Crimwife (18 page)

Since Brad had left with Lily, there’d been only one other hope of escape from the failed attempts at detoxes and rehabs. His name was Kevin, and he was a security officer in a club near where she worked. He wasn’t sleazy or shifty like the rest, and she confirmed this as true after going out for dinner with him. Trina believes Kevin loved her for herself, and he moved her in and off the streets within two weeks of the dinner. Trina said she loved Kevin, who’d had some business success and made her feel like a princess. He bought her presents and gave her his car to drive. His only vice was drinking scotch from time to time, and Trina’s former chaotic life started to fade into the distance. As the weeks, turned to months, Kevin didn’t change his feelings.

He treated her well, with a genuine respect she had never known. She wanted to give up heroin, which Kevin was paying for in part, but was finding it hard this time. The couple was convinced that a new rapid detox method would work, and Trina booked herself in to an elite clinic.

Feeling secure for one of the few times in her life, Trina was woken on the morning of her detox admission by a 5 am phone call. Kevin had been killed in a car crash on his way home from work. Trina took her personal belongings and the last of the drugs and left the house. She never made it to rehab. Kevin’s family dissociated themselves from her completely, and Trina went back to sex work.

Her current boyfriend, Jeff, is an odd choice for Trina. There’s not much social advancement with him. When they met, he was out of jail for a couple of months, having been in and out since being sent to a boys’ home when he was twelve. He’d been caught stealing, and his mother didn’t stand in the way of the court’s consequences. In the eighteen years that followed, he’d been out of jail for about three of them in total. Trina said she’d previously had a rule about getting involved with men from jail, and didn’t know why Jeff made her break it.

She said she felt loved by him and that he cared about her as much as himself. He had nursed her when she was sick, and when they detoxed together, he always looked after them both. He said after they got Lily back, they would then have a baby together and this would be the family they both wanted so much. He was determined to gain access to his son, who was born when he was twenty, and whom he hadn’t seen for years.

Trina and Jeff’s bond was strong. They wrote long letters declaring their eternal love for each other, and she would faithfully visit every Saturday and some Sundays, sometimes by public transport, sometimes in the cars of clients who had agreed to trade her sleeping over for a drive to Silverwater the next day. To Jeff, she denied working, but said that he knew. She liked that he read books about prostitutes while he was in jail to try and understand the psychology of what she was doing, and why she couldn’t give it up.

*

Jimmy hated Trina. Hate, hate, hated Trina. He didn’t want me to be friends with her, to think she was funny, to even talk to her, and he was furious when he found out she had come to stay.

“What do I ask of you?” he would say to me during visits, as Trina and I would look sideways at each other across the room, trying not to giggle. Visits is a very serious place. “I don’t ask you not to see anyone or do anything. But I know her from somewhere. I’m sure I’ve seen her face in Melbourne. And I don’t like her.” Over time, I noticed that Jimmy often remembered people when he wanted to influence my interaction with them or my opinion of them. Suddenly, he would know them from somewhere else, and they would be trouble.

The hatred in his face was brand-new, or at least I had never seen it before. In that laboratory-style environment, under fluorescent lights, while the clock ticks its warning of time running out, you learn to read someone’s facial expressions thoroughly. I had seen his contempt for the suspected sex offender, or the more general dog, who’d betrayed someone. I had also seen the admiration cross his face as he nodded in the direction of a high-profile inmate who had clearly been set up by the prosecution or his best mate or a woman. But I’d seen nothing like the magnetic repulsion that he showed when Trina came into the room or the conversation.

I figured that because she was a working girl, he was threatened by her and her independence. She was a lot less trouble and a lot more use to me than he was. Her needs were clearly defined and her wants were always negotiable. But it was deeper than that.

Before too long, jolted by his determined hatred for a girl he barely knew, it occured to me: “He hates Trina because he’s the same whore that she is.” It was a logical and obvious point. He was using me in the same way she was using me, only she didn’t have to write me love letters. She was availing herself of my address, my home and my company, which he viewed as his own.

Jimmy wouldn’t let it go, even when I gave up speaking about Trina, because he knew she was still staying with me. “She shouldn’t be there, you know. And as far as I’m concerned, she’s drinking my coffee and watching my TV and sleeping on my couch.”

It had taken me years to figure out that when Jimmy said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” it was just a line. So this time I said it to him, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Listen,” he said, growing angrier, “she’s going to do something to you that’s going to fuck you up so seriously that you’ll be picking up the pieces for five years to come.”

“How would you know?” I pushed it. “You don’t know anything about her.”

“I know,” he said. “And how often do I ask you to do anything like this?”

After about six weeks of Trina staying with me, the alcohol began to have a strange effect. It was making Trina hostile, and she started getting angry with me. We rapidly grew on each other’s nerves.

Jimmy was unsympathetic and unimpressed. He refused to call me for three days to prove his point.

Three days of silence was a big deal. It was the longest we had gone without contact since he’d been tipped from Parramatta in the beginning. When he called again, he went straight back to his point.

“You don’t understand how this works yet, do you? What you do out there has ten times the impact in here. You associating with her can have all kind of repercussions for me that you have no idea about. And you will have no idea because I won’t tell you.”

“Why not?” 

“Because you don’t need to know and I’ll just cop it. But she needs to go.”

When I told Trina what Jimmy had said, she was drunk, and she screamed at me, “Can’t you see that he’s just using you for parole?” I now had no clue who was on the side of truth. She left for two days and never mentioned it again.

And then, one day soon after, just as quickly as she had arrived, Trina announced she was leaving. We parted amicably, both of us relieved. She had found me too neurotic, and drunks bore me. She left her number for a phone that, like each one before, she lost the next week.

We caught up in the visits line, waiting to be processed, a few Sundays later. When she saw me, she hugged me and started crying. “I was raped at work this week,” she sobbed, her body shaking. I hugged her. We were about fifteen minutes from being called in.

In visits, both the inmate and the visitor play roles. There was no way she could tell Jeff about the rape. It would make his jail so much harder, and he would have to avenge her from the inside. She understood, because she’d been in jail, how it would make him feel.

We were at the front of the queue.

“Could you move your crying somewhere else?” the processing officer called out to us. “You’re in the way of the line.” Any wrong reaction or behaviour can cost a visit. We moved aside.

Trina told me this was the eighth time she’d been raped. The last time it had happened, two years earlier, she’d told Jeff, and it had caused more trouble than it was worth. He’d been angry and sullen. So this time we would both keep silent. And we’d stop the crying, in case we lost our place in the line.

I didn’t hear much from Trina after that. She called once to say she’d had a narrow miss getting busted shoplifting. She told the officers the clothes were to wear when she met up with her daughter, and the cops had been lenient. She was waiting on her parole officer’s decision about whether to breach her. She never made it to see Lily. Jeff called when he got out, to track down his belongings which she had lost, and he said he’d found her using and working heavily. He took his freedom slowly, did the few things he’d wanted to while he was out, and went back to jail two weeks later.

When Jimmy first got out, he was shocked to see himself in a full mirror. He’d only had a small rectangle to shave with in jail, and he was amazed at how old his reflection had grown.

But I knew he had seen his reflection in Trina’s face. I have no idea which parts of his childhood are true, and whether his stories compare to Trina’s. But their adult lives have been identical.

She is craftier, smarter, more charming and wealthier. Her criminality has mostly gone unnoticed. She kept her freedom until meeting one of his kind and was out again on parole long before him. She sees the darkness in humanity that so few are even aware of. She is a successful prostitute, because she knows that sex is not what keeps her regulars satisfied. The majority of the fifteen or thirty or sixty minutes they buy her for isn’t spent satisfying them sexually, but making them feel good, special, attractive, manly and worthwhile. So many men pay her to be someone who will listen and is guaranteed to understand.

Trina and Jimmy have so much in common. They’ve survived life in its most ugly, desperate and degraded expressions, evading death and exploiting each moment and each person they’ve encountered for maximum profit. The commoner’s ideas of dignity were lost to them many years back; there are no lines in the sand. There is nothing for them that can’t be bought or sold. Their concept of survival or victory at any given time dictates their price, as well as what they are willing to sell. They don’t believe in gratitude or remorse. They are only as satisfied in themselves as in their latest job or fix, and the one that needs to come next.

If I were to put it sweetly, I would call Jimmy a chameleon, with the ability to adapt and be flexible, to assess a situation, to be wise and to know people. Some days, he can be a gentleman, or a bloke’s bloke, a philosopher or a romantic. On other days, when I look back at his tear-stained letters with “forever” and “always” and “yours” all over them, I know he’s a common whore who believes he deserves to be a highly paid escort.

I remember that Trina was honest with me, while Jimmy reminds me more of an opportunistic infection, a virus searching for a home, invading, leeching, destroying, before moving on to search for a new host. The reason he hated Trina was that during those weeks when I was their common ground, they were competing for the same cell life. She was daring to work his corner and, from the inside of a jail cell, he managed to move her along.

A few months after Angie and I had met, Luke got out of jail. Her life was more stable than it had been for nine years. She had custody of her teenage boys and a permanent full-time job. Three years on from the high-speed police chase with Luke, she was still mending relationships with her relatives, who’d been unforgiving of her recklessness. When we first spoke, she was enthusiastic about a better future. She wanted more for her boys, she told me, and to make up for the life they’d lived with her jail boyfriend.

She was open enough in our second interview to say that her longing for Luke still existed. She fantasised about being with him, and that was hard to give up. The good times had been great. There was no one else who had ever made her feel the way he did. They had made so many promises to each other and they had meant them, she believed. It was the people around both of them who had torn them apart. His ex, her family, the father of her boys, nobody had approved, which, as it tends to do, only pushed the couple closer together. She knew, though, that they had all been right. Being with Luke had brought nothing but havoc into her life, and she had only narrowly escaped jail and losing her kids permanently. It had even taken her weeks to get her house fixed after the months of Luke living there. Repairs had been ignored while she was with him. The friends of friends who’d broken in while she and Luke were on the run had taken whatever could be easily hocked and trashed the place.

Angie could see clearly now that Luke’s drug use wasn’t temporary. The lifestyle she’d thought he was battling to leave when she visited him the first time in rehab was all he knew years later, and with the benefit of jail, he was a much more capable criminal. Angie felt that acknowledging her feelings for him was healthy, and she also felt that they were finally over. She had changed her numbers and refused his calls for so long now that he had left her alone for some months before Angie and I spoke.

The only issue at that time was that her current relationship with John was disappointing her. John was great with her boys. He worked in a mobile phone outlet store and lived a regular life. He didn’t have the driving ambition that Luke did, even if Luke’s only dreams were of drugs or hiding from police. John was happy enough working, spending time at home with her and the boys, or going to the pub for a few beers and some Keno. The boys played football and the four of them liked watching games together. Life was almost as it should be, except for the outings to the pub growing longer, but since John had nothing at all to do with crime, the excitement and the pain Angie was used to were missing. The roller-coaster had been exchanged for a ferry ride, which is what is supposed to happen when you grow up. Angie knew this and was doing her best to enjoy the pleasant storm-free sail across the peaceful lake. John’s version of excitement consisted of beer and well-played football. The more disgust she showed at his drinking, the more John drank to flaunt Angie’s hypocrisy. “You put up with that junkie scum,” he’d say, “so you don’t even know what normal is when you see it.”

“You may as well be a junkie,” she’d tell him. “You act like one, only it’s legal for you to act like that. At least junkies shut up when they get what they need.”

John’s jealousy of Luke was never far from the surface. He knew he was no competition for him. The mixture of fear and joy that flashed across Angie’s face when the Luke situation was raised was proof enough.

Angie was determined to do right by her boys, and said she believed that she wouldn’t have any real contact with Luke again. But after he got out, he tracked down her number and called her. How he got it, she doesn’t know. She didn’t recognise the number on the screen when he first called, but she hung up straight away when she realised it was him. She said that he sounded so good, so healthy and so like the early Luke, drug-free and enthusiastic. Even though she’d vowed never to see or speak to him again, his voice sparked all her old feelings. Within hours of hearing Luke’s voice, Angie wanted to see him again.

Luke was drug-free but homeless and staying with friends. By the time he found Angie, he’d been out three weeks and was doing well, apart from being poor. He asked about the chocolate mousse she used to make and she told him she had some left from the weekend. The next day, three years after Angie had turned her back on Luke, she was having sex with him in his mate’s house, as soon as his mate had gone out. She sent me an SMS that said, “I’m in full swing.”

She was thrilled to be with Luke again. It was picking up from where they’d left off. He made her feel beautiful, like a queen, and one half of their own universe. The night before a job interview, John came home drunk and woke Angie up as he sang his way into bed. The next morning she told him to leave. Then she went to meet Luke. That night, a weeping John asked her how and why he did not get a tenth of the understanding she lavished on Luke. Angie did not know what to say. She had no rational answer.

Apart from the strong physical connection, Angie still struggles to explain it. The evidence is clear that Luke brings only problems into her life. She had spent seven years with them and they had become her own problems too. Yet her longing for Luke had never entirely left.

This time, it was harder to manage. She had to hide the situation from her parents, family, friends and John, until she ended things with him. After John moved out, it was much easier to see Luke again and for longer. His love for her was louder and stronger than ever, she says, despite their time apart. He was so happy he had “Angie” tattooed in a quarter-moon shape from armpit to armpit on his chest.

The problems were still there. When Luke saw his son, he would argue with his ex and get depressed. He started dabbling with drug use, and then it grew to an everyday need. For someone who hated pot when she had smoked it once, and who occasionally drank a couple of glasses of wine at weddings, Angie was back on course with Luke. Once again she was funding his habit, and found herself waiting outside dealers’ houses in the car. In their small community, it would only take one person to see her and put the pieces together. Gossip about them had spread like wildfire after the police chase had been on the news. Angie had turned her back on anyone involved with Luke after he went to jail and she went to court. And there she was again, reassuring him he wouldn’t be sick for long, giving him her phone to call dealers, and sitting in plain view while he ran into an apartment block or house, wiping the vomit off his arm with his sleeve. When he jumped back in the car, he would insist it was the last time.

This time, though, it was harder to tolerate. Angie’s patience quickly wore thin. When they got home after one of these drives, Angie made herself clear. She told Luke that she had only ever spoken to him because he was clean. His drug use led to crime and jail, and she wanted that part of her life to be over forever. Luke snapped, says Angie, grabbing her arm, clenching and twisting it. With his other hand he pushed her chest back, banging her head into the wall. “You’d wanna be really, really careful who you tell what to do, you fat whore.” Then he left.

He turned up two hours later, and Angie told him to go. Luke refused and started yelling outside about the slut he knew who lived in this house. Then he kicked the door in. He called her a self-righteous bitch and blamed her for his drug use. Angie told him she’d call the police if he wouldn’t go, which eventually convinced Luke, who was still on parole and not ready to go back yet.

The bruise on her arm was a nasty black purple that didn’t fade for two weeks. The security doors and window locks she installed cost her thousands of dollars that she didn’t have. Her boys found out that she’d been seeing Luke while they were with their father or at school. Angie took out a two-year restraining order against him. There was a lot to make up for, again. But Angie says her boys were more forgiving this time, because the trouble had gone on for only three months and their mother had kept them out of harm’s way.

“He called me fat,” says Angie, when we try to reach a conclusion about why she’d acted so quickly to get rid of Luke, instead of giving him another chance. She said that since she’d always been a good girl before Luke, it was much easier to live an honest and stable life. She would never jeopardise her kids’ safety again, either. And Luke’s violent outburst had been one too many this time. But how was it different from the times they’d fought before?

“In all our time together, he had only ever made me feel beautiful. Suddenly, I wondered if all of it was a lie. He had called me other names before in fights we’d had, but never fat, never ugly. He always used to make me feel good about myself and then, that day, it disappeared. It was all we had after everything that happened – the fantasy, the fairytale – and he destroyed it when he called me fat. I knew he’d only get worse.”

The day Luke kicked her door in was the last time Angie saw him. He went back to jail not long after and wrote her a letter of apology. Breaching a restraining order doesn’t worry crims when they’re already locked up. She read the letter, said it was insightful, and that Luke had told her he would let her go and get on with her life, that he understood. Angie never replied. She diligently screens all her calls and takes comfort in the knowledge that when Luke got out this time, he moved in with his ex and his son.

Angie is engaged to a man she met at work. Her boys get on well with him. Both of her boys have excelled at school, and one is in his first year at uni. The wedding was postponed last year because they want to buy a house first. Angie is delighted that she is in a relationship with a man who not only works, and has a valid driver’s licence, but earns more than she does. They have a great sex life. He is thoughtful, generous and treats her like a queen. He can drink beer without falling off the couch. But there’s still that question I have to ask: is he going to be enough for her to forget Luke forever?

“Of course he is,” she says, smiling. “I finally have the life I wanted, a normal life. He’s a thousand times the man Luke was. Well, he’s going to have to be, isn’t he? I’m not giving this ring back.”

We laugh, and the conversation moves to wedding plans.