The Listeners Read online

  THE LISTENERS

  Monica Dickens

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  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

  One

  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 receive
r, 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.

  They were not unkind eyes, or frightening. They were blank. Clear blue like laundry bleach, not smiling, not glaring, not puzzled. They were as expressionless as Mrs Brady’s glass eye, at the greengrocer’s. It was a marvel to Jackie that anyone could see with eyes like that. Mrs Brady couldn’t see you if you came up unexpectedly on her glass side.

  ‘Hullo, Mum.’ That was what he meant, but he knew, because Malcom’s friend had made a tape-recording for him, that he said something like, ‘Huh-o, Muh.’

  ‘What were you doing down there? I thought you weren’t going to talk to yourself any more.’

  ‘I talking to He’en.’ Jackie did not bother to lie to her.

  ‘I see, dear. And what did Helen say?’ Muh was always careful how she spoke. She said, ‘And-a h-what-a did’, especially when she was speaking to Jackie, moving her lips like captive worms, precisely.

  ‘She told me about her dog. It bit a bloke was selling carpets.’

  ‘It-a bit-a man.’ Muh’s forehead frowned, though her blue eyes showed nothing. ‘I don’t want you to go downstairs at night,’ she said. ‘You’re too big a boy for playacting and games. Aren’t you?’

  Jackie nodded, looking down at her from under his thick forelock. She only came up to his shoulders, but she made it seem an advantage to be short.

  ‘And-a there is no Helen, is there?’

  Muh did not believe in Helen or Amy, or any of them he talked to at the Samaritans. One day, when he brought in some ‘Wile-U-Wate’ heeling jobs, the women were talking about a piece in a magazine which gave you the number to ring if you were going to put your head in the oven, so Jackie had rung them up on Thursday night to see what they would say.

  He had been ringing almost every Thursday night since, with the workshop door shut. Muh had caught him once before, but she thought he was pretending. So when she said, in her ‘teaching’ voice like that poor woman at the school who kept trying to make him read, ‘There is no Helen, is there?’ it was safe to say, ‘Yes.’

  Jackie yawned. Helen had sent him to bed, so he toddled in his drooping pyjamas into his room and manoeuvred his length into the tunnel of bedclothes.

  ‘Good night, Jackie,’ his mother called in a sanitary voice. She still tucked up Malcom, and read him stories about children called Rodney and Tessa who navigated space rockets. Jackie was allowed to eavesdrop on the stories, but not to be tucked up. Jackie was a man.

  ‘Samaritans—’

  Rapid electronic beeps from a call-box.

  ‘Samaritans — can I help you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I saw your poster. I’ve nowhere to go.’ A Tyneside voice, a broad flat statement, not asking for anything.

  ‘I can give you some names of hotels and boarding houses...’ Victoria tilted her chair back to reach for the folder.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘The cheapest you could get would be about fifteen shillings a night.’

  A single-syllable laugh. ‘I’m broke, sister.’

  ‘Where are you? I can tell you where the Reception Centre is.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A Government hostel, they’ll give you a bed. Hold on just a minute...’

  When she hung up the telephone, it rang again before she had taken her hand off it.

  ‘Samaritans — can I help you?’

  The beeps again, replaced by heavy breathing. A man.

  ‘Yes? Can I help you?’

  The breathing continued. It could be anxiety. It could be a joke. It could be a sex call. It could be fear or pain. Whatever it was, you waited. You never rang off first.

  You tried to offer help without being officious. You tried to make contact, but if no one spoke, all you could do was show that you were there. That you were still listening. That you would listen all night if that was what they wanted. Friendship. Caring. Love. Your voice had to convey your heart.

  And if you failed— ‘Tell me what number you’re ringing from/ Victoria said too anxiously, ‘and I can ring you back if the money runs out.’
r />   The breathing went on, harshening, quickening, until the beeps cut in again. Then nothing.

  ‘Damn.’ It was horrible when that happened. You didn’t know. You didn’t know that it was not your fault.

  She made an entry in the log book. ‘22.00. Phone-box call. Breathing only.’ An entry of Helen’s higher up said, ‘21.40. V. rude person who might be our old seagoing friend rang from what sounded like a public swimming-bath. So abusive even I couldn’t answer back.’

  Helen was in the kitchen at the back of the old greening stone house that had once been a rectory, breaking the hearts of parsons’ wives and their poor little maids, and was now the Samaritan Centre. The homeless man was still asleep by the wall of the small front room that had once been a study where the parson yawned over repetitious sermons, wearing mittens to save coal. Depressed, Victoria sat and twisted her hands in her lap, staring at the telephone. Please try again. She turned Robbie’s ring round and round on her finger. When he had given her the little box, irritatingly glorified with shiny paper and bows, she put the ring on to her right hand quickly and casually, before he could suggest the other. The tiny jewel was absurd on her. Wanting her to be petite, Robbie invariably chose presents that were too small and too dainty. If the ring would not go back over her knuckle, she would have to be buried in it.

  Please try again, she begged the unknown man who had breathed his fear and loneliness. Perhaps it had taken all the courage he had left to ring this number. Don’t be afraid. I am afraid too. I lost you. I let you go. Give me another chance.

  She heard Helen coming back down the hall. Victoria dug the corner of Robbie’s absurd jewel into the flesh of her finger, and leaned over the desk where the telephone squatted like a black secret. Ring now. If Helen comes in here, I shall be coward enough to let her take the next call. She’ll talk to you. Help you. Save you. But I want it to be me.

  Although she had been passionate to join the Samaritans, and would have died if she had been turned down, Victoria was not really sure she should have been accepted. She had the wrong spirit. Selfish. Obsessed. The others were so balanced. So bloody nice. They accepted her as they accepted each other, and every last least lovable client, without judgement, without seeing how inadequate she was.