Authors: Phil Shoenfelt
Of course, she was beautiful, and resourceful too. Soon, she was selling her own hand-made jewellery from a stall in Portobello Market, widening her ever-increasing circle of acquaintances who ranged from unwashed and ragged dole-queue kids (some of whom she shared a squat with), up to the wealthy musicians and big-time drug dealers of Kensington and Chelsea. But it wasn’t enough. Something of the Persian princess was maybe inside her after all, and the charms of living in a cold-water flat, with no heat or electricity, were beginning to wear thin, especially now that winter was approaching. She saw the riches and comforts that her West London friends enjoyed, and accustomed as she had been to having these things herself, she began to plot and scheme, to think of ways of raising herself
up to their level, as she saw it. She’d won her freedom — now she wanted to enjoy the material comforts she had known before, but on her own terms, without the annoying interference of her mother and family. Maybe then they would respect her, accept her for who she was instead of what they wanted her to be. At the very least, she would be able to respect herself, to know that everything she had achieved was the result of her own efforts, not because of some handout that was always conditional upon someone else’s idea of good behaviour. She had been denied love without conditions; now she would achieve wealth and status without conditions too: she would be beholden to no-one. And so it was that Cissy made the decision to enter the dark and treacherous waters of big-time drug-dealing.
• • •
I don’t know where she met Scottish Dougie. He was a Glaswegian hard man of the old school, about thirty years of age when they met (she was then eighteen), and seemingly outside the circle of her usual acquaintances. Maybe she met him in a club, or pub; maybe somebody introduced them; maybe it was divine intervention. Whatever the case, it was a strange, unlikely pairing, but one which seemed to offer her the fast and easy route to money and material comfort that she now craved. Dougie was not cut from the same cloth as the dealers she had known so far — mainly rich kids using their parents’ money for a little private investment of their own, one which could produce dividends at least as attractive as any their fathers might hope to make in the City. He had come up the hard way, via the old Gorbals tenement blocks and borstal, and he’d already served time for a variety of offences ranging from armed robbery to
GBH
. A three-inch knife scar disfigured one side of his face, a memento of some long-forgotten gang war, while his
nose had been broken on more than one occasion, giving him a flattened, almost ape-like appearance. This, together with his build (that of the proverbial brick shit-house), made him into the kind of character you most definitely would not wish to pick an argument with, though apparently several people did on account of some masochistic desire to prove a point to themselves, or others. (He had a younger brother, Tony, who was equally as hard, and whom I met years later when he used to buy speed off me in Camden Town. You could never refuse to sell to this guy, no matter what hour of night or day he might happen to call around. If it was three in the morning, he would bellow up from the street below demanding drugs, and if you ignored him, or pretended to be asleep, he was not averse to kicking the front door in, bawling you out for being a cunt and not letting him in in the first place. Basically, he didn’t give a fuck.)
So for Dougie, dealing smack was easy meat — there was comparatively little risk involved, and the middle-class kids he sold to were a far cry from the battle-hardened thugs he had grown up with in Glasgow. Undoubtedly, he held a powerful attraction for Cissy, adrift as she was in a cold and potentially dangerous city, and she knew that with him there would be no trouble from difficult or uncooperative customers: no-one would dare to mess with her if they knew that she was together with such a desperate character, and besides, he had the contacts and the knowledge that she needed to get started in this lucrative but lethal business.
Things started to go wrong almost from the start. Dougie had recently lost a weight of gear, worth several thousand pounds, on a deal that had turned sour when some rival from the past had informed on him to the police. The package had been discovered in a parked van at some point midway between London and Glasgow, and it was only by a mixture of luck and foresight that Dougie had avoided being caught himself. The
van had been hired under a fictitious name, and with no other concrete leads available the police were powerless to act. However, they knew who was behind the deal and as far as they were concerned they could wait — it was just a matter of time before the net of their investigations closed around him.
So when Cissy arrived on the scene, Dougie was desperate to make his money back, and possibly saw her — young, fresh and plausibly innocent as she was — as some kind of decoy, a screen he could use to cover his tracks, or maybe use as a courier. She was different to his usual pulls: tough, loud-mouthed women used to sticking up for themselves and their kids against foul-tempered, drunken, often violent men. Cissy could certainly hold her own in any argument, and had an impressive command of street language that she’d picked up along the way. But she also had a sense of style, the rich kid’s assurance of her own place in the world, that held great attraction for someone of Dougie’s chequered background, and according to Cissy he always treated her well: beyond the occasional screaming match, their relationship never degenerated into brawls and physical violence.
The first few trips they made up to Scotland together were a success. The deliveries were made and paid for, while Dougie clawed back some of the money he had lost on the previous occasion. His intention was to accompany Cissy on the first couple of drops, to introduce her to his friends and connections in Glasgow, after which she would undertake these trips alone while he took care of the London end of the business. They would each make enough money to finance whatever side-projects they chose to pursue (Cissy dreamed of opening her own club), and it would enable them to adopt the wonderful lifestyle that she so admired in her West London friends. It would be like a fairy tale, a rags-to-riches story, with Cissy as the beautiful princess and Dougie as the ugly toad who would turn into a handsome prince under her magical and beatific
influence. She really did think like this, and in spite of her sassiness and apparent “street-smarts” Cissy was, behind the facade, the original, wide-eyed, little-girl-lost alone in the big, bad world. She had no true idea of the sinister forces she was playing with, and that were about to rain down upon her dreaming, innocent head.
Of course, she knew that what they were doing was against the law and that it carried a stiff penalty too. But Dougie had such a powerful physical presence, and had so many dangerous, well-connected friends, that she found it hard to believe that any harm could come to her while he was there to protect her — he was like a talisman for her, and she had complete faith in him, as if he were the father that she’d never really had. And she saw no evil in any of this. To her, the law really was an ass, merely a concoction dreamed up by grey, old men to benefit others of their own age and social class, and if there were people, like her, who wanted to buy drugs and have a good time with their lives, then why not? She was just providing a service, after all, like a publican, or the owner of a restaurant, so why shouldn’t she make a profit as well? No-one was forcing people to buy, it was all a matter of choice and personal freedom — and besides, she quite enjoyed the notion of “living outside the law”, of being a renegade. It was an attractive image for her, and she adopted it with the same enthusiasm and whole-hearted commitment she displayed for all her masks and successive identities.
It was on their third or fourth trip together that things went badly wrong. I never managed to find out exactly what happened and I don’t think that Cissy was ever really sure either. Maybe it was the fact that she had begun using more of the drugs herself and, to Dougie’s extreme annoyance, had become blasé and over-confident, boasting to friends and acquaintances about how well she was doing, how in love she was and how rich she soon would be. Perhaps it was just bad
luck. More likely it was some person from Dougie’s past, either the same, or different, motivated by revenge or rivalry, who dropped the penny on them. Whatever the truth of the matter, when they arrived at the house in Glasgow at the end of this fated trip the cops were there waiting for them; and this, in a most cruel, abrupt and impolite manner, effectively pulled the plug on Cissy’s career as social climber and bon vivant. The uncertainties about the bust and who, if anyone, was responsible were to eat away at Cissy’s peace of mind for years to come. When I first met her I had the feeling that she was still blaming herself for everything that happened that day, even though she put up a bold and aggressive front.
She told me about the initial shock of her arrest, the unreality of it all, as she and Dougie were led away for interrogation; the feeling that a trapdoor had opened beneath her feet and that she would never stop falling; and the cold numbness, like a spreading paralysis, as the truth of her predicament became an inescapable fact. That first morning after we met, she took me for breakfast at a worker’s cafe off the Holloway Road and told me about the two years she’d spent in jail: first in Scotland, later in Holloway Women’s Prison, not half a mile away from where we were then sitting and from where she had only recently been released. Her new disguise was that of a cockney street urchin, with large floppy cap pulled down over her short, spiky blond hair and a long black overcoat that was several sizes too big for her, reaching down almost to her feet. She made such a picture, wrapped inside this horse-blanket: just over five feet tall, with enormous brown eyes and a strangely blunted Mediterranean nose that gave the impression of a tiny woodland creature, foraging for food amongst the leaves and undergrowth of the dark forest. She even spoke with a cockney accent, authentic in tone, syntax and rhythm, that she’d acquired in prison and which, I presumed, had been adopted for reasons of camouflage and self-preservation.
“Yeah, fuckin’ Old Bill, sittin’ right there waitin’ for us — bastards! An’ Dougie, with a fuckin’ weight right there in the bag, an’ the place all staked out — I mean what could we do? Talk about the spider an’ the fly … But somebody must ’ave grassed us up, right? An’ when Dougie gets out, I wouldn’t wanna be in that fucker’s shoes — I got a few ideas about who done it, an’ I bet Dougie does too, an’ if I was that toss-head, I’d start runnin’ right now — ha ha ha ha …”
She cackled wickedly into her steaming mug of tea, and began to roll a cigarette from the packet of Samson that lay on the table in front of her.
“Yeah, but it could have just been from the time before — I mean, the cops probably had you under surveillance the whole time …”
“Nah, they didn’t ’ave nearly enough to go on from that — no names, no addresses, just a phone call, not enough to warrant an operation of that size, no fuckin’ way! Nah, it had to be a tip-off, c’mon — names, times, places, I mean they knew exactly who we were, for Chrissake. A regular fuckin’ welcomin’ committee it was, we didn’t stand a chance — an’ some cunt’s gonna pay, you’ll see …”
Cissy pulled hard on her cigarette, trying her best to appear like some hardened jailbird, with her foul-mouthed invective and thirst for revenge. But somehow it didn’t ring true — she was far more funny than scary, like some really bad caricature of the Artful Dodger, and I just couldn’t take her seriously, she was trying much too hard. I also had the feeling that she was worried for herself, covering up her own fears with this display of bravado, and that she wasn’t exactly looking forward to the day of Dougie’s release with joy in her heart and a spring in her step. He was in Peterhead Prison, then, one of the toughest jails in Britain, and though it’s true it lay hundreds of miles to the north, up in Scotland, she hadn’t made the slightest effort to visit or even contact him. In fact, she hadn’t set eyes on him
since the day of their sentencing. No-one knew for certain the exact circumstances behind the bust, and she had every reason to believe that Dougie might blame her (and her weakness for slack talk and careless boasting), for their misfortune. The slightly worried note that crept into her voice whenever she mentioned his name made me realise that she was actually living in fear of him — maybe because of the bust; maybe because she’d got another boyfriend now, and hadn’t waited for him like the dutiful wife he might have expected.
I realised, years later, that Cissy was always running scared, that there was some kind of unfathomable darkness in her which could never really be plumbed. This state of fear was a constant, and although the outward manifestations of it might change, it really came from inside her. She was always convinced, profoundly, that someone, somewhere, had it in for her, that the worst would always happen — and of course expecting it to made sure that it did: she seemed to draw trouble like a magnet. All the time, you could see the wrong moves she was making, the slightly skewed version of events she held to, the all-too-likely disastrous outcome of this, or that, course of action. But it was futile to point this out to her, she would have none of it — she was always right, and all that would happen was that you would become the new threat, the new demon to be wrestled with.
All of this contrasted strangely with her daylight personality, which was bouncy, energetic and outgoing, full of ideas and crazy schemes; and she could also be open-hearted and generous, regularly giving away treasured possessions as if they meant nothing to her at all. But during the night she would often wake in fear, drenched with sweat and trembling from some dark dream; frequently, with a gut-wrenching, primeval scream of terror — her mouth open, her eyes wide and uncomprehending — that had a horrible note of despair and hopelessness in it. It was as if she knew she was doomed,
as if she had somehow stepped off the rim of the tangible world and was falling down through the void, cast away into the outer darkness and heading, most assuredly, for some stinking, enmired pit from which she would never escape, and which concealed every shade and form of horror that she had ever imagined. It would take minutes to calm her down from one of these attacks, before she began to recognise the solidity of her surroundings once more, and she could never remember (or never would tell), the oppressive and miasmic content of these dreams. What ghosts lurked inside? Maybe it was prison that had darkened her, or maybe the darkness had been there all along. Heroin, for awhile, had seemed to keep the ghosts at bay, with its ability to make the user feel inviolate and immune. But soon they were back, crowding at the door in ever greater numbers, the drug that had at first seemed to promise relief turning traitor, increasing the dread in a consequent and directly exponential manner.