Trisha faces the future

      So Trisha calls Kleene Machine and tells Mrs Kovac, who is the owner of the property, that she will take the flat. Kleene Machine’s shop-front has been recently repainted in deep crimson, lettering in gold. It is not unattractive. The firm charges top prices. It used to be a betting shop. Mrs Kovac hires out domestic and office cleaners from Eastern Europe and farms out the dry-cleaning on a commission basis. Kleene Machine’s little crimson and gold van, driven by Mr Kovac, beetles around the area and is a familiar sight, if a rather surprising one in this mixed area, in which piss-stained, concrete walls and broken windows are still evident. This particular branch of Kleene Machine, an organisation which has so far made good profits by judging the property market and being the first to arrive in up-and-coming areas, was leased by the Kovacs as a concession two years ago. The neighbourhood is becoming popular with the media classes—journalists, film makers, ad men, minor celebrities and so on, who are less frightened of gun crime than the professionals—lawyers, doctors, accountants—and are the foot soldiers of the class war, as they prepare to drive out the riff-raff, ethnics of many varieties, take over and gentrify. The media game in London is to buy property cheap and sell dear by virtue of blessing the area with their presence and their spending power.

      The police have gone before, making life uncomfortable for drug-dealers, whores, beggars and the gangs 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 cheap flights, and allocated where Western need most lay. The clever ones were whisked off into banks, the pretty ones landed in the sex industry, the careful ones became nannies, the kind ones carers, and the daft and docile ones, Mrs Kovac’s speciality, became cleaners. Now she ran Kleene Machine she would trust the most dextrous to do mending and repair work: replace buttons, patch, take up hems, let out seams—there is a lot of such work to be done: these days, with exercise done or neglected, diets working or otherwise, people change their shape rapidly. Fat today, slim tomorrow: wide-muscled shoulders on Saturday night, soft and sloping a week hence. But good mending girls were in short supply: the art of careful, delicate and precise workmanship was dying in the East as it long since had in the West. ‘Repairs’ were a good little money earner if you got it right but finding the staff was an increasing problem.

      A few of Mrs Kovac’s best girls had got away to good jobs in the fashion industry in Paris, where they commanded good wages. Now they had learned the route, too many others followed. Lately the bottom had fallen out of the Far East market: girls from Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand were earning their living at home, their national economies were better. Times were better. Eastern Europe and Russia was the new market for girls. Soon that too would dry up and she would be left with the British, who were too disdainful to exert themselves at such mundane and badly-paid tasks. Poles were hopeless at sewing but good cleaners. It was a Communist upbringing mixed up with Catholic guilt that did it, in Mrs Kovac’s opinion. They scrubbed both to cleanse their sins and benefit the community. But she could see that someone like Trisha, who had let slip about her past in embroidery, and was clearly in reduced circumstances, might