The Listeners (8 page)

‘Malcom is much too old for toys,’ she chided kindly. ‘You shouldn’t spend your money.’

Miriam winked. ‘It’s for Jackie.’

He had known it would be a mistake. Although Muh often treated him like a child — wipe your mouth, let me
see your hands, only dirty boys make that noise — he must not behave like one. He had to go to cunning extremes to hide toys and picture books and furry animals from her, because she turned out wardrobes and drawers at every change of season and flipped over his mattress once a week. A blue wool monkey was dangling on a string alongside the drainpipe outside his window, puzzle books were in the holiday suitcase on top of the linen cupboard, and a vast store of bubblegum that he had stolen from Woolworth’s was buried in a box of coloured leather scraps under the workroom bench. Only Helen knew where the gum was. He had told her one night, and she said she liked it too.

His mother put the toy into her handbag — would she give it to one of the special children? — and they went out.

The play centre was in the basement of St Barnabas Church on the other side of town. Jackie and his mother walked there in the drizzle. It was quite a long way, but Muh did not like the bus. She could not be shut in anywhere. On the rare occasions when she would go to see a film, to be able to say it was no good, she had to go out and stand outside at least twice. When she came back in, she could not find where the family was sitting, so she made Jackie go with her, since Malcom refused to get up.

The windows of the flat were always being flung open. ‘It’s stifling in here!’

‘It’s the change of life, dear,’ Miriam said.

Muh went pink like a geranium. ‘I’m not anywhere near that, thank you very much. The whole place reeks of your vile cigarettes.’

She flung open the windows and Miriam turned up her collar and said, ‘If you’re still smoking at forty, you’ve got lung cancer anyway.’ Muh would
die
if she knew that while she was out, Jackie and Miriam had been smoking away like twin chimneys, lighting each cigarette from the stub of the last, desperately inhaling. They had let young Malcom have a go too, to stop him telling.

If Jackie shut his window on a frosty night, she would
come in after he was asleep and sneak it open. ‘You can have another blanket,’ she said if he complained that he woke up cold, but all the blankets in the world would not save you from Muh’s idea of a little healthy fresh air.

She walked briskly through the clean wet streets with Jackie beside her, his long disorganized legs skipping occasionally, hopping between the pavement lines, but she laid her hand on his arm and said, ‘Easy fellow,’ as if he were a horse.

They might meet someone they knew. They did know quite a few people in town, because of the shop, and Muh being on the Parent-Teacher committee, and a member of the Butterfield Culturettes, who read poems to each other and made a little thin music with whatever they could play, even if it was only a comb and toilet paper.

Jackie and Malcom sometimes listened outside the window of Mrs Devon’s large sitting-room, where the meetings were held.

‘Ill met by moonlight, proud-a Titania,’ declaimed Muh, and, ‘What,’ said Miss Larkin, ‘jealous Oberon! Fairies skip hence.’

Jackie and Malcom fell into the flowerbed in stitches.

Butterfields had grown to such a size that the people you knew were only a tiny speck among the whole crowd. You could go for days without a familiar face coming into the shoe repair shop or into other shops in which you were buying. You could walk, as Jackie was allowed to (’Have you wound your watch? What-a time did I say be back? And six means six and not half past’) for hour after hour among the doll’s-house streets and never see a face that opened to a smile or a hullo. It was not like the pictures in the leaflets where women called and waved to each other over their flapping laundry, or a man with a pipe and a pullover leaned on his spade to talk to a grandmother and a little boy over the garden gate. Butterfields people kept themselves to themselves. Muh joined things because she said she must give of herself, but there were many women who saw nobody when their husbands were
at work and the children at school. Last month, one of them had been found dead of sleeping pills.

Malcom had read bits of it to Jackie out of the local paper. ‘She was such a quiet girl we never hardly saw her.’ The neighbour on the other side, a certain Mrs Digit, world-famous now with her picture in the paper wearing a flowered overall like a bolster cover, had said, ‘How should I know? I don’t poke my nose into everybody’s business.’

The body, Malcom read, had been lying on the bed for about eight hours. ‘Phew, what a ponk—* The story disappeared with a rattle as his mother snatched the newspaper away.

The Play School was in the basement of St Barnabas Church which stood behind the recreation hall and the bowling alley and one of the public houses where a man had once staggered out as they were going home from the cinema and almost knocked little Muh over. ‘Here, here,’ Dad had shouted, and rounded his fists, red as a tomato, and the man had laughed and gone back into the pub. The church was built on a slight grassy rise so as to poke its spire as close up to God as possible. There were only a few gravestones in the fenced plot, but ‘Another winter like this,’ Mrs Manson said, taking off her scarf and shaking raindrops out of the front of her hair, ‘and it will be standing room only.’

They had caught up with her on the path that led round the side of the church to the basement door, running from her car with her little boy whose hair clung in spikes whether it was raining or not.

‘Huh-o-, Char-ie.’ Jackie crouched down and grinned into the child’s face. The dark eyes looked neither at nor through him. They did not look at all, but that did not discourage either Jackie or lively Mrs Manson, who had five other children and looked like her eldest daughter.

‘He knows you, you see!’ She put Charlie’s hand into Jackie’s, where it neither pulled away nor clung. Jackie took Charlie down the steps and over to the pegs at the end of the big noisy basement room. As soon as you let go
of Charlie’s hands, he put them in his mouth, working them round and round inside the wet reddened lips, so that he left strings of saliva on everything, including Jackie as he unfastened the little boy’s coat. At home, Jackie knew, because he had been there to tea, Mrs Manson went about with an old towel tucked into her waist and wiped the doorknobs and chairs and tabletops without noticing she did it.

The floor of the long low room was littered with toys, pedal car, blocks, tricycles, a small slide and a climbing frame where a little girl hung upside down by her heels, red in the face if she had not been black to start with. In one corner, three or four children were cooking at a sand table, banging toy saucepans about and throwing sand into each other’s eyes. Jackie led Charlie to the slide and put his limp pigeon-toed foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, but as soon as he took away his hand, the foot slipped off.

‘Ugh-gh-gh! Gurr-r-r!’ Charlie roared like an unknown animal. His meaningless eyes stared at nothing over his hands, working and turning inside his mouth.

‘Let’s leave him alone, Jackie, and see what he’ll do, shall we?’ From six years of living with Charlie, Mrs Manson put everything as a bright question, rather than an order. ‘Yesterday, Harriet almost got him to clap his hands. It was marvellous!’ Jackie laughed an empty kind of laugh ha ha, to match her eagerness.

Harriet was especially good with the children who stayed in a shut-in world. She rolled on the floor with them and came up dusty on her large behind. She tickled them, pinched them, sang into their uncaring eyes. ‘Anything to make contact!’ she cried to the other helpers, crashing herself down on the mattress where a child lay with his arm curled defensively over the back of his stubbly head. Jackie thought she was a little touched.

Feeling suddenly blank and without a notion of who or where he was, or what for, he mooched over to the low tables and unfolded himself into one of the small chairs. He pretended he was helping the fat girl with the jigsaw
puzzles, so that he could collect them in front of him and do them himself. Fat Mara shrieked and her face collapsed in exaggerated sobs. Jackie pinched her rubber thigh under the table and she fell off the chair and ran to a grown-up. She ran to a girl Jackie had not seen here before. She was standing awkwardly in a corner with her hands hanging, as if she did not know what to do or how she got here. She looked as if her mother had left her at a railway station and forgot to come back for her. She had thin straight legs in white stockings sticking yards out of a very very short skirt — Muh wouldn’t think much of
that
! She had short straight hair cut raggedly, and great eyes with lashes painted round them like a doll.

When the fat girl ran at her legs, she reeled, then dropped quickly to the floor to hug her, glad of something to do, burying her face against the child’s. But old fatty Mara never stayed with anything more than a minute. She pulled away, thumping the girl’s arm to make her let go. The girl got up and stood again, watching.

Jackie put his tongue between his teeth and went on with the puzzles. Most of the children were playing quite busily. His mother was in the kitchen-space behind the hatch, opening a tin of biscuits. Harriet was. at the gramophone with a small group, waving her arms and singing, head going like a mad bobbin. At the far end of the room, the sand table was deserted. Charlie was standing by it with his toes turned in and a naked slice of back where his trousers were dropping over his narrow hips. One hand was in his mouth, the other was on the edge of the table.

Looking round, Jackie saw Mrs Manson watching Charlie as if there were nothing else in the room. His hand trailed in the sand, stopped, and picked up a little pie pan. He was just scooping up sand like any other child when Jackie’s mother slipped open the hatch and, seeing that everybody was happily employed, clapped her hands like a pistol shot and cried, ‘Snack time, everybody.’

Charlie, with his hand raised to dribble sand delightfully
back on to the table, let it drop and wandered away, scattering sand on the floor and letting the pie pan roll away without noticing.

‘Come along, everybody! Come on then, Mrs King, you’re not doing anything. Now is when we have our snacks. Oh no—’ as the girl in the long white stockings, glad of a job, pushed a chair towards one of the tables. ‘We all bring our own chairs.’

‘We,’ Jackie wanted to tell the girl, means the children, not her and you.

‘Now then, Jack, come along, look lively! I thought it was your job to fetch the milk. Harriet — come, it’s table time.’ She switched off the gramophone and it died with a groan and a wail from Tommy to add to the shrieking of the chairs as the children dragged or pushed them across the floor.

Those who would came and sat round the tables. Charlie had gone to the side of the room and was sitting with his arm over the back of the chair, the hand dangling, his head on his arm like a tired old man. Jackie’s mother picked him up chair and all, and put him at one of the tables, where he turned sideways and drifted away again with his arm on the back of the chair.

Muh wiped strings of saliva off the front of her Play School washable dress and called again, ‘Come along, Jack, sharp’s the word! The milk won’t grow legs and walk in, you know!’

‘Ha, ha,’ said Harriet, trying to make the children laugh by force.

Jackie said a very bad word. He was fitting the last few pieces into the sailing ship puzzle. ‘Fuck,’ he said, and the girl with the painted eyelashes heard him. Her brown eyebrows went up and her pale mouth pulled down into her chin as if she would cry, but she was laughing really. Jackie uncoiled himself from the chair. ‘Want come fetch a mi-uh!’ he shouted, to make sure she understood. Harriet did not always understand him. She pretended she did, but she bobbed her head and said ‘Cheers’ when he told her he had a cold.

The girl understood. She nodded and let the smile break on her face. She put out her hand and said her name was Sarah. Jackie took her hand as if she were Charlie and led her towards the kitchen.

‘Darling? Darling, is that you?’

‘Who else were you expecting?’

He sounded rather cross, but Sarah threw herself down the dark little hall and flattened herself to him, cheeks, breasts, stomach, the front of her white mesh thighs, as if she could pass right into him like an astral spirit re-entering its earthbound body.

‘Oh, I love you, I love you. You smell like my husband.’

‘What kind of man would he be, Madam?’ Brian pushed her away gently and took off his coat. He was not tall, but square and muscular under the sharp grey trousers, the double-breasted blazer with the monogram FRH.

‘He’s the junior assistant to the assistant manager at the Front Royal Hotel,’ Sarah said. ‘I’ve just made him a martini, but you may have it.’

‘Thank God.’ Brian went up the staircase, which was no wider than a ship’s ladder, and fell into a chair with his legs stuck out in front of the glowing mouth of the little iron stove. Their house in Salt Street in the old fishing village part of the town was so narrow that there was only one room on each floor, kitchen, sitting-room, bedroom, with a bathroom hanging on at the back like a papoose.

‘God, I’m tired,’ Brian groaned. ‘We’ve had a hell of a day. Everything blew up at once.’

‘Tell me’, Sarah gave him his glass arid sat on a stool by the stove to stare at him. They had married three months after they met — couldn’t wait, now or never, whichever way you saw it. She still could not at all get used to him, with his fair glinting hair and lazy spoiled blue eyes and his hands and the alien smell of his shoes, and his continuing presence in her life. She watched him constantly, trying to understand. Sometimes, sitting opposite while
he ate, or watching him at the mirror tying his tie or narrowing his eyes conceitedly with his head turned to smooth the side of his hair, she panicked: I don’t know you! What have I done?

He did not know who she was. She dressed the way she always had, big sweaters, tiny squares of skirt, coloured tights, her boots the most expensive thing she bought, her hair carefully ragged, ten minutes to outline her startled eyes and paint lashes one by one on her cheeks. She had looked like that since he knew her, except for the painted lashes, which was a brief fad that had almost run its course as disguise. She was disguised as Sarah King, and he was Brian. How long did you have to live together before you could be honest?