Chapter 59

Sinners, Poor and Wretched

Iris

2056

Although there was a sense that Iris had been lucky, it had to happen of course. For more than four years she'd managed to keep the same job at Omiota Biotech, but all it took was a business reorganisation by the company's new owners in Phnom Penh for her job to be made redundant. However much the rich Cambodian shareholders benefited from England's flexible and business friendly policies, especially the Kingdom's competitive tax rates for foreign companies based in the Far East, they also appreciated the ease with which they could sack the entire North London workforce and not be a single Riel out of pocket.

The consequence of such flexible employment policies was rather less welcome to Iris. She was unemployed and she had no severance pay. There was also no longer such a thing as Unemployment Benefit or Social Security these days. National Insurance was only there to provide a state pension when she retired, although if you believed what government ministers and the national press had to say you'd think that the state had never been so generous to those citizens who'd found a way to claim benefits. Iris envied such wealthy scroungers, but she'd never met one. If she had then maybe they could have told her how she could scrounge even a penny off the state. If there was just one of the Government of National Unity's proud boasts that was undeniably true it was how far the welfare state had been rolled back.

Iris' salary had never been high enough to put much aside when she was earning and now she belonged to the one in five who were officially unemployed she had to find a way to provide for herself until she found her next job. So, along with the other supposedly workshy millions, Iris was now serving on a government-sponsored Work Experience Programme. She doubted whether this was experience that would ever help her find a proper job. Even though the remuneration was paltry and far less than what she used to earn, even this privilege was doled out only reluctantly. Not everyone could enrol on a Work Experience Scheme. Immigrants were especially unwelcome and it was unlikely that many would apply anyway given the daily risk of being picked out of the crowd and deported. As the posters proclaimed: Illegal Immigrants had no rights. And it was dreadfully easy for an immigrant's status to slip into illegality. All it took was to be sacked.

"It's fucking hard to keep a job once you've got one," said Oxana, another girl also privileged to attend the Work Experience Centre. "There's nothing that resembles job security these days. If my hubby wasn't so obviously English, I probably wouldn't be allowed to work here."

"Why's that?" wondered Iris as she tugged apart a copper coil from its plastic container so that the valuable metal could be recycled. "You're not a criminal or anything are you?"

"You didn't notice my name?" said Oxana with some scepticism. "My family's Russian. Or at least they were originally. Neither my mum or dad has ever been further east than Margate, but they still gave me a Russian name. The bastards!"

"Isn't your daughter's name also Russian?" Iris remarked as she tossed the copper into the designated bucket and started to tear apart the plastic cover that sealed the defunct electrical components. "At least I think Olga's a Russian name."

"When she was younger it didn't seem such a big deal," said Oxana. "And her dad was a proper Russian. He was born in Ostrovnoy, which is somewhere fucking cold near Finland. He came over to find work in the City of London, which is ironic since nowadays more people go to Moscow for jobs than would ever dream of coming here."

"So where's he now?" wondered Iris.

Oxana picked up an old television from the conveyor belt and worked her knife into the seam between the screen and its frame. "I dunno," she admitted. "We never got married anyway. He dumped Olga on me and then fucked off. He probably had a wife back in Russia. He'd never have told me if he had. Anyway, if he was still living in England he'd have been picked up by now and bundled off in a van. The only people with foreign names that don't get treated like shit are those from China and Taiwan and those other Far Eastern places."

"And your husband? He's OK, isn't he?"

"Don't keep asking me questions," said Oxana aggressively. "I don't fucking know. He ran off years ago. He's probably gone back North where he came from. And if he's got any sense he'll have stayed on the train and crossed the border to Scotland. They don't have so many unemployed up there, do they?"

"There are probably fewer Scots than there are unemployed people in England," Iris admitted.

The day was long, but at the end of it Iris and Oxana and the others all got paid cash. Although It was scarcely the kind of work Iris would have chosen, in truth it was no more boring than her work at the biotech lab. There was a sense of satisfaction in pulling apart the electronic goods that rolled past on the conveyor belt and dropping its constituent parts into separate buckets and passing on what she couldn't get at to those who had the tools for more difficult resource extraction. In an age where minerals and metals were getting ever more expensive, the value of what could be salvaged was now well worth the effort of labour-intensive extraction. Iris was grateful that she was working in a factory and that the goods she was handling had only recently been thrown away. Some Work Experience Centres were based at landfills where the valuable metals and plastics were thoroughly contaminated with the overwhelming stench of rotting foodstuff. Some of the landfill waste was over a century old and Iris had heard that very good bonuses were awarded to anyone who found anything of archaeological significance like a 1980s computer or an intact and readable paperback novel.

Iris waved goodbye to Oxana at the exit to the Work Experience Centre where her sullen gawky daughter was waiting for her. Although Oxana wasn't much older than Iris, her daughter was already almost old enough to have left school. In fact, since the government had lowered the age of compulsory education in the interests of promoting a flexible economy, perhaps Olga had already left school.

Iris wandered home in the February dusk, thankful that it was dry and that she didn't need to blow cash on the bus fare home. It was less than an hour's walk to the house she shared with Ellie along with Ollie and Austin: a gay couple who were forever fondling one another and kept Iris awake at night with their incessant fucking. How could two men make so much noise together? In their case it was grunting, thumping and the occasional yell rather than the full-throated screams Iris associated with Ember who used to share the apartment before she moved up north.

Iris noticed her neighbours' noise rather more ever since she'd split up from her boyfriend. Malcolm had become quite a recluse and much less fun to be around. He'd become increasingly exasperated by the frequent ID checks he often had to submit to when he travelled on public transport. Officers from the regular police force and the recently instituted Migrants and Aliens Control Bureau had plenty of incentives to hunt out illegals as the bonus they'd earn was worth as much as their salary. Malcolm dreaded what might happen to him if one day he ever forgot to carry his ID. At best, he'd have to spend a day or so in a detention centre. Even if they didn't rough him up a bit, as was very likely, there was a fair chance that just missing a single day at the office where he worked as a support engineer would be enough for him to lose his job. Especially so if his employer discovered that he'd spent his unauthorised day off in police custody.