When she was alone with Derek, he said, ‘What do you think of her?’
Marsha had always liked Derek. He had struck her as the sort of man who, if there were more of him, would make feminism unnecessary. That was how he used to seem, at least; things might be different now, with his daughter, his homebound wife and his professorship. Still — it was touching, the air of apology that hung round him like a halo, this naked request for admiration of his obnoxious, unfortunate daughter.
‘I think she’s lovely,’ Marsha stammered out, ‘Can she live a fairly normal life?’
Derek smiled. ‘You knew I meant Lynn?’
‘Oh. No. Lynn seems tired.’
‘She is tired,’ he said.
‘How has she adjusted to — you know —’
‘The only way Lynn would adjust. By being obsessive and conscientious and not letting herself think about how it needn’t have happened —’
‘I’m sure she doesn’t expect you to take the blame. Not more than half, anyway. If it is blame, which I doubt.’
‘She seemed to decide to have a child very suddenly,’ he said, ‘in the middle of being very anti it. I was glad it took us such a long time. It meant it wasn’t just an impulse. I still can’t help feeling I pushed her into it.’
‘Does she say that?’
‘Of course not. ’
‘Well then.’
‘Are you staying long?’
‘Not here,’ she said touchily, ‘I’m going to get involved in things at Collindeane tower — you remember?’
‘Do I remember? I’m always telling Lynn she ought to go up there.’
‘Hm. Interesting dilemma, when a man tells his wife she ought to be more feminist.’
‘No!’ He spread his hands in anxious apology, ‘No, that isn’t what I meant at all, it’s just —’
‘Derek, it’s all right, I’m only teasing.’
Their invitation to Marsha to stay for the rest of the holiday seemed sincere enough, so she did. She kept off the subject of Collindeane, trying instead to make friends with Jane and learn to look after her. The two proved mutually exclusive. The only role in which Jane would accept Marsha was as an ally against Lynn. But even this seemed exploitable. ‘Mummy always hurts me,’Jane would whine. ‘Maybe I could learn to do it so that it won’t hurt you,’ Marsha coaxed. ‘I don’t want it done at all,’Jane would say, though on the few occasions when Lynn left the treatment late, Jane became edgy in spite of herself. Marsha managed to interest her in the possibility of proving Mummy wrong in her theory that nobody else could thump Jane’s chest in the correct manner; and Lynn got a few days out with Derek and some uninterrupted reading.
At night, Marsha slept in a partitioned-off corner upstairs; she had a collapsible bed with uncomfortable sheets which seemed clean to the eye but felt shiny and sticky. The central heating imparted a uniform airless warmth through the place and could not be controlled. It was hard to imagine this being good for anyone’s respiration, but Lynn insisted it worked wonders for Jane. Some nights Marsha’s body felt the motion of the sea, and odd dreams came: she was on a ship that was a block of flats with Posy at the top of the steps saying, ‘Marry me, Marsha, and we’ll make ourselves useful’, but the ship sailed on and it wasn’t going anywhere. She awoke, wet with hot-and-cold sweat, hearing Jane’s rasping breath through the partition, thinking, I must help with — but unable to remember whom she had to help. She went back to sleep fretting, I’m not welcome, I must leave here, and then she was in David’s house, in his bed for heaven’s sake, and he was explaining very gravely that he had to hurt her for her own good.
Lynn stood over her with a steaming cup and an old radio with David’s voice coming out of it.
Marsha hoisted herself up in bed.
‘What time is it?’
‘Nearly midday.’
‘You should’ve got me up —’
‘Why?’ Lynn handed her the cup. ‘Last day of the Christmas hols. All the politicians are back at work.’ She turned up the volume on the radio. ‘Thought you might like to hear your friend.’
Marsha sipped. There was something about this koffee for getting you up in the morning. It grabbed you by the throat like a ferret, shook you into wakefulness. It sharpened up her hearing for Dave, who didn’t sound at all like himself, and it wasn’t just because of the rather old transistor.
‘... certain necessary modifications in the administration of Benefit, owing to the need to concentrate national resources on preparing industry for ...’
Marsha yawned. ‘Wait for it,’ Lynn said.
‘... until now has been paid indiscriminately. We are now introducing an element of selectivity ...’
Marsha put her cup down. She was wide awake.
‘... linked to a programme of education for motherhood, necessitated by a decline in standards which is a cause of grave national concern ...’
Another voice cut in, a silvery, resonant, younger man’s voice. ‘This is not simply a matter of economics.’ He himself was interrupted then, for commercials. It gave Marsha a chance to ask Lynn who he was.
‘Peel,’ said Lynn, ‘a frightening young man in a hurry. Whizz kid, coming up fast under Laing. his approach to social policy has a pleasing simplicity. It’s just another branch of industry. He is of the opinion that Benefit is a matter of investment, pure and simple. Paying mothers produces good workers and hence is cost-effective. He made a wonderful speech the other day, against the re-introduction of old age pensions. Point one, old people are useless. Point two, they only need pensions because they have lived improvident lives and haven’t kept in with their families. Therefore they don’t deserve pensions. They say he’s descended from the original Sir Robert. Of whom it was said his smile was like the silver plate on a coffin.’
‘There’s something pretty coffin-like about this guy’s voice,’ said Marsha, ‘when I really listen.’
Peel was speaking again. ‘The Family Party remains a party of principle. Our founding principle was to reverse the discrimination that our society practised against dutiful mothers. We were the first party ever to assert that such women ought not to be in complete financial subjection to their husbands. Yet women in absurd numbers and on the flimsiest of pretexts have been exploiting the independence we have given them. They walk out on husband and home; they raise children unnaturally in all-female communities. Standards of moral and physical hygiene defy belief. With the aid of male dupes or perverted science, fatherless infants are conceived. Daughters are raised to hate men, sons to hate themselves. The women blaspheme, rewrite history, pervert nature, are greedy and immodest. They attack the state, yet draw money from it. They abandon the old and the sick. Families should be the cement of the nation; women should be the cement of families — the importance of which role we have acknowledged in the only way that counts. But the nation is falling apart. We must change our brand of cement.’
The magical voice paused and David’s came back.
‘It will be open to any woman who has her Benefit withdrawn to present herself at her local family branch for rehabilitation and training. On satisfactory completion, payment may be restored.’ And then the men moved on to talk about something else.
‘Is that how it works?’ Marsha asked with wonder, ‘Don’t they put things through parliament any more?’
‘Oh sure. They’ll do it one night when there’s a football match on. Mrs Patel will say something against it — she’s the Family Party’s bleeding conscience — but no one’ll be interested, Marsha. These are women’s issues.’
Later in the day they listened to government announcements detailing how the new scheme would work. Women could assume that their Benefit would continue unless they heard to the contrary. Anyone wishing to make a complaint against a specific mother could do so anonymously.
Lynn said, ‘One thing. This’ll bring a lot of women together.’ ‘Yes ...’ said Marsha cautiously, not wanting to forestall whatever was coming next.
‘It’ll prove what one lot said all along. That the whole point of Benefit was to control us.’
‘And at the same time,’ said Marsha, ‘we’ll fight to the death to prevent it being taken away.’
‘It’s what they call feminine logic.’
After they’d laughed together, Marsha ventured, ‘We’re going to be there, aren’t we Lynn?’
‘Yes,’ she said, and there was no hesitation, ‘Oh yes.’
Marsha wrote to Posy.
‘You must come. No, not to lead. It may exasperate you (it does me) the way everything is so untogether but at least there is something now on which we can all agree. All feminists, that is; and some others too — already some women from FAMILY have come over to us in disgust and asked us what we plan to do. The reception they get varies — the ones who go on about the government undermining women’s sacred vocation to motherhood tend to get short shrift, and some have flounced out in disgust at their first sight of lesbians kissing! Others find our leisurely style of decision-making every bit as infuriating as you would, my dear. But still ... Isabel Travers always used to say we were all on the same side! She’s the grandame of the party, she never stood for parliament, thinking it more womanly to manipulate from the rear — she’s given a sort of grudging endorsement to the idea of selectivity, but it sounds as if it’s more in the interests of party unity than anything else ... Mrs Patel, her chum, now turned radical (all things are relative) has been deafeningly silent. Of course, for every renegade, FAMILY’s acquiring new friends, nastier and further right than before, but still ...
‘Now we wait on tenterhooks to find out who will be the first to have her Benefit withdrawn, and what the famous rehabilitation and training will consist of. It’s assumed that women in the feminist communities will be first for the chop, so Collindeane is trying to increase its self-sufficiency. You would be surprised at the farming that can be done in a block of flats and a patch of land. And of course no one sees anything wrong with shoplifting or burglary from the rich. And we have skills here which we never have to buy — plumbing, (your legacy, I like to think), making clothes, doctoring, etc. And while it’s necessary, some of us can still work for pay.
‘Posy, I miss you, and you would love it here. Please come.’
Some women fled from Collindeane. They felt that by severing their links they could safeguard their money. Judy Matthews was one who went, taking her son Jim. This saddened Lynn. The chance of making peace with Judy and re-establishing contact with the boy she still thought of as hers had been a factor in bringing her to the tower with Marsha.
An official letter came to a woman who lived there with her three babies. She’d come to escape the bullying of her violent husband, and was now getting hesitantly into an affair with Pam, the girl Marsha had first met on sentry duty. The woman opened the letter and read it, but everyone knew what it would say.
‘I’m an unfit mother.’
‘I should hope so,’ said Pam, ‘living here.’
‘My husband has complained.’
‘Good.’
‘What am I going to do?’ Her flippancy dropped. She was scared.
The women said, ‘It’s okay, you know. If we starve, we starve together.’
‘But it’s not fair if I stay here and can’t contribute.’
‘You can contribute. We need to know what goes on at these rehabilitation joints. ’
Pam interrupted. ‘Hey, wait a minute.’ The unfit mother said, ‘It’s true. I’ll go.’
When they turned up at the office marked rehabilitation, the green-uniformed clerk looked at the six of them and said, ‘All of you?’
‘All of us,’ they said in unison, but the unfit mother said, ‘No, just me.’
‘This way. The rest of you can go home. ’
‘We’re waiting.’
‘You wait outside them.’
They stood for four hours in the bitter cold outside the olive-painted office that had once belonged to the Department of Health and Social Security. Strange women walked through and up to the green door. They were forlorn or frightened or stiff-faced with defiance but they did not stop to talk and none of them came out. Snow was making patterns against a black sky when the unfit mother at last returned. She was laughing but unnerved. ‘They’re mad.’
Pam cuddled her. ‘Come home, love, and tell us.’
‘No, I have to decide, there’s something I have to decide now.’
‘Tell us.’
They formed a ring to keep her warm.
‘They asked me lots of questions. Where did I live, why did I leave my husband, what sort of eduction were the children getting, why hadn’t I brought them with me. I didn’t know I had to, I said, all wide-eyed.’
‘That’s the trouble with you unfit mothers,’ said Pam, ‘you don’t read so good.’
‘They said, “You do realise, don’t you, that having your Benefit withdrawn is a very serious matter?” As if it was something I’d done. They said I had a choice’. I could walk right out — “you’re not a prisoner, you know, Mrs er-um,” they kept saying. Or I could go home to you-know-who, which act would immediately reinstate my fitness and restore my money. Or, if I refused to see sense and do that, I’d have to prove my willingness to get fit. “How do I do that?” I said —’
‘Wide-eyed?’
‘Wide-eyed, quite. They said, “how d’you fancy a few months on the continent?” “What?” I said. “We’ve found this nice family for you,” they said, “diplomatic service, three children of their own, they need a bit of help. In return for that, they’ll help you and train you in the best ways of mothering your own.’” The unfit mother looked round with grim satisfaction at her friends’ astonishment. ‘I said to them, I said, “I knew we were doing the shit-work for their industries. I didn’t know we were cleaning the shit out of their lavatories as well.” ’
‘Great. What did they say?’
‘Well, we argued a bit, and then I said I’d go. To play along, you know. They said I had to see a doctor first. “It’s all right, thank you,” I said, “I’m quite well.” But they gave me to this loony doctor. The first thing he said to me was, “Lie down.”
“No,” I said.
“But this is for birth control,” he said, as if he expected me to say, oh, birth control, I see, that’s all right then. And then I saw it. He didn’t mean me to, not then, but he lifted the wrong cloth. It was like a small glass crab, full of green fluid, and it had spikes.
“It’s very modern,” he said. “I can see that,” I said. “It’s not like something you’ve got to remember,” he said, “once it’s in, it’s in.” I was looking at the spikes. He was going on. “After all, we don’t want you having more babies till you know how to look after the ones you’ve got, do we? And it’s quite safe, we’ve tested it on gorillas.” “You keep that thing to decorate your Christmas tree,” I said, “I’m gay.”
‘Then the shit really hit the fan. It appears there’s a special rehabilitation place for lesbians, and this wasn’t it.’
Pam put protective arms round her. ‘Wherever it is, you aren’t going.’
‘It’s somewhere out in the fens. And I am.’
‘But what if it works?’ Pam wailed.
A mother living in Seyer Street had her Benefit withdrawn. She was told it was because of her morals. But it was years since she’d been on the game. She’d given up all that when FAMILY moved in to make the street a showcase of their methods. Someone must have been spreading scandal.
Now she went to FAMILY and asked what she had to do to get her Benefit back. She should know, they said. Was she being a good mother? She had better give up boyfriends and let them fit her with a Pellet. The Pellet was filled with stuff that would be gradually released to stop her getting pregnant, if she were to slip up on her vow to give up boyfriends. No, they didn’t think there was anything to be gained by letting her see it.
Would she get her Benefit back now, she enquired woozily through
the fading anaesthetic? Well, they said, they would see.
Back home, her children screamed and punched her, demanding food. She went out and quaked on a street corner. It was stupid to be frightened of being grabbed by a stranger when that was your line of business.
It wasn’t long before a man came by and asked, ‘Do you fuck for money?’ Moonlight winked on a flash of gold on his shoulder. She couldn’t take him home because of corrupting the children. She led him behind an empty house. The proceedings were short and peremptory. He didn’t want any clothing removed. He didn’t want to talk either, which embarrassed her; in the old days even the most silent customer usually said something, if only an obscenity, or his false name, or hers. In her awkwardness she chattered, and let fall the fact that she came from Seyer Street.
‘Seyer Street? Then you had every chance to reform.’ His whole weight was behind the fist that smashed her face. She stood her ground, thinking, right mate, that doubles the fee. Every chance to reform! Bending metal for fancy gadgets for rich foreigners, doing it at dead of night for fear of losing Benefit — and losing it anyway in the endt Wicked, sharp metal that fought you and gashed your fingers —’You are a bad girl,’ the man was saying, ‘and I shall have to punish you.’ Oh God, one of them. He had a stick — a club, a plank. He had picked it up on the derelict land. He hit her head and her legs and her back, over and over till it didn’t even hurt. ‘And don’t ask for money,’ were his parting words, ‘You liked it.’
Women from Collindeane found her crawling up the street, dumb, weeping and covered in blood. They took her in.
‘We know you’re not ready to talk, but can you understand? Tap once for yes, twice for no.’
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