Ladies From Hell Read Free Page B

but we get a ten per cent surcharge for being butterflies and pariahs. (I’ve heard both phrases used often enough, so you must take your choice). But being a bachelor I was worse off than most as I attracted another ten for the privilege. The unmarried, as is well known, are child-rapists at best and anti-Establishment at worst, though I could never understand how keeping them short of cash automatically rendered them harmless.
    Now, living on ten per cent of my income was an unlikely sort of trick but until the latest fiasco I was managing it. Point one was that I was making a hell of a lot of money; I’d been exhibiting with the rest of the Neo Pre-Raphs and my stuff was fetching top prices. I don’t feel the cold too much, I’d had to give up drinking and smoking and I was living in a grotty old caravan just outside Brixham, so my overheads were zilch. Even the confiscation of Class D property, where it still existed, didn’t make a sight of difference; there was nowhere else to put me, and the van turned out to be too ramshackle to tow away. But then some bright bastard slapped on five per cent across the board for a Mickey Mouse new insurance scheme, and my goose was sizzling nicely when another Department—God bless the lack of liaison—decided Class D’s still weren’t contributing enough to the common weal and upped their loading to twenty per cent.
    Now this, when I worked it out, presented an interesting anomaly. It meant that for every hundred Anglos I earned, I owed the State a hundred and five. Which I was sure must be a paradox, even in Civil Service logic; so I hied me along to the local Big Brother bureau to see what they’d make of it. It must have been one of the first negatax cases to be presented. I wasn’t left in much doubt that if I chose to crawl under a bush and turn my toes up it would be fine by them; however I made it crystal clear that if I was going to starve to death it would be noisily, and in public. Since nobody else could come up with an answer the Social Security people got it droppedin their laps. They made it plain in their turn they weren’t in business for the purpose of supporting undesirables; and I was obviously highly undesirable, otherwise I wouldn’t have attracted negatax in the first place. But a tax levied is a tax that must be paid and they agreed to make up the difference between what I earned and what I would owe, so at least I stayed socially solvent. The obvious thing to do of course was reduce one of the levies; but the Civil Service doesn’t operate like that, it considers any backward step a sign of weakness.
    By this time a lot of other people were taking an interest, and a similar case to mine had got itself as far as the High Court. The judgement that finally emerged was an all-time lemon. A Social Security handout, it was ruled, was tax-exempt by definition, as anything else invalidated the concept of Relief. Also of course the whole system would at last vanish down a well-earned rathole, though that was never said in as many words. So my five nega wasn’t merely safe, it was bombproof.
    I pondered the situation for a time; then I joined National Unity. The Party isn’t banned—after all we’re still a democracy, and proud of it—but for some years carrying a card had meant an automatic ten per cent surcharge. It had to be met, so up went the handout. Which meant I was five per cent better off than I had been on my old Class D. A quick conversion to Scientology paid fifteen and got me parity with a Class C basic; at which point I wrote to Clancy, Am’s mother. She was ahead of me though. She’d divorced Evan—they used one of those DIY instaschemes the Social Democratic Alliance pushed through during its last tussle with the Corridors of Power—so they’d both got their ten per cent loadings as singletons. SocDemAl had also brought in a hare-brained idea about using tax loadings instead of fines; so Clancy lowered the boom. She heaved bricks