by Rosie Chard
“It’s not that dodgy,” she said, “but I think it’s the place where people show themselves up . . . the most.”
Someone sniffed.
“Did you hear anything interesting?” I said, feeling a nerve twist in my stomach.
She frowned. “They were talking about their bodies.”
“What sort of bodies?” asked Eve. Her cheeks had cooled and a look of authority had settled on her face.
Missy’s voice mixed indignation and uncertainty. “Fat sort of bodies.”
“What did they say?” Violet pulled her chair closer to the table.
“They were ashamed.”
“How did you know they were ashamed?” asked Eve, her pencil poised between her fingers.
“She said so.”
“So only one of them was ashamed,” said Violet.
Missy blinked fast. ‘Yes. Only one. But she was very ashamed.”
“Why?’ asked Jack, looking genuinely puzzled.
“’Because she had cellu . . . cellulite. That’s why.”
Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed Violet’s hand high on her arm. “Did they say anything particularly insightful about their . . . cellulite?”
Missy glanced down at her notes. “Not really. Just that it was . . . let me check . . . ‘all over the place.’”
I felt drained. Only nine thirty in the morning, yet my neck ached and my eyes were watering. I dabbed them with my handkerchief and blinked rapidly. I wondered if this was all I was ever going to get from the eavesdroppers. Snippets of minor importance, conversations we could already predict. It was obvious women were going to talk about their bodies in a Ladies’ toilet. I could just imagine the look on Wilson’s face as I gave him my findings. Sir, I have discovered that women discuss their body shape in toilets and people talk about coffee in cafes.
“Is it a bit iffy down there?” persisted Jack.
“Sorry, what did you say?” I said, returning to the moment.
“Is it a bit iffy down in those Camden bogs?”
I couldn’t read his look. “I don’t–”
“You don’t go there at night do you, dear?” said Eve.
Missy smiled. “Oh, no. I’d never go down there at night.”
“Missy loves daylight,” I said.
She smiled again.
“You alright, Bill?”
“Yeah, I was just thinking.”
“’Bout what?”
“Oh, you know, the gang.”
“Getting a bit out of hand, are they?”
I sighed. “I don’t know, James. They’re a bit . . . all over the place.”
“That’s the whole point isn’t it?”
“Yeah . . . well . . . I suppose so.”
“Got a loose cannon, have you?”
I sighed again. “I feel like I’ve got a whole room of loose cannons.”
“How d’ya mean?”
“Nothing concrete, just a bit of a feeling that things aren’t quite right.”
James sighed. “Spit it out, Bill.”
“Well, Jack thinks he’s being followed.”
“Oh yeah? Who by?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t think he is. He’s scared of everything, hangs on the edges of the meeting, never says much. But that’s not my main worry.”
“What’s your main worry?”
“It’s Eve. You know, she’s the one who works at the Citizen’s Advice Bureau. The one with the ginger hair.”
“Guinea?”
“Yeah, Guinea. She’s been hearing some dicey stuff in the launderette, you know, petty thieves and that.”
James tilted his head to one side. “Is she discrete?”
“Oh, yes. She’s probably the most discrete.”
“Sounds like she’s going to really hear something.”
“Yeah. I . . . hope so.”
I clicked on my mouse and opened a new page in Word. I was glad to be in my office. The sight of James now trying to cut his nails with a pair of blunt scissors made me feel relaxed, so I set to work typing up the minutes of the meeting. It occurred to me that whoever invented the method for writing minutes must have been a sadist. Apart from the tedium of the meaningless preambles and the banality of the additional comments section, I always felt pressured by the action required column. What the hell to write here? Arrange next meeting was considered lame by the higher administrative tiers while write minutes was a joke that hadn’t been funny even the first time.
“By the way, how are you going to collate all the data?” asked James, tidying a thumbnail with his teeth.
“God knows. I’m trying to categorise it into themes right now.”
“What have you got there?”
I glanced at my notes. Curry, murder, cellulite. “There was talk of a woman’s weight.”
James snorted. “That’s illuminating. Wilson’s going to love that. Hey, you could write a self-help manual.”
I dispatched a look across the room. “You may joke, but I think I might be starting to sense something interesting out there.”
“Like what?”
“I’m not sure yet . . . I’m working on it.”
“Are those eavesdroppers really earning their keep? It’s going to reflect badly on us if you spend all this money on them and they come up with nothing.”
“They’re working very hard; they’re professional; they want to hear.”
“I’m surprised they’ve got so much energy. Some of them are really old, aren’t they?”
“Not that old, although I suppose they might be finding it rather a long day, but I can’t let them stop now.”
“Maybe it’s time you burnt their slippers.” He grinned.
“James, where did you–”
The phone rang. It was Wilson.
MISSY always felt guilty relieving her bladder. It seemed like an insult to her place of work, rather like releasing wind in one of their meetings, something she dreaded, but she’d been in position for over three hours so was on the verge of giving in. She pulled up her pelvic floor and looked down at the back of her hands. Such smooth hands. The blue light of the toilet had ironed out the veins and removed all the freckles from her skin. She was tracing her finger across her knuckle when she heard voices outside the door. Women. Two. The voices stopped and she waited, waited, waited until she couldn’t wait any more – urine trickled into the toilet.
“Oi! Who’s in there?”
She held her breath.
“Who is it?”
“Nobody.”
“Get out here.”
Missy pulled up her knickers, let her dress drop to her knees, rushed her notebook and pencil into her bag and opened the door. Two girls barred her way. One had a cold sore on her upper lip.
“Were you listening to us?”
“No.”
“Bet you were!” The taller girl moved towards her and pinched Missy’s arm. “Little spy. Bet you’re gonna put us on the Internet.”
“No . . . really, I’m not.”
“So what you doing creeping about down here at this time of night? Are you a prostitute?”
“No.”
“What are you then?”
Missy squeezed out a smile. “Just a girl.”
They both laughed. The breasts on the larger girl shook; a strand of hair settled into her cleavage.
“Are you looking at my tits?” said the larger girl.
“No. I was just leaving.”
Missy turned to go but as she reached the bottom step she felt someone yank the back of her hood.
“Didn’t your mummy ever tell you to wash your hands?”
Missy didn’t reply. She twisted free and she ran. She tore up the steps, up into the cold air of the High Street. She dashed across the road and didn’t stop running until she was inside the Tube station, through the ticket barrier, and onto the escalators. Then her life slowed. Her heart slowed. She drifted down past the advertisements on the wall, past the passengers coming up on the o
ther side. Only then did she have time to sniff the disinfectant on her sleeve and adjust her bag on her shoulder. And only then did she become aware of the feeling in her chest, the desire to get back down beneath the ground as soon as possible and look at her naked skin in the cold blue light.
CHAPTER
24
Sunday the 13th of November was a cold day. I knew I’d be standing around so I put on a pair of thick socks and my old school scarf, which was the only one left after my mother had purged my wardrobe in a malevolent fit of orderliness.
I pictured the scene that awaited me as I rode the Tube to Charing Cross: the quiet huddles of people shuffling their way down Whitehall, the flanks of police horses in high-vis coats, but I was unprepared for the queue. Turning into Horse Guards Avenue I stopped with such abruptness that the person walking behind bumped into me.
“Watchit, mate!”
“Sorry,” I said, annoyed with myself for apologising when the fault was clearly equally spread. But more annoying was that now we had spoken and had had bodily contact, I was connected to this stranger. I felt compelled to nod as he let loose his opinions on the state of the buses these days and went through all the details of an unfortunate incident with the driver when he’d tried to pay with a Scottish five pound note.
“What are we queuing up for?” I asked, hoping to swing the conversation towards a topic of some usefulness.
He looked at me blankly. “What d’ya mean?”
“The queue. Why are we standing in a queue in the middle of a London street?”
He looked me up and down. What did he make of my comfortable coat and corduroy trousers, I wondered. He was dressed in a leather jacket airbrushed with poppies. Biker veteran, James would have labelled him.
“Not been here before?”
“No.”
“It’s security. We’re a prime target.”
Not feeling particularly prime, I stretched my neck up and looked towards the front of the queue – past the old ladies in wheelchairs, beyond the clutch of teenagers in orange anoraks – until I saw the cause of the delay. “Christ, there’s a metal detector up there!”
“Keep it down, mate. They’ll haul you in if you make a fuss.”
I looked closely at my companion’s face for the first time. One eye was bloodshot and he had a scar on his nose. “You mean we have to go through metal detectors just to walk down the street?”
“This ain’t your average street.”
“No, but . . . is it like this every year?”
“Every year.”
I looked at my queuing companion with new respect. He seemed to have a knowledge of city life that was far superior to mine. I checked my watch. Ten forty. Only twenty minutes to go.
We shuffled forward; I felt a trickle of guilt as I passed through the metal detector and was released into Whitehall. There were thick crowds of people here all trying ingenious ways to elevate themselves: sitting on walls, standing on little plastic stools and clinging to niches in buildings. A small boy had inserted his head through an iron railing, but his mother was showing no sign of concern, so I sauntered by without a second glance. Finally, I squeezed myself onto the bottom of a flight of steps with what seemed like fifty other people and checked my watch. Ten forty-five.
For some reason I found myself thinking of Eisenstein’s dodge in Battleship Potemkin, of allowing one sailor to turn his head when the dead mutineers were carried by. What sort of people come to the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, I wondered. Old soldiers for sure – berets and caps bobbed everywhere – and military families, dad in a blazer, mum in a sensible coat, little Jimmy wanting some crisps, but who were the others? Who were the ordinary-looking people who surrounded me, fingering their service sheets and checking their mobile phones? Why was I here?
Surely nothing more than a whim had made me pull on my coat, leave the house without any breakfast and board the Tube to the most ceremonial part of London, but now, looking round, seeing the sad faces, the sad, bent necks, I wondered if something else had brought me to this street on this day, for this moment.
As I looked again at my watch, someone nudged my arm; I smelt leather and there he was again.
“Watcha, mate.”
“Oh, hello.” My queuing companion was now sharing twelve inches of step with me.
He turned his head. “This is Kiera, my girlfriend.”
I took her in quickly, a big woman hanging onto his arm. She had on a leather jacket with Lest We Forget stitched across her front. “Hello, Kiera,” I said, hurriedly making eye contact as I realised I had been reading her chest. But before she could reply a gun salute tore down the street, slamming into the buildings, detonating in my ears.
“Fucking hell!” said Kiera. She slapped her hand across her mouth.
“Schh,” A voice behind me, breath on the back of my neck.
“It’s nearly eleven o’clock,” said another voice, a few steps higher up.
And then I saw them – an extended family of Gurkhas threading their way towards us. The men were tweaking the bands in their hats and the Gurkha grandmas were chatting in an unrecognizable tongue, oblivious to the rigid crowd. It wasn’t until they reached the bottom of my steps that they paused, looked round bewildered, and then smartly closed their mouths as eleven o’clock arrived and the golden tones of Big Ben began their march down the street.
Two minutes in silence is not a long time, but as I stood on the steps, surrounded by hundreds of people, it seemed as if we were frozen; no limbs moved, no eyes blinked
I closed my eyes, sifting out the silence of the crowd. At first there was nothing, absolutely nothing, then my ears sharpened, my whole body became taut, and the tiny bones of my ear moved as the hammer struck the anvil. Minute sounds had arrived in the street: the gentle rustle of the plane trees above our heads, the tap tap of loose rope on a flagpole, the zip on a Gurkha grandma’s handbag being pulled shut. And then I heard something else.
Wilson was in a good mood when I finally made it to his office. He looked up as soon as I entered the room and smiled. Yes, smiled. Not a malevolent grin but a real human greeting, full of well-meaning teeth. I’d been quite successful at postponing the meeting up until that point, what with a check-up at the eye hospital and a leaking toilet in my flat demanding attention. However after his emailed requests to see me had been bumped up to ‘urgent’ and Jean had ominously mouthed something across the street as I left work the previous day, I decided I had to ‘face the music,’ as James liked to categorise it. But the procrastination had not been entirely in vain. It had given me time to collect in the eavesdroppers’ notebooks – a traumatic event akin to removing sweets from a child – and see what we had. At first I wasn’t sure what we had. There were the descriptions of course. I’d never requested settings or details of clothes but all of the eavesdroppers included them. Jack frequently referred to the ‘small, pale scout’ he’d seen on the train while Eve described with great affection the ‘man with the large singing mouth,’ who frequented the launderette. Then there was the slapstick. Missy noted how ‘the man’s folding stool collapsed,’ and Stanley had described in capital letters the man who had ‘actually, yes really,’ (underlined) slipped on a banana skin. Finally there were the miniature scenes so beloved of Jack. ‘One of them just stares, combs her hair and backchats,’ impressed me more than I’d like to admit. Even Stanley wrote of the ‘ground slippery with rain and orange peel.’ But it was Violet’s final line that surprised me the most. ‘I admit I thought London had gone crazy and felt annoyed with the world.’ Not a quote overheard from someone else but, it seemed, a thought from within. How bitter and bereft they’d been when I collected the books, but now I began to understand why it was so hard to let them go.
But with my meeting with Wilson looming I tried to ignore the stories brewing in those pages and attempted to see a pattern, an undercurrent slowly rising to the surface.
“What have you got for me?” said my boss.
&
nbsp; I sat on the chair on the other side of Wilson’s desk and placed the notebooks down.
“What are those?” His smile had drooped, his voice an octave lower.
“It’s the data.”
Wilson studied me for a moment. It was as if he was trying to make sense of the situation just by gazing at my mouth. He picked up the closest notebook and flicked through it. Never had the turn of a page sounded so threatening, “Where’s the report?” he said. “Where’s the overview? The description of methods . . . where is your summary of the findings to date?”
Such archaic terms. In my new world of notebooks and erasers and pencilling in I’d as good as forgotten the templates, the tried and tested methods of social research. “We haven’t got to that stage yet.”
“What stage have you got to?”
“We’re still at the rough data stage. There’s been no crunching of numbers, nothing’s been . . . digitised . . . yet.”
“I see.” He glanced at the calendar on the wall. “But there must be something you can tell me about what the public is saying.”
“They’re saying . . .” I inhaled, “they’re talking about sex . . . and drugs and . . . rock and roll.”
Wilson stared. “William. This isn’t a joke. This project is costing me a lot of money. I need to get some results. I need to know how your so-called eavesdroppers are performing.”
“It’s not a performance.”
“Oh? What is it?”
“It’s more of a calling.”
“A calling? Are they nuns?”
“I’m sorry. I know it sounds strange but they’re really getting into it. They do a lot more hours than we pay them for and–”
“Why do they do a lot more hours than we pay them for?”
“Because they love it.”
“They’re not going to be demanding overtime are they?”
“No! They’re very happy. They love what they’re doing, for them it’s just life carrying on.”
“Life carrying on. I see.” He tapped his thumbnail on the desk. “So there’s nothing to be concerned about?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing concrete to report?”
“Not yet.”
“And you’re going to digitise them?”