Chapter 10: The Discovery

Spring. The kind where Bradford can’t decide if it’s done with winter or not — one day you’re in a T-shirt, the next it’s sleeting sideways off the hills and you’re pretending you brought a coat because you definitely didn’t.

Saturday morning. Mum’s at the kitchen table with her phone and a mug of tea that’s gone cold. I can tell it’s gone cold because she hasn’t drunk any of it. She’s just holding it, like she forgot why she picked it up.

‘You all right?’

She doesn’t look up. ‘Hmm? Yeah. Fine.’

She is not fine. This is the kind of fine where I need to sit down.

I sit down.

‘What is it?’

She puts the phone face-down on the table. Then she picks it up again, like she can’t decide whether to show me.

‘UC was less this month,’ she says.

‘How much less?’

‘About two hundred and seventy quid less.’

I stare at her. Two hundred and seventy pounds is not a dip. That’s a crater. That’s — I’m already converting it — that’s over forty hours of my wages. Nearly five full shifts.

‘Why?’

‘I had a good month.’ She says it flat. The way you’d say it if having a good month was the problem.

‘What do you mean, a good month?’

‘I picked up extra shifts. Two weeks in March, the care home needed me four days instead of two. So I worked them. Took everything they offered.’

‘And that’s… bad?’

‘Apparently.’

She picks up the cold tea, looks at it, puts it back down. Somewhere in the flat, Yus is watching something loud on his phone. I can hear a tinny voice doing commentary on a football match or a YouTube video or possibly both.

‘Can I see?’ I say.

She hesitates. Then she slides the phone across the table.

It takes me a minute to find it. The UC journal is not — how do I say this — it’s not designed by people who want you to understand it. It’s government digital. Grey text on white background, headings that don’t quite explain what’s underneath them, and a layout that feels like it was built in 2012 and then nobody came back.

I’ve left my PE kit at school again. I just remembered. It’s been in my locker since Thursday and it’s going to smell absolutely rancid by Monday. I make a mental note to deal with it, which means I will forget about it completely until Monday morning and then panic.

I tap into the payment statement. There it is: a breakdown of this month’s UC, line by line.

Standard allowance: £393.

Child element: £333 plus £287. That’s for me and Yus. I didn’t know they broke it down like that. I’m worth three hundred and thirty-three pounds a month, according to the Department for Work and Pensions. Yus is worth two-eighty-seven. Good to know.

Housing element: £0.00.

I stop on that.

‘Mum — why’s the housing element zero?’

‘What?’

‘The housing element. It says nought.’

She leans over. Squints at the screen. ‘It’s always said that.’

‘But — we pay rent. We live in a council flat. We pay rent.’

‘Yeah, I know we pay rent, Maya.’

‘So why isn’t it on here?’

She takes the phone back. Looks at it. Her face does something — I can’t place it. Not anger, not confusion.

‘I don’t — when I set up the claim, it was after the move. I was doing it on my phone at half eleven at night because the appointment time was expiring. It asked about housing costs and I tried to put them in but it wanted the tenancy reference number and I couldn’t find the letter because everything was still in boxes and —’ She stops. Presses her lips together. ‘I said I’d go back to it. I never went back to it.’

I pick at my thumbnail. The edge is ragged from where I bit it in maths on Friday. I want to say something but I don’t know which version would help and which would just make it worse.

I open the calculator on my phone instead.

The taper rate. I find it in the payment statement, and then it finds me — the way something does when the numbers hit and you can feel it in your stomach before your brain’s caught up.

The UC journal shows what HMRC reported as Mum’s earnings for the assessment period, and then it shows the deduction.

Mum earned £1,100 that month. The care home gave her four shifts a week for two weeks and she took every one because of course she did — when you’re on a zero-hour contract and they offer you hours, you take the hours, because you don’t know when they’ll offer again.

Work allowance: £404. That’s the amount Mum can earn before UC starts reducing. After that, for every extra pound she earns, UC takes back 55p.

I type it in. £1,100 minus £404 is £696. Times 0.55. That’s £382.80. UC drops by £382.80.

Mum earned £500 extra. UC dropped by £275 extra. Her actual gain from all those extra shifts: £225.

Pagal. The whole system is pagal.

‘So for every extra pound you earn over four hundred…’

‘Maya —’

‘They take 55p back.’

‘I know how it works.’

‘You kept 45p. Out of every pound.’

She doesn’t respond. And I don’t stop, because the next thing is already in front of me — the housing element, the zero on the screen — and I’m already clicking through to the housing costs section before I’ve processed what the taper numbers mean. The two things land on top of each other. The system takes 55p from every extra pound she earns AND there’s been money sitting in a box she didn’t tick for seven months. Both at once. Both right there on the screen.

I open the calculator on my phone. I pull up the council rent statement — it’s pinned to the cork noticeboard in the hallway under a supermarket receipt and a letter from Yus’s school about a trip he’s already forgotten about. Our rent is £433 a month.

‘Mum, if the housing element’s been missing the whole time… how long have we been here?’

‘Since September. Seven months.’

Seven months. Even if the housing element’s only partial — and there’s something about bedrooms and who counts as needing one and I can feel that calculation getting complicated in ways I’m not ready for — but even at a rough guess of two hundred a month, that’s fourteen hundred quid. Possibly more. Possibly less.

Over a thousand pounds, maybe.

I keep going. Not because I’ve decided to — I haven’t made a decision about anything. I’m just… clicking. Following links. The way you fall down a Wikipedia hole at 1am except this one is about money the government might owe your family.

There’s a weird smell coming from somewhere that might be the bin or might be the radiator — it’s been making this burning-dust smell since we moved in and nobody’s figured out why. I should probably look into that at some point. I won’t.

Council Tax Reduction. I find a page that says you can get up to 100% off, but that turns out to be the old scheme — or maybe the Scottish one? I go back, search again, find the Bradford-specific page. Bradford Council runs a scheme — separate from UC, because nothing about this system is joined up — where low-income households can get up to 75% off their council tax. The form is online. It takes about fifteen minutes.

I find the council tax bill on the cork board. The annual amount is £1,370.

NHS Low Income Scheme. Something called an HC2 certificate. I read the eligibility page twice and I’m not sure I understand it. But it covers prescriptions, dental treatment, eye tests. Mum paid for a prescription last month — £9.90 for antibiotics. She might not have needed to.

I start adding it up on the calculator. And I want to be clear — I’m guessing. Half of these I might be reading wrong, and the websites contradict each other, and I’ve got about fifteen tabs open and I’ve lost track of which ones are current. But roughly: the housing element, council tax reduction, free school meals I already get, maybe some bursary thing for sixth form, the prescription stuff. I add things up, take things away, add them back.

Accha. The calculator shows a number. Even at the low end — if I’m being pessimistic, if half of these don’t work out — it’s over two hundred a month. At the high end, maybe three hundred or more.

That’s food and heating. Maybe one less midnight phone call through the wall — or maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

Two hundred quid a month is over thirty hours of my wages. Four full shifts at the supermarket. I close the calculator and open it again because I don’t trust the number.

Same number.

It’s ours. Or it should be. I think.

Mum sits back down. She’s made aloo gosht, which she only makes on weekends because it takes time, and the flat smells like cumin and coriander and home. Yus has asked three times if he can have the last yoghurt and has been told no three times and is now eating the aloo gosht in front of his phone in the living room because sitting at a table is something his generation simply does not do. There’s a bit where he drops roti on the carpet and picks it up and eats it and I pretend I didn’t see.

I watch Mum eat. She’s doing the thing where she tears the roti into small pieces and uses each one to scoop, methodical, like she’s not thinking about it. The flat is warm, telly on low, Yus laughing at something on his phone. It’s calm. One of the calm ones. And I think: now. While it’s like this.

‘I’ve been looking into some things,’ I say.

She’s looking at me the way she looked at me the night we went through the credit report. Cautious. Not closed — but braced.

I tell her about the housing element. I show her the screen. I tell her about the Council Tax Reduction and the HC2 certificate.

I also tell her I might be wrong about some of it. That I don’t know exact amounts. That some of these might not apply the way I think they do. Because I genuinely — I just don’t want to promise something I can’t deliver.

She puts her fork down.

‘Where did you get all this?’

‘Government websites. Citizens Advice. I just —’

‘Maya, I don’t need you going through my —’

‘I wasn’t going through anything. I was on your UC journal, the one you showed me, and I just — I kept clicking.’

She picks up her fork. Puts it down again. Her jaw does something tight.

‘I might be wrong,’ I say. ‘About some of it. I probably am.’

That lands wrong too. She takes it as me saying it’s not worth the effort, which is the opposite of what I mean, and now her face has closed off and I’ve messed this up.

‘Never mind. Forget it.’

‘How much,’ she says. Not a question. A demand.

‘What?’

‘How much are we talking about.’

‘Maybe — maybe two, three hundred? A month? I’m not sure. Some of it depends on —’

‘Two hundred.’

‘At least. Maybe more.’

She presses her fingers against her eyelids — three seconds of dark.

‘Why didn’t they —’ She stops.

‘I know.’

‘Seven months.’

‘Yeah.’

The kitchen is quiet except for Yus’s phone in the next room. The radiator ticks. Something clatters — a spoon, probably.

Mum looks at me. I don’t know what to do with my face so I look at the table.

‘I’ll do the forms,’ I say. ‘Tonight. I’ll start with the housing element — that’s just updating the UC claim.’

‘That’s not your job.’

My thumbnail again. I press it against the edge of the table.

‘You’re sixteen.’

‘Yeah.’

She doesn’t nod. She gets up, takes the plates to the sink, runs the tap. I sit there. The water runs. She scrubs something that doesn’t need scrubbing.

‘Right,’ she says, with her back to me. ‘After Yus goes to bed. Show me what to do.’

We spend the evening on it. The housing costs section in the UC journal is where Citizens Advice said it would be. You enter your rent, your tenancy type, whether you get any help from anywhere else.

‘Want a brew?’

‘Yeah.’

‘There’s no milk.’

‘Black’s fine.’

Mum types. I point. She backspaces, types again. The kettle clicks off. Neither of us gets up for a bit.

It takes twenty minutes because the broadband keeps dropping. Bradford broadband. Powered by the same technology as the self-checkout machines at work — string and prayers, like Darius says.

We submit it.

Then we start the Council Tax Reduction form on the Bradford Council website. It’s longer. It asks for income details, savings, who lives at the address.

Mum pauses.

‘Who lives at the address,’ she reads.

‘Yeah.’

‘All the people who live here.’

‘Yeah.’

She types: Amina Hussain. Maya Hussain. Yusuf Hussain.

She stops.

The cursor blinks.

I think about the phone call. Mum’s voice through the wall, the night I couldn’t sleep. Low and careful. Benefits… entitled… and then, quieter: but what about Ammi?

‘Mum?’

‘I need to put your nani.’

‘Okay.’

She doesn’t type.

‘It asks for — it wants their status. National Insurance number, immigration status.’

‘Nani has a National Insurance number. She works.’

‘It’s not that simple, Maya.’

Mum doesn’t explain it all at once. She gives it to me in pieces, the way she gives everything — like pulling thread from something she’s been holding together for years and being careful not to unravel the whole thing.

‘Your nani came here a long time ago.’

‘I know.’

‘Before I was born. With your nana. When the mills were still going.’

‘Yeah.’

‘She had papers.’

‘Okay.’

Mum stops. Picks at the edge of the laptop keyboard. There’s a key that sticks — the ‘E’ — and she presses it and lets it bounce back. Press. Bounce. Press. Bounce.

‘The papers were your nana’s, really. She was on his… his thing. His visa.’

‘And when Nana died?’

‘She was supposed to sort it. Her own papers.’

‘Indefinite Leave to Remain,’ I say. I don’t know why I know the phrase. Something I read earlier, on one of those Citizens Advice pages, in a section I clicked past.

Mum looks at me. ‘Yeah. ILR.’

‘She didn’t apply?’

‘It costs money.’

‘How much?’

‘Thousands. Nearly three thousand, last I looked.’

Neither of us says anything. Three thousand pounds. Beta, that’s — three thousand pounds just to apply to prove you have the right to stay in a place you’ve lived for decades.

‘And there’s a test,’ Mum says. ‘In English.’

‘She speaks English.’

‘Not — not test English, Maya. There’s a specific test. The Life in the UK test. Multiple choice. In English. About British history and — I don’t know, the Houses of Parliament or something. And she’d have to go to them. The Home Office.’

She stops again. The cursor’s still blinking.

‘She doesn’t trust them.’

‘The Home Office?’

‘Any of them. After the Windrush thing. After —’ Mum shakes her head. ‘She watched people she knew get letters. People who’d been here forty years. Prove you belong here.’ She almost laughs but it isn’t a laugh. ‘So she didn’t go.’

I sit with that. The kitchen is very quiet.

‘So she can’t claim UC.’

‘No.’

‘Or housing benefit.’

‘No.’

I don’t keep listing things. I don’t need to. She pays into a system that won’t pay back. Banks turned her away. And she keeps her money in tins because what else was she supposed to do.

I think about the tins. The labelled tins on top of the wardrobe. کرایہ — rent. کھانا — food. باقی — rest.

She wasn’t being old-fashioned. She just — yaar. What else was there.

There’s a phrase for what Nani has. I saw it earlier. On the Citizens Advice website, in a grey box, in a section I skipped because I thought it didn’t apply to us.

No Recourse to Public Funds.

Five words.

‘Does she know?’ I ask.

‘She knows.’

Mum doesn’t add anything. She doesn’t need to. Nani has always known.

I want to be angry and I am angry but the anger just sits there. It’s not like the taper rate, which is a number I can point at. This is —

I don’t finish the thought. The radiator ticks. Mum’s hands are flat on the table.

‘Can she — is there a way to sort it? The ILR?’

‘Maybe. I’ve looked into it. But the money, and the test, and —’ Mum tips the laptop lid back up. The form is still there. The cursor is still blinking after Yusuf’s name. ‘She’d rather have her tins.’

I think about that. About choosing tins over the system. About how it’s not really a choice.

Mum closes the Council Tax Reduction tab without entering Nani’s details.

‘We’ll do this one without the — I’ll figure out how to handle the Nani part later. It’s fine.’

It’s fine.

Later. The flat is dark. Yus is asleep — the specific silence of a twelve-year-old who has finally stopped making noise. Mum’s in her room. The laptop is still on the kitchen table.

I’m on the sofa bed with my phone and I can’t sleep. I’m doing what I always do when I can’t sleep, which is Google things I probably shouldn’t at midnight.

‘NRPF UK what does it mean’

No Recourse to Public Funds. A condition on certain visas. Prevents access to most means-tested benefits and social housing. The list: UC, Housing Benefit, Child Benefit, Child Tax Credit, Pension Credit, council tax reduction, social housing.

Then the other list — the things you CAN still access. NHS treatment. State education. The state pension, if you’ve paid enough National Insurance.

Nani has paid National Insurance. For years. The tax comes out, the NI comes out, and it goes into a pot she can’t drink from.

I open TikTok instead because I need sixty seconds of not thinking.

A cat falling off a shelf. Someone making biryani in a pot the size of our bath. A girl my age doing a ‘no-spend day’ challenge and her fridge is the size of our bathroom.

I close the app.

I get up. The mattress dips and springs back. I walk to the kitchen, fill a glass from the tap, drink half of it standing at the sink. The window above the sink is black. I can see myself in it — hair up, old T-shirt, glass in hand. I drink the rest. Put the glass on the draining board. Walk back.

I’ve had that Sabrina Carpenter song stuck in my head all day. The one from the advert. It’s going around in a loop and I want it to stop but every time I try to think of a different song it comes back louder.

The numbers from earlier. The housing element. The council tax thing. Money that might be ours, if the forms go through, if I’ve read the websites right.

And Nani. Who doesn’t qualify for any of it.

Darius’s credit card company. The way nobody told him either. Bas. I lock my phone and put it face-down on my chest.

I lie on the sofa bed. There’s a spring that digs into my hip if I lie on my left side. I’ve started sleeping on my right. That can’t be good for me.

My phone buzzes. Sienna:

u free tmrw
primark trip

I type back:

yh maybe
got some stuff to sort first tho

mysterious
is it boy stuff

its government form stuff

…
ur so weird maya
love u tho

love u too
night

I put the phone down. 11% battery. I should charge it but the cable only reaches from the plug to the floor and I’d have to get off the sofa bed.

I don’t get off the sofa bed.

Tomorrow there are forms to fill in. The housing element. The council tax stuff. Not exciting forms. Not life-changing forms. Just forms that might mean an extra couple of hundred quid a month, which is heating and food and one less midnight phone call.

And then there’s Nani. Who can’t fill in any of them.

I pull the blanket up. Roll over. The blanket smells like fabric softener and the dog from the Freecycle family we got it from, faintly, still. I stare at the wall.

The ILR application. Three thousand pounds. The Life in the UK test. The Home Office. Nani watching Windrush on the news, watching people who’d been here their whole lives get told to prove it, and deciding: no. I’m not going to them. I’ll keep my tins.

Except I found something on a forum earlier. Someone asking about NRPF and council tax forms, and the replies were — they weren’t reassuring. Something about how if you don’t have ILR and you put your name on things, sometimes people check. And if they check —

What if filling in a form is the thing that makes someone look?

I sit up.

The council tax form. The one Mum closed without entering Nani’s details. The one she said she’d “figure out later.”

My phone buzzes. 8% battery. Sienna again:

primark at 11 tho yh?

I don’t reply. I’m staring at the ceiling, and the Sabrina Carpenter song has finally stopped, and in the silence I can hear Nani’s door open down the hall. The bathroom tap runs. Then it stops. Then her door closes again.

She’s been here forty years. Paid tax, raised a family, never took a penny from the state.

I keep thinking about the form. The bit where it asks who lives here.

Through the wall, Mum’s light clicks off. The yellow line under her door disappears.