Crocodiles & Good Intentions

by Liza Cody

‘So I’ve written out her mum’s name and address and you’ve got to see her the way you promised.’

  ‘I never!’

  ‘Take it,’ she said, shoving the grubby corner of an envelope into my hand, ‘and shut up shouting.’

  2

  Release, Of A Sort

  At last the time came when the medic gave me a couple of days’ worth of pills, the sub-assistant governor gave me the seventy-three quid I’d earned cleaning toilets and they sent me out for public consumption once more.

  I was as grey and sober as the morning, and I remembered the last time I heard that door slam behind me, years ago, when I had no friends or relations, no job and only the address of a hostel in Southwark to go to. Back then I thought I’d be able to claw my way back to a proper respectable life. Now I know I can’t, and that relieves some of the pressure.

  But as if to deny me the comfort of low-to-no expectations, the first person I saw when I hit the street was Ms Kaylee Yost with a plastic folder full of instructions and helpful suggestions about how I could retrain to be a sober productive citizen. To a person as determined as I was to celebrate freedom with a bottle of red wine, this could only be described as a bummer.

  Then I saw Electra trotting towards me, her fur as beautifully marked as a tabby cat’s, her ears pricked and her tail waving, ‘Hello, how are you, where’ve you been?’ Of course she didn’t actually say that out loud – I need more than one glass of red before she lets me hear her – but her citrine eyes shone with welcome. I dropped my carrier bag and held out my arms.

  There is life after prison, and here she was, with her forepaws on my shoulders and her sleek head tucked under my chin.

  Then I saw my ‘sister’, my mister-sister, clickety-clacking towards me in kitten heels, grass-green tights and a scarlet fun fur coat. ‘I might of known I’d come second to a dog,’ he breathed tremulously.

  ‘Well she is a greyhound,’ I said before he wrapped me in fun-furry perfumed arms. I’ve got to say I prefer dog fur and dog perfume, but given an audience, Smister can’t resist a girly display.

  ‘I missed you so-o much, but Pierre and Cherry looked after me and I looked after Electra. I made her a cashmere knitted jersey for the cold weather but Pierre wouldn’t let me put it on her today. He said you’d kill me.’

  ‘She looked like a bridesmaid at a really flaky wedding,’ Pierre said, arriving soon afterwards.

  ‘She looked gorgeous,’ Smister protested.

  ‘I swear, if a dog could blush… ’

  I said, ‘Who’s Cherry?’

  ‘Shall we try and find a café?’ Ms Yost put in quickly, ‘for a celebratory cup of something hot?’

  ‘What about a pub?’ I asked.

  Ms Yost looked warningly at Pierre. He collected himself and said, ‘Now Angela, you know that isn’t going to happen on my watch.’ Pomposity really didn’t suit him, but it made Smister giggle.

  I ground my teeth. This wasn’t freedom at all. This was social control. I might as well have stayed in chokey.

  I said, ‘Well anyway, I’ve got to go to Shoreditch to do a favour for a friend so I really don’t have time for celebrating.’

  ‘What friend?’ Smister said. ‘You don’t have any friends.’

  ‘Bonds are forged in adversity,’ I said. Smister seemed to have forgotten that he and I were friends. Pierre wasn’t the only one who could be pompous.

  ‘Now, girls,’ Pierre said, ‘don’t start. You haven’t seen each other for months. Let’s do as Kaylee suggests and find a cuppa caffeine. I’m sure she doesn’t have all day.’

  So we had an uncomfortable half hour pretending that Smister was a girl, that Pierre was my AA sponsor and that I wasn’t gagging for alcohol.

  Kaylee Yost said, ‘You look so much healthier.’ By which she meant cleaner.

  Pierre said, ‘The whites of your eyes are actually white.’

  ‘I like the teeth,’ Smister said.

  I nearly took them out and threw them at him.

  Electra said nothing, bless her. She leaned against my chair and rested her head on my knee while I fed her bits of my sticky bun under the table.

  In prison I don’t have to pretend to be sociable. Nobody expects me to appreciate them or be grateful for stuff I never asked them to do in the first place. But I mumbled my thanks to Ms Yost for finding me a probation officer out in the bleak wasteland of North-by-Northwest Finchley because it was close-ish to Pierre who was supposedly supervising me. And, I might add, as far as it could be from the West End, my preferred place of non-residence.

  The Devil takes a well-meaning moron like Kaylee Yost and shoves her like a stone into my shoe. He makes sure that I can’t walk freely and that she, poor lamb, will have all her ideals crushed under my calloused and cynical foot. Two birds – one stone. What a clever bugger he is. All the little steps along the hard road that brought me to this café with these three mismatched people began with him. I was in the clanker because I did his bidding. The one pure act I made of my own free will was choosing Electra. She is the only true innocent in my story.

  Kaylee left eventually, but only after forcing me to use her phone to make an appointment with a probation officer called Howard Piper. She was determined to put me on the straight and narrow path – the one she treads daily and finds so easy to follow.

  Pierre said, ‘Don’t put her down. She’s always gone the extra mile for you.’

  ‘But she’s so boring,’ Smister complained. ‘That suit’s pure polyester.’

  ‘Why don’t you give her a makeover,’ I suggested.

  ‘She doesn’t even know she needs one. Speaking of which – what do you think of these?’ He unzipped his coat and exhibited a tight sweater which showed off a swelling bosom that looked completely natural.

  ‘Oh you haven’t,’ I cried.

  ‘Had the augmentation? No, stupid. But I’ve been seeing the sweetest little endocrinologist. He’s a total genius with hormones. Pierre’s so-o jealous.’

  Pierre sighed flatly. ‘You still don’t get me, do you? I’m a guy. I don’t want the tits, except on Cherry. I’m an illusionist. That’s something else.’ He was a motor mechanic, bald as an ostrich egg, with arms like knotted oak, who was nevertheless the most popular Diana Ross on the North London Drag Circuit. It was a comfort to me that he and Smister didn’t understand each other, because I was flummoxed by both of them.

  ‘Why am I still here,’ I asked, ‘listening to you two, when I’m free to do what I like for a change?’ I stood up.

  ‘Hold on,’ Pierre said. ‘I lied to the cops for you. Fuck knows why, except I can’t stand to see a grown tranny cry. Fact, you’re not going to swan off and get roaring high on your first night out of the joint. Cherry would worry.’

  ‘Pierre and me, we’ve done up the ambulance for you and Electra,’ Smister said. ‘It’s behind Cherry’s house and it’s the address you need. You can’t not have an address any more.’

  ‘Who’s Cherry?’ I asked again.

  The Ambo looked like a Pretty Princess bed-sitting room except there was no princess and nowhere to sit but the bed. There was even a cute pink bunny on the pillow for me to cuddle if I got lonely. I could feel the vomit rising in the back of my throat. There were tears rising in the back of my eyes too; perhaps Smister did care in his own excruciating way.

  Electra drank water from her personalised pink bowl before stretching out in a soft bed of her own. She looked utterly content. The Ambo smelled of lemon-scented cleaner, air freshener and the chemical toilet. It reminded me of chokey and cleaning bogs. I wanted to smell London air, slow traffic, fast food, free people and dogs.

  I lay on the bunk and asked Electra to come and lie beside me. Then I buried my nose in her neck and went to sleep. At least that was a freedom I could indulge in – sleeping to the hum of real life without the constant jolt of s
lamming doors.

  I dreamed a lonely dream of a chalk path that stretched for miles across rolling hills. Electra ran on ahead until she was a dot on the empty horizon. That was all, but it seemed to go on forever.

  I had supper that night in Cherry’s house. She’d made a bland chilli which we ate American style with crackers instead of rice. Afterwards we had brownies and drank weak coffee.

  She spoke cooingly to Pierre, bantered with Smister and petted Electra, and she was polite to me. Sadly, there was no wine or even weak beer with the meal, and when I excused myself to go to the loo there was nothing intoxicating in the medicine cabinet, no interesting bottles in the fridge or any of the kitchen cupboards. Cherry’s house was as dry as dinosaur bone.

  But the remedy was in my own pocket. ‘I’m going to the pub,’ I said, when I got back from my search of Cherry’s house. I felt in my pocket for the seventy-three pounds I’d earned in the can. It was gone. All of it.

  I roared.

  Pierre, Smister and Cherry sat stone still. They looked shocked but not surprised. Electra flattened herself under the coffee table.

  My boiling, rageous stare settled on sticky-fingered Smister.

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t my idea.’

  ‘Give it back.’ I stood over him, furious. ‘Do you have any idea what I had to do to get it? Do you?’

  ‘Stop shouting.’ Cherry leaped up. ‘Pierre and me, we lied for you. So don’t make us look bad. And please don’t shout in my sitting room either. You’re scaring Electra.’

  Pierre was looking as untroubled as Buddha. He said, ‘Have you taken your medication?’

  ‘Yes,’ I shouted. But of course I hadn’t. I’d thought I could endure the meal and the company and then reward myself at the nearest pub. After a few jars of the red stuff everything would’ve been all right. I wouldn’t need the chemical fog any more. Electra would talk to me again and I’d be free.

  ‘You haven’t, have you?’ He looked straight into my eyes.

  ‘Pants on fire,’ said Smister.

  I made for the door. ‘A fine homecoming this turned out to be!’ I would’ve stormed out righteously except that Electra wouldn’t storm with me. She stayed under the coffee table looking sorrowful.

  ‘Homecoming?’ Smister jeered. ‘You wouldn’t have a home except I donated the Ambo.’

  ‘What did you need the Ambo for anyway?’ Cherry asked him. ‘You’ve been living in my spare room since she’s been… away.’

  Pierre yawned and said, ‘Go take your pills, Momster. Chill. Get some Zs.’

  My out of body experience:

  Suddenly I was hanging from the ceiling in the corner of the room above the TV. I was upside-down like a bat, looking at Smister, Cherry, Pierre and Electra as if they were four faces of Woman. Smister, a boy, aka Little Missy, who knew beyond reason that he was a girl, and who looked more girly than Cherry – a real woman. Pierre who used the womanly art of illusion to convince everyone that he was a diva and more glamorous than any real woman, while at the same time claiming the privilege of being a real man. Cherry, a woman so real that she was unthreatened by these encroachments on her territory. Electra, the faithful, trustworthy, caring face of femaleness. And me? Well I wasn’t there at all. I was the Invisible Woman in the tableau. With my big feet and plastic teeth, my scarred face, and my tragic lack of juice – did I even count as a woman at all?

  Smister helped me to my feet. Electra whined and licked my hand. Pierre said, ‘You can’t suddenly stop taking the medication you’ve been on for months. Tomorrow, after you’ve seen the probation officer I’ll take you to Cherry’s GP and get you fixed up with a prescription and a programme for cutting down.’

  ‘Anyone‘d think he was a real AA sponsor,’ Smister grumbled as he and Pierre supported me to the back door.

  Cherry held Electra’s collar, keeping her in the house.

  I lay down alone on the bunk bed in the Ambo feeling even more abandoned than I ever had in chokey.

  3

  My Friends Are My Enemies

  Howard Piper was one of those phoney probation officers in a black down-wit-da-kids hooded sweat. He barely looked up from his files – a woman my age didn’t register on his screen. It was one of those times when being Invisible Woman was a blessing. He wouldn’t give me any help, but he wouldn’t give me any grief either.

  The doctor was different. He wanted to show how kindly and caring he could be to one of life’s rejects. He accepted Pierre’s word without question and handed my prescriptions to him instead of to me. Over my head, he discussed with Pierre drug dependency and its effects on alcoholism. He included me every now and then with a kindly paternal smile. I obliged by sitting in mulish silence, zoning out and playing with Electra’s ears.

  Afterwards I stomped off in a huff without saying thanks or goodbye. Pierre caught up and forced me to wait in the pharmacy till the prescriptions were filled and then made me take my pills right there under the pharmacist’s cruel eye as if I were just another methadone addict.

  I used to like Pierre. Not any more. Sometime, somewhere, Satan had whispered into his neat black ear. The words travelled through his brain and infected his heart. Now he is an agent of the Corrupter but he doesn’t know it. He thinks he’s kindness on legs. He took the morning off work to ‘help me out’ and he bought me a lunch of fish and chips and hot sweet tea. He kept my medications safe in his pocket because he suspected I’d sell them to buy drink.

  I’d been out of chokey for twenty-four whole hours and not yet tasted freedom or a sip of the red. Clearly the Lord of Vile Worms was turning all my friends against me. Everyone was conspiring to make me into a sober, respectable, clean and tidy citizen.

  But you have to work at respectability every day of your life. You can’t get drunk, or fart in public. Your socks should match, your finger nails should be grime-free and you should be able to invite strangers home for tea and cake. But what’s the point? I don’t want cake, clean fingernails, an address or friends because as soon as I begin to get used to them the Devil snatches them away. He can’t find me if Electra and I keep moving and live out of range of doctors, lawyers, and probation officers.

  Out of sight and out of my mind, if I own nothing, nothing can be snatched, and if I have no home I can’t be evicted.

  That evening Cherry went out to an evening class entitled, ‘Design Your Own Handbag’. Pierre, Smister and I ate pizza. While the two of them were in the kitchen arguing about who should take out the rubbish I stole ten quid from Smister’s purse and, with Electra by my side, crept out through the front door.

  We wandered the night streets alone and felt the cold damp of winter on our eyelids and earlobes. We smelled the plumes of unleaded pollution from the North Circular Road and saw the accumulated grime from years of traffic on the windows of failed shop fronts. Roaming gangs of youths ate slimy kebabs and forced us into doorways or gutters while they passed. It wasn’t malice. They were so up their own arses with their phones and their iPads that they simply didn’t see us. They were the peers of the pavement. Their wealth and status were invested in the shiny technology they held in their hands so they forgot they were powerless, neglected and rejected. Just like me.

  We found an off-licence lurking behind steel shutters. Inside, the shop assistant and the booze cowered in a cage of bulletproof glass. I posted my money through a slit and the assistant put a two litre bottle and my change in a bin for me to collect. It was a miserable suspicious exchange but I didn’t care. Freedom was mine, and now the answer to all my problems was in my own hands – a heavy plastic bottle of red comfort.

  Electra’s ears were pinned flat against her narrow skull. She shivered with cold and anxiety. I said, ‘Don’t look at me like that. I don’t know what you’re complaining about – or are you too good for me now? Have you conveniently forgotten how close you were to
being put down when I rescued you?’ She whined and pressed against my legs.

  We left the off-licence and turned back towards the Ambo and Cherry’s house. But I couldn’t wait. I unscrewed the bottle top while we walked and stuck the neck between my lips. I took a long deep swallow – my first for so many painfully dry months. My throat opened to receive the cure for all that ailed me and I could feel the barbed wire that was tightly wound around my head loosening even before the wine hit my stomach.

  I experienced seven minutes of pure joy. The load of tension and resentment slipped off my shoulders, I no longer felt the cold. The empty hole in my chest healed. My head felt light and airy.

  ‘Electra,’ I said, ‘how can anything that feels this good be bad for me?’

  ‘I never said it was bad for you,’ she replied sadly, ‘I said it was bad for me. You’ll forget your way home and we’ll end up in a doorway somewhere without even a blanket to share.’

  ‘Cobblers! We’re going home now.’ But I stopped. Without warning, pain grasped the base of my skull in an iron fist and squeezed. As if I’d been sucking lemons, all the salivary glands under my tongue went into production. Sweat poured down my face. Then I threw up. Pizza and half a litre of red wine tumbled out of my mouth onto the pavement. Even after it was empty my stomach convulsed and heaved.

  I staggered away from the mess. My head, my guts and my throat were in spasm.

  ‘What?’ Electra asked.

  ‘Poison,’ I retched. ‘Your good friends Pierre and Smister fed me bad pizza.’

  She backed away, disgusted. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t the wine? You aren’t used to it anymore.’

  ‘It’s the pizza!’

  ‘Okay, don’t shout.’ She stood a few paces away from me wrinkling her fine slender nose. ‘Only come along. Quickly. You don’t want to end up back in the slam for D and D.’

  ‘I’m not drunk,’ I moaned, ‘more’s the pity. And how can I be disorderly when I can’t even stand up straight?’