The Listeners (31 page)

On H there was only one knob, and it was stiff. Tim tried it both ways. He wrenched at it, hurting his bad finger, and let out a wail. A hand came from behind and lifted his hand off the knob and turned him round.

‘You’ll be able to go out soon, Tim,’ the strange man said, the man who had stolen him from Mr Gilbert. ‘Come and sit down and I’ll find you a book.’

It’s locked, isn’t it? Tim did not need to ask it. He had not spoken to anyone since they brought him to Ward H. They would not get a word out of him, even under torture. Even if Dr Marjorie spent all day and all night with her ‘Like to have a bit of a chat?’

It was not until the next day that he found out where the telephone was. He heard someone talking, gabbing away to himself, nothing odd in that. Nobby did it all the time. When Tim went round the corner to see if it was Nobby come to keep him company, he found a very short elderly man standing on his toes to speak into a telephone on the wall, his free hand gesturing elaborately, talking in some foreign language, or some sort of Nobby language, whatever it was, it made no sense.

Tim walked on casually. Later when everyone was at tea, he got up and made as if to go to his locker, then
doubled back through a side passage and round past the baths to the visitors’ room where the telephone was. He knew a thing or two, you see. They did not reckon with Tim Shaw.

‘I want to speak to Paul.’ It was the first time he had used his voice for two days. It was weak and cramped, like a leg too long in one position. ‘Paul, 401. It’s Tim. He’ll know. Tell him ... tell him ...’

Outside the room, rubber soles squeaked on the linoleum. They were coming for him. ‘Tell him to come,’ he gasped. ‘Tell him I—’

He crashed the receiver back on the hook as the rubber footsteps paused outside the door. Panting, he flattened himself against the wall, his heart like a piston. The footsteps squeaked on, grew faint, a door banged.

He went to sit in the main corridor. He sat on the floor with his book jammed against the wall and watched the single knob of the door. He sat there for hours. One or two people tried to persuade him to move, but it was like trying to get periwinkles off the rocks.

A key turned in the door. An arm in a white coat opened it, jangling more keys, and Paul came in. He always looked larger than ever at Highfield. In this place where people either scurried or crept like moles, Paul’s shoulders were wider, and he stood straighter and moved more deliberately.

‘Hullo, Tim.’ If he had said, ‘What on earth are you doing there?’ Tim would have stayed on the floor. He did not say it, so Tim got up and they went into the visitors’ room and had a bit of a smoke, and after a while Paul said, ‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘I had a word with that lady doctor. She was a bit vague.’

‘What did she tell you?’ If Tim could find out just what had happened, he would know what to say.

‘Only that there was an accident in the carpentry shop. One of your mates got hurt, wasn’t that it?’

The chisel slipped and Mr Podgorsky got chopped.

‘Tried it on again, eh?
Arthur Callaghan said, his mouth like slugs, like snails without shells.

‘It wasn’t my fault.’ Tim said. His eyes blanked, and all of a sudden, clear pictures moved into his brain like slides. He saw Mr Podgorsky’s fingers splayed and waiting. He saw again the colours of his sick flashing rage, and doubled up, clutching himself.

Paul stayed with Tim for a long time. The boy would not let him go. He clung to him, wept, fell into a dumb depression, staring blankly at the floor, got up once and beat his head feebly against the wall. One of the few coherent things that came through was his fear of being sent away from Highfield.

‘We talked about his discharge, last time I was here,’ Paul told the staff nurse, after Tim had been given a sedative and put to bed. ‘Could that—’

‘It’s possible.’ The nurse had been down for his supper. Remnants of it were eluding his tongue. ‘Sometimes when they’ve been on this closed ward, I’ve even known them to do a violence so as to be put back in. Safe, you see. Gets too institutionalized, a boy like young Shaw.’

How do you get him back into the world? Paul felt depressed and discouraged. Tim seemed to have slipped back a long way.

It was late. He would be late to fetch Alice. She would be late for the South End A.A. meeting. She would have to go into a crowded hall after the meeting had started, and it would panic her.

He stopped at a garage to telephone.

‘Don’t bother,’ Alice said. ‘Don’t bother to come home. I’m not going to the damned meeting.’

‘You must. It won’t matter, the others can talk first. I’ll be there in half an hour. Be ready and we’ll go right away.’

‘I am ready.’ She laughed that hoarse nicotine laugh, and then Paul realized.

Punishing his small car, taking chances, he drove home as fast as he could, and left the car in a forbidden place,
its end sticking out into the traffic. The lift was stuck with the doors open on the top floor. He ran up the stairs, seeing himself collapse there, turn blue. ‘Heart,’ they would say as they turned him over. ‘What a wonderful way to go.’

His unsteady hands fumbled with the key. He crashed in, shouting. Alice was sitting calmly at the kitchen table with a bottle and a glass, quite civilized, quite ladylike in the oatmeal dress (’the colour of sick - so suitable’) she often wore to A.A. meetings.

‘For God’s
sake
- after all you’ve been through! How can you be such a damn fool?’ He was furious with her. He smashed her glass into the sink, took the bottle and poured the whisky on the broken glass.

Alice half rose to get at the cupboard, but he pushed her back into her chair.

‘I’m through with you. All the chances you’ve had, and you chuck the whole bloody thing away—’ He shouted at her, chanting abuse as if he were speaking dialogue in a play.

‘That makes us even then,’ Alice said rather gleefully. ‘I’m really glad I found out about your fancy lady. It would have been too sad to have missed such a watertight excuse to have a drink. Though I’ve thought for some time you must have someone. I mean, you’d be pretty silly if you didn’t, all things considered, but it’s a pity she was lying on your shirt-tail tonight. It’s bad luck on Jane.’

‘I went to Highfield to see Tim.’

‘I mean, I didn’t mind. I didn’t really want to speak at the meeting, but it’s a bit hard on poor old Jane. Eight years sober, and St Paul lets her down. Who, as they say, is she?’

‘God, this is ironical, Alice, I was at Highfield, I told you. Tim Shaw is in trouble. I had to go to him.’

‘Don’t lie, you fake Samaritan.’

‘Call the Samaritan Centre. Ask someone to look in the log book and see if Tim rang for me.’

‘That would give them a laugh, wouldn’t it? Poor old
sozzled Mrs Hammond, checking up on the old man.’

Look – Alice, I’ll make coffee. We can still get to the meeting. You’ll be all right.’

‘No thanks. I’d rather stay here.’ She got up and took another glass and a bottle of something from the cupboard under the sink.

Paul went to the telephone.

‘Want me to come round?’ Scott sounded very tired.

‘Not much good tonight. Perhaps tomorrow you could talk to her?’

‘I’ll try. It’s going to be tough, if I know Alice.’

‘She say’s it my fault.’

‘Oh, of course. It’s always someone else’s fault. God damn acoholics, they’ll do this every time,’ Scott said disgustedly, as if he were not one himself.

On a Saturday afternoon in spring, when Brian had gone cursing to the Front Royal to ‘wait on people who aren’t fit to wait on me,’ Sarah King was in the small panelled study at the Samaritan Centre, listening to Paul on the telephone.

‘Of course, Jim. Come up right away ... Bit of a sit, of course, as long as you like. Do you want to talk to someone? Yes, I’m sure he will. Don’t worry, Jim. Come on up. I’m glad you rang.’

He wrote in the log, ‘
Jim Baxter rang, distressed. Will come in for a sit and poss. talk to 100

‘Why is he distressed?’ Sarah asked.

‘He mucks about with young children. Got about twenty convictions, been in and out of mental hospitals, it’s hardly helped at all. He comes in here when he feels it coming on. Bit of a sit. You can go and chat to him when he comes in. He likes a new ear.’

‘What shall I say?’

‘He’ll do most of the saying. Don’t worry. I’ve heard you talking to clients. You’re doing very well.’

‘Am I? Am I really?’ She snapped at it like a dog biscuit.

‘What’s the matter, Sarah? Why are you so unsure?’

Paul looked very tired. When Sarah had first come like a magnetized sleepwalker up to Church Grove and this old stone house, Paul had seemed strong and wise and unassailable. Since then she saw him sometimes looking older than he was, his hair greyer, his face more deeply lined, his voice lower, his broad shoulders not stooped, but carrying some burden which he only set down when he turned with his slow smile to take up the burdens that were brought to the Samaritans.

When he asked her, ‘What’s the matter?’ Sarah wished that she could give him back the question.

‘I don’t think I’m unsure,’ she said, ‘Do I look it?’

‘Only if you feel it. People take each other at face value. That woman who went into the bank after the thief had locked up the staff, she saw him as a bank clerk because he was behind the grill. A client who comes in here sees you as a Samaritan, existing just for him. Your funny chopped hair and the nothing skirt and that damn dangly thing my mother used to swing like a lasso in the Twenties. You are there for him.’

‘I always feel he thinks, “What’s
she
doing here? I came for help.”’

‘So he sees you as someone who can help.’

She got up restlessly and went to the window, moving the curtain. Nothing in the road beyond the brick wall. In the garden, the lush green weeds that had devoured the vicar’s lawn steamed in the surprising sun.

‘Brian calls it playing angels, coming up here, a dropout from reality. I go home excited, wanting to tell him what happened, but he wants to tell me about Colonel Sebastian and the Spanish waiter, and I think
that’s
unreal.’

‘Do you fight?’

‘Sometimes. No, not really. That’s unreal too We throw things carefully. He shouts. I cry. As if it were expected of us.’ She came back to sit opposite him. ‘Do you fight with your wife?’ She felt secure enough with Paul to ask it.

He laughed instead of answering, and then said,
‘You’ll find out that being a Samaritan here doesn’t make you one at home.’

‘It ought to.‘

He shook his head. Rachel, number 350, pearls and aqua cardigan and undulated dated hair, came in with a bottle and a cloth.

‘My weekly sanitizing.’ She wiped round the mouthpiece of the telephone. ‘This phone must be loaded with germs. No wonder we all get colds. I do mine at home every day in the flu season.’

‘Do you get flu?’ You were supposed to give tolerance to the other Samaritans as well as the clients.

‘My Robin, you know,’ she perched a rubbery haunch on the desk to prattle to Paul, ‘I thought he would never pick up after last time. Cough - it would break your heart. He came back from school with a note. “Please, Mrs Drew, keep him away.’ But he’s so behind with his maths, it’s such a worry with exams coming up. He could pass them on his head, but he—’

4000 rang like a sharp rebuke. Paul picked it up at once, glad to cut Rachel off in mid-flight. A click, then nothing. The burr of the dialling tone. He wrote ‘Dud call’ in the log book.

‘—because you see,’ Rachel went on as if she had never stopped, ‘if he doesn’t pass enough subjects this year, he’ll miss his chance at Grenoble. And with my cousin so near ... I wish you could see her house. Last summer when I—’

Paul picked up the strident telephone, listened for a moment, and wrote again, ‘Dud call.’

SAMARITAN LOG BOOK. DAY DUTY.
15-30 Dud call. (Paul, 401.)
15.35 Dud call. (Paul, 401.)

When Gretchen had ironed the flax of her hair and gone out, Carrie heaved herself clumsily out of her bed nest and padded into the other room, narrowing her eyes to see, because her glasses were lost. The piece of furniture
they pretended was a settee still looked like Gretchen’s bed, unmade, magazines and underwear and toast crusts among the rumpled sheets. It was a two-roomed flat, with a bathroom on another floor and a niche across the passage to cook in, a cold tap on the half landing.

‘It’s a slum really,’ Gretchen told people. She was proud of it, in an irritating, unnecessary way. Her mother pronounced it ‘fascinating, atmospheric,’ jangling the jewellery she crafted out of bits of old cars. Carrie’s parents had never seen it. Her young brother had been there once on his way to a motorcycle rally, and been ordered not to tell.

Carrie was taking a teachers’ course. Gretchen, who was a Sociology student unfitted by temperament or desire for any kind of sociological career, had only asked her to share because she was no threat. They were both dislikeable girls. Gretchen was bossy and coarse, with tombstone teeth. Carrie was sullen, heavy-jawed, her major talent the giving of offence or taking it. When they had people in for spaghetti, or the sticky mass of rice which Gretchen said was paella, Gretchen made a lot of noise and ill-informed argument, while Carrie ‘The Carrier’ slouched round with coffee and some kind of wine which you could not get drunk on before you brought it up.

At home in the spiritual wastelands of Bucks, where her parents grew vegetables and various smaller livestock with edible flesh or products, she had always been called Caroline, with the O pronounced to rhyme with barrow. She had changed it to Carrie when she won the scholarship (’Were they
sorry
for her, or what?’ her brother marvelled) and escaped to the University. Gretchen’s name was not Gretchen. She had changed to that when she discovered how to make her hair this colour.

The water jug was empty. In her pyjamas, Carrie went barefoot down to the tap that dripped out of the wall into a stained metal basin like a urinal.

‘Not dressed yet?’ Mrs Mason was climbing the stairs with two loaded string-bags.