The Listeners Page 6

  Another half-mile of wide white road brought him to the chainlink fence of Butterfields Comprehensive, a model modern school complex fantastically equipped and furnished for two thousand children. He parked his car, walked under the granite pillars that held up the gym, and pushed through the swinging doors whose original glass had been replaced by a sandwich of glass and wire netting. Feeling older than fifty, he went up to his classroom with his hand on the rail, while multitudes of boys and girls in mulberry uniforms and shoes that sounded like clogs surged past him up the stairs as if he were not there.

  Mumbling and muttering, dropping heavily from stair to linoleum stair in his new leatherite walking shoes with simucrêpe soles, young Malcom sulked off to school from the flat over the shoe shop.

  ‘Bye!’ Jackie called from the top of the stairs, his toes on the edge like a diver; but Malcom would not turn round or answer. Jackie shut the door of the flat and shuffled back to his breakfast, clapping a spread hand over the yawn that would make his mother say, ‘And-a no wonder. Play-acting downstairs with the phone half the night. Pick up your feet.’ His mother was at the sink, plunging plates into hot sudsy water almost before you had finished the last corner of fried bread. She never let the washing-up wait. She always left a shining sink, even if it meant opening the shop late or missing the start of the evening news.

  ‘Malcom don’t want go a school, Muh,’ Jackie chuckled.

  ‘Doesn’t want,’ Muh said. ‘He didn’t finish his homework last night, so he’ll have no one but himself to blame if he gets a wigging.’ She turned back to the sink. She was always careful to face Jackie when she talked to him, as if he was deaf.

  Malcom was thirteen. He bicycled every morning from the shopping centre down Cherry Tree Avenue, up Holly Rise, round the long curve of Meadside and past the football grounds to Butterfield Comprehensive School. At four-thirty, he bicycled back, grubbier and more rumpled, was inquisitioned about marks and placings, and sat down to a brain-building tea of eggs or herrings, with vitamin complex stirred into his milk.

  Malcom was clever. Malcom was in the ‘A’ stream. He read the newspaper and did electrical experiments on the end of a bench cleared off for him in the workshop. Malcom was clever. He got it from his mother, who had been to college for two years, never forgotten. He was nine years younger than Jackie. No need for Muh to say why she had waited so long for a second child. It was there in her neat pink face when she turned it from Malcom to Jackie.

  But Malcom was not the only one going to school today. Jackie was going to school too. His mother belonged to the Association of Parents of Special Children, and Friday was her day to help at the Play School. Jackie was much too old to play, but he liked the music and the cheerful company, and he had learned how to take the little ones to the You-know-where. So Muh usually took him with her, leaving Miriam to take care of the shop, and no instant heeling done that morning, unless Dad had time, which was unlikely, with the perpetual pile of soleing and stitching with which he never quite caught up. Butterfields was very hard on shoes. All the walking on pavements which had been made with some kind of hard sparkling stone in them. Very good business for some people, the customers joked, drawing shoes from among the boxes of soapflakes and cornflakes in their shopping bags.

  ‘Keep them going for just a bit longer,’ Like taking an old dog to the vet, they brought out dreadful old favourite shoes, and pretended they were only for gardening.

  ‘Yoo hoo – yours truly reporting!’ Miriam had some rather common mannerisms, like shouting up the stairs, but she knew the business of the shop, and Muh did not have to pay her too much, being a cousin. ‘Hello, love!’

  Jackie went clattering down on his big feet which had to go sideways on the stairs, and she hugged him fondly, smelling of armpits and cigarettes.

  ‘Huh-oMim!’

  He went through into the shop with her, and she showed him what she had brought, a marvellous little man on a tricycle, whose bell rang as his legs went round. He was seamed down the middle from front to back. Jackie pulled him apart — ‘Mind what you’re doing, that cost money!’ — and cleverly clipped him back together again, to show Miriam how it could be done.

  ‘Ah well, another day, another deed.’ Miriam began to pull the dust cloths off the permanent displays, and to bring out from under the counter the handbags and the better-quality shoe buckles and bows that were put away each night.

  ‘Good morning, dear.’

  Jackie’s father came through from the workshop in his apron, a beam on his shiny red face, which went right on over the top of his head. He was going to have Miriam here all morning, popping into the workshop for a cigarette when the shop was empty. ‘You got here then.’

  ‘No, I was run over crossing the Broadway. This is my ghost.’ Miriam’s laugh was an open-mouthed shriek. Muh frowned as she came in through the front of the shop with her gloves on, rainboots over her shoes, and a top layer of transparent plastic like a cake cover over her orange felt hat. She had gone out at the side entrance and in again at the shop door like a customer, to see what Miriam was up to.

  ‘Aren’t you coming, Jack?’ He was watching the little man tricycle down the counter.

  ‘Yeh.’ He looked up, open-mouthed. Of course he was coming.

  ‘Then put-a on your galoshes.’

  ‘No.’ His mouth closed with the lips tucked in.

  ‘It’s starting to rain.’

  ‘What’s the matter, can’t John put on soles that don’t let water?’ Miriam laughed and so did Jackie and his father, all throwing back their heads, and a customer who pushed open the door at that moment (da-doing on the musical chime) looked embarrassed, as people do coming into a jolly group.

  ‘Have you got any black shoe polish?’ There were stacks of it, but she had to say something. She said it to Jackie’s mother, but because it was Friday and she was in her outdoor things, she pretended she was a customer too and would not answer.

  Miriam began to show black polish, and Dad backed into the workshop like a kitchen hand. He had not shaved the bottom half of his beefy face, because he was not supposed to be seen in his working apron. Only Jackie went in and out between the customers and the workshop, shutting the door on the elves.

  When he came back wearing huge galoshes like rubber life-rafts, the customer had gone and Muh had the little tricycling man on the palm of her hand like a butterfly.

  ‘Malcom is much too old for toys,’ she chided kindly. ‘You shouldn’t spend your money.’

  Miriam winked. ‘It’s for Jackie.’

  He had known it would be a mistake. Although Muh often treated him like a child — wipe your mouth, let me see your hands, only dirty boys make that noise — he must not behave like one. He had to go to cunning extremes to hide toys and picture books and furry animals from her, because she turned out wardrobes and drawers at every change of season and flipped over his mattress once a week. A blue wool monkey was dangling on a string alongside the drainpipe outside his window, puzzle books were in the holiday suitcase on top of the linen cupboard, and a vast store of bubblegum that he had stolen from Woolworth’s was buried in a box of coloured leather scraps under the workroom bench. Only Helen knew where the gum was. He had told her one night, and she said she liked it too.

  His mother put the toy into her handbag — would she give it to one of the special children? — and they went out.

  The play centre was in the basement of St Barnabas Church on the other side of town. Jackie and his mother walked there in the drizzle. It was quite a long way, but Muh did not like the bus. She could not be shut in anywhere. On the rare occasions when she would go to see a film, to be able to say it was no good, she had to go out and stand outside at least twice. When she came back in, she could not find where the family was sitting, so she made Jackie go with her, since Malcom refused to get up.

  The windows of the flat were always being flung open. ‘It’s stifling in here!’

  ‘It’s the change of life
, dear,’ Miriam said.

  Muh went pink like a geranium. ‘I’m not anywhere near that, thank you very much. The whole place reeks of your vile cigarettes.’

  She flung open the windows and Miriam turned up her collar and said, ‘If you’re still smoking at forty, you’ve got lung cancer anyway.’ Muh would die if she knew that while she was out, Jackie and Miriam had been smoking away like twin chimneys, lighting each cigarette from the stub of the last, desperately inhaling. They had let young Malcom have a go too, to stop him telling.

  If Jackie shut his window on a frosty night, she would come in after he was asleep and sneak it open. ‘You can have another blanket,’ she said if he complained that he woke up cold, but all the blankets in the world would not save you from Muh’s idea of a little healthy fresh air.

  She walked briskly through the clean wet streets with Jackie beside her, his long disorganized legs skipping occasionally, hopping between the pavement lines, but she laid her hand on his arm and said, ‘Easy fellow,’ as if he were a horse.

  They might meet someone they knew. They did know quite a few people in town, because of the shop, and Muh being on the Parent-Teacher committee, and a member of the Butterfield Culturettes, who read poems to each other and made a little thin music with whatever they could play, even if it was only a comb and toilet paper.

  Jackie and Malcom sometimes listened outside the window of Mrs Devon’s large sitting-room, where the meetings were held.

  ‘Ill met by moonlight, proud-a Titania,’ declaimed Muh, and, ‘What,’ said Miss Larkin, ‘jealous Oberon! Fairies skip hence.’

  Jackie and Malcom fell into the flowerbed in stitches.

  Butterfields had grown to such a size that the people you knew were only a tiny speck among the whole crowd. You could go for days without a familiar face coming into the shoe repair shop or into other shops in which you were buying. You could walk, as Jackie was allowed to (’Have you wound your watch? What-a time did I say be back? And six means six and not half past’) for hour after hour among the doll’s-house streets and never see a face that opened to a smile or a hullo. It was not like the pictures in the leaflets where women called and waved to each other over their flapping laundry, or a man with a pipe and a pullover leaned on his spade to talk to a grandmother and a little boy over the garden gate. Butterfields people kept themselves to themselves. Muh joined things because she said she must give of herself, but there were many women who saw nobody when their husbands were at work and the children at school. Last month, one of them had been found dead of sleeping pills.

  Malcom had read bits of it to Jackie out of the local paper. ‘She was such a quiet girl we never hardly saw her.’ The neighbour on the other side, a certain Mrs Digit, world-famous now with her picture in the paper wearing a flowered overall like a bolster cover, had said, ‘How should I know? I don’t poke my nose into everybody’s business.’

  The body, Malcom read, had been lying on the bed for about eight hours. ‘Phew, what a ponk—* The story disappeared with a rattle as his mother snatched the newspaper away.

  The Play School was in the basement of St Barnabas Church which stood behind the recreation hall and the bowling alley and one of the public houses where a man had once staggered out as they were going home from the cinema and almost knocked little Muh over. ‘Here, here,’ Dad had shouted, and rounded his fists, red as a tomato, and the man had laughed and gone back into the pub. The church was built on a slight grassy rise so as to poke its spire as close up to God as possible. There were only a few gravestones in the fenced plot, but ‘Another winter like this,’ Mrs Manson said, taking off her scarf and shaking raindrops out of the front of her hair, ‘and it will be standing room only.’

  They had caught up with her on the path that led round the side of the church to the basement door, running from her car with her little boy whose hair clung in spikes whether it was raining or not.

  ‘Huh-o-, Char-ie.’ Jackie crouched down and grinned into the child’s face. The dark eyes looked neither at nor through him. They did not look at all, but that did not discourage either Jackie or lively Mrs Manson, who had five other children and looked like her eldest daughter.

  ‘He knows you, you see!’ She put Charlie’s hand into Jackie’s, where it neither pulled away nor clung. Jackie took Charlie down the steps and over to the pegs at the end of the big noisy basement room. As soon as you let go of Charlie’s hands, he put them in his mouth, working them round and round inside the wet reddened lips, so that he left strings of saliva on everything, including Jackie as he unfastened the little boy’s coat. At home, Jackie knew, because he had been there to tea, Mrs Manson went about with an old towel tucked into her waist and wiped the doorknobs and chairs and tabletops without noticing she did it.

  The floor of the long low room was littered with toys, pedal car, blocks, tricycles, a small slide and a climbing frame where a little girl hung upside down by her heels, red in the face if she had not been black to start with. In one corner, three or four children were cooking at a sand table, banging toy saucepans about and throwing sand into each other’s eyes. Jackie led Charlie to the slide and put his limp pigeon-toed foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, but as soon as he took away his hand, the foot slipped off.

  ‘Ugh-gh-gh! Gurr-r-r!’ Charlie roared like an unknown animal. His meaningless eyes stared at nothing over his hands, working and turning inside his mouth.

  ‘Let’s leave him alone, Jackie, and see what he’ll do, shall we?’ From six years of living with Charlie, Mrs Manson put everything as a bright question, rather than an order. ‘Yesterday, Harriet almost got him to clap his hands. It was marvellous!’ Jackie laughed an empty kind of laugh ha ha, to match her eagerness.

  Harriet was especially good with the children who stayed in a shut-in world. She rolled on the floor with them and came up dusty on her large behind. She tickled them, pinched them, sang into their uncaring eyes. ‘Anything to make contact!’ she cried to the other helpers, crashing herself down on the mattress where a child lay with his arm curled defensively over the back of his stubbly head. Jackie thought she was a little touched.

  Feeling suddenly blank and without a notion of who or where he was, or what for, he mooched over to the low tables and unfolded himself into one of the small chairs. He pretended he was helping the fat girl with the jigsaw puzzles, so that he could collect them in front of him and do them himself. Fat Mara shrieked and her face collapsed in exaggerated sobs. Jackie pinched her rubber thigh under the table and she fell off the chair and ran to a grown-up. She ran to a girl Jackie had not seen here before. She was standing awkwardly in a corner with her hands hanging, as if she did not know what to do or how she got here. She looked as if her mother had left her at a railway station and forgot to come back for her. She had thin straight legs in white stockings sticking yards out of a very very short skirt — Muh wouldn’t think much of that! She had short straight hair cut raggedly, and great eyes with lashes painted round them like a doll.

  When the fat girl ran at her legs, she reeled, then dropped quickly to the floor to hug her, glad of something to do, burying her face against the child’s. But old fatty Mara never stayed with anything more than a minute. She pulled away, thumping the girl’s arm to make her let go. The girl got up and stood again, watching.

  Jackie put his tongue between his teeth and went on with the puzzles. Most of the children were playing quite busily. His mother was in the kitchen-space behind the hatch, opening a tin of biscuits. Harriet was. at the gramophone with a small group, waving her arms and singing, head going like a mad bobbin. At the far end of the room, the sand table was deserted. Charlie was standing by it with his toes turned in and a naked slice of back where his trousers were dropping over his narrow hips. One hand was in his mouth, the other was on the edge of the table.

  Looking round, Jackie saw Mrs Manson watching Charlie as if there were nothing else in the room. His hand trailed in the sand, stopped, and picked up a little pie pan. He
was just scooping up sand like any other child when Jackie’s mother slipped open the hatch and, seeing that everybody was happily employed, clapped her hands like a pistol shot and cried, ‘Snack time, everybody.’

  Charlie, with his hand raised to dribble sand delightfully back on to the table, let it drop and wandered away, scattering sand on the floor and letting the pie pan roll away without noticing.

  ‘Come along, everybody! Come on then, Mrs King, you’re not doing anything. Now is when we have our snacks. Oh no—’ as the girl in the long white stockings, glad of a job, pushed a chair towards one of the tables. ‘We all bring our own chairs.’

  ‘We,’ Jackie wanted to tell the girl, means the children, not her and you.

  ‘Now then, Jack, come along, look lively! I thought it was your job to fetch the milk. Harriet — come, it’s table time.’ She switched off the gramophone and it died with a groan and a wail from Tommy to add to the shrieking of the chairs as the children dragged or pushed them across the floor.

  Those who would came and sat round the tables. Charlie had gone to the side of the room and was sitting with his arm over the back of the chair, the hand dangling, his head on his arm like a tired old man. Jackie’s mother picked him up chair and all, and put him at one of the tables, where he turned sideways and drifted away again with his arm on the back of the chair.

  Muh wiped strings of saliva off the front of her Play School washable dress and called again, ‘Come along, Jack, sharp’s the word! The milk won’t grow legs and walk in, you know!’