Mother's Little Helper, Part One
It always came down to money in the end. If they’d had money, then there wouldn’t have been a problem: Gwyneth wouldn’t have had to spend her life caring for her elderly mother – something she did willingly, and with love; but it was hard sometimes. Her mother could then have gone into The Glades, the exclusive care home on Gower. All it took was money – but they didn’t have it; not that kind of money anyway.
Gwyneth sat in the kitchen and sipped her ‘cup of tea’ – a brew made with a generous helping of gin, plus tonic, and with no tea in it at all. Just one large one wouldn’t hurt, even though she was about to go for a drive. Without her little car she’d go completely barmy stuck there in the house in Mumbles – she loved going for walks on Gower: it cleared her head.
Caswell was beautiful that day. The beach stretched to the sea in the distance, where Gwyneth could see tiny wet-suited surfers splashing in the waves. The sky was large and blue, with steam train puffs of cloud chugging across it, chased by something sinister: the electric darkness of a thunder cloud, bursting over the sea far off to the west. But it would be a good hour or so before it reached them.
The hills around the bay were sprinkled with gorse flowers, newly minted coins glinting yellow and gold in the spring sunshine. Wild flowers were gorgeous in the woods at this time of the year too – so, after her walk, Gwyneth decided to explore Bishop’s Wood, next to the car park. The chirruping of birds welcomed her as she climbed up into the wood. And then something else chirruped, from somewhere to her right.
It was unmistakably a mobile phone. Intrigued, Gwyneth walked towards the sound of the ringtone, and soon she found its source, nestling under the shrubbery: a black holdall. At that very moment, the mobile’s shrill ringing stopped.
Gwyneth felt like one of those characters in the detective dramas she watched with her mother on the television as she lifted the bag out from under the bush. Maybe the holdall was full of money? More likely it belonged to a student and had been hidden there as a prank. She only hoped it wasn’t body parts or an abandoned baby.
She took a deep breath and then, in one steady assured movement, unzipped the bag. When Gwyneth looked inside, she gasped.
For there, in the holdall, the mobile phone she had heard was sitting on a cushion of little plastic bags, each of which was filled with white powder. Gwyneth wasn’t stupid – she knew what it was straight away: drugs. It had to be. Well, it was hardly likely to be flour, was it, unless someone was planning a baking day in the woods? What kind of drugs though? In the television detective dramas, white powder always meant heroin or cocaine, so presumably the bags were filled with one of those. A sudden chill of wind made Gwyneth’s heart flutter like the leaves of the trees above her. She looked around; there was no-one there.
Then Gwyneth did something that she thought only other people would do: she picked up the holdall and walked back to the car park with it – as though that were the most normal thing in the world.
A white flash of lightning and clap of thunder heralded the hammering of raindrops on Gwyneth’s car as she left Caswell. The tarmac of the road hissed and fizzed in the downpour. It was just as she was nearing the top of the hill that Gwyneth heard something behind the whoosh-click-swoosh of the windscreen wipers: a siren. Then a black car came round the corner heading for Caswell, so close to Gwyneth’s car that she felt it sway; soon after, a police car screeched in pursuit.
Gwyneth blushed when she thought of what she had in her boot. She thought of stopping – of telling the police that she had found the bag and was on her way to hand it in – but it was raining so hard and the police car seemed in such a terrible rush. No – it would be far better to take the holdall home; she could hand it in at the police station in the morning.
That evening, after dinner, Gwyneth left her mother watching television and went upstairs. She pulled the holdall from under her bed, opened it and stared at the contents. Even though she had brought the bag home with her, she almost didn’t expect it to be real. It was all just so peculiar: a woman like her doing such a thing. What was she thinking? Gwyneth felt a pang of guilt which was fast developing into shame when the mobile started ringing. She looked at it in horror.
What should she do? Answer it? But who would be calling? The owner of the holdall? And presumably they would want their bag back. Gwyneth hadn’t thought of that when she’d taken it home. The drugs would be worth money, of course – maybe hundreds of pounds – and people tended not to like losing money. Or what if it was a customer? Someone who wanted to buy drugs from the dealer who owned the holdall?
Without knowing why, Gwyneth picked up the mobile, pressed the ‘call answer’ button and held it to her ear.
“Davo? That you?” said a youngish male voice. Well-spoken too.
Gwyneth clicked the call off and put the phone down on the bed. What in God’s name was she doing?
Downstairs, she made herself a very large ‘cup of tea’ and drank it down in one.
The next day, Gwyneth took the holdall to the police station. Except she didn’t – although she had meant to. She had even put on her coat and gone upstairs to retrieve the holdall. It was just then that the mobile had rung. Gwyneth answered it.
“Davo?” the voice said.
“Davo isn’t here, I’m afraid,” said Gwyneth. Well, she might as well say something.
The caller ended the call. Immediately, the mobile rang again.
“Who you?” said the voice; Gwyneth thought she heard Cardiff in it, and private schooling.
“Mary,” said Gwyneth, spontaneously settling on the pseudonym as her eyes glimpsed a religious print on the wall.
“So when can you deliver?”
Gwyneth thought, and the thoughts crunched in her skull like cogs in old machinery.
“Anytime you prefer,” she said, startled at her words.
The man wanted two bags – twenty grams – of ‘charlie’, he said. Gwyneth said she’d be there within the hour.
She had no idea why she was doing this. No idea at all. But a few minutes later Gwyneth found herself driving along the Mumbles Road with two bags of cocaine wrapped in a handkerchief in her coat pocket. She turned into the Marina and found the address. She rang the bell. For a moment the thought of turning and running away entered her head – but she didn’t. The intercom squealed and she was buzzed into the apartment block. A man of around thirty was standing by the opened door of his apartment, dressed smartly in a slick suit; he looked like a solicitor.
“Mary,” he said.
Gwyneth nodded. She didn’t smile; she was too busy trying not to show how nervous and scared she was. The man took the two bags and examined them. Then he produced a wad of cash from his pocket, handed it over and closed the door.
The first thing Gwyneth did when she got home was to count – and recount – the little bags full of white powder in the holdall. One hundred and ninety eight bags left now. The man at the marina had paid her £800. For two bags. That meant two hundred bags were worth £80,000.
After making herself a large ‘cup of tea’ – with ice and lemon – Gwyneth knew what she had to do. She had one hundred and ninety bags left, so she could always spare one.
Copying what she had seen on the television, Gwyneth sprinkled the powder from one of the little bags onto her dressing table mirror, held a crisp fifty pound note to her left nostril, and snorted. Her immediate reaction was to sneeze, then sneeze again: the cocaine tickled and fizzed in her nose – or was it her brain? She repeated the procedure with the right nostril, then lay down on her bed and waited. At first, nothing happened. And then she could feel her brain changing – becoming both fuzzy and clear at the same time. And she could feel the energy – presumably that was what they called ‘the buzz’ on the television. She felt twitchy and nervy, but also had a feeling that she could achieve anything: she somehow felt physically taller and more confident too – it was a type of arrogance she disliked. But she had so much energy! She felt she could run to Caswell Bay and back – but what if someone saw?
Then it occurred to her: cleaning. She had been meaning to do it anyway. So, after hoovering the house from top to bottom, Gwyneth cleaned the kitchen and bathroom, and dusted every surface in the house too: she just couldn’t stop.
So that’s why they take it, she thought, when the effects of the cocaine started to wear off. That was the buzz they were after – all that energy and self-belief. But as Gwyneth stood admiring the sparkling cleanliness of her home, she decided that it wasn’t really her kind of drug. No – she’d stick to her gin: it may well be a bit depressive sometimes, but it was better than the twitchy mania of cocaine and a brain buzzing as though flies were hatching in it. On the plus side, Gwyneth and her mother were perhaps now living in the cleanest house in all of Swansea.
That evening, Gwyneth got two more calls – orders for addresses in Langland and Limeslade – and it was after returning home that Gwyneth realised something strange: she was actually enjoying what she was doing. It was as though her life had acquired some kind of purpose, although perhaps not a morally acceptable one. Maybe her new-found energy and optimism weren’t entirely due to the cocaine, after all.
In the next couple of weeks, Gwyneth made deliveries every day. She was kept so busy that the drug-dealing almost became a full-time job, and the increased activity meant that she now only had one or two cups of ‘tea’ per day too: she had to keep a clear head when dealing with so much cash.
She delivered to apartments in the Marina and the Meridian tower, and to Sketty and Uplands and Gower – and was always careful to wear a hood so as not to be recognised, just in case. She even got orders from Cardiff, mostly from media types in Llandaff, near the BBC, so she drove up twice a week. She had always wondered why these days she could make neither head nor tail of much of what was on the television. Now she knew.
Most evenings, she didn’t get home until after seven, and things were so busy that she hired a part-time care worker for her mother – a retired nurse who lived locally. Under her bed, in the holdall, she stashed the piles of cash, in neat wads, next to the shrinking supply of little plastic bags. When they were all gone, she would relax – but not now, not when she was doing so well. It was just so hectic and tiring being a drug dealer!
In fact, so preoccupied was Gwyneth that she didn’t notice the brand new Mercedes with blacked out windows that was parked opposite her house when she returned home that evening, or the two figures lurking behind her front door as she put the key in the lock.
What happens to Gwyneth? Find out in Part Two...
