The Listeners (34 page)

Behind the giant bakery which was swallowing shop after little independent shop and breeding a generation of children in this town who had never tasted real bread, there was a small, cat-stunk area of mud and rubble, stuck about with the skeletons of prams and bedsteads. Low down in the bakery wall, warm steam came periodically from a grating, and here behind a pile of broken bricks, half a dozen people were crouching or lying.

Victoria was dressed like the students in jeans and an old sweater, her hair in pigtails, but she felt too clumsily bountiful, handing out the broken pastries which the pie factory contributed, bending down to hear the cracked whisper of a man who could not get up. He had only one leg. No stick or crutches.

‘Fetch us something then.’ He was not a man but a woman, wearing an ancient suit too big for her, the sleeves over her hands, a felt hat stiff with dirt pulled down on her head like a bag, a face grey and pitted like an old-time coal miner.

‘I thought they gave you some crutches.’ Jack came over.

‘I lost them.’

‘You sold them again?’

‘Yes dear.’

Jack grinned at her. ‘Any idea where Michael is? We’ve been looking for him.’

‘He was taken last week.’ The woman sat on the ground with her one leg stuck out in front of her. The smell of spirits that came from her was strong enough to ignite.

‘To the Spike?’

‘The bogeys come with guns that night and drove them into the vans.’

‘With
gunsl
’ Victoria could not believe it.

‘Water guns. Toys.’ The woman opened the cavern of her mouth into something like a smile. Her head wagged and bobbed constantly. She could not hold the mug of soup steady enough to drink it. Victoria crouched down and held the mug to her dark crusted lips. The woman drank. They looked into each other’s eyes. When the woman had swallowed all the soup, she vomited it up over Victoria’s hands and the knees of her trousers where she knelt before her.

After consulting with Peter, Victoria went to the Government Reception Centre to see what she could do for Michael.

The hostel was a square grey block, slate-roofed, moated with an asphalt yard on the worst side of Flagg’s Hill. It had once been a workhouse, then a casual ward in the days when there was a string of them within walking distance of each other all over England for the thousands of vagrants who tramped the land. Now it was the only Government hostel in the town, crowded, understaffed, unjustly disliked, both by its customers because it imposed some discipline, and by its neighbours because it ‘dragged down’ a district which was already no pleasure garden.

On the high wall round the yard of the Spike, various offensive messages had been scrawled in chalk or faecal matter. ‘
Burn the bums’, ‘Piss off you freaks’
were among the most civilized. The steps of the buildings were strewn with gravel and small stones, as if someone had been assaulting the door. Broken windowpanes were patched with cardboard.

‘You find us under siege.’ The Warden was a round wheezing man with a face squeezed choleric by a tight shirt collar.

‘Who sieges?’

‘Boys mostly. Egged on by their parents - not discouraged anyway. They’ve been breaking windows faster than I can get anyone in to repair them.’

‘Couldn’t some of the men—’

‘My dear,’ the Warden had a touch of the homosexual in his voice and finger movements, ‘watch your talk. The Glaziers’ Union.’

Old Michael was in one of the dormitories, sitting on the side of a neat narrow bed with an unlit cigarette stub wetly between his lips, his eyes closed, swaying gently back and forth. There were about twenty beds in the long room, with a locker and a worn strip of carpet, which was each man’s kingdom.

‘Hullo, Mike.’

‘You’ve not to be late for mumble-mumble.’ The bleared eyes saw something far back beyond this place and time. Knots of yellow tissue partly obscured the whites. The iris was faded and watery.

‘It’s Victoria - from the Samaritans. Remember me?’

‘I know you,’ the old man said quite sharply. ‘Where’s them boots you were going to fetch to me?’

‘Oh Mike.’ Victoria laughed, and a man a few beds away, crouched over a minutely folded newspaper, looked up at her as if she had shouted in a library. ‘I’ve been trying to give them to you for weeks. I couldn’t find you.’

‘Can’t feel me feet.’ He stuck them out and seemed
surprised to find them covered in a fairly decent pair of brown boots.

‘Can’t you walk?’

‘Not much. I couldn’t go back up the Lane, that’s why, and get my money.’

‘Where are the boards?’

‘Eh?’ He put his hand behind his ear and screwed up his grizzled face. ‘Eh?’

‘The sandwich boards.’

‘Eh?’ He was quite cross. ‘They got my money down the post office,’ he grumbled.

‘Your pension? You can get that if you’re going to stay here. You must go there and give them an address.’

‘With these feet ...’ He lifted up the brown boots as if they were wooden blocks and put them carefully down again.

Victoria found the Warden. He was cutting meat for stew, scarlet in the face, although the kitchen was not hot.

‘Can’t get the help,’ he wheezed apologetically. Three or four men were in the kitchen, one at the sink, one mopping the floor with grey water, a bald man with albino eyelashes crouched on a chair without a back, very slowly peeling potatoes with a knife that looked as blunt as a wooden spoon. ‘No one here with a steady enough hand.’ The Warden savaged the meat, wearing a plastic see-through apron with a psychedelic heart centred with the word LOVE.

‘Can I help you?’

‘My dear ... You get down to the post office for the old man. He’ll be able to feel his feet all right when he has something to buy a drink with.’

‘I’ll come back.’

‘You do that, Missie.’ At thirty-five, Victoria was usually glad not to be called Madam. From this man it could be a veiled insult. The back of his trousers was like the Marble Arch. His eyebrows were half hoops, very black as if he had dyed them, although his thick hair was white.

The post office was in one half of a tobacconist and
newsagent’s shop, rather quaint, with an old rubbed counter that had seen better days when this was a better district. A man and his wife were behind the grill, their pig-faced daughter across the shop with the sweets and cigarettes. Victoria had a note from the Warden and what passed for a signature from Michael.

‘Mind how you go,’ the man said, when he gave her the money. ‘We’ve had some of the old people robbed. It’s a bad neighbourhood. I come from Nottingham.’ He disclaimed responsibility.

It was a nasty street of cut-price groceries, stalls selling bacon and cheap underwear, a sour-looking pub on every other corner, a grudging chapel, its door boarded across, its iron gate chained. Victoria clutched her bag and watched loiterers and pretended she was Rita Hayworth moving on stilt heels through the press of a New York sidewalk, trying not to look as if she knew a bit player was going to pounce when she reached the chalk mark.

When Tim went back to Ward Cs, Mr Podgorsky had gone. Tim wondered if he was dead.

They sent Tim out to work in the vegetable garden, and they changed the colour of his pills and said that he was better. They sent him to the Resettlement Officer who found him a job at a grocery in the town at the bottom of the hill, and they put him to live in the Highfield hostel across the road from the main gate. Tim allowed all these things to happen to him as if he were a doll.

The hostel was called Halfway House. It was a modern building with big windows and bright plastic flowers on all the tables. Tim had his own room on the men’s floor, with a wardrobe and a mirror and a basin and a plastic lace cloth on the table by his bed, where he put the transistor radio he bought with some of his money from the carpentry shop.

It was the nicest room he had ever had. It looked out on a field with a pond where two small boys came every evening to catch tadpoles and eat them. It had curtains which moved all night at the open window. The floor was
slashed and scarred by some former desperado, but they had waxed it over and put a blue rug on it, which Tim shook out of the window every day.

When Paul came to see him, one of the women made them a pot of tea and they sat in the comfortable chairs in the window of the lounge. Paul said that it was like being in a good hotel, which perhaps it was.

‘I had the devil of a job to find you,’ Paul said. ‘No one on the ward seemed to know where you were. I wish you’d write me a letter next time you move.’

They laughed because Tim did not write letters. That was known between them. When Paul had brought him paper and envelopes, Tim hid them for a while, and then gave them back to him.

‘I didn’t know where this place was, so I asked a nurse who was walking by the car park, and who do you think it was?’

Tim scratched his head. Dolores? ... Rajah? ... Bett? ... The Strangler? ... He had known so many nurses.

‘That nice Olive who was with you on C
²
.’

‘Oh her.’

‘She was glad to know where you were. She was worried about you.’

Tim stuck out his lip. ‘She never come to see me. She went away.’

‘To start her training, you know that. She was going to come back and see you, and then she heard about the accident, and she was afraid - no, of course not of you – but she told me today, “I was afraid they would say I spoiled him.”’

‘She coming here?’

‘Perhaps. Shall I ask her?’

Tim shook his head. If you kept yourself secret from people, they could not get at you to hurt you. It was that simple.

‘What about that girl you told me about?’

‘Who?’

‘The Smasher. Felicity, wasn’t it?’

‘Oh her.’

‘Have you seen her again?’

‘She’s gone to that place where they put the old people who can pay to die.’

‘A nursing home?’

‘Just down the hill. I go by it every morning on my way to the bus.’ And stare at all the windows. One day she will be standing there pulling a blind and shell see me and stick out her tongue.

Nearly all the residents of Halfway House went out to work. Tim took a bus down into the town and back every day. ‘How does it go?’ Mr Perry, the Warden, asked him the same question every evening, and Tim gave him the same answer. ‘Same old game.’

The same old game was pushing cartons of groceries out into the shop, unpacking them, stamping the tins and boxes with a price and putting them up on the shelves for customers to take down again. It was a demanding job, but Tim was trying quite hard to learn it, because he did not want to be sent back to the carpentry shop.

One morning, when he was mooning about in the white apron that was too long for him, with the tapes going three times round his waist instead of once round Jumbo Dodd’s, trying to decide whether to risk one more layer on the soup cans, she came round a corner of the cereals and stopped dead.

‘You could knock me over,’ she said.

‘Hullo, Fliss.’ He stood there with a grin all over his face, a tin of mushroom soup in each hand. She pretended to be surprised to find him, but something about her manner made him say, ‘You knew I was here.’

‘I know everything that goes on,’ she said darkly.

They stood for a while swopping words like Well and I dunno and Small world. She looked stronger, less spooked.

‘You all right then?’

‘Been worse.’

‘What’s it like then,’ he watched his toes, ‘where you are?’

‘Stuffing food in one end and cleaning it up when it
comes out the other. I can come and go though.’ Her voice went up into a question. The old Felicity invitation, pale mouth parted, tongue tip running along her teeth, her eyes sliding about under the smooth shiny lids, looking everywhere but at you.

‘So can I.’

‘Nights?’

‘If I ask Mr Perry. I’m at Halfway House.’

‘I know.’

Did she? You could never tell her anything. ‘I can stay out till nine-thirty. You - you want—’

‘Meet you tonight.’ She began to gabble and whisper rapidly, her eyes darting. ‘I can get out after supper. Wait by the bus stop. I’ll meet you there.’

Tim polished his shoes in the laundry. Martha, who was quite ugly, with a lump on her neck in which it was said there grew teeth and hair, sang out spitefully, ‘Someone’s got a gir-irl!’

‘No harm in that,’ said Mr Perry, fiddling with taps and knobs, trying to get the washing machine back into cycle. There was some nice equipment at Halfway House, if it wasn’t for the people who used it. ‘You have a good time, Tim, and be home by nine-thirty because that’s when I lock up and Mrs P. doesn’t enjoy gravel thrown at the window.’ The Warden worked very hard at making things sound like sensible arrangements rather than rules.

Tim and Felicity went down the hill on the bus and stood in the line outside the cinema for ten minutes before they conveyed to each other that this was not what they wanted to do. They walked on through the broad main street of the old market town to the other side, where the houses and pubs and shops grew smaller and the pale street lamps were the only light. Every so often they went into a doorway. Headlamps of cars swept over them like a policeman’s torch. By the door of a public house called the Waggoner’s Arms, there was a sign that said it was a commercial hotel. They stopped. By now they did not have to say things.

‘I’ve not enough money,’ Tim said.

‘I have.’

‘They’ll know us. It’s too near the hospital.’ Everybody in this town was on the lookout for Highfield patients. At the shop, when he had toppled a hundred packets of cornflakes, women had stared and said things to each other.

‘Let’s go to a lodging room.’ Felicity was sweating heat, as if she were feverish.

‘It’s too late.’ The lights were out in many of the houses. This end of the town was dead by nine. ‘We’ve got to get back.’

She dragged him on, and they went beyond the houses and into a place that was used as a dump. There was a car standing there without wheels or doors. She pulled him inside and on top of her on what was left of the back seat.

‘Wait...’ And this time he could wait, just long enough. He exploded inside her, and she held him close, rolling about on the broken cushions, and would not let him free.