by Kathryn Montague
It's 6pm and I'm in bed, lying here with a hot, stinging red bottom. Sent to bed with a smacked bottom at my age! How did this come to be that I, an adult woman, would be treated like a child? No, I'm not into pervy games. I'm not handcuffed to the bed, waiting for a hunky man. This is very much not how I expected I'd be living at 24.
My father was Joe Connell, the biggest gangster in Liverpool. I don't mean he was physically big. He was actually quite small, like me. I mean big in that he ran everything. I was his little princess but even I knew that you didn't cross Joe Connell. He always said that I got my beauty from my mother and my brains from him but that since I was a girl I should use my brain to know that my place was to look pretty and nothing more. Growing up, of course men started noticing me but they were all too scared to go near Joe Connell's daughter. Much to my dad's regret, there was just me and no son, so he was on the lookout for a suitable heir, and he found him.
Mickey O'Rourke began as a little scally kid stealing hubcaps. It wasn't long before he'd moved on to stealing cars. My dad spotted him and took him on. He got him running messages, nurtured him, mentored him, and as Mickey got older, my dad recognised in him the intelligence mixed with ruthlessness that he had himself, and decided that Mickey would inherit his empire. That empire, of course, included me. So, I became Mrs O'Rourke.
Mickey was good to me as long as I did what I was supposed to. I could have all the clothes and makeup and jewellery and handbags I wanted because I was there to make Mickey feel proud and other men jealous.
The trouble was, I wanted more. Not much more but I had those brains from my dad and I wanted to use them. If I couldn't be involved in the business then I wanted other things. I wanted to read, I wanted to learn.
Mickey found it funny at first, all the books that kept appearing in the house, but then he found it embarrassing. He was worried I might start having opinions and argue with him in front of his colleagues. I wanted to go to night classes. Mickey said I could learn flower arranging. I said I was thinking of French. It might be useful when we went to St Tropez. He said that was stupid. There was no need to speak French in France. As long as you shouted loud enough in English everyone understood. I suggested Cantonese. There were so many Chinese in Liverpool, I said maybe if I learned to speak Cantonese I could help Mickey a bit with negotiations. That was a big mistake. Like my dad, Mickey thought women should stay out of business and, I hadn't realised, he was starting to have a lot of trouble with Chinese gangs trying to muscle in on his empire.
That's when I made my second mistake. We'd had a big row the night before so I decided to go and see him at work and make it up to him. He owned the big Bingo Hall but in his offices at the back, there were a lot of things happening that had nothing to do with legs eleven or two fat ladies. I went in through the front of the hall, nodding to the kid they had watching. He knew I was Mickey's wife. I walked through to the back but as I got to Mickey's office I heard raised voices. There was an argument going on. I waited outside the slightly ajar door. Mickey wouldn't have wanted me walking in on it. Then I heard the gunshot. Then the kid at the front shouted, 'It's the bizzies!'
There were running feet and banging doors and I stood there, not sure what to do. Armed police burst into the Bingo Hall. I was grabbed from behind by a policeman. He knocked me to the floor, knocking me out of my shoes, got hold of my wrists and handcuffed me! He dragged me back out to the front of the Hall and into one of the cars. I saw they'd got the kid watching out too. Poor little thing. He was so scared he'd wet himself. Mickey and everyone else had got away.
They took me down the station and locked me in a cell. I was fuming. I'd lost my shoes and my handbag. When Mickey found out what they'd done to his wife, I knew he'd go mad.
I was waiting there for ages and then the cell door opened and this little fellow came in. He looked like nothing much but I found out later he was the top detective and he'd be watching Mickey for years, trying to get him. He went white when he saw me.
"Fucking hell," he swore. "Mickey O'Rourke's missus. The fucking idiots. What were they thinking?"
He went out, slamming the door, while I yelled, "What's going on? You can't keep me here. I haven't done anything. Wait till my husband finds out I'm here."
The man came back in about 15 minutes later. "Right," he said, "we've not got much time. Your Mickey has spies everywhere. He'll know you're here and he'll be worried about what you might have told us."
"I haven't told you anything," I said.
"We need to get you out of here and fast," he said.
I still had no shoes, and my stockings were torn from being dragged through the Bingo Hall. I was sure I had mascara down my cheeks but I had no mirror to check. This man didn't give me a chance to ask questions. He took hold of my elbow and started pulling me towards the door. I tried to stand my ground and he picked me up and carried me out of there! I'm quite small and slim so it was easy for him but I was just totally confused about what was going on. He hurried out the back of the police station, shoved me into the back of a car, got in the front and drove away.
"Would you mind telling me what's going on?" I asked.
He glanced at me in the mirror. I looked in the mirror myself. God, I looked a mess. "You can call me Jim," he said. "You know your husband's a big gangland leader, don't you?"
"He runs a Bingo Hall," I said.
Jim sighed. "I'll take that as a yes," he said. "He's got his finger in every pie in the North West. A man died today and you witnessed it. Mickey got away himself. He always does. But word will have got to him that his missus was there and that the police have got her. He's going to be looking for you and he's going to want to shut you up. Do you understand now?"
"He loves me," I said, and I believed it too but I knew that he loved himself more. I hadn't seen my mother since I was six and I didn't know if she'd got away or if my dad had got rid of her. I knew Mickey would have no hesitation in silencing me if he had to. There was no shortage of pretty young women who could replace me.
Jim drove on and on till we got to a little country police station. He stopped the car. "We'll go in there," he said. "I'll get you a cup of tea and I need to make some calls. We've got to sort you out a new identity and somewhere to stay."
We went into the police station and I went straight to the toilets to wash my face. I didn't have any makeup to put on afterwards and it was strange. My face felt naked. I hadn't been out of the house without makeup in ten years. My hair, carefully styled and lacquered that morning had flopped down. I didn't have a comb on me so had to manage as best I could with my fingers, trying to tidy it up a bit. I crept back out of the toilets, wincing a bit, as the soles of my feet had been cut and scratched on the gritty floors I'd walked on. Jim was on the phone. He looked at me. "Bloody hell," he said. "You look about 14 with all your makeup gone."
He turned back to the phone, whispering urgently into it, while I sat on an uncomfortable chair and leafed through an old magazine, sipping the cup of tea he'd left out for me.
Jim finished his calls and came back to me smiling. "We've got a plan," he said. "It was seeing how young you look that gave me the idea. Mickey's going to have all his mates looking out for a glamorous young woman. But you're not going to be a glamorous young woman. You're going to be a nice little fourteen year old girl. We've got you a new name." He looked at his hand where he'd scribbled the name. "Susan," he said. "Susan Potts."
I made a face. This was all moving a bit fast. Just that morning I'd been the wealthy, glamorous wife of the most feared man in Liverpool. I'd been knocked to the ground and arrested. Now, I was barefoot, didn't know where I was, and was being told I had to be a kid called Susan.
Jim ignored my face. "I've got a social worker on the way," he told me. "She's going to take you to a foster home. All you've got to do is play along. Be Susan for a bit and you'll be safe. Hopefully, we can gather enough dirt on Mickey to get him put away, then you can come out of hiding." He paused. "You'd better take that wedding ring off."
"But..." I said.
Jim held up a warning hand. "No buts. If you want to stay alive you have to do this."
What could I do? I wanted to stay alive.
It was dark and I was tired by the time the social worker arrived. She was quite pleasant but I was used to plain women like her looking at me with envy not pity. She held my hand. My hand! I was 24 and a mafia boss wife. Or I had been. I suppose I was now just this poor old fourteen year old Susan Potts who needed a foster home.
She drove me to my new home. "You'll like May Millsom," she told me. "She's one of our best foster mothers. She's been doing it for years. Lovely woman. She'll take good care of you. You'll have to watch your ps and qs, though. May Millsom is quite strict with her children."
I didn't say anything. My head was spinning with everything that was happening to me that day.
We arrived at the house. It looked quite nice, little and cottagey. Miles smaller than the lovely house I lived in with Mickey with the big gates on the drive, and the bullet-proof glass in the windows. The door opened and there was a woman standing there who matched the cottage because she looked like a cottage loaf. Her greying hair was in a bun and she wore an apron, tied in the middle separating her into a big bulge above and an even bigger bulge below. Her welcoming smile reached right up to her eyes and I could see that the social worker was right. She did look like she could take good care of me. "Hello, dear," she said. "You can call me Auntie May."
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