Benefits

by Zoë Fairbairns

  His car whispered up Seyer Street. The hovels of the gangs who had so unexpectedly and so effectively defended the tower from the first eviction attempt (and thus necessitated the use of gas) were being flattened and scooped up by excavators. They were a health hazard.

  And the tower. He stepped out of the car and looked at it. The attack had not changed its shape but it looked frail, bent, shy as a naked woman hiding behind her hands. Broken boards in the lower windows took the shape of teeth. Fluids poured in defence from the top still dripped down the building like tears. There seemed to be a lot of bodies on the ground, roughly covered. Here and there a face showed, frozen in an agony of suffocation. Some of them were children dressed in red.

  ‘It’s outrageous,’ he muttered.

  ‘Sir?’ said a policeman, hurt.

  ‘Not you. It. That it was ever built.’ The policeman was about his own age. ‘They used to put the poor to live in those, you know, and thought they were doing them a favour.’ He collected his thoughts. In his official voice he said, ‘How did it go?’

  ‘Quite straightforward, sir.’

  ‘And the, er, occupants?’

  ‘Many left voluntarily.’

  ‘Good. The others?’

  ‘Some arrests, sir.’

  Peel glanced at the draped bodies. ‘Injuries?’

  ‘Those were the ones that left voluntarily. They jumped when they smelt the gas.’

  ‘Is it clear to go in?’

  Peel approached the building. Debris was being loaded into skips. Men carried the skips in a human chain to a disposal truck, loads and loads. Would it never end? How long had the women been there to accumulate so much junk? Rugs and wood and dead chickens. The truck backed away, low with weight; another advanced, crushing a heap of rubbish. Peel held up his hand. The van stopped, the driver sighed; Peel rummaged in the rubbish, identified the soft brown tail of a dead dog. He took the dog in his arms and delivered it to a policeman who wrapped it in a rug and laid it with the women. Peel proceeded into the base of the tower.

  He paled and gagged, then was hastily flippant. ‘Don’t think much of their housekeeping.’ The policeman laughed excessively. ‘Saved us a lot of bother, sir, dropping it all for us.’ Peel smiled but wanted to be sick. The mess on the floor (so nauseously thick you could not even see the floor) suggested some giantess going berserk in a kitchen in hell: earth had been thrown, and manure and smashed eggs and sponges soaked in blood (he gagged again at the shape of the sponges, knew what the blood was) and buckets of shit, human and animal and bird; and cooking oils and milk (milk from what animal, dear god, or was it ...?) and treacle and jam and beans and their liquor and honey and urine and candlewax, and, clinging to the stickiness, feathers and flour and leaves and the petals of roses and dear god the smell! His nose sought the lingering sourness of the counter-insurgency gas as relief from the sickening, organic musty intimate smells of women and their works. One thing he decided; the men who had dealt with this would get medals.

  He started to climb, marvelling at the state of the place. Daylight shone through cracks in the walls, bricks were missing, window-frames barely met. Forgivable in an old building, he supposed, but he understood that this one had been falling down since it was built, destroyed from within by the sainted proletarians it was built to ‘help’.

  The figure of a fleeing woman grabbed his attention. He flinched, hid, peeped — but it was only a curtain bulging and swaying at an open window.

  Up he climbed. The height was no hardship to him, he was fit. But to keep families in here — nowhere to play, steps to haul prams up, neighbours to disturb! Only a planner with no requirement to please his customers could come up with such a thing. If people had wanted to live in tower blocks, they’d have built them for themselves.

  He reached the top and his thoughts were coming clear and fast with the freshening of the air. He looked down on the flat street. The former inhabitants would have to go somewhere. They could not be jailed or rehabilitated forever.

  What, then, did one do with ... he hunted for a phrase, remembered only the wrong rats ... those who would not pull their weight? The great dilemma for politicians who chose to make such people their business. Peel knew some history. You could leave them to starve, but there were dangers in having a class with nothing to lose, even if, left to themselves, they would breed themselves out. (Maybe it should have been done ...) You could ship them off to camps and kill them en masse but that was inhumane. You could make a fortune writing books to prove they were not to blame but that was amoral. You could spawn a leviathan welfare industry. Or you could do none of these things.

  The Victorians had known a thing or two, and if they had only had the courage of their clean, logical convictions the chaos of the welfare state would never have come to be, chaos which David Laing had loved to lambast and ridicule but for whose return Peel was sure he yearned. Take his squeamishness over withdrawing Benefit from mothers who didn’t deserve it, for example! And all the time swearing he didn’t believe in handouts!

  Poor Laing. Peel genuinely regretted his end and the manner of it. But he could not be looked to for sense. He was of the soft generation, of the post-war guilt-ridden child-obsessed baby boom. They rode a roller-coaster of gratuities: free milk, free cod liver oil, free schools, free medicine, free grants to go to college ... it was Peel’s view that the trauma of the seventies, the sudden realisation that the party was over and they couldn’t get what they wanted by slapping on the label rights and howling, had blighted that generation for life, had rendered them incapable of understanding how life works.

  Night follows day. Illness follows infection. Want follows idleness and destitution improvidence. The Victorians had understood. He leaned on the brick wall on the roof of the tower. It was solid. The Victorians too had put up buildings for their poor — but they had made no pretence that they were offering desirable residences!

  ‘We should have tried it years ago,’ Peel thought, and added (not realising he spoke aloud) ‘We did try it years ago. And what was the result? A nation more prosperous and inventive than at any time in its history. Before or since.’

  ‘Let go of me.’ Marsha’s wrists were bound rigid with thick cuffs of light, tight metal. They were high overhead, stretched and tied to a stick fastened to her back. Her ribs ached. Hard fingers had searched her, inside and out, and when she tried to wriggle away from their discomfort, fists cuffed her. No one had asked her anything. They kept saying, ‘You’ll talk,’ as if she had refused. What had she to tell? She couldn’t remember what had happened. First she was going to assassinate David, then she wasn’t, then she did. Except that she had a feeling she didn’t. She didn’t want to think. Thinking brought back his flaming pillar of a body, boiling in speechless agony.

  ‘Stop pushing,’ she pleaded. With her arms up like that she could hardly breathe, yet her voice sounded polite. She might be standing in a bus queue. She couldn’t understand why they kept pushing her. They surely didn’t think an assassin (they thought she was one, she wasn’t sure) cared about escaping.

  Even when she had the plan to kill him (which she had abandoned, or had she taken it up again?) she didn’t remember planning an escape. All she’d felt was hatred. All she’d heard was Posy urging that for once in her life she should get off her ass and stop waiting for a nice collective cop-out compromise decision and go ahead and bloody do something outrageous, spectacular, cruel and stunning, to match the enormity of the seizure of the tower. All she’d heard was the contempt in the voice of the guerilla woman. All she’d heard was her own voice: you’ll always be an interloper in Lynn’s life. However much she tries to do the decent thing you’ll always be her bit on the side. You’ll never be as legitimate as the slimiest, smuggest, most casual boyfriend.

  Now she felt numb with the shock of death. The one man who’d fucked her didn’t exist. He hadn’t even left a body.

  She was manhandled past a window. She glimpsed her face, tomb-white. Behi
nd it her thoughts seethed like maggots, untouchable.

  They untied her and put her in a small dark room. She could feel neither walls nor floor, her limbs were numb. It was warm and airless and dry. A blink of light dazzled her and was gone. It let her see a hole in the floor, maybe two inches across. She was meant to pee in that, she supposed. Typical. Or was it a secret escape route, could she pick and wear away at the sides of it, rubbing with her fingernails till it was wide enough for her body? The light flashed again and again. The flashes got faster till her eyes did not know if the light was on or off; the light mixed with remembered darkness, darkness with remembered light — she moved her hands before her eyes — the movement looked jerky, like very old movies. Her body seemed to disobey the orders she gave it. The walls of the cell moved in to crush her, then out of sight. She panicked. Shadowy waves rode up and down. She was in a ship. She was going to be sick. She tried to aim for the two-inch hole but it would not stay still.

  ‘Count the waves.’

  The voice came from the four comers of the room but she saw nobody. A spasm hit her feet and rattled her teeth, more unnerving than painful. That voice again;

  ‘That was a grade one shock. There are ten grades. Count the waves.’

  Her eyes tried to follow the waves up the walls through the dazzling strobe light.

  ‘Count them.’

  ‘Fifteen.’

  ‘Wrong.’

  ‘Twenty now ...’

  ‘Wrong. Go on counting.’

  ‘Why, if it’s always wrong?’ A shock juddered up her spine. ‘Fifty-two! Fifty-three!’

  ‘Wrong.’

  She was always wrong but as long as she tried to count there were no more shocks. Sometimes they pretended they would let her sleep but when her eyelids met, electricity made her stomach heave. I’m being tortured, it’s too funny, I'm being driven mad. She made her brain stop counting waves while her voice shouted random numbers. Her brain tried to figure out why she had assassinated David, since sooner or later she was going to be asked. And she needed to know for herself. A towering block of windows rode the waves and figures fell crashing from the windows and she cried. Why are they torturing me, I’ve nothing to deny? She welcomed the electric shocks and the pains from her bonds because they were real and distracted her from the mad seasickness of counting waves.

  Hours or months later when they took her into another room for interrogation she maintained her balance only with difficulty as she proclaimed, ‘I am the goddess.’

  ‘You’re the ringleader?’

  ‘Goddess.’

  ‘And who’s yer visible presence here on earth, goddess?’

  ‘Posy.’

  ‘Posy who? Describe her.’

  ‘I have never seen such a powerful woman. A rock of flesh. So much flesh —’ Marsha’s head nodded. They let her sit.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Anywhere, she could be anywhere.’

  ‘D’you want to go and count waves again?’

  ‘I don’t know where she is, she goes everywh —’

  The interrogators closed in. ‘So it’s international?'

  ‘Women all over the world will rise up, Posy says.’

  ‘Is that where you get the guns from, Posy?’

  She described Posy for them, every detail of her body and her work and her manner and her beliefs and how they would know her. They wrote it all down.

  They took her to another cell, a still grey box. She saw waves but they could have been inside her eyes. No one talked to her; bland food appeared through a hatch. She supposed she would have a trial soon. She looked forward to it. It would establish what had happened. There would be a jury. She would walk into court and see Lynn on it, smart and discreet in a ladylike hat. She practised the imperceptible smile they would give each other, and the hug when she was acquitted.

  But would there be any more hugs, after that celebratory one? And would she have a defence counsel?

  And would she be able to appeal?

  She watched her body to tell the time. Two months she guessed ... but stress could disrupt periods, and besides, at her age ... When they stopped altogether was it merely menopause, or had time stopped, or had somebody raped her ...

  ‘When am I going on trial?’ she demanded of the bowl of pap.

  ‘You? You’re unfit to plead.’ The hatch rapped shut.

  She was not to be tried, then? Or sentenced, or released? She was only fifty-one. What if she lived to be a hundred? She heard animal noises in her cell and could not believe they came from her. She was given books she did not want to read and the chance to hear taped music. One day they said to her, ‘We’re going to let you out.’

  They let her out into a grassed-over yard. Wild-eyed men pressed their noses against the glass and leered and gestured silently. She guessed she was in a men’s prison. Or asylum. Of course. They wouldn’t want her mixing with women.

  ‘Run about nowl Take exercise!’

  But she wanted to be back in her cell. Had she been useful? The world thought her mad. She quaked. By killing David she had brought Peel to power. Posy came at night like a gentle giant. ‘Of course! You’ll go in the herstory books — it was heroic, it was fabulous!’

  ‘But was it any use?’

  Posy winked and hugged her. ‘They haven’t caught me yet.’

  She decided to hunger-strike. After all, the suffragettes did it, and got let out. Marsha didn’t expect to be let out (she didn’t even want to be — it would foul things up for Lynn) but she wanted a visitor or a letter or evidence that someone cared.

  ‘No one’s asked to visit you,’ they said.

  ‘That’s a lie.’

  ‘Or letters.’

  ‘But the whole women’s movement is ...’

  ‘Women’s movement!’ they scoffed, ‘There isn’t one. Not any more.’

  She shuddered at their certainty. Was Lynn all right? It was astonishing how long you could go without eating and not feel ill. A week, two, three ... But what if they didn’t know? What if no one out there knew she was hunger-striking? What if the government were pleased to be saved the bother of executing her, what if that was why she was here? She thought she heard women singing and imagined them hunger-striking in solidarity with her at the prison gates. Go away, go away, save your risks for something else.

  A dish of stewed beans appeared at the hatch with thin shreds of meat. They smelled good, they were evidence that someone cared, even if it was only the clerk who’d have to fill in an extra form when she died. She ignored them. She lay still, saving energy, wondering why her body could not get the idea that it wasn’t meant to survive.

  She lay two days with her eyes shut and smelled the beans rotting. When she opened her eyes a cardboard box lay by the dish. It had been examined but they had sealed it up again. As if she were a child.

  It was light. They hadn’t, they surely hadn’t sent an empty box to torment her ... the little spray of twigs and leaves and hard berries that had been in Posy’s funeral garland fell into her thin hand. Their faint scent caught her starved senses, shooting her sky-high like a drug. Guilt caught her throat. She should have saved them from the tower herself instead of rushing off like that. (Maybe she wouldn’t be here now if ...) She searched for a note. Maybe they’d taken it away. Maybe a love note between women was too subversive. Maybe there hadn’t been one.

  Her famished fingers were alert, skimming the box. They felt z slight indentation. She tilted the box to catch the light, and read (as if someone had leaned heavily on the box to write and the words had cut through) ‘You were useful. Love, Lynn.’ And as she looked again she saw that ‘were’ had been crossed through and replaced with ‘are.’

  You liar, you liar! Or did she mean, you are at your most useful when you are out of the way? She examined the dried berries. Never eat strange berries, they may kill you or render you sterile, invisible, mad. She sniffed them. She smiled. When they brought her fresh beans and meat, she ate them, keeping
the berries for company.

  Isabel Travers’ honey-blonde hair waved softly over her haggard early-morning face. She had not made up yet. She looked from the newspaper to her husband, half asleep, teeth hanging out, pushing at his breakfast. Breakfast was rather a grand name for the wet pulp, but she had sworn that as long as her legs would carry her round a kitchen and as long as Alan could raise a spoon to his mouth, he would not want for hot food. She liked to serve beans in their dark juice in nice white dishes, monogrammed in green.

  She looked back at the close lines of miniscule type in the latest government announcement. How could an old person with failing eyes be expected ... she wavered with her magnifying glass and realised that this message was not for old people with failing eyes.

  DEPARTMENT FOR FAMILY WELFARE — EUROPOP

  An action-research programme will begin immediately with a view to giving British women the benefits of the latest research on parenthood-planning. Special encouragement will continue to be given to women showing high standards of mothering. Potential mothers wishing to draw state Benefit will also be given the opportunity of volunteering for the following pilot projects:

  a) ACCELERATED REARING. To ascertain the feasibility of raising children to adulthood in less than the traditional 15-20 years, suitable mothers will be invited to accept prenatal procedures and early intensive education with a view to equipping sons for professional qualifications in their early teens.

  b) SKILL AND SOCIAL PROGRAMMING. Behavioural science has long been concerned with the extent to which characteristics (aggression, sex-roles, genius, etc) are innate or learned. Mothers will be treated to ensure the birth of identical twins. One twin will be removed from the mother at birth (after full counselling) and raised in a neutral environment. The other will remain under carefully controlled social and familial influences. Comparisons will be made to ascertain ...