Broken by Ilsa Evans Read Free Book Online Page A

backand, upon being told to get moving, promptly burst into tears.
    The end result was that neither child was ready until well after the school bell had rung. Which meant that Mattie needed to take them in via the office, where she filled out late notes and, while there, quickly changed her emergency contact number. Then she took the children to their classrooms. Max, his olive skin flushed, hung his bag on a spare hook and took his seat without even glancing at his mother again, while Courtney clung to her hand until forcibly removed by the prep teacher. It didn’t matter that Mattie, peering through the window after leaving the classroom, saw the child recover quickly enough to start chatting cheerfully with the others. She still felt gut-shot with guilt.
    And this morning was the worst possible time for delays because she had an appointment at 9.30 am at the district Centrelink, where she had to prove her eligibility for a parenting payment, otherwise she was going to be in serious financial trouble. The last time Mattie had visited one of these places, they hadn’t even been called Centrelink, but Social Security offices. Which made a lot more sense because that was exactly what they were, a government department that supported those who needed social security, either permanently, such as the disabled, or temporarily, like the unemployed.
    It had even moved since her last visit, and was now situated in a hugely busy hub attached to a shopping complex in Wantirna, as if to taunt those on restricted finances with everything that they could not afford. Pubs, billiard halls, expensive specialty shops, boutiques, restaurants, they all surrounded the Centrelink office, greedily awaiting their share of a limited bounty.
    Mattie walked up the steps and past a group of male teenagers whose jeans were worn so low on their skinny hips that the crotch almost linked their knees. They ignored her as she passed, concentrating instead on gazing into the middle distance with a studied casualness. The automatic doors slid open and she entered a glass atrium with rockpool fountains and copious marbled tubs of luxurious foliage. The Centrelink door was to her left so she pushed it open and entered a world so divorced from the cool serenity of the atrium that it was almost a physical shock.
    There were counters staggered over the width of the huge room, with confusing names such as ‘Newstart’ and ‘Parenting Claims’. Each counter had a stretch of yellow tape stuck to the carpet about four or five feet back so that the person being served was separated from the line of people waiting. And there were a lot of people waiting. The Newstart line was mainly made up of younger people dressed very similarly to the group outside. The only exceptions were a girl wearing a business suit, and a black-clad youth who had so much metal on his clothing and inserted into various parts of his flesh that, whenever he moved, he glinted fairy-like in the overhead lights.
    Banks of seats made up the area on either side of the doors through which Mattie had entered, and these were filled almost to capacity with people of all ages, backgrounds and styles of dress. And they, like those waiting in the queues, were relatively quiet. In fact, for an area accommodating such a large number of people, the noise level was surprisingly low. Except for the odd muffled conversation and the occasional mother telling off an errant child, most of the people waited silently, their body language speaking of lethargy as they studiously avoided eye contact.
    And Mattie didn’t want to be there. As she paused just inside the doorway, she was suddenly struck with a sense of alienness, of not belonging. Something had gone wrong somewhere that
she
, with her planned marriage, and planned children, and planned life, should be here, contemplating joining the ranks of the single parents dependent on government handouts for survival. This didn’t happen to