Listening in the Dusk

by Celia Fremlin

  This broad, prosperous suburban road, flanked by the shrubs and ornamental trees of the well-screened front gardens, was silent, and absolutely deserted. No cars, even, were passing. Big well-curtained windows, set well back beyond lawns and flower beds, showed an occasional crack of light, but the houses here were too well-built, too painstakingly double-glazed, for any sound of life to emerge into the outside world. All was quiet except for the pad-pad-pad behind her, and also the sound, suddenly preternaturally loud, of Alice’s own boots as she hurried towards safety.

  Yes, safety. She was no longer bothering to vet her own inner vocabulary.

  Number eleven … Number thirteen. Number twenty-one could only be a few gates away. Yes, here she was, and as she paused, fiddling with the icy latch of the ornamental iron-work gate, she was aware of a sudden rush of sound from behind, and the man was upon her, grabbing her arm and holding it in a relentless grip. Sheer panic, strangely mingled with a detached and cool determination not to admit any of this to Miss Dorinda, blurred her reactions for a moment, and she stood limply in the man’s grasp.

  “Good evening,” he said; and only now did she take in that her assailant was not the unkempt teenager of the stereotype, but a man approaching middle-age, heavily built, and with a lined, pallid face under the harsh streetlighting.

  “Good evening,” he repeated. “I’m sorry if I’ve alarmed you, Mrs Harman, but I wanted our interview to take place well away from seventeen Beckford Road. I’ve been watching for you to come out on your own, and this seemed a good chance …”

  Mrs Harman? Mrs Harman? Oh, he means Hetty, of course. Hetty Harman.

  “I’m sorry,” she said stiffly, “I’m afraid you’re making a mistake. I’m not Mrs Harman, she’s the landlady. I’m just one of the tenants, I —”

  “Oh, but that’s all right, that’s fine! It wasn’t Mrs Harman herself that I wanted to see: the person I am trying to contact is a young lady residing at that address; I’m sure you’ll be able to help me. A blonde young lady; you know her, I take it? I wonder if you could be very kind, and tell me what her name is? The name she is using?”

  “But …” Alice was aware of the grip on her arm tightening. “But, if you don’t even know who she is, how can you …?”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t know who she is. I said I didn’t know … Now, look, Madam, it’s a very simple question I’m asking you — simply the name of a fellow-tenant of yours. You must know it.”

  Alice’s wariness deepened. I’m not going to tell him, she resolved. No way. I don’t know what he’s after, and I don’t care, but I know — I absolutely know — that Mary won’t want anything to do with it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m afraid I can’t help you. There is no such person as you describe at our address. And now, if you’ll excuse me …” She made to open the gate with her free hand, but his hold on her arm tightened.

  “Now, now, Madam, not in such a hurry! Perhaps I should tell you that my business could be greatly to the young lady’s advantage, should she care to co-operate. You will be doing her a great service, I promise you, if you will tell me … Now, come along, Madam! Just a simple answer!”

  He paused, scrutinising Alice’s face in the half-light. Then: “Look, I’ll make it worth your while …” and here he pulled out a wallet, and from it took a thick bundle of notes, which he fingered encouragingly.

  If Alice had had any doubts about the rightness of her decision, this settled it.

  “No!” she cried. “Absolutely no!” and seizing her chance — for her interlocutor had had to release her arm in order to get at his wallet — she wrenched the gate open, raced across the garden and up the steps, ringing a frantic peal on the bell.

  It was Cyril who answered — still up, though it was nearly ten — and he led her into the drawing-room where his parents were watching television. They were polite and pleasant about the whole thing, not a word was said about the demerits of classical studies; she was even invited to stay for a cup of coffee, after which Mr Benson insisted on driving her home. For which she was profoundly thankful; the thought of walking back alone up this deserted road, never knowing behind which bush her inquisitor might be lurking, had been weighing heavily on her.

  Chapter 14

  The most awful thing about getting old is watching yourself getting worse at things. Every year from now on my body is going to work a little bit less efficiently than it does now in all sorts of ways, and every year I’ll enjoy my favourite things less, and be less good at them. My friends will be getting less good at things too, because of course they are getting old just as fast as I am, so that one by one we will be giving up the things we do together. It’s awful the way I can see it coming.

  People laugh when I talk like this, they think it’s funny. They don’t seem to realise that twelve is old. Already, at twelve, your muscle-weight ratio is not quite as good as it was when you were eight and nine. You don’t fall so well, and if you jump off a roof you’re more likely to break a bone than you were then. Your hearing is deteriorating too, especially in the high registers. I’ve noticed that myself. A few years ago I could hear bats squeaking, and already I can’t any more, they dart past in silence, and from now on they always will.

  I was saying this to Mrs Saunders — Alice, I usually call her now — about the high-frequency loss of hearing, and not hearing bats any more, but, alas, she didn’t seem to get my point. “Who told you that?” she asked, which was silly, really, because surely it is common knowledge. “What made you think of bats suddenly?” she asked me then, and I told her it was the picture she’d got stuck up on her wall for all to see, she seemed to be quite bothered; so I decided to shut up. Perhaps she has a phobia, or something? ‘Nucteriphobia’ it should be, if there is such a word. I must look it up some time.

  Still, I quite like going there for my lessons, it’s much nicer than having them at home. We’re going quite fast, we’ve got to the bit where Cyrus is only ten and thinks he is a poor shepherd’s son, but of course he isn’t, he is really the son of the Great King. I like that bit, because I’ve felt like that myself sometimes, though of course in my case it’s pure fantasy, because Daddy isn’t a poor shepherd, he’s in the City and jolly well off, and anyway there aren’t such things as Great Kings any more. This is one of the reasons why I like reading Herodotus, he writes about a time when it was possible to be glorious and powerful without its being Right Wing, and Reactionary, and all that sort of thing.

  Also, I’ve added nearly two hundred words to my vocab since starting, mostly nouns, and sometimes Alice asks me to stay for supper, which is quite fun, especially when Hetty does a fry-up. Hetty is the landlady, and she says she gets fed up with all the things her lodgers buy and put in the fridge and then forget to eat, and so every so often she takes the whole lot out and fries them all together with masses of onions, and invites everyone down. Sometimes there is a fuss about the smell from someone called Miss Dorinda, but in general they like it. I certainly do.

  I wish Christmas wasn’t looming. Really, I wish there wasn’t such a festival. This is one more deterioration I’ve noticed in myself with advancing age. I used to love Christmas, like Sophy still does because she’s only six, and so there’s lots of things she still wants. There’s nothing I really want any more, at least nothing I could get as a present, and that makes it very sad opening my parcels. I used to love opening my parcels, even if it was some silly toy, but that’s all gone now. I’m merely bored, the way adults are bored, which just goes to show how old I’m getting. Soon, I’ll be bored with everything. And quite soon my brain-cells will start dying off, they start doing it in your middle teens, so I read recently.

  Growing up is like a slow terminal illness; the time is coming when you won’t even want to run about any more, or jump over things. Have you ever watched an adult trying to run for a bus? Or to jump over some obstacle? See what I mean?

  Mind you, it’s not only humans that experience this deterior
ation as they reach maturity. Both sea-squirts and oysters have a lively existence for a few weeks as larvae, swimming about all over the place and foraging; then, once they are mature, they settle down to immobility for the rest of their lives. Barnacles too, I believe.

  So it’s not only humans. But it still seems a shame, especially if you are one.

  Yawning, stretching his cramped fingers, Cyril closed the school Project Book, whose many untouched pages he was using up as a diary. No one ever looked at project work any more, not since the strikes, and so it seemed sensible to use up the blank pages in any way he chose. He leaned back in his chair, or, rather, leaned the chair itself back, as far as it would go, balancing it on its back legs at about forty-five degrees, a wonderfully precarious feeling.

  Outside his bedroom window he could see the sky beginning to fade from the brilliant blue of a sunny mid-winter day to the pallor of evening. The year was almost on the turn; even before Christmas, the days would be drawing out. All at once, he was stirred by a sharp restlessness. The chair clattered back into its correct quadrupedal position as Cyril jumped to his feet, and throwing his anorak round his shoulders he was downstairs and off into the cold, clear twilight. With the perfunctory information “Out!” in response to the vague babble of concerned enquiry emanating from his mother’s room, he was slamming the front door behind him and leaping down the steps, four at a time. He could do six; but that left only two for the second leap, which was a bit pointless.

  Park Rise Estate was his destination, for several of his school friends lived in the flats there; in particular, his very best friend, Winston, who was not only black, and therefore a member of the Top Gang, but had also invented the wonderful new game they called the Bike Run. The joys and terrors of this game were right now half-choking Cyril with anticipation and excitement as he raced along, darting across busy streets regardless of little red men and little green men, his speed and agility making a mockery of the dreary traffic regulations — regulations which the lumbering, slavish adults were obliged to observe. There they stood, huddled in their coats and scarves, patient as cows, waiting meekly for the signal that they might blunder across with their briefcases, their shoppers and their bad legs, while Cyril, member of a different species altogether, could skip and skim and dodge among the slow-moving traffic, making rings round the lot of them, as the early small mammals had once made rings round the slow, doomed dinosaurs.

  Running, running, running! The air, the wind was like silver moonlight in his lungs … and with a final spring he was on the parapet at the foot of the stairway used for the Bike Run. The gang wasn’t there yet, nor was the bicycle; but Winston was, all ready with his wide welcoming grin, the whites of his eyes brilliant, alight with mischief in his black face.

  “Gitcher!” he yelled, and, “Gitcher!” yelled back Cyril, and instantly — because after all they had to pass the time somehow until the bicycle gang had gathered — they were both tearing up the sloping pedway that led to the bridge between the two neighbouring tower blocks; Cyril a few yards ahead and Winston in furious pursuit.

  It was like flying, it was like swooping to the Seventh Heaven on wings of light, powered by the joy of racing blood pounding through veins dilated with the ecstasy of the chase. Hunter or hunted? Which was which? How little it mattered as your legs flashed over the cement floors like scissored lightning, and your whole soul leaped to the challenge of speed … and speed … and then more speed …

  Up the slanting pedways, over the bridges, down the darkling stairways, taking the steps four, six, eight at a time — bounding out into the evening light once more. Turn … Dodge … Wild, bouncing kangaroo-springs up the stairway once again, back on to the bridge where the ground flickered beneath you, and your lungs filled with a glittering ecstasy of wind and winning …

  “No running on the pedways!” snarled an angry voice from behind a lace curtain which twitched and dipped with righteous resentment; a lace curtain with the law solidly on its side, because was there not a notice at the entrance to the block: NO RUNNING ON THE PEDWAYS. NO BALL GAMES. NO PLAYING ON THE STAIRS?

  By now, the lined and bespectacled face had made itself visible from behind the curtain, and was mouthing through the glass the all-too-familiar phrases:

  “’Ooligans! Bloody ’Ooligans, the lot o’yer!” was roughly what it conveyed before the curtains quivered back, consigning it to the dark and cluttered anonymity from which it had come. But now another voice took up the complaint, a gentle voice this time, civilised, and using no bad language at all, but effectively delivering exactly the same message. A little more consideration — surely not too much to ask? Suppose there had been an old person there, you could have knocked right into them, they could have been badly injured, a broken hip quite likely. Or suppose someone blind … Deaf … Using crutches …? or someone whose nerves were bad, think of the shock …

  The two boys hung their heads, listening attentively, taking in the message. The message that the whole world is a geriatric ward into which the young and the strong are admitted on sufferance provided they observe the post-operative rules of moving slowly and with due circumspection. They don’t actually have to use crutches themselves so long as they behave as if they did, recognising the fact that nearly everything is dangerous and to be avoided, and that fun and laughter may disturb someone who has a headache; and, in general, that being ill and miserable is a much more worthy and important state than being happy and well, and must therefore be ministered to assiduously at all times; whereas happiness doesn’t matter at all, and can be damped down and trodden into the ground with impunity.

  Oh, well. There was still the Bike Run. The others would be there by now, and since it took place at the back of the flats, behind the garages, with no windows overlooking them, there would — hopefully — be no interruptions. The people with the headaches and the crutches and the bad nerves never came that far, especially not when dusk was falling, as it was now.

  Yes, there they were — Steve, Biko, Gus and Errol, all waiting — and Winston and Cyril were given a hero’s welcome, especially Winston.

  “Hi, Nigger!” the two black boys yelled to him cheerily — they, of course, were the only ones allowed to use this intimate form of address; for a white boy to use it would have been bad form, arrogating to himself a privilege which didn’t belong to him by right. There was nothing unfriendly about the distinction, but still, it was one more small factor in the prestige accorded to black gangs on the estate. All the boys yearned to get into a black gang, but it was something of an honour, not accorded to all and sundry, and Cyril had been thrilled to the very core at finding himself accepted by this lot — albeit largely on account of being Winston’s best friend.

  Winston was the unquestioned Master of Ceremonies for the Bike Run. He it was who had produced the bicycle, a full adult size, too large for most of them, but all the more exciting for that. Although still in working order, the machine was badly battered — but this was all to the good, really, as it was assuredly going to get more battered still.

  The staircase used for this sport was dark and shadowy, lit only by a forty-watt bulb behind the window of a warehouse behind the garages. It consisted of eighteen concrete steps, which were never swept, because why should the caretaker drag himself over to this part of the estate where no one ever went, not unless they were up to no good, anyway, and why should he bother with the likes of those? Let them clear away their own beer cans and such if they’d a mind to, who cared?

  As it happened, the bicycle gang did care, they had to, because the game was dangerous enough as it was, without the odd beer can getting in front of your wheel; and so the first thing they did — quietly, though with much hoarse whispering — was to sweep the steps with an old hearth-brush, also produced by the resourceful Winston.

  “Whose turn …?” “No, mine …” “No, it’s Biko’s,” was roughly the burden of the whispering; and when the steps were clear, the one whose turn it was — Steve
on this occasion — humped the bicycle up to whatever height he dared, mounted it while clinging with one hand to the rail, and then — Wheeee …! This was where you had to let go, and come bouncing down, struggling to keep the machine upright, and above all not — absolutely not — grabbing at the rail for support when you felt yourself out of control. If you did — and Cyril nervously thanked his stars that he had never disgraced himself thus — you lost all your points gained over the previous weeks, as well as being shamed in front of the whole gang. Points, of course, were scored by the number of steps you could descend before crashing.

  So far, the highest step from which anyone had ever descended successfully was fifteen. It was Winston of course who had achieved this, though Biko was not far behind with a near-successful descent from fourteen; he had only crashed on the very last step, with the front wheel already on the ground, and the gang had unanimously agreed to award him full points for a successful descent, just as if he hadn’t crashed at all.

  Cyril yearned, with an aching of the soul quite beyond the power of words to describe, to be the first one to attempt sixteen; but so far he was light-years away from any such triumph. One of the rules of the game was that you had to go up step by step. Until you had managed at least one successful descent from, say, nine, you weren’t allowed to go on to ten; and nine, it so happened, was exactly where Cyril had got to. So there were six more stages to be achieved, each of them harder than the last, and goodness knew that had been hard enough. Eight times he had crashed — once bruising his shoulder so badly that it was all he could do to prevent his family or the school finding out — before his final success, only a week ago. How they had cheered him — in whispers, of course, which was the way it had to be — as he arrived on the ground with a final fearsome jolt which felt as if it had knocked his spine right adrift from his ribs; but — joy of joys! — with the bicycle still upright. The fact that it had skidded from under him immediately detracted nothing from the achievement, for the front wheel had got itself beyond the bottom step, and that was what counted.