The Listeners
Page 34
When Andrew handed over the 4000 telephone to Sarah, he said, ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of Paul. Keep trying him and ask him to call Tim Shaw. Here’s the number.’
Tim waited for a long time in the telephone box. Twice someone came to make a call, and when they saw that he was not using the telephone, they tapped on the glass with a coin, and he waited outside until they had finished.
He waited for hours. A church clock kept striking, the quarter, the half, three quarters, nine, ten, eleven.
Some of them were still up at Diddlecot. He could hear the set going in the front room, and the clink of teaspoons. They did not care whether he was in or out. They didn’t care. Paul didn’t care. He was in league with Felicity, the two of them, meeting at the nursing home and laughing about Tim, he knew that now.
Well, he would show them. He had known for days how he would show them, ever since he found Vernon’s sleeping pills in the bathroom cabinet, mad thing to do, leave them there where anyone could get them.
‘Anyone seen my capsules?’
‘I’ll help you look.’ Tim had helped Vernon to look everywhere but in his own pocket where he had the little bottle hid.
‘One tablet at night, as necessary.’ Standing under the light in the middle of his room, Tim read the label. He opened a bottle of Coca-Cola and took five of the pills. They went down tasteless, like jelly. It would be Vernon who found him, coming up to tell him he would be late for work.
Tim – oh Timmy! How would they find his mother? She would have to be told. They would all have to be told, gathering in this room, a weeping crowd of them, like doves.
Tim began to feel dizzy. He blinked away tears and sat on the bed to sample his dizziness, watching the floor tip and the door handle swell and recede, swell and recede. It was like the time when he was drunk, in the pub with Frank that time when the sailor had bought their drinks, and the table-top came up and smacked Tim on the nose.
He pushed himself off the bed and walked to the door, swaying from foot to foot, feeling the air with his hands. Giant steps would carry him down the stairs, floating along the road until he came to her lighted window. Crash! A stone as big as a football. She would poke out her head through the jagged glass and the blood would run all down the bricks where the tight braids of her hair hung down.
In the mirror on the back of the door, he saw his white face, aghast. He put his fingers on his wrist and felt the blood throbbing under the little ridge of scar. Under the stairs when the glass went in, the blood had welled quickly without pain and Paul had come and put his hands on him and shouted, ‘Here he is!’
‘No one can tell you what to do,’ Peter had said. ‘Don’t ask for answers. The only answer to your life is you.’
‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘Wait. Be yourself. Don’t listen to anyone else. Listen to yourself.’
He got into his car and drove away from the town. He stopped by a telephone to tell Barbara to come with him, but when he heard the beeps, he hung up without putting in the money. He drove far out along the top of the hills where the trees were stunted flat on top and blown away from the sea. After a long time, he followed a narrow white road down into a cleft of the cliffs and when it became sand, he got out and slept on the dry turf.
He woke stiff and heavy. The day at school hung before him like a sullen threat. Tim had once said, in depression, ‘You can’t stand to look at how long the day is, but you have to keep looking.’
Sighing, looking at the day, Paul drove more slowly back. Before the town, he turned off the road and went round by the village where Tim lived. The cottage and the lane before it were in commotion. Tim had taken some Seconal and then slashed his wrist and bled to death when the drug blacked him out.
Helen’s employer had been kicked by a Shetland pony that ran through her first-aid tent at a horse show, so Victoria was taking Helen’s Thursday night duty.
She still looked rather battered. One side of her face was grazed and discoloured, and she wote dark glasses because of her eye. She and Sarah switched the telephone through to the bunk room quite early, and turned on a small lamp, so that Victoria could lie down and take off the glasses.
‘Samaritans – can I help you?’
‘Helen? Oh – Sair!’ Jackie chuckled. ‘I come your hou make pots?’
‘I’d love it.’
‘Next week? Munnay?’
‘Will she let you?’
‘I don’t care.’
Sarah began to rehearse fighting words. Somehow, in spite of the trauma of Wool worth’s, it was going to be easier to talk to Jackie’s mother.
Quite late, they heard a key in the front door and Peter called to them from the hall. ‘Not burglars. I’ve come to try and find some slippers and stuff for that drug man. We’re going to the clinic and his feet are all swollen.’ He came up to the doorway of the bunk room. Sarah got up. ‘First night duty? How nice you look in jeans. No hips.’
He went down to his office at the back of the house. The telephone on the shelf between the bunks rang. Sarah looked across at Victoria. She shut her eyes and said, ‘You.’
The man had left the girl he had been living with. ‘I’m no good for her. When I’m drunk I don’t know what I do. When I get sober, she’s gone sometimes, but she always comes back. Why?’
‘She loves you?’
‘It’s useless. Why shouldn’t I kill myself? There’s ... well, it’s like ... there’s nothing...’
‘You feel life’s got nothing for you?’ Sarah sat on the edge of the bunk and clutched the telephone, crouching over it, alone in the world with the man’s slurred voice. ‘What about the things you have to give to life?’
‘Like what?’
‘Yourself. Work to do. You said you wanted to be a journalist. A story to write. Someone who needs you.’
‘I’m no good for her. Oh look, why am I telling you this? You don’t care.’
‘I do.’
‘Why? Why do you? Have you got time to talk? Do you mind if I talk? I know I’m not making much sense, but I’ll go off my head if I can’t talk to someone...’
Sarah came out of the call as if she were coming out of water, shaking off the concentration. Peter was standing in the shadow by the door with an armful of clothes.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘One thing, Sarah. Don’t say, “You feel there’s nothing to live for.” Say something like, “There’s nothing to live for.” See the difference? It identifies you with him. It shows him that you know it might as well be you, suffering what he is suffering.’ He bent to kiss the top of Victoria’s sandy red hair. ‘Good luck.’
He only kissed Companions. Questions stormed into Sarah’s head, but she did not ask them.
‘Who is he?’ she asked when he had gone. ‘What is he? I worked for him for two months and I don’t really know him at all.’
‘I don’t think anybody does. I think he’s what each one of us needs him to be. When I was in hospital, I had a dream about him. He said, “I am the agent of God, and you are my messengers.” ‘
The telephone rang, and one of them picked it up.
‘Samaritans – can I help you? Oh, I’m sorry ... I’m sorry. Don’t cry. It’s all right ... Yes I know, it’s terrible when you can’t sleep. I know ... I know ... It’s all right ... Yes, I’m here. I’ll wait. I’m listening...’
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
Copyright © Monica Dickens 1970
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ISBN: 9781448206704
eISBN: 9781448206346
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