by Rosie Chard
“Can I take everyone’s coats?” I said, peeved that being the host meant I had to haul a bundle of damp garments out into the hall and force them onto the overloaded coat tree. I glanced back into the living room as I tried to ram Stanley’s trench coat over my jacket. Violet sat straight-backed on a stool; she was rubbing something white and creamy into the back of her hand. She looked all right. She looked the same as the day I had first set eyes on her.
The snacks were three-quarters gone by the time I returned to the room, so I grabbed a handful of the remaining almonds, the over-salted detritus, and by way of reward sat down in the most comfortable chair. “Can everyone find a seat, please,” I said.
“Shall I begin?” asked Eve, settling herself on the sofa and flicking through her notebook.
“No, Eve. I’ll begin.”
I don’t know if there was something in the tone of my voice, but that was the moment they seemed to understand something was different. Their faces looked paler than their necks. Their mouths hung.
“I have something important to say. You five. . . .” I waved my hand across them, “are a quintet of natural listeners with ears as sharp as razors and–”
“You’re going to end it, aren’t you.”
It was Jack who’d spoken. He sat a little crookedly in his chair and for a second I felt nervous of him. I looked down; the almonds looked pathetic in my hand. “Yes. I’m going to end it,” I said. A clock ticked somewhere.
“You can’t!” Missy’s voice was the squeak of a creature.
Stanley stood up; I had a new view of his nostrils. “No. You can’t end it.”
“I have to,” I said.
“Why exactly do you have to? ” asked Eve, all reasonableness and calm.
I took a deep breath and consulted my mental notes. “Listen carefully, everyone. The project was set up to try and find out what the general public was talking about. I was looking for something that other researchers hadn’t found. But it appears that I was wrong. There isn’t . . . anything out there.”
“But there is!” said Eve. “We just haven’t found it yet.”
I examined my hands folded round my knees, but the reply wasn’t there.
“Giving up a bit easily, aren’t you, Bill?” Stanley had a new tone in his voice.
“I’ve given this a lot of thought. It’s not a rash decision.”
Violet snorted. No one spoke. I wondered if they were rehearsing something, polishing a group tirade.
I began a few limp sentences. “I really appreciate the work you’ve all done. We did make some progress and–”
But it wasn’t a sentence that halted the words in my mouth. It was something else. A new sound had entered the room. A sob – deep in the back of a throat.
On a bench outside 21 Chart Street, Shoreditch, London. 3.30pm.
Young man: We’ve never been alone together without him.
Older woman: Say that again. I can’t hear you over that hammering.
Young man: I said, we’ve never been alone together without him.
Old man: Never.
Young man: Anyone want a cigarette?
Old man: We don’t smoke.
Young man: Not even a bit?
Loud woman: I might start.
Older woman: You won’t.
Young woman: I won’t.
Old man: He didn’t have to do it.
Old woman: Of course he didn’t have to do it.
Young woman: Weren’t we any good?
Old man: Of course, we were good. We were bloody brilliant. Oh, no. He’s the one who’s in the wrong.
Loud woman: There’s something else. Something he’s not telling us. I mean it’s not as if we did anything bad, is it.
Old man: I definitely didn’t do anything bad.
Old woman: I didn’t do anything bad . . . wrong either, but. . . .
Loud woman: But what?
Old woman: I might have got lost.
Old man: I thought you knew London like the back of your hand?
Old woman: I meant I could have lost my moral compass.
Loud woman: Jesus!
Old woman: Oh, no. I’m not religious–
Old man: We know you’re not religious. You might have been though.
Old woman: I don’t understand.
Loud woman: You know what? We should carry on. Just us.
Young woman: Just us?
Old man: No!
Loud woman: Why the big ‘no’?
Old man: What would we do with our notes? All the data?
Loud woman: There is no data, according to him upstairs.
Old man: So . . . does that mean there’s no need to go on then?
Young woman: Couldn’t we keep in touch? I really like you . . . all.
Old man: I like you all too. But we don’t need to do any more listening to like each other.
Loud woman: Don’t we?
EVE entered the launderette and walked straight up to the man on the bench. “Hello. I have something to give you.”
The man glanced up from his newspaper. “Who are you?”
“I’m . . . well, we spoke the other day.”
“What about?”
“I helped you with that shirt. That delicate one.”
The man turned his whole body and looked at her. Eve hadn’t been looked at like that before. She slipped her hand into her bag and pulled out the leaflet. “I thought this might help with your woollens, when you’re hand-washing at home.”
She didn’t usually smile when she gave out her leaflets. It might appear condescending or worse flirtatious; she liked to keep things professional, but this man looked like he needed a little cheering up. And this was a very special leaflet. Made just for him.
He didn’t smile back. “What else have you got in that bag?”
“Nothing.”
“Sure?” He snatched her bag out of her hand, turned it upside down and began flinging the contents onto the floor, leaflet after leaflet: tax fraud, benefit fraud, senior debt, Internet fraud, student debt.
“What’s all this fucking crap?” The man kicked the pile then picked up a leaflet, Getting the most from your benefits. He opened the first page and then turned to her with a look of genuine fear on his face. “What are you?”
“I’m . . . well, I’m. . . .”
But the man wasn’t listening. He now had his hand in her pocket. He wrenched out her notebook. “What the fuck’s this?”
Eve’s tongue had dried. ‘Could I have that back, please?”
“No.” He opened a page at random.
The man was a slow reader. So slow there was time for Eve to think he might hear her heart so violent was the thump in her chest. He traced the first three sentences with his finger, paused, and then traced again. He slapped the book shut and shoved it into his pocket. “Come outside.”
The beat inside Eve’s ribs was hurting now, but somehow she forced life into her trembling legs and trailed the man out of the launderette, three paces behind, then five, then eight.
“Get ’ere!” he said, before turning his back to her and striding on.
She scuttled behind, her ankles painful. She scanned the street, left to right, right to left. Where were the people? she thought. Why was there no one here?
The man strode down the street for a few yards then stopped beneath the shadow of an awning. She paused behind him, feeling the enclosure, hardly able to draw air into her terrified lungs.
“Are you with the police?” he demanded.
“No.”
He smiled – a rotten, sickly grin that oozed out of his face. “So what are these notes?” He held out her notebook.
A survivalist slipped into her clothes. “I just like listening.”
He gripped her wrist. His hand felt like a huge warm bunch of bananas. But tight. “I’m not an idiot. You were spying on me, weren’t you.”
“No, I . . . meant no harm. I like listening to people stalking – I mean talking. I like people.”
&nb
sp; “Yeah? I don’t like people.” His face moved closer to hers. “And nobody likes a fucking eavesdropper.”
It was at that moment Eve remembered the words of her self-defence teacher years earlier; they punched their way into her head – ‘Go for the nose. If all else fails, go for the nose.’ She’d cringed at the time. The idea of ramming two fingers into a stranger’s nostrils, the gristle, the cold touch of moist snot, was more than she could bear. She’d practiced the shin slide instead. But it was a nose not a shin that was bearing down on her, so she did it. Just like her teacher told her, with conviction and intent and with the benefit of recently sharpened ladies’ nails.
“Fuck!”
Eve paused on the street corner, arranged her scarf around her neck and adjusted her brooch so it was straight. After that she went into the pub on the next street and washed her hands in the toilet sink. Finally she returned to the launderette, gathered her leaflets up from the floor, (brushing off the occasional footprint) and then walked down the street and waited at the bus stop. She was fingering the notebook, safe in her pocket, as the bus appeared on the horizon.
CHAPTER
32
We did make some progress and. . . . We did make some progress and. . . . We did make some progress and. . . .
They’d taken turns to dab at the tears streaming down Missy’s face and they remained in my living room even after I began loudly washing up, refusing to go home. I was scared they’d still be there by the time I had wiped every part of the kitchen counter three times, but when I peeped back into the room it was empty. Just a hint of damp donkey in the air and a scattering of salt spilt on the table. I sat on a chair, just sat.
My shoes sounded more like slippers a little later as I trailed through my flat going through the motions, closing the blinds, throwing a ball of paper into the bin, then switching off the toilet light. I sat on a chair and stared at a grey square on the wall where someone had tested a new paint colour a decade earlier, before picking the eavesdropper file up off the table and opening it. So much had happened since I’d first read the application forms yet the paper looked fresh and still smelt like the inside of the stationary cupboard. I read every detail – the first names, the surnames, the middle names, the postcodes, the dates of birth, the genders and the array of signatures, each unique: sprawling, uptight, unstable, shaky, reckless. My injured eye watered, I couldn’t stop it; I couldn’t stop it; my good eye watered too.
MISSY’s nose was blocked and her eyes itchy, but she ignored them as she slipped her key into her keyhole and entered her flat on soundless feet. She looked across the living room, past the sofa, along the floorboards, halfway up the wall. They were waiting for her.
She approached the mantelpiece. The family hadn’t moved – same straight-backed father, same yellow-haired mother and same expressionless child, her eyes badly painted, her head out of scale with her neck. Dust was there too, veiling the tiny plastic chicken beside the father’s elbow, the knives and forks, the three plates touching the outstretched fingertips. Missy ground her teeth and sniffed, ground and sniffed. Then with over-sized fingers she lifted the child from its chair and sat it gently down on the mother’s lap.
CHAPTER
33
A whole day passed before I plucked up the courage to tell Wilson what I’d done.
I knew this moment, the great confession as James christened it, had to come. My eyes were itching as I hovered outside Wilson’s door, so I scratched them, both of them, with nails and for a long time. Done.
The door opened. “What are you doing hovering about out there? Come in.”
Wilson wore his usual suit, the one with white stitching, but he also had on a wide orange tie. I could not take my watering eyes off it.
“Thanks,” I said, sliding into the room.
“Take a seat, William. You alright?”
“Yes, thank you.” My vision cleared and I felt myself to be in his space, perching rather than lounging, grimacing rather than smiling. It struck me – applying for a job, losing a job – we do the same things: smile inanely, agree with everything that is said, and dredge up manners that make us look like automatons.
“So to what do I owe this pleasure?”
“It’s over,” I said.
“What’s over?” he replied, his voice uncharacteristically firm.
I thought he was joking, but no, he had his hands on his desk in a managerial way. His features were arranged just so.
“I’ve abandoned the eavesdropper project.”
Abandoned. The word was hardly out of my mouth before I realised how poor a choice it was.
Wilson narrowed his eyes in the way, which for a man so benign, was chilling. “Abandoned?”
“Yes. There were problems.”
“What sort of problems?”
“The data . . . it wasn’t quantifiable.”
“I see.” He looked normal, his eyes blank, mouth a bit shifty. “So it was all for nothing – the training, the money?”
I nodded and looked down at the table. “It just wasn’t a good idea.”
“And what about the people. Did they go willingly?”
I held his eye. “Yes. Of course.”
He looked at me for so long I found myself counting the moles on his nose. “I’ll have to find you a new project,” he said. “Something a little more . . . conventional.”
I smiled. I nodded. The sound of a distant plane entered the room.
Lies. Lies. Lies caused cold sores; cold sores caused lies. I sat alone in my office and rubbed Herpesan onto my upper lip. The eavesdropper project was over. The file would be closed, documents shredded and the notebooks archived in the dusty room with the locked door in the basement. I opened Violet’s notebook and read.
No. 27 bus. 3 pm
Boy: What happens when a star explodes?
Girl: What?
Boy: Do you know what happens when a star explodes?
Girl: No.
Boy: The world moves away.
Girl: What do you mean?
Boy: The stars are holding us in place.
Girl: What’s your favourite place?
Boy: Scotland and Ukraine. Ukraine is so big there is a bridge to it.
Girl: Is there a bridge to London?
Boy: Yes, there’s lots of bridges to London.
I closed the book again and stared into space. It was my property in a way, or the firm’s at least, but with Violet gone it seemed personal, a diary halted in mid-sentence. She had personalised hers with doodles and hearts, plus it had an aroma, a musky scent that I’d last smelt on my collar as a sixteen-year-old behind a shed on a caravan site in Hastings.
The eavesdroppers hadn’t wanted to relinquish their notebooks at the end of our final meeting, but I’d insisted. You’ve bloody got to, I’d growled as their faces fell and their fingers tightened. Eventually they’d given in and I’d returned all the books to my desk drawer, and turned the key.
I pulled a sheaf of papers from my in tray. Wilson’s hallmark verbiage littered the top sheet – the company appreciates . . . a resumption of duties . . . assist Mr. Gingold with . . . and I felt shitty as I turned off my computer, put on my coat and left the building. I couldn’t face the Tube so I walked along the Embankment, crossed Hungerford Bridge, strolled along the Southbank then doubled back across Westminster Bridge and started the long walk through the royal parks to the eggshell blue houses of South Kensington.
I liked it there; I wanted to live there, but I didn’t stop, I walked on for another half hour, treating the city as a country walk – shrivelled berries in the hedges, leaves in the puddles – until I came to the cheap end of Fulham Road. Here I walked more slowly, gazing at my reflection in each shop window: off licence, betting shop, hardware store, launderette. My reflection and I stopped together; I looked through my face into the launderette.
A woman sat alone on a bench. She looked directly at me, her face as raw as a smacked bum. Not Eve. Thank God, not Eve.
JACK flicked through the pages of his new play. Pages – tens of them. In some sections the words had lost their shape, collapsing into circles of no meaning and mixed with slack letters lying down on the line as if they had died. But in others the words sat up straight, bolt and ready to go. He’d been up half the night working on it. He had a plot; he had characters; he felt he had touched the poetic part of the play, the elusive other. He even had a title: Didn’t See it Coming.
He’d almost forgotten the joy of writing. Yet the grubby bundle of papers was the proof scattered in front of him; he hadn’t dreamt it, he’d written lines and every day, every minute he could go and check. They were there on the page. Once written, they were always there.
But he was tired. Tired and sad. He closed his manuscript, sipped from a glass of water and gazed into space. He missed his listening notebook. It usually rested on the corner of the table, but now that corner was bare. Mr. Harcourt had gathered them up at the last meeting like a priest collecting bibles at the end of a sermon, but Jack had held it together. His features hadn’t cracked; his eyes hadn’t filled with tears. Even his voice, usually the part of his body most likely to let him down, had held steady. But now he was wavering.
He picked up his bank statement that lay open on the table. He’d taken three months unpaid leave to be part of the project and now here he was, unemployed for a month, soon to be very broke. He’d wanted to ask about money at the meeting, not long after the terrible moment when Mr. Harcourt had detonated his grenade, but in the outbreak of anguish which followed, it had seemed churlish to mention something as mundane as paying the gas bill.
Jack went over to what he called The Cupboard. Here, in extreme order lay the tools of his trade: empty notebooks, erasers still in their wrappers, pencil sharpeners, coloured pencils. He picked out a small notebook with a grey cover and then found a 2B pencil, its lead as sharp as a pin. Finally, he put on his coat, checked he had his Tube pass, slipped the book and pencil into his pocket and left the building.