by Hayley Long
I completely froze for a few minutes and then, when I was sure he was no longer looking at me, I started rocking again.
I don’t know how long I sat there rocking. It must have been quite some time though because my belly had started to growl really loudly and I remembered that I’d never actually got to have my lunch; in fact, the only thing I’d eaten all day was a Pot Noodle at half past eight in the morning, and Pot Noodles don’t exactly fill you up for very long. But still I sat there rocking and this time I could hear:
And I probably would have just sat there forever, listening to the rhythm of my rocking and listening to my belly grumble and trying not to listen to the bad language which was being shouted by the scary man from behind one of the metal doors, had I not started to need the toilet.
For a while, I just carried on rocking because I didn’t know what else to do and, to be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure any more if I could stop even if I wanted to. But pretty soon, the need to wee began to make my stomach hurt and I stood up. The grumpy old policeman shot up and opened his window again.
‘Where do you think you’re off to?’
‘I need the toilet,’ I said.
I watched as the GOP took a key from a hook on the wall of his office and attached it to a huge chain on his belt. Then he opened a side-door and signalled for me to follow him.
The GOP stopped outside one of the mustard-yellow metal doors and unlocked it with his key.
‘This one’s empty,’ he said. ‘You can use the loo in here. I’ll wait outside, if you don’t mind.’
I walked through the door. Inside was a small room with no windows. On one wall was a low bench with a blue plastic mattress on it. On the other wall was another metal sign about drugs and alcohol. In the corner of the room, squashed in between the near wall and the end of the blue mattress, was a metal toilet. It had no lid and no seat and there was no sign of any toilet paper. I looked at it long and hard and then I opened up the mustard-yellow metal door again.
‘That was quick!’ said the GOP.
‘Am I supposed to use that thing?’ I said, and pointed at the metal toilet.
‘Well, what else do you think it is?’ said the GOP. ‘A dentist’s chair?’ He was clearly a very funny guy, this grumpy old policeman. Not!!
‘I’m not using that.’
The GOP laughed but it wasn’t a very nice laugh. ‘That’s the best I can offer you. Think yourself lucky. Some of the cells have only got a bucket.’ And then he folded his arms and looked at his watch as if he had a plane to catch.
I looked back at the toilet. I was starting to feel desperate. But obviously not that desperate. From the next room the scary man began to shout and swear again, making me jump.
‘How long do I have to be here?’ I asked the GOP. And then before he could answer I added, ‘What’s happening to me?’
‘Are you going to use the loo or not?’
I looked back into the cell and shook my head.
The GOP made an irritated noise and led me back up the corridor towards my Recess of Shame. As we passed one of the mustard metal doors a great commotion erupted from inside and the man who had been shouting and swearing since my arrival screamed out, ‘Let me out of here, you bastards, or I’ll piss on the floor.’
The grumpy old policeman gave a deep sigh and muttered, ‘That’ll help!’ Then he jerked his head at the bench in the recess and said, ‘Now sit down.’
I sat down. The GOP stood in the corridor, looking at me, with his arms folded over his fat stomach.
‘The reason you’ve got to wait here is because we can’t interview you without a supporting adult present. That would usually be a parent. And at the moment we’re having some problems getting hold of one—’
‘If my mum’s not working, she usually goes out shopping on a Saturday,’ I interrupted.
The GOP carried on talking as if I hadn’t said anything. ‘ and unless we can get hold of one, we’ll have to get a social worker in. And depending on whether or not any social workers are available, that could take thirty minutes or it could take several hours. So you’re just going to have to sit quiet and be patient and hope that somebody at home gets our telephone messages pretty sharpish.’
I bit my lip. Then I leaned forward and put my head in my hands.
The GOP said, ‘Bit late crying about it now, young lady. You should have thought about that when you were helping yourself to things that don’t belong to you.’
I sat up, swallowed hard, took a deep breath and said, ‘My mum does have a work phone which is always on. I don’t know what the number is off by heart but you’d be able to find out easy enough.’
The GOP looked at me for a moment. He had a very stern face. He reminded me a bit of my Welsh teacher, Mrs Rowlands, except that he was blatantly a man of course.
‘Where does your mother work?’ he asked.
I put my hand over my mouth to stop myself from being sick and then, ever so quietly, I said, ‘Here.’
‘Pardon?’ said the GOP.
‘Here,’ I whispered.
‘Take your hand away from your mouth and then maybe I’ll be able to hear you.’
I did as I was told, took another deep, deep breath and almost shouted.
At this, the grumpy old policeman almost smiled. He leaned back against the mustard door behind him. ‘Well, well, well. And what is your mother’s name?’
I stared at the writing on the wall next to me.
In my mind’s eye I could see myself taking out a marker pen and writing underneath:
‘Detective Sergeant Carolyn Biggs,’ I said.
‘Detective Sergeant Carolyn Biggs,’ repeated the GOP, and then he said again, ‘Well, well, well.’ And then he left.
I sat right back on the wooden bench and leaned against the wall. The pain in my stomach had disappeared. It was almost as if my body had given up wanting the toilet and forgotten about it. Down the corridor I could still hear the scary madman ranting and raving. It wasn’t a nice place that my mum worked in and I was glad she’d never brought me here. I closed my eyes and tried to think about something different, something which would calm me down and stop me thinking about what was going to go through my mum’s head when her phone beeped and ruined her day off. And about what she’d say when she heard that her younger daughter had been arrested. And the weird thing is that all I could think of was Stevie Smith and that crazy poem of hers which goes ‘Aloft, in the loft, sits Croft; he is soft.’ Except that in my head, I’d changed the words so that it now went:
Aloft,
In the loft,
Sits Lottie;
She is potty.
And I kept saying it over and over and over to myself until my mum came.
The next room I saw was not much bigger than the cell with the toilet in and almost as grim. There were no windows in there either. Inside, there was nothing except a table and four chairs. On the table was a big old-fashioned tape recorder. On the chairs were me and my mum and two policemen: a man and a woman. My mum had surprised me. When the grumpy old policeman had opened up his little window to tell me that my mum had arrived and I could now be interviewed, I thought that I was about to be at the centre of a murder scene. I thought that she was going to go completely stark raving mental. But she hadn’t at all. She’d just looked at me with a face that was all lined with sadness and worry and silently shaken her head. For the first time in my life I noticed that she was starting to look a little bit old. I felt awful then. I felt like it was my badness that had put those lines on her face. This feeling was worse than getting shouted at.
The man policeman said, ‘My name is Detective Sergeant Giles and this –’ he nodded at the woman – ‘is Detective Constable Arbon. I need to ask a few routine questions and then, when we’ve got those out of the way, you’ll be interviewed with the tape on. Do you understand?’
I nodded. Detective Sergeant Giles was tall and thin with black hair. He had a nice face and a kind voice and made me
feel ever so fractionally better. But only by about one-eightieth. His colleague, Detective Constable Arbon, was short and fat with blonde hair. She didn’t have a nice face and she hadn’t spoken a single word since I’d entered the room but was eyeing me with a clear and blatant look of disapproval. I didn’t like her at all. I leaned forward, cupped my chin in my hands and sneaked a look at her identity card. It had DC Ellen Arbon written on it.
‘Can you just confirm that your full name is Charlotte Beryl Biggs?’
DS Giles placed a clipboard on the table and patted his pockets for a pen. He found one and tucked it behind his ear, and then, from somewhere beneath him, he produced a greasy paper bag, which he set down on the table next to the clipboard.
My mum nudged me and hissed, ‘Pay attention, Lottie, and answer the question.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I’ve binned the Beryl bit and prefer to call myself just Lottie.’
DS Giles smiled ever so ever so slightly and said, ‘And can you just confirm your address, please Charlotte.’
I sighed. ‘Sixty-two, Springfield Place, Whitchurch.’
‘And your date of birth?’
While he was speaking to me, DS Giles had taken a large pork pie and a sachet of tomato sauce out of the paper bag. He pulled the pastry lid off the top of his pie, squirted red sauce all over the pork inside and then pressed the lid back on. Then he picked the whole thing up and took a large bite. I watched him, fascinated. Though it made me feel a bit sick, to be honest.
My mum gave me another nudge. I jumped in my seat and quickly answered his question before my mum could poke me again. With one hand DS Giles ate his pie, and with the other he wrote something down on a form which was attached to his clipboard.
‘OK,’ he said when he’d finished his pie. ‘We’re going to start the interview now. DC Arbon will say a few details out loud for the tape, and then you just answer the questions as best you can.’
I don’t mind admitting that by now my head was starting to swim. I still hadn’t eaten anything since the Pot Noodle way back at half past eight in the morning, and I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d visited the toilet. DC Arbon had leaned forward and pressed down the play and record buttons on the tape recorder and was saying a whole bunch of boring stuff out loud, like what my name was and what day it was and what I’d done wrong, and my mum was still just sitting there quietly next to me, not going mental and looking a bit old.
DS Giles said, ‘Did you put the shoes and the polish and the foot-odour spray in your bag, Charlotte?’
I nodded my head. DC Arbon said, ‘Can you speak up for the tape?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And did you intend to pay for them?’
I thought about this question for a moment and then I said exactly the same as I’d said to Gina and it was the truth. ‘I don’t know.’
DS Giles said, ‘Well, put it this way, Charlotte – would you have paid for those items today if they hadn’t been found in your bag?’
And I didn’t know how to answer that so I started biting my fingernails and tried to think of something helpful to say, but the only thing I could think about was how DS Ellen Arbon’s name backwards was NO BRA NELLE and that wasn’t exactly very helpful at all because all it did was make me laugh.
My mum took hold of my arm and shook it and almost shouted, ‘This is NOT funny, Charlotte,’ and when I spun round in my seat to tell her to get the hell off me, I saw that she was trying not to cry and I realized it really wasn’t funny. And then everything hit me at once and I realized too how tired I was and how much my head and stomach were hurting and how miserable and frightened and weird I felt and then I started to cry so hard that I thought I’d just go on crying forever and ever and DS Giles decided it would be better if he stopped the tape.
the skeLetONs iN mY CuPBOarD
They let me off with a warning. Before I was allowed out of the interview room and able to walk, a free person, with my mum down the steps of Cardiff Central Police Station, DS Giles said, ‘We’ll be keeping an eye out for you, Charlotte. If we ever see you in here again, you won’t get off so lightly.’ So now I am under official surveillance by the South Wales Police Force.
During the drive home my mum didn’t speak at all, except for once when she lowered her window and shouted at someone who was driving in another car. I’ve never seen her do this before. She is usually quite a calm person. I sat next to her in the passenger seat and slid down as low as I could without getting strangled by the seat belt. I would have slid down and just disappeared altogether if I could. I wasn’t feeling very good.
When we got home I headed straight for the stairs because I wanted to climb into my bed with all my clothes on and pull the duvet up over my head and be on my own. I couldn’t stand the idea of my mum telling Ruthie and my dad about all of this, and I didn’t want to be able to overhear her on the phone when she did. I especially hated the idea of Ruthie finding out. I could just imagine her on the other end of a phone in Aberystwyth, being all scandalized and wishing that she’d never bothered to buy me that orang-utan T-shirt. I couldn’t bear to think about it. In fact, thinking about anything at all was making me hideously miserable. Right then, I was really, really needing to be alone somewhere that was totally quiet and totally dark. To be honest, I even think that I wouldn’t have minded dying all that much if I could have done it without any effort.
But when I was halfway up the stairs, my mum said, ‘Oh no, you don’t! You and I are going to sit down and have a talk.’
I didn’t bother to argue. I felt so tired that there was no way I could have won anyway. I was pretty much a mess, to tell you the truth.14
When we were both sat down in the kitchen I braced myself and waited for my mum to go berserk. But she didn’t. For ages she just sat there looking a bit old and a lot fed up and then, finally, she said, ‘I think this is my fault.’
I looked up, surprised. Of all the things I had expected my mum to say, this was not one of them. I was so completely flabbergasted that for a minute or two I even forgot to feel miserable. I said, ‘Er? Hello? I got caught nicking stuff. How can that possibly be your fault?’
My mum leaned her forehead against the palm of her hand and said, ‘I haven’t been paying you enough attention, and now you’ve gone completely off the rails. I should have seen this coming and stopped it.’
I sat there speechless. Making somebody feel angry is one thing but making somebody completely and utterly depressed is another thing altogether. It actually started to make me feel a bit cross. I looked my mum properly in the eye for the first time in days and days and said, ‘I’m not a baby. I don’t need twenty-four-hour childcare. Me stealing that stuff was my mistake. It’s me that’s messed up here, not you.’
My mum said, ‘So why did you do it?’
And then I stopped feeling cross and shut up again because that was the question that had been confusing me all afternoon.
My mum said, ‘Is this the first time you’ve taken things without paying for them?’
I scratched my thumbnail into the top of the table.
‘Lottie, if we’re going to put things right, we need to be honest with each other. I need to know everything NOW. I can’t take any more surprises tomorrow or next week or next month. If you’ve got anything you need to tell me or any skeletons in your cupboard that need a good airing, I want them now, please.’
We sat in silence for a while and then I took a deep breath and said, ‘I think I might have one or two other things in my wardrobe.’
My mum said, ‘What are you trying to tell me, Lottie? You’re going to have to speak up a bit – I can’t hear you.’
So I took another deep breath and then I said, ‘I think I might have one or two other things in my wardrobe.’
My mum nodded her head ever so slowly. ‘We’d better go and take a look, hadn’t we?’
Five minutes later my mum and I sat in silence on my bed and contemplated the scene in front
of us. Covering the floor of my bedroom was an assortment of random items, some of which I clearly remembered seeing before and others of which I had no memory at all. All of them had come out of my wardrobe.
There was:
One pair of LAYLA ballet pumps in size four in black
One pair of LAYLA ballet pumps in size seven in brown
One copy of a book called Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography by Frances Spalding
Six cans of Heinz Baked Beanz
One pair of ETHEL indoor slippers in size five
Three packs of Melody Platinum Sun-Kissed hair colorant
A roll of YOU PAY stickers
One copy of Shakespearean Sonnets
Twelve packs of American Tan tights
One pair of SHANE in size ten in fawn and brown
A pair of sunglasses
Four Sole Mates Shop Floor Sounds CDs
A left foot of an OLGA gym shoe in size three
A right foot of a TOPSY jelly shoe in size six
One copy of a book called Let’s Speak Welsh
One Stevie Wonder CD, Songs in the Key of Life
One pair of CHARLOTTE ladies lace-ups in size six in beige
A plug-in air freshener
A toy giraffe
A James Dean mouse mat
A Forrest Gump DVD
A Dragon Coffee House mug (without any chips in it)
A birthday card (still in its plastic wrapping) with the words Happy Birthday Daughter on the front
A silver eyeshadow
A pair of foam insoles size seven to eleven
A key ring that looked like this:
and a £1 pack of fifty clothes pegs.
We sat there for ages, me and my mum, just looking at all this stuff. Nobody was more surprised than me at quite how much of it there was. And most of it was so scatty that it was almost funny in a way. Almost.