
“Do you need some weed?”
His eyes widened and his mouth flapped open but he stammered. “Er…”
“I know where to get some. How much do you want?” I asked as if I was offering to get him some chocolate from the shops. David frowned, unsure of what to say. It must have been pretty unusual to have your little sister’s mate offering to score some weed for you. But to me, I was helping him out, which also meant money for me. What’s the big deal?
“Erm…an eighth?”
“Give me £20 and I’ll be back in 10 minutes,” I said matter-of-factly. David began to rummage in his pocket and then stopped. “Hang on. Where are you getting this from?”
“I know someone. Do you want it or not?” Pretty assertive on my part but it worked.
The deal was agreed and I told the girls I had forgotten something from home and would be back for the sleepover party in a bit. £20 and 10 minutes later, I had returned from my home with a freshly-wrapped eighth, which I handed to David as I breezed through the front door. “Keep quiet about this. Not a word to those two. See you later,” I said as I left him open-mouthed at the foot of the stairs. There it was. I had successfully concluded another deal.
10. HUMAN RESOURCES
Over the next few months, as Gillian and I became frequent visitors to Debbie’s, David would occasionally whisper that he needed some more, and I was happy to oblige on the understanding that he didn’t tell Debbie or Gillian or anyone else. He would slip me a couple of bank notes and I would slip him a wrap when no one was looking. We’d arrange for me to drop it off to him away from the house, round the corner, or in the townie after school. I thought I was being clever, you know, not involving my mates in what was going on. I had this noble idea that I was also protecting them. And the last thing I wanted was for any of the parents to find out and kick off and get the authorities involved.
Soon enough, some of David’s mates were asking for weed. That’s how I met John, through David. I would meet them in this grotty café in the townie and slip them the stuff under the table. Might have seemed brazen, but who would have suspected me, a mere slip of a girl, of couriering cannabis around? I did get some hassle. Some of David’s mates would ask me to deliver to their houses. No way. I wasn’t running all over Kirkby at all hours of the night. Either come to me when and where I say or not at all. And don’t even think of turning up at my home because you’ll get fuck all. I still wouldn’t sell at school. I didn’t need that kind of hassle.
It’s not like I sold all the time – if I had taken too much from the plants, it would have been noticed and that would have been the end of that. Plenty of times I had to disappoint people because I simply had nothing to sell. But when I did have some, I sold out pretty fast. £10 here, £20 there. Nothing major.
I could bore you with the remainder of my school years but there was nothing out of the ordinary. I was still helping Janice and Mum but as far as they were concerned, I was the good little helper and model student. I don’t think they ever suspected that I had my own sideline going on. As long as their money was coming in, they didn’t really notice anything else happening around the edges of their lives.
As my sixteenth birthday approached, I had a lot of choices to ponder. Stay on in sixth form and do A-levels? Leave and try and get a job, or more likely at the time, sign on? Anyway, what kind of job could I go for? The jobs that did rarely come up in Kirkby at the time were bog-standard checkout girl, shelf stacker, factory cleaner, fish finger packer, that kind of thing. No thanks, not interested.
Other choices were less abstract and more immediate. Maybe it was time for me to say to Janice and Mum that I was old enough to start selling on my own. It was my way of being more independent. I already had a small but regular flow of customers, thanks to David, John and their mates, but the promise of selling more was becoming more appealing to me.
Saturday, 15th of April, 1989. Mum and I had taken a shopping trip together into the city centre, hoping to take advantage of the thinner than usual crowds – Liverpool were playing Nottingham Forest in the semi-final of the FA Cup at Hillsborough, the home of Sheffield Wednesday. In my mind, the result was a foregone conclusion – we would hammer them and go on to lift the Cup at Wembley – so I decided not to watch as I normally would have done.
Mum and I mooched from shop to shop, swapping inane chitchat, before heading to the bus terminal on Queen Street. On the bus back to Kirkby, the driver had his radio on to listen to the match but something was not right. Instead of commentary on the match, it sounded more like a news report – something about overcrowding at the stadium in Sheffield. With all the cacophony of the other passengers chatting away and the rumble of traffic outside, it was hard to hear what had happened. I just hoped it wasn’t hooligans or something like that. It wasn’t until we got home and switched the telly on that we saw what had happened.
People being crushed to death against the fences. People desperately clambering up to the stadium’s higher tiers. Bodies being carried away on makeshift stretchers. Ambulances on the pitch. Kenny Dalglish looking ashen-faced. The death toll kept rising throughout the day and into early evening. How the fuck had this happened at a football match? What were the Police doing? The newspapers the next day were horrible. Pictures of people being crushed to death against the fences. Friends, parents, brothers and sisters being dragged apart and killed in the crush.
I didn’t know of anyone personally who had died, but with Liverpool being a small city, friends knew friends who had been caught up in it. It seemed like everyone was no more than two degrees removed from someone who had lost their life. When that shit-rag The Sun published their infamous ‘THE TRUTH’ headline on the Monday morning of April 17th, copies were being burned in the street. We had a special assembly at school on the Monday morning. Even some of the teachers were crying.
Of course, the Police had monumentally fucked up the crowd control procedures, but as per usual, no Policeman lost their job, no Policeman was charged with manslaughter and no Policeman was ever made accountable. CCTV from the stadium mysteriously vanished. Police notebooks went missing. Suddenly the Police were claiming mass amnesia. The bastards had got away with it, smearing us with lies as they chinked their glasses and looked forward to their gold-plated taxpayer-funded pensions. It was the fans that were blamed, by the Police, politicians and the public who believed everything they read in that fucking rag. The justice system didn’t want to know. Judges, lawyers, the Police,
the newspaper men, the politicians…all colluding with each other, all members of the funny handshake club, no doubt, covering each other’s arses. Fuck them all. And the Police wonder why they don’t get any cooperation from the public.
With GCSE exams out of the way (with results not to be known until August), the final day of school in July 1989 culminated in a disco being held in the school sports hall in the evening, crammed with hundreds of hormonally-crazed sixteen-year-olds underneath coloured lights and carried away by the sounds of summer, S-Express, MARRS, Technotronic, Black Box, Soul II Soul, Neneh Cherry, Stone Roses, Happy Mondays. Teachers pretended to keep mindful eyes on us round the edges of the hall. Boys sidled up to girls, girls sidled up to boys, girl cliques in the middle of the hall practiced their dance moves, boys on the outer fringes watched and shuffled their feet because they couldn’t dance. The Goths as usual sat in the corner with their moody gobs on and not having any of it.
Debbie had become aware of my sideline. Thanks, David. Loose lips sink ships. How I ever expected it to remain a secret from her was laughable, but she was cool with it. However, she had let slip about my sideline to one of her cousins, who had told one of her mates Jenny, and this Jenny had a mate who wanted some weed. After much to-ing and fro-ing along the chain of communication, it was agreed that I would meet this mate outside the school gates, near the boarded-up newsagents at the end of a parade of shops over the road from the school. At 8pm, this mate turned up. He looked to be about 18 and was wearing the standard scally uniform of a Sergio Tacchini trackie outfit. He had also brought a mate along, a smaller runt-like mong with bad acne and a helmet of greasy hair, mop-top style.