Benefits

by Zoë Fairbairns

  The woman’s hand tapped.

  ‘You were raped?’

  She hesitated before tapping once, yes.

  ‘And beaten up?’

  Tap.

  ‘We can give you some injections, in case he has given you a disease. Is that all right?’

  Tap

  ‘And we can do a minor operation to clear your womb in case he made you pregnant.’ She shuddered and clutched herself. ‘Do you want that?’

  Tap, tap, tap, tap, no, no.

  ‘All right. Is that because you would want to be pregnant?’

  No.

  ‘Then it’s because you know you can’t be? Because you’ve got something inside you?’

  She stayed at Collindeane, in the quiet room, and became calmer. She was not badly injured, but she couldn’t speak. Through signs she communicated that she wanted the women to go and find her children, but when they tried, the house was empty. This sent her into deeper silence.

  A neat lady came to the tower in an Olex suit and home-made shoes.

  ‘I wouldn’t normally come,’ she said, ‘to a place like this.’

  ‘But your Benefit’s been taken away?’

  ‘You’re the only people. My husband said I should come.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘They didn’t. They say it might be a mistake in the computer. They’re looking into it.’ She started to sob. ‘I’ve been in FAMILY since it started.

  The women exchanged glances. ‘I’m sure they’ll find it was a mistake,’ they soothed.

  ‘But in the meantime —’

  ‘You’re short of money?’

  ‘Good gracious nol’

  ‘Then — ?’

  ‘I can’t face my friends.’

  The unfit lesbian mother who had gone to the fens for rehabilitation escaped back to Collindeane. She told of a honeycomb of little white cells in the middle of a marsh. Rehabilitation meant being put in one of the cells and making it into a home. You were supposed to paint it and keep it clean and furnish it tastefully from a catalogue. When you had done one cell satisfactorily, they removed one wall and hooked up a second, and so on until you had made a beautiful home. At which point your children could be sent for, and your husband (or surrogates, if these were not available). You would then learn to look after them.

  As far as sex was concerned, the unfit mother had been given to a pleasant-mannered man who did not hold with the notion that it was necessary to inject anaesthetic into the clitoris of a lesbian or frigid woman in order to relocate her sexuality where it belonged; he felt sure that he could rely on his technique.

  ‘And could he?’ Pam demanded.

  A dreamy look came into the unfit mother’s eyes. ‘He was certainly nice.’

  ‘There,’ stormed Pam, ‘I said she shouldn’t go.’

  The unfit mother hugged her. ‘Only kidding.’

  ‘Well, don’t,’ Pam grumbled.

  ‘Did you finish the course? I mean, are you now fit?’

  ‘No,’ said the woman, ‘I ran away.’ She looked round at her lover and her friends and the battered walls of the tower. ‘I got lonely.’

  Sometimes after stories like this, Lynn spotted mild smugness in Marsha’s eyes.

  ‘The point is taken,’ Lynn said archly, ‘It’s good that there are places like this.’ She was spending three or four days a week at Collindeane now, helping newcomers or cultivating window-boxes or writing things. Jane came with her, and as Lynn relaxed, she relaxed too. She helped in the creche, finding delight in children, the younger the better. Both felt nervous about the prospect of Jane being looked after by the women in the tower, but the ones learning medical skills were keen to discover all they could about her. When Jane found herself authorised to deliver lectures on her illness she went to it with a will, and although she retained her slightly hurt and supercilious air (keeping in reserve the possibility of being a bitch again at some future date, Marsha speculated) she enjoyed her times in the tower, even to the extent of occasionally coming by herself, and taking her treatments from strangers without a murmur.

  Marsha moved in and lived at the tower. The women invited her, and Lynn had not suggested staying indefinitely with her and Derek. Lynn’s stayed as her mailing address, though, and whenever she saw Lynn she asked anxiously if there was anything from Australia. She tried to hide her feelings when there wasn’t.

  One night Marsha was taking her turn as sentry with Germaine the dog. It was quiet and mild and peaceful; the only movement was the constant flicker of curtains in the street, whose occupants remained fascinated by goings-on at the tower. Suddenly Marsha heard what sounded like a fight between a man and a woman. She tensed, prepared to call help, till she realised that the woman seemed to be getting the better of it. She peered through the gloom. It wasn’t a physical fight anyway. The figures approaching the tower were an adult woman and a tall, sullen boy. The woman kept yelling at the boy to go away, leave her alone; she was angry rather than afraid. He was following her forlornly, like a huge beaten puppy. The woman’s red clothing registered, and Marsha realised it was Judy Matthews with Jim.

  Judy seemed physically well but her mind was all over the place. She muttered of goddesses and moons and starvation and monsters. She'd run away to safeguard her Benefit, she said, but they’d taken it from her anyway. No, she didn’t know why; no, it wasn’t because she was black or because she’d lived with feminists or because she’d once tried for an abortion; she didn’t think so; she thought it was because she was holy; they were frightened because she was holy and magic.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ Marsha said.

  Judy barred Jim’s way. ‘This man cannot come into the women’s tower.’

  ‘You know we make an exception for sons.’

  ‘You think I would not know,’Judy said haughtily, ‘If I had a son?’

  By this time more women had come out, attracted by the commotion; Marsha waited till they had taken Judy away to be cared for, then quietly signed for Jim to come in too. She asked another woman to replace her as sentry, and found him some bread and a few mushrooms. He was big, dark and morose. He said please and thank you as if demonstrating manners. He flinched each time she spoke to him. He seemed to cry out to be touched but she knew she couldn’t.

  ‘What have you been living on, Jim?’

  He shrugged. ‘This and that.’ The food was gone and there was no more.

  ‘Do you know why they cut off her money?’

  ‘Of course. I’m eighteen.’

  Of course, he must be.

  ‘And now,’ he growled, ‘she says I’m not her son. She says she never had a son.’

  Marsha sighed. ‘She isn’t well, Jim. She’s had a hard struggle.’

  ‘It’s been hard for me too. I am her son, aren’t I?’

  ‘Of course ...’

  ‘I’m not staying here,’ he said fiercely, ‘She’s told me I’m not wanted one time too many. This is a bloody madhouse. I’ll get work abroad.’

  ‘Stay here for tonight. Tomorrow we’ll see.’

  She found him a corner and some cushions and rugs; he kept saying he wouldn’t stay, but fell asleep in the middle of saying it. It was still very dark. The tower settled down again to finish its broken night. Marsha resumed her watch, Germaine at her feet. She relaxed. One incident per night was the norm. She dozed.

  A scream tore the air. This time it was inside the tower. More screams followed, and shrieks and running feet. By the time Marsha found the source of the noise it had been calmed. It was the ex-prostitute who’d been raped and beaten. She had broken her silence. She had been shocked into screaming by the appearance in her room of an intruder, a black man come to assault her.

  Enquiries were made, the mystery was solved. There was no intruder. Jim Matthews had been wandering about, half asleep, looking for his mother to make her admit she was his mother. He had wandered into the room of the terrorised woman. He mumbled his apologies. She accepted them, even m
ade a few trembly jokes about how the shock had helped her find her voice. She even thanked him shyly and patted his arm. But Judy’s rage was terrible.

  ‘It proves he is not my son. No son of mine is a rapist.’

  She wouldn’t listen to anyone. She insisted that Jim must leave or she would throw him from the top of the tower. Other women came bleary-eyed to join the argument. It moved from Jim in particular to the whole issue of having sons in the tower at all.

  ‘You see!’ one woman cried, in the middle of all the early-morning acrimony and chaos, ‘they divide us by their very presence!’

  Marsha withdrew from the argument to find Jim getting his things together.

  ‘Would you like to go to Lynn’s?’

  He didn’t answer. He just started to cry.

  Cold fury closed in on Lynn’s face as she heard the tale, sitting in her dressing gown while the sun came up. After a happy, confused reunion with Jim, she had given him a bed. Now she sat with Marsha, drinking bitter koffee.

  ‘What you seem to be saying is that Judy no longer wishes to care for Jim now that she can’t make money out of it.’

  ‘That’s not —’

  ‘What about the other sons living at Collindeane?’

  ‘The women are deciding.’

  ‘Oh they’re deciding, are they? Send them all along here, why don’t you? Bloody home for waifs and strays, this is!’

  Marsha looked at the floor. ‘I’m sorry. I assumed you’d want Jim.’

  ‘Of course I want Jim.’

  ‘Look, Lynn, it’s all very well, but he scared the life out of a woman who’d been raped!’

  ‘Deliberately, of course.’

  Marsha sighed, stood up. ‘Judy’ll feel different when she’s had some sleep and some food. She’ll have him back.’

  ‘Over my dead body,’ said Lynn.

  ‘I guess I’d better go. Will you be coming in later —?’

  ‘No,’ said Lynn, ‘I won’t.’

  Part Three

  Chapter 6: Foreign Policies

  The ‘Towards 2001’ conference was held in the conference centre in Europea City. The centre, round as a tennis-ball, white as the moon, gleamed over the city on impossibly thin legs. To Derek Byers (seconded by his college as part of the international organising team) there was something optimistic but unnerving about the way the building, which could not possibly stand, stood; symbolic, perhaps, of the way it was to be the nerve-centre of the new superstate which, superseding the old economic communities, would unite parts of the world that had never been united, solve problems that had never been solved.

  Now it was the year two thousand; just months away from another year made famous before its time by fantasy fiction. Memories of films about space odysseys made Derek smile; it wasn’t going to be quite like that, it appeared. Survival on this planet took precedence over voyages to others.

  At the feet of the sphere lay the city: an unpleasant ticky-tacky fabrication, rows and clusters of pastel-coloured boxes, pink and lilac and pale gold, homes for planners and builders and civil servants. Derek didn’t like the sphere or the city or, if he was honest, the notion of Europea. Partly, he assumed, it was his age. He was nearly sixty and Europea was a young man’s dream. And his heritage of jingoism, the shameful uneasiness of an Englishman throwing in his lot with foreigners. This sort of thinking had to stop. Sentimentality and chauvinism were equally inane. The twenty-first century would be no time to go it alone. And it would be no time to be marooned on the outer fringes of trading blocs either — your consumers prey to foreign price agreements, your population to demands for migrant labour, your markets to dumping. The Europea standard of living seemed to promise great things: even the pale, clean buildings smirked — our air is clean, we have machines to wash it.

  Once inside the sphere for your conference, you had no need to leave, nor did the guards expect you to. Meeting halls, restaurants, shops, gyms, saunas, telecommunications, entertainment, were all enclosed in the huge glistening ball. You could talk back to your boss or your wife in your home country on a telescreen; you could board the high-speed monorail car in the base of the sphere when it was time to go home. And there were brothels too, where the discreet girls wore blindfolds.

  Floors moved, you did not have to walk. Open escalators criss-crossed and radiated in a circle. Glass-walled lifts rose and fell with whispering speed. Wherever you looked, eminent men were being moved by strange forces to unknown destinations in the pale, white light, and the air was like mountain air, bracing and heady, but not cold.

  Derek Byers was amused and irritated to notice the British contingent behaving in the sphere like children at a fair: playing with gadgets, gulping down free drink, making quite unnecessary trips on the moving floors, watched with condescension by foreigners to whom it was no novelty. There were many who thought that when it came to it, Britain would not be admitted to full membership of Europea; its economy was so rickety, it had so little to offer; and this sort of behaviour, Derek mused, did nothing to dispel that impression. He had been here several months, preparing, serving his country’s apprenticeship along with other international tea-boys from aspiring members of Europea. The sphere made his head spin, made him feel slightly mad, as if he had lost touch with anything natural, as if he had to remember to draw breath or he would suffocate. He remembered conferences in the old days, at universities, staying in student halls of residence with tiny cold rooms and narrow beds and the faint smell of unwashed socks seeping from the locked cupboard.

  He sniffed the white air of the sphere and dreamt of unwashed socks.

  Wherever he looked, faces known to him from the dust-jackets of books sprang into life — and sometimes he caught strangers looking at him too, with puzzled or admiring recognition. The pulsing brain of a continent. A new continent. Not every state in the old Europe would be included in the new Europea, whereas some countries on the far side of the globe had been invited to join. The great sphere — and there would be answering hemispheres in the capital cities of all the member nations — was a symbol of the smallness of the modem world; distance didn’t matter. Race didn’t matter either, nor did ideologies. What did matter was that those nations which had kept a grip on their affairs and weathered the economic storms of the last thirty years should join together and hold on to their means of survival (and defend themselves, Derek added when he felt cynical, from the jealous whinings of those who had not fared so well).

  Power, food, population, world peace, trade, health, industry — these were the cornerstones of survival, and if agreement could be reached the oddest of enemies might become bedfellows. ‘And talking of bedfellows,’ a tipsy colleague had recently responded to Derek’s strivings for conversation, ‘there aren’t any women here.’ And he had warmed to his theme of the preferability of a woman who knew a thing or two.

  It was an exaggeration to say there were no women at the conference, but only a minor one. It was the usual scene. A few tokens, lauded for their sex as much as for their specialities; two types: fussily dressed with clouds of perfume, or stern and austere, one of the lads. Apart from them it was a gathering of males, albeit black males, white males, yellow males, capitalist males, socialist males, political males, scientific males, humble males, puffed-up males, all convinced (in this year two thousand) that they represented humanity.

  Derek was on call for organisational emergencies. A row of telescreens perched like squirrels on the edge of his desk; in each a tiny man waved his arms and mimed a speech. Press a button and you could hear what he said in one of twenty languages, tinny and computerised.

  ‘Planning!’ A video-recording of the introductory address by the President of Europea, an erratic quicksilver of a man whose mood changes were said to be the biggest single obstacle to Britain’s entry. He had surrounded himself with advisers who predicted doom for the British economy and pointed out how little it had to offer; and on a purely personal level he affected to despise every Briton he met. There
were plenty of colleagues to disagree with him, of course, and his powers were not autocratic; but the giant infant of the Europea bureaucracy would not be hard to control. Derek twiddled the knob and listened to him.

  'Planning! Planning is the key! Let the twenty-first century go down in history as the century of planning! Let us see all the world’s problems, which seemed so momentous in the world’s infancy — for so the first twenty centuries AD will appear — let us see them rendered soluble by planning —’

  You had to admire the aplomb with which the man delivered himself of his stream of clichés. Derek frowned and tuned into the Power seminar. Another white man in middle age. Talking about nuclear energy. Every home in the superstate lit by it, every vehicle powered. Early teething troubles no longer applied; present day technology far safer than oil. Problems of waste-disposal being overcome; deep in the earth in unpopulated areas ... well, underpopulated. Shot into space. Rendered water-soluble, tests were hopeful.

  World Peace. Best protection from war was obviously to range all militarily mighty nations on the same side — their interests might in any case prove to be the same ...

  Health. The long list of diseases that could be rendered obsolete. The organs that could be transplanted, substituted. The ages to which man might one day live!

  Trade, Industry, Food. The earth had a vast population to support. Need to end wasteful competition, inefficient farming and processing. Europea to be of a size and variety to be self-sufficient. An interruption, not fully heard; the speaker replied: ‘We nations have got together, organised ourselves. Nations outside Europea are free to do the same. Their problems are not our problems; we will not impose our ways on them.’

  Population. Despite nearly a century of efforts by international agencies, still a headache. Increasing out of control in some places. Elsewhere — Europea, for instance — problems of imbalance. Large elderly populations supported by too small a workforce, too few caretakers. The product of a baby-boom followed by a slump. ‘The fault is not with science,’ explained the professor who ran the agency Europop, his tone slightly hurt; he looked unreal, badly-drawn, with the lines of late middle-age in his face but thick, youthfully-black chin-length hair. ‘The technology of contraception is perfected. The problem is social —’