Sonia made a joke or so that morning, catching up with Natalie on the walk to school. Natalie wasn’t particularly talkative. She still had this idea that if you kept yourself to yourself everything would be okay. Slam the front door and keep the world out, was her motto. Only now if she slammed the front door the whole house would shake and fall.
‘Car broken down then?’ Sonia asked.
‘Yes,’ said Natalie, conscious of Ben blenching. Obviously it was as he feared, and this embarrassing acquaintance could never now be shaken free. In the file that made its way to school were six females (four of them sponging off the State) and one male, and he was the male. It was a terrible situation. He would be seen, moreover, by friends from school, who were driving past in proper style and comfort, and laughed at. He hated his childhood. It was appalling to be so at the mercy of the adult world: to be obliged to suffer one humiliation after another because of its disinterest or actual sadism. It would have been perfectly possible for his mother to have ordered a taxi and saved him from this ordeal, but she just wouldn’t.
‘Can’t your husband mend the car?’ asked Sonia (the bitch!), and her voice floated in the wind over hedges and fields. I will give you a discourse on hedges presently: about layering. Hedges ought to be layered in the winter, not just have their tops sheared by that machinery which is so dangerous to passing traffic. Branches must be bent, part-severed, and intertwined in all but horizontal position, so a calculated and stock-proof tangle of foliage is achieved. The cuts heal, leaves and flowers spring, birds delight, fieldmice rejoice. (You said presently, Sonia, not now. You mean well, then you forget. Part of your difficulty is your capacity to be sidetracked: into, for example, arson: shrink)
‘No,’ said Natalie.
‘What do you keep him for then?’ asked Sonia. That was the joke. (Shall we consider anti-male humour and what we are really trying to say when we indulge in it?: shrink)
Natalie laughed politely. Sonia knew then she wanted something.
‘Walking’s all right in this weather,’ said Sonia. ‘It’s when it rains and the cars splash you I hate it. Mostly it’s the women drivers are the worst. And people who have dogs in the back. I don’t know why.’
But Natalie didn’t seem to be listening.
‘Can you tell me about social security?’ was all she asked.
Now she’d come to the right person for that. Sonia was practically a founder member of the Claimants’ Union. (Now defunct by reason of encroaching lethargy. My own theory is that they put something in the glue on the back of the brown envelopes circulated by the DHSS.)
‘Not between now and nine o’clock, no,’ said Sonia. ‘Some time perhaps when I’ve got a week to spare. When I’m dying of malnutrition in the cottage hospital, and have a spare moment from taking the kids to school and back, you come to my bedside and I’ll tell you. Not that they usually admit those dying of malnutrition into hospital these days – they’d have no room for proper contributing citizens if they did, would they? But I might swing it through the Claimants’ Union. Though, now I come to think of it, they’ve closed the Cottage Hospital, so you’d have to take the bus into Bristol to visit me: they might give you a special compassionate allowance to pay that, but by then I’d be dead.’
‘Seriously though,’ said Natalie. She was just a kid herself. She thought I was joking.
‘What do you want to know, precisely? Low Income Family Supplement? That’s great if you swing it, but you have to find yourself a full-time job first. You can get them round here cleaning the milk tankers. Inside, not out. You crawl around inside them all night for sixty pounds a week. The fumes make you sick all the next day, and may do long term damage to the CNS. Central nervous system, to you. And you’re not the type employers are looking for: you might ask for more, little Olivia Twist, or go to the Factory Inspectorate. But you just might be lucky, and actually get the job. Then you could claim a blanket allowance, a whole 50p! Lucky old you. Dog food? No – no pets on the State, I’m afraid. If you’re thinking of going on social security, why don’t you cook and eat the dog?’
Jax was bringing up the rear of our little procession; did I forget to tell you that? Bess was frightened of him, and I’m not surprised. She kept bumping into my legs while I walked, in her attempts to keep out of the beast’s way. I had to keep turning round, and warning her not to go too far out into the centre of the road, where death awaited, not just the fear and exhaustion of walking along its edge.
‘So, no pets,’ Sonia went on. ‘They’ll pay for a colour telly though, so the kids can watch monsters, rape and murder and not feel left out. A spot of sexist singing and dancing and a blown-up body or so and a close-up of a child starved to death by its parents on the news. They’re stopping subsidized school dinners round here. Presently they’ll start handing out a sandwich lunch allowance on a sliding scale, depending on fillings, which will cost more to administer than a free dinner a day for the entire population. That’s the way it goes. Does that answer your question about social security, or the DHSS as it is known to connoisseurs?’
‘Where are their offices?’ she asked. She didn’t even know that. My favourite haunt had somehow passed her by.
It’s no use. I am guilty. I should never have caught up with Natalie that morning. I should have taken a lesson out of her book and kept myself to myself. I wanted to embarrass her and hurt her by asking about her husband, and I was punished.