Low life | 19 March 2011

Beside the roundabout a woman was standing with her thumb out. Late thirties. Black knee-length boots. Old jeans. No coat. The thumb was resigned, indifferent.

I swung in sharply, positioning the door handle precisely level with the thumb. She pulled the door open and sat in. A red, careworn face. I stated my destination. She said she would ride with me as far as Graves Cross. I clicked the lever into drive and we set off up the hill.

Silence. She stared resignedly ahead. If hitch-hikers prefer not to speak, it’s fine. I’m not one of those who feel they are owed an explanation or a potted biography. I usually have the music turned up in any case. But this woman’s indifferent, fatalistic air impressed me. I strongly sensed a woman hemmed in by bullshit and poverty; a woman expecting nothing from life but more of the same; a woman without a single life-enhancing delusion. I respectfully asked her where she had been today.

She had been to the Job Centre, she said, keeping her eyes on the road. She’d been ‘on the sick’ for five years, but now that she was well, she was obliged to present herself there for an interview. The Job Centre woman had solemnly promised that any job they found for her would pay a minimum of eight pounds a week more than her combined housing and unemployment benefit. It had cost her more than that, she observed drily, to travel there to be told it.

I asked her why she had been ‘on the sick’. Cancer, she said. Ovaries. They’d ripped it all away, she said: womb, ovaries, the lot. Had she children? I said. One, she said. A boy. Now 22 years of age.