The Listeners

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Book: The Listeners by Monica Dickens Read Free Book Online
Authors: Monica Dickens
thought she was a little touched.
    Feeling suddenly blank and without a notion of who or where he was, or what for, he mooched over to the low tables and unfolded himself into one of the small chairs. He pretended he was helping the fat girl with the jigsawpuzzles, so that he could collect them in front of him and do them himself. Fat Mara shrieked and her face collapsed in exaggerated sobs. Jackie pinched her rubber thigh under the table and she fell off the chair and ran to a grown-up. She ran to a girl Jackie had not seen here before. She was standing awkwardly in a corner with her hands hanging, as if she did not know what to do or how she got here. She looked as if her mother had left her at a railway station and forgot to come back for her. She had thin straight legs in white stockings sticking yards out of a very very short skirt — Muh wouldn’t think much of
that
! She had short straight hair cut raggedly, and great eyes with lashes painted round them like a doll.
    When the fat girl ran at her legs, she reeled, then dropped quickly to the floor to hug her, glad of something to do, burying her face against the child’s. But old fatty Mara never stayed with anything more than a minute. She pulled away, thumping the girl’s arm to make her let go. The girl got up and stood again, watching.
    Jackie put his tongue between his teeth and went on with the puzzles. Most of the children were playing quite busily. His mother was in the kitchen-space behind the hatch, opening a tin of biscuits. Harriet was. at the gramophone with a small group, waving her arms and singing, head going like a mad bobbin. At the far end of the room, the sand table was deserted. Charlie was standing by it with his toes turned in and a naked slice of back where his trousers were dropping over his narrow hips. One hand was in his mouth, the other was on the edge of the table.
    Looking round, Jackie saw Mrs Manson watching Charlie as if there were nothing else in the room. His hand trailed in the sand, stopped, and picked up a little pie pan. He was just scooping up sand like any other child when Jackie’s mother slipped open the hatch and, seeing that everybody was happily employed, clapped her hands like a pistol shot and cried, ‘Snack time, everybody.’
    Charlie, with his hand raised to dribble sand delightfullyback on to the table, let it drop and wandered away, scattering sand on the floor and letting the pie pan roll away without noticing.
    ‘Come along, everybody! Come on then, Mrs King, you’re not doing anything. Now is when we have our snacks. Oh no—’ as the girl in the long white stockings, glad of a job, pushed a chair towards one of the tables. ‘We all bring our own chairs.’
    ‘We,’ Jackie wanted to tell the girl, means the children, not her and you.
    ‘Now then, Jack, come along, look lively! I thought it was your job to fetch the milk. Harriet — come, it’s table time.’ She switched off the gramophone and it died with a groan and a wail from Tommy to add to the shrieking of the chairs as the children dragged or pushed them across the floor.
    Those who would came and sat round the tables. Charlie had gone to the side of the room and was sitting with his arm over the back of the chair, the hand dangling, his head on his arm like a tired old man. Jackie’s mother picked him up chair and all, and put him at one of the tables, where he turned sideways and drifted away again with his arm on the back of the chair.
    Muh wiped strings of saliva off the front of her Play School washable dress and called again, ‘Come along, Jack, sharp’s the word! The milk won’t grow legs and walk in, you know!’
    ‘Ha, ha,’ said Harriet, trying to make the children laugh by force.
    Jackie said a very bad word. He was fitting the last few pieces into the sailing ship puzzle. ‘Fuck,’ he said, and the girl with the painted eyelashes heard him. Her brown eyebrows went up and her pale mouth pulled down into her chin as if she

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