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. She was glad she’d borne a child while she could. He’s in there, actually, she said, cocking a thumb. We were passing the turn-off for the prison. He was doing life, she said.
What for? I said. Street robbery, she said. Rather a hefty sentence for street robbery, surely? I said. It’s an effing joke, she said. It was true that her son had a backlog of other convictions and charges, none of them particularly serious. But he hadn’t committed no street robbery. He was just doing his job. Which was? Collecting protection money, she said. His client had refused to pay up and her son had beaten him. The client went to the police claiming he’d been the victim of a street robbery. He chose his false accusation with care. Judges come down heavily on street robbery.
Goodness me, it all sounds most unjust, I said, with the uncomfortable feeling that every supplementary question of mine was ushering us inexorably into a lower circle of hell. So what was the nature of her son’s client’s business? Drugs, she said. Smack. A dealer. In return for his weekly payment her son had protected him from ‘hassle’. I expect this drug dealer isn’t looking forward to your son’s release very much, I said. He’s disappeared, she said, her eyes still on the road.
Blooming drugs, I said, carefully overtaking a toiling cyclist. They’re an absolute curse. She agreed with me up to a point. She had to have her smoke, she said. If she didn’t have her daily spliff, people had better look out.
What happens if you don’t have it? I said. Basically, she loses her temper, she said. For example? For example there was that time when someone gave her ‘grief’ in the street about her son. She’d followed him into the fish and chip shop and bitten his ear off. She hadn’t meant to bite it off. She’d only meant to scream into it. But she hadn’t had a smoke that day, and in her blind temper she hadn’t realised she was chewing on the ear at the same time.
Dear me, I said. What rotten luck. Surely there were consequences? Oh, yes, she said. When he’d tried to hit her, she’d bitten his finger off, too. Three and a half years she’d got for that. She rattled off the names of four of Her Majesty’s prisons as though they were illustrious household names. I hadn’t heard of three of them.
I looked at her. She was still looking ahead. The face was placid. It was perhaps an often told tale. We’d only scratched the surface. The hinterland was vast. That was the impression.
We arrived at the crossroads where she said she was getting out, and I pulled over. Well, it’s been nice talking to you, I said. She looked at me, considered me as though for the first time, then dismissed me with a half-suppressed snort of derision. But when she got out there was a degree of gratitude, I felt, in the way she was careful not to slam the door.
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