Hilda makes money

Hilda has a friend with a scanner
and an inkjet
and Hilda prints single-sided
twenty-pound notes on light-weight
A4 that she nicks from the photocopier
in the Millennium Library.
She cuts round the edges
with hairdressing scissors.
She crinkles them in a JC's bag
full of biscuit wrappers.
She slams them down on the bar in Take Five
where they know her name
and the year her husband left her.
They hold the note up to the light,
give a satisfied nod,
and swing her a pint of lager shandy
with the ratio gone wrong.
She smoothes a twenty onto the counter
in JC's store. JC never throws away
the packets of broken digestives that rattle like maracas.
Hilda eats the lot ' top to bottom '
digging in with a tablespoon.