by Rosie Chard
James’ shoulders drooped. He liked nothing better than relaying snippets from the newspaper. I usually managed to continue writing emails as he read but occasionally I was forced to down tools and wait in suspended animation while he stumbled through a trough of journalistic analysis, sometimes mispronounced, always lacking a punchline.
“Do you believe everything you read?” I said.
“No. Do you believe everything you hear?”
A man was throwing up into a drain by the time we left the pub. James and I exchanged superior glances, and then made our way towards the Tube station. It was a damp night – the rain seemed to be everywhere, beneath my eyelashes, inside my nose, and with our collars pulled up and our necks sunk into our shoulders we walked in silence, until James spoke. “Bill?”
“Yeah.”
“There was something else.”
“What do you mean?”
“Back in the pub, I heard something else.” He fiddled with his collar. “I heard a woman whisper something into another woman’s ear. I didn’t like hearing it. I felt I shouldn’t be listening.”
I thought of Goliath. “What did she whisper?”
He moved closer. “‘I’m never going to smile again.’”
JACK sat down at his kitchen table. The chair ached out a complaint, but he liked that. He always enjoyed the sounds of the objects in his home. His cutlery drawer chattered, his blinds murmured and his copy of Hamlet whispered up to his face as he flicked through its worn pages. He made a space on the table, pushing his notebooks to one side and gathering his pencils into a pile, and then pulled the newspaper he’d picked up on the Tube out of his pocket. He opened it onto the classified ads. Two advertisements merged across a fold in the paper and for a moment he imagined life as a sympathetic welder. Then he spread the newspaper out fully and studied the advertisement that had been circled by the man on the train.
LISTENERs WANTED
Researchers wanted for sociological project in London.
Good rates of pay.
Flexible hours – maximum 35 per week.
All persons must be between 18-75
Ordinariness would be an asset
No experience required. Training given.
Must be good listeners.
Call 020 5555 7296 to obtain an application form
Or to arrange an interview or send your C.V. to
Bill Harcourt 29 Craven St. London.
He tried to picture the person who’d written the copy. Use of the word ‘persons’ suggested they were old. The absence of an email address suggested they did not know how to use a computer and were definitely old. But he liked old people. He found them easier to talk to, if he had to speak. He read the advertisement again and wondered if he had it in him. It would mean meeting new people, stranger-type people. He hadn’t been to an interview since he’d got his current job and that had been a rushed affair with an interviewer who seemed more nervous than he, and the offer was probably a mistake. But he had subsequently managed to carve out a niche for himself in his current office, a private world the size of a small wardrobe. It centred on his computer screen and the few inches round it, where, in spite of the digital paintbox that could do anything with everything he still liked to lay out the tactile tools of a graphic designer at his elbow: Rotring pens, coloured pencils, erasers and scalpels. The small scale of his workspace allowed him to concentrate on his work without having to worry about talking to the others. He found it hard talking to the others. But he found it easy to listen. His fellow workers, the first generation of digital designers now pressing up against the ceiling of middle-age, were not so interested in the larger subjects of life, the crushing facts of global warming or the fine details of government legislation, they were interested in the mechanics of every day. Yet this was what always caught his attention. The story of the bus driver who was rude to pensioners for getting on the bus too slowly, the neighbour’s problem with the dustbin lid that wouldn’t stay on, and the error at the hospital when the hernia was mistaken for hip replacement because the doctor had bad writing. He liked the way each person talked, but no one really listened to what the other was saying.
Jack picked up a pair of scissors, cut out the advertisement and stuck it into his notebook with a glue stick. Then he got himself a can of orange juice out of the fridge, sat back down at the table and looked at his phone.
CHAPTER
8
James looked hung over the next morning when I arrived at the office. I knew that feeling, the fur on the tongue, the little haze round anything bright, so I turned on my heel and brewed him a strong, tar-like cup of coffee with four spoonfuls of sugar and a biscuit. I’d slipped them quietly next to his elbow, and tiptoed halfway across the room before I noticed my in tray. “Bloody hell, look at that!” Typically bare, it was almost unrecognizable as mine, so high was the tower of envelopes piled within it.
James looked up slowly from his work, as if allowing blood levels in his head to reach equilibrium. “What . . . ? Oh, yeah. Jean brought them in before you got here. I suspect teaming hordes of eager eavesdroppers are buried in there somewhere.”
It was like Christmas. Or the St. Valentine’s Day I’d imagined as a teenager. I don’t know why I’d asked for handwritten applications for the jobs rather than emails. Perhaps reading about the Mass Observation project had put me back into analogue mode. Whatever the reason, it marked me as out of touch, and for a moment I regretted such a retrograde step. But then I picked up the first envelope and felt the childish thrill of receiving a real letter written on real paper. The art of fixing a stamp into the correct corner of the envelope had clearly been lost, but the handwriting was surprisingly clear – in the age of the keyboard – mostly legible and mostly straight.
I laid them all out on my desk in size order, but noting James seemed to have acquired an eyebrow that was quizzically arched, I collected them up into a rough pile and began to go through them at random. I thought of the applicants. Perhaps somewhere down there inside the envelopes would be the perfect eavesdroppers, a team of dedicated listeners who would hear what nobody else could. I’d already fashioned their characteristics in my mind: methodical, efficient, wise, but not too worldly, not too slick. I wasn’t asking much, I just wanted people who could tune their ears to the right frequency and remember everything they had heard.
All the envelopes were different and it was a pleasure at first to just feel and sniff them and then grandly make use of the gold letter opener Jean had given me when she discovered she had two the same.
“Anything interesting?’ asked James, through a mouthful of biscuit.
“I . . . don’t know. It’s weird, there’s all sorts in here.”
“You wanted ‘all sorts,’ didn’t you?”
“Yes, but I’m not sure how I’m going to decide – hey, listen to this one: ‘Crouching down beside a keyhole is my favourite position.’”
“Bloody hell!”
“I wonder if I’m going to get nothing but weirdos and stalkers?”
“Course you are.”
I scanned the next letter. “James, listen to this.”
“Go on.”
I held up the paper, cleared my throat and read, “I’ve always loved to listen. Ever since the day I overheard a marriage proposal on the top of the number seven bus.”
“Is that the sort of thing you’re looking for?”
“Yes, I think it is – God – I don’t know. What do you think?”
James had a cartoon thought, tilting his head and swivelling his eyes to the side before turning back to face me. “I think this whole thing’s going to get you in trouble.”
“How come?”
“Well, you’re dealing with amateurs, aren’t you. And it’s not a proper job so there’s no loyalty there. And . . . how do you know you can trust them?”
“Trust them with what?”
“The information.”
“You mean the information they hear out on t
he street?”
James scratched his head.
I was beginning to see why people never showed initiative in our company. I was also starting to see why Wilson resorted to introducing banal new projects and giving them names that sounded like air fresheners. But the air round here needed some freshening. “So, I gather you’re out then.”
James grunted. “I’ll lend an ear now and then, but I don’t want to be the one transcribing details of someone’s hernia into the computer. Okay?”
“Okay.”
VIOLET didn’t need much sleep – high-powered women generally don’t. The Prime Minister got by on a couple of hours a night and Violet saw parallels with herself, with her ability during the long hours of inertia to sort the snubs, replenish the regrets and distill the stores of adrenalin, yet be alert the moment the sun broke the horizon. She could keep on running until she stopped.
It was four in the morning by the time she kicked off her slippers and lay down on her bed. Silk sheets were one of her little treats to herself, but on this night they felt uncomfortably clammy and she kicked off the duvet and spread her body out into a star shape in an effort to cool down. She went over the events of the day in her head. Like an award-winning executive she had written down the pros and cons of the listening job. Not on the computer, that was for deadbeats, but on expensive cream paper with a watermark that sang high quality when you held it up to the light. Then she had checked her bank account, rejigged her budget and applied for the job. Professional listener was a title that rolled elegantly off her tongue, but when precisely to make the call had been a dilemma. Eventually she had drunk a glass of iced water, loosened up her throat with some warbling exercises in the bathroom and telephoned the number in the advertisement. Obviously her manner had been impressive as the man had offered her an interview straight away. He was impressed. He was in love with her already.
She flipped the duvet back over her legs and began planning her outfit. Short skirt or long?
CHAPTER
9
I decided to walk down Whitehall at lunchtime. This part of London, with its black railings and badly parked Porsches, made me feel prickly, yet sometimes I imagined I could live in one of the massive stone buildings that lurked on the edge of the streets. But no one lived here. All embassies, churches and government ministries, it was a place to pass through, never linger too long, never imagine too much.
I glanced up at the sky as I stepped out onto the street and started along one of my well-worn paths. I crossed Northumberland Avenue, followed the swaying backsides of two police horses along New Scotland Yard before turning into one of London’s most ritualistic streets. I was immediately confronted by the backside of another horse high on a plinth, its iron flank cast into a pose of strength and optimism, its gaze fixed on the Houses of Parliament which filled the distant end of the street.
I mooched along, then paused halfway up the street on a stippled square of blind persons’ pavement by the pedestrian crossing and looked up at the Cenotaph, the bulky monument to war that sat stranded in the traffic. I’d seen this tomb of the Unknown Soldier many times on the television every Remembrance Sunday, engulfed in marching arms and marching legs, its base shored up with poppy wreaths. But now, surrounded by buses and lorries and cars, it looked incongruous, alone. I’d always assumed it was empty. ‘Who was the unknown soldier?’ I’d asked my dad as a kid. ‘What did he do?’ But my dad never answered me. It was as if he hadn’t heard.
We’d actually attended the remembrance ceremony one year where I’d been confused by the old soldiers in black overcoats and black hats who looked too frail to carry the medals pinned to their chests let alone to haul the kit for launching rockets. And it had bothered my ten-year-old self even then. How could anyone so well known be unknown?
A glazier’s van stopped in the traffic in front of the monument, but I could still see bits of it through the large sheet of glass fixed to the vehicle’s side. I felt tense in the way I did these days around glass and placed my hand in front of my eyes. I dropped it back down and noticed a man pause at the monument’s base beside me, one hand held on the back of his head. Thinking. Thinking about what?
I remained on my piece of blind pavement and closed my eyes. It’s frightening to close your eyes when you are outside on your own. The world felt huge, yet at that moment I relished the feeling of my senses sharpening. The traffic seemed far away but also close. Something hummed. An overloaded fridge lorry maybe? Or an overloaded city? Yet between the sounds I could hear pieces of silence. I thought yet again of the soldier inside his tomb. Unknown yet known by everyone. The contradiction nagged me. Then I thought of the man in the hospital bed. I would never know who had slept next to me for those long nights. I wasn’t sure why I cared. And finally, for reasons I understood even less, I thought of the eavesdroppers. My group of listeners would answer my questions. They would surely press their ears to the keyhole and hear things no one had heard before.
I pulled up my collar and walked to the end of Downing Street, home of our Prime Minister, prison of our leader. I slipped into the crowd gathered at the gates and admired what there was to admire: the empty street, the traffic cones, the double yellow lines kinking round a drain. Assorted tongues rippled through the crowd: French, German, Japanese and then English, clipped and recognizable.
“See the black house, yeah . . .?”
“Yeah, yeah, I see. Bit plain . . . isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Got your coat? It’s getting nippy.”
“What’s that?
“I dunno. D’ya know?”
“No. Don’t know.”
“That copper looks cold.”
“Ha, yeah. Ha.”
Three policemen stood just inside the gate, their bodies rounded by pockets bulging with notebooks and phones and unrecognizable objects. Three Mr. Plods with too much chocolate, a pistol on the thigh, machine guns held as they’d been trained to hold them, bullet-proof vests, a flash of gum between parted lips, buttons straining, too tight, everything too tight and another chew of the gum. The crowd photographed everything on their mobiles: the gum, the pistol on the thigh, the mobile phone primed to ring. Police eyes scanned the crowd, a little jump of the heels, trying to shake out the cold. We looked at them; they looked at us. I aimed my phone at my feet and switched on record.
EVE felt a muscle pull in her back as she reached up to the top of her wardrobe. Blankets were up there, ones that she never used, plus her old school uniform. She pulled down a shirt, the brown one for special occasions, smacked off the dust, and then eased a pleated skirt off its hanger and lay both items down on the bed. That was her. That flat person lying on the bed was her – too tired to do anything but lie down, chest deflated, hem draped over the edge.
She thought of the prospect of new job with a shiver of excitement. She had cut her hours at the Citizen’s Advice Bureau to six a week. They hadn’t liked it, but the Bureau didn’t pay and she needed some money. As a school administrator, she’d paid her whole life into the state pension, but when it came, the beige letter on the mat on her sixtieth birthday, she realised it was not going to be enough. Although frugality was in her blood, honed to perfection during a childhood of second-hand clothes, freezing bedrooms and plain breakfast, as the months on a pension wore on the wear and tear went unattended, and every part of her life frayed, flimsied or broke. She couldn’t keep darning the holes in the toes of her tights forever.
She hovered at the end of the bed and then gently plumped her cheeks. Finally she gathered her flat self up and got dressed. She hadn’t been to a job interview for thirty years. The piercing squeak of the interviewer’s chair was all she remembered of the last time she’d bared her soul to a stranger. No need to bare her soul this time. They’d called for a listener. And listeners have no need to speak.
CHAPTER
10
I hadn’t done many staff interviews. James was the one who saw the bulk of our researchers; I was the one who pic
ked the best of the crop. The whole process was a bit too much like company role-play sessions for my liking. Wilson had recently decided it would be a good idea to act out our office procedures in order to ‘sharpen our corporate skills.’ This meant not only instant mortification as we took turns to interview imaginary clients in the stuffy conference room at the top of the building, but it nurtured all sorts of simmering resentment among colleagues long after the sessions were complete. The only concrete result, as far as I could tell, was a spankingly written human resources manual that gilded every in tray thereafter. As I sat in the meeting room waiting for the first candidate, I realised I had never actually looked through its laminated pages so heavy with bullet points, but before I had a chance to get past the longwinded preambles someone knocked on my door.
“Your first candidate is here, Bill . . . I mean Mr. Harcourt.”
“Send them in,” I said. Pompously, I realised a second later.
“Him,” corrected Jean.
I mused briefly over how I’d deal with ecclesiastical cases requiring jurisdiction when, slotting nicely into my highest age cohort, an elderly man entered the room. He seemed lost for a moment, confused by the arrangement of furniture, but then he came towards me in what could only be described as a lunge.
“Take a seat,” I said, hoping to deflect him before he tripped.
“Ta.” He gripped the back of the chair and pulled it close to my desk, as if about to share its surface with me, and sat down.
It was easy to identify the long-term unemployed. Apart from the jacket that didn’t match the trousers – close, but not close enough – there was the inflamed piece of neck where an unfamiliar collar chafed. And there were also those forgotten corners, probably overlooked in the stress of making themselves presentable after months in loose-fitting trousers and slippers: the line of grime on the watchstrap, the sweater pills gathering at the elbow. But the long-term unemployed were the ones I admired the most, the jaded and faded ones who still had the energy to pull themselves out of the armchairs and mould their credentials to the latest set of job requirements.