by Weldon, Fay
It was Ben and Alice who shocked her back to her senses: so she shot suddenly upright and this time stayed there. Their poor white traumatized faces stared at her from the bunk beds – inmates had to provide their own sheets and she’d brought these in the suitcases. The hostel kindly provided charity blankets. (Now everyone with any sense uses duvets there’s a glut of discarded blankets all over the country and they’re freely available.) Natalie was just sitting, too tired even to unfold the rather stained sofa bed and get onto it and go to sleep. She couldn’t turn the overhead light off: a greenish ten watt bulb glimmered permanently overhead. The light stays on in case the children wake in a strange place and are frightened, or that’s what they say, but they don’t mean to make these places too comfortable, do they, or who’d make the effort to get out of them? ‘Their faces were so greeny-white and ghostly, and they were so quiet, I realized what I’d done,’ Natalie said. ‘I realized they only had me. Harry wasn’t coming back to rescue us. I clapped my hands and said very loudly, ‘All right! Up! We’re getting out of here,’ and they both sat up at once.
‘Natalie,’ Ben said, ‘I think we’d better stay just for the night. Get some sleep. We’ll think in the morning.’ (it was the first and only time he ever called her Natalie. Usually it was Mum, or Ma, or You. (The softer form, Mummy, was left for Alice.) But now he spoke to his mother as if she were an equal. This shocked her, too. Between them, Harry and she had deprived their son of his childhood – not that he’d been making too good a job of that, either, to date. Privilege and self-doubt mixed makes some people obnoxious, and Ben was one of them. In the short time he was with us up at the estate, he improved enormously: privilege had been snatched away, and his sense of being the one male amongst so many helpless, hopeless females did wonders for his self-esteem. He was okay, was Ben, in the end.
‘No,’ said Natalie, ‘we’re going right now! We are simply not going to spend the night in a place like this.’
And the children dressed and Natalie packed, and they tiptoed down the yellow and pink stairs (no carpet) in the greeny light from the horrible unquenchable bulbs. The warden – I shall call her Ms Frostbite because I never did get to hear her name – popped out of the ground floor front room where she was watching the late-night horror (no doubt) and said:
‘Where are you going? What irresponsibility is this? How dare you take those children out after bedtime! Don’t you know that room was booked for you? Don’t you know by accepting it you were keeping others out?’ and so forth, but Natalie took no notice and kept on walking, and so did the children, and the door closed behind them and no one followed them, and they were free. In the dark, in the cold, penniless, hungry, and alone, but free.
It took them forty-five minutes to walk to the Boxover Estate. Once they heard a police car, and hid behind a hedge until it passed. Perhaps it was looking for them, perhaps it wasn’t. Were there laws concerning vagrancy? Natalie didn’t know. There was a full moon. There was almost no traffic. The countryside seemed to hover – as if the fields lay quivering an inch or so above the brown earth – patterned with strange silvery shadows. Natalie had never seen it like this before. Even the children were impressed. ‘It’s like fairyland,’ said Alice.
‘You’re such a baby,’ said Ben, but he said it kindly. He carried one of the suitcases. Alice helped Natalie with the other, and though this was more trouble than it was worth, as the corner of the case kept banging into her ankles, Natalie did not try to stop her. Neither child complained about tiredness, hunger or thirst, and now they were out of the hostel and their mother was in charge of them and herself again, the colour had come back to their cheeks, albeit a strange translucent moonlit pink, the like of which Natalie doubted she’d ever see again. Crunch, crunch, crunch went their footsteps, echoing. An owl hooted, a fox barked.
‘I like this walk,’ said Alice. It was their moment out of time.
Her knock got me out of bed. Knocks after midnight usually mean trouble. I opened the door and there Natalie stood in the moonlight with her children, half apologetic, half stubborn. She didn’t say anything. Her presence explained itself.
‘Oh well,’ I said. I was wrapped in my blue silk kimono, circa 1930, 80p from Oxfam. ‘End of a quiet life. Come in. You can have the sofa, the kids will have to make do with the floor.’
You’ve got to stick together, down here at the bottom of the world. As I say, all you have in the end are your friends.
Interlude
Of course Sonia loved Natalie. Of course she was in love with her. Wouldn’t you be? Who else was there for her to be in love with? Some women can’t go out their front door without meeting up with a randy wood-carver or an alcoholic one-eyed sailor, while others get into a state where they only ever meet other women. Men somehow dissolve out of their life altogether. This had happened to Sonia. So when Natalie knocked upon her door in the middle of the night, wide-eyed and dramatic, what did you expect would happen?
Don’t misunderstand her. Sonia would no more have touched Natalie than have picked up a dog’s turd with her bare fingers, even a dog she knew well. She would, that is to say, have considered any kind of physical approach shuddery, and she certainly could not imagine kissing Natalie. Sonia would have found the deed embarrassing and disgusting. Sonia was no lesbian. On the other hand – now, how can she explain this to you? – Sonia could quite see herself in the same bed with Natalie, clasped, clasping and intertwined, giving and receiving all kinds of pleasure, in imitation of the act (as she remembered it) with men: in the interests of comfort, consolation, present-quenching excitement and emotional and physical gratification. But not somehow kissing.
Sonia is a disturbed woman. She does not act the way the consensus agrees that a woman should feel and act. That is to say if she kills someone she should feel remorse. If her children are taken away from her she should feel grief. If she takes money from the State she should feel gratitude. If she falls in love with another woman, admit she is a lesbian. Sonia just won’t.
What strikes Sonia is how un-free any of us are, to act, be and feel the way we want. Things are offered, then snatched away. Sex with a man gives you such a stunning sense of safety. There you are, suddenly the size of two people, not one: not frightened any more, totally loved, needed, used, valued. As long as it lasts. It’s an illusion, isn’t it? It stops: it presents you with perfection and then snatches it away. He rolls off and away and you’re half what you suddenly perceive is your proper size, and he’s back to his wife or his bank balance or his mates or whatever it is that’s preoccupying him. How quickly, as young girls, you lose your rightful expectations. Your first lover isn’t likely to be loving, tender, permanent, true, is he? The statistics are against it. It’s your uncle or his best friend or your best friend’s boyfriend, or you’re gangbanged or taken for a laugh or so drunk you can’t even remember except you’re pregnant. And it’s a loss. It’s a real loss. Why is it men pay so much for the privilege of deflowering a virgin? It’s because they’re getting real value for money. Virginity is real, it’s a proper state, all rightful expectation, and self-righteousness, not just the run up to being fucked by all and sundry. This is why Sonia is glad Stephen has custody, care and control of Teresa, Bess and Edwina. Sonia has no illusions left. Little girls need illusions. Stephen will do them very well: he is all expectation and self-righteousness – look how he behaved over Alec. His daughters will learn from Stephen and look after their virginities until they’re ready to hand them over to nice, caring, loving, boring permanent men. If they stayed with Sonia they’d be running after strangers in no time at all, in order to talk to them, and take their sweets, and go behind the bushes, never to emerge again.
Okay, give Sonia a fix. What loathsome drug is choice for today? Go ahead, poison her, calm her, finish her off. It’s all attention, isn’t it. Attention-seeking devices, like all you Eddon shrinks with your Eddon Method. Goodnight. Sonia will try and do better tomorrow.
Second Home
>
So there Natalie was the next morning, sleeping on Sonia’s sofa, with Ben and Alice in sleeping bags on the floor amongst the uncleared-away toys, and a little white kitten, rashly strayed in from next-door’s garden, batting one of Alice’s curls against her ear for the pleasure of watching it bounce back. At least it was one step up from the Emergency Hostel – though it was not clear from Ben’s waking expression that he thought this was the case. He had a clear view underneath the sideboard to a collection of dusty socks, little girls’ knickers and random female rubbish. At Dunbarton furniture was properly pulled out and swept behind.
In the kitchen Sonia was trying to muster seven bowls for cornflakes.
‘It can’t be permanent,’ she said. ‘But I expect I can sort you out. You’ve come to the right person. I’m a one-woman Claimants’ Union.’
‘I’m grateful,’ said Natalie.
‘Don’t ever be grateful,’ said Sonia. ‘You have to learn not to be grateful or it’ll be the end of you. You’ll sink into the Supplementary Slime and never crawl out. Cultivate resentment. It gets you further.’
‘I’m afraid I’m putting you out terribly,’ said Natalie, in her genteel little girl’s voice.
‘You are,’ said Sonia, ‘to be blunt. The DHSS aren’t going to be too happy to discover I’m harbouring a fugitive from the Hostel. The way they’ll look at it is, what right do you have to turn your nose up at the taxpayers’ offer of accommodation? And they’ll find ways of punishing me. They might even stop my 20p a week soap powder allowance. I get that for Edwina’s sheets. She wets the bed sometimes. Does Alice wet the bed?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Pity. You’re really missing out. Does Ben have asthma?’
‘No,’ said Natalie.
‘Encourage a wheeze or two,’ said Sonia, ‘if you can. They really go for asthma up the DHSS. Instant sympathy. Sometimes people die from it, you see, and they don’t want to be blamed, or thought hardhearted.’
‘I don’t want to be dependent on the State,’ said Natalie.
‘Who does?’ inquired Sonia, civilly. ‘But what choice do you have? There’s no fresh milk, only powdered. It’s cheaper. Ben can make it up.’
The children didn’t go to school that day, and Natalie just slept and slept, in Sonia’s bed.
Driven Mad
Natalie stayed with me for three months. I gave her tutorials on the Welfare State: she did the things I was too depressed to do, such as picking up toys, sorting out clothes, and weeding the garden. Within the week, strangely, the house had the same polished orderly look that characterized Dunbarton. Very boring. Alice slept with my three, Ben had a blanketed-off section of the bathroom, and Natalie and I shared a bedroom. (Oh yes, separate beds. Are you mad? Ros across the road had a divan to spare. She’d found it in a skip. The things people throw out!)
Natalie got thirty-seven pounds forty-three pence from the State, plus various renewal and heating allowances. I managed to extract fifty-five pounds forty-three for my lot. We pooled the money and even occasionally managed a bottle of wine. I don’t think she was happy, but I was. No word came from Harry Harris. The children no longer asked after him. Ben was silent but responsible (as responsible as any male can be: that is to say as long as it suits him but not a moment longer: consider his father!) and Alice clucked around my three making herself useful. I could see panic in her blue eyes, sometimes, when she thought no one was looking. Both children hated their school. They were laughed at on two counts: first for having posh accents, then for living on the Boxover Estate, where the new poor (us) and the problem families (her: she’d walked out of the hostel) were housed. Most children adopt the local accent pretty quickly, as cover, but these two seemed unable to do so. They were somehow unbending: stubborn, like their mother. They found it difficult to admit defeat.
Natalie got herself put on the housing list, though I couldn’t see the reason for it. It seemed to me we were doing pretty well as we were. Only once did she flip. We and a group of others were queueing outside the telephone on the green, with our coins at the ready, and Ros came out of the booth in tears. Ros had a boyfriend at the time they reckoned was supporting her, though he wasn’t; he could only just support himself and his beard. So they’d stopped her benefit. The DHSS don’t mind if men visitors stay until two o’clock or even three, but four’s going a bit far, five smacks of early shift, and anything later means breakfast, and if it’s breakfast there’s hell to pay. They don’t begrudge us a spot of sex – it saves paying the psychiatrists’ bills later – it’s relationships they can’t stand. They reckon the ultimate obscenity is human affection. If a man stays, your benefit stops. We, the abandoned mothers of Britain, don’t deserve love. We had our chance, and we muffed it. I muffed my chance of being kept by Stephen by having this fancy about Alec, this stupid feeling that even as a non-earning citizen (stay-at-home-wife) and mother (forgive me, unpaid child minder for the State) I was entitled to love and be loved.
So I would get confused and upset sometimes, and even with my help Natalie got a lot of things wrong. She should have gone to Welfare in the first place – they’d have presented her case to the DHSS and the Housing Department themselves and then both would have coughed up. And she should never have believed Mary Alice about Housing: clerks in one department have no idea what goes on in another, and sometimes not even their own. Regulations change every week. If you don’t hear what you want to hear you must go from clerk to clerk and department to department until you do. Of course Welfare’s in Street, DHSS in Glastonbury, and Housing in Shepton, and Appeals in Bridgwater – that’s a forty mile round trip from Eddon Gurney, and none of us has a car, have we? And there’s only one bus a day, if you’re lucky, so you have to hitch, and you can’t hitch with children. And that, if you ask me, is why one in five women on supplementary benefit ends up in mental homes. Driven mad by the State.
‘Driven mad’. It’s just a phrase these days but I think it’s a real enough concept. Women do get driven mad. Men drive women mad. Anxiety about how to keep a home going for the children drives women mad. Unrequited love drives women mad. Working out how to get from A to B when you have no money and there are no buses drives women mad. (Don’t ask me what drives men mad. Let them look after themselves. They run society, don’t they, not to mention the hospitals and the drug industry? They are the psychiatrists. How many women shrinks in here? Four? To twenty-eight men?) Okay, okay, feminism sends women mad. Funny joke. Point taken. I have to take it, don’t I, because I want to get out of here.
As I say, it was Natalie’s turn to flip when we were waiting in the queue for the telephone one Monday morning. I’d been explaining to her how I meant to get through to Tania Rostavitz, the only welfare officer at Gurney who has a clue. That is, by saying I was her sister Anna. I just happen to know, from reading the holiday postcards in her office, that Tania has a sister Anna. Claim a personal relationship – otherwise the switchboard just leaves you hanging on the end of the line, until your money runs out and the pips go and you give up. Saves them all kinds of trouble, doesn’t it!
Anyway, Ros came out of the box in tears – you should see Ros: she’s so romantic looking: really beautiful with misty black hair and big eyes; she looks like a Hardy heroine, and here she was, stuck with the kids in a council house, arguing with the State as to whether or not this fat, awful little creep with the beard was a full-time or a part-time lover – oh yes, we get reduced by our circumstances! A lovely brimming saucepan of hope and emotion simmered down and down until it’s a sort of greasy sludge – if you’ll forgive a metaphor from the kitchen. And Natalie suddenly for no apparent reason shrieked and started banging on the telephone box and shouting ‘I can’t live like this. I won’t!’ and ran back and sat in the garden all afternoon. Just sat. She wouldn’t go inside the house. She said it frightened her.
The only upshot was, of course, she and I had to join the telephone queue again the next day and by then Tania had gone on
holiday (they’re always on holiday or on courses or being transferred to head office) and there were even more delays. But she had to get through somehow. For some reason of their own the DHSS had given a special clothing allowance to Ben but not to Alice. Something to do with him sleeping on the bathroom floor and her having a proper bed. But by then anyway Alice was sleeping on the sofa. And when we wrote them letters all we ever got was one of those forms with reasons for disallowance on them, and the section ticked ‘child over requisite age’ which was crazy, since Ben was older than Alice anyway. Once their computer starts doing that kind of thing, you have to get through in person. It’s full time work being on social security. They really make you earn your living.
But look, it was cosy. I reckon we could have gone on like that forever. But fate started intervening, working itself up towards the fire on the float. Just little straws in the wind. Natalie actually getting a job and then the odd matter of the old leather bucket. It quite frightens me how things keep turning up, and taking a hand in events. You get the feeling that not just people, but material objects, are part of the general conspiracy to toss you up in the air and land you where you least expect.
Cough, Cough, Cough Again
‘Same old floor, same old mop, different owner,’ said Flora to Jane. (Remember her? Arthur’s long-suffering wife? Too thin for her own good?) Now Jane and Arthur were living in Dunbarton, Flora still came up to clean. Why not? A job’s a job and it’s stupid to feel loyalty to one employer just because they’re hard done to by the next. When did an employer ever feel loyalty to an employee? That’s what Bernard wants to know. His father worked for thirty-five years in the sales office of a firm which made linoleum. The office was just under the factory chimney. Strange particles fell from the sky, and drifted through the windows, along with the flecks and grime. In the thirty-sixth year Bernard’s father got cancer of the lungs. He was fired (before he had time to make a connection between inhaling fumes and his illness) on the grounds that he’d been pilfering. It was true. He had. He’d been pilfering for twenty-four years. Everybody did it. Just a square yard or two of reject stuff, otherwise thrown away. It just all of a sudden became a firing offence, the day after he reported sick. Funny, that. Cough, cough, cough he went and did the new staff-relations man come and visit him in hospital? Like hell he did. A friend or two from work came. A new man sat at his desk now, they said. The waters had just closed over Bernard’s father’s head. It was as if he had never been. And no pension either, because of the pilfering. And as everyone knows, lung cancer can happen to anyone, even non-smokers.
