Chapter Fifteen - The Apprentice

Wednesday 15^th November

Shane Walker was used to visiting the Community Café.  He didn't eat there but he dropped in sometimes to meet his mother for a lift home, if he had stayed late at college for something or been practicing with the band at his mate Josh's house.  At first, he had been disgusted at the state of some of the old, homeless blokes who came in for their evening meal.  His mum didn't seem to notice; she chatted to them much as she chatted to everyone, she joked with them and, if there was a problem, she spoke firmly but with respect.  Gradually, Shane started to recognise some of them and know them by name.  He started to say 'hello' to them.  He might get an 'alright, nipper!' in return, he might not.  Last winter, the band had done a charity gig at the Nelson and raised a couple of hundred pounds for the night shelter.  They were booked to do another at the end of the month.

Calling in at lunchtime was a new experience.  The clientele was more mixed.  Some of them looked like business people, teachers or ordinary shoppers.  It wasn’t so easy to guess who were paying for their meals and who were eating on the house.

The grey-haired guy behind the counter offered Shane a choice of veggie lasagne, shepherd’s pie or chicken curry.  He sounded like a northerner.

‘I don’t have a voucher,’ Shane replied.

‘That’s alright, lad,’ the man replied.  ‘Your mother’s put one in the box for you.’

Shane didn’t think he knew the man, so was surprised he knew who he was.

‘Paula said to watch out for a young fellow with a ponytail, wearing an army surplus coat, who might be coming in to volunteer,’ the man replied.  ‘I’m a volunteer here myself.  My name’s Tom.’

‘I’m going to be working in the advice centre,’ Shane answered, worried that his mother had stitched him up with kitchen work instead. 

‘I know you are.  I’ll be joining you, after lunch, although I think the plan is for Toby to get you helping out in the IT clinic.  Martin and Hilary are going to have a chat with you first.’  He waved a ladle across the food in front of him.  ‘If you’ve time, you’d do well to enjoy a hearty meal before that!’

Shane wasn’t sure if the man was joking, or if he was in for a grilling.  He asked for lasagne and took his plate and a glass of juice to an empty table, where he could see the door through to the advice centre.  He had promised to be there at one o’clock.  That gave him fifteen minutes for his lunch.

A few people came in and out through the door while he was eating.  A couple went straight to the counter, grasping their vouchers, while others hurried out, almost as if they might catch poverty if they stayed too long.

‘Hello, nipper!  Paula said you might be in!’  Shane’s grandfather plonked himself down on a seat opposite, with an unusually small portion of shepherd’s pie.  ‘I can’t hang about.  Me and the Father are off out in a minute.’

Terry told Shane about the outreach foodbank.

‘Do you get anyone there?’  It seemed unlikely to Shane that there would be much demand away from the town centre and the estates.

‘There was one bloke last week – but I can’t really talk about that.’

In the event, he didn’t have to.  Just before Terry finished shovelling his lunch away and Shane was starting to worry about his interview, two men came out of the advice centre door.  One was a short, fair-haired man wearing last season’s SFC shirt.  The other was a younger man, taller but quite gaunt.  To Shane’s surprise, he came over to their table. 

‘If I keep you waiting, sorry,’ he said to Shane’s granddad, in a central European accent.

‘You’re alright, nipper,’ said Terry.  ‘We’re not ready to go just yet.  You could get some grub if you like.  Everything go to plan?’

The thin guy looked confused.

‘Have they sorted out your money?’ asked Terry, a little louder than Shane thought was necessary.

‘Yes.  Martin think is sorted now.’

‘Good!  I should bloody well hope so, after all the bother you’ve had.  Bunch of clowns!’  Terry pointed to the man in the football shirt.  ‘That’s Toby, by the way, not Martin.  Martin is a thin bloke with glasses.’

‘I see Martin; Toby help with language.’

‘Your English isn’t bad, mate.’  Terry got to his feet.  ‘If you’re not having a bite to eat, you can give us a hand loading the van.’

‘Do you need me to help, Granddad?’  Shane got up.

‘No, son.  Me and Mick can see to it, with the borstal boys, of course.’  He looked at the clock and tilted his head towards the advice centre door.  ‘Haven’t you got to be through there?’

‘Yeah, I have!’

Shane pushed on the door and stepped through into a quite corridor.  He almost missed the man sitting at a desk to the right of it.

‘Ah!  You must be Shane.’

Someone else he had never met seemed to know him, in this case an older man with a high forehead, tightly curled grey hair and a wise, inquisitive face.

‘My name is Vaughan James,’ the old man said.  ‘If you’ll give me just a moment or two, I’ll take you through to see Martin and Hilary.’

Shane took a seat at the end of a short row of chairs opposite the desk.  An Asian man, who Shane guessed was perhaps thirty, came out of a room just beyond them, accompanied by a middle-aged woman.  He guided her to the café door.

‘Make sure you have something while you’re waiting,’ he said, handing her a couple of laminated tickets.  ‘Tom will let Marjorie know, when you’re ready to choose your food.’ 

‘But after that…?’  She was clearly still in some distress.

‘The Council will let us know within a fortnight.  If you need to, please do come in again.  Vaughan can gave you more vouchers.’ 

‘I’d be more than happy to,’ the old man reassured her.

As she went out, Shane saw his grandmother come out of a different side door, with a lady of about her age.  She was using her crutches; so was her client.  They were laughing and trying not to trip each other over as they left the room.

‘Hello luvvie!’ she called, spotting him as she came towards them.  ‘Have you had your lunch?’

‘Yes Nan.  So’s Granddad.’

‘Then I’ll just have to join this nice young man, won’t I, Deepak?  

‘I would love to, Lyn, but I have an urgent letter I must do now, while all the details are fresh in my mind.  Maybe next week?’

‘He always has an excuse to stand me up!’ Lyn said to the other lady. 

Vaughan opened the door for them.

‘Good luck with your interview, luvvie.  Don’t worry about it.  I’m sure they won’t give you too much of a hard time!’

Shane sighed.

‘You really shouldn’t be so anxious,’ Vaughan advised him.  ‘They’re just as keen to make a good impression on you as you are to impress them.’

‘Really?’

‘Quite so.’  A phone on the desk rang.  The man picked it up. ‘Oh yes, he’s here.  Shall I bring him in?’

Shane had expected to be ushered into one of the interview rooms.  Instead, he found himself stepping into an office, cluttered and somewhat sort of space between and around the desks.  A dark-haired woman in her forties was sitting beside one of the desks and a man Shane thought might be thirty or so, with quite spiky brown hair and glasses, stood to her left.  There was a seat in front of them.

‘You must be Shane,’ the woman said, in a voice that reminded him of Joanna Lumley.  ‘Please make yourself comfortable.’

Shane sat down.  Then he decided it was warm enough that he ought to take his coat off, so he stood up again.  One sleeve swept across the nearest desk and scattered a pot of pens across the floor.’

‘Sorry, I…’ Shane started gathering them up.  The man came to his aid.

‘Thanks,’ said Shane.

‘I’m Martin,’ he said.  ‘And this is Hilary.’

‘Hello,’ said Shane, looking up at the dark-haired woman.  Closer to, she looked quite a bit older than he had first thought.

‘Welcome to Mission Control,’ she said.  ‘I’m afraid there’s not a lot of room.  We moved out of the bigger office when the computers arrived.  It’s really rather fortunate that we’re rarely all in here together!’

Shane wondered where he would go.

‘You’ll be fine,’ Hilary said.  ‘You’re likely to be in the computer room with Toby or perhaps helping with reception, if we don’t scare you off today!’ 

She laughed.  Shane laughed too.

 ‘Would you like a drink – water, tea, whatever?’ asked the man.  

‘I’m good,’ said Shane.

‘I’m sure we don’t have to tell you too much about what we do, with your Nan being part of our team,’ Hilary continued.  ‘When she said you had expressed an interest in helping, we were delighted.  I am right in thinking that you’re only free on Wednesday afternoons and you would like to help through here, rather than in the café or foodbank?’

‘Yeah,’ said Shane.  ‘I’d like to be an adviser.’

He noticed Hilary and Martin glance quickly at each other.

‘There’s a shedload of training you’d need to do to be an adviser,’ Martin said.  ‘I’m not saying you couldn’t do it – I expect you could – but it would eat up most of your Wednesday afternoons for the rest of the academic year.  We don’t think we could spare the staff time to do that, either.’

‘But don’t let that put you off,’ Hilary added. 

Shane guessed he had given his disappointment away on his face. 

‘We think we might be able let you loose without too much training, if we play to your strengths,’ she continued.  ‘Hence the idea of getting you involved in the IT clinic.  What do you know about Universal Credit?’

‘Not a lot,’ Shane admitted.  ‘Nan – Lyn, that is – says it’s bad news for disabled people, but I don’t really get why.  There was something on the news, too.’ 

Shane vaguely remembered something about waiting for payments – he wished he’d followed up the story online and found out more.

‘Isn’t there a problem with how long you go without money?’ he asked.

‘There is.’  Hilary smiled at him.  ‘It’s usually a minimum of six weeks, which means that, unless you’ve already made your claim, you probably won’t get your first payment until after Christmas.’

‘Fuck!’ said Shane.  He immediately wished he hadn’t.

‘You two should get along,’ Hilary said to Martin.

‘H prefers us not to swear,’ Martin explained.  ‘I think that’s expecting too much, with what’s going on right now, but don’t use bad language in front of our clients.’

‘Sorry.’

Hilary used that gaff as a springboard to fire a series of quite searching questions at him, which he could tell were to check out his attitudes.  He answered honestly, hoping he didn’t say anything wrong.  Martin and Hilary seemed happy with his replies.

‘Getting back to UC,’ said Hilary.  ‘In addition to the wait for your first payment – indeed, part of the reason for it – is that most people don’t qualify for benefit during their first week.  There is a great deal of pressure on the Government to change that.’

‘Do you think they will?’

‘Possibly, if they think it will put an end to other criticism,’ Hilary replied. 

‘It shouldn’t,’ Martin said.  ‘There is so much wrong…’

‘The issue that concerns you is this,’ Hilary said, continuing her explanation to Shane.  ‘Everyone is expected to claim UC online.  Not only must they claim it online, they must manage their claim online.  If they have to look for work, the Jobcentre will look for evidence they have been doing so in an online journal.  The jobcentre will send details of appointments, meetings, training and jobs to apply for via email.  It may come as a shock to someone of your generation, but there are still many people, of working age, who do not have a home computer or a smartphone or, if they do have these things, they lack the capacity or expertise to use them for such sophisticated tasks.’

‘You’ve met my granddad,’ said Shane.

Martin and Hilary exchanged glances again and smiled.

‘A perfect example, if I might say,’ Hilary chuckled.  ‘If you imagine Terry, your granddad, trying to fill in a benefit form on the computer…’

‘He goes mental enough doing it on paper!’

Hilary coughed and raised her eyebrows.

‘Sorry,’ said Shane.

Martin took over the briefing.  ‘Toby will explain more when you see him but what we need is someone who can help them with the practical stuff – answering security questions, making up safe passwords they can remember, logging in and out, making sure it’s all logged where their work coach can see it.  Toby – or another one of us, if he’s away – can concentrate on the advice side of things.’

‘Are you interested?’ asked Hilary.

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Shane.  ‘I’ll give it a go.’

‘Excellent,’ said Martin.

‘There are a few strict rules that you must follow,’ Hilary insisted.  ‘Quite often, people ask if we can write their passwords and security questions down for them, and save them here, on their file or on our computers.  I’m afraid we absolutely can’t.’

‘Obviously!’ said Shane.

‘It may seem so, to someone used to computers,’ said Hilary.  ‘But, when people have trusted you with their medical history, financial details and sometimes very disturbing personal information, they rather expect us to be a safe place to store their data too, especially if they have issues that make remembering some things quite difficult.  Our problem is that while they might share that data with us, we can’t know who else they would also share it with.  If there’s then an issue with someone accessing their account and tampering with it, for example to change bank account details, we run the risk of coming under suspicion and, while I’m sure we could clear ourselves in due course, the damage to our service from such an incident would be very serious.’

Shane hadn’t thought of it like that before.

‘It’s a nightmare really,’ said Martin.  ‘Without this kind of support, some of our clients aren’t going to cope with this system at all.  In fact, we know they already aren’t.’

‘Like Daniel Blake?’ said Shane.

‘Who…?’  Hilary smiled at him again.  ‘Of course, the film.  For a moment, I thought you meant a real client of ours!’

‘Was it realistic, what happened to him?’ Shane asked.  When Shane had mentioned seeing the film, one of his fellow students had insisted it was all Communist propaganda.

‘Sadly, it was mostly all too believable,’ said Hilary.

‘Apart from that adviser telling him he was definitely going to win,’ Martin added.  ‘We would never do that.  Even if we thought we were definitely going to win.’

‘Could I go to a tribunal one day?’  Shane asked.

‘Maybe,’ said Hilary.  ‘Firstly, however, I think we should introduce you properly to the rest of the team.’