The Listeners (25 page)

As he shambled closer, his eyes on the ground, his broken boots weaving through the Marsh Lane litter, Victoria saw who it was.

‘Michael!’ She ran to the old man. ‘Hullo, Mike.’

He stopped, raised his head and blinked at her.

‘I was at the Samaritans last time you were in. What are you doing out so late?’

‘Well, I’ll tell you.’ They were by a lamp-post. He rested against it, leaning on his back board like a coiffed Japanese, and shifted the weight of the front board up, moving his shoulders feebly under the worn leather straps. ‘It’s Christmas, see.’ His mouth was a toothless cavern. ‘They gimme five bob extra to keep the board out till nine.’

‘But it’s long after nine. Time you went home.’

‘Robbie had come up, light and springy in his suede ankle boots. ‘This is Michael,’ Victoria said. ‘He comes to the Samaritans sometimes for a cup of tea and a warm. Where are you living now? Are you still with the students?’

He nodded. ‘Got a fag?’

People were passing back and forth on the neon-lit pavement. Robbie had taken Victoria’s arm to lead her away, but when he saw beads turn to look, he stayed, intrigued, not by Michael, but by the image of himself stopping on Marsh Lane to chat with a derelict sandwich man. He took out a cigarette for the old man and lit it. After two deep drags, Michael was choked by a bubbling paroxysm. He could not bend double because of the boards. He leaned against the lamp-post with his legs sagging in the baggy trousers, his chin hanging over the edge of the front board like a man in a noose. The cigarette stayed on his lower lip, smoking up into his streaming eyes and the dirty grey mat of hair that covered most of his face.

‘Ta,’ he said, when he recovered breath. He wiped his nose on a tattered scarf and held out his hand for Victoria to pull him upright.

‘Are you all right? Is there anything you need?’ ‘Shall I try and get you some shoes?’ His boots were grotesque lumps, bearing no relation to the shape of feet. ‘I’ll look in the Director’s office. Perhaps I can find a coat too. Shall I bring them here?’

‘Yes, darling.’

‘Come on, it’s time to go. Let’s take him to the hostel, Rob. Please. It’s miles to walk, right up by the old factories above Royal Bridge.’

‘What about the boards?’ The Brethren of the Judgement were sealed up with a padlocked grill. ‘Do you take them with you?’

‘That’s right, mate. Slept on ‘em before now, an old man like me. Been through two wars. Lost half my ribs . . .’

‘We’ll never get them in the car, Victoria.’

‘Let’s try.’ She began to lift off the sandwich boards. Michael gave a yell as the edge caught on his head. A few people stopped to watch.

‘Victoria, don’t be childish. They’re wider than the door.’

‘You could at least try.’

‘You’re making a scene.’ A man and a girl ran up from a noisy cellar like rabbits, and stopped to stare. While Victoria and Robbie were arguing, the old man resettled the boards and weaved away from them along the gutter at a fairly good pace. The board on his back said, ‘
Salvation from Doom, Tues. & Thurs. 7.30. Brethren of the Judgement.
’

Robbie drove Victoria to the house in one of the stucco squares whose top floor was her flat.

‘I’m coming up.’ Usually he asked, ‘Can I come up?’

‘No, Robbie.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you didn’t want to have Michael in your car.’

‘That’s stupid.’

’So were you. Those boards would have gone in.’

‘He didn’t want to go in the car.’

‘You didn’t want to take him.’

‘Well then, everyone was happy. Good night, dear love.’ He surprised her by crossing the pavement on his quick neat feet, getting into the car and driving off -Beep-beep! A light snapped on in the Berridges’ window. Everyone in this square was a member of the Noise Abatement League. They had forced the Council to change the route of a yodelling dustman.

O
N THE SECOND
day of the New Year, Sarah went up to the Samaritan Centre to take the telephone test. She met Meredith at the door in a white Austrian coat, miraculously clean in this dirty town. ‘I’m afraid.’ she said. ‘Are you?’

‘What the hell.’ Meredith made a face. ‘I didn’t want to be a Samaritan in the first place.’

Upstairs, two telephones were rigged up to a loudspeaker, so that everyone could hear the calls. The volunteers crowded into one of the interviewing rooms partitioned off from the loveless rectory bedrooms, and went out one by one to pretend to be a Samaritan.

The smiling lady, who sported a soft little fur hat today and looked like the sort you would be glad to own as your mother, was called first.

‘Oh!’ She gave a yelp. ‘Not me.’ She had wanted to sit with her head on one side and listen to the others make fools of themselves.

‘Why not?’ Peter was brusquer tonight. ‘That’s what you came for.’

She twittered out to the next room, and Meredith was chosen to make the call.

‘I can say anything, right?’

‘Our real clients do.’

Meredith pressed a buzzer. The lady in the fur hat said, ‘Hullo?’, although she had been told to say, ‘Samaritans - can I help you?’

‘I’m going to kill myself,’ Meredith said in a gruff, mulish voice.

Long pause. Dead silence.

‘Did you hear what I said?’ Meredith asked irritably. ‘I’m going to kill myself.’

‘Oh look here’ - a gasp - ‘You can’t do that.’

‘Why not? It’s my life.’

‘Yes, but I say, it’s against the Law.’

‘What’ll I care if I’m dead? I’m on the windowsill. I’m going to jump now.’

‘Oh no!’

‘Why not?’

‘What’s your name?’ the lady asked sharply.

‘None of your business.’

‘Tell me your name and where you are.’

‘I don’t want anyone to find me.’ Meredith began to cry, simulating dry sobs.

‘Now listen to me, you must pull yourself together—’

When Peter called her, she came back, not smiling any more, very flushed and flustered, breathing rapidly through cut-back nostrils.

‘I know I was terrible.’ she began, and Peter said, ‘Yes. Perhaps it’s a good thing. You made every mistake in the book.’ He was not nearly so nice tonight. ‘Who’s next -Jillie?’

‘I’d rather wait till the end.’ There was only one student now. The fat one had dropped out, with a few other people, before the end of the lectures.

‘I’m as likely to insult you then as now,’ Peter said, ‘I’ve got to be tough, don’t you see, because of the clients. It’s their feelings that matter, not yours.’

Sarah had planned that she would pretend to be an unmarried mother of forty, but when she began to talk to Jillie, she was somebody else. She was a terrified girl, alone in a cold quaking house with haunted attics - her grandmother’s house in Wales - waiting for her husband and knowing that he was not coming back. She gabbled and gasped and stammered. She was unwanted and alone. It was her fault. She would be alone for ever.

When Jillie came back from the struggle, she said to Peter, ‘I didn’t say enough, did I?’

‘You didn’t get much chance. Good act, Sarah. It’s odd.
Volunteers always make better clients than Samaritans.’

‘Because they air their own problems?’ Meredith suggested.

‘Perhaps.’

Richard Bayes pretended to be a college student, desperate about exams, and letting down sacrificial parents, and not having made any friends. Was that the story of his own recent youth? ‘People think I’m a bore,’ he said. And it was true. Richard Bayes was a bore, a humourless person without colour, tirelessly plodding after the same issues, like an ant rebuilding its labyrinth each time it is kicked over.

‘I don’t think you’re a bore at all,’ Meredith said, much more warmly than she spoke to real people. ‘I think you sound like fun.’ She activated him into a conversation that became subtly charged with sex. Richard Bayes actually tried to make a date with her.

‘Samaritans don’t have sex with the clients,’ Peter said when she was finished. ‘That’s about the only thing they don’t do. Symbolically though, as Meredith was doing -sometimes that’s just what’s needed.’

Sarah’s call was made by the bald grandfatherly man in the soft heather tweeds. He turned himself (his life’s secret fear - or desire?) into a respectable bank manager who had gone mad in a jewellery shop and pocketed a diamond bracelet.

‘How can I face the trial? Everyone will know. I’ll lose my job, my friends - what will I tell my children? I can’t face it.’

He spoke slowly, heavily. Sitting on a high stool, her feet tucked through the rungs, hugging the dummy telephone on her knees, Sarah could see him exactly as he would be. Not the kindly man with the freckled scalp and the well preserved stomach under the tweed, but a stout red-faced man who had been drinking. She could see where he lived, a decent small house out Haddington way, with dahlias and a wife called Evelyn. He had locked himself into his room to make the call, terrified that Evelyn would come and rattle the knob. He had
opened the drawer where his old Service revolver lay. Loaded?

‘We’ll stand by you.’ she heard herself say. ‘You’re not alone - really. We’ll help you all we can. Whatever happens, we’ll be your friends.’ She saw herself outside a great studded door like a medieval gaol, a bag of food and books on her arm.
Are you his daughter?

‘I’ve forfeited my friends.’

‘Not us. Oh please believe me—’

She would not have been surprised to hear a shot from the other room.

When they were leaving, Meredith said on the stairs, ‘Your left eye is smudged. Were you crying?’ She asked it with bald curiosity, like a schoolgirl.

‘I made a mess of it.’

‘He said you sounded like a natural Samaritan.’

‘He didn’t say anything to me.’

‘I don’t think they do. They only say nice things to the clients.’

‘They’ve taken me.’ When the letter came, Sarah could not help telling Mrs Wrigley, who ran the Mens Sana. ‘The Samaritans have taken me.’

‘I think it’s very splendid of you to do that, dear. A wonderful thing for a girl of your age.’

‘But you don’t understand. It’s splendid of
them
to take
me.
’

The usual depressing customers were in and out. Sarah tried to be convinced by Mrs Wrigley’s faith in the health breads and herbal creams, but they did not visibly improve the clientele. Most of them were regulars, for the Mens Sana, with its bunches of dried herbs in the window and stacks of stone-ground loaves which either were or looked like cardboard, did not usually attract impulse shoppers.

‘How are you, my dear?’ they asked, and some inquired after her cats. She barely knew what slie answered. I am going to be a Samaritan, her mens sana sang. They took me.

‘They’ve taken me!’ She did not go home, but panted up the wide marble steps of the Front Royal, across the veranda and through the lounge to where Brian was behind the reception desk, putting letters into pigeon holes. She grabbed the counter, her legs weak. ‘They’ve taken me.’

‘Where to?’

‘The Samaritans. They want me.’ She felt her face alight, provocative, stunning him with joy.

‘Of course they do, darling. Who wouldn’t?’

His smile devastated her. Their eyes clung, staring, as they did in bed, their faces changed.

A woman in a stiff fur coat put down her room key with its phallic wooden weight. ‘What did Mr Postman bring me today, young man?’

‘Just a moment, Mrs Quiller.’ Brian did not turn quickly to her. He moved his head round slowly from Sarah in a way that would have been quite insulting if Mrs Quiller had not been immunized by a lifetime of disparagement.

He completed the turn and drew a letter out of the honeycomb behind him.

‘But that’s a bill!’ she protested, pouting in a manner that had captivated the late Mr Quiller half a century ago before he made his money and began to destroy her. ‘I ordered a nice long letter.’

‘Sorry, Mrs Quiller.’

‘I’ll write you a letter some day, telling you all the things I think about in my room up there with only the wild wet sea for company; then you’ll have to write back.’

‘Yes, we will,’ Sarah answered for him, but Mrs Quiller did not register that she was Brian’s wife. She rotated and went on to the door like a walking toy, as if Sarah had not spoken.

SAMARITAN LOG BOOK. NIGHT DUTY.
05.40 Agnes rang from South Station, distressed and exhausted. Wants help with some trouble (unspecified) and will come here. (Ralph, 255
)

Long before dawn, when the empty milk-cans began to clang about, they kicked out the people who had been sleeping on the benches and under the arches of the old goods shunting.

When the man came shouting round, Agnes did not wake, since she had not slept. She had held herself in a tight ball under her thin coat, curled like an unborn baby, rigid with cold. If she did not move, she could survive.

She opened her eyes. ‘Come on.’ the man said, not unkindly, but not looking properly at her, as if she were not a person at all. ‘You’ve got to get moving.’ Shouldn’t be here at all. The police are round almost every night now. You were lucky.’

Lucky. She sat up, still holding herself clenched tightly, as if her soul would leak out if she let go. She ran her tongue round a rank mouth and pushed back her hair.

‘Got change for a cup of tea?’ She did not look at him. He pretended not to hear, moving away grumbling among the black brick pillars.

Hot tea and bread and butter. Agnes could feel them falling into the hollow well of her stomach. Water came into her mouth. Being sick on nothing was worse than bringing up your dinner. She had found that out.

Somewhere at the back of her head, in a cavern of demons, the wailing and mewing never stopped. Faces pressed against a grimy window. The baby rolled about on the strewn floor, naked, red and screaming.

It had been too easy to go. All the time she had thought about it, all the times since John disappeared, that she had shrieked, ‘Shut up - shut up! I’ll walk out of this room and never come back!’ as if they were old enough to understand, the twins and the baby, wet, stinking, the three of them, crying night and day. And then, day before yesterday, day before that, last week - how long ago? - she had just put on her coat and gone. It was so easy.