The Listeners (7 page)

Above the Samaritans’ square stone rectory, Commercial Road deteriorated upward through the mazes of Flagg’s Hill. Half-way up was Darley Road, grim grey housing for the artisans of the early factories, now warrens where luckless families and loners like Tim and Frank paid four or five pounds a week for a peeling buggy room without heat or water.

On the flatland beyond Flagg’s Hill were the austerity flats built after the war and never improved, the ground trampled as hard as the cement yards where children shrieked and fought and bloodied their grey knees. Billie had a flat in Block C, a prison address for a prison building, the stairway open to the rain and snow, the lift stinking of urine and vomit, even when it worked.

On the mornings when she could face it, Billie put on her green cafeteria overall and hauled herself across the river to the other side of the valley where the University had kept part of that opposite hillside green, with a
park and playing fields that dropped in terraces to the river and the boathouses. Upriver, the raw orange brick of the hospital where they had taken Tim, belching forbidden smoke as if it had a gas oven instead of a mortuary. Downriver, the old factories, spewing forbidden ullage. Many were defunct, all their dirty windows broken, their yards piled with rusted junk. One of their old office buildings, condemned but not yet demolished, was the house run by some of the University students for derelicts like old Michael who drifted in and out of town, and sometimes died there, from crude spirits, or drugs, or pneumonia, or starvation, or simply because they stopped living.

Lower down towards the sea, the busy town-centre clustered on either side of the river, old and new unpat-terned, shops and offices and municipal buildings. On the second floor of an old structure that rocked perceptibly when the presses ran was the office of the bi-weekly local paper, where Victoria, Samaritan number 422, was receptionist and secretary to the editor.

Behind the
Courier
building, wandering like a colon through the main part of the town and somehow ignored by the planners who dreamed of their city resurrected clean and white, Marsh Lane still held the miasma of its name. It started with the suspect Station Hotel where no one would choose to stay because of the noise, and petered out in an abandoned coal yard off Commercial Road. Somewhere near the middle, where Marsh Lane crossed the main shopping street, old Michael could be found off and on hobbling along the gutter, yoked back and front with boards that hectored, ‘Repent Brethren, for the end of the world is tomorrow.’

There were three town bridges over the polluted river, two railway stations, cinemas, theatres, traffic jams twice a day, hundreds of places where you could drink or eat, and a famous little old seagoing village where chestnut trees grew out of uneven brick pavements and artists real and quasi set up easels in the leafy summer streets.

It was a town that had everything, although chunks of
it had nothing much. Singleton Court, where Paul and Alice Hammond had lived for the two years since he had been allowed the charitable chance to resign from the Cotswolds school, had not much to do with the town, the suburbs or the countryside, its flats designed with nothing much in mind but housing bodies. It was full of people like Alice who had nothing much to do but get through the day, and people like Paul who had not much choice but to survive their marriage, and hope for something better for their children.

‘Where have you been?’ When Paul went home for a shave, Alice was in the sitting-room, cutting her toe-nails on to the fireplace rug.

‘I left you a note.’

‘Can’t read.’

‘I was called out about five.’

‘Did somebody, as we say, “put an end to it all”?’

‘Almost. I think he’ll be all right. He lost a lot of blood.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know yet. I’ll try and talk to him this evening.’

Alice sighed. ‘Are you going to make some tea?’

When Paul came back with a cup for her, she was sitting hugging her knees, her bare feet yellow, the toes distorted by the pointed shoes she had continued to wear after they went out of style, because it met some neurotic need in her to walk painfully.

‘Darling.’ She was staring at the fire which glowed and flickered through logs whose metal mesh foundation was wearing through the painted bark. They had inherited it from the last tenant. ‘Darling, you know, now that the children are off my hands,’ (they were twenty and seventeen) ‘I ought to have some purpose in my life.’ She said this about once a week. ‘I might try the library, or get a job in a boutique. I’d like to take a course at the University. Sometimes I think I’ll join the Samaritans. Would you sponsor me?’

‘We don’t “sponsor” people. Either you are the right type and they take you, or you’re wrong and they don’t.’

‘I feel I could offer so much to people who were plumbing depths, because I’ve been there myself.’

‘You said that when we started in A.A.’

‘Oh, them. I’m not an alcoholic, that’s why it was no good. And I don’t like coffee in paper cups. And everyone being nice to each other, and jolly.’

‘And not being able to have a drink.’

‘Right, as usual. Darling,’ as Paul went to the door, ‘the tea is too hot. I can’t drink it.’ She was whining like her own daughter, a dozen years ago. ‘Get me a little short one, will you? Just to set me up.’

‘Help yourself.’ Paul went out yawning. Alice went into the kitchen, poured something, and had to be sick in the sink because Paul was shaving in the bathroom with the door locked.

‘One to bring up, the next to keep down,’ she chanted like a nursery rhyme, sitting red-eyed on a counter stool in the tiny kitchen, clutching a glass while Paul made toast and ate it quickly. When he went to get his jacket, she followed him and stood in the bedroom doorway, so that he had to move her aside to get out. Her shoulder under the torn frills of her birthday negligée (he should have bought something that was easier to wash) was a bony knob.

‘One day,’ she called after him when he was at the front door, ‘you’ll be killed in a car crash or stoned to death by the children, without kissing me goodbye.’

He came back to kiss her and she bent her head to rub the dry colourless hair under his chin.

‘I couldn’t have married anyone but you.’ She put a sob into her voice.

‘Have I made you happy?’

‘So very happy.’

Sometimes they played at being closely married, to disguise the possibility that under the misery and disgust and disappointment, they still might be.

Hungry and with a headache, a little sick from sleeplessness, Paul drove to work through the thick morning traffic in the little red car which was mutilated with
Alice’s dents and scratches. He crossed the river by Royal Bridge where he had sat and talked one night to a girl on the parapet, both of them dangling their legs over the black water. If you jumped in the river, it was said, you would be poisoned before you drowned.

Turning north where the older factories squatted under the hill that hid the University from the town, he skirted the new factory estate, and saw the electronics plant where he had lunched yesterday, the executive building landscaped with readymade grass and pools and little trees, the huge window of the dining-room flashing an acknowledgement back to the sun. If there was to be a big lunch with things that took a long time to cook, might Mrs Frost be in there already, her small diamonds on the back of the sink and flour in her wedding ring? If Paul were to turn into the car park and go up to that floor in the silently chuckling lift, she would make him a cup of coffee, and he would be late for his first class.

Another half-mile of wide white road brought him to the chainlink fence of Butterfields Comprehensive, a model modern school complex fantastically equipped and furnished for two thousand children. He parked his car, walked under the granite pillars that held up the gym, and pushed through the swinging doors whose original glass had been replaced by a sandwich of glass and wire netting. Feeling older than fifty, he went up to his classroom with his hand on the rail, while multitudes of boys and girls in mulberry uniforms and shoes that sounded like clogs surged past him up the stairs as if he were not there.

Mumbling and muttering, dropping heavily from stair to linoleum stair in his new leatherite walking shoes with simucrêpe soles, young Malcom sulked off to school from the flat over the shoe shop.

‘Bye!’ Jackie called from the top of the stairs, his toes on the edge like a diver; but Malcom would not turn round or answer. Jackie shut the door of the flat and shuffled back to his breakfast, clapping a spread hand
over the yawn that would make his mother say, ‘And-a no wonder. Play-acting downstairs with the phone half the night. Pick up your feet.’ His mother was at the sink, plunging plates into hot sudsy water almost before you had finished the last corner of fried bread. She never let the washing-up wait. She always left a shining sink, even if it meant opening the shop late or missing the start of the evening news.

‘Malcom don’t want go a school, Muh,’ Jackie chuckled.

‘Doesn’t want,’ Muh said. ‘He didn’t finish his homework last night, so he’ll have no one but himself to blame if he gets a wigging.’ She turned back to the sink. She was always careful to face Jackie when she talked to him, as if he was deaf.

Malcom was thirteen. He bicycled every morning from the shopping centre down Cherry Tree Avenue, up Holly Rise, round the long curve of Meadside and past the football grounds to Butterfield Comprehensive School. At four-thirty, he bicycled back, grubbier and more rumpled, was inquisitioned about marks and placings, and sat down to a brain-building tea of eggs or herrings, with vitamin complex stirred into his milk.

Malcom was clever. Malcom was in the ‘A’ stream. He read the newspaper and did electrical experiments on the end of a bench cleared off for him in the workshop. Malcom was clever. He got it from his mother, who had been to college for two years, never forgotten. He was nine years younger than Jackie. No need for Muh to say why she had waited so long for a second child. It was there in her neat pink face when she turned it from Malcom to Jackie.

But Malcom was not the only one going to school today. Jackie was going to school too. His mother belonged to the Association of Parents of Special Children, and Friday was her day to help at the Play School. Jackie was much too old to play, but he liked the music and the cheerful company, and he had learned how to take the little ones to the You-know-where. So Muh usually took him with her, leaving Miriam to take care of the shop,
and no instant heeling done that morning, unless Dad had time, which was unlikely, with the perpetual pile of soleing and stitching with which he never quite caught up. Butterfields was very hard on shoes. All the walking on pavements which had been made with some kind of hard sparkling stone in them. Very good business for
some
people, the customers joked, drawing shoes from among the boxes of soapflakes and cornflakes in their shopping bags.

‘Keep them going for just a bit longer,’ Like taking an old dog to the vet, they brought out dreadful old favourite shoes, and pretended they were only for gardening.

‘Yoo hoo – yours truly reporting!’ Miriam had some rather common mannerisms, like shouting up the stairs, but she knew the business of the shop, and Muh did not have to pay her too much, being a cousin. ‘Hello, love!’

Jackie went clattering down on his big feet which had to go sideways on the stairs, and she hugged him fondly, smelling of armpits and cigarettes.

‘Huh-oMim!’

He went through into the shop with her, and she showed him what she had brought, a marvellous little man on a tricycle, whose bell rang as his legs went round. He was seamed down the middle from front to back. Jackie pulled him apart — ‘Mind what you’re doing, that cost money!’ — and cleverly clipped him back together again, to show Miriam how it could be done.

‘Ah well, another day, another deed.’ Miriam began to pull the dust cloths off the permanent displays, and to bring out from under the counter the handbags and the better-quality shoe buckles and bows that were put away each night.

‘Good morning, dear.’

Jackie’s father came through from the workshop in his apron, a beam on his shiny red face, which went right on over the top of his head. He was going to have Miriam here all morning, popping into the workshop for a cigarette when the shop was empty. ‘You got here then.’

‘No, I was run over crossing the Broadway. This is my
ghost.’ Miriam’s laugh was an open-mouthed shriek. Muh frowned as she came in through the front of the shop with her gloves on, rainboots over her shoes, and a top layer of transparent plastic like a cake cover over her orange felt hat. She had gone out at the side entrance and in again at the shop door like a customer, to see what Miriam was up to.

‘Aren’t you coming, Jack?’ He was watching the little man tricycle down the counter.

‘Yeh.’ He looked up, open-mouthed. Of course he was coming.

‘Then put-a on your galoshes.’

‘No.’ His mouth closed with the lips tucked in.

‘It’s starting to rain.’

‘What’s the matter, can’t John put on soles that don’t let water?’ Miriam laughed and so did Jackie and his father, all throwing back their heads, and a customer who pushed open the door at that moment (da-doing on the musical chime) looked embarrassed, as people do coming into a jolly group.

‘Have you got any black shoe polish?’ There were stacks of it, but she had to say something. She said it to Jackie’s mother, but because it was Friday and she was in her outdoor things, she pretended she was a customer too and would not answer.

Miriam began to show black polish, and Dad backed into the workshop like a kitchen hand. He had not shaved the bottom half of his beefy face, because he was not supposed to be seen in his working apron. Only Jackie went in and out between the customers and the workshop, shutting the door on the elves.

When he came back wearing huge galoshes like rubber life-rafts, the customer had gone and Muh had the little tricycling man on the palm of her hand like a butterfly.