Benefits

by Zoë Fairbairns

  It was a great high-ceilinged hall of an office in a converted mansion; the hall was divided off into territories by shoulder-high movable screens. Bells shrilled constantly; it took a while to realise they were not a burglar alarm but telephones out of sync. David had his off the hook, but even while he was speaking people kept bustling round his screen and saying things like ‘when you’ve got a minute, Dave’ as they dumped piles of photocopied sheets into his in-tray.

  Judy, it seemed, was known to the Social Services. ‘A classic case of multiple deprivation and inadequacy,’ Dave called her.

  ‘You mean black and a woman’ said Marsha quickly.

  ‘May I do this?’

  ‘Course, sorry, go on.’

  Father unemployed, mother feckless, history of mental disturbance and so forth. Threw her out when they found she was pregnant — GP no help with abortion, told her she had a real live baby in there and did she want to see it chopped up in a pedal-bin. Sent her along to us. She saw a colleague of mine who was not of the same persuasion as the doctor, denied the chopped-up babies story and said she’d try and arrange things. Only Judy was a bit confused by then, understood her to be saying there wasn’t a baby at all and just wandered off. By the time we saw her again, of course, it was much too late.’

  ‘So she had the baby, right, but why is he in care?’

  ‘The social security found she was living with a man.’

  ‘What, the father?’

  ‘White guy, could be. She’d only just moved in too. She’d had a bedsitter of her own, been managing quite well apparently, only she took up with him and went to his place. Well, of course, they don’t pay social security money in those circumstances, if the woman’s living with a bloke he’s got to support her. They’re a lot of insensitive buggers. They went barging in late at night, caught them in bed together, took away Judy’s order book and said they might prosecute. She flipped. Made them take the baby away, kept shrieking that he wasn’t hers, there wasn’t a baby and she wouldn’t be any man’s prisoner.’ His grimace was half sad, half cynical. ‘She’s obviously picked up something in that tower of yours. Strictly speaking, it’s not the social security’s province, taking away people’s babies, that’s our job, but they were sufficiently disturbed by her behaviour to bring him to us.’

  ‘And the bruises?’

  ‘Two versions. The man in the case says she threw a fit of hysterics and fell down the stairs. Someone else in the house says he heard an argument to the effect that if he was going to have to keep her and her brat she could damn well clean the place up, and then the guy hit her. I don’t suppose well ever know.’

  ‘What happens now?’

  ‘Judy’s caseworker thinks she ought to go into hospital for a bit. ’

  ‘And Jim?’

  ‘We’ll find him some foster parents and hope it won’t be too long.’

  Lynn said, ‘I’d like to foster him.’

  ‘Oh.’ David looked startled, then pleased. ‘Yes, well, you know him quite well, don’t you?’

  ‘I know both of them.’

  ‘On the face of it, it sounds like a good idea. You’d have to talk to the caseworker, be interviewed and so forth, and many hundreds of pieces of paper will have to be moved around desks before such an obvious and humane solution can be implemented, but time will be on your side really because everyone knows what a bad thing it is to leave a child motherless.’ By means of some gesture, which Lynn could not remember afterwards, he indicated that the interview was at an end. As she went away, she wished he were not quite so indiscriminate in his use of irony; it made it hard to spot.

  The Collindeane women worried and felt guilty about Judy going into a psychiatric hospital, and vowed to visit her and offer her a home when she came out. But once inside she refused to see anyone; she relapsed into depression, was violent with the nurses even under sedation and would not speak except to deny, viciously and emphatically, that she was a mother. At any mention of Jim, she turned her face to the wall. And one evening, when there were no staff to supervise her, she walked out of the hospital and disappeared.

  Lynn worried for a few days that she would turn up at the house and claim Jim, and then for a few more days that she would not turn nip at all; then she dismissed worry and guilt as self-indulgence and got on with the business of loving and enjoying him. He was amazing. He was all fun and no trouble. He slept through the night, and even in the daytime seemed to have got the idea that the clatter of her typewriter meant that he should lay low and say as little as possible; and that if he complied, all his physical and emotional needs would be attended to by a calm and cheery woman who would sometimes take him to a cold but curious place where there were colours on the walls and hordes of women whose only apparent purpose in life was to pay him attention. And Lynn was finding that the pressure of his needs didn’t mean she worked less, just more efficiently.

  The Social Services department gave her good support. In fact she sometimes felt tempted to remind them that it was only a baby to whom she was giving houseroom, not some adolescent vandal. The caseworker phoned at least once a week to ask if there were any problems. There were group meetings for foster-parents, if she cared to attend. And she received a tax-free non-means-tested index-linked fostering allowance of nearly ten pounds a week. Judy had received just three pounds from the social security to cover Jim’s needs, and that only before she moved in with a man. Lynn was also entitled to extra payments to buy Jim’s birthday presents, and help with her telephone bill.

  She seethed for several months, then confronted David.

  He seemed surprised. ‘It’s our normal rate for fostering babies. When he gets older, it'll be more; if he turns into a juvenile delinquent, there’s a modest living to be made.’

  'But I’m treated so much better than Judy was!’

  ‘Different departments,’ said David, his face hidden by a sheaf of papers.

  Lynn was well into her next burst of indignation before she realised he was joking. At least — not joking. It wasn’t humour that lit his eyes when he lowered the papers, it was bitterness and something else, even inspiration.

  'My dear Lynn. Sit down.’

  She didn’t like being called his dear, but she sat.

  ‘What you must understand is that the guiding principle on which the social services of this country are based is to reward, support and compensate those who make a mess of their lives or renege on their responsibilities at the expense of those who do not. I am one example of this principle in action; I do not, for instance, spend very much time patting young children on the back for never having been through the courts, or helping industrious breadwinners to get a pay-rise. Another is the man who can get —’

  ‘— more on social security than he can working, come on David, you can do better than that, you know that’s only because wages are low.’

  ‘May I continue?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘You have come across the principle at work in a rather more exquisite form: the fact that we will give you money that, had we given it to Judy in the first place, she might never have abandoned her son at all. Then, of course, you have to take into account the additional costs that we shall no doubt run into in a few years when Judy turns up again and wants him back —’

  ‘I won’t fight,’ said Lynn, ‘if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Possibly, but we may. The best interests of the child are paramount, you see — which interests are best served, apparently, by first of all insisting that the child is born, then persecuting the mother until she flips and then handing the child over to you. You understand?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Neither do I. I want some coffee. Do you?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  He pushed some pennies towards her. ‘The machine’s over there. I take it black with no sugar.’ The absent-minded command was so astonishing that she could only obey. She pressed the coins into the machine and a plastic cup appeared in a doorway to
be rained upon by acrid brown granules and warm water.

  David said, ‘Have you got children of your own?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pity.’

  ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’

  ‘You see, just supposing I wanted to commit suicide in the career structure and make a name for myself as a radical critic of social policy — just supposing — there’s a wonderful game we could play.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Lynn coldly.

  ‘Little dream of mine. Judy comes back, wants Jim. We oppose it on the grounds that she hasn’t the resources to look after him as well as you can. Meanwhile you give up your own kid, put it into care. Guess who is appointed foster-moster — complete with tax-free index-linked non-means-tested fostering allowance, payable whether she lives with one man or ten or is just boringly married. So there you’d have it — two kids, two mothers — who looked after which would be your business — and two fostering allowances. We wouldn’t get away with it for long, but it would make the point, eh?’

  ‘Very funny, David.’

  ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’

  She got up to leave. ‘Meanwhile Jim stays with me?’ She was cold and shaking. ‘You will let me know if she turns up again won’t you? And I’ll be sure and try very hard to make a baby for you to play political games with. ’

  A day later he phoned after talking to Marsha and was full of apologies. He hadn’t realised, he said, that she was actually trying for a baby and he was sorry if he’d put his foot in it. Lynn tried to be gracious but the seal was set on her dislike of him. And something similar seemed to have happened in Marsha’s mind too becasue she broke with him and shortly afterwards went away with Posy, who had itchy feet. Lynn was surprised at how much their departure disturbed her. She wasn’t seriously tempted by the prospect of taking off on a feminist odyssey, travelling the world and bonding with a woman (especially one like Posy); but it seemed very enterprising and youthful and made Lynn feel dull and uncommitted. Also she missed Marsha. Her combination of cautious commitment and kindness, her childlike incomprehension in the face of jargon or pomposity, had lent intense pleasure to their conversations together.

  Repeatedly in the first weeks Lynn sat down to write letters to Marsha, often getting to the end before remembering she had no address.

  Part Two

  Chapter 3: The Wrong Rats

  Nineteen eighty-four came and went, but the discussion continued: had Orwell been right? Public opinion was divided. On a literal level, clearly he had not been. The nation had its problems, but the inborn good sense of its people had saved it from the excesses he foresaw. The country did not lie in thrall to an autocracy of left or of right; government was sluggish and pragmatic; proportional representation ensured frequent changes of party in power, but rare changes of policy. Outside parliament, of course, the fascist right kicked and spat at the Marxist left, but these factions cancelled each other out, proving if anything that freedom of political thought still existed. Inside parliament, individual MPs kept up their outward allegiance to the parties for which they had been elected, but in effect it was government by pact and coalition. For whatever their differences, the major parties were united in their perplexity as to why the coming of North Sea oil had not brought economic recovery on anything like the scale promised by their now-retired colleagues, and in their anxiety over what was to be done to appease their restive neighbours in the European community. No — the prospect of a one-party tyranny or a single-minded big brother overseeing every act and thought of the people, and bending them to his nefarious aims, was the least of Britain’s worries.

  It mightn’t even be such a bad idea, some thought. He would at least do something about the bushfire of sexual permissiveness that was wrecking national morale. Hairy rubber cunts were sold in supermarkets (alongside the Feminine Aids counters which specialised in frothy nightgowns and books of poetry) and pornography publishers produced education supplements that could be tom out and given to children. Newspapers that had once dared to the limit by printing naked girls with erect nipples now had couples copulating in the ‘position of the week’ — usually they were heterosexual adults, but lesbian scenes were popular too, particularly if they involved children. With all the sex that was going on (and rape seemed to be on the increase, though it was impossible to be sure now that it was classified as ordinary assault) a boom in the birth-rate might be expected; but it was down, down, down on projections. Laws still theoretically controlled the availability of contraceptives and abortion, but the free market overrode these; what you wanted, you could buy. The ecology lobby that might once have been heard applauding such developments was now silent; and voices were raised pointing out that even such babies as were being born were coming mainly to immigrant stock, lower-class whites, single mothers and — not to put too fine a point on it — the stupid and inept. The reason being (well, one of them) that recent revelations about injuries and long-term damage caused by pills and intra-uterine devices had scared such women off using them, v/ithout giving them the intelligence to use other methods or the money to afford abortions.

  And eugenicists who commented darkly on this phenomenon noted that it mirrored the situation worldwide; the population of the Third World was still exploding, the West was ageing and on the decline.

  Still, this was what came of free choice. There was no tyranny, either in private or public life. And yet there were those who saw uncanny fulfilment of Orwell’s prophecies. Here, for example, were the misnamed bureaucracies: ministries for law and order, health and welfare, that had ceased to dispense either; organisations for racial harmony whose main function was to encourage blacks to accept voluntary repatriation; and all-male committees to promote sex equality. Here were the promises to keep the people together: when the oil is flowing everything will be fine had had to be replaced with when the oil is flowing more abundantly ... or when the oil that belongs to us, as distinct from that which was mortgaged to foreign bankers to shore up governments in the seventies ... when the Arabs stop fooling around with world prices ... when we've brought inflation under control ... then you can have your jobs back, and your hospital beds and your housing and all these other state bounties which you cannot believe are not your right.

  And the dying welfare state brought its own newspeak as well: governments’ failure to link child benefit, unemployment pay and so on to the cost of living was the fight against inflation, putting children on half-time schooling was referred to as giving parents a free hand, closing hospitals and dumping dying patients on the doorsteps of unwarned and distant relatives was community care, and a new political movement that saw remedies to the whole predicament, if only the nation’s women would buckle down to traditional role and biological destiny, was known quite simply as FAMILY.

  FAMILY’s enemies (and it had many, most notably among feminists) were fond of equating its origins with movements of the seventies such as the anti-abortion campaigns, the racialist right and the pro-censorship lobby, and certainly it had drawn members from all these. But it was not the same as any of them, and could not seriously be dismissed as anti-black or anti-woman by anyone who took the trouble to find out the facts; after all, as FAMILY was fond of pointing out, one of its founders was a woman of Pakistani origin!

  Rashida Patel was not its chief publicist, however. That task fell to the strictly British Mrs Isabel Travers, who never needed any encouragement to explain how FAMILY was born. ‘We were chatting in Sainsbury’s, Mrs Patel and I, rather more years ago than I care to remember. I do remember saying that these Asian women had a lot to teach us about family life. She replied that that might be so, but maybe in her community women didn’t stand up for themselves quite as much as they should.’ Mrs Travers seemed to think that said it all. Alan Travers had risen to prominence in his wife’s organisation and was now one of the Family Party’s two members of parliament.

  The other MP, David Laing, was a younger man, around forty, with a
passionate hatred of feminists. He shared this with many other members of the party, but not Isabel Travers. In fact, she was fond of saying that family and the women’s liberation movement were both on the same side if they did but know it.

  ‘How can you say that, Mrs Travers?’ interviewers liked to ask. Mrs Travers was a delight to interview. Always blonde and cool and pretty and respectful. Always informal and chatty but never waffly. She tempered her approach to each medium like a professional: for newspaper journalists she spoke slowly in short, simple generalities; on television she smiled a lot and complimented her opponents on the intelligence of their remarks; on radio she allowed herself to be profound, even vulnerable. Yet in essence what she said was always the same.

  ‘I say that because the true liberation of women will never come about until proper respect and value is placed upon their role as nurturers.’

  Mrs Travers and Mrs Patel had shown flair for public relations from the beginning; and the beginning for them had been shortly after the famed conversation in Sainsbury’s, when they organised a summer procession in honour of family values in a South London borough particularly hard hit by both government spending cuts and feminists insisting that ‘family values’ were a euphemism for women doing the housework. When she wasn’t explaining that she and the libbers were on the same side really, Mrs Travers took pains to point out that FAMILY had no quarrel with the poor or socially inadequate; it was just that she wanted to pay tribute to the unsung millions of women (and men) who lived normal lives, did not swap roles, get divorces or abortions, become homeless or batter their children (or their wives); people who faced misfortune with resourcefulness and courage and without recourse to public funds. When a national newspaper first published Mrs Travers’ views, the response was so great that a whole page had to be given over to readers’ letters.