Benefits

by Zoë Fairbairns

A low moan escaped from Isabel’s lips. Alan grunted and jerked his spoon. Beans fell on the floor with a soft plop. Isabel bent closer to the paper; the lines swam together.

  c) SEX RATIO PROGRAMMING. This long-term multigenerational project will give women the right to choose the sex of their unborn baby. Researchers will seek to establish the correlation between the proportion of females in the population and national fertility rates ...

  Further projects (cloning, extra-uterine gestation, &c) will be announced in due course.

  Women wishing to participate will be given priority for the removal of contraceptive pellets and the payment of Benefit ...

  Veins stood out on Isabel’s white temple. Her arm stiffened — she thumped the table.

  ‘You must talk to Peel,’ she said.

  Alan stared.

  ‘Peel. Talk to him.'

  ‘Ha! Peel!’ Alan started to mutter to himself, bean juice staining the white stubble on his chin.

  ‘He must know that this was never —’

  Alan mouthed, ‘Europea —’

  She wasn’t listening. ‘The effect would be devastating,’ she said, ‘if we were to denounce —’

  ‘Rubbish!’

  ‘Alan, why is it that you are so lucid when you wish to contradict me and senile when I want to discuss something?’

  He looked at her in astonishment. She could not remember when she had last raised her voice to him. He grumbled: ‘He’d call us sentimental old has-beens, mourning our lost potency.’

  ‘I never had potency,' she retorted, and he was back in his dream.

  How had it happened, she wondered as she peered at the newspaper, trying to find a saving clause, something that would tell her she had misunderstood, how had it happened, this descent from an ideal of FAMILY life, to control and contempt? Same thing, she heard the feminists hiss, and knew she could not go to them, even if she wanted to, even if she knew where they were.

  There was a truth and a rightness and a homecoming that they refused to acknowledge, in submission to the male. Outward submission, that was. When it came to it women had ways to get what they wished — and a woman whose husband was secure in the belief that he was the boss could be more ‘liberated’ than one with an insecure man fumbling between equality and guilt. Didn’t the sex act say it all? It was hard to believe, watching Alan’s senile slobbering, but her flesh could still tingle and weep at the memory of nights of voluptuous surrender — the pride and gratitude of feeling his strength and aggression melt into tender care for her delight. The wild thrusts of the man impaling her like prey, and the love and mercy in his face — didn’t that synthesise it all, wasn’t that what it was all about? And how could there be joy in it if the strength and the aggression and the mercy and the love were all melted down into politics?

  The feminists didn’t understand. But then did she?

  What would the government do next — especially if there was resistance, if the improbable feminist-FAMILY alliance that called itself The Women turned out not to have been repressed? She shuddered to think of the years ahead, of more and more clumsy mannish interference in the chemistry, the poetry, the checks and balances of sex and creation. The Women had called her an oppressor when all she sought was to claim and safeguard the female empire!

  She’d often wondered, over the years, how much her own sterility (a mystery, the doctors said) was the result of some botched political plan by men ... radioactivity in the air, perhaps, or a pollutant in the water supply.

  Alan made a clumsy movement with his spoon and sent more beans scattering over the floor. She sighed deeply and reached to pick them up one by one, each bean leaving a sticky smear. Her head rested on the edge of the table. Her golden hair slipped and fell off. The hair underneath was a short white cap, and the back of her head looked winsome and young like a boy risen wet from a swimming pool.

  Chapter 10: Planned Population

  The Europop researchers had always known it would be many years before their work produced results that the scientific community would recognise as significant. Even if Accelerated Rearing did create fourteen-year-old nuclear physicists, there would have to be enough of them to rule out the possibility of random genius; many dozens of pairs of identical twins would need to reach adulthood before firm conclusions could be reached on nature versus nurture; and of course the Sex Ratio Programme would not bear fruit in the lifetime of its architects.

  The researchers had been carefully chosen for their sense of mission and dedication, and were well paid to compensate for the lack of status that shorter-term projects with earlier conclusions would bring their peers in other fields; but sometimes they grumbled.

  ‘We won’t be around to see the species when every rogue gene is obsolete.’

  ‘We may, we may. The professor may yet abolish death.’

  ‘Then we’ll be out of work. He’ll have to abolish birth to make room.’

  ‘And then what will the Tummies say?’

  ‘Tummies’ was a little joke they had. It had been coined by a journalist at the time of the mothers’ strike. If there’s a strike, the journalist had quipped in a column, there must be a trade union. The trade union of mothers, TUM. It didn’t take much wit to move from that to Tummies, especially if you thought for one moment what you were talking about. It avoided paying the strikers the compliment of taking them at their own assessment: The Women. Now Tummies was popular parlance for any recalcitrant women. In the government Women’s Centres it was shorthand for those who got pregnant without permission or were otherwise unco-operative.

  There weren’t many but there were enough to be irritating. Organized feminism — The Women — appeared to have been wiped out. Thousands had been sent abroad for rehabilitation and returned with the wind taken very much out of their sails. Skulking back to what they thought of as ‘their’ communes, they found themselves invited to enter Welfare Hostels, minimal accommodation for the truly destitute with conditions expressly designed to encourage them to seek an alternative. If suitable, they could get married, have babies and draw Benefit. Or they could take domestic employment in private homes.

  Many succumbed or disappeared; the post-entry economic boom had allowed Benefit levels to be a real incentive to women to behave themselves. The whining of the Tummies was not organised resistance, just perversity: ‘I’m not one of The Women, doctor, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t have another baby when I want one.’ The doctors tried to be philosophical about the fact that it was always the feckless, difficult women who took this line. The ones whom one wouldn’t really mind having an extra baby or two were always the ones who stuck most meticulously to the population plans made for them, and whose contraceptive pellets remained firmly in place until permission was given for their removal.

  The Europop workers considered appealing over the heads of married Tummies to their husbands, but Peel warned them off. It would go against the grain of the British male to be instructed on any aspect of his sex life by foreign scientists; it was a small miracle that he hadn’t openly objected already! It was far better to use propaganda to remind men that the twin bounties of pellets plus Benefits could relieve them finally of any anxiety concerning the consequences of sexual intercourse, and to hint that concern with family planning was rather unmasculine.

  And so, when women who had agreed to participate in Accelerated Rearing suddenly protested that their children’s babyhood was being taken from them, or refused at the last minute to give up the second identical twin, or confounded all predictions by opting for girls in the Sex Ratio Programme, or sneaked off to backstreet practitioners when Women’s Centre doctors refused to remove their pellets, the Europop workers tried not to worry, tried to see it as teething troubles, looked more closely at their counselling techniques and put pressure on Peel to step up the propaganda of the New Family Movement.

  Peel was less confident. The professor buzzed and bleeped him over airwaves at odd hours of the morning to rant that the programme was ex
pensive and it was money down the drain if random breeding continued to be allowed. ‘It confuses the figures, Peel. And it is bad for the morale of those who are co-operative.’

  Peel wasn’t sure, either, that The Women had been wiped out with the ease and thoroughness that their silence suggested. Someone was still doing illegal operations. Someone was still sowing discontent: just because you couldn’t see them it didn’t mean they weren’t there. The nastiest diseases could be clobbered by drugs and appear cured, when in fact they were continuing their lethal work deep in the body, unheralded by symptoms until it was too late.

  Whenever he saw an unaccompanied woman, he wondered ...

  Whenever he heard a tale of female recalcitrance, be it in a Welfare Hostel, in some man’s home, in a Women’s Centre or a Europea factory, he wondered. He decided he’d liked them better when they were visible. For who could tell? When a tearful girl asserted her right to fulfil herself through motherhood, who knew which side she was on?

  The refurbishment of FAMILY — now the New Family Movement, open only to those whose loyalty and morals were above reproach was long overdue. The emphasis had to change from sentimental concern for individuals to the Family of Man. ‘The Family of Man has ruled this planet for only a short span in the history of the universe. Are we here to stay, or will we waste our resources, destroy ourselves? Let us show, by planning and self-control, that we will stayl And let it be the proud boast of this nation that we showed the way!’

  The NFM ran processions: mammoth spectacles now, transmitted from whichever city originated them, to giant telescreens in other urban centres, and piped into private homes. Here was a sick deformed monster — not a real one of course, that would be inhumane, but a constructed parody of a human being with bent limbs, watery skin and the clownlike features of the hereditary-mad. Watchers were encouraged to give free rein to their feelings: hiss, boo, turn away, vomit, feel no guilt. Guilt belongs not in natural reactions (does not the lioness mercy-kill her deformed cub?) but in those of us who have permitted such travesties to be born when we could have stopped even their conception.

  Films were shot onto walls of buildings, humans with black skin stretched thinly over poking bones, picking fields bare like locusts. ‘The way of the future? Not for Europea!’ And fat white people lounged in a modern city for contrast.

  Smiling women operating machines that cleansed the air. ‘Chained to motherhood? No longer!’

  Peel was almost as pleased with his public information films as he was with his Welfare Hostels. They at once cleared the streets of trouble-makers and encouraged workers to accept the jobs that Europea offered. This in turn made the president better-disposed to the British in general and Peel in particular. The president had been scornful that a man with a ridiculous ministry called Family Welfare could claim to have the answer to labour troubles, but now Peel felt he was well on the way to a prestige job in Europea City.

  Of its own momentum, far more effectively than any public information film could engineer such a thing, fear of the Welfare Hostel entered popular culture. Teachers could warn difficult students: ‘You know where you’ll end up.’ ‘Go to bed, or Mr Peel will come for you,’ mothers could tease. ‘Better than a stay in a Welfare Hostel,’ trade union negotiators could console their members over a watered-down pay claim. A whole new genre of sentimental fiction (particularly popular with the ladies) chronicled families’ struggles to keep from the disgrace of the ‘’ostel’. ‘Little licit’ became a term of abuse addressed to a child; it referred to the illicit babies, those conceived outside the plans of the Women’s Centres, who frequently ended up in the Hostels, with or without their mothers, since no Benefit was payable and families with illicit children often found it hard to get jobs or homes.

  The use of those conspicuous old tower blocks ensured that many people could view a Welfare Hostel from the windows of their homes; and churchmen were pleasantly surprised that the visibility of immediate retribution revived an interest in hell, even in so sophisticated an age. Religion took a new hold, particularly among those who did not regard themselves as candidates either for Welfare Hostel or hell.

  It was Peel’s duty to visit a Hostel now and again. It would be a very solemn occasion, the inmates lined up by age and sex in their loose Olex uniforms with the name of the Hostel’s catchment area stamped on the shoulder. He would listen courteously to their complaints about food or conditions, then point out that the doors were open. Sometimes he would list job opportunities, or suggest that the destitute might turn to their own families for support. Finally a pretty little girl would present a bunch of flowers, a ceremony which reassured Peel that he was not turning hard, it touched his heart so.

  It amused Peel to hear the demands from political dissidents (grown vocal and cocky in the boom, yet easily dealt with by selective offers of employment in far-flung regions of Europea) concerning the Hostels. He considered it instructive, the way they made more fuss over minimal provision than they ever had when there was none. If there had to be Welfare Hostels, the dissidents loved to argue (missing the point entirely) did they have to be so inhumane?

  ‘No one has to go there,’ Peel would reply quietly.

  Did they have to be painted inside and out in garish, restless colours, with lights that always burned? Must the inmates wear stigmatising uniforms, did the interior walls of the flats have to be removed so that people were kept without privacy, like goods on shelves? Did the most personal details of life have to be bound with rules, like talking and movement and visits to the lavatory only at set times? Did families have to be shattered, one man’s wife forced to lie with another man's husband and the children rotated between different sets of adults until they didn’t know who they were?

  Peel noted the objections but had one answer. ‘They can leave at any time.’

  Lefties complained about the work the inmates did. Great bales of industrial laundry were brought from Europea in ships, overalls and tarpaulins stained so deep with caustic dirt that skin would come off scrubbers' hands before it would budge. It was rumoured to be make-work too; the laundry was sent to other Hostels to be made dirty again. ‘If they don’t like it, why don’t they seek work outside?’ Peel would enquire; anyone could turn up at a channel port with identity papers and get put on a boat. Passage was free and destinations seductive: the Mediterranean coast, millionaires’ playgrounds.

  The lefties had their answer, of course, most notably in the shape of a half-caste young firebrand called Jim Matthews, who’d been there. ‘The visiting workers are assigned to factories where no one else will go. Sun and millionaires’ playgrounds there may well be only a few miles away, but the visiting workers are not to know. We sat in clockless, symmetrical barns in thick protective clothing. Nuclear energy installations are the most voracious users of British male labour; we sat at benches radiating from a central tank and packed god knows what coloured powders into heavy lead cylinders. Workshifts ended and began at all hours; you had to undress and be scrubbed by men with brooms, then taken by closed van to visiting-worker hostels, row upon row of tiers of bunks in another circular barn, till you dreamt all night in lines and circles. Board and lodging are docked from wages at source and there’s precious little left ...’

  When they weren’t complaining about the conditions in the Welfare Hostels, the dissidents fell back on the cost. If the state could afford to maintain people doing make-work in tower blocks, why not give them the money instead? Let them keep their lives together? Peel smiled. And when he heard that Matthews and some of his chums were getting together to form a political party that would revive the old Department of Health and Social Security, he could only laugh wildly. He was particularly entertained by reports that their inaugural meeting had ended in disarray when some historically-minded females pointed out that the old DHSS had discriminated against women, and refused to accept the male majority’s plea that they agree the principle of reviving it and leave the details till later. Still, the S
ocial Security Party gained modest ground, and Peel began to wonder whether priority should go to allowing the women to wreck it, or finding out who they were.

  Now that Lynn stayed at home all day, hunched over piles of paper at the kitchen table, writing letters that she never knew if Marsha even received, Derek decided he’d preferred the past. She’d been more with him when she spent time at the tower with Marsha and came home guiltily eager to be as nice as possible, than now when she was around all the time but seemed not to notice whether he was.

  He’d almost got used to the idea that she was in love with Marsha. She’d been sparkle-eyed like a teenager, she’d made him feel like a parent, she’d even made him feel that it was patronising and dismissive of him not to feel threatened, as if he didn’t take women’s love seriously enough; but now as he let himself into the house and saw her, her body still, her eyes and wrists racing across the page, just as he had left her this morning, just as he had left her when he went to bed last night, the only thing greater than his anxiety was his feeling of being shut out.

  What did she write in those letters? What did the prison censors smack their lips over? Her disappointment that even now Jane wouldn’t turn against FAMILY, insisting with tears pouring down her cheeks that they were right, it would be anti-social for her to try for a child and she must just study hard to be a good wife and help her paragon of a sister-in-law, Astrid, with her children? His own shortcomings as a husband? Ah well. There would be something new for them now.

  ‘I’ve lost my job,’ he said.

  She went on writing. Derek has lost his job? It occurred to him that she hadn’t heard; it occurred to him that he hadn’t really spoken. He said, leading up to it gently, ‘I've been asked to go to another of those conferences.’

  ‘Designing another new continent ...’ she murmured, not looking up, ‘Well, I’m utterly confident ...’

  ‘I said I wouldn’t go.’