The Gate

The Gate

Asalya Issa

Copyright © 2023 by Asalya Issa.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 12/16/2022

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Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 1

Loud voices creeping into my ear while i’m asleep, I woke up to yelling and screaming. I rubbed my eyes and got up to peek from the cracks of my door; it was my mother and father arguing. This was a daily thing for them, but I had never thought my mum would take it this far. She pulled out a pistol from under the couch and pointed it at my father. My heart dropped, along with my jaw. I quickly ran out of my room and started yelling, Mum, no, don’t shoot Dad! I had my arms around his waist, crying. My dad bent down to me with his eyes on my mum, and he said in my ear, I need to go out for a while. I’ll come back for you, I promise. He went to his room to pack. I looked over to my mum, who was also crying with a gun in her hand. I didn’t know what to say to her. How dare she want to kill my father.

My father and I were the closest. He would always tell me how much he loved me and how I was his favourite person in the world. I would always spend time with him after he came back from work and when he finished arguing with my mum. He was always getting accused of cheating, and other things I never understood. He would always tell me that she was just paranoid and that he would never do anything to hurt his family. I guess her pulling a gun out on him was his last straw. He kissed me goodbye and left. That was the last time I ever saw him; he never came back.

Everyday for two years I would wait by the window for him to finally come back. But he never showed sight ever again and I lost hope. Six years later, my family was becoming broke, living in a one-room apartment, my mother not knowing what her next move would be or how to pay the next house’s rent. That was when she decided to split us apart. We all gathered our belongings and drove to Wollongong, where my mother’s siblings were living. We arrived at my grandfather’s house, but there wasn’t any room for all four of us. My mother and baby brother stayed with my grandfather, while my older brother and I had to get split up with separate uncles. Jared went to live with my uncle Byron, and I went to live with Uncle Andy.

He wasn’t the best influence. For a couple of months, I noticed suspicious activity happening regularly. I’d rather not know, so I never asked questions. His home was like a convenience store, with customers coming in and out looking for a hit. At the age of thirteen, I tried to turn a blind eye and avoid everything that was happening around me. I tried to put my education first rather than focus on my environment. But eventually, everything caught up with me. The parties, drugs, alcohol. It was a lot to take in at the age of thirteen.

Three months later, a customer knocked on the door, a very beautiful woman with model-like features, too pretty to be visiting a trap house. She had blonde hair and blue eyes and went by the name Olivia Sergeant. She was asking for Andy. He wasn’t home at the time, so I called him to let him know someone was asking for him. He then told me to go to the room, give her what she was asking for, and take three hundred dollars from her. Obeying, I went to the forbidden room, opened the top drawer, grabbed the scales, and began weighing up a certain amount of white powder-like substance. I didn’t know much about drugs. I was clueless about how much to weigh and which drug was which (who does at the age of thirteen?), but remembering what Andy instructed me to do, I still willingly put the drug in a tiny nappy bag and handed the white substance to her with three hundred dollars in return. Having an open mind at thirteen made me realise how easy it was to make money.

Living with Andy, I had a lot of responsibilities. I looked after us. I washed our clothes, cooked food for both of us, and cleaned his house. One regular day, I was washing his clothes, going through all the pockets as usual, and I found a few thousand dollars in his pockets. I was young, but I had a very mature mindset. Thinking outside the box, I insisted this was a test to see if Andy could trust me. Trying to be trustworthy, I dried up his money and put it away in his top drawer. I decided not to take it for my satisfaction. Later on, I then realised that it was a bit of a test and that he had purposely left the money in his clothes to see what I would do about it.

After the test, I gained my uncle’s trust. Andy started allowing me to sell drugs when he wasn’t home. I did all the drug work when he wasn’t around, running the house, taking care of every customer coming through, and cleaning everything up by the end of the day. I was a runner for a whole year before I got arrested.

Selling drugs felt legal. It felt like everyone was allowed to sell and do drugs because it was human nature for me. I guess I was wrong when I had fifty-four charges.

I caught the bus to school every day. I woke up at 7am, took a shower, dressed in my school uniform, cooked some breakfast, and organised two bags of cocaine.

I walked over to Olivia Sergeant’s house and dropped off the two bags and took my six hundred dollars. This was a daily occurrence for me. I walked to the bus stop that wasn’t too far from her house and then hopped on the school bus. I sat in the front since I had no friends; I didn’t need friends when my uncle had so many. Waiting to get to school, I overheard my peers talking about some house that got raided in Greendale called the Drug KingPin. In the back of my head, I felt like it was my uncle’s house that got raided, so I skipped school and caught another bus to go home because my intuition was telling me it was my house. I arrived at the front of my house and saw sixty police cars outside and double the amount of police raiding the inside. I started to tremble and realised that selling drugs wasn’t right.

Not long after, two police detectives walked up to me and read me my rights and placed me under arrest. I didn’t know how to feel, it felt as if there was a knot in my throat.

A short time later, they took me to the police station to place charges on me. They informed me that because of my age, I had to have an adult present, so they rang my mother.

I was taken to a little cell underground and waited for hours; the night felt long and dark. I felt like I was lost because I didn’t know what was going to happen, where I was going to end up and what the outcome was going to be. In the cells, I was across Andy and a few of his friends. We were all quiet and curious as to what the outcome was going to be. Hours later, the detective came down to my underground cell, unlocked the cell, and instructed me to get up. As I was getting up, I heard my uncle and his friends yell out, Don’t tell them shit! Answer no comment. I looked back in confusion as I didn’t know where they were taking me. I got to a boxlike room with a camera setup. I sat down, and a detective sat in front of me, trying to get me to leak information about my uncle. That’s when the questions began.

Is your name Jacqueline Florence ? I answered yes.

Do you live at 64 Made Street, Greendale? I once again answered yes.

Have you sold any illegal substance? My face went red. I felt hot, but to be truthful, I was not scared at all because of the things I witnessed. I believed it was legal and everybody did it, living with my uncle and so-called family, where we would party and do drugs pretty much every day of the week. My answer was I want to see my lawyer.

They asked me many more questions.

Do you know Olivia Sergeant?

Does Andy sell drugs?

What were you doing on the 22nd of March? Where were you on June 19th?

My answer was always I want to see my lawyer.

After a long period and my continuous response to their questions, one of the detectives brought in a TV and a VCR showing me going down the street with my hands in my pocket to Olivia’s car and receiving money. Olivia was a regular customer for me. I was speechless. The detective, whose name I did not care to remember, looked me in the eyes and said to me with no bluff, There’s so much more than where that came from. Start talking.

I replied with no bluff, I’m hungry. Get me something to eat.

Chapter 2

They arrested me. They put me in the back of a paddy wagon and drove recklessly while I was in the back, moving around like a rag doll. In my opinion, they tried to use some scare tactics to get me to talk. I did not budge. It was four in the morning, and they drove me down a very dark road past a place called Keeling. We arrived at the Long Bay juvenile prison. It was a very scary place according to all the stories I had heard; it was crazy. I was unaware of how long my stay here was going to be. I felt a long chill go down my neck. For the first time, I felt and was all alone. I didn’t know anyone.

I lay down, trying to process what had just happened. I gained zero sleep.

At 9am, the guards woke everyone up. I was in a fish tank, and an inmate came by my window and said to me, I’ll see you in the yard. I went to the yard and noticed her waiting for me on a bench alone. I gathered all the courage I had left, accepting the fact it was my first day in jail and also most possibly my first prison fight. As I stood in front of this girl, she requested me to sit down. She spoke to me and asked me if I was indeed Andy’s niece. Not knowing the outcome of telling her the truth or not, I agreed to her question and replied yes. She told me that her mum used to go out with Andy and that she would look after me during my stay here. I did not want to be here for long. I greeted her with a thank-you before heading to the showers. I didn’t trust her no matter how stern her words came across. I was still always watching my back because of the stories I had heard about this place.

I headed back to my jail cell and sat on the revolting bed, still curious about what was going to happen to me. Suddenly, an officer came and asked me what I would like for breakfast. I hadn’t eaten since the incident. Having an empty stomach, I responded, Anything, except bacon. He walked off without saying a word. I waited twenty minutes before they brought me two pieces of toast with vegemite. At first, I didn’t know what this brown stuff was, so I took my finger and scooped bit and licked it. I was on the verge of vomiting; it was disgusting. But I was still starving, so I decided to eat the crust of the toast that had no vegemite since that was what I had to deal with. I waited hours and hours until two guards came to my room and told me to get dressed as I was going to court. They once again put me in the back of a paddy wagon and drove to the courthouse.

The two guards opened the back of the paddy wagon. As I stepped out, they forced handcuffs around my wrist. I looked up at them in confusion, not knowing why they were cuffing me again. They walked me to the courthouse, and I saw my mother and Byron sitting on the benches. I sat down with an old-looking guy, only to soon find out that he was the lord mayor of Wollongong, who went by the name of Charles Harrison. He represented me as my lawyer. The lord mayor was representing me, a thirteen-year-old girl, who was also a drug runner. I didn’t ask questions. I just let it be. The prosecutors and my lawyer argued to the point that I didn’t understand what was happening. Minutes later, the judge asked us to rise, and we obeyed. He looked down at me and said, We’re going to drop all charges. I nodded. I knew at that moment that someone had bribed the judge. Why would a judge let a kid with fifty-four charges on her head go freely? I went to my mother and Uncle Byron and gave them both a hug. I cried into their shirts. Please take me away from this place. We walked to the car, and I nervously asked, Where’s Andy? Byron replied, Jail, and you’re never going near him ever again, you hear me? I nodded. I looked out the window, still not knowing what I was supposed to do with my life now. I was worried about Andy, whose bail had got denied. I suppose no judge would take a bribe from him.

A few weeks later after court, I tried to go back to school, pretending nothing happened a few weeks ago. It wasn’t so easy since my whole school knew what happened because it was on the front page of every news article that came out and on