The Listeners

by Monica Dickens

  One evening when Brian was working, Sarah and Andrew took Carrie to the theatre. Carrie fell asleep in the second act. She fell asleep everywhere she sat down. She was past insomnia, but she had a lot to make up.

  They took her back to her flat and met Gretchen, who stared and said, ‘I thought you made that up about having new friends. What did you mean, the Suicide Squad?’

  ‘We ride a motorbike on the Wall of Death,’ Andrew said.

  ‘I’ve never seen you.’

  ‘We’re in the hospital a lot.’

  ‘Oh belt up,’ Gretchen said. She stuck far out in front and behind, her back hollow. She had enormous healthy incisors, like a blunted vampire. They had bruised the mouth of her boy friend, an etiolated Italian, who remained lying on the sofa bed when the others came in.

  It was a wretched place for Carrie to live, two stuffy rooms in a slum street not even near the University. She came out to light Sarah and Andrew down with a torch, since there was no bulb on the staircase.

  ‘I told you it was a dump,’ she said.

  ‘I could help you look for something else.’

  ‘Gretchen wouldn’t let me. She needs me.’

  Andrew drove Sarah home. She liked being with him. He was uncomplicated, enjoying being young, not striking attitudes, eagerly voluble, or easily silent if he did not want to talk. He was the sort of man you could go round the world with. He was not beautiful like Brian, assured and spoiled, a shining stranger; but when he kissed her lightly outside her house, the unfolding vistas of the kind of man she might have married quite unnerved her. She got out of the car quickly.

  Brian was turning into Salt Street at the top of the hill. ‘Who brought you home?’

  ‘Andrew. One of the Samaritans. I told you about him.’

  ‘Oh God.’ For some reason he took off his shoes to climb the stairs, as if he were a sneak lover in Sarah’s girlhood home. ‘I’m jealous of that spotted girl. Now have I got to be jealous of Andrew too?’

  Rape and pillage and drug raids. Tot kidnapped by babysitter. Thirteen nude teenagers arrested in Edge-water cottage. Seasonal licences must be slashed, says Alderman. As the summer teemed in, the Courier increased in size and heat.

  ‘Better take a quick holiday, Victoria, while there’s still time.’ Uncle Willie, chaotic and unpredictable, one of his pockets smouldering.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Mrs Start can come in. Order up some Guinness.’

  Victoria stayed with friends in London, and bought clothes and went to the cinema. If she married Robbie, as he still thought she might, they would have his parents’ flat when the Bank moved him to London, and what the hell would Victoria do? Not much point in being someone’s secretary if you were richer than they were.

  She would join the London Samaritans at the old City Church. She went to look at it, walking past the door in the corner of the church tower, too shy to go inside.

  Those who were chosen to become Companions, the inner core and lasting spirit of the movement, went to a service here in this lovely church, to dedicate their lives to the work of the Samaritans.

  200 was a Companion. So was Ralph, and Betty. Helen had recently been chosen. ‘Why me, for God’s sake? I’m a bigger mess than most of the clients.’

  Peter had once told Victoria that the instinctive ‘Why me?’ reaction was a sign that they had picked the right person.

  Leaving the church, she went underground at the Bank station. She had come by bus. She would force herself to go back in the Tube, although even as she went down the steps, the anxiety was there.

  Seven, eight years ago, quite a long time after she and Joe had seen the last of each other after wasting years of pretending they would marry, he had fallen under a train. Her hatred of the Tube had been one of her reasons for leaving London.

  She sat solemnly in the train opposite the solemn faces, without recognition on her part or theirs. Here eyes could only look at eyes, not into them. If crowds of strangers were to smile and greet each other, it would be too exhausting, like being at a perpetual cocktail party or soul gathering.

  At the no-man’s-land of Earl’s Court, nobody’s home station, everybody’s junction, she waited for another train at the end of the platform, looking at the other people, as all Samaritans did, as potential clients. A little scrum of boys charged down the steps carrying a football. With vacant, wordless jokes, they pushed each other forward and stood at the edge of the platform, windmilling their arms as if they were losing their balance. The live rail gleamed back at them. Cold steel, but if you fell on it, you would fry instantly, bubbling like batter. The tallest of the boys threw the ball over the line, and as Victoria watched in horror, he jumped down, bent over the live rail, stretched his long arms for the ball, swung upright and was back on the platform as the train swayed racketing in.

  Victoria still stood transfixed. If I had been there when Joe fell forward on to the line, I would have stood and watched and done nothing.

  The train slid away without her. She turned and went back to the escalator. She felt sick and faint, very ill. Her heart felt swollen, beating thickly. It was hard to breathe. Past the advertisements of all the offered crotches in swim suits, panties, Y-front shorts, she was carried upwards, drooping over the moving black handrail. Something would happen. Something dreadful was going to happen to her, while the people glided up and down and did not see that she was there.

  Was this what Jean meant? Trying to go into a crowd: ‘I was in a panic that my heart would stop, would in some way explode. I was moving in a nightmare ...’

  I am going to have a heart attack. Victoria could not reach out to the coat of the woman standing two steps above her. Bodies don’t touch other strange bodies. Help me, she said silently to the woman’s broad back, not loudly enough to see her swing round a face impatient with suspicion.

  Victoria’s heart was pounding, her mouth dry, her legs would hardly carry her over the top of the stairs as they rolled under. She went to a little hotel and took a room and lay for a long time on the bed until the terror quietened and at last left her. She had lived with Joe the horror of his death. Unable to cry out or to have the cry answered, he must have known that panic aloneness as he fell forward from the staring people.

  She left her friends and London the next day.

  ‘You should see a doctor,’ the woman said, when she told them something of what had happened. ‘That’s really neurotic, Victoria.’

  The man said, ‘I tell you what it is, sweetie. I’ve told you before. It’s time you were married.’

  Her rose-and-white flat was a shell.

  Soon after she came home, she went up to the government hostel to see old Michael.

  ‘He’s scarpered, dear.’ The Warden was tending a small patch of onions in the unlikely soil of Flagg’s Hill.

  ‘On those feet?’

  ‘He’ll be back. He’s signed on here. He’ll come back to get his money.’

  ‘Could you telephone me if he does?’

  ‘Why all the interest, Missie?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Victoria laughed. ‘He’s such a pitiful old man. I think: if it were my father ... I find myself worrying about him.’

  ‘Save your energies. Here, you can have these green tops if you like. Quite a lift to your salads. There’s not much you can do for that old sport. They go their own way, that kind, you know, and die alone.’

  Eight

  ‘AND SO WHAT are you going to do now, Dad?’ Jeff, taking refuge behind the plain glass of his huge wire spectacles, asked it as soon as they left the nursing home.

  He had come with Paul, but then would not look at his mother, nor touch her. He had wanted to come, perhaps to assure himself that what his father had told him was true.

  Alice was in a chair, tied round the waist with a soft binder, because she could push herself forward and fall out. Her short hair was cleaner and paler. Her slipped face knew nobody. From time to time, she wept.

  ‘
It doesn’t mean anything.’ Mrs Laidlaw’s grin sugared the scene. ‘There’s some liability of the emotional control mechanism. It doesn’t mean that she is sad.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Mr Hammond, we don’t, but your wife is in a vegetable state. She cannot feel or understand.’

  ‘Will she ever?’ Jeff’s voice from where he hung back in the doorway sounded unused and creaky, as if it had never broken.

  ‘We can only hope.’

  ‘And so what are you going to do now, Dad?’

  ‘About what?’ They got into the car.

  ‘The divorce. Barbara.’ He had met Barbara and liked her, but he drawled her name as if he found it ridiculous.

  ‘Nothing. Nothing can be done now. I was too much a coward to say that to Barbara, but she said it first anyway.’

  ‘Yes, that’s very noble.’ Jeff thought for a while and then he asked, ‘What’s the point of being noble?’

  ‘It’s preferable to being bitter. It’s also the Law, when someone can’t speak or make a sign, can’t prove they understand what is said to them. I can’t divorce your mother, Jeff.’

  When he went back to see Alice, he sat in front of her and held the dead claws of her hands and said over and over again, ‘I’m here, Alice. It’s Paul. It’s all right, dear, it’s all right. I’m here.’

  ‘It’s a pity she can’t hear you.’ Mrs Laidlaw, a woman of much wiry energy, roamed ceaselessly through all the rooms of the home, checking to see who had died, dusting off table tops and lockers with a paper towel and a can of aerosol deodorant instead of spray wax.

  ‘Sometimes I almost think she knows me.’

  Mrs Laidlaw shook her head, grinning from ear to ear. ‘That’s a good girl!’ She patted the old lady, curled up like a foetus on one of the beds, a bright orange bow tied round the few hairs that were left on her pink scalp.

  When she had gone out, the young nurse who was in the room feeding the other patient stuck out a narrow pointed tongue automatically at the doorway. She was thin and pale, with dark shifting eyes that settled nowhere, hair piled carelessly up under a rumpled cap, straggling round her sharp face.

  ‘Don’t give any notice to her,’ she told Paul. ‘Alice knows more than you think, Alice does.’

  Alice sagged into the binder, the dressing gown fallen open over her bony chest, the bags of her breasts.

  ‘It’s me. It’s Paul. It’s all right, Alice.’ He stared at her to force understanding into her eyes. He squeezed her hands. ‘Alice!’ Her mouth drooped. Saliva ran. Tears ran gently and he reached out his fingers tenderly to brush them away as he had when she was young and stormy.

  ‘She knows me all right.’ The nurse shoved a spoonful of baby food into and around the cracked mouth of the patient, wiped it on the edge of the sheet and came over.

  ‘Alice.’ She bent forward and clicked long bony fingers in front of the empty eyes. ‘Wake up, dear. It’s me -Felicity.’

  Felicity. The Smasher. Skinny and sallow, with long sticks of legs and an evasive, head-tossing manner, she did not in the least fit Tim’s admiring description, but if she had, she would hardly have bothered with poor little Tim.

  ‘I know a friend of yours,’ Paul said. ‘Tim Shaw.’

  ‘He’s no friend of mine,’ the girl said quickly.

  ‘He told me you went out with him.’

  ‘Did do,’ Felicity said, ‘doesn’t mean I do now.’ She bent over Alice, who did slightly turn her face upwards, though without expression. ‘She can’t speak, you see,’ Felicity said bossily, ‘so I’m teaching her to wink. Once for yes. Two for no. You understand that, don’t you Alice? There. You see?’

  ‘No. Nothing.’

  ‘You’ve got to look very closely. You’ve got to know. Are you a good girl, Alice?’ She raised her voice. ‘Of course you are. Not going to pee the chair?’

  ‘Stop that,’ Paul said, ‘I’ll tell Mrs Laidlaw.’

  ‘You do that,’ Felicity said, ‘and see where it gets you. Alice likes me. Perhaps that makes you feel jealous. She likes me because I’m very good to her.’

  Paul got up, bent to kiss Alice lightly and went to the door.

  ‘You’re Paul, aren’t you?’ Felicity said. ‘Paul, 401. Yes, that’s right. I know a lot about you.’

  Mrs Laidlaw was in her office, telling a visitor a story about a patient who became so swollen with cancer that the skin of her upper arm burst like an overblown balloon.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  She turned the skeletal grin to Paul.

  ‘The nurse – that girl Felicity. She – she’s good with the patients, is she?’

  ‘I’m quite pleased with her. She’s nice with the old folk, and they like to have a young person about.’

  ‘She seems to think my wife can communicate with her.’

  The smiling headshake. ‘There’s too much motor damage, Mr Hammond. Even if she could possibly take anything in, she’s not able to put out. I’m afraid,’ she added, not for the benefit of Paul, who was a known quantity, but for the visitor, who was a prospect.

  The mobile shop of which Ted Dace was driver and manager and Tim was boy (’Here Tim boy, come on boy!’ as if he had a tail to wag) was a box on wheels, with shelves all round and a counter near the back door for Special Offers.

  ‘And you watch that like a hawk, Tim boy,’ Ted warned, ‘Because that’s where the bloody kids knock off the stuff when Mum asks for something from out of the cab.’

  If the kids were at school, Mum would argue the change, or say she had been overcharged last week, or shorted on the weight of plums. Some of the women on the housing estates would cheat anything on wheels.

  Ted Dace was a youngish, unsmiling man with a thin mouth notched back between nose and chin, a great thinker and talker, with or without an audience, since he had long been driving about these deserted roads alone, before the grocery dreamed up the job to help boys like Tim. This suited Tim, who sometimes did not say a word from the start of the day until they coasted on their last egg-cup of petrol into the garage.

  The mobile philosopher. ‘Stay around, Tim boy,’ Ted said out of the side of his mouth that did not have the match stuck in it. ‘You may get an education yet.’

  Jouncing down the rutted lane that led to Castle Farm, Ted wrenched the wheel round, but too late. They were into a pothole and out of it, and they knew what they would find back in the van, even without the noise of fallen angels.

  He stopped the engine and opened his newspaper, while Tim went round to the back. Each time they went into a pothole or a deep rut, the tins on the shelves flew into the air, and as the van bounced back under the falling tins and boxes and jars, it caught them one shelf lower, with the things that had been on the bottom shelf all over the floor.

  Tim had an idea. It was an afternoon of driving rain. They were both fretting to get home, Ted to a new wife, Tim to give his owl-hoot on a blade of grass under Felicity’s window. He left the goods where the shelves had caught them, and put the stuff on the floor up on to the empty top shelf.

  ‘You been quick,’ Ted said when he climbed back into the cab. Tim nodded. He did not need to speak. Ted did the talking for both, and knew better than to ask Tim a question that needed an answer.

  Castle Farm was a dilapidated stone house on a windy hill, built of the remains of an ancient fortress, and haunted by fettered monks. Ted Dace had seen them on a dark winter afternoon, walking through the pig yard, right through wall and sties and all. The bachelor farmer who lived there left out a list for the mobile in a hole under his doorstep. It was a two-mile drive from the nearest house. Sometimes the list said, ‘Marg. ι small white. Bit of soup.’ Sometimes it only said, ‘I small tin baked beans thank u.’ Ted had tried to cut this farm off his route, but the manager of the grocery said, ‘The outlying farms are the life-blood of the mobile trade.’

  ‘If so, we’ve got anaemia.’ Ted thought of that afterwards, and said it, going backwards up Pea Hill when low gear wa
s slipping.

  Tim got out of the van and walked through the wet manure and straw of the farmyard to the back doorstep. The list was written over a printed page. The farmer’s departed father had had a few books, and he was using them up for grocery lists.

  Tim collected the goods and carried the box back to the step and covered it with a sack. On the way back to the van, a cow swung its head down and began to come at him. Tim ran, fell in the mud, climbed the gate, fell again. His hair was plastered over his eyes. His hands were filthy. Ted made him wash them in a watering trough before he would let him into the van.

  Lecturing about the contamination of food, with particular reference to his aunt, who had been a typhoid carrier in a West End hotel and had finished off half a dozen people after a wedding banquet, Ted went into the same pothole with the other wheel and out again with the same sound of the heavens falling.

  He stopped and jerked his head. Tim got out cursing, all his words in the right order, and sorted out the jumble of sweets and jelly packets and biscuits and cake mix on the floor on to the top shelf where the soups ought to be. When they reached East Cross, the brakes announcing them like an ice cream bell, and Ted went round to the back to fill orders, he could not find anything.

  He was angry with Tim. ‘People who are bloody feebleminded got to follow directions,’ he raved. ‘Follow directions, or we’re all in the queer. Look at this.’ The familiar old mobile did look odd, with all the soap powders and bleaches up where tinned fruit and veg. ought to be, and fruit and veg. down on the meat and fish shelf, and meat and fish all jumbled in with big bags of flour that had not fallen.

  ‘Look at this, and tomorrow my stocktaking.’ He began savagely to rearrange the shelves, while two or three housewives stood outside with coats and aprons over their heads and invited him to knock it off and get out their orders.

  ‘Feeble-minded ... Welfare State ... honest crust ... week’s work for a day’s pay...’ grunts and snarls flew out of the van as Ted slung the goods back where they should be like a speeded-up old moving picture. Tim climbed in to help him, but he elbowed him out of the way.