THE CALLERS
RAMSEY CAMPBELL
Mark’s grandmother seems barely to have left the house when his grandfather says “Can you entertain yourself for a bit? I could do with going to the pub while I’ve got the chance.”
Mark wonders how much they think they’ve entertained him, but he only says “Will grandma be all right coming home on her own?”
“Never fret, son. They can look after theirselves.” The old man’s hairy caterpillar eyebrows squirm as he frowns at Mark and blinks his bleary eyes clear. “No call for you to fetch her. It’s women’s stuff, the bingo.”
He gives the boy’s shoulder an unsteady squeeze and mutters “You’re a good sort to have around.”
Mark feels awkward and a little guilty that he’s glad he doesn’t have to meet his grandmother. “Maybe I’ll go to a film.”
“You’d better have a key, then.” His grandfather rummages among the contents of a drawer of the shaky sideboard—documents in ragged envelopes, rubber bands so desiccated they snap when he takes hold of them, a balding reel of cotton, a crumpled folder stuffed with photographs—and hauls out a key on a frayed noose of string. “Keep hold of that for next time you come,” he says.
Does he mean Mark will be visiting by himself in future? Was last night’s argument so serious? His mother objected when his grandfather offered him a glass of wine at dinner, and then her mother accused her of not letting Mark grow up. Before long the women were shouting at each other about how Mark’s grandmother had brought up her daughter, and the men only aggravated the conflict by trying to calm it down. It continued after Mark went to bed, and this morning his father informed him that he and Mark’s mother were going home several days early. “You can stay if you like,” she told Mark.
Was she testing his loyalty or hoping he would make up for her behaviour? While her face kept her thoughts to itself his father handed him the ticket for the train home like a business card, one man to another. Mark’s mother spent some time in listing ways he shouldn’t let anyone down, but these didn’t include going to the cinema. Wearing his coat was among the requirements, and so he takes it from the stand in the hall. “Step out, lad,” his grandfather says as Mark lingers on the pavement directly outside the front door. “You don’t want an old crock slowing you down.”
At the corner of the street Mark glances back. The old man is limping after him, resting a hand on the roof of each car parked with two wheels on the pavement. Another narrow similarly terraced street leads into the centre of the small Lancashire town, where lamps on scalloped iron poles are stuttering alight beneath a congested late April sky. Many of the shops are shuttered, and some are boarded up. Just a few couples stroll past deserted pristine kitchens and uninhabited items of attire. Most of the local amusements have grown too childish for Mark, though he might still enjoy bowling or a game of indoor golf if he weren’t by himself, and others are years out of bounds—the pubs, the clubs waiting for the night crowds while doormen loiter outside like wrestlers dressed for someone’s funeral. Surely the cinema won’t be so particular about its customers. More than one of Mark’s schoolmates has shown him the scene from Facecream on their phones, where the girl gets cream squirted all over her face.
As he hurries past the clubs he thinks a doorman is shouting behind him, but the large voice is down a side street full of shops that are nailed shut. At first he fancies that it’s chanting inside one of them, and then he sees an old theatre at the far end. While he can’t distinguish the words, the rhythm makes it clear he’s hearing a bingo caller. Mark could imagine that all the blank-faced doormen are determined to ignore the voice.
The Frugoplex is beyond the clubs, across a car park for at least ten times as many vehicles as it presently contains. The lobby is scattered with popcorn, handfuls of which have been trodden into the purple carpet. A puce rope on metal stilts leads the queue for tickets back and forth and twice again on the way to the counter. When Mark starts to duck under the rope closest to the end of the queue, a man behind the counter scowls at him, and so he follows the rope all the way around, only just heading off two couples of about his own age who stoop under. He’s hoping to avoid the disgruntled man, but the queue brings Mark to him. “Facecream, please,” Mark says and holds out a ten-pound note.
“Don’t try it on with me, laddie,” the man says and turns his glare on the teenagers who have trailed Mark to the counter. “And your friends needn’t either.”
“He’s not our friend,” one of the boys protests.
“I reckon not when he’s got you barred.”
Mark’s face has grown hot, but he can’t just walk away or ask to see a film he’s allowed to watch. “I don’t know about them, but I’m fifteen.”
“And I’m your sweet old granny. That’s it now for the lot of you. Don’t bother coming to my cinema.” The manager tells his staff at the counter “Have a good look at this lot so you’ll know them.”
Mark stumbles almost blindly out of the multiplex. He’s starting across the car park when somebody mutters behind him “He wants his head kicked in.”
They’re only words, but they express his feelings. “That’s what he deserves,” Mark agrees and turns to his new friends.
It’s immediately clear that they weren’t thinking of the manager. “You got us barred,” says the girl who didn’t speak.
“I didn’t mean to. You oughtn’t to have stood so close.”
“Doesn’t matter what you meant,” she says, and the other girl adds “We’ll be standing a lot closer. Standing on your head.”
Mark can’t take refuge in the cinema, but running would look shameful and invite pursuit as well. Instead he tramps at speed across the car park. His shadow lurches ahead, growing paler as it stretches, and before long it has company, jerking forward to catch up on either side of him. He still stops short of bolting but strides faster. He’s hoping passers-by will notice his predicament, but either they aren’t interested or they’re determined not to be. At last he reaches the nightclubs, and is opening his mouth to appeal to the nearest doorman when the fellow says “Keep walking, lad.”
“They’re after me.”
The doorman barely glances beyond Mark, and his face stays blank. “Walk on.”
It could be advice, though it sounds like a dismissal. It leaves Mark feeling that he has been identified as an outsider, and he thinks the doormen’s impassive faces are warning him not to loiter. He would make for the police station if he knew where it is. He mustn’t go to his grandparents’ house in case they become scapegoats as well, and there’s just one sanctuary he can think of. He dodges into the side street towards the bingo hall.
The street looks decades older than the main road and as though it has been forgotten for at least that long. Three streetlamps illuminate the cracked roadway bordered by grids that are clogged with old leaves. The glow is too dim to penetrate the gaps between the boards that have boxed up the shopfronts, because the lanterns are draped with grey cobwebs laden with drained insects. The only sign of life apart from a rush of footsteps behind Mark is the amplified voice, still delivering its blurred chant. It might almost be calling out to him, and he breaks into a run.
So do his pursuers, and he’s afraid that the bingo hall may be locked against intruders. Beyond the grubby glass of three pairs of doors the foyer is deserted; nobody is in the ticket booth or behind the refreshment counter. His pursuers hesitate as he sprints to the nearest pair of doors, but when neither door budges, the gang closes in on him. He nearly trips on the uneven marble steps as he stumbles along them. He throws all his weight, such as it is, against the next set of doors, which give so readily that he almost sprawls on the threadbare carpet of the foyer.
The caller seems to raise his voice to greet him. “Sixty-three,” he’s announcing, “just like me.” The pursuers glare at Mark from the foot of the shallow steps. “You can’t stay in there,” one girl advises him, and the other shouts “Better not try.”
All the gang look determined to wait for him. If they don’t tire of it by the time the bingo players go home, surely they won’t dare to let themselves be identified, and so Mark shuts the doors and crosses the foyer. The entrance to the auditorium is flanked by old theatrical posters, more than one of which depicts a plump comedian with a sly schoolboyish face. Mark could imagine they’re sharing a joke about him as he pushes open the doors to the auditorium.
The theatre seats have been cleared out, but the stage remains. It faces a couple of dozen tables, most of which are surrounded by women with score cards in front of them and stumpy pencils in their hands. The stage is occupied by a massive lectern bearing a large transparent globe full of numbered balls. Mark might fancy that he knows why the posters looked secretly amused, because the man in them is behind the lectern. He looks decades older, and the weight of his face has tugged it piebald as well as out of shape, but his grin hasn’t entirely lost its mischief, however worn it seems. Presumably his oversized suit and baggy shirt are meant to appear comical rather than to suggest a youngster wearing cast-off clothes. He examines a ball before returning it to the globe, which he spins on its pivot. “Three and three,” he says as his eyes gleam blearily at Mark. “What do you see?” he adds, and all the women eye the newcomer.
At first Mark can’t see his grandmother. He’s distracted by a lanky angular woman who extends her speckled arms across the table nearest to him. “Lost your mammy, son?” she cries. “There’s plenty here to tend to you.”
For an uneasy moment he thinks she has reached for her breast to indicate how motherly she is, but she’s adjusting her dress, her eagerness to welcome him having exposed a mound of wrinkled flesh. Before he can think of an answer his grandmother calls “What are you doing here, Mark?”
She’s at a table close to the stage. He doesn’t want to make her nervous for him if there’s no need, and he’s ashamed of having run away. The uncarpeted floorboards amplify every step he takes, so that he feels as if he’s trying to sound bigger than he is. All the women and the bingo caller watch his progress, and he wonders if everybody hears him mutter “I went to the cinema but they wouldn’t let me see the film.”
As his grandmother makes to speak one of her three companions leans forward, flattening her forearms on the table to twice their width. “However old are you, son?”
“Mark’s thirteen,” says his grandmother.
Another of her friends nods vigorously, which she has been doing ever since Mark caught sight of her. “Thirteen,” she announces, and many of the women coo or hoot with enthusiasm.
“Looks old enough to me,” says the third of his grandmother’s table-mates, who is sporting more of a moustache than Mark has achieved. “Enough of a man.”
“Well, we’ve shown you off now,” Mark’s grandmother tells him. “I’ll see you back at home.”
This provokes groans throughout the auditorium. The woman who asked his age raises her hands, and her forearms sag towards the elbows. “Don’t keep him to yourself, Lottie.”
The nodding woman darts to grab a chair for him. “You make this the lucky table, Mark.”
He’s disconcerted to observe how frail his grandmother is by comparison with her friends, though they’re at least as old as she is. The bingo caller gives him a crooked grin and shouts “Glad to have another feller here. Safety in numbers, lad.”
Presumably this is a joke of some kind, since quite a few women giggle. Mark’s grandmother doesn’t, but says “Can he have a card?”
This prompts another kind of laughter, and the nodding woman even manages to shake her head. “It’s the women’s game, lad,” the caller says. “Are you ladies ready to play?”
“More than ever,” the moustached woman shouts, which seems somehow to antagonise Mark’s grandmother. “Sit down if you’re going to,” she says. “Stop drawing attention to yourself.”
He could retort that she has just done that to him. He’s unable to hide his blazing face as he crouches on the spindly chair while the bingo caller elevates the next ball from the dispenser. “Eighty-seven,” he reads out. “Close to heaven.”
The phrase earns mirth and other noises of appreciation as the women duck in unison to their cards. They chortle or grunt if they find the number, grimacing if they fail. Nobody at Mark’s table has located it when the man at the lectern calls “Number forty, old and naughty.”
“That’s us and no mistake,” the moustached woman screeches before whooping at the number on her card.
“Number six, up to tricks.”
“That’s us as well,” her friend cries, but all her nodding doesn’t earn her the number.
“Forty-nine, you’ll be fine.”
The third woman crosses out the number, and flesh cascades down her arm as she lifts the pencil. “He’s that with bells on,” she says, favouring Mark with a wink.
He has to respond, though the smile feels as if his swollen lips are tugging at his hot stiff face. “Three and twenty,” the man at the lectern intones. “There’ll be plenty.” Mark’s grandmother hunches over the table. He could think she’s trying to evade the phrase or the coos of delight it elicits from the rest of the players, but she’s marking the number on her card. She seems anxious to win, staying bent close to the card as the bingo caller consults the next ball. “Six and thirty,” he says, and a roguish grin twists the left side of his mouth. “Let’s get dirty.”
He pokes at the grin with a finger as if he wants to push the words back in, although they’ve raised appreciative squeals throughout the auditorium. The fleshy woman falls to her card so eagerly that every visible part of her wobbles. “That’ll do me,” she cries.
Presumably she means his suggestion, since she hasn’t completed her card. Mark sees his grandmother glance nervously at it and then stare at her own as though striving to conjure up a number. “Four and four,” the caller says and almost at once “There’s the door.”
The moustached woman rubs her upper lip so hard that Mark fancies he hears the hairs crackle. “Never mind that,” she tells the caller.
He blinks at her and stares around the hall. Mark feels more out of place than ever, as though he’s listening to jokes too old for him—beyond his comprehension, at any rate. The caller’s drooping face grows defiant as he identifies the next ball. “Ninety-five,” he says. “Leave alive.”
This brings no laughter, just a murmur that falls short of words. At least Mark’s grandmother has found the number on her card. She needs three more to win, and he’s surprised by how much he hopes she will. He puts the wish into his eyes as he gazes up at the stage. “Number fifty,” the caller says in a tone that seems almost as mechanical as the dispenser. “He’ll be nifty.”
“Aye,” several women respond, and the quivering woman gives Mark another wink.
“Eighty-one, nearly done.”
“That’s me,” the nodding woman agrees, bowing to her card as if the motion of her head has overtaken the rest of her.
Perhaps she means her age, since the irregular cross she makes doesn’t finish off the card. “Twenty-nine,” the caller says, keeping his eyes on the ball he’s raised between the fingertips of both hands. “See the sign.”
If the players do so, they keep quiet about it, not even greeting the number or bemoaning their luck. The caller displays the next ball like a magician and puts a finger to the edge of a grin that’s meant to appear mysterious. “Sixty-three,” he says. “Time to flee.”
The murmur this provokes is unamused, and he concentrates on the ball that rolls out of the dispenser. “Twenty-four,” he says. “Can’t do more.”
His gaze is drifting towards Mark when the fleshy woman emits a shriek that jabs deep into the boy’s ears. “We’re done,” she cries. “It’s mine.”
The caller shuts the globe and extends a hand. “Give us a look.”
As she mounts the steps to the stage a series of tremors passes through her body, starting at her veinous legs. Having checked her numbers against those that came up, the caller says “We’ve a winner.”
She snatches the card and plods back to the table, where Mark sees how the crosses resemble sketches of gravestones, at least until she turns the card the right way up. She lowers herself onto her creaking chair and says “I claim the special.”
The caller doesn’t look at her or anywhere near her. “It’s not time yet,” he tells whoever needs to hear.
While he leans on the lectern to say so he puts Mark in mind of a priest in a pulpit, though the comparison seems wrong in some way Mark doesn’t understand. He’s distracted by his grandmother, who lays down her pencil next to the card scattered with the kind of crosses all the women have been drawing. “I’ll do without my luck tonight,” she says and grasps his arm to help her stand up. “Time someone was at home.”
“Don’t be like that,” the fleshy woman says. “You can’t just go running off.”
“I won’t be running anywhere.” As Mark wonders whether that’s defiance or the painful truth his grandmother says “I’ll see you all another night.”
“See us now and see yourself.” The speaker nods so violently that her words grow jagged. “You’re still one of us.”
“I’m not arguing,” Mark’s grandmother says and grips his arm harder. “Come along now, Mark.”
He doesn’t know how many women murmur as she turns towards the exit. While he can’t make out their words, they sound unhappy if not worse, and all of them are closer than the exit. Nobody moves as long as he can see them, and he finds he would rather not look back. His grandmother has almost led him out, clutching his arm so tightly that it throbs, when the lanky woman who first greeted him plants a hand on her breast again. Though she could be expressing emotion, Mark has the unwelcome fancy that she’s about to bare the wizened breast to him. His grandmother hurries him past, and the doors to the foyer are lumbering shut behind them when a woman says “We aren’t done.”
Mark hopes she’s addressing the man on the stage—urging him to start the next game—but he hasn’t heard the caller by the time he and his grandmother emerge onto the steps. The street is deserted, and he suspects that the couples who followed him from the cinema are long gone. Outside the clubs the doormen keep their faces blank at the sight of him and his escort, who is leaning on him as much as leading him. She’s quiet until they reach the shops, where she mutters “I wish you hadn’t gone there tonight, Mark. We’re meant to be responsible for you.”
He feels guiltier than he understands. She says nothing more while they make their increasingly slow way home. She’s about to ring the doorbell with her free hand when Mark produces the key. “Isn’t he in?” she protests.
“He went to the pub.”
“Men,” she says so fiercely that Mark feels sentenced too. She slams the door by tottering against it and says “I think you should be in your bed.”
He could object that it isn’t his bedtime—that he doesn’t know what offence he’s committed—but perhaps he isn’t being punished, in which case he isn’t sure he wants to learn her reason for sending him to his room. He trudges up the narrow boxed-in stairs to the decidedly compact bathroom, where every item seems too close to him, not least the speckled mirror that frames his uneasy face. The toothpaste tastes harsher than usual, and he does his best to stay inaudible while spitting it into the sink. As he dodges into the smaller of the two front bedrooms he sees his grandmother sitting at the bottom of the stairs. He retreats under the quilt of the single bed against the wall beneath the meagre window and listens for his grandfather.
He doesn’t know how long he has kept his eyes shut by the time he hears the front door open below him. His grandmother starts to talk at once, and he strains to catch her words. “Did you send Mark to fetch me tonight?”
“I told him to stay clear,” Mark’s grandfather says not quite as low. “What did he see?”
“It isn’t what he saw, it’s what they did.”
“Are you still up to that old stuff? Makes you all feel powerful, does it?”
“I’ll tell you one thing, Len—you don’t any more.” Just as righteously she says “I don’t remember you crying about it too much when it was your turn.”
“Well, it’s not now.”
“It shouldn’t be our house at all.” This sounds accusing, especially when she adds “If there’s any talking to be done you can do it.”
Apparently that’s all. Mark hears his grandparents labour up the stairs and take turns to make various noises in the bathroom that remind him how old they are. He finds himself wondering almost at random whether they’ll take him to the celebrations tomorrow on the town green; they have on other May Days. The prospect feels like a reward if not a compensation for some task. The door of the other front bedroom shuts, and he hears a series of creaks that mean his grandparents have taken to their bed.
For a while the night is almost quiet enough to let him drift into sleep, except that he feels as if the entire house is alert. He’s close to dozing when he hears a distant commotion. At first he thinks a doorman outside a club is shouting at someone, perhaps a bunch of drunks, since several people respond. There’s something odd about the voice and the responses too. Mark lifts his head from the lumpy pillow and strives to identify what he’s hearing, and then he realises his efforts are unnecessary. The voice and its companions are approaching through the town.
Mark does his best to think he’s misinterpreting what he hears. The voices sound uncomfortably close by the time he can’t mistake them. “Seventy-four,” the leader calls, and the ragged chorus answers “Knock on his door.” Mark is additionally disconcerted by recognising that the caller isn’t the man who was on the stage. However large and resonant it is, it’s a woman’s voice.
“Number ten,” it calls, and the chant responds “Find the men.” The chorus is nearly in unison now, and the performance puts Mark in mind of a priest and a congregation—some kind of ritual, at any rate. He kicks the quilt away and kneels on the yielding mattress to scrag the curtain and peer through the window. Even when he presses his cheek against the cold glass, all of the street that he can see is deserted. His breath swells up on the pane and shrinks as the first voice cries “Sweet thirteen” and the rest chant “While he’s green.”
They sound surer of themselves with every utterance, and they aren’t all that troubles Mark. Although he knows that the houses opposite are occupied, every window is dark and not a single curtain stirs. Is everyone afraid to look? Why are his grandparents silent? For a few of Mark’s breaths the nocturnal voices are too, but he can hear a muffled shuffling—the noise of a determined march. Then the caller announces “Pair of fives,” and as her followers chant “We’re the wives” the procession appears at the end of the road.
It’s led by the fleshy woman. As she advances up the middle of the street she’s followed by her moustached friend and the nodding one, and then their fellow players limp or trot or hobble in pairs around the corner. The orange glow of the streetlamp lends them a rusty tinge like an unnatural tan. Mark doesn’t need to count them to be certain that the parade includes everybody from the bingo hall except the man who was onstage and Mark’s grandmother. As his grip on the windowsill bruises his fingers the fleshy woman declares “Ninety-eight.”
She has a handful of bingo cards and is reading out the numbers. “We’re his fate,” the procession declares with enthusiasm, and Mark sees eyes glitter, not only with the streetlight. The moustached woman wipes her upper lip with a finger and thumb while her partner in the procession nods so eagerly that she looks in danger of succumbing to a fit. “Eightynine,” their leader intones as if she’s reading from a missal, and the parade almost as long as the street chants “He’ll be mine.”
They’re close enough for Mark to see the fleshy woman join in the response. He sees her quivering from head to foot with every step she takes towards him, and then his attention is caught by the lanky woman in the middle of the procession. She’s by no means alone in fumbling at a breast as though she’s impatient to give it the air. That’s among the reasons why Mark lets go of the curtain and the windowsill to huddle under the quilt. Once upon a time he might have believed this would hide him, but it doesn’t even shut out the voices below the window. “Twenty-four,” the caller shouts and joins in the chant of “Here’s the door.”
This is entirely too accurate for Mark’s liking. It’s the number of the house. As he hugs his knees with his clasped arms and grinds his spine against the wall he hears a muffled rumble close to him. Someone has opened the window of the next bedroom. Mark holds his breath until his grandfather shouts “Not here. Like Lottie says, you’ve been here once.”
“That was a long time ago, Len.” Mark can’t tell whether this is reminiscent or dismissive, but the tone doesn’t quite leave the fleshy woman’s voice as she said “It’s either you or him.”
After a pause the window rumbles shut, and Mark finds it hard to breathe. He hears footsteps padding down the stairs—whose, he doesn’t know—and the front door judders open. This is followed by an outburst of shuffling, first in the street and almost at once to some extent inside the house. As it begins to mount the stairs Mark hears the caller’s voice, though it’s little more than a whisper. “Number one,” she prompts, and a murmuring chorus responds “Let’s be mum.” Is it proposing a role to play or enjoining secrecy? Mark can’t judge, even when the procession sets about chanting in a whisper “Mum, mum, mum …” The repetition seems to fill the house, which feels too small for it, especially once the front door closes behind the last of the procession. The chorus can’t blot out the shuffling, which sounds like the restlessness of an impatient queue. All Mark can do is squeeze his eyes so tight that the darkness throbs in time with his pulse, and he manages not to look until he hears a door creep open.