The Listeners (11 page)

‘There! Good as new,’ But it was not good as new. The skin was bruised and the arm was a heavy ache. He held it bent up with his fist to his shoulder, as the nurse had told him. His other arm, the plaster one, lay outside the covers, palm up, as if he were asking for something. It did not hurt him as much as the one they had put the needle into.

He could not remember how much it had hurt when he had come down on it with the piece of broken glass. Perhaps it had not hurt at all? He remembered almost nothing except the terror of the blood. In the telephone box, he had pulled off his jacket and wrapped it over the soaked towel, but the blood came through. It was everywhere,
his fingers slipping in it as he fumbled with the dial.

‘Hang on.’ Unseen, she had been joined to him in fear. ‘Stay where you are.’ He remembered the panic of pushing blindly out and falling on the pavement, a stunning smack in the face. Somewhere, a man’s voice shouting. The grip of hands.

Some time that evening — the clock was behind his head by the television, and although several people, nurses and patients, had spoken to him, Tim had said nothing to anyone — faces and waving hands began to gather on the other side of the ward door. Two nurses hurried round straightening the bed covers. Don’t touch it! Tim cried silently, as the darker one lifted the dead weight of his left arm so that the other could smooth the fold of the sheet. The Sister, a little person in dark blue with a winged cape like a bird, fussed round the men who were sitting in chairs, tying pyjama cords, tweaking dressing-gowns across gaps, pushing down the awful handkerchief that sprouted from an old man’s pocket.

‘It’s gone seven, Sister!’ someone called out, and the swing door took courage and moved very slightly, as if in a draught.

She looked round her kingdom. ‘No one is coming in until this ward is straight.’ But if you had your girl waiting out there, what would she care if the black nurse and the brown nurse had made those sharp folded corners at the bottom of your bed, lifting and tucking and creasing down with swift, pale-nailed fingers?

The draught that moved the door strengthened. Each time it swung, it opened a little farther, until all at once the Sister pulled it open and a horde of people spilled into the ward, tracking out immediately in different directions, eyes fixed towards one bed.

‘It’s the hardest time of day.’ The chubby man in the next bed rolled his balding pink head on the pillow to look at Tim. ‘Don’t you have anyone either?’ Tim shook his head. ‘Cheer up,’ said the man. ‘Some of the frights I see coming in here, makes you glad you got nobody.’

Through the tears on Tim’s lashes, the crowd of bodies that had burst in began to resolve itself into individuals. A lank-haired girl sitting with a man’s hand in hers, staring, saying nothing. A woman whispering behind her hand, eyes darting. A boy in work clothes, dried clay on his trousers, the Sister looking at his boots. A mother in a merciless hat, bringing forth chocolate, nuts, a toilet roll from a bottomless bag.

‘My old lady came once,’ the fat man said. ‘But I told her if all you’re going to do is complain about Dad, you’d best not trouble.’ But he held his eyes on the door, which kept opening again as people came in late.

A woman with curly fair hair, her arms full of bundles, laughing, dropping an orange, the low chatter pausing for a moment as people turned to watch her hurrying to Tim’s bed.

Hullo, Mum.

Hullo, dear. Feeling better?

A tall solid-looking man with dark grey hair whiter at the sides came through the door, stood looking lost, then spoke to the Sister, smiling down at her as she sat at the centre desk She nodded and pointed, and the man turned the smile towards Tim and came over. He had very large feet, with rubber soles that squeaked on the polished floor.

‘Hullo.’ He stood by Tim’s bed looking down. Although he was still smiling, he looked serious as well. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘All right.’ It was the first thing Tim had said since he woke up and found himself here. The words came out in a croak from his dry lips, swollen where he had grazed them falling.

‘I wasn’t allowed to see you this morning.’ The man looked round for a chair, but there were none left.

‘Sit on the bed,’ the fat man said, interested. ‘What’s it matter?’

‘Better not risk it.’ the tall man folded his arms and turned slightly to block the fat man without being noticeably rude. ‘Did you get my message?’

Tim shook his head.

‘What a pity. I said to tell you I’d be back tonight. I didn’t want you to think we’d abandoned you.’

A policeman? He did not talk like one, but that was the thing. You didn’t know. Tim lay with the back of his head pressed into the hard pillow, his eyes fixed on the man’s friendly face, shadowed round the mouth and chin. He could feel his heart pounding under the tidy bedclothes. Would the man notice that as a sign of guilt?

‘My name is Paul.’ He had a very deep voice that came out of his throat, not his head, like some people. ‘Do you want to tell me yours?’

Oh,
no.
Oh,
no. You don’t trick me that way, mister. He had stubbornly refused to tell anyone his name since lie had woken with a headache and vomit in his mouth, and the nurse had said, ‘What’s your name, dear?’ before he had finished chucking up.

The man thought for a moment, then he looked at the plaster, and asked, ‘How’s the arm?’

‘All right. Had a bit of an accident. Nothing much.’

‘Yes. I know. I hope it doesn’t hurt.’ After another pause, his face creased into a smile again, and he said, ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’

Tim shook his head.

‘You don’t remember then — last night. The Samaritans? You rang our number, 333-4000. Do you remember that?’

333-4000. He could feel the holes of the dial, slippery with his blood. ‘It was a woman. She spoke to me.’ ‘Help me,’ I said. ‘I can’t stop the blood.’ ‘Where are you?’ They had been joined in a secret fear.

‘You asked for help,’ the big man said, ‘and so I went to try and help you. Near the old water tower on Flagg’s Hill. I found you behind that broken wall. But it’s not surprising you don’t remember. You were bleeding very badly.’

‘You — you were there?’

‘Yes. I’m still here, if you want me. Don’t worry. I know you can’t talk now. You’ve been through a pretty rotten
time. I’ll come back, if you want. Would you like me to?’

Tim could feel his face growing hot and swollen. The tears were on his lashes again. He blinked and a tear fell, wet on the side of his nose, salt in his mouth.

‘My name is Paul,’ the man said again. ‘333-4000. The Samaritans. If you want me, you can get Sister to ring us.’

‘I wouldn’t cry,’ the chubby man said, after the bell had emptied the ward and the nurses were carrying out the flowers. ‘Was that your old man? I say, was that your old man?’ Tim would not look at him, but he knew that he was turned humpily on his side, staring with his sticky eyes.

Tim put the back of his good wrist across his eyes, as if the light hurt. My name is Paul... My name is Tim. All right, I mucked it up. That’s it then.
If you are at the end of your tether
... Under the stairs, with his dream face staring in the mirrpr, and the thing done. But even that I couldn’t do. Even that I mucked.

WHAT I WANT FROM NEXT YEAR. D. GERALD BRIGGS

Next year I leave and get my car licensed. Next year I go forth as it’s said to meet the world with equal terms, except that for my generation it will never be equal to them who have got it made while we were still too young to know.

At home on Saturday morning, Paul was correcting essays. Alice answered the telephone in the bedroom, and came to the sitting-room door with white grease on her face and her hair back-combed straight up from her scalp. ‘St Peter’s on the line. They’ve got a throne for me in paradise and want to know if you’re good for the fees.’

‘I’ve got a policeman here,’ Peter was speaking from the Samaritan Centre. ‘He’s asking about the boy you
went out to on Thursday night. 200 says you saw him in the hospital yesterday. Do you know his name? Not that I’d tell the copper, but it would be useful to know.’

‘He wouldn’t tell me anything. Poor kid, I think he’s terrified.’

‘He would be. I’ll keep the law off his neck, and you—’

‘Do you think I should go again? He didn’t seem to want me.’

‘Look Paul, he asked for our help. Let’s try and give it. Go back today and try to get through to him, will you?’

Visiting hours on Saturday were from two to six. Paul could go to the hospital on the way back from taking his son out to lunch. Jeff was still at Burlington, the school where Paul and Alice had once lived in a faded, comfortable house with trellis on the brick for roses, and twenty boys perpetually clumping up and down the bare wooden stairs and the dormitory passage.

At the time of the scandal (’She’s nothing but a drunken nymphomaniac’), the school had offered halfheartedly to let Jeff stay out his four years, not expecting that he would, since every boy, master, wife, maid and local tradesman knew about Alice and the Assistant Head’s wife’s Australian cousin. Paul had wanted Jeff to leave, but he could not insist without seeming unwilling to pay the full fees, which would be charged now that he was not on the staff.

‘Don’t let him stay,’ Alice had begged, in the drying-out clinic where Paul had taken her. ‘How can you want to, Jeff?’ she wailed at her son. ‘After the things that bastard said about me!’ But the boy had set his mind to it, sticking out his lower lip, crusted with impetigo at the time. Outside, he told Paul, ‘I’m not going to let her spoil my life, or you because you can’t handle her.’ Frighteningly, he had grown up, grown away. Paul could not talk to him. Somehow he managed to find the extra money, and Jeff had stayed at the school.

Alice would not go there, not this Saturday, or ever, so
Paul went off alone. It was a long drive, through country that became increasingly familiar and dear to him as he went farther inland. Here had been much of his life. The grammar school in the quiet Cotswold town which never grew larger or smaller. The rivers and hills and tunnelling lanes, the misted forests of childhood. The stone farmhouse where he had found his father sitting on a sack in the grain shed the night after they slaughtered his infected cattle. They had moved away after that, his father glumly caring for another man’s stock, but many years later, after the war. Paul had jumped at the chance to go back.

Ten years at Burlington, seven of them in Archway. The chunky brick house which had been built on at the end of the main building had been the favourite home of his marriage. Until everything went wrong.

‘And if we’re raking up the past,’ Alice said sometimes when they were not, ‘you were doing your share of the boozing at Archway, in case you forgot. If those damn boys had been less unconcerned, you’d have got kicked out long before.’

Paul drove in at the back gate, past the beech hedge, the tarred toolsheds, the neglected orchard where the grass was never cut because of the daffodils, and where Alice would have hung her laundry if she had been that kind of woman. There was laundry there now, small children’s things and the home-washed shirts of a thrifty young wife.

Paul drove through the brick arch to the paved yard where there had once been stables, now sheds for bicycles, sports gear, mowing machines, the pottery shop with the zig-zag chimney which had been built for a wash-house. He stayed in the car for a minute or two. He had hoped that Jeff would be watching for him and would come out. Which was more stupid, for Paul to be a coward at fifty, or for Jeff, at sixteen, to be unaware?

Paul got out of the car, put his foot on the familiar granite step and went into the back hall, which still smelled of linseed oil and the red scouring soap the
school had always used, oblivious to the advent of detergents. Two boys in sweaters and running shorts, jumped down the last flight of stairs and pivoted round the pineapple newel post as boys had done for years, the carving almost obliterated by squeaking palms.

The boys were not familiar. ‘Excuse me, sir.’ They edged past, their legs white and knobbly.

‘Is Jeff Hammond up there?’ Paul asked.

‘No sir, I don’t think so.’ The boys went on, but as they opened the door, one of them stopped for a glance back and then jumped out over the high granite step to be able to tell the other, ‘Hammond’s father —
you
know.’

The present housemaster’s wife was in one of the front rooms, hair pinned up but coming down, an air of small children about her: pins stuck into the band of her skirt, a mess like baby’s dribble on her blouse, a torn book in her hand.

‘Oh, Mr Hammond, how
nice.’
She had been the new geography master’s wife when Paul was here, living down in the village, invited to the duty sherries, but not the
intime
parties where Alice would get stoned and Paul would forget that he must be up at seven to shout his boys into the showers. ‘Is Jeff expecting you? He went up to the library, I think. Do come in and sit down, though it seems silly inviting you into your own house, doesn’t it? I hope it doesn’t make you feel dreadfully sad,’ she said, kindly deciding that this was a better approach than pretending to know nothing.

She produced the inevitable sherry, which Paul had learned in ten years to live with, if not to like, and presently Jeff knocked and came in, poking his head owlishly round the door, his shoulders rounded, a pile of books in his long arms.

‘I didn’t know you were here. Sorry, Dad.’ He invariably started off with an apology, which caused Paul, as now, to solicit one.

‘I did say twelve-thirty. I haven’t got too long.’ And that was unfair, since it was not until this morning that he knew he must be back in time to go to the hospital.

‘I’ll just take these books up,’ Jeff said in his gentle, immature voice. ‘Am I OK?’

‘What else have you got?’

‘Nothing much.’ Jeff was wearing rubbed corduroys and a sort of Western leather jacket with remnants of fringe and the nap worn off the shoulders like the back of a baby’s head. Paul knew better than to suggest the school’s regulation grey suit. ‘Do you want me to change?’