Benefits

by Zoë Fairbairns

  It seemed a short, soft fall, and everyone got ready to laugh. But Posy went pale and fought for breath. In less than five minutes she was dead from a heart attack.

  The desire to laugh wildly put Marsha in a panic as she heard this. In a shaky voice she asked, ‘Did she ever talk about me?’

  ‘Oh yes, and about the great tower, taller than the highest trees, where you were leading the women to revolution.’

  ‘Posy always did exaggerate.’

  The woman shrugged. ‘She did not exaggerate about the height of your tower. It is remarkable. What was it built for, originally?’

  ‘To keep people in.’

  ‘I have brought you this. From the garland we buried her in.’ And the woman gave Marsha a spray of dried twigs and leaves and berries. Despite the distance it had travelled, a faint, sweet, woody odour hung in the air. It cleared Marsha’s head. She felt well.

  The woman kept a respectful silence, as if Marsha might be praying. But she didn’t move. Marsha said, ‘There’s another reason why you’ve come?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Resistance has grown in my country to the exploiters from Europea. We wish to have contact with other liberation struggles. The men laughed when I said I would contact you, but —’ she dipped deep in her raincoat pocket again, like a housewife hunting for change. ‘I have brought you something. I can get more.’ She dropped a little yellow gun into Marsha’s hand.

  ‘It looks like a toy,’ she said, fascinated.

  ‘It’s no toy.’

  ‘A water pistol, then.’

  ‘You can practise with water. This is better.’ The woman’s eyes were flinty as she handed Marsha a gold foil cylinder that felt full of jelly. It was heavier than it looked and had strange markings on it, unfamiliar lettering that Marsha seemed to know spelled out Danger, Caution.

  ‘They are specially shaped for women’s small hands, and easy to use.’

  ‘Where do you get them?’

  ‘A friendly government.’

  ‘How does it work?’

  The woman took the gun and showed how the cylinder slotted into the barrel. She demonstrated pulling the trigger, at which point a pin would pierce the cylinder and jelly would squirt under pressure from the gun, ignited by a spark. ‘Accurate and very long range. You can burn off a man’s head while his feet are still in his boots. I can get you a crate.’

  Marsha forced her brain to work. Some women were into non-violence and some would complain about the fire-hazard of storing the fuel and some would —

  ‘Would we have to pay?’ she fenced.

  ‘The cost.’

  ‘You see, we don’t have much money.’

  ‘What could you afford?’

  ‘You see, it’s earmarked — I couldn’t — not without —’

  The woman frowned. ‘You are armed already?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what is the difficulty?’

  ‘You see, it isn’t that kind —’

  ‘It is serious, this revolution of yours?’

  ‘Yes, but —’

  ‘How can it be serious if you are not armed?’

  ‘Can I contact you?’

  ‘I leave today. I can get you a crate. Yes or no.’

  Marsha said in despair, ‘I’d need to ask the others and nobody’s here. They’re all off visiting other women’s groups.’

  ‘I thought it would be sufficient,’ said the woman, ‘to come to your headquarters. ’

  ‘This isn’t a headquarters. We don’t have headquarters.’

  The woman got up to go. ‘Our men were right to laugh at you.’

  ‘Wait. Wait here.’ Marsha’s body felt feverish again, but she dragged herself to the top of the building and back down again to see who was around. Judy making spells in her chapel; medical women preoccupied with their patients, very unlikely to want to discuss flame-throwers, let alone give up the precious money earmarked for supplies to have them on the premises; childminders. There were the sentries, of course, but even if they wanted arms they were not enough to make such a choice democratically. Marsha did not need to ask to know the answer: ‘Wait till the next house meeting.’

  The visitor left, radiating scorn.

  Marsha went back to her chair and her cold. Wind blew straight on to her but she couldn’t be bothered to move. Something yellow caught her eye; she realised the woman had left her gun. Deliberately? Marsha hid it. Then she pressed the little spray of twigs in her fist and stared at it till it dissolved in the mist of her eyes.

  ‘Marsha?’

  Not Judy, please, I won't be nice to her, I can’t —

  It was Lynn. ‘They said you were ill.’

  ‘I’m not ill, I’m crying.’

  ‘Why?’

  Because Posy’s dead.’

  Lynn knelt and put her arms round her. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I just got a message.’

  Lynn’s shoulder was bony and insubstantial. ‘Come home with me?’

  ‘No thanks. I don’t want to intrude on your family.’

  Lynn held her face, looked puzzled. ‘What’s brought this on?’

  ‘Derek thinks I’m a lesbian,’ Marsha wailed.

  ‘But so do I. Aren’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  ‘I always assumed you and Posy —’

  ‘Don’t assume anything!’ said Marsha fiercely, ‘I’ll tell you one day, one day I will.’

  Lynn had come to return a box of papers she’d given up trying to sort. ‘I wish women had always remembered to put addresses on things in the old days,’ she said helplessly. Marsha kept on crying. Lynn had told Derek she wouldn’t be long, but she leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. ‘I’ll stay a bit,’ she said.

  The long silence was broken only by the soft whistling of wind and Marsha trying to control her breathing. ‘D’you know what she said once,’ she blurted fiercely, ‘she said there was nothing I could do for her that she couldn’t do better for herself. In bed, I mean.’

  ‘That was nice of her.’

  ‘Don’t —’

  ‘No. But look. Are you doubting your whole sexual identity because you didn’t live happily ever after? Heterosexual people don’t do that.’

  ‘You are, though.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Living happily ever after, and Derek thinks I’m trying to break it up. Well, doesn’t.he? Doesn’t he think there’s something between you and me?’

  Lynn shrugged. ‘There is. I’m very fond of you.’

  ‘Don’t be naive. I want more.’

  ‘Why?’

  Why? The only answer Marsha could think of was to hold someone warm, because Posy died, but Lynn was going ahead with the kind of pent-up fluency that made Marsha wonder if she had been waiting for an opportunity to say all this. ‘Why? To prove something? It wouldn’t prove anything. I mean, you might think it does and Derek might think it does and even I might think it does, but it doesn’t. It’s a great male idea, you know, that you pass some magical point of no return when you go to bed with someone, or when you touch some particular part of them, or tell them some important secret — it’s all part of the great male mania for labelling things and classifying them and planning.’

  Marsha smiled damply. ‘You’ve got a lot to say on this, haven’t you? Have you been thinking again?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Rationalising the fact that I want to sleep with you or whatever the hell it’s called between women.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s my turn now. ’

  ‘And to see what it’s like, hm?’

  Lynn flushed. ‘I suppose that would be no worse a motive than trying to get at my really-quite-nice husband.’

  Marsha said, ‘This conversation is getting embarrassing.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it? So not tonight Josephine. Come home though, Marsha, and let me make a fuss of you.’


  ‘No, I’ll stay here.’

  Marsha dreamt so pleasantly that night that she woke unsure of whether she had actually slept with her arms round Lynn or not. Her cold was better, but depression re-descended. Posy was breathing down mighty contempt. I arranged for the women’s movement to be armed, Marsha, single-handed I arranged for the first great international gesture of women's solidarity with women across the seas, across the borders of race and class, alone I did it, and at a crisis in history you turned away because you had not taken a collective decision! Ye gods and goddesses — was this why I died?

  Sadness and guilt suffused her. She should have had courage, she shouldn’t have flinched like that from the reality of physical conflict because it was going to come anyway, sooner or later, and then cowardice would be called by its name and no one would be fooled by special pleading of commitment to non-violence or collective decision-making! She could have been useful. She would never tell anyone, she decided, looking at the little yellow gun and the foil cylinder hidden away. After all, what use was there for feminists in a weapon that could bum off a man’s head and leave his feet in his boots?

  It was the day for the visit of the president of Europea. It was summer. The dawn sky was pale, the sun wreathed in mist. Not a leaf stirred. It was going to be hot.

  The president’s swift fleet would reach Dover around 10 a.m. He and his party of ministers and experts and wives and journalists would be whisked to London in bullet-proof cars. At a prearranged point they would transfer to open cars for a slow public drive to lunch with the prime minister, the cabinet and the royal family.

  The president had had to be reassured. ‘Of course open cars are safe. Of course the people want to see you. London has no civil disorder problem.’ But the city’s tramps and beggars had been rounded up and sent to suburban parks, just in case.

  Policemen strapped guns to their waists and looked uneasily out of their windows as they got up in the morning. Sun made for a better spectacle, but rain meant smaller, more docile crowds.

  There’ll be no problems,’ their commissioners had assured them, ‘Most of the crowd’ll be FAMILY.’

  But the policemen remained uneasy, and none more so than those with wives in FAMILY. Each thought it an individual worry and told no one. There was prestige in having a FAMILY wife, not to mention a comfortable home. So they didn't discuss how odd the wives had become of late, how quiet and preoccupied and even hostile; they didn’t share their puzzlement over the number of times they’d come home to find their front rooms full of women and children planning urgently and angrily but switching the conversation to fabric or recipes the minute their husbands came in.

  Mr Peel was uneasy too. David Laing had washed his hands of the Family Welfare aspects of the Europea agreement, told Peel to get on with it. Peel knew it was a sticky area and his own political future hung on it. He felt certain that the women would step into line when it came to it, particularly if the price and the penalties were right — but it would only take some insane performance by the women’s libbers (who fortunately knew nothing) to undermine the image of the nation of public-spirited mothers just waiting for the chance to serve the human race and the new supercontinent.

  The gleaming fleet of cars prepared to move off. The visitors found it quaint to be carried in Rolls Royces. They were going to the royal palace, a skyscraper on the comer of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street that had been built for offices but never occupied.

  The monarch, the president and the prime minister climbed into the first car. The engine purred as it crept through the police cordon and into the main street. The second car carried VIP wives and the princess.

  The crowds — women and children mainly, with flowers and flags, cheered. The police watched them. Plainclothes men pushed their way tensely along the pavements.

  The third car. Mr Peel, David Laing and the professor with jet-black hair. Sun flashed on the car’s mirrors and the hubcaps of the wheels. Sudden movement rippled through the crowds. Police hands shot to their belts ... but it was nothing.

  ‘Let the children through.’Just mothers pushing kids forward to see better. ‘Let the children through.’

  Mr Peel stood up in the car, his arms wide to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd. David Laing sat slumped, his hand over his mouth, his eyes downcast.

  The professor’s eyes, soft and avuncular, roamed over the cheering children at the front of the pavements. When the procession slowed, knots of little girls in green rushed forward under the policemen’s stern eyes and gave flowers. The professor pinched their cheeks, chucked them under the chin.

  It was a heart-warming spectacle, the VIP wives and the princess agreed in the second car, as the procession wound its way through the sunlit West End.

  Chapter 8: The Protection of Women

  All along the route children were being pushed forward. It was a reassuring sight for the police, who had feared that movements a good deal more sinister might come from this crowd. Not that there was any serious dissent over Britain going into Europea but international terrorism could threaten any visiting statesman. Today, though, there were no bombs, no offensive yells; just the age-old appeal of mothers at a spectacle, passed up the line like some gentle army dispatch: let the children through, let the children through.

  Had the police looked closely, they might have noticed something odd. They might have seen slight anguish suppressed in the eyes of the mothers who let them go. They might have seen a lingering kiss, a last whispered word, or they might have wondered why so many of the children carried coats on this warm day, or clutched books or teddy-bears as if they were being sent to bed. Police officers later chided their juniors for not spotting these clues, but, as they had to admit, this was not the kind of detail a policeman was trained to look for.

  The last car vanished through the tall gates in front of the royal skyscraper. Lights winked, messages of relief buzzed between guards. The policemen relaxed and turned back to the crowd, which seemed suddenly thinner, and, now that the cheers and the excitement had died away, oddly quiet.

  ‘All right, kiddywinks,’ the policemen said, ‘Back to mum now.’

  The children gazed up into the policemen’s faces and said nothing. The policemen looked over their heads into the blank space where their mothers had been. Like puppets from a storybook, the policemen scratched their heads and bent from the waist to examine and reassure the children who surged silently around them, then glanced along the line to see their colleagues similarly surrounded, similarly perplexed, and not a mother in sight.

  The prime minister peered at his drink. A paltry pool of cheap liquor, hardly worth dirtying the glass for. The mania for economy had struck even here. Glass chandeliers replaced by inelegant plastic. Reproduction old masters, stretch Olex covers on bursting armchairs. Not like the old days at Buckingham Palace.

  He glanced at the Europea group, hoping that they at least had been given proper drinks. Their oafish president was quite capable of commenting on it if he didn’t think he had been.

  The royals hadn’t put in an appearance yet. In deference to the president’s sensitivities, they weren’t following the usual procedure of guests being formally introduced and expected to bow. The president might refuse to bob at the critical moment, and then there would be the tedious search for the right response to the snub, at a time when the nation’s diplomatic resources were already stretched to their limits. So the guests had been shown into the lounge for a pre-lunch drink, and the royals would filter in when the conversation was moving and the gathering relaxed.

  Which wouldn’t be yet, the prime minister thought grimly, glaring at the knots of people sizing each other up as if for a fight. Peel, sleek and slim in his shiny suit, was laying down the law to somebody’s wife. David Laing stood alone, swigging the koffee he’d made difficulties by asking for, making no effort to mix.

  The prime minister’s toe fidgeted with a wrinkle in the carpet. They hadn’t even bought new carpeting
for the move from the palace, they’d had the old stuff refitted, badly. A gap by the wall corresponded to the wrinkle — maybe if he pushed — he sighed. The wrinkle reared up into a roller-coaster, stopped like a sand-dune. It would be on his nerves throughout the meal. Among other things. He wished it was over, wished the whole visit over. He thought of the country cottage he would flee to when all was signed and sealed. He hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep for a month. Always there was a delegation, a firm, a cobbled-together pressure-group to see, to reassure that their interests were being taken account of. And always, of course, that assurance could be given. Europea was good for everybody.

  At least. There was one part of the agreement that troubled him, and that was the Europop project. He wasn’t sure why. Politically it was feasible — birth control came low on anyone’s agenda these days, and all that was needed was a photogenic expert who could blind people with science and wouldn’t mind going on television in the middle of the night when nobody was watching. In practical terms it made sense; and morally ... well, it was superstitious to feel uneasy, and superstition had no place in the third millenium anno domini. He sighed. He’d been won over. Public opinion could be too, when the time came to tell them about it, if it was couched in the right terms by the right man.

  His eyes fell on Laing, hunched in a comer. He seemed to be trying to eat his cup. Curious fellow, not long for the political world, the prime minister guessed. All the heart seemed to have gone out of him. Never very much talent anyway — typical that he should have chosen a two-bit party like the FP in which to pursue his curious obsession. He’d never have got anywhere in the jungle of real politics. He held his job because nobody else wanted it.

  A door opened; eyes swivelled, expecting royals. But it was a footman who informed the prime minister in a slightly contemptuous stage whisper that there was a call which the switchboard felt he ought to take personally. Embarrassed, the prime minister excused himself, avoiding the president’s glance of questioning indignation.