The Listeners (6 page)

He ran upstairs and knocked on the door again. When there was no answer, he began to beat on the door with his fist and shout.

‘Frank! Frank, let me in!’ A door across the passage opened and an unseen person threw a shoe at him as if he were a cat, and banged the door.

Tim went down to the little lavatory place under the stairs. He ran water into the dirty glass and drank, staring at himself in the mirror over the corner basin. There’s a nice looking boy, who is he? Oh, don’t you know, that’s Tim Shaw. No, I don’t know. Holding the glass, he put the tip of his fourth finger against the artery of his left wrist. He could not find the pulse, so he turned over his hand and let it hang slack, counting the gentle thread of his heart.

If you are at the end of your tether.
Watching his
aghast face, he broke the glass in the basin and drew the sharp edge deeply across his wrist. Blood sprang out before the pain. He looked down and saw it, welling into the basin as if his soul was emptying away. With a sob, he pulled the towel off the hook, wrapped it round his arm and ran out of the little place, down the hall, out of the front door and down the steps to the street.

Will I die — will I die? He thought of all the people in the house surging down under the stairs and shouting round. They would be horrified, disgusted, blood all over the place — get the police. Holding the towel round his arm, feeling the blood beginning to soak through on to his right hand, he was running down the echoing street towards the main road, running for his life.

The telephone clamoured in Victoria’s ear. She grabbed it and spoke before she was awake enough to think.

‘It’s done ... I’ve done ...’

‘What is it?’ Victoria sat up. Helen woke and got quickly off the bunk.

‘I’m going to die.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Help me. It’s all blood …’

‘Where are you?’

‘In a phone box.’

‘Where?’

‘Near where I live. I ran out. I can’t stop the blood.’

‘Where?’

‘Near the waterworks — Flagg’s Hill. Oh, come and help me, I can’t—’

‘Stay there. Stay where you are. I’ll try and get help. Hang on,’ she said, ‘hang on, it’s all right.’ But there was a clattering noise, and then nothing more.

Paul woke, and reached for the telephone without turning on the light.

‘Near the waterworks on Flagg’s Hill.’ Helen told him. ‘Victoria thinks he may have collapsed. He dropped the phone. She’s hanging on in case.’

‘Suicide attempt, is it?’

‘Looks like it. Peter thinks I should call an ambulance.’

‘All right. Then try and trace the call in case I can’t find him.’

He got out of bed, quickly into some clothes and out of the flat without waking Alice, buried in sheets and pillows. Downstairs, he ran through the hall and out of the side door to the yard in the middle of the buildings. He got into his car and drove towards the north, weaving through the first traffic that was beginning to drag the cold grey streets to life.

Near the top of Flagg’s Hill, the old brown brick water tower rose crenellated above the labyrinth streets. Around it, a high sooty wall bristled with spikes like a tiger’s cage, befouled by dogs and artists of the obscene chalk stub. On the corner of a small street behind the wall, Paul found the ambulance waiting by a telephone box outside a public house. There was some blood on the floor and smeared across the coin box and the glass of the door. One of the ambulance men was on the telephone talking to Victoria.

‘Yes, he’s here now. All right, miss ... well, we may do. All right?’ He came out of the box, looking at the ground. ‘I found the phone hanging where he’d dropped it,’ he told Paul. ‘You’d think we could trace him by the blood. There’s some here, look, by the wall.’ He brightened up. ‘At least it’s not another practical joker. Now where?’ He cast about on the pavement as if he were divining water. ‘Must have found some way to stop it, or someone came by, more like, and helped him.’

‘We’ve got to find him.’

‘Probably already on his way to hospital.’ The ambulance man shrugged.

‘I’m going to have a look round,’ Paul said. ‘Will you stay here?’

‘Not all morning.’ He was an ungracious man, with a cold eye and a defensive way of speaking, on guard against public effrontery. His mate, more rubicund, his uniform less sharply fitted, was at the side of the public
house, talking to a man with a raincoat over pyjamas who kept a hand on the edge of the door as if ready to slam it. At a window above, a netted woman looked out, chewing on her gums.

‘I told you — nothing,’ the man was saying. ‘I’d have known if there was any trouble. I know everything that goes on round here. Blood in the phone box — that’s nothing to wake people up for. Always cutting each other up, they are in these parts.’ He shut the door. The woman kept the window open until Paul and the ambulance men, searching the ground, moved out of her sight.

‘Better not be another false alarm,’ the defensive man said. ‘I was out last week to a chap who was supposed to have taken thirty nembutal, and found him in bed with his landlady. Gives your lot a bad name.’

‘I don’t think so.’ Paul disliked him on sight. ‘I think it’s the other way around.’

‘Suit yourself.’ The man did not like Paul either. ‘Ten minutes, Jim,’ he said to his mate, ‘and that’s it.’

He went down a passageway behind the public house. The rubicund man crossed the rood, and Paul went down the hill, looking in shop doorways, trying side gates, scouting the yard outside a garage. At the corner, there was blood again. Behind a broken wall, on a demolition site strewn with bottles and rubbish, he found the boy, his white ghost face half in the mud, his left arm bundled in a denim jacket wet and sticky with blood. Paul knelt down to him and shouted. The red-cheeked ambulance man came running, the other more slowly, with a face that had seen everything.

The morning shift of Samaritans had arrived. In the bunk room, Victoria had changed into a dress, and was trying to make something out of her face in a two-inch square of mirror propped on the bookcase. Long greenish eyes that looked sleepy until half-way through the morning, her grandmother’s nose, which had been the only classy thing about her, a pale mouth that looked sad if she caught its reflection unawares.

‘You look as if you knew this had to end,’ Sam had once said. ‘Do you?’

‘No.’

But she did. They had both known. Sometimes now when she caught herself looking sad in a shop window or in a mirror at the turn of the cinema staircase, she noted: There is a woman who has lost her love.

Andrew, who was a student at the University, put his shaggy head round the door. ‘Someone called Billie wants to know if you’re still here. Are you?’

‘Oh yes.’ She had untied the green scarf and she went downstairs with her hair hanging round her shoulders. ‘How are you, Billie?’

‘How do you expect?’

‘Didn’t you sleep?’

‘Yeah, but there’s such a thing as a hangover, dear heart.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘Serves me right.’

‘Are you going to the cafeteria?’

‘After a night like that? Hell, no. I’ll tell you something, Victoria. I had a full bottle of aspirin in the drawer by my bed.’

‘So have lots of people.’

‘You know what’s very annoying about you? You won’t get excited. I was going to take the lot.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t.’

Billie’s jeer, a noise between expectoration and vomit.

‘I’ll be here on Sunday. Why don’t you come in and have a chat?’

‘Might. Might not. I’ll see what — you know — what develops.’

‘Good luck.’

‘Ta.’

Victoria went back to the mirror on the bookcase.

‘Why bother?’ Helen came in with her coat on. ‘Aren’t you going home?’

‘I’m going to get some breakfast and then go to work.’

‘No sleep?’

‘It’s press day.’

‘You told me you needn’t go to the paper this morning. Why?’

‘Oh — I don’t know.’ Victoria told quite a lot of lies, sometimes to fend off solicitude.

‘If you’d told me, I wouldn’t have asked if you could do the extra night duty,’ Helen said.

‘I know.’ Victoria gathered up her long sandy red hair and began to wind it smoothly round her tired head. ‘That’s why I didn’t.’

‘Yes. I see.’

They felt easy and honest together after their shared night. To work as a Samaritan was an intensification of the focus of living, direct and clear. You knew what you had to do. You knew why you were there. Could even sometimes begin to grope towards an idea of who you were, as the pretence and defences fell away before the urgent truth of human contact.

Paul stayed at the hospital until the boy’s arm had been sewn up. He had severed a tendon, and they put the arm in plaster to the elbow. A splint was bandaged to the other arm where the needle of the blood-drip went in. After they had taken him up to the ward, Paul waited outside until a staff nurse with a waist girthed in between bosom and swinging hips came out and headed for the kitchen, mouth working importantly.

‘The boy with the wrist — could I see him for a moment before I go?’

‘In the middle of my bedpan round? You must be mad.’ She went into the kitchen and poured tea out of a great metal pot that stood stewing on the stove.

Paul wanted to ask, ‘Can I have a cup?’ but she had her back turned, looking out of the window in a sudden daydream, the calm eye of her storm of early morning activity. Through the glass of the ward door, Paul could see nurses panting round with shrouded bedpans. A few patients shuffled about in dressing-gowns collecting bottles from old men who drew them brimming forth
from under the bedclothes where they had secreted them all night. By the far wall, the boy lay on his back under the drip bottle, his suffused face turned to one side, his arms stretched stiffly out beside him.

‘Tell him I’ll come back this evening,’ Paul said, as the staff nurse headed out of the kitchen again and through the ward door, twitching the curtain all the way across the glass to stop him looking.

IT WAS A TOWN that had everything. Old, new middling architecture, pleasing to the eye, unremarkable, appalling. Shops, factories, seafront, slums, University. A satellite New Town full of disoriented families who would not think of it as home until the next generation. Floodable bungalows along the estuary where people pottered through the end of their lives. Esplanade hotels where ditto, but more lavishly.

Peter Wallace, Samaritan number 100, who was the Director of the branch in this town, lived at the unfashionable end of the seafront, disguised as the proprietor of a small, comfortable hotel where families came back year after year and found their odd lost sandal still at the back of the cupboard. They knew that he worked somewhere else, since his wife seemed to run the hotel and he was not much seen in the daytime. They knew that he had an attractive, reassuring way of making you feel that the hotel was for you, instead of you and your cash for it. They knew that he and their children enjoyed each other, that his wife sang in the kitchen and that they somehow kept staff year after year. They did not know that he had studied for the priesthood until he saw that his ministry must be larger than the church. They did not know about the Samaritans, unless they happened to ask.

Beyond the Wallaces’ Baytree Hotel, at the mouth of the small sluggish river was a pier, and a clutch of bothies where you could drink and dance and see a film with whips and snarling women, eat batter with a little acid fish inside, feed money into machines with flashing lights and belting music, and wander past bland wax figures of
Princess Anne and Mao Tse-tung and Lyndon Johnson (Nixon not yet ready).

On the other side of the river was the New Town, name of Butterfields, not a cow in sight, spreading like a brick psoriasis over the downs and meadows. It boasted an elementary school, and a big comprehensive school where older children could learn anything from computer programming to fitting pipe-joints. In the comprehensive school, Paul Hammond, Samaritan number 401, was in the English department, not its head nor ever would be with that public-school-housemaster background, although the staff were willing to condone it, since he had had the sense to get out.

Most of the Butterfields children could walk or bicycle to school, as their parents could walk or bicycle to the factory estate where great names of industry were taking root, company flags flying, storm-driven sea-gulls beating round the plate glass towers and concrete chimneys. It was in one of these shining towers that Mrs Barbara Frost had cooked lunch for Paul and the directors of Unitech Electronics. It was in the vaunted Butterfields shopping centre, where you could stroll without getting yourself or your pram run over, and chill sea winds swept through the holes in the pseudo-Moore statuary, that Jackie’s parents plied their trade in leather and plastic and Jackie did his Wile-U-Wate heels in the back workroom.

Out to the west on the other side of this great conglomerate town, the richer people, who had moved away from its terraced streets as the town grew too crowded, had turned the outlying villages into suburbs. In the twenties and thirties, they had built timbered granges and brick mansions and stucco villas with red tiles in the back hall and a room with wicker furniture for the maids. They had set out lawns and borders and tennis courts and blue-grey conifers, and roses which they had to prune themselves now that all the old men of earthy aphorisms had been killed off by Welfare.

In one of the half-timbered manor houses, with feather designs stamped in the plaster and unnecessarily latticed
windows which she only cleaned when no one could see out any more, Helen, Samaritan number 434, lived with her fatherless children in a flat behind the kitchen and sustained a mutual love-hate existence with her employers.

The tall terraced houses in the Victorian part of the town were now mostly cut up into flats and government bureaux and day nurseries and clinics and offices where social workers kept a one-bar electric fire under the desk, the heat not quite reaching the visitor’s chair. On the edge of these streets, strategically placed to catch those who fell through the holes in the passionless sieve of bureaucracy, the Samaritan Centre offered unconditional welcome. You did not have to fill in a form. You did not have to categorize your problems. You did not have to have a problem at all if what you wanted was to sit and be at rest in the comfortable warm room which ran from the jungle of the front garden to the wilderness at the back, and had once been the vicar’s parlour, with a paper fan in the fireplace and brown paper to keep the sun off the carpet.