Free CONDITION BLACK by Gerald Seymour

in the playground, hit his head on a bench, been taken to hospital. The school hadn't had his number at A.W.E. The teachers couldn't ask Frank where his mother might be because his class was out for the day on a Project Course. The first Sara had known of Adam's injury was when she had turned up to collect him at the school gate. She'd told him about the looks aimed at her by Adam's teachers. That was the end of her working, and anyway the money had been peanuts.
    "Your mortgage is currently set at £62,500, Dr Bissett, which is slightly excessive for the salary you command, but I do quite understand that you bought at the top of the market and that interest rates were then not at their present level."
    They had made the move to Lilac Gardens in the summer of 1988. They had paid £98,000. They had known they were on the knife edge, and interest rates had been at 8 per cent. Sara had said that she just was not prepared to live any longer in the jerry-built little terrace at the bottom of the village.
    " N o w , your salary works out at approximately £1460 per month, gross. Then, we've tax, insurance, local government rates, pension

    contributions, and the mortgage. I would estimate that, allowing for your outgoings, you have around £600 a month at your disposal.
    But that, of course, does not take into account the loan we made you at the start of the year. Six thousand five hundred, repayable over three years, plus of course interest. That's another £180 a month, without interest. You are behind on the interest, Dr Bissett, and you are two months behind on the r e p a y m e n t . . . "
    The loan had been to buy the second-hand Sierra, and then had been topped up to cover repairs required by the M . O . T . ; and then increased again when Sara's Mini had just died on her, expired in the middle of the village with 110,000 miles on the tombstone. Sara had to have a car. And topped up again to pay for the repair of the flat roof over the kitchen, and the man who had done the work should have been prosecuted for fraud.
    " D r Bissett, I hate to say this to a government employee, but
    . . . private enterprise round here is on its knees for skilled and qualified people . . ."
    "What I'm interested in is no use to the private sector. And I'm a research scientist, damn it, not a yuppie."
    "So be it . . . Can you look for promotion, a better salary scale, a higher grade?"
    "I've been looking for it for years, but I'm not in charge of promotion and the people senior to me in my department are Home of the most brilliant minds in England, and elsewhere for that matter."
    The bank manager eased back in his chair. He was young and a Initially, flitting from branch to branch and all the time climbing.
    His elbows rested on the leather padded arms of his chair, and his fingers were clasped comfortably in front of his chin.
    "Something has to be done. We cannot go on like this, Dr Bisssett,"
    Sara said that the exterior woodwork of the house was a disgrace and needed painting, and that the kitchen floor needed new vinyl, and that the hall carpet was awful. Sara said that if they couldn't do better than last year's holiday, a caravan in the rain in West Wales, then it wasn't worth bothering . . .
    Bissett stood.
    When he was angry then the Yorkshire surfaced again in his voice, the grate of the harsh streets of Leeds. So bloody hard he had fought to get those streets behind him. All that struggle, just to have this jumped-up little man lecturing him.
    " T r y telling the government that 'something has to be done'.
    Try telling bloody Downing Street 'we cannot go on like this'."
    "Nobody forced you to buy that house."
    Bissett stared at him. "Don't ever say anything as stupid as that to me again."
    In his adult life he had never struck any person, certainly not Sara, not even his children in anger. He stood, looming over the manager's desk. His forehead beneath his curled brown hair was reddening. His spectacles had shaken down the arch of his