Ben, in the World. Doris Lessing

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       ‘How old are you?’

      ‘Eighteen.’

      This reply did not come at once because Ben was afraid of what he knew was going to happen now, which was that the young man behind the glass protecting him from the public set down his biro on the form he was filling in, and then, with a look on his face that Ben knew only too well, inspected his client. He was allowing himself amusement that was impatient, but it was not quite derision. He was seeing a short, stout, or at least heavily built man – he was wearing a jacket too big for him – who must be at least forty. And that face! It was a broad face, with strongly delineated features, a mouth stretched in a grin – what did he think was so bloody funny? – a broad nose with flaring nostrils, eyes that were greenish, with sandy lashes, under bristly sandy brows. He had a short neat pointed beard that didn’t fit with the face. His hair was yellow and seemed – like his grin – to shock and annoy, long, and falling forward in a slope, and in stifflocks on either side, as if trying to caricature a fashionable cut. To cap it all, he was using a posh voice; was he taking the mickey? The clerk was going in for this minute inspection because he was discommoded by Ben to the point of feeling angry. He sounded peevish when he said, ‘You can’t be eighteen. Come on, what’s your real age?’

      Ben was silent. He was on the alert, every little bit of him, knowing there was danger. He wished he had not come to this place, which could close its walls around him. He was listening to the noises from outside, for reassurance from his normality. Some pigeons were conversing in a plane tree on the pavement, and he was with them, thinking how they sat gripping twigs with pink claws that he could feel tightening around his own finger; they were contented, with the sun on their backs. Inside here, were sounds that he could not understand until he had isolated each one. Meanwhile the young man in front of him was waiting, his hand holding the biro and fiddling it between his fingers. A telephone rang just beside him. On either side of him were several young men and women with that glass in front of them. Some used instruments that clicked and chattered, some stared at screens where words appeared and went. Each of these noisy machines Ben knew was probably hostile to him. Now he moved slightly to one side, to get rid of the reflections on the glass that were bothering him, and preventing him from properly seeing this person who was angry with him.

      ‘Yes. I am eighteen,’ he said.

      He knew he was. When he had gone to find his mother, three winters ago – he did not stay because his hated brother Paul had come in – she had written in large words on a piece of card:

      Your name is Ben Lovatt.

      Your mother’s name is Harriet Lovatt.

      Your father’s name is David Lovatt.

      You have four brothers and sisters, Luke, Helen, Jane, and Paul. They are older than you.

      You are fifteen years old.

      On the other side of the card had been:

      You were born………….

      Your home address is…………

      This card had afflicted Ben with such a despair of rage that he took it from his mother, and ran out of the house. He scribbled over the name Paul, first. Then, the other siblings. Then, the card falling to the floor and picked up showing the reverse side, he scribbled with his black biro over all the words there, leaving only a wild mess of lines.

      That number, fifteen, kept coming up in questions that were always – so he felt – being put to him. ‘How old are you?’ Knowing it was so important, he remembered it, and when the year turned around at Christmas, which no one could miss, he added a year. Now I am sixteen. Now I am seventeen. Now, because a third winter has gone, I am eighteen.

      ‘OK, then, when were you born?’