Courting Trouble (12 page)

‘Then why are you beaming?’

‘I’m not beaming.’

‘Darl, you’re smiling so hard you look as though you’ve just had a B12 vitamin shot.’

‘I am not!’ But, in truth, the thought of the stranger’s smile stayed in my mind for a long time . . . even while we were being fingerprinted, frisked and bustled through metal detectors. (Please note that if you can’t afford a doctor, go on a prison visit. You’ll get a free X-ray and breast exam and, if you mention drugs in any way, a complimentary cervical smear test, too.)

As we handed over our shoes, phones and ID, I took in my surroundings. Everything seemed to be made not just of polyester, but imitation polyester. The prison smelt sour, like stale daylight trapped for decades until it has gone rancid. It wafted over me like bad BO seeping out of armpits in summer on the Tube. As we moved from the holding pen deeper into the prison, the whole place reeked of mourning, ghosts and desperation.

Another gargantuan officer led us in silence to a large room partitioned off into glass cubicles. She adjusted her underwear with a thumb and a wiggle of her opulent backside, then pointed to one of the small rooms. Phyllis was wedged into a chair that was nailed to the floor. As was the table. She looked as though she’d been plunked down on a planet to which she was not native. Her grey hair was strangled into a tight ponytail. Her skin and lips were gravestone grey.

‘So the food hasn’t killed you yet?’ My mother’s voice was sympathetic but also robust and unpatronizing. ‘What did you have for lunch? Cup o’ Crap or sweet-and-sour stray cat?’

‘Somethin’ like it, pet!’ Phyllis’s forced good cheer was painful in its transparency. She was giving a very good impression of a duck’s back.

‘Phizz is a very good cook, you know,’ my mother told me. ‘She’s addicted to those daytime-telly cookery shows.
MasterChef, The Great British Bake Off
. . .’

‘I am a bit partial to a drizzle of balsamic,’ Phyllis said. ‘You gotta get me out of ’ere, for the sake of me tastebuds alone,’ she bluffed, adding eagerly, ‘’Ave you seen my Chanty?’

‘Yes,’ my mother reassured her, in a voice as composed and calm as a hotel receptionist’s. ‘She’s on the mend.’

And then Phyllis smiled. A genuine smile. This smile was like the front door of an old house opening, disused with rusty hinges.

‘And I will reunite you very soon.’ Roxy smoothed the old woman down as though she were a crumpled bedspread. ‘But let’s talk about your defence first, shall we?’

‘The poxy scum deserved it.’

‘I know,’ Roxy agreed. ‘Kill one man and you’re a murderer. Kill a million and you’re a conquering heroine . . . Boudi-bloody-cca.’

I eyeballed my mother. This did not seem the most promising strategical tack, so I took over.

‘Like Roxy, you’re a woman of many convictions, Phyllis. Let’s just not make them all criminal. Okay?’ My pathetic attempt at a little ice-breaking humour fell completely flat.

‘An eye for an eye,’ Phyllis stated grimly.

‘Unfortunately, righteous indignation is not a defence,’ I told her.

‘Listen carefully, Phyllis,’ Roxy interrupted. ‘As I understand, you went around there with a firearm to protect yourself while you warned them not to say one denigrating word about your granddaughter. But you had no intention of using the firearm, did you?’

‘Yeah I did—’

‘Hold on. Let me finish . . . But when you got there, Stretch opened the door and yelled something abusive at you. Isn’t it
then
that you felt under threat?’ Roxy prompted.

Phyllis shook her head, bemused.

‘Some threat was made to you, so you had to defend yourself. Did you feel under threat, Phyllis?’

Phyllis was looking intently at Roxy.

‘You were so frightened you pulled the trigger—’

‘They don’t frighten me, those evil knobheads.’

Roxy and I exchanged exasperated glances. My mother extracted a cigarette packet secreted in some fold of her vast bra. Over the next hour, I wrung from Phyllis every minute detail of the night she shot the rapists: the exact time she drove her battered bomb of a car to the estate to snap photos of the culprits on Chantelle’s mobile; the exact moment she showed the photos to Chantelle for verification; where she got the gun; how long it took her to get back to the council estate . . .

My mother smoked continuously throughout until I begged her to desist. ‘Roxy, can you please stop dropping cigarette butts on the prison floor?’

My mother raised a puzzled brow, looking around the small, grimy room. ‘You’re worried about mess? In this cesspit?’ she asked sarcastically.

‘No, I’m worried the rats are getting cancer.’ I coughed dramatically. ‘You’re asphyxiating me. You’re not allowed to smoke. There’s a sign.’ I pointed to the huge printed instruction on the wall behind us.

My mother responded with a wink and a blast of smoke in my face. ‘I’m shortsighted.’

After another half an hour of passive smoke-inhalation and frantic note-taking, the prison officer waddled over to announce that it was 3 p.m. and visiting time was up. ‘But you kept us waiting outside for at least an hour,’ I complained.

The prison officer’s yawn was like that of a hippopotamus in a watering hole. ‘And you kept me cravin’ a smoke for the last hour,’ she rasped.

My mother took the hint and gave the smuggled cigarette packet to the officer. People were shuffling out of their individual cubicles into the long, bare room. Some visitors were weeping, others swearing. The guards, oblivious, herded them all together. Inmates and their guards did have one thing in common though. Immense bottoms. It looked as though everyone in the place had stuffed two watermelons down their trousers.

The fluorescent light above us was intermittent, the bulb buzzing on and off like a trapped blowfly. Phyllis, who had been calm throughout the visit, seized my arm. ‘The estate’s bad enough, but I reckon the drugs in ’ere are worse. These girls need help. Coke is called medicine. “J’have my medicine?” they keep sayin’. You’ve gotta get me out. Those poxy rapists ’ave a lotta mates in ’ere. I don’t feel safe.’ The old lady had gone as limp as a perm in a sauna.

Whereas
my
biggest fear is being trapped in a lift with a Scientologist, poor Phyllis was at the mercy of vicious inmates and unpredictable wardens. Holloway Prison is clearly full of the kind of people Jerry Springer could build an entire series around.

As we rose to leave, Phyllis clutched Roxy’s arm with a trembling, arthritic claw. ‘I’m scared, Roxy. Please, please, in the name of Jesus, get me outta ’ere.’ Her face was so drawn it seemed to be melting.

‘What the hell’s that on your arm, love?’ Roxy pushed up the sleeves of the old lady’s cardigan to reveal a bracelet of bruises on both forearms.

‘Oh, this one woman, she keeps tauntin’ me all the time. Shovin’ me round an’ that. I can take it, meself. But I won’t let ’em say one bad word about my Chanty! I won’t! . . . I won’t!!’

I understood Phyllis’s desire to have the last word. I just prayed it wouldn’t be on her epitaph.

‘The bail appeal hearing’s scheduled for next week,’ Roxy reassured her with a pat on her back. ‘Everything’s going to be fine, Phizz.’

Phyllis returned the ghost of a smile.

My mother and I walked in silence back towards the daylight. The steel prison gates wheezed open with a death rattle, then slammed shut again behind us. And still we said nothing, because both of us knew that everything was about as fine as the grey drizzle which had set low over London. Phyllis might as well have been swimming in shark-infested waters with a gaping leg wound. As usual, Roxy and I had ended up testing the depth of the legal waters – with both feet.

The type of handbag you carry says a lot about you. For example, if you’re carrying someone else’s handbag, it says that you’re a thief. But, from petty thieves to porn stars, Pandora’s was open to all women in trouble. At the time of Phyllis’s arrest, our little practice had three other cases on the legal boil. One involved a woman whose Arabic hubby had been watching a pornographic film for the first time and was shocked to discover he was married to the star. He was now divorcing her and claiming custody of their two children and half her earnings. The other case involved a fire-eating stripper whose flaming nipple tassels had set off the club’s smoke alarms. The nightclub’s owner was trying to sue her for water damage. And then there was the bigamist who targeted women who were financially stable but vulnerable. He ended up leaving a string of ‘wives’ in thousands of pounds of debt. Roxy explained wryly to Portia: ‘Bigamy is having one husband too many. Monogamy’s the same.’

A solicitor’s job is to collate all the relevant documents and witness statements. As Roxy was snowed under preparing all these briefs for me, it was decided that day that she would head back to the office to toil at the case coalface while I visited Chantelle in the hospital.

Pushing into the overheated hospital was like opening an oven to check a roast. A wave of stale warmth hit me. I eased open the door to Chantelle’s room to find the bed occupied by an old man.

What with eighty-hour working weeks, no sleep, financial cutbacks and waiting lists longer than the Great Wall of China, nurses are a curiously uncommunicative lot. Too busy to answer my frantic enquiries, staff passed me from one desk to another like an unwanted parcel – one possibly laced with ricin. Then I saw the pre-Raphaelite-pale, auburn-haired nurse who’d been taking care of Chantelle. I grabbed her arm, begging for information. She gruffly explained that the teenager had checked herself out.

My intestines macramed instantly. Rape victims are statistically vulnerable to self-harm and suicide. Heart in mouth, I rang the mobile number Phyllis had given me. When I heard Chantelle’s voice, my sigh of relief was so loud it’s a wonder passing paramedics didn’t suspect I was having an asthma attack and order an oxygen tent. Chantelle explained that she couldn’t bear all the people at the hospital knowing what had happened, so she had gone to stay with her best friend from school.

I turned the car down the hill from Hampstead towards Camden and on to the Tony Benn Estate. In my rush to find Chantelle, I forgot to take my armoured personnel carrier – otherwise known as Roxy – which is why, fifteen minutes later, I found myself surrounded by a group of hooded youths, poking at me and demanding money, iPhone, car keys . . .

Council estates are daunting for bookworms like me. The rats here could use a woman my size as a chew toy. Using my famed streetwise skills, honed for survival in the urban jungle, I immediately fumbled for my mobile to call my mother. But as I reached into my inside jacket pocket, the tension ratcheted up. Two flick knives materialized. The hair stood up on the back of my head as though I were a cartoon character.

‘I told you the council estate was not your natural environment.’ It was the handsome, golden-haired Roman emperor from the prison forecourt. I recognized his clotted-cream consonants and statuesque build. Even through a thick jumper his flexed arms were so muscular, it looked as though he had packets of cement implanted under his biceps. ‘The only firm rule on an inner-city estate having drug-turf wars is that those with rocket-grenade launchers have the right of way, isn’t that correct, boys? . . . So, what are you guys carrying?’

With the same pride and enthusiasm as an Englishwoman showing off her camellias, the boys paraded their weaponry. Four flick knives, a machete, six knuckledusters and a revolver of some kind – basically, everything lethal bar a drone plane and a ton of napalm.

‘Oh my God! It’s like a war zone. All that’s missing are piles of sandbags with jumpy eyes and gun barrels sticking over the top,’ I said nervously.

The stranger then advised the gang to get rid of their weapons and drugs as a police raid was imminent – at least, I think that’s what he said, as he imparted most of this information in rapid-fire, guttural street slang. I needed United Nations headphones to decode the conversation.

‘It’s considered good manners to convey information about impending raids from rival drug gangs or police,’ the Roman emperor told me. ‘This takes the place of weather reports in inner-city ghettos. News of stab victims takes the place of celebrity gossip.’

After a bit of high-fiving and back-slapping, the boys sauntered off.

‘If teenagers were a radio, then you seem to have their frequency,’ I marvelled.

‘You just need to speak their lingo.’

‘Really? What’s the local lingo for “I’m unarmed and not dangerous and quite academic, really, so please don’t let me suffer a lingering death and just point me to the nearest library”?’

He smiled. ‘Sorry, there’s no such phrase in the local vocabulary. It’s just that reaching inside a jacket for your phone resembles the gesture of drawing a gun and makes trigger-happy, macho boys a little more jumpy than is entirely prudent. They’re not bad kids, really.’

‘Really? I dunno . . . The way they clean under their nails with the blades of their flick knives kinda makes me suspect they failed their Health and Safety badges in the Boy Scouts.’

This time the stranger laughed. ‘They’ve just been thrown on society’s rubbish heap. They’re in that weird no man’s land between school and—’

‘Jail?’ I interrupted.

‘Well, yes, sadly. Most graduate from school with certificates in how to make kerosene bombs out of plastic milk bottles. Where are you going, by the way? Would you like me to escort you?’

‘I want you to know that I’m a feminist – totally independent and self-sufficient in all things . . . But, yes please.’ I fumbled through my handbag for the scrap of paper on which I’d scribbled down the tower block and flat number Chantelle had given me over the phone. The stranger pushed up the sleeves of his jumper, threw his leather jacket over one shoulder, took me gently by the elbow and steered me through the buildings with no effort or disorientation.

‘People presume those kids’ only vocation is crushing beer cans against their foreheads. They’re demonized as “chavs” by the press. But these boys have grown up amid poverty, family breakdown and the lure of easy money from dealing. What you have to understand is that, since Britain lost its manufacturing base, the drug industry’s the only factory still open.’