The Listeners Read Free Page A

Adam’s face spread into a hypnotized beam of self. ‘And I’d lick the oil from the tins. They couldn’t keep it out of my hair.’
    ‘You couldn’t remember when you were a baby.’ Tim stared across the table at him. He could remember nothing of Harrow or Hendon.
    ‘Mum tells me about it.’ Adam made round smug eyes over a two-fisted mouthful of toast, and his mother, seeing Tim’s burning face, had coughed into her finger-tips, spitting a crumb of toast on to her cheek, where it remained, and got up to fetch hot water to the teapot.
    Later, Adam’s father had let Tim spin the big coggedhelm to open the lock gates; but he would not go to tea at the lock cottage again, so Mrs Johnson invited one of the other boys, to satisfy her social conscience.
    When he left the House of God’s Angels (Tim had never been able to say the name of the Home, only the address) and went to work for Mr Gregg, people in the villages began to know him as the runty boy who came round with the truck of hyacinth seconds or subsize caulies that could not go to market. Quiet chap. Doesn’t say much. But there was nothing to say, either to the housewives with their time-worn comments on the weather and the crops, or in the dormitory hut, where the floating population of Italians and Spaniards did not stay long enough to learn much English. It had taken Tim half a year to tell Mr Gregg that he was not going to stay either, and another five weeks to announce that he was going south, and another eight days after that to rehearse what he was going to say at the ticket office in the railway station.
    Going through London and out again like a boy in a dream, he had thumbed a lift on a furniture van coming to this town and stayed here, drifting from job to job, sometimes drifting jobless, his tongue thick in his mouth like a parched desert traveller’s, strangling himself with silence.
    In the hotel kitchens, no one could talk against the volcanic clatter of the dishwasher. On the night squads, the vacuum cleaners shut out the world. In the factory loading bays the diesel lorries roared. On the building sites, it was too cold that winter to think of much more than knocking-off time and how quickly you could get your gloves back on after blowing your nose. On the roads, standing boot-deep in the spring mud of the sewerpipe trench, everyone was in too sullen a temper to try to compete with the clatter of the excavators.
    Most evenings he went to the same café and ate the same food.
    ‘The same, dear?’
    ‘Ta.’ He sat by the fly-trap curtain in the window andlooked as if he was reading the paper. Sometimes people came and sat at the table without noticing him. Sometimes they asked for the sugar or the thick sauce.
    ‘Live round here?’
    ‘Darley Road.’
    ‘Working?’
    ‘Not this week.’
    ‘What’s the treacle tart like?’
    ‘All right.’
    ‘The trouble with these people down here, they make it with golden syrup. Now where I come from, where they understand good food, it’s got to be black treacle, or they’d get it thrown back in their face.’
    Tim listened, sketching the pattern of the formica with his finger-nail. If you listened to a man, he went away thinking he had had a conversation. But a girl … It was not true that a girl only wanted to talk about herself, whether you listened or not. If you could not even answer a question like, ‘All on your own?’ she stared and giggled and said to her friend (they were always in packs), ‘What’s the matter with him?’ as if you were a personal affront.
    In his room, in the toppling terraced house where he lived half underground with the weight of a dozen or more people on his head, he listened to the beat of ground-floor transistors and thought of storming up into the night streets and doing some abomination, some unimaginable thing to a girl.
    ‘You’re mad,’ Frank said. ‘You don’t want to be afraid of them. They’re screaming for it.’
    A lot of them looked as if