The Listeners (2 page)

They were not unkind eyes, or frightening. They were blank. Clear blue like laundry bleach, not smiling, not glaring, not puzzled. They were as expressionless as Mrs Brady’s glass eye, at the greengrocer’s. It was a marvel to Jackie that anyone could see with eyes like that. Mrs Brady couldn’t see you if you came up unexpectedly on her glass side.

‘Hullo, Mum.’ That was what he meant, but he knew, because Malcom’s friend had made a tape-recording for him, that he said something like, ‘Huh-o, Muh.’

‘What were you doing down there? I thought you weren’t going to talk to yourself any more.’

‘I talking to He’en.’ Jackie did not bother to lie to her.

‘I see, dear. And what did Helen say?’ Muh was always careful how she spoke. She said, ‘And-a h-what-a did’, especially when she was speaking to Jackie, moving her lips like captive worms, precisely.

‘She told me about her dog. It bit a bloke was selling carpets.’

‘It-a bit-a man.’ Muh’s forehead frowned, though her blue eyes showed nothing. ‘I don’t want you to go downstairs at night,’ she said. ‘You’re too big a boy for playacting and games. Aren’t you?’

Jackie nodded, looking down at her from under his thick forelock. She only came up to his shoulders, but she made it seem an advantage to be short.

‘And-a there is no Helen, is there?’

Muh did not believe in Helen or Amy, or any of them he talked to at the Samaritans. One day, when he brought in some ‘Wile-U-Wate’ heeling jobs, the women were talking about a piece in a magazine which gave you the number to ring if you were going to put your head in
the oven, so Jackie had rung them up on Thursday night to see what they would say.

He had been ringing almost every Thursday night since, with the workshop door shut. Muh had caught him once before, but she thought he was pretending. So when she said, in her ‘teaching’ voice like that poor woman at the school who kept trying to make him read, ‘There is no Helen, is there?’ it was safe to say, ‘Yes.’

Jackie yawned. Helen had sent him to bed, so he toddled in his drooping pyjamas into his room and manoeuvred his length into the tunnel of bedclothes.

‘Good night, Jackie,’ his mother called in a sanitary voice. She still tucked up Malcom, and read him stories about children called Rodney and Tessa who navigated space rockets. Jackie was allowed to eavesdrop on the stories, but not to be tucked up. Jackie was a man.

‘Samaritans—’

Rapid electronic beeps from a call-box.

‘Samaritans — can I help you?’

‘I don’t know. I saw your poster. I’ve nowhere to go.’ A Tyneside voice, a broad flat statement, not asking for anything.

‘I can give you some names of hotels and boarding houses...’ Victoria tilted her chair back to reach for the folder.

‘How much?’

‘The cheapest you could get would be about fifteen shillings a night.’

A single-syllable laugh. ‘I’m broke, sister.’

‘Where are you? I can tell you where the Reception Centre is.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A Government hostel, they’ll give you a bed. Hold on just a minute...’

When she hung up the telephone, it rang again before she had taken her hand off it.

‘Samaritans — can I help you?’

The beeps again, replaced by heavy breathing. A man.

‘Yes? Can I help you?’

The breathing continued. It could be anxiety. It could be a joke. It could be a sex call. It could be fear or pain. Whatever it was, you waited. You never rang off first.

You tried to offer help without being officious. You tried to make contact, but if no one spoke, all you could do was show that you were there. That you were still listening. That you would listen all night if that was what they wanted. Friendship. Caring. Love. Your voice had to convey your heart.

And if you failed— ‘Tell me what number you’re ringing from/ Victoria said too anxiously, ‘and I can ring you back if the money runs out.’

The breathing went on, harshening, quickening, until the beeps cut in again. Then nothing.

‘Damn.’ It was horrible when that happened. You didn’t know. You didn’t know that it was not your fault.

She made an entry in the log book. ‘
22.00. Phone-box call. Breathing only.
’ An entry of Helen’s higher up said,
‘21.40. V. rude person who might be our old seagoing friend rang from what sounded like a public swimming-bath. So abusive even I couldn’t answer back.’

Helen was in the kitchen at the back of the old greening stone house that had once been a rectory, breaking the hearts of parsons’ wives and their poor little maids, and was now the Samaritan Centre. The homeless man was still asleep by the wall of the small front room that had once been a study where the parson yawned over repetitious sermons, wearing mittens to save coal. Depressed, Victoria sat and twisted her hands in her lap, staring at the telephone. Please try again. She turned Robbie’s ring round and round on her finger. When he had given her the little box, irritatingly glorified with shiny paper and bows, she put the ring on to her right hand quickly and casually, before he could suggest the other. The tiny jewel was absurd on her. Wanting her to be petite, Robbie invariably chose presents that were too small and too dainty. If the ring would not go back over
her knuckle, she would have to be buried in it.

Please try again, she begged the unknown man who had breathed his fear and loneliness. Perhaps it had taken all the courage he had left to ring this number. Don’t be afraid. I am afraid too. I lost you. I let you go. Give me another chance.

She heard Helen coming back down the hall. Victoria dug the corner of Robbie’s absurd jewel into the flesh of her finger, and leaned over the desk where the telephone squatted like a black secret. Ring now. If Helen comes in here, I shall be coward enough to let her take the next call. She’ll talk to you. Help you. Save you. But I want it to be me.

Although she had been passionate to join the Samaritans, and would have died if she had been turned down, Victoria was not really sure she should have been accepted. She had the wrong spirit. Selfish. Obsessed. The others were so balanced. So bloody nice. They accepted her as they accepted each other, and every last least lovable client, without judgement, without seeing how inadequate she was.

As she turned to smile at Helen, coming back into the room with sandwiches, the telephone jerked her back with a shock of nerves. She grabbed it, waited for the beeps. ‘Yes? Oh — Billie. Hullo.’

‘Just making sure you’re still there.’

‘Do you want me?’

‘Me? No, but all those poor sods.’

‘What sods?’

‘Well, I mean ... ringing and ringing. Can’t have that, you know,’ Billie said sternly, and rang off.

‘How is she?’

‘All right, I think,’ Victoria said, ‘She’s drunk.’

It seemed like a message sent direct to him.

If you are desperate,
the poster said.
If you are at the end of your tether.
Well, if it could be the end of something that had never properly begun, that’s me.

Tim was twenty. He had lived for almost two years in
this great conglomerate town of slums and university and factories and rich flowering suburbs and seaside trippery and reeling rows of new estate houses, eating up the salty grassland. He had come from the flat wet plate of an eastern county, where he was supposed to learn how to grow the flowers and vegetables that made their own frenzied growth out of the dark earth that was so frigging fertile, Mr Gregg said, it was like growing the poor buggers in straight manure.

That was not Tim’s natural home. He had spent the first years of his life in some place like Harrow or Hendon that you could call a part of London if you liked. His third foster-mother took him to East Anglia, and after she sickened of it, and of Tim, he had lived mostly in a Children’s Home, where the nurses came and went almost every month, since girls these days would not stand for all the washing.

At school, the boys from the Home tended to shun the others, to forestall being shunned. Once, Tim had been invited to tea with Adam Johnson, whose mother felt that we should all do what we could to help those less fortunate than ourselves. They had sardines on toast and Battenburg cake in a little house by a canal lock where Adam’s father worked the gates.

His mother said, ‘When Adam was a baby, all he wanted was sardines and pickles,’ as though she were telling some event in history.

‘That’s right.’ Adam’s face spread into a hypnotized beam of self. ‘And I’d lick the oil from the tins. They couldn’t keep it out of my hair.’

‘You couldn’t remember when you were a baby.’ Tim stared across the table at him. He could remember nothing of Harrow or Hendon.

‘Mum tells me about it.’ Adam made round smug eyes over a two-fisted mouthful of toast, and his mother, seeing Tim’s burning face, had coughed into her finger-tips, spitting a crumb of toast on to her cheek, where it remained, and got up to fetch hot water to the teapot.

Later, Adam’s father had let Tim spin the big cogged
helm to open the lock gates; but he would not go to tea at the lock cottage again, so Mrs Johnson invited one of the other boys, to satisfy her social conscience.

When he left the House of God’s Angels (Tim had never been able to say the name of the Home, only the address) and went to work for Mr Gregg, people in the villages began to know him as the runty boy who came round with the truck of hyacinth seconds or subsize caulies that could not go to market. Quiet chap. Doesn’t say much. But there was nothing to say, either to the housewives with their time-worn comments on the weather and the crops, or in the dormitory hut, where the floating population of Italians and Spaniards did not stay long enough to learn much English. It had taken Tim half a year to tell Mr Gregg that he was not going to stay either, and another five weeks to announce that he was going south, and another eight days after that to rehearse what he was going to say at the ticket office in the railway station.

Going through London and out again like a boy in a dream, he had thumbed a lift on a furniture van coming to this town and stayed here, drifting from job to job, sometimes drifting jobless, his tongue thick in his mouth like a parched desert traveller’s, strangling himself with silence.

In the hotel kitchens, no one could talk against the volcanic clatter of the dishwasher. On the night squads, the vacuum cleaners shut out the world. In the factory loading bays the diesel lorries roared. On the building sites, it was too cold that winter to think of much more than knocking-off time and how quickly you could get your gloves back on after blowing your nose. On the roads, standing boot-deep in the spring mud of the sewerpipe trench, everyone was in too sullen a temper to try to compete with the clatter of the excavators.

Most evenings he went to the same café and ate the same food.

‘The same, dear?’

‘Ta.’ He sat by the fly-trap curtain in the window and
looked as if he was reading the paper. Sometimes people came and sat at the table without noticing him. Sometimes they asked for the sugar or the thick sauce.

‘Live round here?’

‘Darley Road.’

‘Working?’

‘Not this week.’

‘What’s the treacle tart like?’

‘All right.’

‘The trouble with these people down here, they make it with golden syrup. Now where I come from, where they understand good food, it’s got to be black treacle, or they’d get it thrown back in their face.’

Tim listened, sketching the pattern of the formica with his finger-nail. If you listened to a man, he went away thinking he had had a conversation. But a girl … It was not true that a girl only wanted to talk about herself, whether you listened or not. If you could not even answer a question like, ‘All on your own?’ she stared and giggled and said to her friend (they were always in packs), ‘What’s the matter with him?’ as if you were a personal affront.

In his room, in the toppling terraced house where he lived half underground with the weight of a dozen or more people on his head, he listened to the beat of ground-floor transistors and thought of storming up into the night streets and doing some abomination, some unimaginable thing to a girl.

‘You’re mad,’ Frank said. ‘You don’t want to be afraid of them. They’re screaming for it.’

A lot of them looked as if they were. In the streets, on the buses, strutting in and out of the shops, they moved as if they were naked, except that they had a few clothes on. There was a smell of sex all over the place. The town ought to spray.

‘Screaming for it,’ Frank said. ‘A lot of them won’t drink or smoke, mind, but you’re always safe if you offer them the other.’

But they look through me as if I wasn’t there.

Even if Tim had been able to tell him that, Frank would not believe it. Frank believed there was only place a girl looked.

Frank was a lorry driver running to fat before thirty, with all his small features crowded into the middle of his face, as if it was warmer there. He drove for the paper mill, and he had a room half-way up the house in Darley Road, having left his wife, or she him. The others in the house — white, black, brown, men, women, pigs — were in twos or threes or more. When Frank came back from the Carlisle run, doped with the road, he occasionally talked to Tim, because everyone else was feeding children or making children or stretched out on the bottom rung of their spine, eating pies made of stewed mongrel dog and watching television.

The night that Tim saw the poster, Frank had come back from Nottingham with energy to burn and a couple of free passes for a dance hall in the South End that a man had given him in a lorry park in exchange for a packet of cigarettes.

Tim shook his head.

‘Come on,’ Frank said. ‘Do you good, a young chap like you, hanging about with a face like a drain. What’s the matter — you never been out dancing?’

‘Yes, I have.’

A bristly girl like a boar who washed lettuces at one of the hotels where he worked had once asked him to go with her, and then not turned up. Tim had hung about outside the hall for a while with his hands in his pockets, pretending to be taking a door count. Then he had waved and grinned and raised his eyebrows at nobody in the distance. Then he had gone away. He did not go back to the hotel kitchen any more, so he never knew whether the girl turned up or not.