The Listeners (18 page)

‘And then?’ He shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘Perhaps you still kill yourself. Perhaps you don’t. The Samaritans will never physically prevent you from taking your own life. They’ll try to show you that it could be worth while not to.’

He sighed and leaned back, passing a large brown hand across his face, pushing back his springy hair.

‘I hope I haven’t bored you,’ he said politely. ‘I do so much listening that I grab at a legitimate excuse to talk. Listening. Befriending. Counselling. You have been told by now that this is the main work of the Samaritans. Those of you we choose—’ He looked round the room as 200 had done, as if he were deciding now (what sort of face was best to make?) – ‘will learn to listen and to befriend, both on the telephone and face to face with clients. I don’t like that word, but it’s the only one -patients, customers – there’s no other. English has more words than any other language, but it lets us down there.

‘I can’t give you a typical Samaritan client. There’s no such thing. I could sit here all night giving you example after example, each one different, and then your first call when you’re alone on 4000 will be something you never heard of or even imagined in your wildest fantasies. What’s the basic rule?’

‘Listen,’ someone said.

‘Yes, that of course, but how?’

‘Tolerantly.’

‘And?’ He lifted his chin.

‘Not be shocked?’ Sarah wanted to sound mature, but her voice came out naively high, as if she would run screaming at her first four-letter word.

‘Right.’ He did not seem to recognize that he had seen her before. ‘You’ll get sex calls. Filthy sex calls. You’ll have to listen while people are masturbating in phone
boxes, and you can’t hang up. Ever. You’ll hear foul abuse. Crude things about yourself and what might be done to you, but you hang on, because behind it is probably a cry for help. It’s not a hoax. It’s never a hoax. It may be some of the vilest words to get your attention before the real problem can start to be told. In any case, if it’s masturbating in a phone box, that’s a real problem in itself. If that’s the only kind of sexual satisfaction someone has, then he surely needs help.

‘I’ll give you an example. One of the Samaritans, a middle-aged lady, very respectable, her husband was mayor or town clerk or something, she was walking in the park and she saw a man with his trousers open. He was wanking. That’s a word you’ll hear on the telephone. You may as well get used to it.

‘The Samaritan lady, instead of screaming and running for the police, said to the man, “Look here, my dear, it wouldn’t do for anyone to see you doing that. Better step back a bit behind that bush.” She stood guard until he had achieved his orgasm, then asked him in her kindly motherly way if he felt better.’

He stopped and said suddenly to one of the college girls, the fat one with the bad skin, ‘What’s the matter? You’re shocked.’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Yes, I can tell. And a client would be able to tell right away, even on the telephone. Sometimes that’s all it takes to scare them away. The first impact of your voice is crucial. It could make the difference between saving a life and losing it. Don’t be embarrassed. This isn’t a personal attack, I’m only making a point.

‘Were you shocked?’ He nodded to a comfortable country-veined woman with a bright blue fur felt hat of the kind made only in England and worn only by English women.

‘You couldn’t shock me, my dear.’ She sat with her knees apart, feet planted square, from years of making a lap for children, and because her legs were too fat to cross.

‘All right. I’m a client. I say to you, “I’m screwing my pet dog every night, and before that it was sheep.” How would you take that ?’

The woman smiled, her outdoor cheeks forming red balls. ‘I was brought up on a farm.’

‘What would you say?’

‘I don’t know. “Oh yes?” I suppose, or something like that.’

‘And you?’ Peter looked at Richard Bayes.

‘Let me think.’ He blinked and twitched and sniffed his nose to get his glasses up.

‘You can’t think in silence. You must say something to let the poor chap know you’re still there.’

‘How long has this been going on?’

‘Too severe. You?’

The knitting girl said innocently, ‘What kind of dog?’

Meredith did not laugh. She shifted on her hard neat bottom and asked, ‘What
are
we supposed to say?’

‘Not much. Just be interested. Murmur encouragingly. He wants to tell you, so let him tell you. I’ll give you another one. A woman rings up. She says, “I’m forty. I’m not attractive. I’ve never had a man. What’s wrong with doing it to yourself?” People don’t always use technical terms.’ He pointed to Sarah. ‘What would you say?’

‘Nothing. I mean’ – Don’t blush, Sarah, he’ll think you’re shocked – ‘That’s what I’d tell her. “Nothing.” ‘

‘Was that right?’ Richard Bayes asked.

‘Didn’t you think so?’

‘Well, it doesn’t seem to solve anything for the poor woman.’

They visualized, this assorted group of all ages, classes and types, the plain ungainly spinster on her virginal bed.

‘That’s the point,’ Peter said. ‘You’re not supposed to give instant solutions. You can’t. It’s very humbling to be a Samaritan. Everyone thinks they can change people. A Samaritan knows he can’t. He can only support and listen and reassure them that they are not alone. If you can’t learn that, we can’t take you.’

Someone asked, ‘When will we know?’

‘We’ll have the telephone test after Christmas. Then we—ll let you know.’

‘How many do you take usually?’

‘About one in five, one in six, or something like that.’

‘You mean only two or three of us will get in?’ They looked at each other in consternation.

Sarah wished that she had not told Mrs Wrigley, at the Mens Sana, about the Samaritans. Mrs Wrigley had said, ‘The young are so dedicated,’ chopping nuts for banana loaf. ‘If they don’t take me, I’ll ring them up and say I’m going to kill myself,’ she told Meredith.

‘Quite honestly,’ she said, ‘it all sounds so difficult. I don’t think I could cope with it anyway.’

‘Oh you could.’ Sarah grabbed at the sycophantic talisman.

‘Do you really think so?’ The shining lips parted on the white teeth in a smile of genuine pleasure. She wasn’t really aggressive at all. Why had she pretended?

Peter came up to them. ‘How were the Americans?’ he asked Sarah.

‘I didn’t think you recognized me.’

‘Not everyone looks like you.’

He looked at her like a man, and Sarah said, ‘Thanks. The Americans were fine. They liked being at your hotel. I talked to one man who said he was coming back in the summer.’

‘Mr Reynolds. I hope he won’t be disappointed. He seemed to be ... chasing something which he thought he had found here. How’s Meredith tonight? Still think you want to be a Samaritan?’

‘No.’ She grinned with her mouth closed, denting her chin. ‘I never did. It was you who said I wanted to.’

She lived outside the town. Sarah drove her down to the station. In the car, Meredith asked, ‘You know Peter then?’

‘I met him once, with my husband. He’s at the Front Royal.’

Meredith made a face. ‘Ghastly place,’ She would have
said it anyway, if Brian had been the owner or the manager. ‘That why you volunteered?’

‘No. It was other things. Coincidences. A bell rang in my head, you know?’

‘I try not to listen to mine. It usually tolls doom.’

‘Why did you volunteer?’

‘God knows. No – Peter. Don’t confuse the two.’

‘Do you know him well?’

‘Mm-hm.’ Meredith nodded, her chin cupped in the neck of her sweater. ‘Too well. Hours and hours of battle.’

Sarah tried to keep her face incurious, but Meredith said in her clipped defensive voice, ‘It’s all right. I don’t care. When you’ve got that tube down you sucking your guts out, you don’t care about anything. He’s seen me at my worst anyway. You could say that.’

M
RS
O
LIVE
B
ARROW
, a dark plump widow with a shadow of moustache and trotting feet in small soft shoes, was a Nursing Assistant on the ward at Highfield where they put Tim. From the start, she was the one who focused for him the complicated hospital scene.

When he arrived, stiff and speechless, she helped him to put away his things and showed him his island of property - bed, rug, locker, chair - in the long dormitory. She took him into the day room and introduced him to Mr Gilbert, the Staff Nurse, who for days was only freckled hands and buttons on a white coat to Tim, who could not raise his eyes. She told him the names of some of the other men and which were the warmest places to sit and what time dinner would be. She fussed about in a bunchy blue overall with her hair piled up under a crumpled cap, exuding warm female sweat and kindly stock phrases, both comforting.

Tim could have died when Paul left him alone among thousands in this place which looked like a mad giant’s castle outside and a giant anthill within, but after Mr Gilbert had left him too, Olive Barrow had come and said, ‘Ah now, lovey, don’t carry on. It’s not as bad as that. Turn off the taps, there’s a good boy, and you can come and help me set the tables for dinner. One hand will do the work of two, I’m sure. Keep busy, that’s the ticket. Here’s Uncle Fred, he’ll show you the ropes. Uncle’s my right hand man, aren’t you, Uncle dear?’

She was there in the morning for breakfast, filling up mugs from the huge tin teapot, handing out the bacon and fried bread. ‘Tomatoes! It must be Thursday already.
Where does the week go?’ She was there when Tim came back from the workshop, clattering the metal covers on the kitchen trolley with a noise that spoke of dinner. She was there at tea, her fingers smelling of bread and butter, and when she finally knocked off after helping the maid and some of the men with the washing up, she always looked for Tim to say, ‘I’m off then, Timmy.’

‘See you in the morning.’

‘If I’m spared.’

Tim went every day with a batch of others to the carpentry workshop that was part of the Industrial Therapy unit. A male nurse went with them and they went in file, not like soldiers, but to keep out of people’s way, tromp tromp down the long branching corridors, through doors and up and down stairs. Highfield was not locked, but if you were brilliant enough to find your way out, you did not need to be shut in.

After a week, they had taken the cast off his wrist to show the raised scar. Did I do that? A cramp clutched his stomach at the thought of the glass going in. They asked him what work he would prefer to do.

He shook his head. ‘Nothing.’ He kept his hand in his pocket now. When he had to take it out, he held it turned down.

‘There’s not much outside work at this time of year,’ the doctor continued as if Tim had kept silent. Perhaps he had? Sometimes he thought he had spoken when he had not.

‘There’s the small parts assembly where we put together bicycle valves and things like that. Or the carpentry shop might be the place for you. Are you any good with your hands?’

Tim shrugged, spreading the fingers of his good hand and examining it back and front.

‘What sort of jobs did you do?’ the doctor asked quite casually, but if he expected to catch Tim by pretending to look for something on his desk, he was not as clever as he would like to think.

Kitchen porter, builder’s labourer, roadwork - it would
all get back to the lady with the bottle-bottom glasses at the Employment office, and she would sink him, nothing less.

Tell nothing. This doctor did not seem to mind any more than the darkie one at the other hospital had minded getting no answers to his questions. So why did they bother to ask them? There was a Chinese one here, nice young chap, nervous, learning - they all learned on you - very polite.

‘Tell me what you remember, Tim. Let’s talk about when you were a little boy. Don’t think. Just tell me anything that comes to you.’

It was very easy to switch yourself off like a wireless. No bother at all.

Tim went off every morning with Alec and Uncle Fred and Mr Podgorsky and Arthur Callaghan and them, and in the barn of a workshop that smelled so sweet of shavings and oil and hot grinding wheels, he learned how to make bread boards and chopping boards for women to chop on in their kitchens, and at twelve o’clock he went back to Olive Barrow with the cabbage and overdone meat smells, like any boy going tired to his mother after work.

On the first Friday when they gave him his pay envelope, he took it to her and asked her to keep it safe for him.

‘You can’t trust any of them.’ He glanced at stupid Alec, and Nobby all hunched over the table with that string of saliva down his chin, and poor wurzel-headed Dick, giggling in his wheelchair, legless for all anyone knew under the plaid rug. Gang of thieves, the lot of them. There were footsteps every night in the ward. If you woke and yelled, ‘What’s up?’ they would say, ‘Got to go to the toilet again,’ nastily, as if their weakness were your fault.

‘I’ll put your money in the hospital bank for you, dear,’ Olive said.

‘No, you keep it. You can give me the money for fags and that.’

‘You can draw out of the bank any time. You must fill out a slip.’

‘What slip?’

‘The one they’ll give you.’

He did not go to the bank. He did not know where it was. He gave his money to Olive each week, and cadged cigarettes off smarmy people like Ernie, whom nobody liked because he messed his trousers; or took them out of people’s lockers, and sometimes off the trolley shop that the whistling lady in the yellow overall pushed round. You asked her for a magazine she had not got, and when she bent to the bottom shelf, it was easy. She whistled like a canary, it was marvellous to hear it, down the corridors to announce her coming.

Highfield was full of men and women, old, young, sick, well, mad, sane, doctors, druggists, keepers of mice, nurses, maids, stooped old men with sacks who picked up litter on the grounds and might or might not be patients. Tim wended carefully among them, avoiding contact, shrinking from Bob Bamber in the carpentry shop when he leaned over to check a measurement, safe only when Olive Barrow was about with her loose-powdered skin and her busy hands and feet and her warm flesh smell, watching for the evenings when Paul would come treading solidly into the day room, telling Tim stories about the pupils at his school, bringing books, sweets, cigarettes.