Free The Listeners by Monica Dickens Page A

said she must give of herself, but there were many women who saw nobody when their husbands wereat work and the children at school. Last month, one of them had been found dead of sleeping pills.
    Malcom had read bits of it to Jackie out of the local paper. ‘She was such a quiet girl we never hardly saw her.’ The neighbour on the other side, a certain Mrs Digit, world-famous now with her picture in the paper wearing a flowered overall like a bolster cover, had said, ‘How should I know? I don’t poke my nose into everybody’s business.’
    The body, Malcom read, had been lying on the bed for about eight hours. ‘Phew, what a ponk—* The story disappeared with a rattle as his mother snatched the newspaper away.
    The Play School was in the basement of St Barnabas Church which stood behind the recreation hall and the bowling alley and one of the public houses where a man had once staggered out as they were going home from the cinema and almost knocked little Muh over. ‘Here, here,’ Dad had shouted, and rounded his fists, red as a tomato, and the man had laughed and gone back into the pub. The church was built on a slight grassy rise so as to poke its spire as close up to God as possible. There were only a few gravestones in the fenced plot, but ‘Another winter like this,’ Mrs Manson said, taking off her scarf and shaking raindrops out of the front of her hair, ‘and it will be standing room only.’
    They had caught up with her on the path that led round the side of the church to the basement door, running from her car with her little boy whose hair clung in spikes whether it was raining or not.
    ‘Huh-o-, Char-ie.’ Jackie crouched down and grinned into the child’s face. The dark eyes looked neither at nor through him. They did not look at all, but that did not discourage either Jackie or lively Mrs Manson, who had five other children and looked like her eldest daughter.
    ‘He knows you, you see!’ She put Charlie’s hand into Jackie’s, where it neither pulled away nor clung. Jackie took Charlie down the steps and over to the pegs at the end of the big noisy basement room. As soon as you let goof Charlie’s hands, he put them in his mouth, working them round and round inside the wet reddened lips, so that he left strings of saliva on everything, including Jackie as he unfastened the little boy’s coat. At home, Jackie knew, because he had been there to tea, Mrs Manson went about with an old towel tucked into her waist and wiped the doorknobs and chairs and tabletops without noticing she did it.
    The floor of the long low room was littered with toys, pedal car, blocks, tricycles, a small slide and a climbing frame where a little girl hung upside down by her heels, red in the face if she had not been black to start with. In one corner, three or four children were cooking at a sand table, banging toy saucepans about and throwing sand into each other’s eyes. Jackie led Charlie to the slide and put his limp pigeon-toed foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, but as soon as he took away his hand, the foot slipped off.
    ‘Ugh-gh-gh! Gurr-r-r!’ Charlie roared like an unknown animal. His meaningless eyes stared at nothing over his hands, working and turning inside his mouth.
    ‘Let’s leave him alone, Jackie, and see what he’ll do, shall we?’ From six years of living with Charlie, Mrs Manson put everything as a bright question, rather than an order. ‘Yesterday, Harriet almost got him to clap his hands. It was marvellous!’ Jackie laughed an empty kind of laugh ha ha, to match her eagerness.
    Harriet was especially good with the children who stayed in a shut-in world. She rolled on the floor with them and came up dusty on her large behind. She tickled them, pinched them, sang into their uncaring eyes. ‘Anything to make contact!’ she cried to the other helpers, crashing herself down on the mattress where a child lay with his arm curled defensively over the back of his stubbly head. Jackie