The Listeners Read Free Page B

they were. In the streets, on the buses, strutting in and out of the shops, they moved as if they were naked, except that they had a few clothes on. There was a smell of sex all over the place. The town ought to spray.
    ‘Screaming for it,’ Frank said. ‘A lot of them won’t drink or smoke, mind, but you’re always safe if you offer them the other.’
    But they look through me as if I wasn’t there.
    Even if Tim had been able to tell him that, Frank would not believe it. Frank believed there was only place a girl looked.
    Frank was a lorry driver running to fat before thirty, with all his small features crowded into the middle of his face, as if it was warmer there. He drove for the paper mill, and he had a room half-way up the house in Darley Road, having left his wife, or she him. The others in the house — white, black, brown, men, women, pigs — were in twos or threes or more. When Frank came back from the Carlisle run, doped with the road, he occasionally talked to Tim, because everyone else was feeding children or making children or stretched out on the bottom rung of their spine, eating pies made of stewed mongrel dog and watching television.
    The night that Tim saw the poster, Frank had come back from Nottingham with energy to burn and a couple of free passes for a dance hall in the South End that a man had given him in a lorry park in exchange for a packet of cigarettes.
    Tim shook his head.
    ‘Come on,’ Frank said. ‘Do you good, a young chap like you, hanging about with a face like a drain. What’s the matter — you never been out dancing?’
    ‘Yes, I have.’
    A bristly girl like a boar who washed lettuces at one of the hotels where he worked had once asked him to go with her, and then not turned up. Tim had hung about outside the hall for a while with his hands in his pockets, pretending to be taking a door count. Then he had waved and grinned and raised his eyebrows at nobody in the distance. Then he had gone away. He did not go back to the hotel kitchen any more, so he never knew whether the girl turned up or not.
    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, hishands 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