Laura Norder

My first real job, I was hired to get arrested. The deal was, I worked for a nightclub as a barman. We didn’t have a liquor licence. What we did have was frequent raids by teams of cops. They’d send in a decoy, who would buy a drink with a marked note, and then the rest of the team would storm in and take all of the booze and money, and arrest the manager. The manager would be fined an admission of guilt fine, and then the club would be up and running again. A manager could get two fines before he had a proper court case, so there was a rotational management team- we took turns in getting bundled into a van, fingerprinted and fined.

It seemed to work, and generally the whole process was done out of obligation on the part of the police. Sometimes they’d even let us know they were going to raid so we could hide the drinks in the ceiling or toilet cisterns.

I was arrested a couple of times. Once on my eighteenth birthday. The next time, I was locked up for five days over a long weekend.

So I served drinks and waited for the police.

That was a long, long time ago. I no longer wait to be arrested, or try and find loopholes in the law. My career path has become legit, like a mafia don.

But I am in the business of arrest. I don’t wear a uniform or sit in an unmarked car muttering into a Dictaphone. I don’t storm drug dens with my pulse battering the inside of my ears and my trigger finger twitching.

I write. My job these days is to arrest you. To let you partake in the criminal pleasures of reading, escaping, learning, dreaming, and then, just when you think you’re getting away with it, to throw you to the ground and in an instant change your life. With words.

Arrest isn’t always a bad thing. For a kid drifting away from the too-distant or too-close care of his parents, arrest can redirect his waywardness. Wake-up call.

Same with cardiac arrest- provided it doesn’t leave you gasping like a landed fish, clutching your chest and watching the world fade to a blur, once it’s over, and you’ve survived, you can appreciate sunrises and sunsets, tastes and even pain, with a renewed, almost rebellious, sense of passion.

So I’ll be there. Watching you. Finding out your habits and your delectations. Waiting for the right moment to slip the cuffs over your wrists, and keep you captive in my world for a bit, until you can look at life with an altered perspective. I hope you enjoy the experience.