The Listeners (32 page)

‘I didn’t feel well.’

‘You girls.’ Mrs Mason wagged her head as if Carrie were hung over or pregnant, and turned up the next flight.

I was the last one to see her, she would be able to say. The last one to lay eyes on her and she said to me, ‘Mrs Mason, I don’t feel well.’ If I had only - if I had only -wouldn’t you think that ordinary human kindness would have led me to ask what was the matter? But that’s the way we all are now, sir, everyone so caught up in the pace of life, men on the moon, hydrofoils across the Channel, we don’t look close and see our brother.

Carrie brought the water jug back, treading heavily on the large feet that were never completely clean, since they were bare most of the time or with the thong of a cracked sandal hanging between the toes, like everybody else. She had let her hair grow, like everybody else, but it was so thick, with those tight corrugations which used to cause strange ladies to exclaim when she was little, that it would not hang in curtains, like everybody else. It stuck out all round her shoulders in a sort of pyramid, and with her heavy face and large bumpy nose, people thought she was a boy. She hung weights on the ends of it. She ironed it into a dry frizz, burnt hair stopping up the steam holes on Gretchen’s iron, then chopped it off quite short and someone said, ‘Kinky! My cousin brought one of those Afro wigs back from the States.’ It was now cut completely short, like an American footballer. Carrie’s father, as short-sighted as she was, might have difficulty identifying her. Her mother would not be able to come, if the pigs were farrowing.

She poured a glass of water and sat down amid the fusty chaos of Gretchen’s bed. Unfair to die in here? But if she was in her own room, Gretchen might not come in for a long time. Carrie hated anyone in her room. At home, she locked the door whether she was in or out of it. Here at the flat, she had only agreed to share the rent if she could have the inner room.

When Gretchen came back, she might have Teddo with her, if she was not at the restaurant. Her globular
eyes would bulge, stretching the blood vessels. She would stare, her lips dropping away from her outsize teeth. A scream. ‘Carrie - oh my
God
!’ Carrie’s life meant nothing to her. Carrie dead would be another thing.

‘Don’t look, Gretch. Don’t touch her.’

Teddo would not look or touch either. He would probably run shrieking from the building, and Gretchen could begin to give interviews. Carrie was doing her that favour, at least, but she would only be a supporting player. Carrie would be the star.

She sat for a while, swirling the water round in the glass and sighing. This seemed to need a lot of oxygen. The telephone was on the floor under the bed. With her feet flat on the floor and her knees apart, Carrie bent down like an old woman and dragged it out. She listened to the dialling tone as if it were telling her something.

Sorry to be so long, her mother would say. I was in with the baby chicks. What is it - what? I don’t understand. What do you mean, Caroline, what do you mean - fail? But I don’t understand, you’ve always been able to work at your books.

Carrie put down the telephone and stood up, went to the window and drew the curtains. She went into her own room and pulled the lopsided blind as far down as it would reach. In the front room, she pressed the catch on the lock so that Gretchen’s key would not turn it, sat down, got up again and released the catch, then wandered about the room, touching things, running her hand along flat surfaces, the table, the fretted shelf above the tiny Victorian grate, the top of the bookcase, ‘environmental surfaces’, as it said in
Orientation of the Child’s Visual Experience.

The feel of the room meant nothing. It had no power over her. The flat was just an ugly place where she had been unhappy, more unhappy than in the dormitory building, since she was more alone. At the dormitory, she could walk among the people in the halls and downstairs rooms quite briskly, as if she were going somewhere.

She took the bottle from the pocket of her pyjama
jacket, and read the label for the hundredth time, with one eye shut. ‘Be careful.’ the doctor had said, but she had not taken any of the pills. If she could sleep, there would be no excuse for failing. If she got another pair of National Health glasses, there would be no excuse for the print to swim before her aching eyes. Staring at words without seeing them, prowling round her room in the night, smoking, weeping, once she had opened the window and sat on the sill, her thick bare legs dangling over the Mortons’ coal shed. When she slept, she could not rouse herself. She missed morning lectures, hiding in her bed. Her mole eyes were drawn back into their lairs. Bruised shadows marked her puffy skin.
That girl is ill.

She put the bottle on the table beside the glass of water. Still life. Something was missing. If she could call up to Mrs Mason - bring someone in from the street to stand in the doorway like cab-drivers conscripted into a wedding - ‘I’m going to kill myself. Will you watch me?’

Mummy! Mummy! Watch me, I’m going to dive!

Yes dear, I see you.

Back at the window, Carrie opened the curtains and thrust her blank face against the glass. A woman pushing a baby smothered in groceries. A man with a briefcase. Running children, squinting at the sun. Cars, bicycles. Two half-empty buses, torsos staring straight ahead, newspapers up. They would read it in tomorrow’s. Except there would be no tomorrow. She could stop the whole thing, blot it out. No me, no world.

Turning from the window, she peered into an endless succession of tomorrows, mirrors within mirrors, empty of hope. She dropped to the floor and crouched by Gretchen’s bed. She was as cold as if her blood had stopped running. At this hollow core of loneliness, she was abandoned even by herself.

The torn telephone book was under the bed with shoes, an apple core, a cigarette packet. She could not see numbers.

‘Operator - those people -1 want the Samaritans.’

One ring. A click. ‘Samaritans - can I help you?’ She banged down the receiver. He can’t change it. It’s nothing to do with him.

What would he have said? Would he use the doctor’s word, neurotic? Would he say, like her father, ‘Go out and get some friends’, as if they were to be had in shops?

She tried again, listened to the man’s deep patient voice for half a minute, then hung up quietly. Nothing was changed. There was no way of changing anything.

She put the telephone on to the bed among the disordered sheets and the purple shawl that Gretchen had found in a street market. She knelt up to reach the bottle from the table and shook out all the pills into her cupped hand. One by one? All at once? The pills were very difficult to swallow. She took four and put the rest back in the bottle, then she sat on the floor, leaning against the bed, and pulled down the shawl to wrap round herself like a shroud.

‘Next time it rings,’ Paul said, ‘you answer it, Sarah. They may have rung off because they want to talk to a woman.’

‘I can take it,’ Rachel said.

‘Let Sarah. She’s got to start some time.’

Rachel looked at her doubtfully. ‘I will if you like.’

‘It’s all right,’ Sarah said, but after Rachel had gone out, she told Paul, ‘I’m scared.’

She had talked to many people who came into the reception room. She had talked to regular clients who rang the office telephone number so as to leave the emergency line free. Free for what? The instrument that Paul pushed across the desk to her was a black mystery, charged with the dynamite of the unknown. She stared at it. I can’t—

‘So you’re one of us now,’ David, 520 had said. Sarah, 589. If she were one of them, she must do this, or go away and never come back, and they would give her number, 589, to someone else, and Peter would say, ‘A pity about that girl, I thought she was the type,’ and then no one
would say anything, and they would forget her.

‘I hope they ring again,’ Paul said. ‘It’s worrying not to know. It might be a joker, it might be a wrong number, but it’s more likely to be someone whose trouble is too bad to talk about.’

‘Suppose I don’t know how to help? I haven’t learned—’

‘All you have to learn is just to listen.’ The constant refrain. ‘No instant salvation. Just humanity. Let it come through in your voice. Let your love come through, Sarah,’ he said gently, smiling, looking at her as if he liked her very much.

He was about the same age as her father. He had come into her dream once, not as a father figure. Her father was an old goat, capering in front of girls like Maria.

The telephone rang. Sarah jumped, and was paralysed, staring at it.

‘Pick the damn thing up,’ Paul said quite roughly. ‘Do you want them to think no one cares?’

When George came out of the station, he had asked the way and been told, ‘Turn left, turn right, take this or that number bus. Get off at the last gate of the football ground, you can’t miss it.’

He had taken the wrong bus. The football ground never came. They never even went over a bridge. When the conductor came to the top deck, he laughed and told George he was miles away and going in the wrong direction.

‘What’s the joke?’

‘Got to laugh, mate. Keeps you from going mad.’

George swore at him and clumped down the stairs and dropped off as the bus swung round a corner. He did it clumsily, stumbling, grazing his hand to save himself. Shouldering his way through the clowns who had nothing better to do than saunter in the Saturday street, he thought, bad omen on this job, he never should have gone for it. Why did Linda want him to? Only gone half a day, and he was angry already for what he imagined about her.

He took another bus and it stopped in some wide square with new white buildings and a clock made of flowers and announced that it would go no farther.

‘You’re supposed to go to the stadium.’

‘Circus only, dear.’ The conductress pointed to the sign above the back step.

‘Why did you take my whole fare?’

‘I didn’t. Just as far as here. Don’t you know what the fares are?’

‘Look. I’ve never been in the cruddy town before.’

‘Some people.’

‘... stranger here.’

‘I’m a bit lost myself.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m hopeless at directions.’

.’Hainh - hyunh - anna - hyi - angya ...’

George’s luck to get them with no roof to their mouth. George’s perishing luck that caused matchboxes to catch fire in his hand, strange towns to declare Early Closing Day as soon as he arrived, telephones to be always engaged, when they were not wrong numbers. Watch him get to the Exhibition Hall, if he ever did, and find the job had gone five minutes ago to someone else.

He growled down some steps in the middle of the road, expecting to find the Public Convenience out of order, flooded, or full of queers.

‘
If you are in despair,’
the notice said. Well, if that’s what they want, here I am.

‘Samaritans - can I help you?’ A young girl’s voice. Things are looking up.

‘I’m in despair, darling.’

She made a sympathetic noise.

‘I’m lost in this bloody city and I’m late and I’ll probably lose that job and what the hell do you care?’

‘What can I - can I help you?’

‘That’s what I’m asking you,’ George said patiently. ‘How can I get to the Exhibition Hall?’

‘Where are you?’

‘If I knew, I’d not be lost.’

She laughed then, and George laughed, and finally she
said she would look at the map, and then she told him some streets and bus numbers, but he was not really listening. He had seen a clock in a bank window and realized how late it was.

‘All right now?’

‘
All right?
I’m an hour late. I’ll have to get a taxi.’

Mrs Latimer turned the telephone dial with a special gold gadget for turning telephone dials. She had a device for lifting sausages out of the frying pan and ejecting them on to a plate. She had a pair of tongs on a long extending handle to pick the dog’s mess off the lawn, and another extending handle with a scoop at the end to get cans off the top shelf. She had brushes with disposable pads for cleaning toilets and baths, a little hook on a ribbon for pulling up zip fasteners at the back of dresses, and a button in her car which made the garage door go up and down. When a certain kind of plane flew over, the door went spookily up by itself in the middle of the night.

‘Samaritans - can I help you?’

A young voice. She had expected someone cool and mature. A nice young voice, quick and a little breathless, eager, like the voices of the daughters of her friends. Like someone she might know. It might even be someone she knew.

‘This is Mrs Charles Latimer,’ she said, as if she were going to give an order at a store where she had an account. ‘It’s on behalf of my son. You do help people, don’t you? Yes, oh, how nice ... Well, he would, I think. He wanted me to ring you. He won’t see his doctor any more, but he said he might come to you.’ With iodine painted round his mouth to make them think he had swallowed it?

‘Of course, he can come in any time and talk to someone.’

The young voice was warm and interested. Not official. Perhaps they could make Gordie see that he did not need the gestures.

I did it. It was easy. First that man, then Mrs Latimer. I did it, I coped. I didn’t panic. I was able to help them. They thought I was a Samaritan. Perhaps I am. One of us. Sarah, 589.

When the telephone rang again, she stretched out her hand without glancing at Paul, and picked it up quite confidently. Omnipotent Sarah. The saviour of the world.

In a dream or awake, Carrie saw the sea. She saw herself walking out straight-legged, her hands at her sides, walking far out at low tide, and walking on, along the bottom of the sea. A deep regretful sadness lay over her like the water. Was this what dying was?

Sighing, she raised an arm to pull the shawl round her shoulders, and knocked the telephone clattering off the bed. The receiver was split, but the dial still worked.

‘Samaritans – can I help you?’ A young girl spoke quickly to her as if she had been waiting.

‘I want to kill myself.’

The girl did not say anything. At last she whispered, ‘What - what’s the matter?’