French Tony and Cheryl the Tattoo.

French Tony and Cheryl the Tattoo; they were a couple you didn’t forget in a hurry. Nobody knew where they came from – well, France presumably in Tony’s case, and from Cheryl’s accent she probably came from somewhere on the South Coast with piss poor schools – but nobody knew where they came from before they arrived in town. They simply rolled up one day, having rented (or possibly having had rented on their behalf by a local authority somewhere else keen to be rid of them) a flat above a Chinese takeaway in the High Street (which the owner later confided in me, is a very good reason not to use online letting agents).

They were both drug addicts, and both alcoholics, quite happy to drink, smoke, pop, snort or inject just about anything they could get their hands on, apparently having long since settled on lifestyle choices that would make the most hardened of social workers want to beat their heads against a rock (or, more likely, a bar). Both were the wrong side of forty, and if their appearances were anything to go by, the wrong side of fifty as well, though when people live the way they lived it gets rather hard to judge; maybe they were both twenty-five.

If their age set them apart from the usual lost souls that drift into town each summer, then their lifestyle didn’t at all. Both were regular customers at the local A&E, mostly because of overdoses or alcohol poisoning, but quite often with injuries sustained either falling over or in the frequent fights they were involved in (something they were both genuinely bad at, but which neither had the sense to avoid).

One thing that did make them different, however, was that they both had a sort of bizarre work ethic. They couldn’t be accused of actually working for a living, and were clearly as dependent on the benefits system as any other drug addicts (rock stars excluded), but they were certainly willing to try working for a living. Not a job was advertised in the town during their stay that they didn’t apply for. They were completely unphased by requests for qualifications, simply making up whatever was required. Medical doctorate, law degree, fork lift truck licence? None of it a problem, they claimed to have it all. 

Of course, pretty much anyone advertising a job that needed qualifications would quickly spot that the literacy level of the application wasn’t quite up to scratch, but less demanding employers often had to interview them before they got the message. Tony made it into the interview stage as a chef (a job where being French is considered an advantage) several times, but nobody who clapped eyes on him was ever going to let him in their kitchen. Likewise with jobs in retail or warehousing, no sane employer would ever let Tony or Cheryl near their goods or their customers.

They were once, for a whole morning, employed as fruit pickers by a local farmer with a particularly trusting (or naïve) nature, though by the end of the morning it had become apparent that while neither Cheryl nor Toney had any aptitude for picking fruit, both had an exceptional talent for destroying it. That brief period of employment came to an end when Cheryl passed out and had to be taken away in an ambulance, and Tony threw up into a hopper filled with apples.

Undeterred by their efforts at gaining employment, they also tried their hands at running businesses on several occasions. One time they tried knocking on people’s doors offering to clean windows, which generally resulted in the police being called by terrified homeowners. On another occasion they obtained buckets and squeegees and tried to wash windscreens at traffic lights, which mostly led to people getting out of their cars and hitting them. Once they tried selling food from a cheap barbeque in the park, though nobody bought anything, and business ended with a small fire and a stern warning from the fire brigade not to do it again. It was even rumoured that Cheryl had tried her hand at escort work, a rumour truly chilling to anyone that had met her.

One time they went for an interview with a chugging company (one of those outfits that send bright young things out in charity tee-shirts to collect bank details from shopper in town centres, which they then swear they will pass on to the charity in question, and nobody else, straight up guv). It didn’t go well, as both Tony and Cheryl turned up off their faces (something that often did even when apparently keen to gain employment, presumably in the belief that other people could not tell) and they were thrown out with some force by the security guards at the Job Centre where the interviews were being held. Not a great success, even by Cheryl and Tony’s standards, but this incident seemed to trigger something in them, raising an awareness that people would give more to charity than they would to hopeless addicts, in idea that was to lead to their downfall.

At around this time a local charity was having a drive to collect more donated goods for its shops. The St Kirby Centre for Disabled Children had had some white plastic sacks printed with the charity’s logo, as well as a date when the bags would be collected, and was posting these through doors throughout the town, a few streets at a time. 

This obviously struck Tony and Cheryl as a something they could also do, and as neither could have an idea like this and not follow it through, they subsequently obtained some similar white sacks, and somehow rigged themselves up a silk-screen printing apparatus, enabling them to manufacture and distribute their own bags. For some reason, however, Cheryl and Tony decided they did not like the original design on the bags, which simply had the charity’s name in blobby writing, and came up with their own design, with a new logo and the charity’s name in a flowing cursive script. 

The bloke who runs the charity, and who used to be an art teacher before leaving Poland, was quite impressed by this, and later commented that, given help to overcome their problems, then Tony and Cheryl could have gone somewhere artistically speaking, though the charity’s trusties, who were mostly churchmen, and therefore didn’t believe in forgiveness or rehabilitation, took a rather different view.

Anyway, Cheryl and Tony delivered their own bags around several streets, and these seem to have gone down well with the donating public, who duly filled many of them and left them out for collection. Which is where things started to go wrong, since what they did not fill the bags with (as Tony and Cheryl had presumably been hoping) was money. 

What people mostly filled the bags with was old clothing. Now old clothing is generally a good thing in a charity shop. People don’t mind paying a couple of quid for a second-hand shirt or jumper if the money is going to a good cause. However, should a French drug addict sidle up to them outside the local Weatherspoon’s and try to sell them the same shirt or jumper, they tend to react a bit differently. Which led, after a short and rather one-sided brawl, to Tony ending up in a police cell, and Cheryl being woken from where she had passed out on the kitchen floor, to find she had a flat full of the local CID, who were very interested in all the white bags, though not in the way that police officers are usually interested in the contents of bags found in drug users’ homes.

At this point things stop being funny. Tony and Cheryl weren’t bad people; they never hurt anybody much except themselves. But they were sick, and sick with an illness that made them do stupid things, some of which were illegal. This particular illegal thing brought them to court on fraud charges, of which a jury found them guilty, and for which a judge decided that Cheryl the Tattoo should go to prison for two-and-a-half years, and French Tony for four (which, bearing in mind that Mad Terry Finnegan only got eighteen months for slashing a fifteen-year-old girl’s face with a Stanley blade, seems a bit excessive). Quite why they should get different sentences for the same crime eludes me (though that copper that drinks in the Queens’ says that the courts do this so that the woman gets out first, and, hopefully, sorts out her life without him around).

Anyway, as has previously been noted, neither Cheryl nor Tony were genuinely bad people, and it is quite possible that had the prison system provided them with some sort of rehab program and access to education, then they might well of sorted themselves out. This didn’t happen. Nine months into her sentence Cheryl the Tattoo died of an overdose. Three months later French Tony hung himself in his cell. Several of his fellow prisoners later came forward and claimed Tony had been devastated by the news of Cheryl’s death, and that they had tried to warn the prison authorities he was a suicide risk. The prison authorities, in turn, claimed that prisoners always say this after the event, but seldom before. Which might be true, though most people would expect the death of a loved one to raise some sort of a flag.

That, of course, is the end of the story. It’s not exactly Shakespearean (other than not having a happy ending, and being about two star-crossed lovers misunderstood by the world, and having a poisoning and a suicide), but it might present a sort of morality tale for our times (whereas Shakespeare himself is getting a bit dated), though I’ll have to admit, for the life of me, I’m not entirely sure what the moral is.