Mantrapped Read Free Page A

of youths, who, listless at best and depraved at worst, used to hang around Wilkins Square and its environs, bringing down the price of property. Now they cluster a quarter of a mile further out and make life miserable for another set of residents. They're restless, they didn't want to go. Wilkins Square has been the province of the uprooted and dispossessed for hundreds of years. Tradition draws them; they drift back, thwarting the police in their attempt to clean up the area. It is touch and go who wins.
    Trisha has to rent: she can't buy. She has no money, other than what she makes from the sale, and that will have to go to pay off the last remaining debts. The auctioneers will want their commission; the tax man will want his last remaining pennies before the benefit agencies take over and pay out what the tax man has brought in. Everything will be recorded on computer and camera. Trisha's face will be studied by security cameras as she stands in line at Job Centres and welfare services. No one will let Trisha go free but no one will let Trisha starve. Trisha, by her careless living, has created quite an amount of work for all kinds of people to do, which is to the greater good, no doubt, and just as well, since the human race is in search of meaningful employment, and caring for others, making a difference, is what it likes to do.
    Trisha makes the phone call she has been putting off. 'Hi there, Mrs Kovac,' says Trisha. She uses her mobile: the landline has long since been disconnected, and the instrument added to the others in the pile flagged Assorted Electronics, £30 . 'Remember me? Trisha?' She speaks cheerfully. No point in dispiriting others. 'I'm the one about the flat. Thanks, I'd love to take it.'
    'You're too late,' says Mrs Kovac. 'I told you to ring before midday. It's gone to the next person on the list. Flats round here are like gold dust. I was doing you a favour not wanting a yes or no there and then.'
    Some people enjoy the power that owning the roof over others' heads entails: to be able to be kind and offer it, or to be mean and snatch it away at will - yes, that can be rewarding. Mrs Kovac finds it so. Trisha has met all too many of her kind lately, power freaks, the kind that cluster in banks or call centres, or wherever desperate need reveals itself. The officials concerned with her bankruptcy - she had offered them chocolate biscuits out of the generosity of her heart and been told she was buying them at other people's expense; there must henceforth be only digestive - enjoyed her helplessness: so did the social workers, who spoke with the soft, consoling voices of the habitually cruel, which belied hard eyes, and the contempt which seethed within. Sensitised now to the unspoken words: How have you come to be in this fix? Serve you right! Now you, who thought yourself so grand, are brought as low as us ! Mrs Kovac is another. Trisha realises she had done it wrong. As with landlords, so in doctor's surgeries, as in all places where you depend upon others for help, it is wiser to weep, wail, and show distress than to display good cheer. Allow those in charge to show mercy, and then they will. But first, crawl.
    Trisha weeps and snivels on the phone. She tells herself it is planned and calculated. It is not. She weeps real tears. Oh please, Mrs Kovac, please ! She wants the flat, needs it. It is cheap and dirty and damp but it will do. It smells violently of carbon tetrachloride. Mrs Kovac undertakes 'spotting' - removing the worst stains by hand - in the back of the shop, before sending other people's dirty clothes off and away to the mysterious places where soiled rags are restored and returned crisp and clean and plastic wrapped. But there are worse smells to live with. Carbon tetrachloride at least smells of improvement, renewal, hope.
    Mrs Kovac previously imported uneducated girls from the Far East, two a penny in their own land, where girls were on the whole disregarded. They were brought in on