Free Revenger by Tom Cain Page A

with muggers, beggars and crazies. Any middle-class families that had country houses had fled. The rest were trying to find a way out. And those who had no choice but to stay, who were trying to live the right way, were being spat on by the system as much as those who sought to destroy it.
    ‘I don’t understand this crazy country!’ Marek liked to say. ‘If you work, they pay you less and less. If you just sit on your ass, then every year the benefits go up and up. No wonder the English are so lazy. Is a waste of time to work here. And having family is impossible! Maybe I should give you baby then leave. You get more money that way.’
    Paula tried to explain that people on benefits weren’t living in luxury, whatever people said. She had enough friends trying to raise two or three kids by themselves in a council flat to know it wasn’t easy. But she also knew that none of those friends even tried to get jobs because they’d never earn enough to make it worthwhile. Plenty of them came from families where no one had worked for years and years. No one stayed married; no one even tried to get a decent education. Paula was desperate to avoid becoming another welfare statistic – and even if she hadn’t been, her mother would never have let her. She’d always taken the same view as Marek: lazy white folk could waste their lives away if they liked, but her children were going to make something of themselves.
    That was what Paula planned to do. All she asked for was just a little help, a little recognition that she and Marek should be rewarded for at least trying to lead a productive life that would actually contribute to society.
    As she cleaned up the salon after the last customer had left, Paula had the radio on. They were talking about that big rally Mark Adams was having at the O2. Paula didn’t quite know what to make of Adams. Marek often said, ‘Every other politician in this country full of bullshit – but this Adams I like.’
    Paula had told him, ‘You wouldn’t think that if you were black.’ But she didn’t make a big issue of it. There were a lot of good reasons to have a fight with her husband, but politics wasn’t one of them.
    She turned the radio off, closed up the salon, pulled down the security shutters and walked off to her car. It was only a little Suzuki Swift, eight years old with over a hundred thousand miles on the clock. But it was Paula Miklosko’s little luxury. She’d paid for it. And she loved it.

14
    STANDING BEHIND HIS shop counter, Maninder Panu watched Ajay put fresh produce into the clear plastic bowls of fruit and vegetables arrayed on a table outside. Each bowl cost one pound. Ajay had to lift up the clear plastic sheet that kept the rain off the bowls in order to refill them.
    A man had stopped to watch the whole procedure as though this was something new to him. He was a white man, somewhat shorter than Ajay and less heavily built, but there was something about the way he stood that gave Panu the impression that he knew how to look after himself. He had none of the fearful nervousness that afflicted so many people these days. Nor was there any of the bullying aggression of the criminals and gang-members who wallowed in their ability to intimidate. Instead he seemed relaxed, self-confident, as though he felt certain he could handle whatever the streets might throw at him. He might, Panu thought, be an off-duty soldier or policeman. The man asked Ajay a question, nodded with interest at the answer, looked at his watch, then came into the store.

    Sam Carver walked up to the counter, scuffing a hand through his short, dark-brown hair – that now had a few faint streaks of grey – to get rid of some of the rainwater. He’d never seen groceries sold by the bowl before. It made him feel like a stranger in his own country to admit that, but he liked the idea anyway. Inside, the Lion Market looked a cut above your average urban corner shop. It was air-conditioned and the goods