by Rosie Chard
“Wishing we hadn’t been so mean now, are we?” he said. Still she didn’t move. Stanley wandered back over to the cage and noticed the paper at the bottom was wet. “So that’s your problem, is it?”
Beryl didn’t like to get her feet wet; it interfered with her concentration. Stanley clacked his lips together again but this time in a deeper, more soothing way. She loved that; she’d always get that faraway look in her eyes when he did that, but no, not today, she just stared at him, all beady and accusing.
“Alright,” he said, “I suppose my tea can wait.”
He crouched down to the cupboard beneath the sink and pulled out the previous day’s newspaper. Then he began the sorting. Out with the Business, out with the Sport, out with the Culture pages. Beryl only liked real news at the bottom of her cage. Plus the Classifieds. Oh, and the Lonely Hearts. That was what made her happiest: a new cuttlefish and a fresh page of lonely hearts beneath her feet. It’s what got her through her day.
He opened the paper flat on the kitchen table – Beryl couldn’t abide creases – and was about to start smoothing out the page when he noticed an advertisement in the top left-hand corner. He was always on the look out for a new job, what with his current one not being up to much, but there was one word in particular that caught his eye. ‘Sociological.’ What could that mean? he wondered. He knew a couple of ‘ogicals’ already. ‘Illogical’ his mother had always called him. A bit harsh he’d thought, considering he had been so good at chess as a child. And ‘pathological.’ His mother had called him that too, but not to his face, just when she was whispering in other people’s ears.
“We’ll have to look that one up, won’t we?” he said.
Beryl liked words. She secretly longed to have the pages of a dictionary lining her cage. That’d be her seventh heaven. Stanley took their Shorter Oxford off the shelf and it didn’t take long to reach ‘S’ but then he got distracted by ‘sod’ (oblong piece or slice of earth with grass growing on it) and then ‘soddish’ (unpleasant, despicable) but finally, after going backwards through the alphabet his gaze landed on ‘sociological’ (pertaining to the study of society).
“It pertains to the study of society,” he called over to Beryl. “We could do that, couldn’t we?”
Beryl gazed back.
CHAPTER
6
Tom Wilson always seemed oblivious to the arrival of other human beings when they were ushered into his office. Jean’s announcements were crisp enough but the boss liked to keep his eyes on his computer screen for longer than was comfortable and visitors were forced to linger in that dead space between the door and the desk until he finally deigned to look up.
“I have another new idea, Tom, ” I said quickly, so as to circumvent any rush attempts at civility. “I think you’ll find it interesting.”
He waved for me to sit down. “Better than the last one I hope.”
“Much better.”
So I began. My warm-up was soothing: praise for Wilson’s sense of judgment followed by a finely timed compliment on his new chair.
Then I revealed the full thrust of it. Social research had got out of touch with its roots, I said; it needed something to bring it back into the limelight. “What we need,” I said, aware of a pompous tone rising in my voice, “is an anthropology of ourselves.” Against my better nature I emphasised my final two words with my index fingers hung in the air.
Wilson’s voice seemed to have lost all intonation. “Mass Observation.”
“You’ve heard of it?”
He lowered his chin and looked over his glasses. “William. British social policy in the 1940s was founded on it.”
“Ah.”
“But do carry on.”
So I carried on, my voice getting ever more confident, outlining my strategy, breaking down the budget, all the while skipping over the grey areas, the pockets of doubt, until I reached my triumphant conclusion “ I want to hire ordinary people to eavesdrop on the public, just like they did back in the day. We’d be the new Mass Observation. You couldn’t get fresher than that.”
Wilson smiled a limp rag of a smile, arched his fingers into a triangle and leant back in his chair. Time didn’t stand still. It ceased to exist.
“You know what?” he said at last. “I like it. I actually like it. But what you are suggesting is somewhat illegal. Depending on your method of course.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “This will be very low key, I promise. Any eavesdropping will be done strictly under the radar.”
In a spirit of Ludditism I decided to advertise in the newspaper for my team of professional eavesdroppers. A real newspaper, made of real paper. I didn’t only want to attract the computer-savvy twenty-somethings who could multitask in their sleep, I wanted to reach the full demographic: the woman too skint to buy a computer, the old man who’d never heard of email. I was looking for ordinary people. The benchmark for ‘ordinary people’ was myself of course. This had seemed a reasonable level on which to base my search until James had questioned the precise meaning of the word in that pedantic way of his. The dictionary had been of little help at first, offering up an entire page of possibilities including, a person ‘who has jurisdiction in ecclesiastical cases,’ and then a person ‘in charge of warships laid up in a harbour.’ It was only when I came upon ‘of common or everyday occurrence’ that my faith was restored in my own banal understanding of the word. Still, the range of possibilities bothered me and I spent over an hour refining the sentences of my advertisement, before returning to the wording I had started with. Was it illegal? I wondered. I knew I’d have to be careful to preserve anonymity, no names, no addresses, no descriptions that could identify places. But the potential illegality of it added to the thrill. And at that moment I was on a high, dying to get going. The blind man’s team was going to listen. And even more thrilling was the question taking shape in my head. What would they hear?
MISSY spent a long time finding a telephone box. There used to be an old-fashioned red one opposite her building and she’d enjoyed watching the comings and goings around it from her window – the desperate hunt for change at three in the morning, the irritated tapping on the glass. But it had been removed six months earlier, leaving a rectangle of stained concrete behind on the verge, and now she had to walk all the way down the Holloway Road to find one. The phone book had been ripped out and the feathered spine hung down in a way that might have made her laugh. She pulled out the page of classified ads from her pocket, unfolded it, checked the number and dialled. Although only a phone call, some buried instinct made her tidy her hair, pressing the frizziest locks behind her ears and patting down the wiry ends that protruded from her parting. She didn’t use her voice during the day and when the person on the end of the line asked, ‘Can I help you,’ she struggled to get a sound out. “I’m calling about the job,” she said.
Such relief, the man on the other end of the line was a talker. All she had to do was stand there and listen while he told her about a job she might get and answered questions she hadn’t asked. And while she listened she looked towards the charity shop on the other side of the road.
A mannequin looked back at her from the window. It wore an ill-fitting dress; it held a cream girdle in its stiff fingers. A pair of silver party shoes encased its feet.
“Yes,” she said, realising a question had been asked. “I can come in for an interview on Friday. What time?”
There was a lot there, in that voice inside the phone. She thought the speaker wasn’t used to talking to strangers, or maybe he just wasn’t used to talking to women, but she heard funny little gaps between his words, longer than you’d expect, but shorter than she liked.
Her gaze wandered down the street until it settled on a man who fished money out of his pockets, rooted through his change and bought a cup of maggots from the vending machine outside the grocer’s.
“Oh, yes. Looking forward to meeting you too,” she said, as if reading from a script.
; She put the phone down and turned towards the direction of home. She’d never been fishing, never sat in a chair by the oily canal at Camden Lock, but she suddenly wanted, no, needed, to have her own cup of maggots. She glanced round, crossed the road and slipped her remaining coins into the vending machine. Then, feeling a thrill inside her chest, she carefully lifted out the writhing cupful, checked the lid was properly on and slipped it into her bag.
It was almost dark by the time Missy got home and she felt tired, in need of a treat. But first she tipped the maggots into a plastic bag, squeezed out the air, tied a knot and placed them on the top shelf of the fridge, next to the three remaining rashers of bacon, dried on the rinds. Then she pulled out a stool and climbed up. She reached to the back of the kitchen cupboard, past the elderly tins of tuna, past the packet of instant gravy, until her hand came to rest on the light bulb.
Back in the living room, she removed the packaging, then placed the bulb gently on the sofa. After dragging the kitchen stool into the middle of the room, she collected the bulb, climbed up and removed the clear bulb hanging from the ceiling and replaced it with the new one. She stepped down and switched on the light. Red. Everything red.
She lay on the floor; she needed a treat. Red light made her beautiful. Red light made her sofa clean, her shoes new, the ragged nails on her fingers rounded and smooth. Yet when she held up her arms and looked at the back of her hand she saw her veins; they rippled across her skin from wrist to knuckle, knuckle to wrist. She flexed her lips, adjusted her hips on the ruddy floorboards and thought of the voice at the end of the phone. She must practice for her new job. No more random listening to conversations in bits, but professional listening where she really listened.
She held her breath. She waited. She tried to cock her ears, unsure of what that meant. She even squeezed her eyes shut tight, hoping that closing down one sense would sharpen another. But the air was empty of sound. The red walls were silent.
CHAPTER
7
“You are kidding, aren’t you?”
I smiled. James was easy bait. Still wet behind the ears at thirty-two, he took a while to get jokes and then retold them back to the original teller with a half-remembered ending, or on bad days, spliced with a punchline from another joke. He had trouble discerning the difference between sarcasm and sincerity, which made for a confused yet pleasantly naïve life. But in spite of all this he was my mate, the bloke in the office I could go to the pub with after work and have a moan.
I sipped my beer. “I tease you not. Wilson even congratulated me on the freshness of my thoughts.”
“So,” James pulled his chair closer, “let me get this right. You’re going to hire researchers from members of the public with no research experience–”
“They’re not researchers.”
“What the hell are they, then?”
“They’re eavesdroppers.”
“Okay, so you hire some people, Joe public and his friends–”
“And her friends.”
“And her friends, and you get them to listen in on private conversations and . . . and then what?”
“They’ll report back and I’ll see what’s out there.”
“What do you mean, out there?”
I took another sip of beer. “Inside the chatter.”
“And how are they going to record this chatter? Hidden mikes?”
“Nothing so crude. They’re going to write notes in a notebook.”
“Won’t that be a bit obvious?”
“Not if they’re good at it.”
James gulped his beer – big, worried swallows that made his eyes bulge. “Am I part of this by the way?” He placed his empty glass down on the table.
“If you want to be.”
He searched my face. “Bill, did you get a knock on the head too in that accident by any chance?”
I suddenly felt mischievous. “Tell you what, James, let’s try it out now.”
“What, eavesdrop?”
“Yes. Close your eyes for a second and listen.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Go on. Close your eyes.”
“Oh, shit. All right. But you’ve got to do it too.”
“I will.”
The pub seemed louder with my eyes shut and I immediately sensed an air of conspiracy in the room. I pictured a mouth whispering behind a hand, but when I opened one eye the room reverted to a scene of ordinary Londoners, clutching their glasses and emptying beer down their throats. James had his eyes scrunched shut like a child playing hide and seek. Feeling like a cheat, I closed my eye again and listened.
Some people are unable to speak quietly. Even in places as muted as the doctor’s waiting room some people are unable to appreciate the resonance of their surroundings or adjust their vocal chords to the acoustics of a space. One such person was either at my elbow, or on the other side of the room. So many people in the pub, yet this voice lorded over them all. A man, he was telling a story – up an octave, down an octave – and it was a promising one. He’d been to Canada – a place called Winnipeg, and it was so hot he had to sleep naked. But one night an animal–
I felt a tap on my shoulder. “You awake, Bill?”
I opened my eyes to see James peering at my face as if checking for acne. “Of course.”
“You looked a bit weird.”
“Did I?”
“Yeah, a bit like an animal, a horse that’s asleep or something.”
“I was concentrating.” I went to rub my eye but stopped in time. “So, what did you hear?”
“Er . . . just some rubbish about someone’s uncle’s car going in for a paint job.”
“That all?”
“Yeah.”
I glanced round the room. “Didn’t you hear the Canadian tale of sweat on the sheets?”
He frowned, “No.”
Funny that, a voice like Goliath and James didn’t hear it.
“What was the story?” he said.
I suddenly didn’t feel like going into detail. “Oh, something about a raccoon under a deck.”
“In London?”
“No, James. In Canada.”
“Hey, Bill.”
“Yes?”
“Did you really get Wilson to agree to this? It’s never going to work, you know. Not with amateurs.”
“They managed alright during the Mass Observation.”
“The mass what?”
“The Mass Observation. You must have heard of it.”
“Nope.”
“Well . . . it was a project set up back in the 1930s by three men, Harrisson, Madge and Jennings.”
James went a long time without blinking.
“They met in the newspaper.”
“What do you mean, they met in the newspaper?”
I sipped my beer. “Harrison published a poem on the same day that Jennings and Madge wrote a letter and that’s how they connected. On the same page.”
James still didn’t speak.
“Don’t you see?”
“See what?”
“They were on the same page.”
James searched my face as if his life depended on it.
I relaxed back in my chair. “Mass Observation was all about the man-in-the-street. The three men, Harrisson, Madge and–”
“Jennings.”
“Yes, Jennings, wanted to find out ordinary people’s opinions by listening in on them. In the street.” James sniffed. “So, just before the Second World War people were sent out to listen in on conversations in pubs and shops and on the bus, then report back. They wanted to find out what the public really thought about the impending fighting.”
James wiped condensation off the side of his beer glass with his finger. “You mean there might be a war coming?”
“James, there always might be a war coming. No, I want to find out what people are talking about today.”
“But we have questionnaires and interviews to do that.”
“But people lie
in interviews.”
James took a mouthful of beer, his throat comically magnified in the bottom of the glass. “How do you know?”
My left eye twitched. “I know.”
James appeared to be thinking. “Hey, Bill. Are you sure it’s legal? – eavesdropping.”
I arranged the words in my head before I spoke. “The law is vague. But we can’t help but eavesdrop. Words are out there all the time. They float in and out of our ears. They fill public space. We can’t close our ears. We shouldn’t close our ears. It’s about survival. We’ve evolved to eavesdrop.”
“Yeah, but that’s different to making a record of what you hear. And what about the government? You know, Nineteen Eighty-Four – Big Brother, and all that?”
I smiled. “I’m Big Brother now. Can’t you see how big and brotherly I am?”
“Seriously, Bill. Surely only certain people, you know, official organizations are allowed to listen and record?”
“Rubbish. Do you believe the government is listening to us now?”
“Maybe.”
“Oh, come on. Are they really interested in listening to everyone? Recording what topping you had on your pizza last night? Noting down what you bought your grandma for Christmas.”
James twisted in his seat. “Maybe the mundane hides the truth. . . .”
I couldn’t repress a slice of admiration. “I wouldn’t lose sleep over it, James. Okay, I accept the government might listen in sometimes, but not to us, not to the small fry who pay their taxes and can’t be bothered to go on protest marches. Government surveillance has to be focused. They’d have too much information to sort through if they worried about all of us.
“But I read an article–”
“Seriously James, there is just too much information out there for anyone to handle. Eavesdropping on an industrial scale just wouldn’t work.”