The Listeners

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Suppose I don’t know how to help? I haven’t learned—’

  ‘All you have to learn is just to listen.’ The constant refrain. ‘No instant salvation. Just humanity. Let it come through in your voice. Let your love come through, Sarah,’ he said gently, smiling, looking at her as if he liked her very much.

  He was about the same age as her father. He had come into her dream once, not as a father figure. Her father was an old goat, capering in front of girls like Maria.

  The telephone rang. Sarah jumped, and was paralysed, staring at it.

  ‘Pick the damn thing up,’ Paul said quite roughly. ‘Do you want them to think no one cares?’

  When George came out of the station, he had asked the way and been told, ‘Turn left, turn right, take this or that number bus. Get off at the last gate of the football ground, you can’t miss it.’

  He had taken the wrong bus. The football ground never came. They never even went over a bridge. When the conductor came to the top deck, he laughed and told George he was miles away and going in the wrong direction.

  ‘What’s the joke?’

  ‘Got to laugh, mate. Keeps you from going mad.’

  George swore at him and clumped down the stairs and dropped off as the bus swung round a corner. He did it clumsily, stumbling, grazing his hand to save himself. Shouldering his way through the clowns who had nothing better to do than saunter in the Saturday street, he thought, bad omen on this job, he never should have gone for it. Why did Linda want him to? Only gone half a day, and he was angry already for what he imagined about her.

  He took another bus and it stopped in some wide square with new white buildings and a clock made of flowers and announced that it would go no farther.

  ‘You’re supposed to go to the stadium.’

  ‘Circus only, dear.’ The conductress pointed to the sign above the back step.

  ‘Why did you take my whole fare?’

  ‘I didn’t. Just as far as here. Don’t you know what the fares are?’

  ‘Look. I’ve never been in the cruddy town before.’

  ‘Some people.’

  ‘... stranger here.’

  ‘I’m a bit lost myself.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m hopeless at directions.’

  .’Hainh - hyunh - anna - hyi - angya ...’

  George’s luck to get them with no roof to their mouth. George’s perishing luck that caused matchboxes to catch fire in his hand, strange towns to declare Early Closing Day as soon as he arrived, telephones to be always engaged, when they were not wrong numbers. Watch him get to the Exhibition Hall, if he ever did, and find the job had gone five minutes ago to someone else.

  He growled down some steps in the middle of the road, expecting to find the Public Convenience out of order, flooded, or full of queers.

  ‘If you are in despair,’ the notice said. Well, if that’s what they want, here I am.

  ‘Samaritans - can I help you?’ A young girl’s voice. Things are looking up.

  ‘I’m in despair, darling.’

  She made a sympathetic noise.

  ‘I’m lost in this bloody city and I’m late and I’ll probably lose that job and what the hell do you care?’

  ‘What can I - can I help you?’

  ‘That’s what I’m asking you,’ George said patiently. ‘How can I get to the Exhibition Hall?’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘If I knew, I’d not be lost.’

  She laughed then, and George laughed, and finally she said she would look at the map, and then she told him some streets and bus numbers, but he was not really listening. He had seen a clock in a bank window and realized how late it was.

  ‘All right now?’

  ‘All right? I’m an hour late. I’ll have to get a taxi.’

  Mrs Latimer turned the telephone dial with a special gold gadget for turning telephone dials. She had a device for lifting sausages out of the frying pan and ejecting them on to a plate. She had a pair of tongs on a long extending handle to pick the dog’s mess off the lawn, and another extending handle with a scoop at the end to get cans off the top shelf. She had brushes with disposable pads for cleaning toilets and baths, a little hook on a ribbon for pulling up zip fasteners at the back of dresses, and a button in her car which made the garage door go up and down. When a certain kind of plane flew over, the door went spookily up by itself in the middle of the night.

  ‘Samaritans - can I help you?’

  A young voice. She had expected someone cool and mature. A nice young voice, quick and a little breathless, eager, like the voices of the daughters of her friends. Like someone she might know. It might even be someone she knew.

  ‘This is Mrs Charles Latimer,’ she said, as if she were going to give an order at a store where she had an account. ‘It’s on behalf of my son. You do help people, don’t you? Yes, oh, how nice ... Well, he would, I think. He wanted me to ring you. He won’t see his doctor any more, but he said he might come to you.’ With iodine painted round his mouth to make them think he had swallowed it?

  ‘Of course, he can come in any time and talk to someone.’

  The young voice was warm and interested. Not official. Perhaps they could make Gordie see that he did not need the gestures.

  I did it. It was easy. First that man, then Mrs Latimer. I did it, I coped. I didn’t panic. I was able to help them. They thought I was a Samaritan. Perhaps I am. One of us. Sarah, 589.

  When the telephone rang again, she stretched out her hand without glancing at Paul, and picked it up quite confidently. Omnipotent Sarah. The saviour of the world.

  In a dream or awake, Carrie saw the sea. She saw herself walking out straight-legged, her hands at her sides, walking far out at low tide, and walking on, along the bottom of the sea. A deep regretful sadness lay over her like the water. Was this what dying was?

  Sighing, she raised an arm to pull the shawl round her shoulders, and knocked the telephone clattering off the bed. The receiver was split, but the dial still worked.

  ‘Samaritans – can I help you?’ A young girl spoke quickly to her as if she had been waiting.

  ‘I want to kill myself.’

  The girl did not say anything. At last she whispered, ‘What - what’s the matter?’

  ‘I can’t tell anybody.’

  She waited. The girl waited. It was as if they were staring at each other across a chasm of death. Carrie fell asleep.

  Sarah burst into tears. Paul tried to comfort her, but she would not be comforted by him, or Andrew, or anyone who tried to tell her that they had all been paralysed by their first shock call, that after that it was all right. She did not hear them. She heard only her own useless stupidity, repeating itself over and over.

  ‘I want to kill myself.’

  ‘What - what’s the matter?’

  ‘She’ll try again,’ they said, but the telephone was mute for the rest of the afternoon. When Sarah went home, she said nothing to Brian. That would be flagellation, masochism, confession, all the things he hated. In the stories that Brian liked, the narrator was the hero, not the villain.

  Gretchen came stumbling in, rather drunk, and kicked her awake.

  ‘Get out. Get out of my room.’ There was a foggy shadow in the doorway that might be Teddo.

  ‘I was going to kill myself.’ Carrie rolled up her eyes.

  ‘Oh, belt up,’ Gretchen said, ‘I’m sick of it.’

  Still clutching the purple shawl, Carrie waddled away and fell on to her bed. Gretchen banged the door between the rooms.

  She slept for a day and a night and half another day. Waking like lead, she rolled off the bed and groped her way to the telephone. The split in the receiver was wider. Screws showed and a piece of flat copper wire. It still worked.

  ‘I talked to someone there on Saturday. Could I - would she be there now?’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Her mouth was lined with some kind of furred sacking, like the bottom of a poultry fe
ed bag. ‘She was quite young.’

  ‘Let’s see - Saturday. Was it Sarah?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Have we got your name?’

  ‘No.’ And you won’t.

  ‘Would you like to speak to Sarah and see if it was her?’

  ‘All right.’

  Carrie was in the middle of a massive yawn when the breathless ‘Yes?’ came through.

  ‘I’m the one who rang you Saturday.’

  ‘Oh, thank God. Thank God you rang again. I’ve been sick with worry because I—’

  ‘I was asleep.’

  ‘I was stupid. I’m sorry. What you said -1 was afraid—’

  ‘You were more afraid than I was,’ Carrie said. ‘That’s why I rang again.’

  They talked for half an hour. It was surprisingly easy when the other person could not see you. When Sarah asked her to come across the river and up to Church Grove, Carrie refused, and then she thought, oh, what the hell. Gretchen will be coming back in her sickening leotard.

  ‘Is it Monday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Gretchen in her Eurythmy leotard, her thighs swelling like torpedos in the blue acetate tights.

  What did Sarah expect to see? She greeted Carrie like an old friend. A man with a beard called Ralph took her upstairs to what might have once been part of a bedroom - Coo, look at Carrie, in a bedroom with a man - but she was too tired to talk to him.

  ‘Come back,’ he told her. ‘Come back, Carrie,’ Sarah said. Everyone said ‘Come back any time.’

  You’ve got to laugh. Where have you been, Carrier Pigeon?

  Been with my friends.

  Didn’t know you had any. (Those teeth were like shin bones.)

  Made some today.

  Who?

  The Suicide Squad.

  Oh belt up, I’m sick of it.

  If Monday was physically the vilest day of the week, Wednesdays at the student cafeteria ran it pretty close, because of the sausages.

  Hot Fried was always sausages on a Wednesday. They came from the kitchen soaking in grease, their skins pale and papery like the skins of old ladies, their accumulated aroma at the end of an hour thick with memories of the cast-off meats that went into their making.

  As Billie ladled them queasily out on to plates for dimwitted students who had been raised on bangers and chips and were not going to risk anything else at this late date, her stomach rose up and fell like a lift, the back of her throat the top floor, her bowels the basement.

  With the sausages, it was usually kedgeree or liver.

  ‘Take it or leave it,’ Billie said when they grumbled. ‘No, Fido, egg mayonnaise is off. The rest of the eggs went into the kedgeree.’

  ‘That’s criminal waste in a world where millions starve.’

  ‘Criminal waste sending you to university, if you want my opinion.’ Billie seethed at the boy in the dusty tight black trousers, his privates as offensive as a stallion.

  Some of them joked with her.

  ‘Old Bill.’

  ‘Look at old Bill.’

  ‘Who spat in the soup, Billie?’

  ‘What died?’ as she forked out liver.

  She was getting to be a fixture here. Students who had left looked for her if they came back for some reason. ‘There’s old Billie. Still wiping your hands on the bread?’ The world moved onwards, taking these furry delinquents with it. Billie was left behind on the flypaper.

  Last night, she had walked in unfamiliar streets, alone, watching, peering into cars, leaning in doorways. She had spoken to a girl who was waiting at a street corner, quite nice, nothing offensive, but the girl had spat abuse at her and said she would call the police.

  ‘Hardly, in your trade,’ Billie said coldly and walked on, watching the people who moved in and out of the neon shop lights, their faces changing from death to hectic colour, watching for Morna. She had come out with the vague idea of searching for a girl. Any girl, a girl who was lonely and strange. The faces went by like moons and flowers and precious gems, but none of them was Morna.

  As lunches slacked off, Billie and Tontine, who tended the urns, took turns to go back into the kitchen for their own meal.

  ‘What’s this?’ On the table in the corner, one of the cooks had put three sausages like the turds of an anaemic dog, chips flabby as macaroni, a sliced tomato flaunting a mildew mark.

  The cook was Polish, conveniently not learning any English, but Billie told him where he could put it anyway. Back on the counter, she knocked off some rolls and squares of cheese and a few Bakewell tarts into her uniform pockets on top of the two spoons to replace the ones that went out with the garbage. On a nice afternoon like this, she used to fetch Morna at the laundry and they would have a picnic on the hillside park, sit on the fallen blossom and hear the speeches, the anarchy and the guitars.

  But Morna was not at the hospital laundry any more. ‘My friends think I should better myself.’ She had got a job in a hosiery shop, but Billie could not remember its name. She did not answer the telephone at her rooms. Billie did not know where she was.

  In the cement yard of her flats, which, like the whole area, looked much the same, spring, summer and winter. Billie stopped to speak to Gary Peace, on the see-saw with another child, too dirty to recognize. She gave them two of the Bakewell tarts.

  ‘Gary Peace!’ A window shrieked open four floors above. ‘I told you to come straight in from school.’ Gary see-sawed on, his mouth ringed with crumbs. ‘Come up here and I’ll tan you,’ Olive Peace invited.

  ‘Come on then.’ Billie held out a hand and he went up with her, plodding up the stone steps like two old people, spiked with a blast of wind at each turn of the open stairway. On the fourth floor, a peeling green door opened, Olive Peace’s bare washday arm came out and plucked young Gary inside.

  Billie opened her front door quickly, as if the note or the chocolate bar or the postcard of bathing ladies with fat red cheeks both ends might scuttle away. Sometimes on her way to the hospital, Morna used to stop by the flat and shove something through the letter-box (a piece of raw tripe once, done up with ribbon). She had not done that for a long time.

  On Billie’s kitchen window, something like a flayed skin hung. It was the cat Thing, waiting to be let in. She opened the window and he dropped down to the sill and came huffily inside.

  ‘No need for that, I brought you some kedgeree.’ It was in a paper cup in her handbag. ‘Never doubt my love.’ She put it on the oven shelf and the cat jumped in, balancing on the grid. Last winter, she had lit the oven with him inside, for a joke, and he had crouched there purring, cave cat.

  Poor old Victoria. Billie had not talked to her for three days. Better have a word with her now, in case she was wondering what was up. She worried, did Victoria. She was one of the world’s born worriers. That was why she had taken on the telephoning bit, so as to get some more things to worry about.

  Ronnie answered the telephone. ‘... yes, I’ll tell her. Is that Billie? How are you? All right? All right.’ She was quite a regular. A lot of Samaritans knew her voice. Good old Billie. Old Bill.

  Victoria rang her back almost at once. ‘Mr Fisher has gone to play golf. I’m typing letters. Very boring. How are you, my old Bill?’

  ‘Up yours, me old Victoria. I’m all right. I thought I’d better find out how you were.’

  ‘In a rut.’

  ‘That’s bad. You ought to get out and about more, like me.’

  ‘What have you seen?’ It was always movies, movies, like two Englishmen meeting in the jungle and swopping their own language hungrily, among the natives.

  Billie had seen Charly. ‘The mouse was better than the fellow. Just making faces isn’t being mad. I look like that all the time.’

  Victoria had gone with this dreary boyfriend of hers to see an offering called Secret Ceremony. ‘Nothing secret about it and no ceremony that I could see, except Mia Farrow having an orgasm on the floor, if you call that a ceremony, it certainly wasn�
�t a secret.’

  ‘Ha ha.’ Billie produced her rusted laugh, because poor old Victoria was trying.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ Victoria’s casual voice.

  ‘Why shouldn’t it be?’

  ‘I mean, well—’ She knew enough to stay off Morna unless Billie brought her up. ‘You’re all right then?’

  ‘Don’t be so nosy, of course I’m all right. What’s the matter with you? You poke about like some fucking gynaecologist. My business is my business.’

  ‘You rang me.’

  ‘Never again.’ The whisky was spreading its tentacles through the roots and branches of Billie’s system. ‘You can whistle for it.’

  When she had banged down the telephone, she sobbed and howled, staring at herself in the crooked mirror, strands of saliva bridging her mouth like a broken harp. She did a forbidden thing, the only thing Victoria had told her not to do. She knew where Victoria worked, because it had come out in a conversation about film reviews, and now she rang the Courier and asked for Mr Fisher’s secretary. After all this time, she did not even know Victoria’s name.

  ‘Mr Fisher’s office, good—Billie! What’s the matter?’

  Like the luxury of diarrhoea, she poured it all out in sobs and wails, the whole bloody insulting mess of it, from the time when Morna started to tease her, ‘When I get married, will you come to my wedding?’ No harm. Just teasing.

  ‘You’ll never get what we’ve had from any man.’

  ‘That’s right, Bill, that’s right, Bill dear...’

  And then ... it was on the pier. ‘I went down the pier’ (the soft wet wood and the mud smell, the muffled old gentlemen left out to rot on the damp benches). ‘Yvonne and them had got some booze down there and I knew Morna had gone along.’

  The windows were all out on one side of the octagonal café at the pier’s end. As Billie drew near - ‘Barricade the doors!’ someone yelled. ‘Here comes that lezzie friend of Morna’s.’

  And Morna’s shrill squeak like a castrated rabbit, ‘Quick, Phil, pull the table across!’

  As Victoria listened, people were in and out of the waiting-room, banging through the door of the reporters’ room, leaving things on her desk, passing through on their way to the stairs, coming in with things to sell, questions to ask, the tea trolley trundling through like a mechanized convoy. Victoria put her elbows on the desk and held the telephone close, to keep Billie’s misery locked in to her ear.