The Eavesdroppers

by Rosie Chard

  “Am I early?” she said, pressing her elbows against the door frame in a semblance to a medieval yoga pose.

  “No, come in. Someone’s got to be first.” Banal expression, I thought. Used only by people who have nothing to say.

  She sat down untidily, demolishing my precious line-up, and placed a laptop on the table. She didn’t speak again until she had everything booted up. “I’m ready.”

  “You’re not planning to use that during the meeting, are you?” I said.

  She looked at me as if I was three years old, but luckily any slipping into that role was halted by the sound of more footsteps massing in the corridor. The door was pushed open and four people filed in. They had the look of strangers unwittingly gathered together for a single purpose, the crowd at the scene of an accident or a group spontaneously picked to form a team at a business workshop. Laying out their personal space with great care, each sat down, pulled in their chairs and looked expectantly in my direction like a row of pale yet worldly sparrows.

  I’d never done a formal pep talk before. Our researchers were normally employed singly, so I’d never had to worry about the miseries of group dynamics. How to muster enthusiasm? I glanced around to see if I could detect any signs of ordinariness breaking out round the table. I opened with a joke; it was one I’d used to reasonable effect in the pub but it went down like a lead balloon. Stanley laughed but the rest looked bewildered, or irritated, or in the case of Missy, faintly unwell.

  But I ignored all this and began my spin. My tale was an intriguing one: I could see that from their eyes. They’d clearly been reared to hide their thoughts; they all fixed up their smiles and held their necks stiff, but I could see thinking was going on, just behind the expressionless foreheads. It was important to give a clear picture so I told them the instructions straight. Go out into the world with the ears of a newborn, untainted by prejudice, devoid of judgement. They had to be ordinary; they had to listen. And they had to note down the conversations they heard in a notebook with a pencil.

  “Pencil!” said Violet. My eardrum quivered.

  “Yes, a pencil.”

  I handed out a plain black notebook to each member of the group. I’d spent the previous twenty minutes sharpening the pencils and felt annoyed when Stanley broke the end off his while writing his name in the front page. “And . . .” the volume of my voice rose, “I want you to remember something important. Hearing is different to listening.” Someone sighed. “Hearing is easy. Listening is what I’m paying you for.”

  The eavesdroppers closed their mouths. “And, most importantly, I don’t want you to show these notes to anyone but me. Does anyone have any questions?”

  “What are we looking for exactly?” asked Eve, her pencil encased in thin fingers.

  “Listening for,” corrected Violet.

  I smelt perspiration in the air. “That’s your job,” I said. “We’re trying to discover what’s out there.” The silence in the room made my throat seem loud when I cleared it.

  Jack uttered his inaugural sentence, his voice barely audible. “You mean, you want us to feel the weave?”

  I couldn’t believe I’d had reservations about him. “Exactly.”

  “Exactly what?” said Missy, twisting a piece of wool round her finger.

  I inhaled. “We’re trying to get a sense of . . . you know, the way things are.”

  Missy appeared to be hugging her own waist; Stanley scratched his forehead. It made me realise the idea wasn’t fully formed in my own head, let alone on my tongue.

  “Do you mean you want us to listen out for something that hasn’t been heard before?” said Violet.

  Such clarity. “Yes!”

  “But how will we recognise it?” Missy held a handkerchief to her cheek as if to dab a tear.

  “He doesn’t know. That’s what he’s paying us for,” Stanley said.

  I felt tearful myself. Or something was making my eyes water. But it wasn’t the bewilderment seemingly felt by the eavesdroppers, maybe something else, maybe the enigma of the project. What I thought I understood, I suddenly didn’t. “Look, everyone,” I said, “you were chosen because you are good listeners. This is an experiment. And like any experiment we don’t know what’s going to happen. Just go out and listen, go out and take notes. Nothing’s going to happen to you out there. It’s only when you bring your notes back that we’ll see if there is anything . . . out there.”

  Missy’s eyes had widened, Violet’s sass departed.

  “There’s something else I need to say.” I took a breath. “You need to be . . . careful.”

  “Careful of what?” said Stanley.

  “That you don’t get, you know, caught.”

  “Is eavesdropping illegal?” Jack had become the sensible one.

  “It depends on our definition,” I said.

  Stanley fished a small dictionary out of his pocket; a seed fell onto the table. I couldn’t believe how long the silence held in the room as he thumbed his way towards the E’s.

  “Water that drips from the eaves of a house,” he announced.

  “Verb, please,” said Violet.

  “The ground on which such water falls.”

  “Veeerb.”

  Stanley’s cheeks reddened as he studied the page. “To eavesdrop. Verb. Listen secretly to a private conversation.”

  Eve spoke in a low voice. “Secretly? Mr. . . . Stanley, is it illegal?”

  Stanley seemed to have discovered the pleasurable power of a pause. We waited, oh how we waited; then we watched his thumb move imperceptibly down the page. “Formerly an indictable public offence.”

  “Formerly,” breathed Eve.

  “That means it’s legal,” said Stanley.

  “Exactly,” I said. “So long as you don’t use a recording device, then it’s a bit of a grey area. That’s why we’re using notebooks and pencils. Now . . .” I glanced round the group, “I’d like to decide your locations. Any thoughts on where you’d like to station yourselves?”

  “The Job Centre,” said Stanley without hesitation.

  “Excellent,” I said. “Any other suggestions?”

  “I’d like to remain in my natural habitat,” said Violet.

  In the hiatus that followed I sensed the others might be searching their brains as feverishly as I, but it was Stanley who ventured a conclusion first. “The shoe shop?”

  Violet tutted, yet seemingly unaware of the slight proceeded to describe, in humid and loving detail, her local coffee shop, with its ‘jostle and bustle and propensity for holding life in eager little clusters,’ as if none of the people around the conference room table had ever heard of, let alone stepped inside, such a place. “My local cafe,” she concluded. “That’s where you’ll find the energy of the city.”

  “Right,” I said, depressed by the limitations of my own vocabulary. “What about you, Jack?’

  “I’ll be in my natural habitat, too.”

  A challenging little smile played on his lips but no one dared to hazard a guess, so it was left to me to ask. “And where might that be?”

  “The Circle Line.”

  “Ah, the Circle Line,” said Stanley, puffing out his chest. “Same smell and sounds since 1979, across the empty track, I half expect to see you there, or someone else from that . . . far distant time.”

  “Is that your words?” asked Eve.

  “No.” Stanley smiled. “It’s the Underground Poem. Don’t you know?”

  Jack somehow caught all our attention. “I sat, a solitary man, in a crowded London shop, an open book and empty cup on the marble table-top.”

  “I don’t think there’s going to be any poetry where I’m going,” Eve said.

  Stanley turned towards her. “Where are you going?”

  “The launderette.”

  “Oh, bravo,” said Violet. “You’ll hear such small talk.”

  I studied the side of her face for a glimmer of satisfaction, but none was there. “The launderette is a good choice
. Have you been in one before, Eve?”

  She flashed black eyes at me; I wondered if guinea pigs had eyebrows.

  “Do I look like the sort of person who owns a washing machine?” she said.

  No time to think. “No . . . yes . . . Missy, what about you? Where will you be working?”

  Missy appeared to be listening to something outside the room. Her ears were larger than I remembered, wiry tufts of hair tucked behind them. “Sorry, what did you say?” she said.

  “Your location? I need to know your intended whereabouts?”

  She brushed a flake of dry skin off the back of her hand. “I was thinking of going to the public conveniences.”

  “Ah.” I waited for my follow up, but nothing materialised.

  “Sounds like a good idea to me,” said Stanley cheerfully. “That’s where people really reveal themselves.”

  I was impressed by his look of innocence. “You will be careful, won’t you . . . ”

  “Is taking a slash dangerous, then?” Sarcasm had replaced Stanley’s cheer. It didn’t suit his face.

  “No, well, not usually,” I said. “By the way, does everyone have a mantelpiece?”

  “A what?” said Violet.

  “It’s that thing that goes over the top of your fireplace,” Stanley explained. “I’ve got a beauty from the thirties in my house. It’s–”

  “I don’t have a fireplace,” said Violet.

  “I had a mantelpiece,” said Eve, “but a cowboy builder removed the original; it was Victorian and solid marble, but so cold to lean on. They replaced it with hideous.”

  ‘What do you mean, they replaced it with hideous?” Violet said. “That’s an adjective.”

  “Pine,” she replied, as if that was enough.

  “Do you have a shelf, Violet?” I said. I hadn’t anticipated this degree of detail.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Is that where you keep your knick-knacks?” asked Stanley.

  Violet sighed.

  “What I’d like you to do,” I continued, “is tell me at our next meeting, just as an exercise – please indulge me – what is on your mantelpiece, or . . . shelf.”

  I sensed movement in the room.

  “You mean everything on it?” asked Stanley.

  I laughed. “Why? Is it so full?”

  He scratched his head. “It’s rather . . . crowded.”

  “With what?” asked Violet.

  He smiled. “Seven decades of tat.”

  “Just note down the top ten,” I said.

  Missy seemed flustered. “The top ten?”

  “Just a simple list of the top ten objects on your mantlepiece. Tat and non-tat. For the next meeting, that’s all. Thank you.”

  Someone let out a low growl. I had no idea who it was.

  MISSY liked the shipping news. On the radio so late it meant she could listen to it in bed and not feel guilty if she fell asleep before the end. Guilt was her sister. They’d been born at the same time; they slept in the same bed. Yet on this night she felt relaxed. Nothing was lovelier than the rise and fall of the broadcaster’s voice, veering north, careering south, 40s, 50s, 60s, becoming cyclonic, thundery showers, poor, occasionally good. Dogger, Cromity, Forth, Tyne, Lundy, Fastnet, the butt of Lewis, veering south, rising, falling, poor, occasionally good.

  Her radio listening work had dried up recently, but it was impossible not to still listen with the ears of an employee. She knew the laugh of every broadcaster, the opening notes of every show, but among the hundreds of programmes, the hours of music, her greatest love was the pips. One, two, three, four, five, six. . . . The hourly markers, five short, one long, had a comforting monotony, which gave her a lovely sense of calm before the turmoil of the news. News. She’d heard more news than anyone on earth. She didn’t want to hear any more.

  She’d been so tired that night she hadn’t bothered to hang her dress on a hanger and it lay collapsed on the floor like a deflated lantern. A party dress, it was layered with nylon petticoats and held onto her body with thin straps that left ridges in her shoulders when she took it off.

  Maybe she’d had too much to drink. It was hard to keep count, especially if the level of the glass never seemed to go down. Drinking could take its toll but burning the candle at both ends was an idea that she’d always liked. She’d tried it out once. She cut the bottom off a short white candle she’d bought in a church shop next to the cathedral and lit both ends. Just the memory of it made her smile: the two piles of wax forming on the table, the shrinking candle, the flames heating her finger on either side. She’d probably have to fine-tune her life now she was a professional eavesdropper. Mr. Harcourt might not approve of bags under her eyes or her chin resting on her hands in meetings. But come to think of it, he had bags under his eyes. And they were bloodshot. Perhaps he liked burning the candle at both ends too.

  Over a late supper – a silent chew on bacon between bread – she’d pushed the memories of the first day aside, but now she allowed herself to recall the scene at her new job, the new faces, the new sets of clothes on unfamiliar bodies and the tumble of anxiety as her turn to speak had arrived. Yet it had felt good to be part of it, whatever it was.

  Listening to the radio all day was a lonely job and the thought of hearing stories and swapping notes with others excited her. But it worried her too. Would they like her, these unknown people? Would her stories be as interesting as theirs?

  She went into her sitting room and wandered over to her only shelf and observed the objects displayed on the wood. She didn’t observe too long, just long enough to adjust the positions of the family living there, pull out the mother’s chair a fraction, turn the father’s shoulders three degrees, and push the child’s tiny seat further beneath the table.

  Then Missy went into the bathroom, sat on the toilet and got into her listening pose, elbows on her knees, chin resting on her palms – The Position, as she liked to call it. Here her bones would lock in place and her muscles hold perfect tension as seconds ran into minutes, and minutes into hours. Not many people could sit long on a toilet. The children she’d grown up with complained of aches in their backs and marks on the backs of their legs, but Missy, she’d been born in a toilet, her damp body wiped with paper from a municipal roll.

  The walls of her flat were thinnest here, but the sounds of voices were often drowned out by the plumbing as the taps belched and pipes shuddered. But today there was something new in the air – a low hum, far in the distance. Or close. She listened harder; the hum carried on.

  Fifteen minutes later she put on her pyjamas, got into bed, switched on the radio and lay back. She placed her hand over her stomach and closed her eyes, her head turning on the pillow, veering south, and her chest, ever so slowly, rising and falling. Life was poor, occasionally good.

  CHAPTER

  12

  Monday was a long and frustrating day, given the onslaught of spam in my inbox and shortness of shrift handed out by the photocopier. During the dead time spent hunting down fresh supplies of toner and filling empty trays with paper I found more than a few moments to reflect on the inaugural meeting of the eavesdroppers. I’d clearly lacked the imagination to picture all five listeners within the confines of a single room when I’d interviewed them separately and was unprepared for the unfathomable frisson that had wafted between my lovingly spaced chairs. I’d envisaged a common strand, a listener’s gene that had the power to govern subsequent personalities but then, as they’d gathered together for a common purpose, surprisingly different characters had emerged. Yet, the more I thought about it the more I recognised there was something that united them, and when I identified what it was, it concerned me. They all wanted something. Desire was an important trait for an eavesdropper I conceded, but, more than that, they all seemed to need something. And need, as my father liked to pronounce whenever he passed a homeless man in the street, is more dangerous than want. But the worry of the group dynamic was soon replaced by worry about the singleton, ou
t there in the world alone, with pricked up ears and a notebook to hand. Were they vulnerable? Would a bolshie bore who’d had too much to drink notice the urgent scribbling and rout us? Where to put the notebook had been a crisis in itself. Under the table or on the top, disguised as a diary? Or even, as suggested by Eve, beneath a cardigan, cradled in the hand like a little hamster.

  James and I discussed training at great length. Although we argued over the suitability of the word training when applied to showing someone how to sit on a chair and copy words into a book, we did agree that something had to be done before I dispatched the group to their listening posts. James preferred the word initiation but I baulked at the connotations: hot mustard, blindfolds, aprons, so we settled on guidelining, a word stolen from an interminable speech of Wilson’s two Christmases previously, excruciating, but oh, so apt.

  I decided to start with Missy. Her on-the-job guidelining was going to require the utmost delicacy so I thought of asking Jean if she’d come along with me to add a feminine perspective, but the sight of her highly-cleansed cheeks and spotless nails as I poked my head round her office door persuaded me otherwise.

  I left work just before lunch, eager to feel a bit of sun on my back. There’s something deeply satisfying about having an office job where you get to leave the building during working hours and continue to be paid, so I felt happy as I went outside. The great London outside, even on the most oppressive days made me feel heady, a bit shandy-drunk, and I rushed down the street feeling as if I’d kicked off my shoes in the office and left them behind forever.

  Missy was late. I’d had two coffees in the forecourt cafe at Victoria Station and a pack of travel biscuits by the time she came running along from the direction of platform thirteen.

  “You know, Missy, it costs thirty pence a go,” I said, as she took off her scarf and draped it elaborately over the back of her chair.

  “What does?”

  “The Ladies loo.”

  She sat down. “Every time?”