Maya joined the queue and glanced back. Hope caught her features in the glasses, framed the face, and – guessing at the spelling of her name – tapped out a search. About a second later she was looking at a full-face photo of Maya, and all her occupational and educational details. Brunel MA (Hons.) in law and government, gap year in Nepal, front-line post in an Advice Centre, campaigns against refugee deportations, member of Liberty and Amnesty, assiduous writer of letters to the web… a troublemaker, without a doubt.
She took the glasses off, rather guiltily, when Maya returned with a full cafetière and two mugs.
‘Isn’t this illegal?’ Hope asked. ‘An outdoor smoking area?’
Maya shook her head. ‘It’s not open to the public and they’re not serving the coffee or tea. The shop sells very expensive dry coffee and tea bags. What the customers do with it is their business. There just happens to be a place out the back where as a favour the customers can use the family’s kettles.’
‘And seats, and tables, and shelter.’
‘Well, you know how it is with extended families,’ said Maya, hand poised over the plunger. ‘They need lots of room for gettogethers.’
‘The inspectors will find some way to shut it down. Otherwise more people would be doing it.’
Maya smiled. ‘More are. More than you’d think. Smoke-easies. Shebeens. Drinking sheds.’ She tapped her glasses, in her shirt pocket. ‘There’s a black app for finding them.’
Hope was not interested in black apps. She felt disquieted that Maya actually had one on her glasses.
‘No, I meant like cafés and so on.’
‘That’s not how it works,’ Maya said. ‘If you’re running a café or a pub, the problem with a workaround like this is that it isn’t covered by insurance. Suppose someone were to scald themselves with the kettle! Or trip and hurt themselves! Nightmare. You run into all kinds of legal minefields even before the health inspectors come down on you. And if they do, they can close a café. The most they can do with this is stop the shop owner from letting people use their back yard. Or someone else’s back yard, for all I know. It’s legally quite tricky. In fact what usually happens is the shop owner just stops for a bit, and a place just like it pops up somewhere nearby. Rinse and repeat.’
She pushed the plunger down, and poured. Hope breathed in fragrant steam, blew, and sipped.
‘Why did you come here anyway?’ she asked. ‘Instead of to a café, I mean? You don’t smoke, do you?’
‘I’m a consenting and mildly addicted passive smoker,’ said Maya, inhaling a passing wisp. ‘I should explain. I work in an Advice Centre, out in Hayes. Lots of refugees and DPs, you know? Which means I work with people who – I’m not making this up – will list smoking under “outdoor activities”.’
They laughed.
‘But that’s not why I picked here,’ Maya went on. She leaned forward, elbows on the table, hand waving. ‘It’s sort of relevant to your problem, sort of an example…’
‘Oh yes, my problem,’ said Hope. She put the coffee mug down, hard. ‘You have some explaining to do.’
Maya did some explaining.
Hope put her elbows on the table and her palms across her eyes.
‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘I feel like I’ve been stalked or something.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Maya. ‘Really you haven’t. It’s just that, you know, you posted on ParentsNet, and then that other mum at your school uploaded yesterday’s little contretemps, and—’
‘Yes, I bloody know that!’ Hope snapped. ‘But that science woman, what did she have to poke her nose in for?’
‘For God’s sake!’ said Maya. ‘She hasn’t done anything. She just told me about you, and I came up with an idea to help. To let you know you’re not alone. And come on, I did help.’
‘Yes,’ said Hope. ‘For today. But that doesn’t do me much good, does it?’
‘That’s what I want to talk about,’ said Maya, sounding both exasperated and embarrassed. ‘About ways you can deal with the situation.’
Hope decided to give Maya a chance. ‘OK,’ she said.
Maya leaned back, as if making a conscious decision to get out of Hope’s face, and waved expansively. ‘The first way,’ she said, ‘is the kind of thing people do here.’
‘Drink coffee and smoke?’
‘No,’ said Maya. ‘Find workarounds. Look, I understand how you must feel, like everything’s closing in on you. The health centre, the school, the insurance soon enough… I know all about that sort of thing, because I deal with it every day. Laws and bureaucracy, God! But the point is, if you really want to, you can get around it.’
‘Like?’
‘Take the school, for example. All those mums who’re giving you trouble – well, maybe you can shame them by going to school in a group with mums who support you.’
‘I don’t know any,’ said Hope.
‘OK, but have you looked? Asked? Anyway’ – Maya waved a hand again – ‘let’s leave that for the moment. Sooner or later the insurance issue will come up – the school will be told it can’t be insured against your little boy, or rather you can’t be insured. Now, you have alternatives there: you could home-school…’
‘No way!’
‘… or join a parents’ school group. I can help you find some.’
‘No, again. I’m not taking Nick out of the nursery.’
‘Well… in that case, there are alternative sources of insurance cover you might consider. Mainly religious – Islamic, some kinds of Catholic, even, uh, Mennonite and so on, you know, sects. They’ll all cover you and the school will have to accept that you’re covered, because of various non-discrimination acts – you see how it works, you use one part of the law against others?’
Hope looked at the dregs of her coffee.
‘Want another coffee?’ she said.
Maya nodded. Hope used the five minutes it took to buy the powder and milk and queue for the water to think over why she objected so much to Maya’s well-meant suggestions. By the time she got back, she thought she had it.
‘I don’t want to sneak around,’ she said. ‘That’s what “workaround” means to me. I don’t want to live in some hole-and-corner way, relying on the goodwill of sects and cults, thank you very much. I just want to live like everybody else.’
‘OK, OK,’ Maya said, again with the backing-off body language. ‘All right, let’s see how you can do it mainstream.’ She gave an embarrassed smile. ‘Have you thought of writing to your MP?’
Hope stared at her. ‘What would be the point of that?’
‘More than you’d think,’ said Maya. ‘They still take letters from constituents seriously. And come on, your MP is one of the better ones. Jack Crow.’
‘He even lives around here,’ Hope said. ‘I’ve spoken to him, now I come to think of it. He knocked on our door at the last election.’