Corrugated iron and plywood
"It'll be alright."
Those were the words of my roommate Kit as she embraced me. I had just lost my job serving at The Black Cauldron Tavern.
"And it's rent day today," I sobbed.
"Yes I know," Kit soothed, "you did remember that it's gone up this week?"
I looked at her aghast.
My name is Holly and I'm poor. Desperately poor. Kit and I live in a shack on Grand City's slum, commonly just known as the Shacks. Corrugated iron and plywood create our home of 12 by 6 feet. At least it was right on Shacks Beach, meaning we could wash in the clear blue Illakian Sea.
That shack was, like many others, rented at extortionate rates off Lord Black, who owned a lot of land on the Shacks and in Grand City as well. Our contract with his company stated that he could as much as double the monthly rent at any point, and I had forgotten that it had gone up by 10 lira to an unbelievable 60 lira a month, each. Bearing in mind that I only earned five lira a day from the Cauldron, you can see how extortionate it was for a small square of land, but Black's properties were always the cheapest, because he could control market prices by owning so much land on the Shacks.
It turned out that I was L10 short on the rent, but the collector at Lord Black's office said that someone would be round to collect the rest in the next week. But that in turn gave me an even worse problem -- tomorrow I would have to pay the poll tax of five lira, and I now did not have a single penny. It was no use asking Kit for help; though she wouldn't admit it, she was as desperate as I was, because she had sold all of her clothes except a long shirt. One of our biggest problems to us poor is that clothing and textiles is taxed heavily. All I can afford at the moment is a tattered grey bikini that I bought at a state confiscations auction. And you have to have clothes; as well as been humiliating, being nude in public is now also illegal.
I lay awake that night wondering what to do. Kit was not in for most of the night; she was out getting enough money to cover her tax tomorrow. But I would not stoop to Kit's activities to earn money. I love Kit, but we have different principles. For Kit was a whore. Almost all shack girls were prostitutes once; it was seen as the only way to earn good money while not needing good clothes or housing. But then the new Emperor came to power and started cleaning up Illakia morally. About a year ago, prostitution had been outlawed (for the woman), and public nudity and curfews and the such had been introduced, making life doubly harder for poor women as poll taxes and clothes taxes went up at the same time. Most, like Kit, continue under the radar, risking the punishment, and who can blame her really. But I was scared; I had seen too many good girls from these streets been strung up publicly and being branded and flogged. And my mother as always had an influence.
My mother had died when I was 14. She had been just as poor as me now, and there was no help for poor mothers. I had never known my father. My mother was a hooker, and all she wished for was that I didn't follow her down that path, having a child by an unknown father. Her dying wish has remained with me to this day.
Superior middle class types in Grand City sometimes called shack girls waifs because to their eyes we all looked the same. We didn't eat a lot. My old wages of five lira only really left me one or two lira a day to feed myself with (after taking out savings for rent and tax and clothes costs, because these cheap clothes don't last long), which was enough for about one meal. Not feeling hungry in itself was considered a luxury. So we were all thin and all tanned, because we did not wear much clothes in the boiling beach weather of the Shacks.
I tried to get comfy in my bed -- a salvaged mattress on the floor. The floor of the shack was basically the sand of the beach, with cardboard at the entrance and a stolen piece of carpet in one corner we laughingly called the living room. A draft breezed in from the ill-fitting door straight onto my bed and I shivered. I was naked (wearing the same bikini 24 hours isn't good for you) and I had a thin white cotton sheet which just covered my thighs, which was the only bed covers we could afford and which we shared. For washing, we used the sea. For toileting, we used a bucket that was thrown into the sewer. For water, we used the only state relief, the right to two pints of fresh but invariably boiling hot water a day. For cooking we had to try to buy as much cooked food as possible, which cost more, because lighting a fire was so time consuming and dangerous.
I eventually got some sleep and woke up early. Kit was not home. I worry for her safety at times. I had decided that to pay my tax, I would have to sell everything I own this morning. I would have to worry about finding a job another day. I could list all my personal possessions in one breath; one bikini, one mattress. I just hoped it was enough.
I stood up and slipped that grey bikini on. The sun was creeping in under the door. I guessed it to be around eight o'clock, which would give me enough time to get down the market, which also had a bumper day on tax day.
