The Listeners Read Free

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 overher 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.
    As she turned to smile at Helen, coming back into the room with sandwiches, the telephone jerked her back with a shock of nerves. She grabbed it, waited for the beeps. ‘Yes? Oh — Billie. Hullo.’
    ‘Just making sure you’re still there.’
    ‘Do you want me?’
    ‘Me? No, but all those poor sods.’
    ‘What sods?’
    ‘Well, I mean ... ringing and ringing. Can’t have that, you know,’ Billie said sternly, and rang off.
    ‘How is she?’
    ‘All right, I think,’ Victoria said, ‘She’s drunk.’
    It seemed like a message sent direct to him.
    If you are desperate,
the poster said.
If you are at the end of your tether.
Well, if it could be the end of something that had never properly begun, that’s me.
    Tim was twenty. He had lived for almost two years inthis great conglomerate town of slums and university and factories and rich flowering suburbs and seaside trippery and reeling rows of new estate houses, eating up the salty grassland. He had come from the flat wet plate of an eastern county, where he was supposed to learn how to grow the flowers and vegetables that made their own frenzied growth out of the dark earth that was so frigging fertile, Mr Gregg said, it was like growing the poor buggers in straight manure.
    That was not Tim’s natural home. He had spent the first years of his life in some place like Harrow or Hendon that you could call a part of London if you liked. His third foster-mother took him to East Anglia, and after she sickened of it, and of Tim, he had lived mostly in a Children’s Home, where the nurses came and went almost every month, since girls these days would not stand for all the washing.
    At school, the boys from the Home tended to shun the others, to forestall being shunned. Once, Tim had been invited to tea with Adam Johnson, whose mother felt that we should all do what we could to help those less fortunate than ourselves. They had sardines on toast and Battenburg cake in a little house by a canal lock where Adam’s father worked the gates.
    His mother said, ‘When Adam was a baby, all he wanted was sardines and pickles,’ as though she were telling some event in history.
    ‘That’s right.’