Breaking Out

by Janice Nix

  ‘Look, Mums –’

  ‘All I’ll say is this. If you need help, come to me. Between us, whatever it is, we’ll fix it. Don’t talk to Emmanuel. Come and talk to me.’

  ‘I don’t talk to him about everything.’

  ‘That’s good. He doesn’t want to know. He’s had a bad experience already.’

  ‘What kind of bad experience?’

  ‘With a woman. It doesn’t matter now. The past is over. Just remember what I say.’

  I was beginning to feel part of Emmanuel’s family. They were lovely people, always generous and kind. Ida had a very good friend whom we called Auntie Beatrice, and Beatrice’s daughter Sabrina became the best friend I’d ever had.

  Sabrina shared my birthday – not just the date, but the same year as well. We joked that we were secretly twins, but then, as time went by, it stopped feeling like a joke. I told her everything about me – and I knew she loved me just as I was.

  ‘You’re brave, you know, Janice. I don’t know how you get the nerve to go out shoplifting,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not brave really,’ I said. ‘It’s just a job.’

  ‘No way!’ She rolled her eyes. ‘I’d be so frightened! Aren’t you scared they’re going to catch you?’

  ‘Naaah!’

  But I couldn’t lie to Sab – she saw right through me.

  ‘Yes you are, JanJan. I can see it. You’re scared sometimes.’

  She was right. But my excitement was stronger than my fear. I was hooked on the danger of lifting. Nothing else could give me that buzz.

  ‘It’s just the way it is,’ I told her. ‘I took up badness. There’s no way back now.’

  For a moment, the two of us were silent. And then Sabrina smiled.

  ‘Well now – we’re sisters for life, so I guess I have to take all this bullshit of yours and put up with it!’

  Then one of the gang disappeared. Patsy was caught while she was working, and sentenced to prison. We used to hang out down at her place quite often – but once she was gone, no one mentioned her name. It was as though she had never existed. It scared me badly. What had happened to her could just as easily happen to me. If it did, would I vanish just like she had?

  That was when Emmanuel asked me to move in with him. He said he thought that we should be together all the time – then he could look after me. I knew what he really meant was that I should stop shoplifting. I decided he was right. When I thought about Patsy, all alone in prison, my stomach churned with fear. The buzz just wasn’t worth it. I decided I was going to start again – and this time lead a different kind of life. I’d put those risks and dangers behind me. The past would be forgotten. I felt sure that Emmanuel and I would make each other happy for always.

  Emmanuel, Nicholas and Alicia were my ready-made family. The children often spent the night, and came around to see him at weekends. I didn’t mind at all – I liked looking after them. When their mum picked them up, she and Emmanuel seemed friendly. Whatever had happened in the past, both of them put the children first.

  Life was quiet, uneventful. As the months went by, I noticed that the days were starting to seem long. I missed the excitement of working up West. And the more I tried to ignore that feeling, the more the feeling grew.

  A glamorous woman rang the doorbell late one afternoon. I was watching TV in the kitchen while I rinsed out the children’s lunchboxes. She was a few years older than I was, and beautifully dressed. She made me feel quite awestruck.

  ‘Hi – you must be Janice? Nice to meet you. I’ve come to pick up the kids. I’m Lucy – I’m a friend of their mum’s. She’s been delayed at work.’

  ‘Uh – well, I’m sorry, but nobody told me. Can you wait while I phone up and check?’

  She smiled at me. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘that’s absolutely fine. I’m glad you’re careful.’

  We chatted. I liked her, and she seemed very interested in everything I said. A few days later, she came round again. This time, the children weren’t there. Soon she was visiting quite often, always when Emmanuel was working. She sometimes brought me presents – lovely new clothes, shoes and perfume. She didn’t explain where they came from. Then one day she asked me if I’d like to come shopping with her. The nervous expression on my face made her laugh.

  ‘Would Emmanuel be angry if you went out by yourself?’ she asked me.

  ‘No!’ I said quickly. ‘No, of course not. He just – he likes it when I stay around the house.’

  ‘Well – I won’t tell your old man if you don’t! And I think you’re a bit young to stay at home all day and be a housewife, don’t you?’

  I didn’t like the thought of lying to Emmanuel. But Lucy was right. I was nineteen – and he was 34. His kids were lovely, I felt safe and secure … but hanging round the house all the time was a drag. Patsy’s arrest had been months ago, and the shock of it had faded.

  Lucy was watching me carefully. When I said, ‘Okay, then,’ she gave a little smile.

  ‘That’s my girl, Janice.’

  She took me back to my old workplace – Oxford Street and Bond Street. We wandered through the shops, stopped for coffee, then wandered some more. But I still wasn’t sure just what Lucy was up to. Then, in the late afternoon when we were having a drink, I noticed her handbag. It was different from the one she’d been carrying that morning. Glancing inside it as she searched for her purse, I saw the shiny clasps of two other, smaller bags tucked down inside.

  Instantly a tingle of excitement sped through my body. I’d missed the thrill of danger. Although I’d tried the straight life, I realised that it wasn’t for me.

  ‘Are you lifting?’ I said to her. She answered with a smile.

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘What do you mean, sort of?’

  ‘Well – my game is slightly different. I’m a dipper. Sometimes the best bargains aren’t hanging on the rails. And the people I’m taking from don’t employ security guards.’

  As Lucy explained, I looked around at the affluent shoppers in the café with their bags of designer shopping, their bulging purses. Everywhere, I saw the gleam of money for the taking.

  ‘So – are you in?’ she asked me.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said to her. ‘Yes, Lucy. I’m in.’

  4

  Aye aye, dick eye

  SEPTEMBER 2014

  ‘SO HOW YOU DOING now, Izzie?’

  It was a week since I’d last seen her. She sat opposite me in the coffee shop, skinny, crumpled and hunched over. She was even paler than before and looked completely exhausted.

  ‘I’m okay.’ Her voice was a whisper. Taking crack heightens sensitivity to sound, so people who are using the drug often speak very quietly. But Izzie sounded even more subdued than she usually did.

  ‘You don’t seem okay to me,’ I told her gently.

  She shivered and wrapped her arms more tightly round her chest.

  ‘You not feeling so good?’

  Withdrawal is a terrible experience. You wake up every day feeling sick to your bones. Your body aches as though you’re getting ’flu. You shiver, then the next minute you’re burning up, soaked through with sweat. Your brain is jammed with anxiety and fear. And your first thought, your only thought, circling round your head with no escape, is – how am I going to get some money? Once you have an answer, you feel a bit better. Now you know for sure that you’ll have your drugs today, whatever you might have to do to get them.

  I fetched us both hot drinks, and put a warm panini on a plate down in front of her. She took no notice of the food, but she did pick up the drink and take a sip.

  ‘I’m glad you came,’ I said to her. ‘When you missed our phone call yesterday I was worried about you.’

  The phone calls were part of the structure I was building in her life. Setting little goals to shape her empty days, to help her remember that she really existed. To clean up her room. To go out and buy herself some food. As well as our meetings at probation, I phoned her three times a week. Eac
h time she picked up, I could tell if she’d been using. She would stutter and jump around from subject to subject, struggling to focus and making little sense. But the most important thing was just to make the calls and speak – to show her that somebody was there for her, no matter what.

  ‘Izzie? Did something happen?’

  She closed her eyes tightly.

  ‘Yeah,’ she muttered. ‘Yeah – I – I –’ Then the words seemed to freeze in her mouth.

  ‘J-Janice – I need a cigarette.’

  ‘Okay. You go outside and have one. But when you get back, I want to see you eat your sandwich.’

  I watched her through the window as she leaned against a lamp post, smoking in rapid, shaky puffs. From a distance, she always had that angular, supermodel loveliness. From here you didn’t notice the rough, tattered edges or the terror in her eyes.

  When she sat back down again at the table, she picked up the panini and obediently ate a few bites. A part of her was always trying to co-operate – I noticed it again and again. It was the part that wanted something different, a life that was so much better than all this. If I stayed next to this girl, she could get out of the shit that she was in – I was sure of it.

  ‘I need you to level with me, Izzie,’ I said. ‘Something bad happened – didn’t it?’

  Slowly the tears started running down her face.

  ‘Baby, what is it?’

  ‘It was K-Karim. You know – the g-guy who lives upstairs. He – he –’

  She stopped and squeezed her eyes tight shut.

  ‘Izzie,’ I said, ‘whatever this man did, it’s a reflection of him not a reflection of you. Please tell me.’

  ‘Okay.’ Her words came out in a stumbling rush. ‘It was three days ago. Karim –’

  Izzie lived in a rented bedsit – a downstairs room with a tiny little kitchen in the corner. The house was packed full of tenants – far too many for their welfare. Their unscrupulous landlord only wanted to make money and wasn’t much concerned if they were safe. A few weeks earlier, a large group of men had moved in, sharing the room right above Izzie’s. They slept in a row across the floor. They’d not been in the house a day before they started harassing her. Not all of them had keys and they were ringing on the doorbell all hours of the day and night, grabbing at her hair and her clothes when she came to let them in.

  ‘Karim s-said let’s do a deal, and –’

  ‘The same deal he did with you before?’ I asked her quietly.

  ‘Yeah.’ Her voice was a whisper. ‘Fifteen quid for a blowjob. Look – I know what you said – I know you told me not –’

  ‘That’s okay, Izzie. Just tell me what happened.’

  ‘S-so I said alright, and we did that –’

  When Karim had finished, he’d usually throw the money on the floor.

  ‘But this time he said he wasn’t done, and n-now he wanted to – to – but I said no, that wasn’t what you said –’

  Her hands were shaking uncontrollably.

  ‘Izzie,’ I said, ‘baby, it’s okay. Just take a breath for a minute.’

  She began sobbing really hard, rocking backwards and forwards.

  ‘So he kept trying – but he couldn’t get it up, because he’d just – so he went all – all animalistic – really rough, like he was wanting to find a way so he could – oh God, Jan. Oh God.’

  I laid my hand gently on her arm, controlling my anger at the horror that she was describing.

  ‘I th-thought he might kill me.’

  ‘Did he manage to do anything?’ I asked her.

  ‘No. He couldn’t. Oh my God, he was so angry. He was yelling like it was my fault. In the end he just gave up, and then he threw a fiver on the floor –’

  She covered her face with her hands. I could barely catch her words.

  ‘S-so I s-said that we’d agreed on £15 and then he hit me. And after that he went upstairs.’

  This was the first time she’d really opened up. I was appalled by what she’d told me. I would have to report her situation to the rest of the team. Her accommodation was very unsafe. But underneath all the mess, I felt a burst of hope. If she could trust me and talk to me like this, there had to be a chance.

  ‘So baby, you’ve had an awful shock. Nothing that happened was your fault. Karim tried to rape you. That’s a serious crime.’

  ‘But Jan – you know what’s worse?’ she whispered.

  ‘What was worse?’

  ‘I heard them later on, a whole bunch of them. They banged on my door and they were laughing really loudly. He’s told them something. So now when they see me, they always keep on laughing, every time.’

  JUNE 1978

  Lucy was a clever, skilful thief. Just as I’d learned from Sugarlips two years earlier, now I started learning from her.

  She was a great actress too, carefully performing her role. Out shopping, she’d hold up a jacket or a dress as though she was checking on the length or the size. Then she’d turn and show it to me, talking excitedly and draping it to and fro across her body – ‘Do you like this one, Jan? How d’you think it suits me?’ But her movements and her chatter were all a big pretend. While she waved the clothes around, admired the fabric and examined the buttons, she was creating a distraction. Then she softly slid her hand into the bag of her chosen victim close beside her.

  So many West End shoppers were wealthy, international people – and yet they seemed completely unaware. They’d leave their handbags gaping open or dangling behind them, then wander around, oblivious to danger. They were inviting us to pounce.

  I watched in amazement as a woman in a Salvatore Ferragamo dress left her bag unattended in the open, on the top of a huge pile of her shopping. Once she’d wandered away, there was plenty of time for Lucy to lift the bag, take the money from her purse, check for other valuables then lay the bag right back at the top of the pile. Its owner was so busy admiring a rack of fur coats, she never even noticed it was missing.

  ‘Is it always this easy?’ I asked Lucy.

  ‘Not always quite as easy as that one!’ She gave a wide grin. ‘But this is Harvey Nicks! The place is full of money, and the people with the money – they really aren’t so careful.’

  At the end of our first day working together, as we were heading home, Lucy gently touched my arm.

  ‘Here you are, Janice. This is just for you – to buy anything you might need.’ She placed £100 – five £20 notes, the ones we called Shakespeares – into my hand.

  I’d never had cash of my own before. Sugarlips had bought me anything I needed, and Emmanuel paid for everything now. But this was really mine, and I was pleased. I couldn’t explain to anyone at home where the money had come from, so I hid it in the bottom of the spare bedroom wardrobe.

  In the squad, our working technique was dip and cover. The thieves go out in pairs. One provides the cover while the dipper does the take. I started out as cover to Lucy, the boss of the team. Then she introduced me to the others. All three of them were older, and all of them had kids. There was Gill, who smoked so much weed that her voice was a deep throaty growl. There was smart, sarcastic Suzi Q, and bright, funny Pepper whose husband Scorcher was a well-known south London street drug dealer. He was in and out of prison, while she looked after their children on her own.

  ‘I just wish she’d leave him,’ muttered Gill with a roll of her eyes whenever Scorcher’s name was mentioned. ‘That girl’s far too loyal for her own good.’

  Dressing up was a big part of our game. To stay a step ahead of store security, the squad chopped and changed our appearances with wigs and clothes and glasses. Sometimes I would copy the West End’s super-rich Nigerians in their hair wraps and long patterned dresses. I loved the way it always brought the shop assistants rushing towards me. ‘How can I help you, madam? Is there anything that madam requires?’ On other days, I’d dress in more subtle, understated wealth – a tasteful Windsmoor jacket, an Aquascutum coat.

  I felt myself falling in love w
ith the game. I loved the beautiful clothes, I loved the glamour, I loved the crazy highs, the tension and excitement. It made me feel alive. Best of all, I loved the look in people’s eyes when they saw the possessions that I had. It made me feel like somebody. A person to be treated with respect.

  A working crew would never walk together. We strung out across the shop floor, waiting until someone gave the signal to move in on our target. ‘Aye aye, dick eye,’ we’d say, when we knew we’d made a spot.

  ‘Aye aye, dick eye?’ I asked Lucy. ‘What’s that mean, then?’

  ‘It means “Heads up! Look over there.”’

  ‘It does? How come?’

  ‘Don’t know. It’s kind of slang. It reminds us to never use our names when we’re working.’

  Pretty soon, I became the sharpest spotter on the team. The others questioned me at first. ‘Why her, Jan? Nah – this one’s looking better.’ Then they noticed just how good my spotting was.

  It was more than just the little tells of wealth – the shoes and handbags, the soft designer jeans, the drape and swing of expensively cut hair. Real money is a shine a person has on the inside. It’s in the way they walk and how they hold their head. It’s a certain air of distance – as though they don’t quite notice the world. To me, that signal always flashed out loud and clear.

  ‘You’re so tall, girl!’ Gill said. She laughed. ‘You’re like a lamp-post!’

  And that was the nickname they gave me. My height and the width of my shoulders were a help because they blocked the victim’s sight. But they made me stand out too, so I worked extra hard to blend in, always careful to play the role of the shopper, examining the goods, admiring and selecting, never glancing around to check on how the dip was going. Staring down at the action only draws the eyes of the mark. I also learned never to speak – conversation is dangerous. It gives the mark too much about you to remember.

  Our most important rule was to keep a £10 note at the ready. That meant we could jump straight in a black cab as soon as we got outside. The West End cabbies had been warned by the police to look for dippers, so the cover always sat in the pull-down seat with her back to the driver. She would block his view while the taker counted profits and we made our escape.