Clapham omnibus

I am on a New Deal course, enduring the stupefying boredom of a morning with Mike. He is the nasty policeman of the training course, and we know him as "Nosferatu."

There is a knock on the classroom door and someone hands him a note. He reads it in mounting horror and rushes out of the room.

"Oh, dear," I say, "I do hope he isn't suffering from incurable cancer."



"No, he's just got flat vowels and a dodgy diphthong," says Chris the cheerful Mancunian.

"Well, but he did have that hospital appointment the other week," says ever-hopeful Hester.

Mike returns, and attempts to go on with the lesson. But he can hardly speak. He has the habit of emitting certain words as a shout, and now it's out of control. "Some organisations are TINY! Some organisations are ENORMOUS!" It is just before Christmas and he attempts to tell us the date when we must return. Finally, I help him out. "I think it's 11th January."

He consults his diary, and says, "yes, Charles is exactly right. Thursday 11th January is correct."

"Legs eleven," says Hester.

"'Legs eleven' is even harder to understand than 'swings and roundabouts,'" I say.

Hester would normally go into a rigmarole at this point, but today she doesn't. Mike stops for lunch at one minute to one o'clock, an unprecedented move.

I leave the Refugee Council's building, where we are being trained as tutors, and go out into the streets of Brixton. Walking under the pretty railway bridges, I draw comfort from the possibility that Mike may soon be taken from us. I have lunch at a right-on restaurant which is gloomy but peaceful. But there is something rather sad about this compared with the early days of the course.

Then, a group of us-Chris, Sean, Hester, George, big Paul, myself, Ibishimi-used to sneak into the Refugee Council restaurant to have a free lunch. There was a sense of comradeship in a shared wrongdoing. But we have stopped going. One of the staff took a dislike to Chris-he has served two prison terms, once in an American cage-and told him not to come back.

But this wasn't the only reason we stopped going. The queue was too long. And Ibishimi, who was the most enthusiastic of all, disappeared. Four weeks ago she ceased attending. Last week they fulfilled their regulations and automatically chucked her off the course. This will have terminated her dole money. We all miss her, although no one has tried to seek her out. Ibishimi wanted to teach embroidery. She was quite a large black woman, bubbly and talkative, but somehow a little bit solitary and cut off from her family. She had a stammer, just like me.

We are assembled in the tea room at two o'clock for the afternoon session, but Mike has not returned. "I wonder what that letter said," says the genial Irishman Sean.

"I know," says Paul, the dyslexic and accident-prone chef. "Ibishimi died yesterday. The receptionist told me."

We are all shocked, and ask the cause. No one knows. Running through my mind is the possibility that this sensitive woman was in despair, and that having her dole money stopped was the last straw. Then Hester says, "can we say we're so upset that we have to have the afternoon off?"

"No, we don't get the afternoon off," I snap at her. "And I am upset."

Mike returns. He follows good management technique by not announcing the news immediately. He tells us just before the afternoon break, for which he will allow us 20 minutes rather than 15. The Refugee Council doesn't know how Ibishimi died either, apparently. Her death has been notified by Employment Services, without further details. I am a journalist, and wonder whether I can cause a stink for this humanitarian organisation by publicising the death.

At four o'clock a middle-class female manager comes to share our grief. She has no more information, except that Ibishimi died not yesterday but four weeks ago. So much for the scandal. She departs, and a card is passed round for us all to sign. For a moment warm-hearted Sean breaks down. "What use is a card? I asked again and again if you could find out what had happened to her. But every time I was fucking rebuffed!"

"I know how you feel," says Mike. "I didn't have any lunch today. I spent the whole lunchtime walking."

I surprise myself by shedding a tear. Am I really upset? God knows. Sean hurriedly apologises, and Mike asks us whether we feel it is more appropriate to finish the session now or go on until five o'clock. We opt to continue.

We hurry off on our separate ways. The corridors and stairs of the Refugee Council are dark and peaceful on this winter afternoon. I press the button that releases the front door, and think for a moment of Ibishimi. We are unlikely ever to find out how she died. We will not stand by her grave. But we were privileged to know a sweet and unusual woman in what turned out to be the last two or three months of her 38 years.