As she turned to smile at Helen, coming back into the room with sandwiches, the telephone jerked her back with a shock of nerves. She grabbed it, waited for the beeps. ‘Yes? Oh — Billie. Hullo.’
‘Just making sure you’re still there.’
‘Do you want me?’
‘Me? No, but all those poor sods.’
‘What sods?’
‘Well, I mean ... ringing and ringing. Can’t have that, you know,’ Billie said sternly, and rang off.
‘How is she?’
‘All right, I think,’ Victoria said, ‘She’s drunk.’
It seemed like a message sent direct to him.
If you are desperate, the poster said. If you are at the end of your tether. Well, if it could be the end of something that had never properly begun, that’s me.
Tim was twenty. He had lived for almost two years in this great conglomerate town of slums and university and factories and rich flowering suburbs and seaside trippery and reeling rows of new estate houses, eating up the salty grassland. He had come from the flat wet plate of an eastern county, where he was supposed to learn how to grow the flowers and vegetables that made their own frenzied growth out of the dark earth that was so frigging fertile, Mr Gregg said, it was like growing the poor buggers in straight manure.
That was not Tim’s natural home. He had spent the first years of his life in some place like Harrow or Hendon that you could call a part of London if you liked. His third foster-mother took him to East Anglia, and after she sickened of it, and of Tim, he had lived mostly in a Children’s Home, where the nurses came and went almost every month, since girls these days would not stand for all the washing.
At school, the boys from the Home tended to shun the others, to forestall being shunned. Once, Tim had been invited to tea with Adam Johnson, whose mother felt that we should all do what we could to help those less fortunate than ourselves. They had sardines on toast and Battenburg cake in a little house by a canal lock where Adam’s father worked the gates.
His mother said, ‘When Adam was a baby, all he wanted was sardines and pickles,’ as though she were telling some event in history.
‘That’s right.’ Adam’s face spread into a hypnotized beam of self. ‘And I’d lick the oil from the tins. They couldn’t keep it out of my hair.’
‘You couldn’t remember when you were a baby.’ Tim stared across the table at him. He could remember nothing of Harrow or Hendon.
‘Mum tells me about it.’ Adam made round smug eyes over a two-fisted mouthful of toast, and his mother, seeing Tim’s burning face, had coughed into her finger-tips, spitting a crumb of toast on to her cheek, where it remained, and got up to fetch hot water to the teapot.
Later, Adam’s father had let Tim spin the big cogged helm to open the lock gates; but he would not go to tea at the lock cottage again, so Mrs Johnson invited one of the other boys, to satisfy her social conscience.
When he left the House of God’s Angels (Tim had never been able to say the name of the Home, only the address) and went to work for Mr Gregg, people in the villages began to know him as the runty boy who came round with the truck of hyacinth seconds or subsize caulies that could not go to market. Quiet chap. Doesn’t say much. But there was nothing to say, either to the housewives with their time-worn comments on the weather and the crops, or in the dormitory hut, where the floating population of Italians and Spaniards did not stay long enough to learn much English. It had taken Tim half a year to tell Mr Gregg that he was not going to stay either, and another five weeks to announce that he was going south, and another eight days after that to rehearse what he was going to say at the ticket office in the railway station.
Going through London and out again like a boy in a dream, he had thumbed a lift on a furniture van coming to this town and stayed here, drifting from job to job, sometimes drifting jobless, his tongue thick in his mouth like a parched desert traveller’s, strangling himself with silence.
In the hotel kitchens, no one could talk against the volcanic clatter of the dishwasher. On the night squads, the vacuum cleaners shut out the world. In the factory loading bays the diesel lorries roared. On the building sites, it was too cold that winter to think of much more than knocking-off time and how quickly you could get your gloves back on after blowing your nose. On the roads, standing boot-deep in the spring mud of the sewerpipe trench, everyone was in too sullen a temper to try to compete with the clatter of the excavators.
Most evenings he went to the same café and ate the same food.
‘The same, dear?’
‘Ta.’ He sat by the fly-trap curtain in the window and looked as if he was reading the paper. Sometimes people came and sat at the table without noticing him. Sometimes they asked for the sugar or the thick sauce.
‘Live round here?’
‘Darley Road.’
‘Working?’
‘Not this week.’
‘What’s the treacle tart like?’
‘All right.’
‘The trouble with these people down here, they make it with golden syrup. Now where I come from, where they understand good food, it’s got to be black treacle, or they’d get it thrown back in their face.’
Tim listened, sketching the pattern of the formica with his finger-nail. If you listened to a man, he went away thinking he had had a conversation. But a girl … It was not true that a girl only wanted to talk about herself, whether you listened or not. If you could not even answer a question like, ‘All on your own?’ she stared and giggled and said to her friend (they were always in packs), ‘What’s the matter with him?’ as if you were a personal affront.
In his room, in the toppling terraced house where he lived half underground with the weight of a dozen or more people on his head, he listened to the beat of ground-floor transistors and thought of storming up into the night streets and doing some abomination, some unimaginable thing to a girl.
‘You’re mad,’ Frank said. ‘You don’t want to be afraid of them. They’re screaming for it.’
A lot of them looked as if they were. In the streets, on the buses, strutting in and out of the shops, they moved as if they were naked, except that they had a few clothes on. There was a smell of sex all over the place. The town ought to spray.
‘Screaming for it,’ Frank said. ‘A lot of them won’t drink or smoke, mind, but you’re always safe if you offer them the other.’
But they look through me as if I wasn’t there.
Even if Tim had been able to tell him that, Frank would not believe it. Frank believed there was only place a girl looked.
Frank was a lorry driver running to fat before thirty, with all his small features crowded into the middle of his face, as if it was warmer there. He drove for the paper mill, and he had a room half-way up the house in Darley Road, having left his wife, or she him. The others in the house — white, black, brown, men, women, pigs — were in twos or threes or more. When Frank came back from the Carlisle run, doped with the road, he occasionally talked to Tim, because everyone else was feeding children or making children or stretched out on the bottom rung of their spine, eating pies made of stewed mongrel dog and watching television.
The night that Tim saw the poster, Frank had come back from Nottingham with energy to burn and a couple of free passes for a dance hall in the South End that a man had given him in a lorry park in exchange for a packet of cigarettes.
Tim shook his head.
‘Come on,’ Frank said. ‘Do you good, a young chap like you, hanging about with a face like a drain. What’s the matter — you never been out dancing?’
‘Yes, I have.’
A bristly girl like a boar who washed lettuces at one of the hotels where he worked had once asked him to go with her, and then not turned up. Tim had hung about outside the hall for a while with his hands in his pockets, pretending to be taking a door count. Then he had waved and grinned and raised his eyebrows at nobody in the distance. Then he had gone away. He did not go back to the hotel kit
chen any more, so he never knew whether the girl turned up or not.
At the dance hall, Tim had thought that he and Frank would stand together and say things about the girls, but Frank went away with a person who even looked horrible from the back, shunting her off into the pulsing mob.
Tim stood as if his feet were nailed to the floor, his hands hanging and heavy, a tight hot band round his forehead where the bumps would neither flare up to a head nor fade away. He could feel his pale hair rising from the back of his scalp in a stiff tuft. Sometimes he could actually feel his hair growing, sprouting out at strange unmanageable angles.
His Adam’s apple was swelling like dough. He could not swallow it down. He wanted to unsnap the neck of his denim shirt, but he could not lift his hands. If he kept perfectly still, the two girls in matching pink-flowered pants, their bottoms carved like jelly babies, would go on looking beyond him at whatever was making them simper and whinny and nudge each other’s fat little chests.
With a superhuman effort, Tim turned his legs and body on the pivot of his nailed feet, to show that he knew there was something ridiculous behind him, and they could all whinny at it together. Behind him were several piles of aluminium chairs, stacked like geological strata so that no one could sit on them.
He turned back with a clever smile to show that he appreciated the joke.
‘Who are you laughing at?’ asked the girl whose dry black hair had somehow been manœuvred up to ride her fat head like a bearskin. The other one, with slick orange hair like furniture polish, touched her friend for luck and said, ‘What’s eating him?’
When they moved on, propelled from behind by assorted bodies, Tim realized that the whole encounter, which had seemed like an hour’s paralysis, had lasted only the less-than-a-minute that it took for the flowered pants to approach and pass.
Under the low ceiling, battered by noise, the crowd in the dance hall heaved like maggots. The lights swivelled the colours of death mercilessly over the faces, shrieking into each other’s mouths. Disguised as a house detective, Tim put his hands in his jacket pockets and began to slip through the crowd, turning his narrow hips this way and that to avoid contact, hanging his head to protect his identity. The man without a face. His orders were never to mix, never to acquire personality. The man without a name. They had chosen him for his size.
He reached the bar undetected. Everyone had a half-filled glass in their hand, without any apparent way of getting it. Gimme a Coke, Tim’s mind announced; but if he had been capable of forcing himself through the thorn forest of bodies between him and the bar, and then of forcing the words past the obstruction of his throat, there would be no problem about himself at all. He would be somebody else.
The problem now was to get out. It couldn’t be helped, Frank. You walked off on me. I tried to find you to tell you I was leaving ... well, I’m sorry you waited, that’s all. Oh — and thanks for the ticket. I had a great time. Mm? Oh well, not bad. Have to take what you can get, don’t you? And a wink, to show that he had observed and assessed the front view of Frank’s girl as well as the back.
The designing of this conversation got him back into the crowd with a set jaw, butting with a shoulder, jerking up his elbows, raising his knees to wade towards the doors, which seemed to get farther away, not closer. No one was annoyed with Tim for shoving through. They fended him off and handed him past and pushed him on with an indulgent palm behind his head, as if he were a child trying to find his Dad in a football crowd,
‘What’s the panic?’ a young man with a bear’s pelt of hair stopped him near the doors. ‘Your Mum want you home?’
Tim plucked at the fingers that gripped his sleeve, and drew his hand back with a cry.
‘Ah,’ said the bear thoughtfully. ‘You want to be careful, sonny.’ He held his hand close to Tim’s face. The ring on the middle finger had a curved hook on it. Tim ducked through the swinging doors — lucky to escape with his eyes!
He ran through the entrance hall and out into the street. A handful of rain was thrown in his burning face. He took off his jacket and was instantly icy cold, but he dragged his hand across his face and shook it out, to show why he was standing there with the wet wind from the sea whipping his shirt against his ribs.
Outside the hall, a posse of motorbikes browsed at the kerb, their riders camouflaged by moon helmets, a loose knot of girls admiring. Slinging the jacket over his shoulder, Tim walked away from them to where he could cross the street. An engine raced. A motorbike came at him with a dazzling eye, swerved, canted, screamed off down the hill.
Tim had jumped on to the centre island. As he stood there gasping for his breath, the traffic lights on the corner changed, and an armoured division came charging up the hill. At the same time, more cars and buses bore down on the other side of his narrow refuge, so that he was caught in a scissor of traffic. He clung to the lamppost in the middle of the island until the lights changed and he could run for it, then sped down the hill to the bus stop, legs grown fleet as a spider, his breath sawing his throat.
In the chilly bus shelter, walled with corrugated green plastic that ended in a draught two feet from the ground, like a lavatory, a few of the dance-hall crowd were fooling about, guffawing, jostling, grabbing, the girls twirling away on to the pavement but wheeling right back when no one pursued them.
Tim stayed outside, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched against their laughter. If they reeled out and pushed him under a bus, arms outstretched as he pitched face forward, the passengers would all get out and stare, and the bus driver would be led away, grey with shock.
Who is it? He was not labelled. No one would know. Frank would go to Carlisle. The people in the Darley Road house came and went all the time. If Tim never came back to his room, they would give his bits of stuff to the Salvation and move someone else in. If anyone at the Employment Office missed him on Monday, they would only think: Well, there, you see. Shiftless. They all are.
It was getting late. As usual, a bus had just pulled away as Tim came down the hill. There was a long wait till the next. He went behind the bus shelter and walked along the hoarding that hid a row of condemned shops, looking at the pictures of crippled children and men in bulging underpants and the swim-suit girls with hair pencilled on their crotches.
He had walked by the small black and white poster without giving it any more attention than if it was a religious advertisement. When he passed At on the way back, he saw that it said: If you are desperate.
Tim stopped and turned to face the hoarding, which was made of dozens of old doors side by side, leading nowhere. If you are at the end of your tether. There was the name, Samaritans, and bold and black at the bottom a telephone number, 333-4000.
If you are desperate. Of course. The poster was a message sent direct to him.
Far down the road, the lights of a double-decker bus rode high over the traffic, an almost empty bus behind it, patrolling in pairs like scared policemen. The girls and youths burst out of the shelter and claimed the first bus for their territory, racketing up the stairs, the girls parading their thighs for the coloured conductor who did not notice. Tim went to the second bus. There was no one on top.
The conductress, with her cap tipped back on a nest of hair and penny-stained fingers said, ‘If you’re going up, I’ll take the fare now.’
Holding on to the stair rail, Tim found a shilling and a threepenny bit in his pocket and gave them to her.
‘Where to, dear?’
Dog and Duck corner was impossible to say, so Tim said, ‘That’, and nodded at the coins.
‘One and threepenny? Don’t bother saying so then, will you?’ she said, taking automatic offence, and Tim ran up the stairs and fell into a seat at the back. He rode up the hill past the closed shops and banks and painted glass fronts of estate agents, the empty seats going ahead in pairs, his image riding beside him in the dark window.
I am desperate. How could he not have seen that before? Yes, I am desperate, and they know it.
Instead of getting off at the Dog and Duck, Tim ran down the stairs long before that and jumped off the bus as it slowed down for a corner by the station. In the archway of the station entrance, there were three telephone boxes next to the shuttered news-stand. In the first a man talked earnestly, with his hat square on. In the second a boy lunged, inspecting his nails, laughing occasionally, shifting his weight from leg to leg, from one wall to the other, bending at the knees to squint at part of his face in the little mirror, listening, contributing nothing, tireless. In the third box, a woman talked fast, like a foreigner, her eyes darting from side to side, her unheard mouth twisting wet and rubbery.
Tim’s mind raised a gun and shot all three through the head, splattering the stones of the archway with glass and brains. The man in the hat finished talking, fussed with his collar, pulled his gloves with difficulty out of his pocket, put them on, refolded his newspaper and stepped out, staring straight ahead as Tim darted under his arm into the box.
333-4000. Tim had been chanting it to himself like a spell. What would they say? What would he say to them? He dialled quickly and pushed in his sixpence.
‘Yes? Can I help you?’
A woman’s voice. He had not thought about it being a woman. He tried to speak, but no words came with the breath that rasped through his constricted throat.
‘This is the Samaritans. Please tell me how I can help you.’
Help me! Tim shouted without sound. Help me. I can’t—
His fists were clenched. His jaw and neck were rigid with effort. For what seemed like hours, his whole body struggled, his chest like a bellows, his stomach drawn into a knot of anguish. He did not know whether he was fighting to get the words out or keep them back.
‘Tell me,’ she said gently. And he tried to tell her, tried to force something past the suffocation of his throat.
‘I’ll wait,’ she had said. ‘I won’t ring off.’ But now she asked him quickly what the number was. ‘I can ring you back if the money runs out. Tell me where you are. What number.’
The Listeners Page 2