The Listener Read Online Free Page B

that, for once, we could do something important together!”
    “Don’t shout,” she said. “You’ll wake him.”
    He started to laugh, leaned against the wall and laughed. The girl watched him coolly and asked, “Did you check the time when you called?” He stopped laughing and left; the front door clicked. Now she was alone with the laboured breathing. It was very near. Sometimes it came closer and sometimes it moved away.
    What if he dies when I’m here alone? Why are they always so ugly when they’re old? Why can’t they deal with their own problems? She kept her eyes on him as shebacked out of the room. Softly, she opened the front door and waited. Now they were coming. The lift stopped. The doctor went in without a word to her. He was short and looked annoyed, as if he’d been bothered quite unnecessarily. The front hall smelled of floor wax. She focused her attention on a pattern in the linoleum and stood very still as she waited for the whole thing to be over. If this is the way it’s going to be, then I want no part of it. Ugly and hard to understand and sordid. If that’s the way the world is, everywhere, all the time, then I don’t want any part of it. It’s what happens to other people, outsiders, at night …
    Inside, they were talking. And suddenly there was a new voice, indistinct and threatening – the man on the floor. A voice that came from far away, from out of a vast indifference. Then he shouted, with a terrible rage. The girl, Leila, began to tremble. I’ll go home, she thought. I’ll just open the door and go.
    She waited. They came back, and the doctor walked past her again without glancing up, looking just as annoyed.
    “Is he getting an ambulance?” she asked.
    The boy sat down on the floor and said, “We have to stay here. He’s not going to the hospital, but he’s going to throw up in the morning.”
    “What do you mean we’re staying here?” the girl shouted. “I won’t do it.”
    He drew up his knees and put his arms around them. “So go, then,” he said sullenly. “I’m going to do what they told me to do. You do what you like.”
    They sat silently and listened to the man breathing in the next room.
    “And if he does throw up,” the girl said, “we have to find a bowl. Or a bucket.”
    The boy shrugged his shoulders. He’d put his head down on his knees.
    “Will you come in the kitchen and help me look?” she asked, submissively.
    “No,” Ralf said.
    She went into the kitchen and turned on the light. There was a packing case in front of the kitchen counter, and across the address label it said ‘Household’. She went back and said, “There’s stuff in a packing case, but I can’t get it open.”
    “Really?” said Ralf. “And where the hell do you think I’m going to get my hands on tools in the middle of the night?”
    She looked at him, critically and patiently, and said, “If they wrote ‘Household’ on a box, then they’ve surely written ‘Tools’ on another. And they can’t have nailed it shut.”
    They found a hammer and a crowbar. They put a dishpan beside the sleeping man. They found a towel for him, and blankets.
    “Do you think we should turn off the light?” Leila wondered. “Is it better if it’s light or dark when he wakes up?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t know him. This fluorescent light is horrible; maybe it’s better if it’s dark.”
    “I’m not so sure,” she said. “If it’s dark, then maybe he’ll think he’s dead, or get scared, and anyway he needs to see where he’s supposed to be sick.”
    “Listen,” Ralf said. “It’s four o’clock. Why don’t we get some sleep?” He spread out a blanket on the hall floor.
    “I’ll sleep over here in the corner,” Leila said.
    “And why can’t you sleep here next to me?”
    “It wouldn’t be right.”
    “And why not? Now, suddenly?”
    “Him!” she whispered vehemently. “Him in there. What if he dies?”
    The boy rolled himself up in the blanket