The Listeners

by Monica Dickens

  Kitchen porter, builder’s labourer, roadwork - it would all get back to the lady with the bottle-bottom glasses at the Employment office, and she would sink him, nothing less.

  Tell nothing. This doctor did not seem to mind any more than the darkie one at the other hospital had minded getting no answers to his questions. So why did they bother to ask them? There was a Chinese one here, nice young chap, nervous, learning - they all learned on you - very polite.

  ‘Tell me what you remember, Tim. Let’s talk about when you were a little boy. Don’t think. Just tell me anything that comes to you.’

  It was very easy to switch yourself off like a wireless. No bother at all.

  Tim went off every morning with Alec and Uncle Fred and Mr Podgorsky and Arthur Callaghan and them, and in the barn of a workshop that smelled so sweet of shavings and oil and hot grinding wheels, he learned how to make bread boards and chopping boards for women to chop on in their kitchens, and at twelve o’clock he went back to Olive Barrow with the cabbage and overdone meat smells, like any boy going tired to his mother after work.

  On the first Friday when they gave him his pay envelope, he took it to her and asked her to keep it safe for him.

  ‘You can’t trust any of them.’ He glanced at stupid Alec, and Nobby all hunched over the table with that string of saliva down his chin, and poor wurzel-headed Dick, giggling in his wheelchair, legless for all anyone knew under the plaid rug. Gang of thieves, the lot of them. There were footsteps every night in the ward. If you woke and yelled, ‘What’s up?’ they would say, ‘Got to go to the toilet again,’ nastily, as if their weakness were your fault.

  ‘I’ll put your money in the hospital bank for you, dear,’ Olive said.

  ‘No, you keep it. You can give me the money for fags and that.’

  ‘You can draw out of the bank any time. You must fill out a slip.’

  ‘What slip?’

  ‘The one they’ll give you.’

  He did not go to the bank. He did not know where it was. He gave his money to Olive each week, and cadged cigarettes off smarmy people like Ernie, whom nobody liked because he messed his trousers; or took them out of people’s lockers, and sometimes off the trolley shop that the whistling lady in the yellow overall pushed round. You asked her for a magazine she had not got, and when she bent to the bottom shelf, it was easy. She whistled like a canary, it was marvellous to hear it, down the corridors to announce her coming.

  Highfield was full of men and women, old, young, sick, well, mad, sane, doctors, druggists, keepers of mice, nurses, maids, stooped old men with sacks who picked up litter on the grounds and might or might not be patients. Tim wended carefully among them, avoiding contact, shrinking from Bob Bamber in the carpentry shop when he leaned over to check a measurement, safe only when Olive Barrow was about with her loose-powdered skin and her busy hands and feet and her warm flesh smell, watching for the evenings when Paul would come treading solidly into the day room, telling Tim stories about the pupils at his school, bringing books, sweets, cigarettes.

  ‘I don’t smoke.’

  ‘You used to. Given it up?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Paul was his friend, but he might still be a spy for the lady with the trolley shop.

  There were girls in the hospital, hundreds of them, patients, nurses, secretaries, girls in white coats who did nothing but go up and down the corridors very fast, to make their bottoms wag. There were thighs under tiny skirts, the inside flesh wobbling as the foot came down. There were big tits and little tits and sharp ones and blunt ones and clubs and concerts and dances where you could get close to them, because here it was not like the outside world where girls stared and pushed each other and said, ‘What’s the matter with him?’

  ‘Go on, go tonight,’ Olive Barrow said. ‘Meet a nice girl.’ But after she had gone home, Tim was always in the toilet when the lady with the beads came round: ‘Who’s going to Activities?’

  And then one day, one bright and dreaming day with clouds like fluffs of whipped cream and a sky like the tune the yellow trolley lady lady trilled, Bob Bamber told Tim to take a nine-by-five bread board to the Domestic Science unit.

  ‘I don’t know where it is.’

  Bob, who was very patient except when you dropped something on his foot, walked the length of the shop with Tim and took him outside and pointed to a brick building with white paint and chimneys. ‘Across the grass, down that path, the door is round the corner, and be sure to make them sign the slip.’

  The sun was out and the air was full of the sea, vigorous and cheerful from beyond the hills. Although it was not yet the end of December, the ground was ringing hard, with an icing of the snow that had drifted down half-heartedly at breakfast time. Olive said it would be a white Christmas. She was quite excited about it, although she had seen fifty Christmases, she said, and many of them lean ones.

  Yesterday they had started to make chains of coloured paper cut in strips and pasted through each other. Tim had been quite good at it, working swift and clean, although it would be a long time before the fingers of his left hand were a perfect machine again.

  ‘It’s my hand.’ He had whined a little to Olive, showing her the hand which no one was interested in now that they said it was healed. ‘It pains me, but I didn’t stop working. Look how much I done.’

  ‘Oh, the poor hand.’ She stroked the back of the fingers as if it was a dog’s paw, but he did not snatch it away as a dog would have done. She bent to pick up the colourful paper chains that swirled about the bottom of his chair. ‘Look how much Tim’s done, Norman, and here you are all over paste, stuck to everything.’ Norman’s fingertips were all over bits of grit and fluff out of his pockets where he had kept putting them in to get the sodden pieces of sheeting with which he fought the day-long battle against his nose.

  Olive took him away to wash. ‘Christmas is coming,’ she sang gently, like - who was it? - Auntie Ruth, it must have been, when they lived in that house under the railway bridge where the stove blew up and took off all her eyebrows. ‘Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat.’

  Bob Bamber had told Tim to put on his overcoat for the trip to the Domestic Science unit, and he had reached the brick building before he realized that he had forgotten to take off his carpenter’s apron. He had been working on a packing case with Stewart, one of those people who abounded at Highfield, who you were not quite sure whether they were a high grade patient or a low grade instructor. The apron was a silly looking pocket full of nails and screws which tied round your waist with tapes. Before he went round the corner to the door of the building, Tim tucked the bread board under his left arm to button his coat across, but all the buttons except the top one were off, so he wrapped the coat round him as far as he could. It was someone else’s, a boy’s, too small even for skinny Tim.

  Outside the door, he realized what he was in for. Domestic Science. Cooking and laundry and that. He was entering a purely female world. He would have turned and gone back, but you did not go back to Bob Bamber without completing the mission assigned to you. If Bob Bamber said, ‘Square that corner,’ you squared that corner if it took you till dinner time.

  The door was open, like all the doors at Highfield, except for two closed wards which were not much spoken about. Mr Podgorsky told him horror stories about other places where he had been, either prisons or nuthouses, it was all the same, because, ‘All you hear is the jangling of keys, Timothy, and the shrieks of poor souls in torment.’ So when he and Tim were really browned off with the situation, they told each other it could be worse, and planned how they would go into the little town one evening and have some beer.

  Tim went inside and stood warily in the shining hall. A woman was pinning notices on a cork board. ‘Hullo,’ she said, and smiled. That was the remarkable thing. Where on earth else did people smile and say Hullo before they even knew who you were?

  ‘I brought the bread board.’ It was still under Tim’s left arm, the hand in the pocket of his coat
.

  ‘Oh lovely, for the cooking school. How very kind of you. It’s that door at the end.’

  When Tim went through the door, all he could see was women. There were cooking stoves along one wall, pans, sinks, what you would expect, but there must have been twenty or more women doing whatever they were doing, in flowered aprons.

  Some of them were girls. A lot of them would pass as girls, at least. Three or four of them round a table in the middle of the big room began to neigh and giggle, taking courage from each other, pushing each other with floury hands, bumping against each other, just like girls in the world. Another girl who was not bumping stepped back, dusting off her hands as if she were going into a fight.

  ‘All right, girls,’ Tim heard her say. ‘This one is mine.’

  She came towards him. She was rather a bony sort of girl with long thin legs and an angular way of moving under the flowered apron, which went right up her front and round her long white neck, on top of which her small head was tipped a little to one side, smiling at Tim.

  ‘Hullo.’ When she got to the door where he stood, she lowered her eyes, pretending she was shy.

  ‘Hullo.’ Tim’s right hand clutching the front of the skimpy brown coat, swelled instantly up like a crimson balloon, the pulse throbbing like a sore. The blush swept up his face so fast he had to blink his eyes. His scalp prickled. Surely she must notice? She had raised her eyes now without raising her pointed chin. They were rather protuberant, dark like treacle, with smooth rounded lids. Her lips, which were smeared with pale lipstick, did not quite close, as if the short nose pulled the top one open.

  ‘It’s the bread board, Felicity,’ a lady in a white overall called from the stoves. ‘Get it thoroughly scrubbed up and take it to Mary Dale so she can start the sandwiches.’

  The girl held out her hand for the board. Tim drew it out from under his arm. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion, the girls watching from the table with their mouths agape, the board passing from Tim to the girl, the falling open of his coat and her eyes staring as she saw the perishing apron.

  ‘Come to join the cooking class?’ The softness of her Hullo had become a hard bright flash, a dart thrown at him. ‘Move over, girls.’ She stepped aside to show them. ‘There’s a new pupil in the pastry department.’

  The slow-motion dream was dashed into a whirl of noise and movement as she spun away from him, holding the bread board like a shield, and the girls sent up a barnyard cackle.

  ‘Wash the board, I said, Felicity,’ the instructor said without turning round from the stove. ‘Clean tools, good eating, you’ve heard me say that before.’

  The girls went off like shot guns, clutching each other, getting pastry dough in their hair. It was some kind of private joke. Felicity, the ringleader, whispered to them as they bent round the table again, their eyes sliding off towards Tim, standing paralysed by the door with the coat wrapped round him again, his right hand clutching the top of his rigid left arm.

  ‘Thank you, young fellow.’ The instructor’s voice set him in motion. He was out of the door and almost out of the building, pursued by shouts of, ‘Shut the door!’, before he realized that what his bad hand was clutching in his pocket was the slip he must take back to Bob Bamber.

  Undecided, he stood in the hall, looking first at the front door, then at the door at the end of the corridor which someone had shut with a derisive crash. He took tentative steps first this way, then that, but there was really no choice. On feet that clung to the tiled floor as if it were a mud furrow, he went back into the cooking school.

  ‘Don’t look now,’ someone said. ‘It’s back.’

  ‘Now girls.’ The instructor came to save him, but when she went for a pencil to sign the slip, the girl Felicity was there.

  ‘Can’t keep away, eh?’

  ‘The slip.’ He jerked his head.

  ‘Quite sharp, aren’t you, finding an excuse to come back and see me?’

  How he got out of there he would never know. Somehow he must have gone back to the bench in the carpentry shop and then back to the ward when the twelve o’clock bell rang. He remembered nothing afterwards except the sallow pointed face of the girl, the creamy pink lips apart, the eyes sparkling with some kind of wet light like leaves in the rain at night. She had laughed at him like all the others, and yet - this was what had blocked out the memory of what had happened after -when the bread board passed from one to the other, it had been as if a message passed between them.

  At Christmas, there was a big dance. The Art unit had decorated the assembly hall with cut-outs from old Christmas cards pasted on to coloured cloth and fashioned into great bows and swags, festooning the walls. Glittering stars hung from the lights, a spotlight all different colours swept constantly over the crowd, turning faces red, blue, purple, as it whirled over the whirling dancers.

  Tim had not wanted to be there, but Olive Barrow insisted. She came to the dance in a green silk dress and brought her married daughter who was going to have a baby. Between them they swept Tim and Alec and even Norman down the stairs and along the main corridor to the hall, laughing and chattering like children.

  Olive steered Alec out on to the floor, pushing him like a pram, and Tim danced with the daughter. There was no help for it. It was more her dancing with him.

  ‘I can’t dance,’ he said, but she did not mind him stepping on her feet and did not seem to feel the heat that rose in him at terror of being bumped by the crowd close enough to feel the swelling of the baby that pushed up the front of her dress.

  After, he did Lily of Laguna with Olive. That was easy. He had one arm round Olive’s soft waist and the other round a big strong girl with a roaring laugh and they swung him back and forth, legs kick up, legs kick behind, while the hundreds of voices swung the dragging melody up into the rafters of the pitched ceiling, and the maniac spinning light whirled them round like the spokes of a wheel, colouring lips blue, cheeks green, setting hair on fire.

  ‘I-know-she-loves-me,’ stamp. ‘I know she loves me,’ stamp, ‘Because she said so. She is my li-lee of Lagoo-na,’ kick. ‘She is my—’

  Across the hall, head back, mouth open, eyes wild with fun, the whirling light hit in a white blinding second Felicity’s face.

  He had not thought about her being here. Or had he? The Chink shrink had talked to him about what he called fantasy, telling lies to yourself like you would to other people, although he did not call it lies. He did not seem to know that was what it was.

  Tim had been afraid of the dance, half because she might be there, half because she might not.

  After Lily, he and Olive went to have a drink of lemonade. There were sausage rolls, sandwiches, cakes, biscuits. A lot of the people just stayed near the food tables and ate their way through the evening. The staff and patients were all mixed up, as was usual at High-field, and with everyone in dresses or ordinary suits, no uniforms or white coats, it was harder than ever to tell who was who. The face of a perfectly serene-looking woman who might be a doctor suddenly crumpled into wailing sobs. A flushed girl, with a horse tail of shining hair down her back and her skirt too short to look, put an arm round her and led her away with a nurse’s professional comfort.

  Felicity was sidling round the outer edge of the crowd. Her hair was braided into a pigtail tied with a big red bow which she swung back and forth. She wore a bright red dress and her lips were painted the same colour, parted and breathless, as she pushed between a talking couple and came to Tim.

  ‘Hullo.’ She put out her hand. He put out his. He had never shaken hands with a girl. He had grabbed, clutched, squeezed, rolled over behind the straw stacks with Molly and her wicked little sister, but he had never solemnly shaken hands.

  Felicity’s hand was warm and damp, but light and trembling to the touch.

  ‘Introduce me to your friend, Timmy.’ Olive was smiling at his side.

  ‘Er - this is er—’

  ‘Felicity Gretch.’ There was a sort of laugh und
er her voice, as if she were out to fool you. ‘Gretch, I said, not wretch. Aren’t you going to dance with me, Timmy?’ No one would have known it was the first time she had heard or said his name.

  ‘I didn’t know you had a girl-friend.’ Olive looked pleased, but Tim knew that underneath she was upset because he had not told her. ‘Go on, dear. Dance with Felicity. I must go and find Norman.’ That showed she was jealous, that she couldn’t just tell him to dance. She had to say a man’s name, even if it was only Norman.

  Still holding Felicity’s moist hand, pitying Olive’s silly smile, Tim felt his heart lift and swell with a surge of elation and power.

  ‘Come on.’ Felicity pulled him away, but not towards the floor. ‘You don’t look as if you would dance very well,’ she said in her rude Felicity way. ‘I know a place where we can put on records.’

  She led him through the usual baffling riddle of corridors and odd-angled stairs, and they came to a small room with a sofa and armchairs.

  ‘It’s the students’,’ she said, ‘but they don’t mind. I was in here once with one of them.’ She dropped her voice excitingly. Oh, she was a wild girl, all right. Why was she interested in someone like Tim? In a dream of adventure, he did not let himself wonder. He watched her as she crouched on her long legs to switch on the electric fire, her knees sticking far out, her bare flushed heels coming out of her shoes. He watched her go to the gramophone and slide a pile of records about impatiently.

  ‘Do you like the Ninnies?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’ Tim liked all the groups, but on the ward if someone turned the wireless up, Mr Gilbert would put his head out of his office and yell, ‘Not so loud!’ as if he did not know that it was no good any other way.

  Felicity had the record nice and loud, and she and Tim sat on the sofa side by side, not touching, while the sound beat over them, like being in a lovely hot water shower with no one tweaking at the curtain and saying, ‘My turn.’