LIFE STORY OF TERRY DONALDSON CHAPTER 4

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Chapter 5: CRACKING UP
Second Hand Sid was the one who got me going. Down at Brick Lane Market, he would take me to help out on his second-hand spectacle stall. Sid encouraged me to take the tarot cards, and do little readings for people at the side of his stall. Somehow it seemed to work, and I would regularly walk out with thirty or even forty pounds. A small fortune!
‘Get yourself down to Camden Lock, Tel’ Sid suggested to me one evening, over a can of lager.
I vaguely remembered Camden Lock Market from my squatting days.
‘Just like that! Just turn up?’ I said
‘Sure, why not? My old man can make you up a pair of signs, Tel. Hand-painted signs that will make you look like the business.’ Sid was a diamond. He took me up to meet his old mum and dad in their pace in Whetstone. His mum showed me some photos of herself when she was younger.
‘You look gorgeous in them,’ I said to her, impressed.
‘What he means, mum, is you look like a right old rat bag now.’ Sid chipped in, merrily.
We all laughed. Sid was a real character, with a wonderful sense of humour, even if he was a mad Elvis fan. He went all the way to Graceland and came back with a stone from the top of The King’s grave.
A few days later, Sid’s dad presented me with a couple of rather lurid but certainly noticeable signs. The first said ‘It Pays to Know Your Future’, and carried the design of the Wheel of Fortune card. It showed a married couple on the top of the Wheel, toasting each other, then, on the downside, a man falling off. The second showed an owl and had the words ‘It is Wise to Know Your Future’. Armed with these two signs and a pack of tarot cards I set off to Camden Lock, and in search of my own fortune.
I was given a small space in a garden area next to a disused houseboat that lay moored to the quay. Underneath a tree, I put up the portable card table and two fold-up chairs. Even when it started raining, there was a steady flow of people turning up for readings. By the time my first day was done, I felt as though I had been given quite a baptism, and was amazed that I had earned sixty pounds! After paying the rent I was left with fifty pounds. Enough to buy a large umbrella, the kind they use to go fishing with.
Day after day I would sit under this umbrella, in all weathers. I was earning enough to live on. I was able to come off the dole and get enough together to put down a deposit on a small place of my own in Crouch End, north London, a bright, cheerful place which overlooked a wooded area from the back.
I also had a stall at Covent Garden Market and it was there I first met Evelyne. She was with a friend and jumped back when I offered to read the cards for her. Something must have clicked though, because a few days later she came to my stall in Camden Lock and asked me to read her cards.
I predicted a new romance on the horizon for her, but knew that to really get a look at what was in store for her, I would have to draw up her astrological chart. This would show her inner strengths and hidden potential. I was always trying to promote astrology in those days. People would come to me for instruction and over the eight years I was at the markets, it grew into the London Tarot Training Centre. I loved being able to put what I had learned in Greece to good use and I found my knowledge deepening each day. I did readings for some famous people, singers, musicians and even members of the House of Lords! Evelyne was there the whole way through, doing all the admin and general back-up. She helped out with the teaching too, something that later would come between us and help us on the road to splitting up.
When Evelyne announced she was pregnant I knew it was time to sell up the little flat and move us into a proper house. My daughter, Claudia, was born in the hot summer in 1996, up at North Middlesex hospital. I was there all the time with Evelyne, looking after her, giving her water, chasing after the nurses who would disappear for long periods of time down corridors like it was a game of hide and seek. When Claudia was delivered, I cut the gristly cord, with a pair of snippers the doctor placed in my hand. As I cut, I had a sudden image of snipping a big fruit from a tree. My daughter arrived with her own name. We had no idea what to call her before she was born, but when she arrived her name appeared in great red letters on the wall of the delivery suite.
The pressure was building up. I now had deadlines to fulfil, a timetable to adhere to.
Each day I would receive dozens of phone calls, and Evelyne was unable to cope with a new baby and work full time. We brought in a nanny and a secretary. I now owned a large four-bedroom house. In the front room was a huge marble fireplace, and a great chandelier, just like the ones I used to look at in shop windows when I was squatting, hung overhead. A white Mercedes stood outside the front door and around the corner were three mistresses, each one unaware of the others. They started out as students in the Tarot school. I fathered a child, a boy, with one of them, a New Zealander who went back home when she found out she was pregnant. This child was born under the strangest and most auspicious conglomeration of planets I had ever seen in any astrological chart. Who knows what he might be destined for with such a chart?
I became quite blatant with my flings and, understandably, it really got to Evelyne. I just couldn’t help myself. I became quite well known around London at this time. I was hosting a show on LiveTV three times a week called Fame and Fortune and doing quite a bit of writing on tarot and the occult.
To top it all, I had also been invited to become a Freemason. Getting in isn’t easy. You have to know just the right people and these people must be willing to propose and second you for membership. It took me over a year to get nominated. I wasn’t supposed to know anything about the initiation ceremony, but my mind was boggling at all the jokes about goats and donkeys that seemed to follow me around.
I arrived wearing the plain black suit that is the ‘uniform’ of Freemasons the world over. I was divested of metal and blindfolded. Then, my jacket was removed, and my shirt opened up to expose my heart. My right heel was slipshod, and a cord was placed around my neck. Feeling like the Hanged Man card in the tarot, I was led, completely blind, into the Lodge Room, and initiated into Abercorn Lodge Number 1549. My initiation was a beautiful ceremony. It meant something on a deep level to me.
I am not supposed to say too much about it, it was part of the oath I took not to. Much of Freemasonry involved extensive learning of ritual and the Bible. A great deal of mystery surrounds the Freemasons in the public mind, and this is compounded by the strange and esoteric symbolism that is to be found within their rituals. I always enjoyed the sense of belonging, especially to something with such a mystique. I met a wonderful variety of people while a member of the Freemasons, from many levels of society, and experienced a sense of equality and acceptance that is difficult to find anywhere else.
At the end of each lodge meeting was the banquet. There would be speeches, a toasting to the Queen, and a chance to meet other fellows ‘on the square’. I went along to the research lodge of Quator Coronati, and used to sit next to Nigel Bagent, co-author of ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail’ and a very scholarly Freemason. As I had by now, written some half a dozen books on the tarot, for both British and American publishers, the person in charge of the seating probably thought I’d be a good conversational companion for him.
Another interesting man I met around this time was Lord Northampton, now Grand Master of the Order. After commissioning me to draw up his astrological chart, Evelyne, Claudia and I were invited up to Castle Ashby in Northamptonshire for his 50th birthday bash. It was April 2nd, 1997.
The party took place over a full weekend. We were taken clay pigeon shooting, and driven around the extensive grounds in horse-drawn carriages. In the evenings we were treated to the most lavish food and drink imaginable, all served impeccably by Lord Northampton’s staff in a massive banqueting hall. In the drawing room was the most magnificent fireplace with carvings of goddesses along the sides. An African team of drummers were brought in, and I took a turn on the voodoo drums.
The welcome Spinny, as he likes to be known, gave us was unparalleled. But by then I was back on the speed, and, like a clown, I had brought some along with me to his party. I was playing pool with an Iranian princess and made the mistake of offering her some.
‘What is it?’ she asked me.
‘Coke.’ I said, lying, too embarrassed to be thought of as offering anything so proletarian as ‘speed’.
But she backed off. Oh dear, I thought, that’s blown that.
The next thing I knew, Spinny was coming for me, his face a mask of outrage.
‘Get the fuck out!’ he was beside himself with rage.
I knew I had blown it.
My weekend hit rock bottom when the police called to my house telling me I had been accused of rape. I’d had a fling with a woman who came to me to have her chart drawn up. We saw each other for a few weeks, but she wasn’t happy when things didn’t work out and I decided to stop seeing her. I was arrested and charged, but when it came out that she had been using a spermicidal cream when we had sex, she decided to withdraw the case. I certainly came to know what it was like to be accused of something you hadn’t done. To add to my trouble, a police informant leaked the story of my arrest to one of the tabloids.
I was on a downward spiral now. The more depressed I became about my situation, the more I hit the speed. I lost my job with LiveTV. My weight went down to about eight stone. Evelyne left and took Claudia with her. I became very paranoid, thinking that people were following me. In hindsight, they might well have been. Eventually I thought I was seeing spaceships. The voodoo rituals I was doing probably added to the sense of doom and chaos I was feeling. I kept thinking I was in a circle, with attendant deities and spirits ministering to me. Outside the house I could see commandoes hidden in bushes, radioing each other to keep themselves posted on my movements.
‘He’s in the bog now, over’ one of them said.
‘Is it a number one or number two, over’ came back the reply.
I seemed to be locked into some program from which I couldn’t easily withdraw. I had my lines assigned to me, my role was pre-ordained. Everyone I knew assumed some role of significance in this unfolding drama. Then I had a friendly visit from the local men in white coats. They had come to try and catch me, to cart me off to the loony bin. They surrounded the house, but I was too clever for them. I managed to turn myself into Gollum from the Lord of the Rings and became invisible, hiding myself up in the loft, while I could hear them call out to each other, fruitlessly.
Meanwhile, up in the loft, I happened to come across the Seven Dwarves, quite by chance. They were sleeping up there, and had been, all the time. I could actually look down on them as they slept, in a row. Their little bags for diamond mining were laid out beside them. I thanked my lucky stars that they didn’t wake up while I was up there. They might have shouted out and led the men in white coats to my hiding place. The dog-catchers eventually gave up and went home. I crawled down, had a bath, and went on discovering some of the great secrets that had been buried deep behind the fireplaces. Some of these secrets were astonishing. One contained what looked like a real diamond behind it. Now it was all suddenly very clear.
I had made it!
I had passed some kind of spiritual test!
I had achieved a magical level of accomplishment, attendant with all the great responsibilities that this would entail.
I was a reincarnation of Merlin . I was in touch with the dead and with clever beings from outer space.
There were people ‘out there’ trying to capture me, so one day, I got into my car and drove off. Somehow, I would be guided to where I was ‘supposed’ to be. I remember seeing the red dragon on the way into Wales. At the time I thought it was a good omen. Red is my lucky colour. Arriving in Butetown, I turned into Doctor Who, and walked around the centre of town, mingling with the fellow-actors. Some were role-playing whores, others tough guys. Poor actors though, I could see right through them. And whereas they were scheduled as ‘extras’, I was one of the lead roles. It was going to be me that rolled back the wheel of time and put the world to rights.
On the side of the quay was a ship, and I tried to get into it, thinking that it was going to transport me to some mythical island where I would meet dear friends from long ago. I wept with grief as I realized I was coming down again. On my way back to the car I found two burly Welsh policemen waiting for me.
‘Is this your car, sir?’ one of them asked me.
I looked up into the copper’s face.
Fuck me! It was one of my fellow stall holders from Camden Lock market. How had this fella wangled his way into getting to play the copper that gets to nick me? Bastard.
Then I looked at the other one. I knew him too. That fat fucker from Afghanistan I used to sit down and eat egg and chips with.
But I wasn’t supposed to let on!
When they searched the car they found a big bag of speed, and some syringes. At Butetown police station, they brought in a doctor to examine me. He tut-tutted as he looked up and down the long lines of pin-pricks all along my arms and legs.
‘You are hallucinating,’ he said, and then went away.
Denied bail, I was off to Cardiff nick.
It took me quite a while to come down and get my head together, but prison is a great place to do just that.
One of the lads I shared with, told me he was a member of the IRA. I didn’t see the need to challenge him on this, or take the piss. It’s not a good idea when you have to share a cell with a man who knows how to make a bomb from the shaved-off tops of the red matches, a biro and a few bits of a mop head. I suspected that the causing of explosions is somewhat frowned upon as practice in Her Majesty’s institutions, so I turned him down when he offered to let me set off one of his creations.
Some of the lads recognized me from my spot on the telly, and we would have a get-together in my cell where I would do readings using an ordinary pack of cards. It seemed to work, too. For some reason, coming down off speed seemed to enhance my psychic abilities. I found that I could really see into their lives. As I talked about their situations, I could actually see their family members, and describe them in incredible detail. I wish I could do it at will, but the gift is not always ours to use as we wish. It is only ever lent to us for a certain time or a certain purpose. When I eventually got to Cardiff Crown Court, some four months later, I was found guilty of possession, but not intent to supply, and they let me go.
Evelyne had sold the house while I was inside. I wanted to go somewhere to get my head back together. Even though we were now divorced, Evelyne decided to come with me when I left for Ireland. I wanted to try and make things right with her. We bought a cottage together, overlooking Galway Bay from the top of Sky Road in Clifden. The view was tremendous, but it didn’t help Evelyne and I get along any better.
I tried doing some writing, and got another book published, my second on the subject of ‘The Lord of the Rings’. The frustration at not being able to fix the problems Evelyne and I were having got too much for me. One day I just got back behind the driving wheel and headed off down the road. When Evelyne contacted some time later. She had sold the house. We split the money. My portion of it went to the gods of heroin and crack, hers on Scientology.
I returned to London and the needle. I got a Dykenal prescription from the doctor. The rush wasn’t as great as I’d known it. I would spend hours trying to get that old high back, opening up dozens of mining operations along my arms and legs trying to find a connection. Very often, I would find a vein, but the blood would clot inside the syringe before I could shoot. I’d end up with scores of pin-pricks all along my arms and legs. Sometimes the puncture wounds would swell if I missed the vein and started pushing down on the plunger before I’d really got inside. There is an art to fixing. After the first hit or two of Dykes my vision would start to go. Because Dykes is crushed up tablets, you can’t skin pop it, inject it straight into the fatty tissue, the way you can heroin. It has to go into a vein but sometimes I would miss and leave purple blotches and abscesses all over my body.
Most of those who found their way onto Dykenol scripts never found their way back. It truly was a one-way street, even more so than H or coke.
When the money from the sale of the cottage in Ireland came through, the first thing I did was go out and buy a BMW.
I started kerb crawling out of extreme loneliness and a desire to meet interesting women. It was a real thrill to set off into the mysterious night and go on the prowl, like I was some sort of wild or mythological beast. I met Claire the day after Friday the 13th, on the night of the full moon. She was an Elvish-looking young woman in her twenties, who was also looking for someone to be close to. It was a case of fatal attraction.
The night before I met Claire for the first time, I cast a spell that would lead me to my one true karmic love. So, for a long time I was convinced that Claire was this love. People who knew me thought I’d lost my mind; teaming up with a girl I had met at King’s Cross who also enjoyed doing Class A drugs. It saddened me that she also liked to go out and pick up other men. I was so disappointed when I realized that nothing I could say or do would ever change her. She actually loved the life style. Anonymous sex is a real turn on for a lot of people, and when you smoke crack for as long as Claire had, your mind stops functioning properly. Crack cocaine quickly gets its claws into you, rendering normal thinking obsolete. You lose touch with reality, and slide into a fantasy realm of wishful thinking, all the time needing more and more of the drug to stay there. It’s like living in an apartment where the rent doubles every week. Crack is an aphrodisiac. This is one reason so many addicts relapse and go back to it. They think that the relationships they form with people who are also on that stuff are deeper and more meaningful. The sex is usually infinitely superior, which for the female addicts is usually a big deal. Each moment of a sexual encounter whilst on crack is a thousand times more colourful, more intense, more pleasurable than any sex ever experienced whilst not under the influence.
Bit by bit, my money got wasted away and I ended up losing my small flat. Claire and I just moved in with my old man. He didn’t mind too much as he and Claire started having an affair together. Eventually my money ran out, so we started borrowing off my dad, or Bollocky Bill, as Clare had re-christened him. I played the idiot and pretended not to know what was going on. I would pop out for forty minutes every now and again, to give her a chance to give him a ride. I only had sex with Claire once, and apart from that single blip on the screen, nothing sexual ever took place between us.
Then Clare started bringing punters back into the house. She would pop out only for a few minutes, and return with someone she had just met, taking him by the hand into the front room. I didn’t care. When you are in desperate need , when you are an addict, all that matters is getting another fucking hit. So as soon as we had the money, we would be out the door again to our friendly local dealer.
We went at this hectic pace for months. I was on a methadone script from St. Anne’s. Sometimes, when there was no money, even for brown, it was all we had. I’d get up early in the morning and head down to the local chemist in Wood Green to collect my fix. There were always dozens of other junkies there too, queuing up from nine on the dot. Sometimes I would sell my script for a tenner. With that tenner I could get an actual hit of brown, and the methadone would go to support somebody else’s habit. Thus the addiction circle would slowly but inexorably spread its tentacles out into society. After all, it was methadone that got me started.
When my car was stolen by a fellow junkie, I loaded up a small canvas bag with three big blades. I had been smoking crack earlier that day, but the short-lived effects had long since worn-off, leaving me in a low, that sense of extreme anger and depression that all-too inevitably accompanies the high. I picked up a bottle of wine from an off-licence, and knocked this back as I made my way through the streets to his door. I rang the bell, and he opened, looking a bit confused at first. He wasn’t sure how much I knew. I went in to his front room, and opened the bag, showing him the blades. The next thing I knew I was on the street, walking down Tottenham High Road . A police van pulled up alongside me and half a dozen policemen jumped out and knocked me to the ground.
One of them shouted out, ‘This one’s injured too!’ and handcuffed my hands behind my back. The last thing I remember before I passed out, was the sound of the siren and seeing the flashing light from the top of the van coming through the windows.
It was just beginning to rain when I came to. I was on a medical table. A doctor and a couple of nurses were cutting my clothes off. A policeman put them into an evidence bag along with my shoes. Then they administered a painkiller and I started to get groggy. When I woke, I was handcuffed to a hospital bed with two policemen standing at the end, looking at me.
My mind was a complete blank.
‘What happened?’ I asked one of them, genuinely unable to remember.
‘If you are going to be OK, I can unlock you and you can relax yourself’’ he said.
I assured him that I wasn’t going to be any trouble. He reached over to unlock the handcuffs so I could sit up.
Rubbing my hands where the cuffs had been biting into them, I tried to work out what had happened. I could remember going into my ‘mate’s’ front room, but after that…
Then it started to come back to me. It turned out that I had cut his hand off. They were still trying to sew it back on in another hospital.
I was charged with GBH , grievous bodily harm, and given bail from the court. I walked out of the courtroom carrying all my possessions in a plastic bag. I had twenty stitches where one blade had, during the fighting, bounced back onto my head. The police had very kindly returned my crack pipe to me. Obviously it wouldn’t be needed for evidence like my clothes.
My first thought was to get my methadone. As I held the little bottle up to my mouth, the sunlight struck it, illuminating the bright green liquid just before the sweetness came to life in my mouth . Then it passed down my throat to my belly, where it brought warmth and relaxation. My next objective was to get a tenner together for some brown heroin. However nice a dash of methadone might be, there’s nothing like the real thing to get you truly back on your feet.
When I start to Cluck, the first things that go are my legs. They collapse under me, leaving me crippled and helpless. But with the methadone kicking in I could use my legs again. I was striding as I made my way over to the derelict house by Duckett’s Common. It was a half-burned out hovel that served as a squat and general shooting gallery. I walked through into the long corridor that ran the length of the house to the back. There the bonzos and drongos that I associated with would be waiting for someone with gear to walk in. If they expected me to sort them out, though, they were in for a surprise. I had just about enough to sort myself out.
Most of them would go shoplifting to get a bit of money together. When I went hoisting it was with Scouser Jane. She was short, but very robust, physically and mentally. When she sorted me out for smoke, I let her crash at my place. But she was like a demon. As soon as all the stuff was smoked off, she would get ready to go out again. She would go out hoisting three, four times a day. My job was to wait at the shop entrance and make sure none of the security guards were following her. I would help her get her haul onto a bus. We’d head up Jolly Butchers Hill to the little old Greek lady in the bakers shop, who would buy everything from her for half price. En route from the bakers, Jane and I would pick up the gear from the dealer. A quick call from the nearby phone box would bring him round in ten minutes. We’d have enough for a few blasts of crack, to be followed by a steadying line or two of brown, just to cool things down afterwards.
Like most junkies, Jane had a little ritual she would go through, just before she lit up. She would always change into a nightie, not a baby doll one, but a really boring, old-time granny nightie, immediately before putting the stone on the gauze. Then, after all the gear had been smoked, she would change back into her blue top and jeans as if nothing had happened. She was as nutty as they come, really.
Jane had all her buyers already worked out. There was the woman with the dog up at Turnpike lane who would buy all the underwear Jane could bring; the elderly Greek lady who wanted DVD players all day long; the lady off Green Lanes who was her cream buyer, and so on. Jane had, over the years as north London’s most successful hoister, created an entire eco-system of alternative commercial activity around her. I suppose she should really get the Nobel Peace Prize for something like that. It never ceased to amaze me how she could slip right by those so-called security men and not be noticed. Occasionally, one of them would recognize her. I remember one at Marks and Sparks. He tried to intimidate her, standing with his hands on his hips like he was a big man, and telling her that if she went inside ‘his shop’ he would immediately arrest her. Jane, if misguided in some ways, was certainly not lacking in the courage department. She stood up to him, replying that it wasn’t his shop and he didn’t have any powers of arrest.
In the world of heroin and crack cocaine, there were some fairly mad but interesting women. One of the maddest was Pauline. She was floating around with a gorilla by the name of Steve, whose sole claim to fame (or infamy, depending on how you look at it) was that his dad had been a member of the SAS. Steve was a mental case, a registered nutter from Chase Farm Mental Hospital. He would accompany Pauline on her hoisting trips. Because of his size, he was able to intimidate security staff if Pauline ever got rumbled.
Steve and Pauline thought they’d try their luck at being dealers. They hatched a plan to get my car off me. Steve started giving me credit, something a junkie should never accept. When the debts are called in there is always a disagreement as to how much is owed and how much has been paid. But, with Claire’s prompting, I took the stuff on credit. Before I knew it, my bill was up to about four hundred pounds. Then Steve turned round and said that, according to his records, I owed him about three grand. I was so shocked that I put up no resistance when he jumped up and grabbed my car keys. At first I tried to reason with him, but he wasn’t having any of it. I knew that he would probably use my car for robberies so I reported it stolen, and gave the police Steve’s name.
The police stopped him that night. Apparently he cried when they arrested him! And he always made out that he was such a tough guy. Pauline cried too when they came to take her away. Up until that point they had been moving as if they were two star players out of ‘The Sweeney’ or ‘Crime Scene’. Clowns. The world of crack cocaine is full of them.
It didn’t take me long to realize that Claire had been an important part of their team. She would scout out potential victims and then get them into situations where Steve and Pauline could rob them. In court Steve got about seven years for stealing a Porche. He had got some other fella the same way he had got me. At the court hearing, he tried to make a break for it. He leapt over the railing and fought his way through the usher and two policemen to get to the door. He didn’t get far. Three more police men were waiting for him outside the court building to drag him back into court. What happened to Pauline? I have no idea.
Girls like her would vanish all the time. They rip off, rob, set-up or grass-up so many people that it becomes inevitable. Someone recognises them and takes their vengeance. There were plenty of times I would be walking along with Claire, when she would spot someone and say to me, ‘Run!’ as she took off, as quick as a flash, down some side street.
King’s Cross was wild in those days. There were dozens, maybe hundreds , of crack dens, dotted all over the place. These places made massive amounts of money, every night; even the smallest of them would make thousands of pounds. The girls would start coming to from the previous night’s revels about sunset. No money, no crack, it was time to find a few punters. The girls turned tricks in the side streets, in the backs of cars, anywhere. If they had enough crack to keep them going, they wouldn’t sleep for days at a time. They would do dozens of punters, one after the other, only stopping to pull into the crack house for a blast of crack or a shot of heroin.
This was the part of London that never slept. Hundreds of cars containing punters hovered about the area all night long, ferrying a fresh supply of males from all over London. The crack dens were almost all run by Jamaicans. They would sit inside the door with the crack and heroin wrapped up in tiny little plastic packets inside their mouths. If the police steamed in they could swallow the evidence.
With a tempting mix of drugs, money and lawlessness it was hardly surprising that robberies, or attempted robberies, were common. These were hard men and they fought fire with fire. I heard stories of dealers losing ears to the thieves’ blades rather than hand over their gear. It wasn’t just the money; a man’s honour and prestige were at stake. The loss of an ear was a small price to pay for being known as a hard man to do business with.
The working girls set up a lot of the robberies. They knew who was carrying the stuff as they made up the majority of the business in the dens. The girls would strike up an alliance with professional or wannabe robbers, and guide them in to a particular place or person. Punters were, of course, another favourite target for a con. The girl would pick up a fella on the main road and then direct him to a little back alley, making out she was too paranoid to go any further. Then, one or two of her male friends would leap on the guy and beat him senseless; take everything he had and drive off in his car, taking the girl with them.
Where were the police in all this? I guess they had bigger fish to catch. The same girls who set up the punters were often recruited by the dealers to do a run abroad. They would know when the big shipments were coming in. So the police left them alone in return for any information they had. Of course, the police were often linked to the dealers in less savoury ways. The corruption that was rife in Islington, Brixton and Stoke Newington Police Stations back in the 90s is well known. Certain officers lined their own pockets, in return for turning a blind eye to a certain level of drug activity.
The outrageousness of the girls down at King’s Cross amazed me. One girl would walk with her bare arse showing all along Caledonian Road, outside Pentonville Prison until she got a punter. The girls were usually extremely well-known to the police down there, and knew that, if they were on any wanted lists, they only had fifteen minutes or so to find a customer, make their money and get back into the car for me to drive them off.
Some of them were able to scoop together fifty to a hundred pounds in under that time. They would leap back into the car with their fists full of money, breathless.
‘Quick, Tel, drive!’ they would say, when they managed to get a bit of extra money out of the punter’s wallet without him noticing. The next stop would be the dealer, or, for some girls, the dealers. Some of them preferred to get their heroin from one source, and then their crack from another, rather than to get both from the same place, as quality would vary enormously, and within a short space of time.
Millie was really good at pulling one of the oldest scams in whoredom . She would wait out on the street for a likely punter. When he propositioned her she would point to a door and tell him a big long story about how she needed a hundred pounds deposit, completely refundable of course, before she could let him into the whorehouse. I used to play the role of the satisfied customer and pretend to be leaving the place. The guys would take me to one side and ask me about this deposit business, and I would tell them it was perfectly normal. Millie and I would split the takings and leave these sad plonkers banging on some stranger’s door
‘Well, where’s the fucking girls, then?’ I heard one irate punter shout, as the woman inside threatened to call the police.
But there was no honour amongst thieves. Back at the crack house Millie would always try to con me out of my half of the money or the gear. She would give me some romantic bullshit about how she had been waiting for me for so long, or she would try steal my car keys off me while we were smoking. When you hit on a big stone, the high can be so intense you completely lose awareness of what is happening right around you.