Benefits

by Zoë Fairbairns

  ‘I thought you wanted it!’ she shouted, furiously. ‘I thought you wanted it!' She got up on her knees and with a strength she didn’t usually have, pushed him backwards. He smiled, puzzled, slightly tense still, but not arguing. His penis flopped against his stomach. She reached for the champagne and filled her mouth with it, then put her mouth to him to let him feel the bubbles.

  ‘Lynn —’

  She moved up his body, kissed his mouth with foam and bubbles and eased herself on to him. She took her weight on her knees and rose up and down, swigging now from a wine glass, now from a water glass.

  Derek said, ‘Er, excuse me.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m here, you know.’

  ‘Who? Oh yes, you.’

  ‘Is this rape or what?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s a woman’s right to choose,’ and she poured champagne and rainwater all over the two of them and all over the bed and continued to rise up and down and back and forth and round and round until everywhere was flooded and everyone was drowned.

  Next day it was still raining. There was nowhere to hang washing and a stain was spreading on the bathroom ceiling. The Hindley kids ambushed passers-by in Seyer Street with water-pistols. Derek was shy and kept starting up conversations on everything except what they were both thinking. At last he said, ‘Did you mean it? Because if not —’

  Lynn’s mouth said, ‘I think I did.’ She had to mean it. She might be pregnant already. She consulted a calendar and did sums. She might indeed.

  Well. That was okay. She could still change her mind. She’d be sensible now. She’d use her cap and her little bombs of sperm-killer and hope that one chance taken had not been fatal. Fatal! What an extrarodinary wordl Anyway, if it had been — fertile, fateful — she still had the number of the charitable clinic that she kept by the phone for Judy.

  Why hadn’t Judy rung? Had she changed her mind, feeling in her rounding belly the same movement and certainty that Lynn now felt in her still flat one?

  Whatever was in there would barely be visible through a strong lens, yet Lynn knew she could not abort it. It was not the physical details; she’d read the anti-abortionists' propaganda and it left her as cold as a trip to the butcher’s. It was something else — something more indulgent, academic, philosophical; the rag-bag of potential that a person could be —

  The friends this person will make (some of them now no more than tears of ambivalence in their own mothers’ eyes), the events she will create or influence, the kindness she will draw from strangers when she bangs her knee. And the rest she will give to the hardnosed lady with the heart that quakes when she picks up the phone and says ‘have you any comment to make on the allegations that you — ?’ and sometimes has days of phone-phobia when work simply has to be postponed; a rest for her and a chance for the other one (the one Lynn knew was there because she was always telling her to shut up), the one that says ‘what’s the matter?’ and ‘tell me all about it’ and listens and does not pounce.

  Panicking but elated, Lynn rehearsed to herself the reasons for not carrying this pregnancy to term (if there was a pregnancy) and found them interesting but irrelevant.

  Even the government seemed in league.

  Under pressure from feminists, poverty campaigners and its own back bench, and faced with innocent disclaimers from the trade union movement, the government had agreed to compromise over child benefits. A very small payment would be made to mothers. It would be financed partly from public funds and partly by taking more tax from fathers. Thus would the promised transfer from wallet to purse take place — but by such slow degrees and in such small amounts and so far into the future that neither purse nor wallet would seriously feel the difference. Lynn felt women had won a victory and had been conned.

  When her period started, there was no room for disappointment or relief, she just felt shocked. She’d known she was pregnant, and she’d turned her brain inside out making the child welcome! She willed the familiar ache to go away from her back; she imagined the foetus (a little girl called Jane — a dull old name, kid, but it seems to be yours; and anyway, you’re going to be such a stunner, it won’t matter) successfully fertilised that extraordinary day while the rain bucketed down, but not quite managing to embed in the threadbare lining of her aged mother’s womb. Tears squeezed from Lynn’s eyes at the thought of Jane clinging to the walls like a climber in a landslide; hang on Janey, hang on, — she saw the little bruised fists and heard Jane’s last sad cry as her home collapsed and broke up and she was washed out on a tide of blood.

  Lynn ran a bath and lowered herself into the water; she watched fascinated as the blood flowed out of her and dispersed into red threads and clouds and whorls, and peered close for a little swimming daughter whom she would rescue with her finger and her thumb.

  Derek and she kept on trying. But three more periods came, each on the day and at the hour it was due, and one at the very moment (as far as Lynn could work out without questioning her too closely) that Judy Matthews was delivered (insisting to the last ‘there isn’t a baby’) of a healthy half-white boy called Jim. Judy remained vague and cryptic, but spent a lot of time at Collindeane where the women made her welcome and where Jim was the first customer for a planned creche. No one knew where they lived the rest of the time.

  He was a plump, placid boy with a philosophical approach to life, which was just as well; sometimes Judy would appear eager to relinquish him to the care of Lynn or anyone else who was around, and would sit by herself, crooning or asleep or stricken with horror in some private dream into which no one else was allowed, and when she came to she would get up to leave alone, fiercely asserting that she had no baby. Sometimes she left him behind overnight, and then would come beating at the doors in the early morning with overflowing milk and charges of kidnapping. Other days she hugged him to herself, was peaceful, even prayerful; she became obsessed with a mural some women were making of goddesses of ancient religions, and though she would never help paint she would sit cross-legged in her red robes (just thin cotton cloth, even in the depths of winter) and contemplate and nurse her baby, wide-eyed.

  Meanwhile Lynn told Derek they should take a break from nightly sex and bought a thermometer and some graph paper. She watched her temperature cruise along at 98.4 for two weeks, then it did a little hop up to 98.7. Derek suggested they should stop doing it with Lynn on top. She lay back with cushions tilting her hips so that the chosen sperm could freewheel to posterity. She tried to think soft maternal thoughts, and was gratified to note that Jim’s warm brown body was provoking these in abundance. There was even a day when playing with him caused her to miss a deadline and the manufacturer of plastic curtains for whom she was supposed to be writing a promotion gave her a rocket down the phone and she didn’t care a bit. (Fourteen days after the hop in the graph, her period started.) She wondered whether years of thinking tough feminist thoughts could make you sterile. She steered clear of the abortion campaign, put all her energies into Jim and Judy and the creche. An American magazine asked her for an article on ‘Male chauvinism, British style.’ She declined, and they didn’t ask again. She found she was living off Derek and she didn’t even mind.

  She read the worst baby books she could find, and strolled (menstruating) round the baby departments of shops, desensitising herself to the anger that their hideous commercialism evoked. It’s all right, body, I know what you're thinking, but you can go ahead, no one’s pushed me into this, I’ve decided. It was winter. Jim was starting to smile at his mother and at all the women, but Lynn liked to think he had a special gummy grin for her.

  The cold was making Posy irritable; at least, she said it was the cold, but the women said behind her back that it was the way she had been proved wrong by the squat being so successful without leadership; and Lynn thought Marsha’s refusal to move in with Posy and continued attachment to David Laing had something to do with it. Whatever it was, Posy kept ending arguments by saying, ‘Do what you want.
I’m going back to Australia soon’; and the response ‘Oh don’t’ was wearing thin with use.

  Marsha was defensive. She said she only hung around with David for research purposes.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, read a book,’ Posy snorted.

  ‘He’s telling me all about the crisis in the welfare state.’

  ‘Oh yeah, the crisis of capitalism part two.’

  ‘There’s no point in talking to you.’

  Once Marsha confided to Lynn that she didn’t even like David that much; she just respected him and felt a sort of desperate attachment, not because he had any sympathy with the women’s movement but more because he hadn’t.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well — living here — I mean, I don’t, but it’s the same because I do live here, I mean, here is where I live if you see what I mean — it all becomes rather overwhelming. I love living here, I’ve never felt so free and useful. But it’s a bit of a hothouse and it doesn’t prove anything, does it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Lynn.

  ‘I mean, I agree with everything everybody says, but it would be surprising if I didn’t, wouldn’t it? You’re not exactly encouraged to think outside the orthodoxy, are you?’

  Lynn smiled to hear her own thoughts so exquisitely expressed.

  ‘I mean, a lot of women would say there isn’t an orthodoxy, just because it isn’t written down as one, but if you say something you damn soon know whether it’s in or out. If I slap my hand over my mouth many more times, I’ll stay that way. Don’t laugh, you’re the same.’

  ‘And where does David Laing fit into all this?’

  ‘It’s the arguments we have. The women say social workers are agents of state repression and control. He says his first function is to stop everyone else feeling guilty.’

  Lynn sighed. ‘He’s not wrong either.’

  Marsha grabbed at her hair like a lifeline. ‘I don’t agree with everything he says.’

  ‘Give me an example.’

  ‘He told me about these two women he visits. A forty-year-old spinster and her dreadful mother. The mother’s got a stranglehold on the daughter, she never lets her leave home or get married or anything, and now the mother’s half-mad and incontinent, doubly incontinent, that means —’

  ‘I know what it means.’

  ‘— yes, well, and even violent sometimes, and every time Dave goes to see them — which he does in his own time, there’s nothing he can do — the daughter gets hold of his hand and begs him, begs him with tears — to get her mother into a home.’

  ‘And can’t he?’

  ‘He says with the cuts there isn’t space for old women whose only — only! — problem is that they crap on the carpet from time to time and who have able-bodied daughters to care for them at home. He said he once told the daughter that the only way he could help would be if she walked out. Which of course she wouldn’t do.’

  Lynn looked at Marsha with respect. ‘Have you raised that here?’

  'Yes, and they said the reason mother’s gone insane is probably the stress of being a woman in this society, and the reason the daughter’s exploited is because she’s been taught to believe it’s her role to be exploited, all of which is absolutely true, but we don’t have many exploited daughters or senile mothers living here, do we? Do you think I should sleep with David?’

  ‘Good heavens! I mean ... haven’t you already?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know if I want to.’

  ‘Don’t then.’

  Marsha sighed. ‘He wants it, and I suppose he has a right —’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘No, a right to want it.’

  ‘I suppose he can want what he wants to want, but you don’t go to bed with people out of guilt.’

  ‘But if I don’t, that’ll be out of guilt too.’

  ‘Posy, you mean?’

  ‘I do love her, I see right through her rages. She wants me to go away with her.’

  ‘“To Australia?”’ Lynn mocked.

  ‘Oh, more than that, my dear, a world revolutionary cruise. Well, it could be fun. Some people say it’s a cop-out to say you’re bisexual, all proper feminists are lesbians. I suspect it’s a cop-out to give up men when you’ve never had one.’

  ‘We could always set up a group called the improper feminists.’

  ‘Trouble is, I don’t know if I’d be able to join. ’

  Lynn realised that Judy hadn’t been in for over a week. She felt almost bereft; she worried what might have happened to Judy, but she actually missed the little boy. She asked around. None of the women seemed unduly worried; Judy had a right to come and go as she pleased. Lynn wondered if she was the only one to have noticed that Judy had had specific needs: to leave her baby for a while and wander and dream and meditate; to proclaim that she had no baby and to be coaxed patiently back into accepting that she had, that he was lovable and that she was caring for him splendidly, for he seemed to be thriving despite her eccentricities. Lynn also found herself wondering whether her own care might have something to do with it — but who, she wondered, was she mothering?

  She confided her unspecified fears in Marsha, but her response was the same as the others: Judy came and went; it was okay. Lynn remained uneasy, and berated herself for not even knowing Judy’s address. And when she did finally turn up, Lynn took no pleasure in being proved right to have worried.

  It was after a particularly agitated night in which she and Derek had argued themselves into knots of exasperation and hostility, he having said that she ought to see the doctor about her infertility. What did he mean, her infertility, she’d retorted, and he'd said, sorry, of course he meant they ought to see the doctor, and she’d said. Freudian slip. And then they’d had a silence, broken by her saying it was probably just a matter of time, and he’d pointed out that she didn’t have unlimited time and again she’d demanded what did he mean she didn’t? Then he had started to shout: damn it, it wasn’t his fault that men could go on fathering children till they were ninety but usually only by women who weren’t too far the wrong side of thirty-five; he was prepared to take personal responsibility for every other form of unfairness suffered by women but not that and now he was going to sleep. His display of doing so with his back turned gave Lynn the giggles because she remembered the speech the best man had made at their wedding, all about how the point of married couples sleeping together was not the maximisation of sex but the minimisation of high dudgeon because it took a very pompous person indeed to remain umbraged while rubbing bottoms with the offending party. And they’d kissed and made up but Lynn stayed awake for a long time, realising that by confiding in anbyody (let alone going to some damn infertility clinic) she would leave behind forever the no- woman’s-land of I'd quite like a baby but I don’t really mind ...

  She woke early, meaning to spend all day writing, but she couldn’t concentrate, so she wandered down to Collindeane. And there she learned that a bruised and silent Judy had come crawling to the door in the small hours, alone, terrorised and unbudgeable from her assertion that she had not got and never had had a baby. And this time even Lynn could not change Judy’s mind. Apart from the anxiety, this hurt.

  ‘Who hurt you, Judy? Was it an accident?’

  You could almost see hysteria boil behind the film of her eyes; her lips were locked but she would nod and shake her head, glaring at the goddess-mural with its muscular Virgin Mary and its Boadicea.

  No it was not an accident. Yes she had been hit. Yes by a man. Yes a man she knew. Yes a man she lived with. And where was the baby? What baby? There was no baby. There was no baby.

  Lynn said to Marsha, ‘I’m worried. Do you think David could help?’

  ‘David? He’s the last thing she needs. He’ll give her a lecture on accepting her responsibilities.’

  ‘But Jim.’

  ‘Yes, we ought to find Jim.’

  They found that Jim was in care. There was no in
formation about Judy, but David promised to keep them posted.

  Lynn said to Derek, ‘You know the Archers.’

  ‘Not an everyday story of country folk?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good heavens. I thought I was joking. I thought you were talking about someone we knew.’

  ‘No, but you remember they had a character who couldn’t get pregnant —’

  ‘Daisy the cow as I recall.’

  ‘Shut up. They tried and they tried, but —’

  ‘Lynn, dearest, what are you saying? The Archers don’t fuck.’

  ‘No, but in the end they gave up and adopted, and lo and behold all her tensions disappeared and she got pregnant.’

  ‘So instead of one baby they had two.’

  ‘That wasn’t quite —’

  ‘What’s brought this on? Is that what you want to do?’

  ‘I thought we might foster.’

  ‘Hm. Do you know anything about it?’

  ‘Marsha’s bloke’s a social worker, he’d be able to tell us.’

  Derek said, ‘I thought you had to be a pillar of the community to foster.’

  ‘That’s why I thought we’d be so suitable. No, I gather they’re pretty desperate.’

  The quarrel of the night before seemed forgotten. When they went to bed, Derek said, ‘We’ll keep trying for our own, though, won’t we?’ and Lynn chucked him under the chin.

  ‘Don’t look so anxious. You’re getting to quite like it, aren’t you?’

  ‘It’s not too bad.’

  ‘I wonder if I’ll be able to stop you when we don’t have to do it anymore.’

  ‘You may well find you can’t,’ said Derek.

  ‘I think I’ve found out what happened,’ said David Laing grimly.

  He was sitting behind his desk in the Social Services department and Lynn was sitting opposite him with Marsha, trying to work out why Marsha liked him and whether she herself did. He was in his twenties but managed to seem both older and younger; his manner of speaking was anxious and dogmatic, and the thick upper rims of his glasses only added to his appearance of constant worry. His hair was quite short but didn’t look right that way; he might have been to the barber’s to please his mother. He sipped compulsively at a plastic mug of cheap machine coffee; he had not offered Lynn or Marsha any, but this seemed to be preoccupation rather than rudeness. Lynn remembered being told he was addicted to the stuff.