Dole.

I

Neil slumped in the chair, leaving the pen dead. It had been one o’clock two hours ago, and there was work to be done in the morning. I watched as he turned the empty pages of the book, once again having written nothing.

It had been the same for several nights since he’d decided to take up the project again; no words, just air and a faint sense of the will to, you know, do something.

He lifted his head from the desk and turned towards me — face pale, eyes enlarged with tiredness. A fucking mess.

“Jesus, Neil. What’s up with you?”

Before financial security, before the joys of ingesting other people’s hair on the crowded tube home — still young and still in the belief he could change the world, Neil had abandoned a job he hated in pursuit of Something Bigger.

He told me that his experiences of unemployment and being a broke-ass had been kind of limited.

Living in South London, he’d experienced a lot of the effects of poverty but more so indirectly — you know, like the sudden influx of budget supermarket stores and crappy one-pound junk shops.

Becoming impoverished was a challenge for Neil. He was OK, though. Writing was his thing and he had the next Ulysses between the pages of his journal. Then he’d decided that being poor didn’t suit him anymore.

“I’m going on the dole, darling. I need money for cigarettes”, he smirked one day. Typical Neil.

And there the job centre had been, a Babylon for unemployed creatives and the terminally lazy — its orange signage all shiny like a beacon in the Dickensian mist. Neil said the centre he frequented felt like a refugee camp for people running from the law, and good fashion. A metal detector would have yielded enough weaponry to support Khalisi’s army, he’d imagined.

He also commented that it was impossible to ignore the scent of poor personal hygiene and despair.

I didn’t like the way his face twitched when he said that.

II

To coach him through the intricacies of government, a personal advisor was provided. Wesley.

Wesley was an inspirational kind of guy who would eventually teach Neil a lot about life and the way the world worked, such as how not to end up in a job you love, how to be cynical about everyone and everything you encountered, and how to be a total jackass.

Wesley didn't care that his young protégé was going to be The Next Fucking Joyce. He barely would’ve minded if he noticed Neil had failed to meet the dole requirements (which, incidentally, he never did, not even once).

Quite often, Neil would take the longest, most scenic route home from the centre because it meant he could walk through the park and just absorb the sense of community there amongst the crackheads and drunks. It was at times difficult to keep a serious face while he was telling me this, but Neil had a future then.

Neil didn’t enjoy being poor, so he went back to the old job. No more words, no more imagination.

III

It was five-thirty all of a sudden. Neil stood up and began to collect his belongings from around the room. Shoes, coat, keys…

Time for work.

I bid him farewell, watching him trudge off to the impending doom of the day, muttering to himself.

“Chin up, kid. It’s going to be OK.”