Memories are made of this

The world outside kept turning
After he had gone there was time for more things, like her Welfare Rights work; slotting -in comfortably with her evening English class. It was mainly by talking with others that Esther realized fully she wasn’t alone with her own sadness and struggles.
Sangria Paw, despairing, stuffed her damp tissue back into the belly of her hideous fake crocodile handbag as she struggled to locate her noisy mobile to turn it to silent.
“Here we go again!”
She looked expectantly at Esther who, in response, shuddered, aware at the pressures her client placed on her, only a volunteer representative after all! At that moment, and in that awkward silence as the doctor, solicitor and a disability agent eased into their roles behind the long, smooth trestle-table with various legal papers, the annoyingly cheerful clerk of the court bounced into the tribunal room. He let the door swing with a bang behind him, coughed and settled himself down importantly, pushing a Kleenex tissue box further onto the table to make room for the fresh jug of drinking water that he carefully put down. Dr Smith, from Hangover House in the next town, scratched his red nose and wiped his expensive glasses with what looked like a dirty dishcloth. Miss Moore, the solicitor, meanwhile advised how the informal hearing would proceed. A fly buzzed round the sticky room, dive-bombed the slatted greying vertical blinds, and then zoomed over their heads for an attack. The Clerk of the Court again allowed the door to slam shut as he continued to fetch and carry more official-looking papers and he seemed blissfully unaware of the case papers that fluttered from Sangria’s knees or of the solicitor’s eyes rolling in contempt.
Esther now noticed her client’s knuckles whitening and her breathing quickening as she struggled to move in her chair and release some of her arthritic pain and cramps. She continued to bat replies to questions such as matters of incontinence or how long it took to walk five hundred yards. Her sobbing increased as Dr Smith forced her to share her most personal details, including how often she emptied her bowels, was there accidents of the most personal kind and when exactly did her pain begin. Esther sensed her mounting anger as she saw her client push her thick hands into the small of her back. She refused the water her mother poured for her and continued to rearrange her sari as she swept in the folds of silk material.
An emergency siren echoed in the distance and then closer, in fact right outside on the suburban pavement voices grew louder, the start of another confrontation maybe. Sangria finally dropped her guard.
“I am sick of you and your bloody stupid questions. Why should I have to fight for this money? I have lost my dignity, my freedom as well as my choices”.
Those on the board looked in horror as she let rip.
“Once I possessed a profession and an identity, just like you, but look at me now! A snivelling wreck wearing support stockings, I can only wear slippers, cannot get into or out of the bath, have no visitors unless they are paid to care – apart from Esther, that is! What shall we talk about, my bowel movements, perhaps?”

How could anyone know the fear Esther faced, but she had to let it go if she was to ever think of being of use to those outside her own comfort zone? Meeting and facing, as well as helping, others helped her to deal with her own fears and pain with success. Perhaps she wasn’t quite as stupid and thick as her stepfather had said but just simply human instead.

The other world
Esther tentatively knocked the young man’s door and, suddenly, there he was standing in the doorway with a stray cat at his feet, looking very wet. He grinned and looked back at the kitchen as she walked into this, her first proper job, after her children had grown, and Joe a painful memory.
“I’m sorry but it’s a bit wet in here, do you think it might be better to take your shoes off?”
Obligingly she removed her shoes and socks and then rolled her jeans up to her knees as she moved through to the kitchen where foil take-away cartons were floating and his younger shared tenant was trying to bail out the water into the yard. Looking at the water trickling down from the ceiling and beside the light switch in the middle room she enquired, probably rather stupidly,
“Why didn’t you ring the emergency number you have been given by Colin?”
“It wasn’t a big flood” muttered the freckle-faced thinner young man as he splashed his way down the galley kitchen. “We thought it would be best that we wait for you, and we did stop up to watch it, didn’t we mate?”
So, together, they looked for an arsenal of cleaning materials, having first located where in the hell the electric mains were, and then she had called an electrician and her boss. They were happy young men who were never rude or coarse and didn’t understand why others might point at them or call them fools. The irony was that those in the street, in their bigoted ways were the fools, as they poked fun at things way beyond their understanding with cheap booze in their hands which they threw away before joining the nearby dole queue. Somehow for months they lived in that ordinary street where they learned about budgeting and cooking as well as social skills, which always caused great hilarity at home with food that her own family threw in the bin behind her back.
Now determined that perhaps she might do something a little more useful after the pleasure she had gained in seeing others grow in confidence, she parked her red Mini outside in a side-street and crossed at the traffic lights to Bedford College.
Later she sat in a hut with other trainee social-work students, fairly certain that with her background she may perhaps be able to help others and take her mind away from herself. So they were tutored by tailored characters with bespoke lives who might never know of the world other than social policy, sociology or interviewing skills but with little mention of the benefit system or how they might go to sleep at night with casework increasing and doing too much or nothing at all. Systems let families down whilst the dominant member of the same household sunk into the depravity of drink and anger. So what were they supposed to do but beat the dog their wife or, at the end of their tether, their child? Knowing she couldn’t change the world she saw, and was never clever enough, she walked away from that.