Interlude | Losing Sophia and Angela

Abstract

I meet Sophia walking down the street with Armando, who is now 13 months old. She is pushing a buggy which is also laden with shopping bags hanging over the handle bars. The buggy looks old and one of the wheels isn’t working properly. It seems to be taking all of her energy to push it through the residential backstreets. She tells me to come with her because she has moved to a different house. I offer to push the buggy but after I try and am completely unable to steer it along the pavement, I take the shopping bags and walk along beside her. She tells me she has been refused child benefit for the second time in London. She has indefinite leave to remain and has a national insurance number but she has been refused and she doesn’t know why. We arrive at the house and it seems very different from the other houses I have previously visited. It is not a small Victorian terrace but a bungalow. When we enter it has many different rooms with locks on the doors, separated by small dark corridors. There is a large kitchen and living room that are almost entirely empty and bare apart from three couches which look as though they have been made for an office waiting room. They have grey plastic cushions and wooden frames. There are large glass doors that open out to a large grassy back garden. There are two men at the bottom of the garden looking into cages full of dogs. Sophia tells me that this is the landlord who is breeding dogs. Armando has fallen asleep so Sophia takes me to her room and places Armando in a drawer on the floor that she is using for a cot. We return to the kitchen where she begins to unpack the shopping she has just bought and begins to make chips out of a large bag of potatoes....