"Perhaps if I pay for these things now? " she asks.
When she reaches her car, Helen is shaking too hard to insert the key into the car door. She stands still, taking deep, gulping breaths, willing herself to calm down. That was too close.
They had almost called Daniel. The thought makes her light-headed. Her husband is a man of principle and firm opinions. A strong man, which is why she married him. He seemed the type of man who would take care of her. And he has. But his view of the law is simple and punitive. He thinks that teenage gang members who commit murder should be executed, that fourteen-year-old thieves should be tried as adults. Only yesterday they had disagreed over a youth arrested for stealing a bottle of cider in a local off-license.
"It was an initiation thing," Helen had said. "His mother's a crack head. He wants to be part of the gang. He wants a family."
Daniel had given her a long look.
"He's probably been unhappy and hungry all of his life," Helen added.
"Nobody's hungry in this country, " Daniel said. He actually believed it. "You heard of Benefits?"
Helen thought of the people in the literacy programme – young and old, struggling with so many demons. Hunger was not unknown. Though her teenage pupils were more likely to eat badly than not at all, their problems went far beyond an inability to read or write.
Daniel knows little about the literacy programme. He believes she teaches pensioners how to use a computer. He would not understand Amanda, the girl who carries a kitchen knife to make small cuts in her wrists when she is stressed. Or Zak, the boy with HATE tattooed on his forehead.
When she first met Daniel, he was studying law and she was passionately involved in a course on Writing and Madness. She would quote Rimbaud, Breton. He teased her for taking this "foreign" literature seriously. He made her feel stupid for liking it, stupid for understanding it. An irony that did not occur to her until much later.
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