I’m not in the habit of quoting
Shakespeare to people, I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that people who
quote Shakespeare are the kind of people who buy books for their coffee table
and only open them when they hear the doorbell. You know the sort, the ones who
used to fold the News of the World up inside The Observer.
But I’m going to break my rule
just this once, safe in the knowledge that I don’t have a coffee table and the
NOTW has gone the way of a deleted voicemail message, so here goes:
“Wouldst thou have a serpent
sting thee twice?”
This popped into my head a few
months back, it was long lazy afternoon of staring out of my windscreen and
waiting for a fare. I was close to home and I could hear the couch and the
kettle calling me but I’d told myself whatever happened I was going to sit
tight for ten hours, even if that did mean prolonged periods of resting my head
on the steering wheel as my day went
down like a slow puncture.
When I finally got a job I felt
like Daniel Day Lewis when he struck oil in There Will Be Blood, I fired up the
focus and bolted around to the rough old neighbourhood where my salvation lay.
The second the door opened I knew my new found hope had been misplaced.
Mum and Daughter supported each
other down the path like conjoined twins on ice. Mum must have been seventy
plus, she looked like a skeleton wrapped in wet parchment. Her neck barely
thick enough to hold up her head and you could have used her fingers to pick a
lock they were so thin. Her hair was like rusted wire wool glue to the end of a
pencil and the clumpy flat black shoes wouldn’t have looked out of place on Frankenstein’s
monster.
The daughter was maybe my age, a
fragile soul set in a fast food frame. Bulky and track suited her pasty face
had the colour of fresh dough, and, I’m afraid to say, the consistency.
Daughter’s eyes darted this way and that, the caution of someone who thinks the
outdoors isn’t so great.
I knew they weren’t going far
before they even got in, in every sense of the phrase.
Daughter bundled herself into
the back seat and slid across with all the grace of a skittish hippo, her mum
got in after her and helped her daughter settle. I realised this was a woman
who had not only given birth, but given her life, to her child. I could feel the
weight of her burden as she clucked, cooed and calmed her daughter who in turn
fought with her seatbelt and talked at a gallop.
“How does this work, I can never
work these things, I pull and pull. Are you okay mate? Sorry mate. How does
this work? Mum? Pull that?” She rattled away like a machine gun all twists and
yanks and fingers to her face, it was like watching a pan of water about to
boil over.
My heart ached as Mum settled
her in and then turned to me and, over a sound track of chatter from her daughter
asked to go to Huyton Village.
I sighed, less than a mile,
£2.20, that job working in McDonalds looked more and more appealing as I pulled
away from the kerb then felt guilty as Mum apologised,
“I’m sorry it’s only a short
one, we can’t walk far.”
“It’s alright love, you tell me
where to go and I go there, that’s my job.”
I smiled in the mirror and she
smiled back, the lines on her face momentarily giving me a clue to what she had
once looked like.
“We’re going to sort out her
money, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, yeah, bloody robbers,
robbers they are, yeah. I only lent £150, bloody robbers, robbers aren’t they
mum?”
“She only lent £150, they’ve
been phoning me for weeks about it, she’s been in hospital, hasn’t been able to
pay have you love?”
“No, no, I’ve been in hospital,
not been well. I was in hospital.”
I glanced in the mirror and Mum
rolled her eyes and I nodded a reply, getting the message. Her daughter still
wasn’t well, she was twisting and turning in a mental storm and she was a long
way from the shore, battered by breakers and break downs she was clinging to
her mother for dear life. I’ve seen those break downs close up before, messy
affairs that leave no stone unturned, nightmares come to life as the world
towers around, looming and pushing you down into the pit and I only hoped her
mother had the strength to pull her out.
“So who has been phoning you?”
“This bloody loan company, they
never leave me alone.” Said Mum, “She had to give them my number when she took
the loan out.”
“Have you guaranteed the money?”
“No, they just phone and phone
asking where she is, chasing her until she pays them.”
“I’ve already given them three
hundred haven’t I mum?”
“She has, she still owes them
one hundred.”
“For £150? Bloody hell that’s
robbery!”
“I’m taking out a loan to pay it
off, to reduce the payments.” Said Mum, stuck between a rock and a hard up
place.
The shopping centre the women were going to was one of those
ones built in the 70's to look modern, they would have called it a "New
development" but if anything it was a step backwards. Like something from
a North Korean planning manual it was all grey concrete, mildew and to-let
signs with sausage roll wrappers blowing around like tumble weed.
I know the village well, I grew up around there, it was once
an exciting place for young Schumacher, my Mum would go the bank, draw out some
money and we’d wander around paying bills on a Saturday morning, first to the
Gas Board, then to the Water Board, then maybe the telly rental and then to the
shops. The purse getting thinner but the money there to see, to be held and
spent till it was gone. We didn’t have credit cards, if we didn’t have money we
didn’t have money. I got a comic on a Saturday and thirty minutes in the
library to look for an Agaton Sax book or something by Bill Naughton. They
weren’t coffee table books; they were under bed sheet books, lit by a torch not
a Habitat lamp.
There must be four or five "Cheque Shops" and
"Payday Loan" outlets dotted around the charity shops and shutters in
the Village now. The council charge for parking so there is a Russian Steppe of
a space were cars once waited, like the great plains after the buffalo had
gone. All those cars are parked at the nearby mega store which enjoys a huge
free car park that was donated by the same council that now is choking off the
independent retailer.
I watched the two women wobble off to indenture themselves
and their benefits to the serpent that would no doubt be stinging them more
than twice. I wondered where it had all gone wrong since Blair and Brown told us
"Things can only get better" and Obama wittered on about “change”.
It funny how as we watch Greece struggle with colossal debt
nobody seems to mention the little people struggling with debts of their own.
It appears the only interest is the kind that charges 1000%.
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