Maurie said, ‘I’ll make a phone call. Have some money wired to us.’
‘Wired?’ Jack said. ‘Do they still do that?’
Maurie waved a dismissive hand. ‘I don’t know. However it’s done, it shouldn’t be too difficult.’
The peep of a horn startled them, and they turned to see a minibus pulled up outside the Wing Lee Hong Kong Chinese supermarket opposite. The driver jumped out and slid open the side door. He was a middle-aged man, wearing turned-up jeans and a knitted jumper. He had a florid face that warned of high blood pressure, and a bird’s nest of wiry hair arranged around a bald crown.
‘Sorry I’m so late, gents,’ he said. ‘The traffic’s right bad this morning, and I’ve still got a few calls to make, but we should get you there on time.’
For a moment none of them knew what to say.
Then Jack improvised. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Well, you’ll be meeting the coach at Bramley. But you’ll get a bite to eat first with the old folk at the lunch club in the community centre. That’s where you’ll get picked up.’ He looked at Ricky. ‘You looking after them, young fella?’
‘Aye, he is,’ Jack said, and he nodded the others towards the van.
Ricky glared at him and hissed under his breath, ‘What now?’
‘You heard the man. Going to get something to eat, son,’ Jack said, and grinned. ‘Better take that photo before we go.’
He and Dave helped Maurie across the road and into the van while Ricky rattled off several quick pictures of the empty parking space where his Micra had been, then hurried over to join them.
The driver smiled. ‘Doing a bit of sightseeing are you, son?’
Ricky didn’t trust himself to speak and just nodded.
‘Funny sort of thing to show the folks back home. A parking space in Leeds.’ And he chuckled. ‘Alright, gents. Everyone safely aboard?’ He slid the door shut, then rounded the van to climb back into the driver’s seat. ‘Hope you don’t mind, but I’ve a whole load of stuff in the back there to drop off at the Farsley Food Bank. Shouldn’t take too long.’
III
Farsley was an old mill town halfway between Leeds and Bradford, subsumed now into the Leeds metropolitan area. It seemed to comprise a main street that ran steeply up a hill to a church at the top of it, with roads like spokes going off left and right to factories and former mills and micro housing estates.
‘It’s a bloody shame,’ the driver said as they drove up the hill. ‘There’s folk in Farsley worked hard all their lives, till them bankers went and ruined the economy. Bloody gamblers, that’s all they are. And it’s honest working folk like what live here that are paying the price of it. Nearly ten per cent unemployed, if you even believe the figures.’ He snorted his disgust. ‘Those that have jobs don’t even earn enough to pay their bills. And these bastards are still picking up their bonuses!’
‘So who employs you, then?’ Jack asked.
‘Oh, I work the night shift at a factory in Bradford. This is just volunteer work.’ He half turned. ‘You’ve got to do your bit, don’t you? Because the bloody government won’t. One of the richest bloody countries in the world, we are, and we’ve got more than three and a half million children living in poverty. One in four! And nearly half of those in severe poverty. Never been a gap this big between rich and poor since the First World War. Bloody disgrace!’
Jack said, ‘When I left school in the sixties, unemployment was one per cent.’ He shook his head. ‘Hard to believe it now. Jobs were so thick on the ground, if you didn’t like the one you were in you could quit, walk round the corner and get another.’
Dave chuckled. ‘I remember old what’s-his-name, Harold Macmillan, saying we’d never had it sae good. And we thought, bloody Tory!’ He made a sound that was halfway between a snort and a laugh. ‘If only we’d known. But the auld bugger was right.’
They turned left off the main street into Old Road, climbed to a turn before a row of old brick terraced houses, and then drove into the car park of the Farsley Community Church.
‘Used to be the Methodist church,’ said the driver. ‘And there’s still a working chapel inside. The hall’s given over now to the food bank.’ He pulled up by a tall wooden entrance porch built on to the blackened stone church, and turned to Ricky. ‘You can give me a hand in with these boxes, young fella, if you don’t mind.’
Ricky looked like he minded very much.
But Jack said, ‘He’ll be only too delighted to help, won’t you, Rick?’
He saw Ricky’s jaw clench, but the young man said nothing. He climbed out of the van and went round the back to help the driver unload.
Jack turned to the other two. ‘Wonder who we’re supposed to be.’
Dave smiled. ‘Does it matter? As long as we dinnae let on that we’re no’ who he thinks we are, the least we’ll get is a free lunch.’
‘I guess so.’ Jack looked up at the big old church. ‘Never seen a food bank myself. Fancy taking a look?’
Maurie said, ‘On you go. Life’s depressing enough.’
Jack and Dave followed Ricky and the driver up the stairs and into the main hall. Beneath a polished wooden ceiling sunlight streamed in through tall, arched windows to fall across tables laid out around the perimeter. Tinned and packaged foods were organized into blue plastic crates, and groups of people, some with children, shuffled from table to table filling their bags with the necessities of life.
Jack and Dave stood by the door watching. There was some discreet banter going on among the volunteers, but the recipients themselves moved around the tables in sombre silence, with just the occasional whispered exchange over a pack of rice or a bag of sugar. It dawned, then, on Jack that what he was witnessing was humiliation. People stripped of all dignity and forced to come here to feed themselves or their children. And he immediately felt a sense of prurience.
He turned at the sound of their driver’s voice, low and breathless, as if imparting a secret. ‘Crying shame, in’t it? You know, more than a million people had to use food banks in this country last year. And a lot of these folk have got jobs. They just don’t earn enough to feed their families.’
Jack glanced beyond him towards Ricky, and saw the young man’s discomfort.
‘Most people don’t realize it, but the biggest cause of folk needing to use food banks is delays in benefit payments. They just don’t have any bloody money at all. Second biggest cause is low income.’ He shook his head. ‘Low income! Can you imagine? How is it even legal to pay people less money than they need to live?’ He lowered his voice even further. ‘And this?’ He nodded towards the lines of tables. ‘This is just the last step in a kind of ritual humiliation.’
Jack noticed that the driver used the very word that had come to his mind.
‘If you were to believe the papers, you’d think anyone could just trot along here and help themselves. They can’t. They have to be assessed by care professionals. Social workers, doctors, police officers. And if it’s decided they’re in crisis, they get vouchers to exchange for food.’ He looked at Jack and Dave, and cocked his eyebrow in disgust. ‘Hard to believe this is 2015.’
As they shuffled out, Jack caught his grandson’s arm on the stairs, and leaned in to whisper. ‘Bloody scroungers, eh? Just topping up their weekly shopping at our expense.’
IV
Ricky sat in the back of the minibus working his iPhone with his thumbs, emailing his father and sending him the photograph of the empty parking space. The road from Farsley took them through suburban housing schemes and new industrial estates, round ring roads and loops. When they reached Bramley they passed countless For Sale and To Let signs on houses and shops. The roads were patched and potholed, and their minibus bumped and lurched, making it almost impossible for Ricky to hit the correct keys.