Poverty
Manu Walsh is a mother of four who lives on welfare and wishes she didn't. She's obsessed with the weather and winter right now. 'Don't like it. Too bloody cold. It never gets warm.'
Fortunately, the woman she calls Mum has rescued them for a couple of weeks. Mum is an elderly, well-off, gratingly well-spoken, ex-teacher Walsh met more than 20 years ago in prison, when Mum was a prison teacher and Walsh was an inmate. Mum taught Walsh to read and write, and the two of them have called and written ever since. Mum says that she was worried about some of the stories that Walsh had started to tell her in the last year, so she insisted that Walsh and the four kids came and stayed in her large summer house by the coast for a couple of weeks, or until 'the heat gets to them.'
'Ha, ha,' says Walsh. She brought three of her children with her - her second-eldest daughter Sam, 15, and her sons Chris, 12, and Aaron, six. Chris is bright-eyed and thrilled to be by the sea and the beach. Aaron doesn't speak. All four of them have sprayed green glitter in their hair. Sam sits next to Walsh and bends her head so that Walsh can spray more glitter on it.
Walsh does this from a distance. Not very long ago, when they were at home, Walsh had to lock herself into her bedroom with the phone and ring the police to tell them to arrest Sam and Sam's elder sister Julie before they killed her. 'They attacked me,' Walsh whispers. 'They planned it together.' They came at her from either side of a room when she was by herself.
Unfortunately, says Walsh, the police weren't interested. 'The cops came through again and said that they couldn't do anything,' Walsh says as she sprays the glitter on Sam's head. Walsh says she has called the police regularly since the girls turned 13 and 14 and got large.
'Teenagers wreck your house and come after you.' She says she's asked for help and government agencies tell her that she's doing an excellent job. Except for Aaron, her children are already bigger than she is. She is tiny and bony, a bit like a jockey. Next to her, her kids look tall and well-fed and even a little swollen; inflated where she is pinched. The three she has here all have white fathers and, with the exception of Aaron, who is slight and dark-eyed, look nothing like her.
Mum and Walsh both say that their aim is to get the kids to choose a different life from Walsh's, even as they watch Walsh live it. Walsh spent her childhood either in foster care, or taking thrashings from her violent step-mother, who, when not at home beating Walsh up, was out on the game. 'I don't know how Dad stayed with her. [She would say] John, I'm going to the pictures. [He would say] yes dear, goodbye. Next thing, there would be a car waiting around the corner for her, picking her up. I'd think oh yeah, catching the bus, are we?' Walsh laughs.
Her father was a hospital orderly, but not a lot of help around the home, especially on the days when her step-mother got stuck in. 'All he's actually done [on the days when Walsh got beaten] is pick me up and tell me how sorry he was and I thought Great, Dad. I can't talk, my mouth is really swollen, my back is so sore... and you should have done something.'
Walsh wants to do something for her own kids, but isn't sure how to. She wants to set a good example and get a job and get off the benefit, but then who would look after the kids? She enjoyed working: she made curtains in her first job, and made ovens in a factory in her second. She also made Easter Eggs in a chocolate factory, and fixed machinery for a coffee company. She was sacked here and there for her attitude toward management, but she was very good at difficult work. 'I was good at technical things. I could fix things very fast.' She left school at 13 and was illiterate until she was sent to prison in the early 1980s and was taught to read and write by Mum. Mum says she was very impressed with the speed that Walsh caught on.
That was a while ago, though. Now, there are the children. Her eldest daughter, 17-year-old Julie, refused to join the rest of the family on this holiday 'because she's got this scum of a boyfriend now... she's a real bubbly little kid, but he's changed her.' Walsh has a boyfriend, too. His name is Ted, and he is 76 ('I had no idea how old he was!'), and he is still working and making good money in the scrap-metal business.
Walsh is worried about the way Ted treats their son, though - the silent, six-year-old Aaron. 'He will pick Aaron up and he will scream at him,' she says. Ted says he abuses Aaron because he wants to set boundaries for him and make sure that he doesn't go off the rails like his sisters. Walsh says Ted's aggression is teaching Aaron to stand up for himself, and that it is important that Aaron learns how to do that. 'Aaron will come up and punch and headbutt [Ted] now and I think well, Aaron, good on you, because you are giving it back. You're doing it now, son.'
Sam says that she wants to go to university and train as an early-childhood teacher. She spends most of her time reading. Chris, for now, likes working the door. 'Hello,' he says cheerfully to the people who wander up to the front door to visit Mum through the day. 'Come in. I'm Chris. He points at Aaron. 'He doesn't talk much,' Chris says. Walsh says that she wants all four of her children go to university, and then perhaps to another country to live, where there is more money and sun.
'I class Mum as their proper Nana,' Walsh says when Mum brings out a tray of drinks she's been working on for a while. 'I didn't read the label on the can very well,' Mum says. 'I poured the whole can in, because I thought it was like punch. Then I saw that it was cocktail fruit, so it might be a bit thick down at the bottom.'
'Bush is an idiot,' Walsh says now, as Mum, who likes to protest, moves onto the subject of war. 'That's what I think. They assassinated Kennedy, didn't they? Why can't they assassinate Bush? He's worse than Hitler.'
'All the best people are protestors,' Mum says.
Chris is emptying little pottles of slime he bought at a cheap shop in town this morning with his mother. 'See, he grins. 'It starts off green, but then it goes grey when you play with it. Part of it is that it feels really crunchy.' Then he explains how to clean yourself off 'in the wild.' He opens his hand and reveals a tiny green plant. He pulls the plant apart, puts the leaves and flowers in his hand, and pours a few drops of his drink on them. He rubs the leaves between his palms until his hands start to squeak. 'Look,' he grins, holding his small palms up for everybody to see. 'Clean.'
'Cold,' Walsh says. 'Your hands will get cold.'