The Listeners

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Shut up, Alice, we’ve heard it all before.’

  ‘Paul Hammond, Flying Squad. Tune in next week for another thrilling drama of life — and death.’

  She went into the kitchen and banged about in there for a while. Something broke. She swore. Water ran. Ice cubes fell into a glass. He closed his eyes and turned away from the door, conscious of the slight downward shift of the flesh of his stomach and cheek that came with fled

  youth. Then she was standing over him at the foot of the bed with a drink in her hand, her mouth shaping greedily towards the glass.

  ‘Damn you, there’s nothing to eat.’

  ‘That’s your fault.’

  She threw the whisky all over his head and face, and went out again to get another drink.

  Tim went on running for quite a while after he left the station. He ran through some empty streets, over a windy bridge, round a square where a woman was walking two huge dogs like antelopes, across a main road without looking at the traffic, through a crowd coming out of a cinema, switching his face from anxiety to urgency so that they should think he was on a mission. Sobbing for breath, his stomach sucked in, he trotted on through back streets, looking for a place where he could get change for the telephone, but keeping away from the main thoroughfares where he might find it.

  When he could go on no longer, he stopped and leaned against a wall. He liked the sensation of being quite empty of breath, his chest aching, his throat a desert, and then the gradual recovery, his lungs filling gratefully, the quietening of his frenzied pulse under his fingers. He could judge its rate quite accurately without looking at his watch. He often put his finger on the tender flesh beneath his wrist, and listened to the message from his heart.

  It slowed to about seventy-five. Bit fast, but good enough for now. Tim walked on. He passed cigarette machines chained to shop doorways so that they could not be lifted bodily and staggered off with to a waiting van. They were full of sixpences he could not reach. He had seen a man on the pier, with two leather bags bulging with packets of nuts and chocolate bars. He unlocked a machine, shook out the money into a pouch, filled up the stacks with nuts and chocolate, locked it up and kicked his heavy bags along the planking to the next machine. When he had done them all, up one side and down the other, he heaved the bags into a little van outside the turnstile, and was carried away. Not a bad job. If Tim could get a job like that, he would be able to stick to it.

  ‘Don’t you ever stick to anything?’ the woman at the Employment Office said, goggling through glasses as thick as bottle-bottoms.

  I couldn’t stand the hotel. There was a fry cook would have got me with a knife sooner or later. Dumbly he stared at her.

  ‘I think I can get you on the pipe-laying.’ She wrote an address on a slip of paper and pushed it across the counter. ‘Go to the works manager and say where you’ve come from. Perhaps you’ll do better in the open air.’

  ‘Timothy!’ She called him back, he turned round again. Her mouth was smiling, but her eyes were still staring pebbles. ‘Stick to it for a bit, eh?’

  Stupid cow. She was supposed to help you live your life, not tell you how to run it.

  Somewhere north of The Broadway, he went into an all-night café. He had never been in here before, which was risky. In some places, you were to go to the counter and ask for what you wanted. In others, there was a girl in an apron longer than her skirt who came to the table, or a bald man in an apron half-way down his legs and tied round the middle with tape.

  The few people in the café pretended not to see Tim coming in. He sat down quickly and scouted out the situation, rehearsing an answer in case someone asked him what he wanted. A ham sandwich. What if there was no ham? He read the list above the counter three times before he could concentrate on what it said. Ham sandwich was one-and-six. Tea was sixpence. That would be two shillings out of his ten shilling note, and they would give him four two-shilling-pieces and he would be no better off than he was before. If he had ham and tomato, it would come to two-and-seven, and they might give him three florins, a shilling and five pennies. But shillings were scarce. They might give him two sixpences, and then he would have a second one to put into the telephone if he would not speak at once.

  When there seemed no likelihood of anyone coming to the table, Tim got up and went to the counter. Now was the time to have your voice vanish! He had had that happen to him too, don’t think he hadn’t. Oh, I’ve had everything in my time.

  ‘Cup of tea and a ham sandwich.’

  You see — it was no use. All he had to do was decide to ask for a ham and tomato and this was what happened. But why had it to be ham and tomato? At the table, it had worked out easily, but it was not clear now. A few figures wandered about his head, but would not line themselves up into sums.

  The woman behind the counter, her bosom and stomach fused together in the middle of her blue overall, did not notice that he had made a mistake. She drew off a cup of tea. She lifted a plastic dome and gave Tim two triangles of sandwich. When he got back to the table and looked between the slices of bread and saw the grey liver paste that lay like a rubber doormat, tears rushed into his eyes and he had to pass his hand across his face.

  You bitch! His mind jumped up and roared his rage. It leaped with clawed hands and reached for her grainy throat across the counter.

  Three boys ate meat pies hungrily, devouring the thick whitish pastry and lumps of meat in three or four bites. An elderly couple sat side by side without speaking, as if they were at the cinema. A girl talked to a man, leaning her arms on the table, putting back her hair every few words so that it could fall forward again.

  Tim drank half his tea. It was very hot. That was why his eyes were watering. He ate one of the triangles of dry bread, which was the top half of the hateful sandwich. As soon as he could get the idea to his legs, he went to the counter and put down his ten shilling note.

  The woman’s spying eyes flicked to the table where he had sat. ‘Wasn’t it the liver paste you wanted?’ she asked kindly.

  The whole café stared up. Eyes struck into Tim’s rashly exposed back. The three boys, the girl with the hair, the couple.

  ‘What did you ask for then?’

  Ham, ham and tomato, two-and-nine, three half-crowns ... Tim’s face was like molten pig-iron. His hair rose on end, dragging his scalp with it.

  ‘I can change it for you, if you like.’

  So that everyone can laugh? Give me my change! his mind roared. He said, ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘Dreadful waste, dear.’ Her mouth was a drawstring bag. She laid the ten shilling note on the ledge of the cash register so that he could not pretend he had given her a pound, and put down some silver coins. Tim grabbed them, turned at bay to face the enemy for a moment and escaped — God knew how!

  Outside, he went this way, that way, like a fickle leaf. He did not know where he was. He started down the hill, saw by the window full of drums that this was the way he had come, swayed and went the other way, crossed the street, walked on until he was beyond the café, then crossed back and wandered on up the hill hesitatingly, as if he were walking in a fog in an unknown country.

  He turned a corner and there were tall flat lights making day of night. He stood against the stem of one, although the spread of its light was universal, and pulled the coins out of the pocket of his jeans. He picked out a sixpence and ran to the telephone box which clung like a limpet to the building on the next corner.

  The number rang in his head like his own name. He turned the dial round, letters, numbers, one after the other with the perfectly co-ordinated machine of his finger. At his command, rods fell into slots, wheels turned, lights flickered, a vast computer was agitated to his will. The beeps commanded his sixpence.

  ‘Samaritans,’ she would say, and, ‘Can I help you?’ And then what on earth would he say? He had nothing that could hold her. They don’t care. You see — the conviction of it was almost a reassurance — they don’t care.

&nbs
p; On an endless hoarding, rushing into the perspective of nowhere, a black and white poster bulged in and out in the wind of fun-house laughter. If you are desperate ... But the telephone could not wait. The impatient beeps surrendered to the dialling tone, arrogant as a purring cat. Tim put down the receiver, put the sixpence back into his pocket, pushed out of the glass door and wandered away, wandered weeping through the lit, deserted streets.

  At the Samaritan Centre, there were a few more calls after midnight. A woman quoting the Old Testament. A boy asking for help for a homosexual friend — but perhaps it was for himself. A man on the night desk of a London paper, looking for information about a missing girl. Whenever the call was from a telephone box, Victoria thought that it would be the man who had breathed so distressingly, and gone.

  She was dozing when the telephone shocked her awake. Her hand went out before her eyes were open. ‘Samaritans — can I help you?’ The beeps answered her. She waited. Nothing happened. ‘Please put in your money,’ Victoria said.

  ‘They can’t hear you till they have,’ Helen said irritably. The dialling tone started. Victoria put down the receiver and fell into a light dream, half involuntarily, half consciously imagined. Sam was in it, and she had shorts, and brown legs and feet, and they were still in the house in Spain with the donkeys rambling along the beach by themselves under mountainous loads of seaweed.

  Paul had got up to run water over his head and take a clean pillow from his son’s bedroom, but the sheets still stank of whisky. He could not sleep in another room, he could not even move to the dry side of the bed, because of the telephone.

  He was falling asleep again when Alice came into the bed like an earthquake, jouncing the mattress, tugging at the blankets, her breath augmenting the reek.

  ‘Why didn’t you go and sleep in Jeff’s room?’ she asked.

  ‘You know why.’

  ‘Oh, dearest, I never knew you cared.’ She climbed on top of him, knees and flat breasts and wild dry hair. He lay still on his back, and after a few feeble heaves and grunts, she passed out and he rolled her off him, and they both slept.

  Frank had never been with an Indian girl. Would she step out of that long swag of coloured cloth, or would he have to unwind it, or find the opening, or what?

  They were in a part of the Town where he had never been before, in a house full of people, some asleep, some awake — my brother, my uncle, my cousin — ‘How do?’

  Hours ago, in one of the clubs, he had swopped the big ugly girl from the dance hall for this one. ‘You’ll have to wake me at six,’ he said sternly. You could order ‘em about, you see, that’s what they understood. ‘And make my tea, mind.’

  She had tiny brown feet like a field mouse. It was all very novel.

  It was about the time when the first shadow of grey light begins to creep up from the bottom of the world, that Tim found himself again in the narrow hilly streets he knew. He was very hungry. He would go back to Darley Road and see if he could find something to eat. Frank always had beer and cake. Beer up the narrow chimney where no one could find it when he was on an overnight run. Cake in a mouseproof tin at the back of the cupboard.

  A police car slid up beside him, the radio conversing in an unheeded monotone.

  ‘Where are you going, lad?’ A slow northern voice. What was it doing among these meaner vowels?

  ‘Home.’

  ‘You’re out late.’

  ‘Been out with my girl.’ Tim managed a wink.

  ‘Ah. What’s your name then?’

  ‘Tim Shaw.’

  ‘Live at home?’

  ‘With my mother.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘14 Darley Road.’

  ‘All right.’

  The car moved on, the two men staring straight ahead.

  Tim felt his pulse. Very good. He had not been afraid. He had talked right out to them, a boy going home to his mother’s house from an evening out with his girl. If they had asked her name, he would have said, ‘Rosie.’ That had been the unsuitable name of the girl in the hotel kitchen.

  He had managed that very well, very well indeed. He walked on smiling, and when he turned at the end of the street, the smile was still on his face, so that anyone who was round the corner would not guess that behind the smile there was neither girl nor mother, nothing.

  The house in Darley Road tilted backward into the clouded sky, its round tile chimney pots like sawn-off arms. It was still too dark to see the door properly. He fumbled with his key, sensing, even before the door opened, the heady mixture of cooking and sewage that possessed the narrow hall.

  Instead of going to the basement at the back of the house, he ran upstairs, and knocked on the door of Frank’s room. No answer. He put his eye to the keyhole — darkness. He put his ear to the keyhole — no sound of breathing. Tim turned back to the stairs and went heavily down the hall, along the chipped tiles past the place under the stairs where the sink and toilet were, and down the dark bending steps to his room.

  It was always fairly dark in here, but often in the daytime he did not turn on the light. He had trained his eyes to read comics in the half-light, sitting by the window with the bottom of the backyard dustbins on a leyel with his head, and the bed and the other bits of furniture in the room seen in shape rather than detail, more reassuring.

  It was quite dark now, and he switched on the light, a boy coming home from a dance. Hullo, dear, had a nice time?

  Yes, thanks. Anything to eat?

  His room was square, with a low ceiling. There was a gas fire and a small rug and some pictures from magazines tacked up on the walls. Frank had been in here once or twice and had looked at the pictures that were of girls, but in the months that Tim had been here, nobody else, nobody at all, had been in this room.

  He sat by the window and waited for Frank’s feet on the steps of the house, or the sound of the front door. He was terribly hungry. There were some biscuits in his cupboard, but the weight of his misery would not let him get up to cross the room. He sat with his feet on the chair rung, leaning forward as if he had cramps, his arms wrapped round his ribs, rocking, staring at nothing.

  After a long time, although his eyes had not seemed to close, he must have rocked into sleep, for he woke in a panic of fear and jumped up. The air was full of a dirty grey dawn. He must have missed Frank.

  He ran upstairs and knocked on the door again. When there was no answer, he began to beat on the door with his fist and shout.

  ‘Frank! Frank, let me in!’ A door across the passage opened and an unseen person threw a shoe at him as if he were a cat, and banged the door.

  Tim went down to the little lavatory place under the stairs. He ran water into the dirty glass and drank, staring at himself in the mirror over the corner basin. There’s a nice looking boy, who is he? Oh, don’t you know, that’s Tim Shaw. No, I don’t know. Holding the glass, he put the tip of his fourth finger against the artery of his left wrist. He could not find the pulse, so he turned over his hand and let it hang slack, counting the gentle thread of his heart.

  If you are at the end of your tether. Watching his aghast face, he broke the glass in the basin and drew the sharp edge deeply across his wrist. Blood sprang out before the pain. He looked down and saw it, welling into the basin as if his soul was emptying away. With a sob, he pulled the towel off the hook, wrapped it round his arm and ran out of the little place, down the hall, out of the front door and down the steps to the street.

  Will I die — will I die? He thought of all the people in the house surging down under the stairs and shouting round. They would be horrified, disgusted, blood all over the place — get the police. Holding the towel round his arm, feeling the blood beginning to soak through on to his right hand, he was running down the echoing street towards the main road, running for his life.

  The telephone clamoured in Victoria’s ear. She grabbed it and spoke before she was awake enough to think.

  ‘It’s done ... I’ve done ...’
/>
  ‘What is it?’ Victoria sat up. Helen woke and got quickly off the bunk.

  ‘I’m going to die.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Help me. It’s all blood …’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In a phone box.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Near where I live. I ran out. I can’t stop the blood.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Near the waterworks — Flagg’s Hill. Oh, come and help me, I can’t—’

  ‘Stay there. Stay where you are. I’ll try and get help. Hang on,’ she said, ‘hang on, it’s all right.’ But there was a clattering noise, and then nothing more.

  Paul woke, and reached for the telephone without turning on the light.

  ‘Near the waterworks on Flagg’s Hill.’ Helen told him. ‘Victoria thinks he may have collapsed. He dropped the phone. She’s hanging on in case.’

  ‘Suicide attempt, is it?’

  ‘Looks like it. Peter thinks I should call an ambulance.’

  ‘All right. Then try and trace the call in case I can’t find him.’

  He got out of bed, quickly into some clothes and out of the flat without waking Alice, buried in sheets and pillows. Downstairs, he ran through the hall and out of the side door to the yard in the middle of the buildings. He got into his car and drove towards the north, weaving through the first traffic that was beginning to drag the cold grey streets to life.

  Near the top of Flagg’s Hill, the old brown brick water tower rose crenellated above the labyrinth streets. Around it, a high sooty wall bristled with spikes like a tiger’s cage, befouled by dogs and artists of the obscene chalk stub. On the corner of a small street behind the wall, Paul found the ambulance waiting by a telephone box outside a public house. There was some blood on the floor and smeared across the coin box and the glass of the door. One of the ambulance men was on the telephone talking to Victoria.

  ‘Yes, he’s here now. All right, miss ... well, we may do. All right?’ He came out of the box, looking at the ground. ‘I found the phone hanging where he’d dropped it,’ he told Paul. ‘You’d think we could trace him by the blood. There’s some here, look, by the wall.’ He brightened up. ‘At least it’s not another practical joker. Now where?’ He cast about on the pavement as if he were divining water. ‘Must have found some way to stop it, or someone came by, more like, and helped him.’