The Listeners (3 page)

At the dance hall, Tim had thought that he and Frank would stand together and say things about the girls, but Frank went away with a person who even looked horrible from the back, shunting her off into the pulsing mob.

Tim stood as if his feet were nailed to the floor, his
hands hanging and heavy, a tight hot band round his forehead where the bumps would neither flare up to a head nor fade away. He could feel his pale hair rising from the back of his scalp in a stiff tuft. Sometimes he could actually feel his hair growing, sprouting out at strange unmanageable angles.

His Adam’s apple was swelling like dough. He could not swallow it down. He wanted to unsnap the neck of his denim shirt, but he could not lift his hands. If he kept perfectly still, the two girls in matching pink-flowered pants, their bottoms carved like jelly babies, would go on looking beyond him at whatever was making them simper and whinny and nudge each other’s fat little chests.

With a superhuman effort, Tim turned his legs and body on the pivot of his nailed feet, to show that he knew there was something ridiculous behind him, and they could all whinny at it together. Behind him were several piles of aluminium chairs, stacked like geological strata so that no one could sit on them.

He turned back with a clever smile to show that he appreciated the joke.

‘Who are
you
laughing at?’ asked the girl whose dry black hair had somehow been manœuvred up to ride her fat head like a bearskin. The other one, with slick orange hair like furniture polish, touched her friend for luck and said, ‘What’s eating
him?’

When they moved on, propelled from behind by assorted bodies, Tim realized that the whole encounter, which had seemed like an hour’s paralysis, had lasted only the less-than-a-minute that it took for the flowered pants to approach and pass.

Under the low ceiling, battered by noise, the crowd in the dance hall heaved like maggots. The lights swivelled the colours of death mercilessly over the faces, shrieking into each other’s mouths. Disguised as a house detective, Tim put his hands in his jacket pockets and began to slip through the crowd, turning his narrow hips this way and that to avoid contact, hanging his head to protect his
identity. The man without a face. His orders were never to mix, never to acquire personality. The man without a name. They had chosen him for his size.

He reached the bar undetected. Everyone had a half-filled glass in their hand, without any apparent way of getting it. Gimme a Coke, Tim’s mind announced; but if he had been capable of forcing himself through the thorn forest of bodies between him and the bar, and then of forcing the words past the obstruction of his throat, there would be no problem about himself at all. He would be somebody else.

The problem now was to get out. It couldn’t be helped, Frank. You walked off on me. I tried to find you to tell you I was leaving ... well, I’m sorry you waited, that’s all. Oh — and thanks for the ticket. I had a great time. Mm? Oh well, not bad. Have to take what you can get, don’t you? And a wink, to show that he had observed and assessed the front view of Frank’s girl as well as the back.

The designing of this conversation got him back into the crowd with a set jaw, butting with a shoulder, jerking up his elbows, raising his knees to wade towards the doors, which seemed to get farther away, not closer. No one was annoyed with Tim for shoving through. They fended him off and handed him past and pushed him on with an indulgent palm behind his head, as if he were a child trying to find his Dad in a football crowd,

‘What’s the panic?’ a young man with a bear’s pelt of hair stopped him near the doors. ‘Your Mum want you home?’

Tim plucked at the fingers that gripped his sleeve, and drew his hand back with a cry.

‘Ah,’ said the bear thoughtfully. ‘You want to be careful, sonny.’ He held his hand close to Tim’s face. The ring on the middle finger had a curved hook on it. Tim ducked through the swinging doors — lucky to escape with his eyes!

He ran through the entrance hall and out into the street. A handful of rain was thrown in his burning face.
He took off his jacket and was instantly icy cold, but he dragged his hand across his face and shook it out, to show why he was standing there with the wet wind from the sea whipping his shirt against his ribs.

Outside the hall, a posse of motorbikes browsed at the kerb, their riders camouflaged by moon helmets, a loose knot of girls admiring. Slinging the jacket over his shoulder, Tim walked away from them to where he could cross the street. An engine raced. A motorbike came at him with a dazzling eye, swerved, canted, screamed off down the hill.

Tim had jumped on to the centre island. As he stood there gasping for his breath, the traffic lights on the corner changed, and an armoured division came charging up the hill. At the same time, more cars and buses bore down on the other side of his narrow refuge, so that he was caught in a scissor of traffic. He clung to the lamppost in the middle of the island until the lights changed and he could run for it, then sped down the hill to the bus stop, legs grown fleet as a spider, his breath sawing his throat.

In the chilly bus shelter, walled with corrugated green plastic that ended in a draught two feet from the ground, like a lavatory, a few of the dance-hall crowd were fooling about, guffawing, jostling, grabbing, the girls twirling away on to the pavement but wheeling right back when no one pursued them.

Tim stayed outside, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched against their laughter. If they reeled out and pushed him under a bus, arms outstretched as he pitched face forward, the passengers would all get out and stare, and the bus driver would be led away, grey with shock.

Who is it? He was not labelled. No one would know. Frank would go to Carlisle. The people in the Darley Road house came and went all the time. If Tim never came back to his room, they would give his bits of stuff to the Salvation and move someone else in. If anyone at the Employment Office missed him on Monday, they would only think: Well, there, you see. Shiftless. They all are.

It was getting late. As usual, a bus had just pulled away as Tim came down the hill. There was a long wait till the next. He went behind the bus shelter and walked along the hoarding that hid a row of condemned shops, looking at the pictures of crippled children and men in bulging underpants and the swim-suit girls with hair pencilled on their crotches.

He had walked by the small black and white poster without giving it any more attention than if it was a religious advertisement. When he passed
At
on the way back, he saw that it said:
If you are desperate.

Tim stopped and turned to face the hoarding, which was made of dozens of old doors side by side, leading nowhere.
If you are at the end of your tether.
There was the name,
Samaritans,
and bold and black at the bottom a telephone number, 333-4000.

If you are desperate.
Of course. The poster was a message sent direct to him.

Far down the road, the lights of a double-decker bus rode high over the traffic, an almost empty bus behind it, patrolling in pairs like scared policemen. The girls and youths burst out of the shelter and claimed the first bus for their territory, racketing up the stairs, the girls parading their thighs for the coloured conductor who did not notice. Tim went to the second bus. There was no one on top.

The conductress, with her cap tipped back on a nest of hair and penny-stained fingers said, ‘If you’re going up, I’ll take the fare now.’

Holding on to the stair rail, Tim found a shilling and a threepenny bit in his pocket and gave them to her.

‘Where to, dear?’

Dog and Duck corner was impossible to say, so Tim said, ‘That’, and nodded at the coins.

‘One and threepenny? Don’t bother saying so then, will you?’ she said, taking automatic offence, and Tim ran up the stairs and fell into a seat at the back. He rode up the hill past the closed shops and banks and painted glass fronts of estate agents, the empty seats going ahead
in pairs, his image riding beside him in the dark window.

I am desperate. How could he not have seen that before? Yes, I am desperate, and they know it.

Instead of getting off at the Dog and Duck, Tim ran down the stairs long before that and jumped off the bus as it slowed down for a corner by the station. In the archway of the station entrance, there were three telephone boxes next to the shuttered news-stand. In the first a man talked earnestly, with his hat square on. In the second a boy lunged, inspecting his nails, laughing occasionally, shifting his weight from leg to leg, from one wall to the other, bending at the knees to squint at part of his face in the little mirror, listening, contributing nothing, tireless. In the third box, a woman talked fast, like a foreigner, her eyes darting from side to side, her unheard mouth twisting wet and rubbery.

Tim’s mind raised a gun and shot all three through the head, splattering the stones of the archway with glass and brains. The man in the hat finished talking, fussed with his collar, pulled his gloves with difficulty out of his pocket, put them on, refolded his newspaper and stepped out, staring straight ahead as Tim darted under his arm into the box.

333-4000. Tim had been chanting it to himself like a spell. What would they say? What would he say to them? He dialled quickly and pushed in his sixpence.

‘Yes? Can I help you?’

A woman’s voice. He had not thought about it being a woman. He tried to speak, but no words came with the breath that rasped through his constricted throat.

‘This is the Samaritans. Please tell me how I can help you.’

Help me! Tim shouted without sound. Help me. I can’t—

His fists were clenched. His jaw and neck were rigid with effort. For what seemed like hours, his whole body struggled, his chest like a bellows, his stomach drawn into a knot of anguish. He did not know whether he was fighting to get the words out or keep them back.

‘Tell me,’ she said gently. And he tried to tell her, tried to force something past the suffocation of his throat.

‘I’ll wait,’ she had said. ‘I won’t ring off.’ But now she asked him quickly what the number was. ‘I can ring you back if the money runs out. Tell me where you are. What number.’

Fighting for breath, fighting for time, he could hear his own breathing, harsh and urgent in the sour mouthpiece.

‘Tell me the number. It’s all right. It’s all right...’

Shrill and demanding, the beeps cut the thread that held them. Tim slid his fingers into his trousers pocket, felt a ten shilling note and crumpled it as he listened to the senseless beeps as if they were a voice. Soon they gave him up as a lost cause, and the dialling tone came smoothly in.

Tim stood and listened to it for quite a long time while his breath slowed and quietened. He could talk now. He would get his money changed and try again. The woman would say: Can I help you? and Tim would say: Yes. Help me. There’s no one. Please listen to me.

When he put down the telephone and turned to go, he saw that the young man in the next box was looking at him, still laughing, contemptuously, his eyes far away, as if Tim were not worth a focus.

Tim pushed open the folding door and went through the black archway into the station, empty and dim under the high glass roof, a few people moving slowly or sitting inert, looking at nothing. On a bench in the pillared shadow beyond the parcels office, a heap of rags and newspapers was already asleep, with no head or feet. Tim went to the only window in the booking office that was not blanked with a board shaped like a gravestone.

‘Change for ten bob?’ He put the crumpled note on the ledge without letting go of it.

‘Sorry.’ The floor inside was raised so that the man could look down his nose at his customers. He had crinkled ginger hair and a moustache no wider than his nostrils. ‘No change for the phone. Sell you a ticket, though.’

Banging against the curved wooden bottom of the ticket office, a stunted woman with a great wide broom as high as her chin was collecting unnamable refuse from the station floor. Tim put the ten shilling note back in his pocket and ran past her and out through the archway entrance against a funnelling wind that tried to drive him back in again.

SAMARITAN LOG BOOK. NIGHT DUTY.
23.00 Phone-box call. Breathing only. (Victoria, 422)
23.15 Billie again. Bit tight. Less miserable. (Victoria, 422)
23.20 Michael still asleep here. Rang students’ hostel again about a bed for him. (Victoria, 422)

Some time before midnight, a young Spanish theology student with a ruffianly beard, and a beautiful girl with soft clean hair came in a little yellow van painted with daisy flowers.

‘Hullo, Michael. I thought you were in the hospital.’

‘I got out.’ The homeless man woke easily, accustomed to napping where he could, and being moved on from anywhere that was warm and comfortable. He wiped his nose with an old bus ticket and put it back in his pocket.

‘I’m afraid it will have to be the floor,’ the girl said. ‘That’s all we’ve got left tonight.’

‘Not a bed in town,’ Helen said, ‘except the Government hostel.’

‘He can’t estand that.’ The Spanish student wore a skiing sweater and a pair of old Army trousers. His eyes were a clear tropical blue between his thick black hair and beard.

‘I was at the Spike a couple of times. Camberwell.’ The man bent down to arrange his shoes so that what was left of the soles was flat on the floor, and took the Spaniard’s arm to pull himself more or less upright. ‘They make you stay on in the morning and do all their work for them.’

‘You scrubbed the bottom of my pans though, last time
you were with us,’ The girl, who was in her first year at the University, had a lovely full-cheeked smile, which turned with completely honest kindness on the tattered smelly man. No, not as deliberate as kindness, Victoria thought. An effortless acceptance. God — in the unlikely event I had ever done anything for anyone at her age, I can picture my strained condescension, how I would have admired myself, and run afterwards to wash my hands and tell someone about it.

‘That’s something else, darling. I’d work my fingers to the bone for you people, if I had my strength.’ The thought of it brought on a foul, waterlogged cough.