by Rosie Chard
[Exit man]
CHAPTER
26
The bus was crowded when I jumped on so I headed for the stairs, grabbing the handrail as we shuddered round a corner. I heaved myself upstairs, sat down and established my territory. I was the man at the top of the Clapham omnibus. I was he: the reasonable man, the regular male who leant neither this way nor that, who spoke neither loudly nor softly. I represented the average; my life ran bang on the line.
Then I noticed my immediate world – two men in front of me were whispering, but my ears got to work, separating the pauses from the clauses.
“He’s trying.”
“I know he’s trying.”
“He’s trying very hard.”
“I know.”
“Too hard.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I don’t like it, either.”
“He’s seen the ears.”
“Yeah, whopping great ears.”
The first man laughed. “Whopping great ears. Flapping.”
I stared at the nape of the neck in front of me, recently scratched, so close I could touch it.
“Hey, it’s our stop!” The neck skin shook with the words.
“Yeah. Let’s go.”
The two men staggered to the stairwell, gripping the backs of seats as they went. I pulled out my notebook and dabbed some words onto the page. Whopping great ears. Flapping.
By the time I reached the end of Stanley’s street I thought I had managed to suppress all my prejudices concerning his lifestyle. That was before I turned the corner and saw the brown pebbledash bungalow with the concrete garden and yes, there it was, a garden gnome with horribly yellow teeth. “Shit,” I muttered under my breath. “Be nice. Just be nice.”
The eavesdroppers had all arrived before me. I realised this as an aproned Stanley ushered me inside and the sound of laughter washed into the hallway. I hung up my coat and wondered how I was going to tread the delicate line between boss at work and boss at a buffet. Stanley was in an impossibly good mood. I flinched as he buffered my shoulder with a warm oven mitt before disappearing into what I could only suppose was the kitchen. I was left stranded, alone in the lounge doorway.
“Hi, everyone.” I waved.
“Hi!” Jack jumped up, crossed the room and shook my hand. “How are you?”
“Hungry,” I said.
They were all well ahead of me in the alcohol stakes; that was obvious from the noise level – even Eve’s cheeks were pink – so I hurried to the table I’d spotted in the corner of the room and ripped the ring from a can of beer. My fears regarding assimilation were quickly assuaged as I realised the booze had dispensed with the need for any sort of reintroduction of myself in a new environment. I was one of them, one part of a tipsy crowd.
I sat on the sofa and observed the scene. Next to me, Jack, in torn jeans, was demolishing a glass of red wine. Missy wore a skirt made of sacking and Eve was in a flat-chested dress that clung to her knees when she moved. Violet, drunk, was the most elaborately dressed, shimmering in leather trousers and a shiny top.
“Hello, Bill.” she said, “Wanna listen to what I got to say?”
Something forced primness into my reply. “No, Violet. Not now.”
“I’m going to. . . .” began Missy, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside my feet. “I’m going to eavesdrop on the eavesdroppers.” She smiled at the curtains.
“Jack!’ bellowed Violet. “Tell Bill who you saw on the Tube.”
“Who did you see on the Tube, Jack?” I said.
Jack glugged a swig of wine.
Violet smiled. “No one.”
The room went quiet; Eve hiccupped; the sound of frying wafted from the kitchen.
Jack swallowed another mouthful of wine and smiled, teeth tinged purple. “It was really noticeable.” He looked in my direction. “The absence. It was just me.”
“Apart from all the others,” said Violet, still smiling.
Jack grinned. The pull of the muscles altered his face. “Yes, me and all the others. But not him.”
“Let’s have a toast.” Eve, flushed and unsteady, held up her glass as if she’d never adopted such a pose before.
“To absence,” said Violet.
“The return of glorious absence!” said Jack.
I wasn’t sure what was happening, but I raised my beer and hugged the eavesdroppers, one by one – and they hugged me.
“Does everyone like sultanas in their curry?” Stanley stood in the doorway to the lounge, a tea towel flung over his shoulder. “Oh, hugs! What’d I miss?”
No one answered; momentarily we just existed.
“Alright, does anyone not like sultanas in their curry?”
Still no one spoke.
He tutted to the air then disappeared back through the doorway, his back scolding us as he went.
I stood up and headed towards the kitchen. “Can I come in?”
“Be my guest!” Stanley ushered me into the room, a hot oven glove brushing my arm.
Objects were on display: a pan of simmering water, smashed garlic, ginger peelings, but there on the end of the counter, surrounded by scattered seed was a bird in a cage.
Stanley flounced his hand in a circle. “Beryl, meet Mr. Harcourt. Mr. Harcourt, meet Beryl.”
“Ah, so this is Beryl.” A blue and yellow budgerigar looked at me – smaller than I’d imagined. “Stanley, she alright?”
He turned quickly. “What do you mean?”
“Just noticing that bald bit there on her front. Is it meant to be like that?”
“What ba – oh, yes. That’s all right. That’s seasonal.” He turned down the gas on the stove. “Jack okay?”
I glanced at the kitchen door. “Didn’t you hear, he said that bloke on the Tube’s gone.”
Stanley grinned. “If he was ever there.”
“Yeah, yeah. What a relief.”
“Let’s go back in. I have a surprise for you. You and all.”
We returned to a scene of quiet sipping. Stanley gesticulated for me to sit. “Close your eyes, everyone.”
I closed my eyes and succumbed to only sounds: a sniff, a hiccup, the sound of a body being rearranged on a sofa. Then a plastic bag, a hand inside and finally, something soft placed on a surface, cotton or maybe wool.
“You can look now.”
Stanley stood on the rug in front of us. He was squeezed into a tight white T-shirt over his sweater, large letters stretched across his chest. The Eavesdroppers. He turned round – nothing gets past us.
My eyes watered: mustn’t scratch.
“Came up a bit small, but what do you think?” he said.
Jack was the first. “They’re great! Where’s mine?”
Stanley touched a pile of T-shirts that hung over the arm of the sofa. “They’re all here. One size only, I’m afraid.”
I adjusted the scaffolding on my smile and from the comfort of my chair observed the rush. They formed an orderly queue beside Stanley, looking happily at their T-shirts as he handed them out. My corneas were bothering me as I watched them pull their new clothes over their heads then wrench them down over assorted chests. Suddenly everyone was the same shape, white bags of distorted writing, flesh squeezed in unlikely places.
“Here’s yours, Mr. B.”
Shit, the E was bigger than the others. “Thank you, Stanley.”
They all watched as I stood up, raised my arms and gingerly slipped the T-shirt over my head, keeping the neck well away from eyes. I could hardly breathe, but I dragged it down, over my stomach, over my hips, until it brushed my knees.
I turned and looked at them, all the faces smiling and flushed. Then I turned slowly round so they could read my back. They laughed; I laughed. How we all laughed.
The scent of cumin was still lingering in my nose when I arrived home just after midnight. The heating had already gone off but my head was too busy for sleep, so I pulled a blanket off the sofa, dragged my chair up to the window and looke
d at the street. The moon was out; grey clouds rushed by; the building site slept.
I wasn’t sure if I was up for another curry buffet. Stanley had tried to arrange a second gathering, forcing a diary out of Eve’s handbag and making a great fuss about the importance of pencilling something in. I wasn’t certain if I was ready for that – the idea that events involving me littered other people’s calendars, unconfirmed, yet real enough to create bothersome guilt. But it wasn’t the enforced camaraderie that was bothering me now. It was something else.
I’d walked back to the station with Jack after the meal. He was chatty, describing a website he’d designed at work, but when I brought up the subject of eavesdropping, in an abstract, general sort of way, he paused.
“Everything’s okay now, isn’t it, Jack?” I said.
“I’m not being followed any more, if that’s what you mean. I’m not of any interest, not for now.”
Rekindled worry is the worst type. “What do you mean?”
“Just that.”
We walked on. I hated that, just walking along in silence, just the sound of our shoes on the pavement and dogs barking from far off windows. I watched his back for a long time after we said our goodbyes. Enough time to wonder – were all the eavesdroppers changing? Were they becoming something different, something I couldn’t understand?
A noise from the street brought me back to the present. A corner of tarpaulin on the building opposite flapped in the wind. Everything else on the site was silent, tools stowed, engines off.
I looked up at the top of the building. It had three storeys now; I could no longer see the sun set on the top of Primrose Hill.
VIOLET leant against the big tree. The night bus had been full when it arrived at her stop but she’d charmed her way on with puppy dog eyes and slid into Lexington Street on a high not even the cold dispel. Most of the house numbers were hidden in dark porches but number 9 was nailed to the front gate. All brass and shine, ‘Over here,’ it said. So over there she’d staggered, heels sinking into the grass on the verge, a feeling she was beginning to enjoy. The tree seemed to fit her back and she leant into it, not caring that the bark was rough and spiders might sleep there.
She thought about the man’s voice, so firm yet with a minute tremble hiding inside certain letters – how the l in the word table quivered, the f in coffee shook. How she loved vulnerability in a man. She didn’t care what he looked like. She didn’t want to know. Beauty is on the inside, after all. She smiled to herself. His beauty had revealed itself to her in the sound of his voice, in his charmingly mistimed words.
She tried to imagine what he would see if he looked out of his bedroom window right then. What man could resist a nymph resting on a tree outside his window at three in the morning? She’d always been good at draping herself gracefully. She should have been a model. But as she looked ahead the curtains were drawn and all she could hear was a low hum somewhere in the air and the creak of the trunk as it leant further towards the ground.
CHAPTER
27
After fretting over thoughts of digitisation I was nervous about calling another group meeting and I spent the days following my conversation with Wilson flicking through my diary, biting my nails – a new habit James had infected me with – and forgetting to eat lunch. I even picked up a heavy object: a large box of paper beneath the photocopier no one else could be bothered to move.
I didn’t want to digitise the data. The analogue nature of my project was becoming increasingly precious to me, and in a fit of pique I bought a paper diary from the stationer’s and wrote all my appointments in it with a pen. It was one of the things that I really liked about the eavesdroppers’ work: the human ears, the real notebooks, the pencils, the pencil sharpeners, the erasers. They all gave it a human dimension to which I found myself increasingly drawn. Not a thought I’d let loose near James, but one that sat quietly inside my head.
Despite a pleading phone call from Missy asking for her notebook back and a rude email from Violet, I hung onto them for several days. I read them in the office; I read them at home; I read them in my bed. I even took one to the park and read it beneath the rays of the sun, but apart from learning some of the lines off by heart – he loves me, he bought me burgers and chips – I couldn’t see any rhythms. I couldn’t see one distinct pattern forming. ‘Just read between the lines,’ James kept telling me from the comfort of his chair. But how? The lines were clear but the ‘between’ refused to present itself. The notion struck me, not for the first time, that perhaps James was right – perhaps there was nothing out there beyond the mundane and meaningless, nothing beyond what we already knew.
I closed the notebooks, pushed them to the corner of my desk and turned on my computer. I clicked on my search engine. An advert for an Alzheimer’s cure popped up at the side of the screen. I looked at the door to my office. I stared at the keyhole. It looked the same as it always did.
Missy’s empty chair worried me. She’d been the most desperate to retrieve her notebook and after I’d placed them into the clamouring hands of the other eavesdroppers, I felt nervous, so very nervous, about the one left lying on the table. ‘Probably got that vomiting bug,’ Eve had said after we’d waited for ten minutes, filling the time listening to a long and filthy joke Stanley had overheard on the bus on his way to the meeting. But I couldn’t help but fret that an empty chair meant a problem.
I cleared my throat. “I declare our seventh meeting open.”
I was hopeless at bringing people to order. I had tested out various methods: letting out an abrupt, ‘right, everyone,’ or glaring schoolmaster-like around the table, but now I was trying out formality.
“Shouldn’t we call her?’ Jack said.
“Missy?”
“Yeah.”
“She . . . she hasn’t got a phone.”
Violet looked genuinely upset. “No phone? Is that true?”
“Yes. She called me from a phone box on the first day.”
“Do you know where she lives?” asked Stanley.
I thought of the human resources folder. “Jean will know. Do you think we should go round there?”
“That vomiting bug is contagious,” said Eve.
Jack was on his feet. “We should go. Just to make sure.”
“Hold on,” I said, “we can’t just turn up unannounced.”
“But you said there’s no way to announce ourselves,” said Jack. He picked up his notebook. “I’m going.”
“Me too.” Violet gathered her notebook and pencil and stuffed them into her handbag.
“I’ll meet you in the entrance,” said Eve. “I’m just going to wash my hands.”
Jean was watching a film of chihuahuas dressed in elf suits on YouTube when we all barged into her office. I felt a surge of new respect, but she misread my expression and in her panic pressed the pause button so as we gathered round the desk her face was framed by a frozen tableau of green jackets and eager noses. But no one commented. We all just waited while Jean fished out Missy’s address and gave us a look that said, ‘please go.’
Missy lived in a 1930s block of flats, the kind which had once been the epitome of suburban living but now had grass growing in its gutters and broken curtain rails in its windows. The air seemed to have left our sails as we waited for her to answer the bell but returned when we heard a small voice on the intercom. “Hello everyone.”
“It’s us,” said Stanley, leaning in to speak.
“I know.”
“Can we come in?”
The intercom, the object of all our attention, suddenly seemed an idiotic thing. “Missy . . . ?” Stanley said.
Violet swayed. “She’s not going to let us in.”
“She’s probably tidying up,” said Eve.
Stanley pressed the bell again and leant in closer. “No need to tidy up, Missy.”
Jack squeezed in between us and spoke into the box. “Missy, are you okay?”
The door opened. Missy wore a dressi
ng gown and slippers. “Hello . . . everyone.”
She didn’t smile exactly, just pulled up her lips at the corners.
“We were worried about you, Missy.” Stanley had assumed the tone of an elderly community nurse.
“Do you want to come in?”
“Is that, okay?” Jack asked.
She nodded. “Of course, come on up.”
Missy seemed unfamiliar with the turn of the stairs and the slow ascent to her flat allowed me to get a sense of the place. The stairwell reminded me of my first rented flat, dust lining the edge of the carpet, thumbprints on the walls.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” Stanley said, as we entered her flat.
A small snort escaped Violet’s nose.
Missy’s flat was what an estate agent would have called compact. The living room was tiny and the floorboards had an expectation of rugs, but there were no rugs. I sat on the only armchair while the eavesdroppers lined themselves up on the sofa, a tight squeeze that made me wonder if they would ever be able to extricate themselves. Missy sat on the floor and tightened the dressing gown at the waist.
“Sorry to barge in,’ I began, “but, we were a bit concerned when you didn’t come to the meeting.”
“I didn’t feel well.”
“Maybe you could call me next time?” I said.
Eve pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and held it in her hand. “You haven’t picked something up down in those toilets, have you?”
“No, no, I just felt tired.”
“Those your miniatures?” said Stanley, attempting to extricate himself from the sofa, then deciding against it.
She glanced at the mantelpiece and then smiled. “Yes. Yes, there they are.”
“I’d have a closer look if I could get out up,” said Stanley, still wriggling.
Missy seemed unnaturally still. “They don’t bear close inspection. It wasn’t a good casting. Best seen at a distance.”
The sofa seemed unnaturally still.
“So. How’s life down in the bowels of the earth?” Stanley beamed and sank back into the sofa
“A rich seam,” observed Jack from the far end.