The revelation of yet ANOTHER police officer being done for rape – this time the Met’s David Carrick – reminds me of a pretty sour story from either 2004 or 2005, from some girl I met while working in Walkabout in Oldham.
I’d apparently met her at Halloween, when I’d been dressed in some old fireman outfit that a university friend had donated to me. I thought it looked ridiculous, but… women in the bar had other opinions. I pulled a LOT of girls. They mostly got angry with me and I collected virtually no glasses all night.
Some weeks later I got a midweek text.
Hello mr sexy fireman.. how come you not in work? Nothing to look at without you here! Gem – the pissed up one who grabbed u! X
Well, that doesn’t number it down, I thought.
I went out to meet Gem in my local bar area a few nights later, midweek. She looked kinda familiar. Dark hair, a little younger than me, okay looking. Total loudmouth, it seemed. No idea whether I’d kissed her or not the night I met her.
Quite quickly I felt like I didn’t want to know. I got serious chav vibes from her and all of her mates. Well, I met her in Walkabout. What do you expect. I should have called it and gone home, but she invited me to an after party, and something made me follow my nose.
I’m not sure who’s house it was – some guy’s, who she incessantly flirted with in front of me. We’ll call him Pete, as I have no clue what his name was.
You can have her, I thought.
We all watched Monsters Inc, which is regarded as a classic Pixar movie these days, but I only saw it that one time, and my memory of it is tarnished by the scenario.
After the film, we were sat on the couch and Gem told me she was a nursing student and she had uni the next day. Here she was getting steaming, pulling an all-nighter. (In retrospect, maybe chronic underfunding isn’t the only problem impacting the NHS.) She described having public sex with men outside bars. She complained that she was "going to die" when she got into class.
Gem told me that, a few months ago, she’d found herself in a fight with another girl outside a bar. For my American readers, a ‘fight’ isn’t an argument. She had traded blows.
“Can you see this scar on my hand?” She showed me something barely visible but behind her highest knuckle. “That’s when I was punching this girl on the pavement.”
She explained, and tried to justify, that she’d pinned this girl to the floor and began punching her in the head. She was drunk, unsurprisingly, and her hand slipped and she’d punched the pavement to one side of her opponent’s skull. Gem couldn’t feel it, though, presumably due to a combination of alcohol-induced numbness and adrenaline, and the knuckle had slid back into her hand.
At this point, sirens. A man’s hands had gripped her and she was flung into a brightly lit Transit van, into a small corner cage, and taken to the local cells to sober up.
After she’d nodded off, in her words, she didn’t get much chance to sleep. Two coppers rushed in and beat the shit out of her. They dumped her on the street the next morning.
“I didn’t report it,” Gem claimed. “Who’s going to believe the word of a drunk 19-year-old over 2 coppers? So anyway, I went to Pete’s and we drove to the police station and waited. We saw a few coming out, so we knew a shift had ended, but these 2 guys were taking their time. Eventually they did come out and Pete filled them in.”
Pete's party dragged on further until it was time for him to go to work – some blue-collar job requiring a van.
He dropped me off first. “Aren’t you going to give him a kiss?” he asked Gem.
I was kinda relieved that she wouldn’t.
Despite the lack of a spark between myself and the delightful lady Gem, she persisted in texting me all morning while I was trying to sleep.
My mum says I don’t have to go in, she informed me. Probably for the best. This went on for a few hours while I was trying to sleep, until she said, If you don’t want to talk, just let me know so I’m not wasting my time.
I should have told her not to talk to me. I don’t know why I didn’t. Maybe I just wanted to figure people out. In retrospect, there’s little to figure out about a drunk chav who lets guys rail her outside Conservative clubs. We talked via text for a little bit.
The next weekend, Gem came into Walkabout while I was working. She couldn’t see me any more because, she said, she was pregnant.
Then why the fuck, I thought, would you come into a rough as fuck bar full of idiots kicking off and getting turfed out all night? You don’t think you’re putting your baby at risk?
But then, I’m a firm believer that, although we’re all different, you get certain types of people in certain types of bars. Gem was far from the only lunatic I dealt with specifically in Walkabout.
I’m proud to say I haven’t been to any Walkabout outlets in a long, long time.
And I’ll keep it that way.
