Read Online The Listeners by Monica Dickens - Free Book Online Page A

thick morning traffic in the little red car which was mutilated withAlice’s dents and scratches. He crossed the river by Royal Bridge where he had sat and talked one night to a girl on the parapet, both of them dangling their legs over the black water. If you jumped in the river, it was said, you would be poisoned before you drowned.
    Turning north where the older factories squatted under the hill that hid the University from the town, he skirted the new factory estate, and saw the electronics plant where he had lunched yesterday, the executive building landscaped with readymade grass and pools and little trees, the huge window of the dining-room flashing an acknowledgement back to the sun. If there was to be a big lunch with things that took a long time to cook, might Mrs Frost be in there already, her small diamonds on the back of the sink and flour in her wedding ring? If Paul were to turn into the car park and go up to that floor in the silently chuckling lift, she would make him a cup of coffee, and he would be late for his first class.
    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walked under the granite pillars that held up the gym, and pushed through the swinging doors whose original glass had been replaced by a sandwich of glass and wire netting.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 handover 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