The Listeners (40 page)

Sarah’s car was sporty and red, with the top down. She tied him in and away they went, leaving Saint Barnabas far behind, leaving Butterfields, leaving the river, flying away from all the people who went about their business as if this was only an ordinary day. They drove along by
the sea with their hair on end, and people in other cars waved to them, the young ones. Sarah and Jackie waved back.

She showed him the hotel which belonged to her husband.

‘We ha’ ‘unch there?’ he asked.

She laughed. ‘Dreams. We’re going home to my house and we’ll have bacon and eggs and fried bread and fried tomatoes.’

‘And beer,’ Jackie said. He was not allowed beer.

She lived in a little house on a hill not much wider than the staircase that led up to Jackie’s flat above the shoe repair shop. They went into her kitchen and he sat and drank beer out of a gold can, while she fried a tremendous panful of all the things his mother said were bad for his gall bladder. Afterwards she took him into the small shed at the back where she made pots and bowls and vases to put flowers in.

The clay was marvellous to handle. She let him mould up a bowl, rolling a long smooth snake and winding it round. His hands trembled with love for it as he worked.

‘I’ll get it fired and then you can come back and glaze it with a colour and give it to your mother.’

Bugger that, Jackie thought, but he nodded and grinned, because he was too excited to bother with words.

‘Do you think she’ll let you come again? I’d love to work with you, show you how to make things. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Jackie? You could be good at that.’ She was as pleased as he was.

When it was time to go home, he asked if they could go on the pier. He was not allowed to go on the pier because of the crude-a element. They went on the pier and he spent three shillings playing the machines. They went to the little zoo because Jackie was not allowed to go to the zoo. He stood for quite a while making faces at the monkeys, but Sarah did not like it, so they went on a bit and when they got to the shops, there was a car pulling out to make a space for them. Sarah parked the red car and they went into Woolworth’s to buy a comb for
Jackie, so that Muh would not know he had lost his own down a crack between the boards of the pier.

Inside the shop, while Sarah wandered, looking at all sorts of things except combs, Jackie found a few things that he could give to her in exchange for the lunch and the pots and the pier and the zoo.

Sarah paid for the comb, and they were crossing the pavement to the car when the man spoke to them.

‘Excuse me, Miss.’

She turned, thinking she had left something in the shop, or been given the wrong change.

‘I’d like you to come to the manager’s office for a minute.’

‘What for?’ They were standing in the middle of the crowded pavement, like a stone in a stream, with the flow of people parting round them and coming together again.

The man coughed into his hand. ‘It’s about the young gentleman.’

‘What’s he done?’ Jackie was smiling beside her, stretching his upper lip like a frog.

‘If you’d just step upstairs to the office.’

‘What’s he supposed to have
done?’

‘He was seen, you see, Miss. No fuss. We don’t want any fuss. If you’ll just step up to the office and we’ll see what he has, the whole matter can be straightened out with no fuss at all, no unpleasantness. It’s up to you, Miss.’

‘Did you take something, Jackie?’

‘Yeh.’ He put a hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out a posy of artificial flowers. The trouser pocket was smaller, and he had difficulty fishing about in it with his large hand. He brought out string, pebbles, chewing gum, a golf-tee, a few small nails, sticky pennies. With his other hand under the pocket, he twisted and contorted his long legs to find what he had for Sarah.

Between them, she and the man got him up to the office. The manager was quite friendly and human, but humanly suspicious. He thought that Sarah was using Jackie to steal for her.

‘But no – no!’ She was almost in tears. ‘Look what he took. It was nothing – just little things.’

‘They often start small. Your husband? All right, I don’t mind you phoning him as long as it’s a local call.’

It was hard to tell Brian. She thought he would swear and rage, but he understood quickly. He was not angry. He sounded – almost pleased. Pleased she needed his help.

‘Come and help me.’

‘Darling, I
can’t.
I want to, but I can’t. I’m alone on the desk. Oh God, this is torture. I love you, my darling.’

‘I love you too. Please talk to the manager.’

‘All right. Yes. Of course.’ He put on a deeper, responsible voice.

‘I see,’ the manager said. ‘I understand ... Yes, I’ll tell her.’ He put down the telephone and told Sarah, ‘He wants you to ring his solicitor if we decide to take this further.’

‘Are you going to call the police?’

On the manager’s desk were the flowers, a tiny jar of cream rouge, a bar of chocolate, a loop of red ribbon, some packets of gum which might or might not have been taken today. Jackie was frowning and fidgeting, his brows working, his mouth and tongue fighting each other.

‘We can’t have this sort of thing going on. The young man should not be in a shop without supervision. He should have some treatment, you know.’

‘Oh, look, he’s – I mean, Look at him. You can’t—’

‘Stealing is stealing, Mrs King.’

He played with them a little while longer, until he had them both on the edge of tears, Jackie not quite knowing why, his eyes filling because Sarah’s were filling. In the end, he let them go. He had meant to all along.

Sarah took Jackie home. He did not speak. He closed his eyes and sagged into his seat belt like a dummy, as if the episode had totally sapped him.

They went through the shoe shop. Some relation of Jackie’s greeted them breezily, slapping him on the back hard enough to make him stumble and choke. His father was in the workshop, running a battery of machines. He
saluted as Jackie walked through, slumped like an ape man. His mother was upstairs. Sarah had to tell her.

‘It was my fault.’ she said. ‘I should have kept him with me.’

The mother, on her own ground, with no Harriet to strive against, was surprisingly relaxed. She took Jackie to his room for a nap. ‘Cheer up, old man,’ she said, ‘don’t look so blue. Nobody’s angry with you.’

That was not why he was sad. ‘They too’ away my hings for Sair.’

‘Yes, yes, it’s all right,’ the mother said, not hearing, as she led him away.

‘I’m really sorry,’ Sarah said when she came back. ‘I wanted it all to go so well.’

‘We can’t always get what we want,’ Jackie’s mother said tritely, but with feeling. She made tea and they talked about Jackie and how she had had to leave College when she found that she was going to have him.

To get married? She allowed Sarah to believe that if she liked.

‘If I had known what he was going to be .. .’

She would have got rid of him and not had to marry?

The other son Malcom was in and out, pestering. When was supper? Where were his plaid socks, his compass, his pocket money? What was wrong with old Jack? Could he go down to the playground and look for Terry?

‘You must be proud of Malcom,’ Sarah said. ‘He’s so bright and quick.’

‘He’s adopted.’ She said it like a denial. ‘I wouldn’t risk another child. We adopted Malcom when Jack was nine. He said to me once, “Wasn’t I enough?” Droll, wasn’t it? He doesn’t understand, of course, about the adoption. He doesn’t know. Nor does Malcom.’

‘Aren’t you going to tell him?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘His parents were – well, I don’t want to talk about that. I wouldn’t want him ever to have to know that he was not-a my child.’

THE WARDEN of the Reception Centre did not telephone Victoria. She had not expected him to, whether old Michael went back there or not. She collected some socks and handkerchiefs and some cigarettes and soft sweets and went up to the Spike on flagg’s Hill, because the old man was on her mind.

‘Oh yes, he came back.’ the Warden said. ‘I told you he would.’

‘You told me you’d let me know.’

‘Ah no.’ He wagged a fat red finger close to her nose. ‘You told me to let you know. There’s that difference.’

Michael had gone to the post office to draw his pension. It was evening. ‘The post office must have closed long ago.’

‘It takes him a long time to get back.’

Victoria went to meet him. She walked through side streets where the town’s unfortunates were supposed to think themselves fortunate to live twenty in a house, three or four in one room. It was a warm night. Children out on the steps, women leaning incuriously out of ground-floor windows, groups of boys on corners ready for trouble, if not looking for it. At a cross roads she paused, and looked along the streets, not knowing which way the old man would choose to creep on his ruined feet.

‘Lost something?’ A boy with long side whiskers like a chinstrap leaned in the doorway of a guitar shop.

‘I’m looking for one of the old men from the Reception Centre. He’s very lame. Have you—?’

The boy hawked and spat. His eyes did not follow her as
she crossed the road. She walked past a dump yard, partly fenced with old doors. Through a broken door, she could see someone moving about in the dark yard, boys jumping round like cats, something on the ground, a boy running from the alley at the far end of the yard with a can.

Without thought she pushed the broken door hard. It split and fell and she ran in, stumbling over the broken ground, stones and bits of iron, calling out something, she did not know what it was, just a noise.

The old man was lying with his face on the stony ground, his arms spread and his feet turned at a strange angle. He looked as if he were dead. The boy was pouring petrol over him. Victoria crashed forward, shouting. A stone flew at her head. Her skull exploded in a thunderclap of pain and she fell, still shouting, screaming at the boys, but they were running away.

She was in a small quiet room, bare and shadowed like a cell. A nun sat by the window, sewing.

‘How can you sew in that light?’

The nun got up and came over, ‘You’re awake, that’s good. How do you feel?’

‘Is my skull broken?’

‘A very bad concussion. It was lucky for you and the old man that someone heard you shouting.’

She lay hardly moving, wandering in and out of sleep. White nuns came in and out and gave her drink and food and said kind boring things. More life was going on in her dreams than in the room.

In a dream, a man wandered into the Samaritan Centre. He had thick tawny hair and a strong sweet face which thinking had made sad, a coarse blue shirt with missing buttons.

He said, ‘I am the angel of God, and you are my messengers.’

She was waking as he said that. When she was awake, she thought that Peter had said, ‘I am the
agent
of God.’

‘I am the agent of God, and you are my messengers.’

Billie found out where Morna was. She was living with this Phil, you wouldn’t credit it, but that was what she was doing.

This Phil made his living buying up property that was to be condemned, filling it with desperate coloured families, and then not being available when the roof fell in or the tenants were turned out. He lived in various places and under various names. Billie had first met him as Phil at a bungalow party in the good old days when she and Morna went everywhere as a couple. He was a burly, curly fellow with coathanger shoulders and a quick way of moving, and women’s hair spray all over his wiry head. He was said to have been a boxer, but in Billie’s and Morna’s estimation, that first time they had met him, the nearest he had ever got to the prize ring was in the corner with a bucket and sponge.

And now, she ... she ... Phil and she were in that crummy bungalow with the brass bells that rang in the draught and the carpet damp enough to cultivate mushrooms. After weeks of ringing Morna’s old place and finally going round there and being repulsed by a homicidal Syrian, Billie had met her by chance on the street.

‘Morna!’ The fair bubbly head was bobbing in front of her like a star among the walking mortals. Pushing past people, Billie pounded after her.

‘What do you want?’ Morna did not even have to turn round to see who had clutched her.

‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’

‘What for? I owe you money?’

‘Morna – look baby, meet me this evening. I’ve got to go to work now. Meet me outside the Odeon. It’s
True Grit:

‘I’ve seen it.’

‘You can’t have. It’s only just on.’

‘I saw it in London.’

‘Who with?’

‘With Phil.’

So it was true. Billie dropped her hand from Morna’s arm and dropped back among the walking people, staring, craning and staring until the babydoll head could no longer be seen.

Somehow she dragged herself through that day’s work, and the next, and the next. She moved like a drugged person along the cafeteria counter, ladling out food without even seeing it, answering quips automatically, good old Bill, her green bow stuck somewhere in her stiff hair and her heart an aching deadweight too heavy to carry about much longer.

She would not ring Victoria. What could Victoria do? Or care. She had heard enough of Billie’s saga. You wouldn’t blame her if she was glad that it was over.

On the fourth day, a voice came to her in the ladies’ room behind the kitchen, which smelled as bad as some of the food they put out.

‘Get out there and fight,’ said the voice. ‘Do something.’

It was a long journey out to where the colony of bungalows and caravans and tenting sites squatted on the flat foggy land at the far side of the estuary. There was only a chance that they would be there, but, ‘Do something’, the voice had said, and this was the only thing to do.

She got off the bus and walked down a long straight road to the water, lined with identical coloured boxes, each one of which looked like the one where she and Morna had gone in Ray’s car and met this Phil. She remembered that the bungalow was painted in whitish yellow, because someone had said, ‘The colour of pus’, and there was a plaster gnome on the edge of a tiny dry pool. Someone had knocked off his head with a bottle.