Free The Listeners by Monica Dickens

treated him like a child — wipe your mouth, let mesee 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 wouldcome 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