by Liza Cody
‘You’ll find a way.’ She turned and walked down the dreary dark tunnel of night, leading me away from shame towards blame.
My head slammed like Holloway doors, blinding me, but I followed the clicking of her high heels on the filthy pavement, hugging my plastic bottle of wine and warmth.
The next morning I woke in a heap on the Ambo floor. My head was twice its normal size and banging like a piston engine. Electra was sleeping on the bed.
‘Momster,’ Little Missy Smister called from outside, ‘are you up?’ His voice was a hatchet that sliced through my nerves.
‘Go away,’ I moaned, and the effort of speaking made my guts writhe.
He hauled the back doors open and stood looking at me while my eyeballs sizzled and fried in the daylight.
‘That’s a hangover and a half,’ he said flatly. ‘Do you know how revolting you look?’
Electra stretched languorously and jumped over my dead body to greet him.
‘Wait till I tell Pierre. He’ll go ape.’
‘Go away – I’m dying.’
Electra wandered away for her morning pee.
‘Pierre will be so-o disappointed.’ Smister was enjoying his own disapproval. ‘He thought you’d changed, poor sap.’
‘He should’ve checked with me first, shouldn’t he?’ I covered my eyes with my forearm.
Smister wouldn’t leave me alone. He thrust a bottle of water at me. ‘Drink this, all of it. You’ve got to take your pills too. And I can’t leave that bottle of wine with you. Pierre’d have my guts for garters and my garters for a noose.’
I drank some of his water and took the hated pills out of his manicured paw. He made me open my mouth so he could check I’d swallowed them. I might as well have been back in the choke.
‘Get up,’ he said bossily. ‘Have a proper wash and put on clean clothes. You whiff of sick and armpits. You can’t come to the house till after lunch. I’ve got a client.’ And off he sashayed with my bottle of mercy under his arm like this derelict corner of an uncaring universe was his own private dance floor.
‘I hate you with a blazing passion,’ I said flopping onto the bunk which smelled so comfortably of Electra that I went to sleep almost immediately.
When I woke up I’d realised what had happened. The Devil had taken my friends and turned them into my enemies. He’d tied knots in Pierre and Smister’s good intentions until somehow, in the tangle, the good transmogrified into bad. As it does when people think they’re on the side of the angels.
I had a wash and dressed in my older, cleaner clothes. I left the vommy ones on the floor of the Ambo. I found my old backpack in the cupboard under the bunk and packed up everything useful, including dogfood and a tin opener. Beggars can’t be choosers, and that’s what I am when all’s said and done: I’m a beggar. I exist only because of the kindness of strangers. Satan has a devil of a job fouling transient kindness.
Then I closed the doors, hid the key in the exhaust pipe and walked away without looking back. Electra fell into step beside me and I stroked her ears. ‘We’ve done it before,’ I reassured her. ‘We can do it again. All we need is each other.’
I didn’t walk all the way to the West End. Are you mad? Just out of holiday camp, with a headache the size of the Albert Hall? I don’t have super powers. I used what was left of Smister’s tenner and took a train. And in case you’re worrying about Smister – don’t. He stole my seventy-three pounds. I only stole ten. He’s way ahead. He’s always way ahead.
I left the underground at Piccadilly Circus breathless, shaking and bewildered by the stench of so many bodies. I felt as if I’d been away for years and in my absence the population had expanded by 99 percent. Standing under cold grey Eros was like being at the hub of a racing, shrieking wheel. I was buffeted by the slipstream and had to sit on the steps to find myself in the chaos.
I told myself this was what I’d longed for in prison. This chaos was my freedom. I was just another leaf clinging to a twig on a huge tree in a gale. No one can mark out a single leaf for malign attention, can they?
‘Chaos is my friend,’ I whispered to Electra. She leaned against my shoulder. I went on, ‘There’s nothing to freak about and everything to be grateful for. I just need to get used to it again.’
‘Well, bugger I, if it isn’t Lady Bag!’ said a thick smelly voice from behind me. ‘She talks to her dog cos no one in his right mind would be seen dead talking to her.’
I turned. It was Scots Gary and his sidekick, Sick Hazel. Her face was as grey and pitted as a pumice stone. She said, ‘I heard you died in lockup.’ She coughed and wheezed. Her ankles were mauve and swollen.
‘Heard wrong. I heard you gave up smoking.’
‘Heard wrong.’ Her laugh began and ended as a retching wracking cough.
Scots Gary said, ‘We should celebrate – yer alive an’ she’s still dying. Ye got some dosh for a dram?’
I had only about sixty pence left so I was forced to drink what they were drinking, which was industrial strength cider.
This time a couple of mouthfuls was all it took but, just like the night before, with the shock of a train wreck, my head and guts exploded.
‘Good god a’mighty!’ Gary said. ‘Wha’s all that about, eh?’
Fortunately I hadn’t eaten anything since the last time so although I felt just as terrible there wasn’t half so much mess.
‘What’s your medication?’ Sick Hazel asked with clinical interest, staring at me while I doubled over. ‘Have they given you something to stop you drinking?’
‘No,’ I gasped.
‘Remember your mate, Wee Craigie?’ she said to Gary. ‘They made him take Antabuse and he kept thinking he could beat it?’
‘Oh aye, poor old bugger.’
‘Antabuse?’ I wiped my mouth and running nose on my sleeve.
‘It’s that stuff they give you to make you barf if you drink. They’re not supposed to unless you consent. But I bet a million pounds Wee Craigie didn’t consent, eh Gary?’
‘Not our Craigie, no way.’
‘See?’ Sick Hazel said, coughing smugly. ‘They’ll have started you on it before you left the slam and it’ll be all mixed up in your prescriptions. Let’s have a dekko at them, I’ll soon tell you.’
‘I haven’t got them,’ I mumbled, my head in my hands. ‘Pierre’s got them.’
‘There you go then – this Pierre of yours is dosing you.’
‘He wouldn’t,’ I protested, my guts sore from dry heaving.
But I thought about the changes in Pierre. He used to stroll on the wild side. But since I last saw him he’d become, oh crap, respectable. Maybe it was because he was living in a conventional beige house with a conventional white bread woman. Maybe Satan and Cherry had persuaded him that he was being cruel to be kind, whereas in fact he was just being cruel without my consent. He was abusing me with Antabuse and Satan was laughing his head off.
‘How long does it take to wear off?’ I asked through a mouthful of corrosion.
‘When did you take the last one?’
I tried to remember how many pills Smister shoved down my throat. I thought it might’ve been four. ‘This morning.’
‘Ye mightn’t want to touch a drop fer a coupla days.’ Gary said. ‘Wee Craigie was sick fer months, right up until the day he kicked the bucket. Ask me, it was them pills killed him.’
‘Don’t scare her,’ Sick Hazel said with a delicious shudder.
We shuffled away from my mess. They were going to Cambridge Circus. Obviously we had to part company. They would be scoring and drinking all day whereas my life was wrecked for the foreseeable future.
I went to my favourite place in the world – Trafalgar Square. My headache was blinding me so I sat on the National Gallery steps till it calmed down a bit. Then I sat some more because I was afraid that if I mo
ved it might wake up again. It began to rain. Electra crept close and I sheltered her under my jacket. She knows when I’m ill or in pain and will always share her warmth. Right now I felt so sick I wanted to lie down and die. It was like the biggest, the worst hangover in the world multiplied by 3.7 billion and I hadn’t had any fun to deserve it.
‘Fuck off, you Master of Maggots,’ I said to the Devil. ‘Find some other way to get at me. Use your imagination for a change.’
Of course I’d heard about Antabuse, but I never thought anyone would try it on me. Certainly not Pierre. Not him.
But sitting there in the cold rain, clenched like a fist with nausea and anger, I found myself remembering the last time I saw my father. Now why on earth would my poor clapped out old mind throw that pissy memory into my hammering head?
I was eight years-old and I’d come back home from school early with an earache. I opened the front door, and saw my dad coming downstairs carrying a very heavy suitcase. It was banging against the wall and I knew my mother would go ape about the paintwork. He stopped. And I stood with the front door still open and my key in my hand. My mother made me wear it on a ribbon round my neck because she said I was so careless I’d lose it. But the girls in the gym changing-room teased me so I always took it off before I got to school. Usually I remembered to put it back round my neck before I arrived home, but here I was at the front door with the ribbon in my hand. And my father saw me. He was always on my mother’s side. Never on mine. Not once in my life did he protect me against her.
He looked at me. He scowled. At the time, so many years ago, I thought the expression on his face was angry. Today, in Trafalgar Square, I wondered if it was fearful.
He said, ‘Don’t tell your mother.’ He continued down the stairs, bumping the suitcase on the steps and the wall. He picked up his coat from its usual peg. He sidled past me, where I stood frozen to the spot at the open door. The suitcase cracked me on the knee and I said, ‘Ow!’ But he didn’t even look at me. Nothing. He just walked away.
I was afraid to tell my mother because of the key. In fact I hid what had just happened behind the earache and by the time she came home I was crying with the pain of it. Even now an unpleasant, sharp ringing in my ears joined forces with the headache. I knew that I’d been afraid of the wrong thing. Is that where it all began – this gift I have for getting everything wrong? Or was I born damaged as my mother so often told me?
My mouth was as foul and dry as a camel’s arse. I staggered down to the fountain, cupped my hands and drank. Electra drank beside me.
‘Oh for the love of Mike!’ said an elderly man in a pale tan raincoat. ‘Don’t do that. It isn’t healthy. Here, take a coupla bucks and buy yourself a bottle of clean water.’ He held out a twenty pound note.
‘That’s twenty pounds,’ I said, suddenly feeling too weak and emotional to fleece a sweet-natured tourist. ‘It’s a lot of money.’
‘Not to me.’ He stooped to stroke Electra’s head and she smiled graciously up at him. ‘Nice pooch,’ he said and tottered away across the square towards Admiralty Arch.
I stuffed the twenty into an inside pocket before anyone could rob me of it. Then I searched in more pockets for a tissue to blow my nose on because I was feeling weepy. That’s where I found the torn corner of an envelope with Gorilla Crapper’s address scrawled on it.
4
Keeping A Promise I Didn’t Make
I went to Shoreditch because there was no point sitting around the West End collecting dosh for booze. In the West End I risked running into someone I knew who’d offer me a drink, and I didn’t think I was strong enough to say no, even though I knew it would make me hurl my tripes on the floor. That’s the tragic truth – I was still aching for a bottle of red, really aching.
Let me tell you something else: I had a lot of time at Charing Cross Station finding someone to change my twenty pound note into a ten and two fives. And then to find someone prepared to accept my ten in return for using their credit card to buy me a travel card.
I was fuming and almost weeping by the time I got on the train. This so-called ‘cashless society’ completely excludes the poor and homeless who don’t have bank accounts or credit cards. We’re the unseen, nonexistent poor.
As if to rub in the insulting truth that only the enfranchised classes are worth bothering about, Shoreditch was much more gentrified than I’d expected. It’s not a part of London I know, but just the name triggered thoughts of the Ripper and Dickensian slums, not wine bars and design consultants.
Knowing that Kerrilla didn’t come from French patisserie territory, Electra and I trudged gloomily into an area of poorer housing. When we found ourselves in a street of broken bottles, kebab shops and overflowing bags of rubbish we knew we were getting close. I asked the way from a fourteen-year-old pushing a coughing baby in a buggy. She pointed to a block of mildewed concrete and cracked glass.
‘No surprises here,’ I told Electra. ‘You know what, if I work really hard and stay sober long enough to get on a housing list, I might, if I’m lucky, be housed somewhere like this.’ I even laughed miserably, because once, years ago, I tried to do just that. But I had the satisfaction of knowing that I’d failed to reach even the normal standards of failure in this great city.
The stairwell was a trash chute of broken toys, infested bedding, cans, bottles, condoms and syringes. At the third floor we found an emaciated girl rolling a cigarette. She was wearing a micro skirt and her legs were blue with cold. She sneered at us as we sidled past onto the outside walkway where the wind hit us full in the face.
Number C23’s door had boot marks on it. The glass panel at the top had been replaced by cardboard and parcel tape. I knocked. Nothing happened. I knocked again and got more of the same. Electra yawned, so I sat down with my back to the door where we were partially protected from the wind.
It had been a traumatic day so far and we’d come a long way. We went to sleep and I dreamed of a warehouse full of empty bottles. I had to carry Electra because she had cut her feet on broken glass. She said, ‘Full of empty – how very like you. Just help me over the hump.’
I woke up to find a Punjabi woman trying to shove a push-chair over my legs. Her friend, a big woman in purple suedette boots, said, ‘Move your arse. Who d’you think you are, passed out on our floor?’
‘I’m waiting for Mrs Cropper.’ I scrambled out of the way.
‘Her? Fat chance. If she isn’t down the boozer… ’
‘Come on,’ the Punjabi woman said, and they left us sitting where a door mat would’ve been if anyone inside was interested in clean shoes. I got to my feet and banged on the door again. Nothing was what I expected, and nothing was what I got until, just as I was about to leave, I heard a child crying. It was a weary, hopeless cry, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by acute sadness. Within a few seconds the unguarded fragment of what had once been my heart twitched awake and felt my father’s desertion, my mother’s bitter disappointment in me, my brother’s anger, my lover’s treachery, and my own desolation when I realised I had loved and still loved the Devil. There was an endless parade of uneaten meals, of drinks undrunk, targets missed, children unborn – and oh, those famished nights.
Cursing my Lazarus heart, I stooped and squinted through the letterbox.
A naked child stood on newspapers in a filthy hall. I could count his ribs but I couldn’t count his bruises. His ancient infant eyes met mine without a flicker of hope or expectation but he kept up his low dreary wail.
I stood up abruptly and almost fainted. My headache smashed my skull. I looked at Electra. Even an elderly greyhound, a beggar’s dog, had more flesh on her bones than Kerrilla’s son, Connor. Electra looked back at me and I could tell by her sweet expression that she knew I would feed her before nightfall. Connor had no expectations at all.
I beat on the neighbour’s door, and when that failed I tried the next one. Eventually
a door was opened by a fat man in a string vest.
I said, ‘Sorry to bother you, but can I borrow your phone? There’s a child is trouble four doors down.’
The man didn’t bother to answer. He turned his back on me and yelled, ‘Sally!’ before going back to his screaming TV programme.
His stick-thin wife said, ‘Oh, the Cropper kid. I sometimes post a pizza slice through the letterbox when they’re out – if there’s any left.’ She jerked her thumb in the direction of her fat mate. ‘I do what I can and don’t you tell nobody any different. As for my phone – fuck off. If she gets to hear I’ve stuck my neb in she’ll rip it off.’ She shut the door.
I made for the stairwell, but my way down was blocked by the blue-legged girl having sex with a balding, white-haired man. She gripped his shoulder with one hand to keep herself from falling while the other hand held a sachet of something that didn’t look like sugar. It wasn’t a long wait, and he walked away downstairs, zipping up his fly as if he’d been having a piss. While she was bending to pick up a dirty tissue I stepped up to her and snatched the sachet out of her hand.
‘Oy!’ she shrieked through a tangle of greasy hair.
‘Gimme your phone.’
‘You fucking slag.’ She made a grab for her stuff. I popped it into my bra. She went for my eyes. I kneed her in the guts. She was thin as a toast rack and had no stamina whatsoever. She sat down and started to cry. It was the same hopeless weary wail I’d heard from Connor.
I said, ‘Lend me your phone.’ Whatever they don’t have, girls in her line of work always own phones. She dug in her jacket pocket and pulled out a smart little phone. I squinted at it.
‘Turn it on.’
‘It is on. You blind?’ But she opened it up and handed it to me, watching my bosom like a buzzard watches a bunny.
I thumbed 999. ‘Police and ambulance,’ I said when my call was answered. ‘My name is, er, Ariadne Baguette. I’m reporting the presence of a starving, abused child, name of Connor Cropper, at… ’ Just at this point the blue-legged girl launched herself at me – all sharp knees, elbows and fingernails. I managed to shout the address into the phone before she tore it out of my hand. I was really surprised she’d gone for the phone and not her rocks.