The Listeners
Authors: Monica Dickens
Monica Dickens
To Chad Varah, Samaritan Number 1
‘Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto’
‘I am a man: I count nothing human alien to me’
Terence,
c
190-159 BC
ON THE SUNLESS side of the hills, where the overgrown town petered out at last in dead grey blocks of flats chucked down on the waste land for people who were supposed to be glad of them, a woman was lying on a bed.
She lay on her back, her large head flung like a stone into the creased pillow. An ashtray rested on the front of her slacks. She had not taken off her boots. Exhausted boots, pleating at the ankle, gum and something else on the soles.
It was a high wooden bed with cat-scratched knobs the shape of lidded chalices. The brown corduroy cover did not hang down far enough to conceal cardboard boxes and balls of fluff underneath. Because the whole building had settled slighly soon after it was slapped up twenty years ago, the wardrobe tilted forward, so that the bottom drawer hung like an underlip and the narrow door swung open when the children ran overhead. One night a body would fall out, toppling on to the linoleum with a gangster’s hat and staring eyeballs.
The woman shut her eyes, but the lids were pulled back by the weight of the words behind them.
Don’t be such a bore.
It’s Thursday.
Well, Christ — do we have to stick to the same freakish routine till the end of time?
She would listen to the words for ever, licking them over and over, like a dog with a torn nail.
She stared at the cracked ceiling of the box within a box wherein she lay. There was a rough map of Ireland in the circle of light from the shade clipped on to the bulb of the lamp. The lamp stood on a powerfully ugly
piece of furniture that might once have been a hospital locker. On it there was a dream book, half a glass of whisky, a telephone. Earlier, the telephone had still looked as if it might ring.
‘Guess who?’ Giggling. Drunk. ‘Come and get me/ Time was.
She lifted her wrist to look at her broad watch. When she sighed, her diaphragm went in and out like a singer. She took a cigarette from the pocket of her shirt, and the ashtray tipped on to the bed as she raised herself on one elbow to light it. She swilled the whisky round the clouded glass and into her mouth and fell back heavily, her stiff beige hair striking the same dent in the pillow. The cigarette drooped between her top lip and her chin. Soon ash fell on her chest. Full breasts, naked under the shirt, were spread flatly backward by their own weight, the nipples out by the armpits. As the cigarette burned shorter, her eyes were full of smoke, but at some time after she had dropped the cigarette into the last quarter inch of whisky, they were not watering but crying, the corners of a gargoyle mouth pulled back towards the tears that ran into her hair, carrying mascara with them like river silt.
About an hour later, moving as heavily as a sleepwalker, although she could not sleep, the woman propped herself up again and groped for the telephone.
She had torn the advertisement out of the evening paper. Torn it carelessly, leaving the top words behind on the floor of the bus. ‘... desperate. If you are at the end of your tether.’ The words were crumpled from her pocket.
‘Samaritans.’
And the number to ring.
Who would answer? Nobody. Do yourself in between nine and
six
, dear, if you expect anyone to give a damn. She dialled the number, to prove it.
Although she had been a Samaritan for more than a year, Victoria was still not free of that tiny instant of panic when the telephone rang.
It was only a fraction of a second. Half a pulse beat, the beginning of a deeper breath. Her left hand was out before the second ring, her voice was speaking for her, the other voice made known, and she plunged like a diving bird into the grappling waters of speech.
‘I can’t sleep.’
‘Oh ... how awful for you. Do you want to talk?’
‘There’s nothing to talk about. I can’t sleep. I just lie like this and my heart pounds right up at the top of my chest. You know?’
‘Mm-hm.’
‘Like it will choke you. And the way you can’t stop thinking. Over and over. I hear the same words over and over.’
‘I know. That can be unbearable.’
‘It’s so bloody unbearable, I—’ The woman on the telephone began to cry. Not gasping sobs, but small bleating moans, as if she were being physically hurt.
‘Tell me. Tell me about it. It’s all right, I won’t ring off. I’ll wait till you can talk.’
‘I’m—oh shit, it’s no good, I can’t—’
‘There’s plenty of time. I’ll wait.’
‘What’s the use?’ The voice strengthened into a cry. ‘You don’t care. Why should you? Nobody cares. There’s no one to talk to. Those shitty friends...’
‘I care.’
Startled, the woman held her breath, then released it on a sigh. ‘I don’t believe that.’
‘You can believe it or not.’ Victoria put her elbow on the desk and leaned her ear on the telephone receiver. ‘It’s true.’
‘I thought — well, I mean — aren’t I supposed to say, “I’m going to kill myself”? That’s what you’re there for, isn’t it?’
‘We’re here’ — it always sounded a little mannered this, and yet there was no other way to say it — ‘to try and help anyone who needs us.’
‘Do-gooders.’ The woman made the vowel sounds of a jeer. ‘I’ve had some of that. I had one once — well, she was
a probation officer, if you must know. She said, “You ought to find some nice man and get married, that’s what you ought to do.” What do you think of that?’
‘Well... that’s all right, I suppose, but nice men aren’t all that easy to find.’
‘You married, dear?’
‘No. I’m not.’
‘How old are you, can I ask that?’
‘Thirty-five.’
‘You a lesbian?’
‘No.’
‘I am. Does that shock you?’
Victoria laughed. She felt among the papers on the desk for a cigarette. ‘You’ll have to try harder than that. Let’s talk about why you can’t sleep. Why you’re unhappy.’
When Victoria’s voice became gentle, the woman gave a sort of strangled gasp. ‘How could you sleep when the only person in the world you care about calls you a freak? Oh shit, you couldn’t understand.’
Across the desk, Helen was talking into the other telephone. A homeless man who was waiting to be fetched by the students was a heap of old clothes by the wall, his broken shoes at a slack angle, as if they had no feet in them. His red-rimmed eyes watched the woman vacantly.
Victoria, in a thick white pullover and blue jeans, her long red hair tied back with a green scarf, elbows on the desk, shoulders hunched, hugged the telephone receiver like a harmonica and asked it fiercely, ‘Why should you care what people say? What’s wrong with being a lesbian?’
Helen, with her shoes off and a pencil stuck through her short wild hair, told her noisy telephone, ‘That’s enough, Jackie, that’s enough. Knock it off now and go back to bed, there’s a good boy. It’s much too late for you to be up ... Yes, of course you can. Anytime. Yes, I’ll be here next week ... Yes, I love you ... I’ve told you what I look like. I look like your mother. Does she? All right then, your grandmother. No, Amy’s not here. Her husband’s
got flu. Victoria’s here. She looks like your sister ... Well, if you did. Yes, yes, she loves you too. All right, love. You go to bed. Goodnight, dear.’
She put down the receiver, looked at the clock and made a note in the log book. Jackie was one of her steadies. On Thursday nights, he set his alarm under his pillow and crept down barefoot to the telephone so that Helen could chide him back to bed like the child he still was at twenty-two.
‘Yes, do,’ Victoria said. ‘There’s always someone here.’
‘I’d rather speak to you though. No sense going through the whole bloody mess all over again.’
‘I’m usually here on Sundays. My name’s Victoria.’
‘Mine’s Billie—well, just Billie.’
‘I’ll give you the second number, in case the emergency line is tied up. I hope we can talk again, Billie. I enjoyed it.
The jeering vowels again, but with less energy.
‘Try and get some sleep.’
‘I’m going to have a drink.’
‘Does that make you sleep?’
‘No, but it makes me more enjoyable.’
Victoria put down the receiver, slid a hand under her hair and flipped it away from her neck. ‘It can’t be much fun being a lesbian if you have to feel guilty about it.’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘To go on loving. Was that right?’
‘No good without.’ Helen got up and went to pick up the slopped cup of tea from the floor by the keeled-over feet. The homeless man was asleep, snoring gently inside the long threadbare coat, a bubble of mucus blowing in and out of his nose.
Victoria, Helen had said. ‘She loves me too?’ Jackie shouted into the telephone. He always spoke too loudly. If your lips didn’t close properly on the beginning and end of words, you had to shout to be understood.
The telephone was in his father’s workshop, on the wall above the nailing machine. In the front part of the
shop, his mother sold handbags and slippers and rain-boots and shoe brushes and polishes and dyes. Her hair was like a grey helmet. She wore a green smock to match the carpet, and her nails were shell-clean as she gave the change on to a little pimply rubber mat like goose-flesh.
His father did the shoe repairs on the trimmers and stitchers in the workshop at the back, whistling through an unlit match. Jackie did heels ‘Wile-U-Wate’, and the waiting women sat in the front of the shop like goods on display and read magazines and curled their stockinged toes and rubbed one foot over the other to get the bunions going.
Jackie got quite bored with the heels. He would much rather sit on the green plastic chairs and look at pictures in magazines, but it was very important for him to have a job and ‘contribute to society’, so that nobody would say he was childish. Jackie would not care if they did say it. He liked to be childish, but his mother did not like it, and his father liked what his mother liked, because she was better educated.
‘All right, love.’ Helen’s voice was rough and friendly, like a blanket. The sort of voice his mother listed as common. The sort of voice that Jackie liked.
‘Goo-ni, He’en. Goo-ni.’ Jackie hung the telephone back on the wall, smiling and safe. Then he remembered that he had forgotten something. He picked off the receiver again and shouted, ‘God bless !’, but there was only the dialling tone, purring at him like a mechanical cat. He was going to dial again — his finger knew the right holes in the dark — when he noticed with a painful chill like frost on iron railings, that the door between the workshop and the stairs that led to the flat was ajar. He must have closed it so gently that it did not catch, and here he had been shouting and laughing as if he was alone in the building.
Would his mother be waiting at the top of the stairs with her ‘patient’ voice? Jackie sucked his lip. Got to risk it. He tiptoed up the stairs, holding up his pyjama trousers and watching his bare feet grab the carpet like
sand. When he reached the top, her bedroom door was open, and in the light from the seven-watt bulb left on for young Malcom to go to the WC, Jackie’s eye travelled up all the buttons of her dressing-gown to the round furry chin, small pink mouth, bumped-up nose, and at last to the eyes.