The Listeners (37 page)

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 was 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.

‘You shouldn’t treat the poor boy like that,’ a round woman like suet said. ‘That’s not very nice.’

‘Sick to death of it ... always some bloody loony ... have us all inside before we’re done ...’

Tim stood at the back of the van with the impatient women, listening to Ted without properly hearing. ‘Never you mind, dear,’ the pudding woman said. He did not mind. He liked to ride about the countryside, as he had when he used to drift round the Lincolnshire villages
with the subsize vegetables and hyacinth seconds. He liked to earn six pounds a week, and he liked to live at Diddlecot, where he had the room under the roof because he was the shortest, and could go out every night as long as Felicity agreed.

He did not mind Ted Dace. He was not afraid of him, as he was afraid of Larry, who had a chopper under his mattress and would one night have all their heads.

Tim told Mary Tolliver. She wagged her large head, which was said to have a plate in it the size of a florin piece, and said, ‘Don’t make up stories, Timmy. I turned that mattress yesterday.’ He told Miss Ogden, the Social Worker, and she made an excuse to come back after Larry had gone out to the pub, and sneaked upstairs like a thief.

‘No, Tim.’ She came down shaking her head. ‘You must have dreamed it.’ She looked embarrassed, as if she felt silly to have believed him.

Mary Tolliver and the old man were always quarrelling. She cooked a lot of mutton stew, because the meat was cheap and she was salting away some of the food money for her old age. The old man did not like mutton stew. He would come into the kitchen in his long underwear when he smelled the onions starting up, and he and Mary would hit each other with anything handy, spoons, the newspaper, a saucepan, a cushion, nothing hard enough to hurt. Thwack! Thud! You could hear them at it all over the little stucco house.

The old man should not be in Diddlecot, because the Highfield cottages were supposed to be for ex-patients who went out to work and could contribute towards the housekeeping. He had got a job as sweeper in the local box works, and as soon as they moved him into Diddlecot, he had officially retired. He cried if they talked of moving him out, because it would be back to the Gerry ward at Highfield, so Miss Ogden let him stay, with his pension and his foul tobacco and his cat which spent the day on the exact middle of the dining-room table, like a great white icing cake.

Tim was glad to find him and Mary always in the house, even when Ted Dace went on strike against the farthest farms and they fetched up early at the garage. It was like it must be to have a gran and a grandad nattering about the place and whacking each other and telling him, ‘You young lads don’t know the meaning of a day’s work.’

Every night after tea, or after washing up, if it was his turn, Tim put on his suit and walked the mile and a half to the road where the nursing home was. He picked a blade of grass and holding it between his hollowed thumbs, blew gently on it like the ghost of an owl.

Sometimes with no result. The light in Felicity’s back room would be out, which could mean she was working, or watching television downstairs. Sometimes the light was on, but the blind was down and it never moved. Sometimes the blind flew up and she flung up the window and leaned far out, reaching down with her arms as if she were going to hurl herself on to the laundry lines.

With Tim’s wealth, they could take a bus into the town and have something to eat, or go to the cinema, or go to the Town Hall if there was a dance or a concert on. Tim could not dance. He stood and shuffled in a corner, getting an erection while Felicity pranced and wiggled round him, throwing her body about in extraordinary ways as if her bones were put together backwards.

Sometimes they walked far out to the other end of the town for sentimental reasons, and tumbled about a bit in the back of the junk car. Once, she made him sit in the front, and compared him unfavourably with the gear lever. After that, he would not go to the old car with her any more.

Although he had some small power over her at times, when she begged him, ‘Do it, do it, I can’t stand it,’ behind the bushes of the cricket field, or in one of the punts pulled up on the river bank by the boathouse, he usually had to do what Felicity wanted. She was quite changeable. If he wanted to do it, and she didn’t, they didn’t do it. ‘I’ll have you up for assault,’ she hissed, ‘and they’ll
put you in the nick, Tim Shaw, and I’ll come and laugh at you through the bars and throw peanuts.’

Once, when she gave the same excuse three times running, he said, ‘I thought you didn’t see your monthlies,’ and she said, ‘Don’t talk dirty,’ and hit him hard across the face, wearing a sharp ring.

Being with Felicity was the thing he thought about all day as the mobile shop careened up and down the narrow lanes, or rolled among the new brick Council houses with an eye out for dogs and toddlers. Ted Dace talked about his wife a lot. Her name was Doreen and she was going to have a baby. That was why the stealing and trickery were so bitter, since Ted’s commission could mean the difference between this or that cot mattress, a play pen, a painted swing to hang in the doorway. He was always buying things for the baby. Tim and Felicity agreed that it would be a laugh if it was born dead.