Keith the bailiff could tell at a glance, surely, that demanding £204 on the spot from a poverty-stricken household such as this one was hopeless. When he pulled up in his Sahara Gold Citroën Berlingo and saw us all sitting around the paddling pool in the front garden, the state of the children’s shoes alone would have told him that nobody had any money. And as my boy’s partner led him inside the house to negotiate, surely he would have noticed, too, that there was no carpet on the stairs, no seat on the lavatory and no living-room carpet; that the enormous old telly was recycled, as were most of the children’s toys; that there was no X-Box, laptop, washing machine or music centre; that some of the light sockets were without bulbs.
And I think he did register these things, and quickly, because when I followed them indoors a few minutes later, bringing the dripping baby, Keith was seated at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee and a packet of Cheerios, and his bailiff persona was laid aside. In its place was that of an unsnobbish, well-mannered man conscious of his obligations as a guest, no matter how poor the household.
But he had to at least fly a kite and try to extract something from my boy’s partner, if only to justify his travelling expenses, and he started the bidding at the lightheartedly ambitious figure of £40 on the table in front of him right now, and £20 a month via standing order.
The man of the house, my boy, was out. He has a part-time job. Sixteen hours a week. Agency work. Care in the community. He doesn’t talk about it much. He goes, he comes back. But his partner is quite happy to deal with debt collectors, comfortable in the hopelessness that because she and my boy already have less than nothing, further austerity measures are pointless.
Before now, I’ve seen her answer the door to the woman who comes weekly to collect payments for the local loan shark company, who give out unsecured loans at extortionate rates of interest. ‘I’ll go,’ she said, when the doorbell rang at the usual time. She skipped to the door, opened it, and just shrugged at the debt collector (a woman). This woman rolled her eyes in sympathy and turned on her heels. And that was that.
She’d allowed Keith into the house today, I supposed, because she’d judged that he was an efficient professional who wasn’t going to waste his valuable time trying to get blood out of a stone. And perhaps she’d clocked, too, that Keith was basically a nice man. As such, the rules of hospitality and common decency demanded that he be offered at least a mug of coffee.
I sat the naked baby on the kitchen counter and put the towel over him while listening to the negotiations being conducted at the table. All that Keith’s employers wanted at this point from my boy and his partner, basically, was a show of willingness to settle the debt. In international finance terms, the big solid man in the white shirt, black trousers and snakeskin belt, smelling of expensive aftershave, was Germany, and the thin woman in a baggy T-shirt, still delicate after her recent hysterectomy, was Greece.
‘Forty pounds? You’re having a laugh,’ said my boy’s partner. ‘Well, how much can you offer?’ said Keith, tossing a palmful of Cheerios into his mouth. She went and fetched her purse and emptied it on the table in front of him. It was more of a joke than a concrete offer. A tightly folded five pound note and a few coins fell out. I searched my own pockets and found a £20 note, which I placed on the table next to the fiver. Keith blinked in amazement at such largesse. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said, taking out his BlackBerry and calling base.
While he was on the phone, my boy’s partner’s elder brother, who lives in the next road, walked in. He looked pale and hunted. He needed to borrow £5, he said, for a pouch of tobacco. He was nearly out of his mind for want of a smoke, he said.
Still on his BlackBerry, Keith was quietly persuading his employers that £25 was about all they could expect in seizable assets or ready cash from this address. My boy’s partner reached across the table, laid a forefinger on her fiver and, under Keith’s nose, withdrew it, slowly, from the debt repayment kitty, then pushed it towards her brother. Too deep in negotiations with his employers to complicate matters with breaking news of an unexpectedly reduced cash-down payment offer, Keith briefly pulled his comical ‘outraged’ face — the mouth wide open in a silent scream — then carried on talking. As I said, a nice bloke.
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