Listen to the Voice

by Iain Crichton Smith

  ‘I’m worried she’s so cool,’ Ruth continued in the same hissing tone. ‘She never smiles. She’s like a robot.’

  ‘What’s wrong with being cool?’ Hugh asked her.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe she’s like you. Maybe she’ll be a writer.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ said Hugh, his face pale.

  ‘What I said. Maybe she should be a writer. Isn’t that a good thing? Maybe a writer doesn’t have to have emotions.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.’

  ‘Oh skip it,’ said Ruth impatiently and watched her daughter driving past with the same unearthly competence and composure as she had noticed before, self-reliant, never bumping into anyone, never making a mistake.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said aloud, ‘what does your writing mean? This is the real world. What have you got to say about this? About the fair? You haven’t said anything. I don’t think you’ve noticed a thing.’ She was hissing like a snake and all the time he was staring at her with his pale hurt face among all the tanned people. Perhaps he thought the fair vulgar, beneath him; perhaps he thought that the music which recalled her youth to her was indecorous, inelegant, raucous.

  They watched Sheila driving round and round in her small yellow car.

  ‘It’s because I don’t drive,’ said Hugh.

  ‘No,’ she almost screamed. ‘It’s nothing to do with that. Nothing at all to do with that. It’s your lack of feeling, your damned lack of feeling. She’s getting like you. Look at her. She’s like a robot, don’t you see?’

  ‘No I don’t see. She’s self-contained, that’s all. But I don’t think she’s like a robot.’

  ‘I don’t care what you say, I know.’

  ‘Do you want me to stop writing then?’ he asked plaintively.

  ‘You do what you want. Anyway I don’t think writing is the most important thing in the world, as you seem to.’

  And all the time there throbbed around her the beat of the music, heavy, sonorous, plangent. Her body moved to its rhythm. And her daughter revolved remorselessly in her small car.

  ‘You’re shouting,’ said Hugh. ‘People are hearing you.’

  ‘I don’t care. I don’t care whether they hear me or not.’

  The cars stopped and she leaned over and pulled Sheila towards her. She walked off ahead, Sheila beside her. It was as if she wanted to get into the very centre of the fair, its throbbing centre, in among the lights, the red savage lights, so that she could dance, so that she could feel alive, even in that place of cheating and deception, crooked sights, bad darts.

  He was so dull, always asking her if poetry was important. And what should she tell him? Why was he doing it if he doubted its value so much? The fair was important: one could sense it: its brash reality had all the confidence in the world, its music was dominating and without inhibition. It was doing a service to people, even though the prizes were cheap and without substance. The joy of existence animated it, colour, music.

  What’s wrong with me? she asked herself. What the hell is wrong with me? She watched a girl and a boy walk past, arm in arm, and she felt intense anguish like the pain of childbirth.

  She hated her husband at that moment, he looked so pale and anguished and out of place. If only he would hit her, say something spontaneous to her, but he looked so perpetually wounded as if he was always trudging home from a war he had lost. The only time she had seen a look of concentration on his face was when he had been firing at the ducks.

  She saw a great wheel circling against the sky with people on it, some of them shrieking.

  ‘I think I’d like some lemonade,’ she said aloud, and they walked in silence to the lemonade tent.

  While they were in the tent a drunk man pushed his way past them swaying on his feet and muttering some unintelligible words.

  ‘Hey,’ she shouted at him but he pretended not to hear.

  ‘Did you see that?’ she said to Hugh. ‘He pushed past. He had no right to do that.’ She was speaking in a very loud voice because she was so angry and Hugh looked at her in an embarrassed way. She wanted to stamp her heels into the man’s ankles: but she knew that Hugh wasn’t going to do anything about it and so she said, ‘I don’t think I want any lemonade at all.’

  ‘That bugger,’ she said, referring to the drunk man, hoping that he would hear her, but he seemed to be rocking happily in a muttering world of his own.

  Before she knew where she was—she was walking so fast because of her rage—she found herself away from the fairground altogether and in an adjacent park where she sat on a bench, seething furiously. When her husband finally caught up with her and sat beside her she felt as if she could pick up a stone and throw it at him, so great was her frustration and her loathing. Sheila sat down on the grass, cradling the teddy bear in her arms and saying into its ear, ‘Go to sleep now. Go to sleep.’ Its unblinking eyes with their cheap glitter stared back at her. She seemed to have forgotten about her parents altogether and was in a country of her own where the teddy bear was as real as or perhaps more real than her parents themselves.

  ‘Why didn’t you want lemonade?’ said Hugh.

  ‘If you must know,’ she replied angrily, ‘I didn’t take it because that man got ahead of us in the queue and you didn’t do anything about it.’

  ‘What was I supposed to do about it? Start a fight?’

  ‘I don’t know what you could have done. You could at least have said something instead of just standing there. You let people walk all over you.’

  ‘What people?’

  ‘Everybody.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘I should get a job then. It’s quite clear to me that you don’t want me to be writing.’

  ‘What on earth …’ She gazed at him in amazement. ‘What on earth has that to do with what I’m talking about? I don’t care whether you write or not. You can carry on writing as long as you like. I don’t care about that. It doesn’t worry me.’

  ‘You think I’m a failure. Is that it?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know whether you’re a failure or not. You’re never happy. You’re always thinking about your writing. And yet you never seem to see anything that goes on around you. I don’t understand you.’

  ‘And what about you? Do you see everything?’

  ‘I see more than you. You don’t care about the real world. You really don’t. You didn’t really want to come to the fair, did you? You think it’s beneath you.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t anything like that at all. It’s just that … Oh, never mind …’

  Sheila was still talking to the staring teddy bear, quiet and self-possessed as she sat on the grass in front of their bench.

  In the old days the two of them had gone out together and they would lie down beside the river that flowed through the glen and she would think that Hugh’s silence was very restful. But they would talk too.

  What did they talk about in those early days that passed so quickly? Days passed like hours then, now hours seemed as long as days. She didn’t even know what he did with himself when she was out working, and even when she came home at night with her fragments of news he didn’t seem to be listening or, if he was, it was to some inner voice of his own, and not to her. She knew that she was jealous of that inner voice that tormented and obsessed him, that it was a part of him that she would never know, deep and dark and distant. What inner voice was there anyway beyond the fair, beyond the passing people and the music? She stared down at the grass which was green in places and parched in others. If Sheila hadn’t been there she might have walked away but she was there and she couldn’t leave her.

  Sitting beside each other on the green bench they stared dully down at the ground. Eventually she got up. ‘We might as well go back and see the rest of the fair,’ she said. ‘After all that’s what we came for.’ Hugh got to his feet resignedly and followed her as did Sheila, cradling the teddy bear in her arms.

  When they returned to the fair, s
he asked Sheila if she would like to go on the swings. She paid for her and watched her settle herself on one of them, she herself standing on the ground and watching her from below, while Hugh was silent at her side. Sheila sat on the swing turning round and round with the same unnaturally quiet self-possessed air. Sheila terrified her. She wondered if, while she was away at work, Sheila was learning to be like her father, distant, without feeling. Maybe Hugh was taking her away into his own secret unhuman world. She wanted to rush up to the swing and stop it and take Sheila into her arms and say to her, ‘This is the real world. This is all the world there is. Don’t you smell it? Don’t you hear the music? Enjoy it while you can. This is your childhood and it won’t come again.’

  She turned and glanced at Hugh, but he was staring ahead of him, hurt and wounded, as if into a private dream of his own.

  God, she thought, what is happening to us? Maybe I should leave him. Maybe I should take Sheila with me and leave him. Maybe I should take her into the centre of the fair and teach her to dance.

  The swing had come to a halt and gravely as ever Sheila stepped off and walked over to her parents still clutching her teddy bear. She stopped beside them, staring down at her brown shoes, shy and serious.

  Ruth took her by the hand and in silence they moved forward.

  ‘Would you like to go into the Haunted House?’ she asked Hugh but he didn’t answer. She didn’t want to go by herself, as she was superstitious and believed firmly in ghosts.

  What had that Hall of Mirrors meant? What had been the significance of it? She had looked so squat and earthbound there. Was that what she was really like who once had danced with such abandon and joy?

  She thought, I’d like to go to a dance just once. Just once to a dance so that I would let myself go. But Hugh didn’t like dancing. I should like to listen to music, she thought, the music of my early days when I had my freedom, before that silence descended. He has done more harm to me than I have done to him with his tall thin spiritual body and his brooding mind. If I had only known before my marriage … If only … But it was too late.

  She was still alive but dying. The flesh—surely that was superior to the spirit, the soul.

  There must be dancing in the world, joyousness and music.

  But Hugh walking beside her was not speaking. She knew that he was hurt and angry, she could tell by the pallor of his face, by his compressed lips. What had he learned at the fair? Had he had any ideas for a poem? She didn’t like his poems anyway, she didn’t pretend to understand them, she was not a poseur as some people were. There were lots of people who would say that they liked a poem even if they didn’t understand it, in order to be ‘with it’. She, on the other hand, was the sort of person who would speak out, who had definite opinions.

  She wasn’t enjoying the day one little bit, she knew that: everything was so hot and sticky. She wanted to be at the centre of things just once, she wanted to do something dramatic, something that she would remember in later years. She wanted to throw perfect darts, hit a perfect target…. No, on second thoughts, she didn’t even want to do that, she merely wished to laugh and enjoy herself and have a happy untidy day so that she could go home and plump herself on the sofa and say, ‘Gosh, how tired I am.’ But that wasn’t likely to happen.

  The three of them walked together but she seemed as far away from the other two as she could possibly be. And all the time Hugh remained wrapped in his silence as in a dark mysterious cloak.

  They came to a tent outside which there was a notice saying SEE THE FATTEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD. She stopped and looked at the other two and said, ‘I want to see this. Even if you don’t,’ she added under her breath. She paid forty-five pence for the three of them and they entered the tent. Sitting on a chair—she thought it must be made of iron to sustain the weight—there was the fattest grossest woman she had ever seen in her whole life.

  The head was large and the cheeks were round and fat and there were big pouches under the treble chins. The breasts and the belly bulged out largely under a black shiny satiny dress. With her huge head resting on her vast shoulders the woman was like a mountain of flesh, and in close-up Ruth could see the beads of sweat on her moustached upper lip. The hands too were huge and red and fat and the fingers, with their cheap rings, as nakedly gross as sausages. Crowned with her grey hair and almost filling half the tent, the woman seemed to represent a challenge of flesh, almost as if one might wish to climb her. Ruth gazed at the immense tremendous freak with horror, as if she were seeing a magnification of some disease that was causing the flesh to run riot. Sunk deep in the head were small red-rimmed eyes, and in the vast lap rested the massive swollen hands. And yet out of this monstrous mountain, vulgar and sordid, there issued a tiny voice saying to Sheila:

  ‘Do you want to talk to me, little girl?’

  And Sheila looked up at her and burst out laughing.

  ‘You’re just like Mummy in the tent,’ she shouted. And she ran over and clutched her mother’s hand, laughing with a real childish laughter. Pale and tall, Hugh was watching the woman and Ruth thought of the vast body seated on a lavatory pan in some immense lavatory of a size greater than she had ever seen, and as she imagined her sitting there she also saw her spitting, belching, blowing her enormous nose. She was sickened by her, by her acres of flesh, by the smell that exuded from her.

  She imagined the fat woman dying in a monstrous bed, people bending over her as she breathed stertorously, beads of sweat on her moustache.

  And Sheila was still laughing and shouting, ‘She’s just like you, Mummy,’ and tall, with egg-shaped head, Hugh gazed down at her, ultimate flesh seated on its throne.

  Ruth felt as if she was going to be sick; the image in the mirror had come true in the stench of reality; the legs like tree trunks, the large red hands, the sausage-like fingers were there before her. She ran out of the tent, the bile in her mouth, and Hugh followed her with Sheila. In the clean air she turned to Sheila and said, ‘There’s the Big Wheel. Do you want to go on it? Your father can go with you if you like.’

  ‘All right,’ said Hugh, as if some instinct had told him that she wanted to be alone.

  She watched them as they got into their seats, and then from her position on the ground below she saw them soaring up into the sky, descending and then soaring again. She waved to them as they turned on the large red wheel. And Hugh waved to her in return but Sheila was staring straight ahead of her, cool and self-possessed as ever. Up they went and down they came and something in the movement made her frightened. It was as if the motion of the wheel was significant amidst the loud beat of the music, the crooked guns and darts. As she saw the two outlined against the sun she knew that they belonged to her, they were her only connection with reality, with the music and the colour of the fair. If something were to happen to them now what would her own life be like? She almost ran screaming towards the wheel as if she were going to ask the operator to stop it lest an accident should happen and the two of them, Hugh and Sheila, would plummet to the ground, broken and finished. But she waited and when they came down to earth again she clutched them both, one hand in one hand of theirs.

  ‘That’s enough,’ she said, ‘that’s enough.’

  The three of them walked to the car. She unlocked the door and got into the driver’s seat, Hugh beside her wearing his safety belt, and Sheila in the back.

  Sheila suddenly began to become talkative.

  ‘Mummy,’ she said, ‘you were fat in the mirror. You were a fat lady. You had fat legs.’

  Ruth looked at Hugh and he smiled without rancour. They were sitting happily in the car and she thought of them as a family.

  ‘Did you think of anything to write about?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said but he didn’t say what it was he had thought of till they had reached the council estate on which they lived.

  He then asked her, ‘Do you remember when we were at the shooting stall?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said eagerly.

/>   ‘Did you notice that the woman who was giving out the tickets had a glass eye?’

  ‘No, I didn’t notice that.’

  ‘I thought it was funny at the time,’ Hugh said slowly. ‘To put a woman in charge of the shooting stall who had a glass eye.’

  He didn’t say anything more. She knew however that he had been making a deliberate effort to tell her something, and she also realised that what he had seen was in some way of great importance to him.

  What she herself remembered most powerfully was the gross woman who had filled the tent with her smell of sweat, and whose small eyes seemed cruel when she had gazed into them.

  She also remembered the two boys with the green and white football scarves who had gone marching past, singing and shouting.

  She clutched Hugh’s hand suddenly, and held it. Then the two of them got out of the car and walked together to the council house, Sheila running along ahead of them.

  On the Island

  THEY TIED UP the boat and landed on the island, on a fine blowy blue and white day. They walked along among sheep and cows, who raised their heads curiously as they passed, then incuriously lowered them again.

  They came to a monument dedicated to a sea captain who had sailed the first steam ship past the island.

  ‘A good man,’ said Allan, peering through his glasses.

  ‘A fine man,’ said Donny. ‘A fine, generous man.’

  ‘Indeed so,’ said William.

  They looked across towards the grey granite buildings of the town and from them turned their eyes to the waving seaweed, whose green seemed to be reflected in Donny’s jersey.

  ‘It’s good to be away from the rat race,’ said Donny, standing with his hands on his lapels. ‘It is indeed good to be inhaling the salt breezes, the odoriferous ozone, to be blest by every stray zephyr that blows. Have you a fag?’ he asked Allan, who gave him one from a battered packet.

  ‘I sent away for a catalogue recently,’ said William. ‘For ten thousand coupons I could have had a paint sprayer. I calculate I would have to smoke for fifty years to get that paint sprayer.’