The Listeners

by Monica Dickens

  ‘What do you want to do?’ Paul asked, when Tim overturned the board. ‘Want to come down to the cafeteria? Like to come out? It’s too wet to walk, but I could get you a pass to go into Town. There’s almost an hour.’

  Tim shook his head.

  ‘Anything the matter?’

  ‘I feel rotten.’

  ‘That’s a shame. You’ve been going so well. They’re very pleased with your work in the shop, I understand, and the way you’ve picked up generally.’

  ‘I don’t feel no better.’ He didn’t. Since Olive and Felicity had abandoned him, he was beginning to feel as lost and diréction-less as when he came in.

  ‘You’ve forgotten what it was like for you before. We couldn’t have sat and talked like this. I think it’s wonderful, Tim, how you’ve got yourself going again. You’ll be leaving pretty soon, they seem to think.’

  Tim had not thought about it. ‘Where would I go?’

  ‘We’ll work something out. I’ll help you, of course. The Medical Social Worker here will help you to find some work you like, and a place to stay. Perhaps you could go on with the carpentry, get some more training, since you seem to be good with your hands.’

  Tim looked at them, palm down on his knees. As he looked, they began very slightly to shake. Under cover of the table, he felt his pulse. It was quickening. When Paul asked him a question, he began to stutter.

  Paul lit a cigarette and began to talk about something else, telling Tim a story about a fight at school in which a boy had broken a leg, and the teacher in the playground had called the police because he was afraid to interfere.

  Tim scarcely heard what he was saying. His thoughts were stopped behind a gate. A gate that said, ‘You’ll be leaving,’ and swung slowly open on a great unknown plain where the wind howled in terror, and there was no shelter, and no horizon.

  The next morning was Sunday. He humbled himself to Rajah Bill and asked him to take a note when he went off duty and try to find Felicity Gretch on one of the geriatric wards.

  ‘What about me?’ Rajah Bill had a fierce face like an eagle. ‘What do I get for my trouble?’

  Tim went to his locker and took out two packets of cigarettes, went back and added a third. What if the canary lady had been marking the fags on the trolley to find out who was knocking them off? Rajah would swing.

  ‘Come to Himms,’ his note said. ‘I’ll wait at the back of the hall.’

  On Sunday evenings, there was community hymn singing in the assembly hall: rows of folding chairs from Tim and Felicity’s air-raid shelter, and everyone singing Abide with me and other such dragging melodies. It was quite sad. Tim put on the bright blue pullover that Paul had given him for Christmas, and asked Mr Gilbert’s permission after tea.

  ‘I didn’t know you went in for that sort of thing.’

  ‘Give it a try,’ Tim mumbled. ‘Can’t do no harm.’

  ‘If you’re going, you can take Mr Pargiter and Norman along with you, save someone the trip.’

  Tim was in good standing on this ward. He was entrusted with people like Norman and poor Mr Pargiter whose head was permanently twisted round, like a knob, so that he had to come at himself from the side with his food. Tim pinned bulletins on the board. He fetched stores, and went to the record library, and bought stamps and toothpaste from the shops for those who could not navigate. As Olive said, it was a wonder how they had ever run C2 without him.

  He got Norman and Mr Pargiter going early and sat them somewhere near the front. ‘Don’t move till I come back for you after.’ He gave Norman a fresh paper-napkin for his tap of a nose. Then he hung about at the back while the hall filled up, and at last, when Dr Stoneman was already striking bold chords on the piano and the doors at the back were being closed, here she was sauntering round the corner from the main lobby as if there were all the time in the world.

  Tim nipped out and let the doors close behind him on the first surge of song. ‘You came, Fliss.’

  ‘I always come to Hymns.’ She must mean that as a joke, because she knew he knew it was a lie.

  ‘I’ve got to talk to you.’

  ‘Go ahead.’ She sat down on a bench by the wall. He sat beside her. People passing back and forth, hospital staff, patients, visitors, glanced towards the music, but did not look at them.

  ‘You didn’t answer my notes.’

  ‘What notes?’

  ‘Didn’t you get them?’

  She shook her head. Who was the liar - Felicity or Olive? He did not trust either of them.

  ‘I wanted—’ He could not say, ‘I wanted to see you. He could not say anything. ‘Fliss—’

  ‘What’s up, Shorty?’ She hardly ever used to call him that. ‘You look like death not warmed up.’

  ‘They may send me away from here.’

  ‘Lucky.’

  ‘I d-, I d—’ His mouth opened and shut like the goldfish on Mr Gilbert’s windowsill. He was getting lockjaw.

  ‘Is that all you wanted to tell me?’

  He wanted to cry on her neck, to be with her in the broom cupboard, close, safe, just them in the world and the world no bigger than a cupboard.

  ‘I don’t know why you should think I care,’ Felicity said rather grandly. She got up, smoothing down her short skirt and picking off a thread that was not there. ‘I’ll be gone myself pretty soon.’

  He stared.

  ‘I’ll be at the nursing home next month. My people are shocked. Such rough work! But it’s a nice bit of pay and a room of my own—’

  ‘Flissa—!’

  But she said gaily, ‘May as well get grooving,’ pushed the swing door into the hall with the flat of her hand and was gone from him.

  Olive would be back on Monday. All night to get through, but she would be there in the morning with her pudgy smile and her warm smell and she would listen to him properly and understand. She would not let them kick him out. He hardly slept all night. He lay with his hands behind his head, staring into the half dark, while shadowy figures went past him towards the bathrooms, stubbing their toes and cursing.

  In the morning, he made an excuse not to go to carpentry. When it was time for Olive to come on duty, he sat watching the door. A stubble-haired woman in Olive’s blue uniform walked in like a duck, looked round, tutted, as if she found the C2 dayroom the mess it was when Olive was not there, and waddled on into the office.

  She came out. ‘Are you Tim? Staff Nurse says you will help me with the dinner tables.’

  ‘Where’s Olive?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mrs Barrett. She’s the Nursing Assistant on this ward.’

  ‘Not any longer, whoever she is. I was sent here. You can call me Mrs Dominic.’

  I’ll see you dead ... He charged into the office, which was not allowed without knocking. Mr Gilbert looked up from the dispensary slips and stood up when he saw how Tim looked.

  ‘What’s up, old chap?’

  ‘Where’s Olive?’

  ‘I meant to tell you. She’s taking her State Enrolled course. She got the chance to start as soon as she came back from holiday.’

  ‘She’s got my money.’ That was not what he meant to say. He did not care about the money. His voice just came out with that.

  ‘No, no she hasn’t.’ Mr Gilbert’s strong freckled hands caught hold of Tim by the upper arms and held him firmly. ‘It’s all in the bank. You can get it any time you want.’

  Mr Gilbert sat him down and stuck a thermometer in his mouth, because he had said he had a headache, to get out of carpentry. ‘I thought you were shamming, Tim, but you do look a bit rough.’

  When Mr Gilbert turned his back, Tim ground the thermometer between his teeth and caressed it with his tongue, trying to make it warm up.

  ‘No problem there,’ Mr Gilbert gave it a quick look. He sent Tim to bed for the rest of the day (a tray of food with the tea all slopped over brought by Uncle Fred), and the next morning, sent him off to the wood shop as a matter of course.

  Tim wa
s dead, a walking mummy case. He was working on a flap table. ‘You can finish chiselling out that joint this morning.’ An unreal man who looked and sounded like Bob Bamber.

  When the chisel slipped and all of a sudden there was blood all over the table and a jagged piece of finger skin hanging, Tim felt nothing.

  It was Arthur Callaghan who yelled. ‘He’s chopped himself!’

  ‘Very brave. Good boy, very brave.’ Bob came quickly with the first-aid box, and kept saying, ‘Bad luck, Tim,’ and, ‘What a good lad.’ But it was a stranger who went with one of the instructors to the surgery and had his wound dressed and a shot of something for his nerves. Not Tim.

  At dinner time, when the men came back on the ward, Arthur Callaghan sidled into the chair next to where Tim sat waiting, like the Good Lad he was today, for his fish.

  ‘Tried it on again, eh?’ Arthur said.

  Tim was holding up the dollied finger of his left hand to ease the throb. ‘History repeats itself.’ Arthur put his slimy fingers on the wrist, touching the raised scar.

  Was that what he had done? The blood spilling over the table, soaking into the wood, the same blood that had welled into the dirty basin under the stairs. Was that what he had tried to do?

  He thought that Olive would come to see him now that he was hurt, but she didn’t care. He lay in bed and cried into the hot pillow. Aunt Posy used to come up when he called out that it was too dark, or he wanted a drink, so he called every night, two or three times a night, so she didn’t come up any more. She did not even stand at the bottom of the stairs and yell, ‘Waddayawant?’

  Olive didn’t care. Her fault, her fault. He’d get the chisel and find her.

  They did not let him go to work for a few days. Then the doctor in the surgery looked at his finger, put a plaster on it and sent him along to the carpentry shop.

  ‘Welcome back to the mines,’ Mr Podgorsky said cheerfully, ruling a meticulous line on a piece of plywood, his spread hand holding it steady. Tim picked up a small saw and brought it down as hard as he could across the splayed-out fingers.

  Six

  ‘THERE’S A SCHOOL Board dinner tomorrow.’ paul was not very good at lying, but to see Barbara, he had to lie, and if he could not see Barbara at all, he could not go on. ’Some new schemes are coming up for the English Department and they want all of us there.’

  Alice was quite good at being lied to. She did not question the lie, she questioned what it said. ’You mean, all the English teachers?’

  ‘All of us who work with the seniors.’

  ‘I thought you might take me out to dinner.’

  ‘Sorry, Alice. Day after tomorrow.’

  ‘Day after tomorrow I’ll be dead.’

  In the middle of a class next morning Glenn Brimmer’s moon face appeared behind the glass top of the door. He watched for a moment, turning his eyes from side to side, until Paul told someone near the door, ‘Tell that boy to come in or go away.’

  He came in. ‘You’re wanted on the phone.’

  Calls were forbidden during classes. ‘Look at chapter ten,’ Paul told the room. ‘Try and see why the jury arrived at that verdict. No rioting.’ He hurried down the stairs and along the hall to the office, past a group of girls who said, ‘Walk, don’t run, Mr Hammond.’ Alice was under a bus. Barbara had burned all the skin off her freckled arm at Unitech. Jeff was in a Swedish gaol. Laura was having a miscarriage. Scott had found Alice dead drunk on the floor.

  ‘I just talked to Jane. She sent you her love.’

  ‘Look, Alice, I’m not supposed—’

  ‘She’s putting on a meeting tonight, in the South End.

  One of her speakers is ill. Or drunk. She wants me to do it.’

  ‘You’ll be all right.’

  ‘Only if you come with me.’

  ‘Can’t you go with Jane and Phil?’

  ‘Not without you.’

  ‘You know I’ve got to go to the Board dinner. If you really won’t go without me, you’ll have to tell Jane you can’t do it.’

  ‘I told her I would.’

  ‘Ring her back.’

  ‘She’s out for the day. Don’t groan, dearest. I do need you, you know.’

  Paul telephoned Barbara at Unitech to tell her that they could not meet that night, and went back to his class. They were not rioting. They were perching on the desks, lying on the floor, talking in groups. Stuart Jenkins, sitting at Paul’s high desk, flicking a cigarette neatly through the window.

  Barbara had said, at Unitech, ‘It’s all right. I do understand,’ but without fondness, as if she did not understand, or did not want to.

  After school, when he was in the library choosing sonnets from anthologies, one of the cleaners huffed up the stairs to call him to the telephone accusingly, as if he were responsible for her emphysema.

  It was 200. ‘Sorry to bother you at school. There was a call from your boy, Tim Shaw, from Highfield. Something has happened, I think. He wouldn’t tell me, but he sounded pretty rough. Can you go to him?’

  Ward H was no different from Cs. The same sort of furniture. The same kind of people sitting and staring, or shuffling about, or doing jigsaws, or lying in bed with their toes turned up in the little rooms off the long corridor. The meals were the same. The orderly brought the same kind of medicine round on the same kind of a tray, and the same music came out of the earphones when you put them on your head.

  The same – but with two differences. The window in the little bedrooms had bars across them. The door at the end of the main corridor was locked.

  After tea on the first day, when a lady had come in and tried to organize some game or other, Tim had made off down the corridor. Time to go back to Cs where they had given up trying to organize games because no one would play. Time to go and see Norman and Uncle Fred and them. Mr Podgorsky would have the Snakes and Ladders board set up. He would not like it if Tim did not come.

  On Ward C2 there were two knobs on the outer door. They turned different ways, the idea being that if you were bright enough to figure out how to open the door, you would not be run over by a bread van if you found your way outside.

  On H there was only one knob, and it was stiff. Tim tried it both ways. He wrenched at it, hurting his bad finger, and let out a wail. A hand came from behind and lifted his hand off the knob and turned him round.

  ‘You’ll be able to go out soon, Tim,’ the strange man said, the man who had stolen him from Mr Gilbert. ‘Come and sit down and I’ll find you a book.’

  It’s locked, isn’t it? Tim did not need to ask it. He had not spoken to anyone since they brought him to Ward H. They would not get a word out of him, even under torture. Even if Dr Marjorie spent all day and all night with her ‘Like to have a bit of a chat?’

  It was not until the next day that he found out where the telephone was. He heard someone talking, gabbing away to himself, nothing odd in that. Nobby did it all the time. When Tim went round the corner to see if it was Nobby come to keep him company, he found a very short elderly man standing on his toes to speak into a telephone on the wall, his free hand gesturing elaborately, talking in some foreign language, or some sort of Nobby language, whatever it was, it made no sense.

  Tim walked on casually. Later when everyone was at tea, he got up and made as if to go to his locker, then doubled back through a side passage and round past the baths to the visitors’ room where the telephone was. He knew a thing or two, you see. They did not reckon with Tim Shaw.

  ‘I want to speak to Paul.’ It was the first time he had used his voice for two days. It was weak and cramped, like a leg too long in one position. ‘Paul, 401. It’s Tim. He’ll know. Tell him ... tell him ...’

  Outside the room, rubber soles squeaked on the linoleum. They were coming for him. ‘Tell him to come,’ he gasped. ‘Tell him I—’

  He crashed the receiver back on the hook as the rubber footsteps paused outside the door. Panting, he flattened himself against the wall, his heart like a piston. The f
ootsteps squeaked on, grew faint, a door banged.

  He went to sit in the main corridor. He sat on the floor with his book jammed against the wall and watched the single knob of the door. He sat there for hours. One or two people tried to persuade him to move, but it was like trying to get periwinkles off the rocks.

  A key turned in the door. An arm in a white coat opened it, jangling more keys, and Paul came in. He always looked larger than ever at Highfield. In this place where people either scurried or crept like moles, Paul’s shoulders were wider, and he stood straighter and moved more deliberately.

  ‘Hullo, Tim.’ If he had said, ‘What on earth are you doing there?’ Tim would have stayed on the floor. He did not say it, so Tim got up and they went into the visitors’ room and had a bit of a smoke, and after a while Paul said, ‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘I had a word with that lady doctor. She was a bit vague.’

  ‘What did she tell you?’ If Tim could find out just what had happened, he would know what to say.

  ‘Only that there was an accident in the carpentry shop. One of your mates got hurt, wasn’t that it?’

  The chisel slipped and Mr Podgorsky got chopped.

  ‘Tried it on again, eh? Arthur Callaghan said, his mouth like slugs, like snails without shells.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault.’ Tim said. His eyes blanked, and all of a sudden, clear pictures moved into his brain like slides. He saw Mr Podgorsky’s fingers splayed and waiting. He saw again the colours of his sick flashing rage, and doubled up, clutching himself.

  Paul stayed with Tim for a long time. The boy would not let him go. He clung to him, wept, fell into a dumb depression, staring blankly at the floor, got up once and beat his head feebly against the wall. One of the few coherent things that came through was his fear of being sent away from Highfield.

  ‘We talked about his discharge, last time I was here,’ Paul told the staff nurse, after Tim had been given a sedative and put to bed. ‘Could that—’

  ‘It’s possible.’ The nurse had been down for his supper. Remnants of it were eluding his tongue. ‘Sometimes when they’ve been on this closed ward, I’ve even known them to do a violence so as to be put back in. Safe, you see. Gets too institutionalized, a boy like young Shaw.’