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Wednesday 11 March 2009

Interrogation

The letter was waiting on the mat for Sally when she got up that morning. She knew instinctively that it was the second summons that she had been dreading. What was it that they knew about her? What was it that they thought she was doing wrong? She left the letter where it lay and went to make a cup of tea.

Why did they want to see her and why the threats to cut off her money if she did not attend? She had already been too scared to go for the first appointment. Now she sat and thought how stupid that had been. They would probably be a lot harder on her because of that. She knew what they were like. Sod's! Trying to force her into work she didn't want or need. Trying to take away her money. All she wanted was to be left to bring up her daughter how she saw fit.
Kelly! She'd have to find a babysitter for Kelly. That would be extra expense, that and the bus fare. All for some poxy interview. Now, when was she commanded to attend? She ran for the letter in the hall. They'd spelt her name wrong again. It was Sally Thornton with an 'o' not an 'e'.

*****
It was up three flights of stairs to a pokey, dark hole of an office that five interviewers had been squeezed into. As well as the desks for the interviewers they had miraculously found space for two more desks for the office workers and five chairs for the waiting area. There were ten people waiting when Sally arrived, and three being interviewed.

As she watched another interviewer emerged from a door behind some screens and moved to her desk. A moment or so later one of the three interviews finished and a relieved interviewer vanished behind the screens and out of the door. The female interviewer who had just arrived came to the reception desk, called out a name and scurried back to her desk as though the waiting area was contagious. Sally looked around her. The walls were plastered with gaudy posters proclaiming the glad tidings of how you would be helped to start a business if you already possessed £1,000. Was that what they wanted her for? Would they only give her money if she started a business for them? Why couldn't they start their own damn businesses, if that's what they wanted? What did they want her for?

Someone was asking for her name, someone was asking for her name. Startled, she came out of her reverie. No! she felt like saying. What do you want my name for? What will you do with it if I let you? But then she thought, they get you anyway, and gave in. They took her name and placed it where she thought it had always belonged.

She had felt just so right from her school days, when she had always had less than the other kids and had consistently been in the lower grades. "You thick or something?" was a question she had been asked on more occasions than she cared to remember. Until she had met her boyfriend she had felt it was her role to be thick. He had valued her as a person like no one before or since.
She sat in silent intensity among the other useless nobodies sitting or standing in a tight semi-circle. She longed for them to return her name to her. As others around her ended their wait, she watched her name inch its way towards the top of the pile and back to her.

She was glad she had left her baby with a babysitter. There was another woman who had brought her two kids. They were running around the office, in and out of desks screwing up leaflets as they went. The interviewers were glaring. You could hear them tutting to their neighbours about that woman's lack of control. The woman had ceased to be a mother, the environment had disabled her. Her initial attempts to control the children had not been a success and she was now embarrassed to try further. It was clear to her, as it was not to the others, that with nothing to do and such a long time to wait there was nothing left for children but misbehaviour.

You could clearly hear the conversations from the interviewer's desks. She was sitting not six feet from one of them so it was hardly surprising. These interviewers removed people's defences as easily as a prostitute removes her clothing. Snatches of intimate moments from increasingly desperate lives were wafting from each desk to be retained or lost as each listening person cared. She felt like taking her clothing off and dancing on their desks to show them what they were doing. She knew though that they would strip her more completely than if she were to bare herself. At least if she were to do it she would be in control, but she was not in control was she?

They could strip her because they knew that she and her fragile family relied on the money that they handed out and that she would humiliate herself, prostitute herself to keep that money. In that moment she felt that she could have been led by the hand and made to commit terrible acts that would revolt her but still she would do them. It was her fate.

It was then that her name struggled its way to the front and was called from the desk. "Miss Thornton". As she received her name, a thought formed in her mind. A memory from school. She often remembered bits of information that she had been taught. It was not that she couldn't retain information more that she'd never been encouraged. It was a history thought that she had remembered. She could picture her teacher talking about concentration camps in the war, and disgusting photos of the people that died. Someone who had been in a camp had said that the people who survived were the people with a purpose in life. That had impressed her, a purpose.
She hadn't known what a purpose was, she certainly didn't have one then. She had imagined herself in the shoes of the prisoner awaiting interrogation. It was odd that she could feel the same nausea in her throat that she had imagined that prisoner feeling.

For a fatalistic moment she felt that she was a purposeless person who caved in under pressure and could not defend what was valuable in their lives, maybe didn't have anything valuable. She thought of Kelly and Stan, her boyfriend who loved her for herself, and she knew what she had to defend. She purposefully pulled up the chair at the desk and looked her interrogator full in his stare.

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The Jam - To Be Someone.

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