The Listeners

by Monica Dickens

  ‘After we left, my husband stopped drinking. He’s not an alcoholic’ She smiled down at Paul, ‘So it was easy.’

  Easy I A private joke, because she knew about the Paul who had pounded and howled outside the door of the Samaritans in the middle of one night.

  She told her audience how he had persuaded her to join A.A. ‘It didn’t work. I hated it. I cheated. I had a bottle in my bag. I used to sit at meetings sweating like a pig till I could get out and have a drink. I put the story round that I had chronic cystitis to explain why I kept popping out to the Ladies’. I hated the whole thing. It sickened me. I thought everyone was so smug. If that was what sobriety meant, I’d choose boozing.

  ‘Now I’ve come back. I’m sober today. Tomorrow I may wake up dead drunk in the flat of some man whose name I don’t even know. That happened to me two months ago. Gives you a bit of a fright. Your only hope is that he was drunk enough to be just as non-operative as you.’

  She did not look at Paul as she joined the laughter, and the coughing that it brought on.

  ‘I’ll stop now,’ she said breathlessly, ‘because I’m dying for a cigarette. I’m dying for a drink too, of course. But I haven’t had one today. Not yet anyway. I can only say I haven’t had a drink today as I’m falling asleep. And then I still might get up.’

  ‘You were marvellous,’ Paul told her in the car.

  ‘She’s a good speaker,’ Scott said. ‘I think I’ll take her to London next month. We’ve been asked to take part in a three-day thing.’

  ‘No,’ Alice said. ‘Don’t ask me.’

  ‘Thought you’d be flattered,’ Scott grumbled.

  ‘I don’t want to get hooked on A.A.’

  ‘You must.’

  ‘I’m not a joiner. I don’t want to be identified with it. I want to use it my way and not be a part of it.’

  ‘Won’t work, Alice,’ Leslie said.

  ‘You don’t know it all,’ she rounded on him, biting her nails. ‘I’m sick of making jokes and pretending all’s well with me under the A.A. umbrella. All’s not well. I hate the whole thing. I want a drink.’

  After they had taken Leslie and Scott home, Paul asked Alice, ‘Did you make that up - about the man whose name you didn’t know?’

  ‘Mm-mm.’ She shook her head. Her nails, which once she had spent hours grooming into refined claws, were chewed into sore stumps below her fingertips. ‘Funny. I was able to tell it to that rabble. But not to you.’

  ‘I knew you weren’t at Bruce’s one night.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said ungraciously.

  He could not answer anything that would not be hypocrisy.

  Later when they were going to bed, the telephone rang. Paul was on Flying Squad call tonight. He was so sure that he would have to go out that he stepped back into the shoe he had just taken off before he picked up the telephone.

  It was Scott. ‘Alice all right?’

  ‘She’s in the bath.’

  ‘She all right?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Tell her she can ring me any time she wants. Make sure she knows that. Any time in the night. I can come round if you need me, Paul.’

  But why wouldn’t I do? Why is it that I can go dashing out to rescue a man in a phone box who has taken half a dozen Seconal and yet I can’t rescue my wife?

  ‘Thanks, Scott. That’s good of you.’

  He could tell none of any of this to Barbara. They had both told each other everything of their lives before, and it was a betrayal of their closeness that he could not betray Alice now.

  After the New Year, Dr Ling went from Highfield, or went to another section, which was almost the same as going away in that rambling, overpopulated place.

  He was replaced by a blank smiling person called Dr Marjorie, who did not bother Tim very much. Plump in a white coat, she appeared in the day room, looking vaguely round over people’s heads as if she wanted to hang a picture.

  ‘Alec - yes, hullo there - Alec Brand, isn’t it? Would you like to come and have a bit of a chat?’

  Alec came up with that smile like an unselective dog, and Dr Marjorie looked mildly round to see what next. A nurse opened the door of one of the side rooms, and the doctor ambled in with her white coat strained across her hips, Alec following as if he were on a leash.

  When the door opened and Alec came out, scratching his head, the doctor looked round at the men reading the paper, or watching television, or knitting (Dick’s great talent, endless tubular works like airfield windsocks, growing down the wheel of his chair), or just sitting and waiting for the world to end.

  ‘Timothy - Timothy Shaw. Do they call you Tim? Yes - hullo. Would you like to come and have a bit of a chat?’

  ‘No, thanks.’ Tim was at a table polishing silver for Olive Barrett.

  ‘Come on, old chap, won’t keep you a minute.’ She had evidently been ordered by Dr Vandenburg to see all his patients, so Tim took pity on her, and after warning Ernie not to touch the polish, and telling Mr Podgorsky to watch him, he went into the side room.

  The doctor had his folder on the table between them. If Dr Ling had written down everything that Tim told him, it must be quite a wonderful tale. Tim did not remember much of what he had said, so he decided to keep mum, lest Dr Marjorie catch him out and start up the business about fantasizing.

  Idea. ‘Could you’ - Tim tried to think himself paler -‘I feel funny all of a sudden. Could you get me a glass of water?’ Golden opportunity to look into the folder and see if Olive had told any of the things that he and she had talked about.

  Instead of getting up, Dr Marjorie leaned her chair back, lifting her blunt feet off the floor, and pressed the wall buzzer.

  Rajah Bill looked in. ‘Timothy feels faint. Could you please get him some water?’

  ‘I’ll get it. I can— I’m-—’ Tim managed to get out of the room.

  ‘What is the matter with you?’ The Indian orderly hissed and gobbled at him.

  ‘Just a joke.’

  ‘Ha perishing ha.’

  Tim had told Olive Barrett things that nobody else knew. Even at the House of God’s Angels, he did not think they had known much. When he was a boy, asking questions, Mrs Pfister used to put on what she thought was her kind face and say, ‘Don’t worry that little noodle about all those bygone things. What’s done is done. We must think about what’s to be.’

  Yes, but what had been done? A lot of it had swirled away in fog. Tim could remember fear. He could remember the scalding water going over his shoulder, because his skin bore the scars of it, although he could not remember how it had happened.

  He could remember the stove blowing up in Auntie Ruth’s face and how surprised she had looked with her brows and lashes all gone to frizzled crumbs.

  ‘That must have been after we left London, because it was in that house where the trains went over, higher than the roofs. Serve her right. She hated her.’

  ‘Hated who?’ He and Olive were making beds. Tim liked to do those kind of girls jobs. When he was sweeping the floor one day, Nobby said, ‘Sissy,’ as he shuffled by, and Tim had kicked him in the crotch.

  ‘Her that came.’ Tim stopped the blanket in mid-shake, and stared past Olive, right through the wall.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Her.’

  ‘Say it.’

  He looked back at Olive and his hands began to shake the blanket again. ‘My mother. She came and they yelled at each other. I run under the settee. She hated Aunt Posy too. “You’d not say that if my man was at home.” Aunt Posy told her. “Why don’t you take the kid then and have done with it?” ’

  Sitting with Olive on his bed when the dormitory was empty, memories were wrung out of him, with tears, as if he were a dishcloth. Buried things came so painfully to the surface that he would moan and clutch his chest as if he were trying to have a baby through his mouth.

  Olive hugged him close. ‘Poor Tim, poor Timmy boy. Olive’s here. It’s all right. Don’t you fret, love.�
��

  When she asked him, he could not remember how many aunties there had been. He remembered bits of gardens, furniture, different kinds of bread, a striped cat, the smell of his mother that hung in the hall - she seldom got much further. Two steps from the door and she was into a shouting match.

  ‘What did she look like?’ Olive asked.

  ‘I dunno. I never saw her. I hid. Hid in the toolshed once two days. They passed me cake in under the door. Fruit bread. There was some rotten apples in there. I licked the boards where they melted. Auntie got a fireman to break down the door. Laugh! There he was with his axe and me sitting on the coal with the pruning knife. At the Home, when Auntie took me, we was walking by the hedge that smelled of cats and she said, “I have tried Tim, I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what she meant. I didn’t know I wouldn’t see her. She had my picture in her camera.’

  ‘It’s a shame,’ Olive said. ‘When I think of the good safe childhood my four have had—’

  He got up off the bed, so that the mattress went down where she was sitting. Who wanted to talk about her rotten kids? She babbled on sometimes like rinse water about her family and her house and how she was going to start training to be a State Enrolled nurse and make more money so she could do something or other to the house and send her stupid son somewhere or other.

  ‘Why don’t you take me home with you?’ Tim asked her once.

  ‘Hush dear.’ She looked round as if the walls were bugged, as well they might be. ‘It’s against the rules.’

  ‘Ho ho, if you knew all the rules I break,’ he said darkly.

  ‘What dear?’ She was washing Uncle Fred’s crépe bandage, humming, her sleeves rolled up above the dough-dimples of her elbows.

  ‘Fliss and me,’ he hinted. ‘Places we go.’

  ‘It’s so nice for you to have a little friend.’

  ‘She’s prettier than you.’ Tim darted it in, watching her, but she was purring over the sudsy bowl as if they were talking of the weather.

  ‘I daresay she is, dear. She’s thirty years younger than me. But you should have seen me in my day.’

  Who cared? Tim walked off, telling himself a string of ugly words that Arthur Callaghan had taught him.

  Olive thought she knew all about Tim, but she did not know about the maids’ cupboard, and she did not know about the air-raid shelter behind the boiler room where the folding chairs were kept, and she did not know about the sheltered place behind the hedge behind the student nurses’ dormitory. Out of bounds to all patients, that bit of the grounds, but Mr Semple had once seen a fat girl taking a bath. The story was legend.

  That would make Olive sit up, if Tim could tell her where they went, but Felicity threatened him with freakish tortures if he breathed a word to a living soul. Or a dead one. She had once got into the mortuary, and seen an old man and a new-born baby. She was so wild. There was nothing she had not done.

  She drove Tim wild, and then laughed at him, because he could not wait.

  ‘Do it, do it,’ she begged, and he was so mad with excitement and terror that someone would come, that it was done before she could open his trousers. The problem of his life was taking care of his clothes before he was found out. They wore brown overall coats in the carpentry shop. After recreation time, he often came back to the ward wearing his overall.

  ‘Why don’t you go to bed in that, you’re in such a hurry to get to work?’ Mr Podgorsky asked, his sad face heavy with the joke.

  The rules of Highfield allowed Tim and Felicity to be together in the library, the common rooms, or walking about the paths that criss-crossed the frost-beaten glass between the turreted buildings. Felicity did not care to be in any of those places. One evening, just as it was getting dark and the bells were ringing for visitors to leave, they were caught coming up from the air-raid shelter by no less a person than Mrs Purchase, matron of all the women nurses, with a row of war medals across the top part of her grey egg-timer dress.

  ‘Just a minute—’ as Felicity began to whistle and stride by on her long thin legs. ‘Who—? It’s Felicity, isn’t it? Felicity Gretch.’

  ‘In one.’ For a girl who had been so put down by her family, Felicity could be quite insolent.

  ‘And who are you, young man?’

  ‘Tim Shaw. Ward Cs.’

  ‘And where have you two been?’

  Tim raised a rifle and picked off the medals, ping, ping, ping, and then her nipples - fff-lofsh.

  ‘Exploring. This is a funny old place, isn’t it?’

  ‘Very funny.’ Mrs Purchase did not disclose what she thought. She went on her way like a person in a Noah’s Ark, but the following day, Felicity’s recreation time was cancelled.

  Tim waited in vain at the end of the long corridor that led to the block where she lived. Doors swished at the far end, and a nurse ran down the stone corridor towards him, her hair flying up as she passed each open window, pulling off her apron as she came.

  She recognized Tim and stopped. ‘Are you waiting for Felicity? She must stay in for a few days.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Dearie, I don’t make the rules. Run!’ she told herself. ‘Run for your life!’ Tim went slowly after her.

  When he next saw Felicity, they sat in the library for an hour and read Good Housekeeping and the Sunday Times Magazine cover to cover, all the advertisements, while Felicity wet Tim’s ear with her whispers. She looked even thinner, greenish bruises under her eyes, her teeth more prominent, the salt cellars in her neck unfathomable.

  ‘They can’t make me eat if I don’t want to,’ she boasted.

  ‘They put a tube down you.’ Tim had seen it done to old Simon after he blacked out and lay like dead for days.

  ‘I went one better,’ Felicity giggled, and Mrs Fletcher said, ‘Softly, softly,’ without looking up from her desk.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head till the metal clip on the end of one of her plaits swung into his face.

  ‘Tell.’ He pinched her thin thigh.

  She suffocated with giggles, stuffing the side of her hand into her mouth, her shoulders shaking.

  ‘Are you all right, dear?’ Mrs Fletcher got up and came over.

  ‘Just a joke.’ Felicity’s eyes were watering.

  ‘I’m glad you can always see the funny side, but remember that Louise is trying to study.’ Louise was in an unlit corner wearing thick dark glasses and making out she was reading the tiny print of the Encyclopaedia, so that Mrs Fletcher would tell everyone else to keep quiet.

  ‘No more talking now. Remember.’

  Felicity raised the magazine and lowered her head. ‘Shoved it - you know where.’ She looked sideways at Tim behind a two-page colour-spread of Ways and Means with left-over Lamb and Mutton.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Daffodil stalk. Spoon. Cork. Anything.’

  ‘Why?’ He goggled at her. His brain was on strike against picturing it.

  ‘They have to get it down.’ Felicity collapsed helplessly, and Mrs Fletcher led her to the door, stopped a passing student nurse and had her conducted back to her ward.

  Dr Max decided that Felicity needed more to occupy her time than the cookery school and the sewing shop, where she had caused a lot of trouble by stitching one of her hangnails down on to the machine. She was sent to one of the geriatric wards to learn how to take care of the old folk, which gave her different hours, so that Tim could hardly ever see her.

  He wrote letters, which Olive delivered - or said she did - but there was no answer.

  One day when he was strolling with Mr Podgorsky through a misted March morning to the carpentry shop -he no longer had to go with Alec and Arthur Callaghan and the rest of the chain gang - he saw Felicity ahead, pushing a wheelchair. She was wearing an unfamiliar pink uniform, but there was no mistaking those legs and the way she turned her feet out, and the two braided snakes of hair down her narrow back.

  Ti
m ran to catch up with her. ‘Hey!’

  She jerked the chair to such a stop that the old lady nearly fell out.

  ‘Hullo, Fliss.’ Now that they were together, Tim did not know what to say. Felicity said nothing. Her treacle eyes shone with amusement, looking him up and down as if he were somehow freakish, her tongue showing between her teeth.

  ‘Where to then?’

  ‘Industrial therapy. The old faggots make little bows all day. Don’t you, dear?’ She bent down and yelled. The old lady sat and gazed back into her past, since she could not have much future. ‘Did you know, Timothy, that all the little bows on all the ladies’ underwear in all of Europe are made here at Highfield? Did you know that?’ She put her head on one side, rocking the chair as if she had a baby.

  ‘No. I didn’t know that.’

  It was a stupid conversation. When Mr Podgorsky came up with his bent knees and his little paunch and his one strand of hair so carefully over the top of his head, they had got nowhere.

  ‘You like it then, up there?’ Tim was not even quite sure where her new ward was, so he could not jerk his head in any direction.

  ‘They like me.’ The mist coiled the front of her hair into wispy springs. ‘I’ve done very well,’ she said prissily. ‘Sister says I might go out and work at the nursing home some day.’

  It was not the old wild Felicity. Where had that one gone? Tim stood staring after her with an ache like heartburn. Mr Podgorsky took his arm to pull him along. ‘Wine, women and song, Timothy. And work for the masses.’

  Tim went down the same path at the same time every day, but he did not see Felicity again for a long time. Olive Barrett had gone off on holiday, and Tim lapsed into a listless boredom.

  ‘In affairs of the heart,’ Mr Podgorsky said, ‘I am the laughing philosopher.’ He tried to teach Tim to play draughts, but Tim could not rouse himself to more than throwing dice for Snakes and Ladders, which Mr Podgorsky despised, although he was kindly enough to play, and let Tim win.

  Paul found Tim playing against himself one evening, and mistakenly played a round or two, thinking that this was what Tim wanted to do.