Breaking Out Read online

  About the Author

  JANICE NIX’s journey is a remarkable story of someone with a criminal history transforming her life to become an award-winning Probation Service Officer. It embodies the transformative change that is possible for ex-offenders. Winning the probation service’s Diversity and Engagement Award enabled her to believe in herself and extend that belief to others on similar journeys.

  Janice lives to inspire and empower individuals and to be the best version of themselves that they can be. Her motto is ‘Each one, teach one’, and she truly believes that change is achievable, no matter who you are.

  Copyright

  An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2021

  Copyright © Janice Nix 2021

  Janice Nix asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Ebook Edition © January 2021 ISBN: 9780008385958

  Version 2020-12-30

  Note to Readers

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  Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008385941

  Janice

  This book is dedicated to my daughter Nadia, the real survivor

  Elizabeth

  For Edward and Alvin Shivmangal

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Note to Readers

  Dedication

  1:Fuck it bucket

  2:Crisis centre

  3:The year I took up badness

  4:Aye aye, dick eye

  5:Cops and robbers

  6:If a woman runs the country – why can’t we do this?

  7:Murder on New Bond Street

  8:You’re a different cat, Mama J

  9:Money talk, bullshit walk

  10:Waiting like a loaded gun

  11:In the dock in Gucci

  12:Green channel

  13:Alone time

  14:Position of trust

  15:Nine to five to nine

  16:Clearing up a hurricane with a dustpan and brush

  Acknowledgements

  About the Publisher

  1

  Fuck it Bucket

  MAY 2014

  ISABELLE WAS BEAUTIFUL. GOLDEN hair, deep grey eyes, a high pale forehead. But I didn’t gaze for long. The girl was a beautiful hot mess. My job was to keep her out of prison.

  She was restless and supermodel thin. Smoking brown – heroin – had turned her into barely skin and bone. I knew she used white – cocaine – as well. White takes yuh up, an’ brown brings yuh down. The angles of her face were filled with shadow and up close, I could see faint dried scabs where she’d been scratching. Craving for drugs makes you claw at your skin. Her dirty hair was full of tangles. The more details you noticed, the rougher this girl looked.

  I was her engagement worker with London’s probation service. Izzie was a good girl underneath, I thought – she’d made it there each week since she’d been ordered to attend a support group with me. That Tuesday morning, for an hour and a half, she was one of ten women, all on probation, who’d come to report their progress. If they didn’t engage with the service, and with me, they were likely to be going to prison.

  Five weeks earlier, I’d set eyes on Izzie for the very first time. A probation officer colleague of mine had been trying to work with her. But Izzie didn’t want to know. She’d been late to one meeting and missed a home visit entirely. She was one breach of probation away from the end of the line.

  I quickly read her file. Involvement with gangs, drug dealing, prostitution. Arrested with forty other members of the ring – all the others received custodial sentences. But Izzie was put on three months’ probation. A beautiful girl is often let off lightly by the courts. And don’t she just know it. Now she thinks that she can get away with anything.

  I looked her up and down. I saw a cute little wannabe smartarse – a chance-taker who badly overestimated how far her cuteness could go. She’d got a whole lot of attitude – but one look in her eyes and a scared little girl was staring back at me.

  ‘Hello, Izzie,’ I said. ‘Your probation officer tells me that you’re not engaging with her. What’s wrong?’

  I could see that she was taken aback by me, even a little intimidated. I’m tall and powerful-looking – I know how to make an impression. I’ve used that presence of mine to put the frighteners on far tougher customers than this girl. I watched her thinking, trying to decide how she could work this situation.

  She decided to play it cute. She tried to flirt with me. She flipped her knotted hair and began a long spiel about all the problems she’d been having. How difficult it was to get to meetings with probation because the neighbours were noisy and kept her awake and the buses weren’t reliable and she’d run out of money for her Oyster card and –

  I cut right through her routine.

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘This is fix-up time. It’s your last chance.’

  At least I’d got her attention.

  ‘If you breach your probation order, they’ll put you inside. It’s very close to happening. Is that what you want?’

  ‘Er –’

  I looked her frankly up and down.

  ‘You live far from the kitchen?’ I asked her.

  ‘Sorry – what?’

  ‘It looks like you don’t cook. Like you don’t eat.’

  When she understood, she tried to laugh it off.

  ‘Oh, hahaha. Far from the kitchen. Yeah.’

  ‘Izzie,’ I said, ‘I’m going to work with you, and together we are going to sort out this crap.’

  She shuffled her feet.

  ‘But before that – we’re going out to lunch.’

  I took her to a local eat-as-much-as-you-like Chinese buffet. She piled up her plate and I could tell that she was hungry. I let her dig in, and waited until she slowed down.

  ‘Izzie.’

  She raised her head. I noticed she looked better. The warm food had put a little colour in her face.

  ‘We’re going to start slow,’ I said to her. ‘Each day, we’re going to set you a target. Something you have to get done. Maybe go out and buy some food. Do your laundry. Clean your place.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I knew she was only playing me along. She was still using drugs, so I wouldn’t get a whole lot of co-operation. Still, we had to start somewhere.

  ‘We’re going to keep in touch by phone as well. I want to hear how things are going.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Three times a week,’ I told her. ‘I’ll call you at ten in the morning, on Monday and Wednesday and Friday.’

  I could see straightaway she was not too happy with that.

>   ‘Do you think that’s too early?’ I asked.

  ‘Uh – well, Janice, look. Quite often I’m still in bed then.’

  ‘It’s good for you to get up in the morning. It might be hard at first, but you’ll get used to it.’

  She stared down at the table.

  ‘And I’ll see you next week, in the office, for our meeting. On time. I don’t accept excuses for lateness.’

  She looked at me wide-eyed, and then she nodded. She didn’t try to argue again.

  Back at my desk, I read her file in full. Artistic parents – her father was a musician – but their marriage broke down while their daughter was a very small child. Her mother had been diagnosed with bipolar depression. After the split with Izzie’s dad, she found another guy quite quickly. But Izzie and her stepfather didn’t get along. The older she got, the nastier their arguments became. Eventually the fighting at home got physical. Then, when Izzie was thirteen, she found a boyfriend. That was when the real trouble started.

  Jake was a messed-up eighteen-year-old who carried a knife to feel more manly. He beat up his girlfriends if he thought they had stepped out of line. To Izzie, he seemed sophisticated, handsome and cool. By now she had been taken into care because of her stepfather’s violence, but no one from children’s services could keep tabs on her. Soon she was sleeping in a football club storeroom with Jake. One moment he was kind and supportive, the next he was accusing her of sleeping with his friends. She was dragged into his world of mental control.

  When she turned sixteen, social services arranged for her to move into a flat of her own. One day Jake came round to visit and found a man’s sock. It belonged to the boyfriend of a friend, but he blew his top with paranoid jealousy. He beat Izzie up so badly that she ended up in hospital. Then he disappeared. She was too scared to press charges, just in case he didn’t get a prison sentence and came looking for her.

  A friend of a friend introduced her to the crack pipe. Izzie found a way she could blot out all the misery and mess of a life that was going off the rails. Pretty quickly she was hooked. She had a new boyfriend, and the two of them started robbing dealers. They’d ring up and say that they wanted to buy a large amount. The local dealers used younger boys as runners, so when the runner arrived with the drugs, the new boyfriend beat the lads up and took their stuff.

  Then Izzie was recruited as a runner herself. By now the drugs ring had been infiltrated by police. She’d not been working long when she tried to score with a user who was really an undercover cop. That was how she was arrested.

  The women’s group met in the conference room at Brixton probation office. It was spare and plain, with three off-white walls and the fourth painted deep swampy green. The paint needed retouching. We pushed the small tables up to one end and made a circle of chairs in the middle, our backs to the clamour of notices pinned on the walls. Those sheets of A4 paper signalled all the chaos in the lives of the people who were sitting in those chairs.

  WORRIED ABOUT DOMESTIC VIOLENCE?

  HAVE YOU BEEN SEXUALLY ABUSED?

  PROBLEMS WITH BENEFIT CLAIMS?

  WE’LL FIND THE RIGHT COURSE

  FOR THE RIGHT JOB!

  STAND UP FOR YOUR RIGHTS!

  In the middle of the circle, I placed the fuck it bucket. It’s not a real bucket, but we all imagined it together. I told the women to sling their rubbish in.

  ‘Chuck it in there, ladies. Doesn’t matter what it is. Doesn’t matter if it’s messy. Maybe you screwed up. Maybe you made a decision in a panic, then found out it isn’t working. If it hurts or doesn’t work or it’s gone all wrong – in it goes. We’ll get these problems out and take a look at them, one at a time. We’ll think together, and we’ll all try to help.’

  As the bucket filled up, I felt the room grow calmer. When women talk, I know that things can change.

  I looked around. I could see that Izzie wasn’t listening to the talk in the group – just the same as the last three weeks that she’d been there. She was distracted, glancing at her watch, then looking again, easing up the cuff of her sweatshirt very slowly so that maybe I wouldn’t notice what she was doing. She looked at the clock on the wall and fidgeted, wondering if her watch might be slow. She was attending the meeting, doing as she was told – but she wasn’t really there.

  Who you waitin’ for, girl?

  Again I spotted her swift furtive glance towards the window.

  Who you waitin’ for, Izzie?

  I thought I knew the answer, but I needed to be certain, so I walked to the window and peered through its vertical white bars into the street. Just as I looked outside, a silver BMW 5 Series rolled round the corner and parked right opposite. I’d seen it before, each Tuesday for the previous three weeks. It got me wondering – same driver, same car. He was a black man, West Indian. A bredda, I thought to myself.

  We had fifteen minutes until the group was over. I’d done all I could to help the other women that day. I looked again at the still shape of the man waiting in the car. I was pretty sure by then what he was doing here, and what he’d come to do. Bit by bit, line by line, he’d come to destroy Izzie’s life.

  Whatever it took, I decided that I was going to stop him.

  ‘Can you please start clearing up?’ I said to the group. ‘I have to see to something.’

  I walked along the building’s winding corridors, then pressed the buzzer which released the final outer door. It was an early summer day – a sharp breeze still blew, but I could feel the warmth of the sun. I crossed the road and tapped on the BMW’s window.

  The man in the driving seat looked up. Nice car, but he was still dressed rough. I suspected that he was a shotter – selling drugs on the street. That’s why he wasn’t flash. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself.

  I know what you’re doing here. Yuh can’t tek mi fi fool.

  When he met my eyes, I rotated my hand, telling him to wind down the window. He was so surprised that he did it.

  ‘Good morning, young man. You waitin’ for Izzie?’ I asked.

  He didn’t answer – just stared up at me without blinking.

  Slowly, through pursed lips, he exhaled.

  ‘I am from probation.’ I touched the ID badge that hung around my neck. ‘Mi nah waa see yuh yah again.’

  The dealer shrugged. I spoke more firmly.

  ‘Leave Izzie alone. If I see you here again, I will call the police.’

  Now he looked straight at me. At first he was surprised, but I could see I’d made him angry. Eye to eye for a moment, we both held our ground.

  ‘Don’ make mi spin two time an see yuh out here,’ I said to him. My words were a warning.

  Still holding my gaze, he wound the window back up. Then he started the engine, and the car slid forwards. I watched as he drove around the corner into Stockwell Road, and vanished from sight.

  Back in the conference room, the group was breaking up. The women were chatting, but Izzie wasn’t joining in. She was pulling up her leggings and flipping back her hair. She went over to the pile of coats and jackets on a table in the corner and searched for her own.

  ‘Izzie?’ I said.

  ‘Yes?’ She half turned towards me, threw me that distracted, lovely smile.

  ‘Can I have a word, when the others have gone?’

  ‘Errrr –’

  She thought she was in a hurry for her date with her dealer.

  ‘You got time, Izzie. Nobody’s waiting outside.’

  ‘But –’

  I was her engagement worker, which meant she couldn’t argue with me. She pressed her lips shut and looked confused.

  ‘Your man in the BMW,’ I said to her. ‘The guy waiting outside. What’s the deal with him?’

  ‘Markie? He’s a – friend. He picks me up here and takes me back home.’

  She knew I didn’t believe her.

  ‘So what’s the real deal with Markie?’ I asked.

  She shrugged and didn’t answer.

  ‘Let’s
sit down,’ I said. ‘Let’s talk. You’ve not said anything today. We need a catch-up.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah – sure. But Janice – I need to meet Markie right now.’

  I looked her straight in the eye.

  ‘You don’t need to meet Markie now. Or ever. I told you, no one’s waiting. He’s gone.’

  She gasped.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I told him to go away and leave you alone.’

  Her face clouded over. ‘Why did you –?’ Then she remembered again that I work for probation. She stopped speaking and folded her arms. As she gathered her sweatshirt back against her body, I noticed again how painfully thin she really was.

  ‘Will you do something for me?’ I said to her. She nodded, but I knew she was angry.

  ‘Izzie, I want you to look in the mirror. For five minutes, every evening, before you go to bed.’ I put on a southern belle-style accent, pursed my lips up and gave a sexy little wiggle. ‘Really look in dat mirror, girl, an’ see just how damn gawjus you are.’

  She gave me a small, uncertain smile. She shifted from foot to foot.

  ‘Uh –’

  I knew I’d be taking a big chance, but I thought I could reach her.

  ‘And then,’ I went on firmly, ‘when you’ve realised that – realise something else. Izzie – you’re a walking commodity. Shall I tell you why?’

  Now she was staring at the floor.

  ‘Izzie – if I was a certain type of criminal, a man with intentions, I’d entertain you. I’d wine you and I’d dine you. I’d get you seen in all the right places. Put you in a flat in Mayfair. Do you know how much escorts make up there? You’d be my prize girl.’

  She didn’t lift her eyes.

  ‘Or maybe I’d put you on a plane. Get you working as a drugs mule. Just look at you,’ I went on. ‘What a useful commodity you’d be.’

  A moment before, she’d heard something that caught her attention. I could tell she was listening now.

  ‘If you was a certain type of criminal, Janice?’ she said. ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘Let’s just say – before probation, I led a pretty colourful life.’