by Rosie Chard
“That it?” he said.
“That’s it.”
“I should go.”
“Yes.”
He picked up his coat, opened the door and turned to look at her. “I won’t bother you again.”
“Mr. Harcourt.”
“Yes?”
“A lot happened,” she said.
A blue smile appeared on his face. “Yeah. A lot happened.”
Missy rinsed the final glass beneath the tap. Alone, yet the smell of Bill Harcourt remained in the room. She sat on the kitchen chair and leafed through her feelings: sad in the way she’d felt when she’d thrown out her school uniform, happy in the hope that emptying her cupboards would be enough. Her rubbish would be collected, the bag taken to an unknown place. Only one thing remained in the fridge, a jar of fisherman’s maggots. She took them out, untied the knot and emptied them onto a plate. Fifteen minutes later they were warm and moving, oozing life, squirming with joy, or squirming with despair. She went downstairs and emptied them out onto the grass.
She came back upstairs, washed and dried her hands, then she approached the mantelpiece and looked into the mother’s eyes – plastic blue and plastic white. She picked the child off the mother’s lap and placed her back down on her chair.
Finally, she pulled the stool to the middle of the room and with a tea towel over her hands removed the blue bulb. Then she screwed in the red one. She switched it on. She stepped down off the stool and lay down on the floor in the middle of her lounge. The smell of beer still lingered on her skin but she ignored it. She closed her eyes; she relaxed her muscles; she angled her ears and listened. It was 8 o’clock. Grandma O’Malley would be coming up the stairs any minute.
CHAPTER
39
Violet wasn’t in the cafe when I arrived. A whim had taken me there, but I checked the tables with all the stealth of a double agent, ordered a coffee, sat down and tried to be Violet. I was tall; I was thin. I was confident; I wasn’t worried by passing things. But it was tiring sitting up straight so I let my shoulders sag and sipped my coffee, a double cappuccino with a heart of chocolate stencilled on the foam.
I was lucky I could still afford a double. Wilson hadn’t fired me. Much to my bewilderment he’d let things go. I’d had to endure a lecture that had wandered off the subject of the mismanagement of company funds and on to the question of how to fix the printer on his desk and I’d felt wrung out by the time he’d finished with me. But, I’d held on to my job.
Something caught my eye on the other side of the cafe. A man was sitting alone at a table in the corner. He had a cup like mine at his elbow and a bag slung over the back of his chair. But what really caught my attention was his hand, writing in a notebook, with a pencil.
No problem. Just a bloke with a notebook. He must be writing a shopping list, a to-do list; he’s writing a play, he’s writing a novel; he’s writing down an important thought he’s just had.
I was overcome with feelings. Nosiness? Suspicion? Jealousy? Surely he was just a bloke trying to write his shopping list in peace: bread, butter, milk, peas. Mustn’t forget the peas.
I stood up and sidled across the room, picked up a sachet of sugar from the counter, cast a trusting eye. “Alright, mate?”
The man looked up. “Sure. . . . You?”
I smiled “Terrific. Thanks for asking.”
He was watching my back as I put on my coat, I could feel it. He was still watching my back as I left the cafe. Why shouldn’t he? He was just a bloke writing his shopping list: bread, butter, milk, peas.
JACK had his ticket ready as he stepped off the Tube. He held his left hand at the precise angle for passing through the barrier in the most efficient way. But the barrier was open: he hesitated.
“Go on through, for fuck’s sake,” said a voice from behind.
Jack felt a knuckle in the small of his back. He stepped forward and continued up the steps without looking back until he emerged onto the street and was enveloped by the calm of Whitehall with its sleeping policemen, gently ticking taxis and soothing orange tarmac.
He kept to the edge of the dark street, his shoulder brushing the rough façades of embassies, while keeping his gaze down on the pavement, skimming his feet over the fag ends and the circles of gum, all flattened by endless soles in a hurry. This was the place. The sacred place that remembered war and forgot the reasons why. He trembled as his feet trod the ground. He paused by the Cenotaph and looked up. The blackness of the sky blurred the outline of the stone.
He walked on, slipped beneath an awning and waited, half-hidden from the street. He heard a muffled sound and turning his head noticed a group of people at the far end of the shop front, huddled together, just a cluster of shoulders and backs of necks. He looked up at the war memorial. Stripped of the yearning crowd it seemed so alone, stranded on the traffic island, getting in the way. Then, an excited voice cut into his thoughts and he turned his attention back to the huddled group. His second more lingering glance took in the detail: five people dressed as clowns – white-painted faces, bulbous red noses. One wore an enormous pair of glasses. And hats, they all wore bowlers pulled comically down over their ears. Jack trimmed his gaze and looked back at the street, so quiet, so still. The chatter of excited voices drew his attention back once more to the end of the awning. Voices brimmed, but the language was not one he knew. The words were fast, stalling at the back of their throats, pauses forced between the words. A luminous white face looked his way.
Jack turned back to the Cenotaph. Moonlight white. Unbearably white. Then Jack’s ears were pulled back beneath the awning once more by the utterance of a single word. “Shakespeare.” Tossed in with the glottal stops and glides of the foreign tongue, the word came to get him.
The group was tighter now, smaller, but a white face turned towards him again, teeth yellow in the smile, a dark cheek showing through a smudge in the make-up.
The white face spoke.
Jack just looked. Then he heard the voice again, in English, yet heavy with a middle-eastern accent. “Please, join us.”
He walked towards the circle; he smelt face paint; he felt an arm slide across his shoulders. Shakespeare.
CHAPTER
40
I hadn’t intended to go back. The Cenotaph, the place where I’d brooded and tried to find answers was tied to my time with the eavesdroppers. But just one last look. I wanted one final moment at the feet of the empty, white tomb.
Although I had no appetite for lunch, I needed fresh air. The sun was out so I left the office at midday and headed towards Whitehall. Other Londoners had had the same idea and many were perched on the steps of grand buildings with lunch boxes on their shivering laps or take-away sushi held delicately between wooden chopsticks, all of them cold-looking, all uncomfortable.
I had just turned into Whitehall when I heard a sound. A bird said a complete sentence. Not just a chirp, but a fully formed sentence. Twice. Goeasyonher. Goeasyonher. When I looked up, the branches were full of pigeons looking back down. I looked from beak to beak, then Goeasyonher came again, but not from up in the tree but from somewhere behind me. I turned. Just a plain concrete wall with a fire extinguisher screwed onto it. I waited a few minutes but the words didn’t come again.
I wandered up the street and stopped beside the monument on the blind person’s piece of pavement and closed my eyes. I thought again of the man inside whom no one knew the identity of. Someone had died, but no one knew who he was. I thought of the soldiers at Lydd. I read the inscription carved into the stone – The Glorious Dead.
“Can you move over a bit, mate?”
I turned round. A man stood beside me on the steps. He held a mobile phone, plus a long plastic stick in his hand.
“What for?” I said.
“I want to take a photo.”
“Oh, of course.”
I moved along the step and watched him clip his mobile phone onto his stick.
“A selfie stick,” he said, eyes
sheepish.
My stomach did a superior flip as the man leant against the hard wall of the monument, held up the mobile, smiled and clicked.
“Why did you take that?” I asked. “Like that?”
His selfie smile vanished. “I . . . what’s it to you?”
“Oh, nothing. Do what you like.”
“I will.”
He repositioned himself on the corner of the monument, stretched out his stick and smiled.
“Budge up a bit, can you,” he said.
I moved an inch. The man stood right next to me, held up his phone on a stick once more and smiled. I could see myself in the screen – a scowling man next to a smiling one. Behind our heads I could also see the building beyond the Cenotaph at the end of the street. I blinked and rubbed my eyes. They watered and the building seemed strangely distorted; the whole façade looked as if it was on a long, gentle curve.
VIOLET knew the time had come – the time to close her ears and open her eyes, the time for it to be over. The old man, who’d been waiting for them in the meeting room, had spoken the truth.
She felt physically sick as she slunk into the cafe. What Bill Harcourt had said was right; they had to close down what they had started.
She sat in her usual chair and waited for the barista to come. But she didn’t want her to come. Not now. Not during this private time while she waited, just for him. She had no doubt. She had a lot of doubt.
“What’s it to be?”
Violet looked up and smiled. Not herself. No, not herself. “Double espresso. . . . Please.”
“Anything to eat?”
Didn’t the girl realise? You can’t eat when your heart is ready to be broken. “No, thanks.”
Violet fingered her keyboard, and then leant back on her chair, closed her eyes and waited.
Soon.
This was the fifth day in a row she had come to the cafe in the hope, in the fevered delusion that he would return to the spot where they had first met. She needed this. She needed to be able to stop.
“You’re late.”
Him. Him. Him. The voice was right behind her.
“Sorry, the bus ran out of petrol.” A woman’s voice. The woman.
“Ha. I don’t believe you.”
His words curled round her ears, but Violet didn’t turn round. Curled right inside her.
“You alright?” said the woman.
“Yeah . . . actually no. I think I’ve got a stalker after me.”
The woman laughed.
“It’s not funny.”
“Oh, come on, John. Who would stalk you?”
John.
“God knows, but I keep getting phone calls. Heavy breathing and all that crap.”
The woman stifled a laugh. “Oh, come on, John. Heavy breathing is really dated. Stalking’s done online these days.”
“How come you’re the expert?” What sounded like a menu slapped down on the table.
“Has anything else happened?”
“No, but I do get a creepy feeling sometimes that she’s watching me?”
“She?”
“Okay . . . it. Sometimes I feel it’s close.”
“John, you’re freaking me out.”
“Sorry. Let’s forget it. Perhaps she won’t bother me again.”
“I’m sure she won’t. Sugar?”
Violet’s heels sunk into the grass as she crossed the verge. She looked back to see small holes trailing behind her, as if a unicorn had stabbed the ground with its horn. The cafe receded from view and she walked quickly up the road. She came to a small park with a broken fence and grass smelling of dog shit. She went inside and sat on a bench. It had no back so she flexed her abdomen and tried to stay vertical. But her edges were sagging. The great sadness was pulling her down. She’d closed her ears and opened her eyes. He hadn’t known her. She hadn’t known him.
CHAPTER
41
Time scurried by and I felt a little older every time I thought about its passing. It was two weeks later when James and I went to the pub and wondered what sorrows we had to drown. James ordered two double whiskies and I asked for a bag of pork scratchings, a combination that never failed to soothe stray anxieties. But today I didn’t need soothing, I’d already supped on a bellyful of confidence.
“Not so loud, Bill,” James said from across the table. “The whole pub doesn’t need to hear.”
“Sorry.”
“Hey, Bill. Do you remember when we were last here?”
My voice dropped. “Yeah.”
“We eavesdropped.”
“I know.”
“We didn’t see what was coming, did we?”
“You never know what’s coming, James.”
“Maybe we weren’t listening properly.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“Bill, what’s up?”
“I don’t need a lecture. I already feel like shit.”
“Sorry, mate. Is that all that’s bothering you?”
“It’s that bloody . . . noise.”
“What bloody noise?”
I gripped his arm. “That fucking hum. Can’t you hear it? Really?”
James shook me off and folded his arms. “It’s probably tinnitus.”
“What the hell’s that?”
“It’s sort of . . . kind of when you hear sounds from inside your body.”
“Which bit of your body?”
“Noises that your ears make . . . inside. You’re probably noticing it because you’ve been a bit, you know, stressed.”
I leant back in my chair. “Not any more – it’s over. Everything’s going to be alright now.”
“Is it?”
“James, don’t look like that.”
“No loose ends?”
“No loose ends.”
“Did you check?”
“Yes, I checked. I spoke to them. They understood. I went around all their places. All eavesdropper-free.” I moved closer. “Really, James. Everything’s fine. I’ve hung on to my job. It’s all sorted. Send me some questionnaires, send me thousands of fucking questionnaires.”
James sipped his whisky. I sipped mine. We sat in silence as the words in the room, some loud, some soft, floated gently into our ears.
STANLEY noticed one of Beryl’s feather’s lying on the hall carpet when he went downstairs to get his first cup of tea of the day. Normally he would have picked it up and put it in his feather box, but no, not this time. He had more important things to attend to. He walked past, hardly noticing that a little part of Beryl flew up in the draft from his body and floated back down onto the collar of his winter coat.
She might be on her way.
Stanley put the kettle on, wiped the kitchen top with a spot of neat bleach, then sat down at the table. “I don’t feel like talking,” he said, in the direction of Beryl’s cage. She stared back. He flicked through the newspaper, and then sat silent. He and Beryl and the kitchen. Just they. He picked up a packet of cotton buds and poked around his ear. He admired his haul of wax, and then threw the bud into the bin. Then he sat silent again and tried to listen to the sound of his body. Could he hear the sound of guilt? Would he actually recognise the tones of regret? Later.
Someone knocked on the door. A gentle knock, the knock of a person with small, weak hands. He looked at Beryl. Could she hear his blood pumping?
The knock came again, still soft, the knock of a small person stretching up to reach.
Stanley felt the air pushing out his lungs; he felt his heart go up a gear. He looked again at Beryl. She looked back at him. Such depth to those dark, beady eyes.
Stanley’s eyes filled with tears as he lifted his trembling hands slowly off the table and placed them over his ears. No more sound. Nothing. Nothing but the hum deep inside his head.
He looked at Beryl. Beryl looked at him.
CHAPTER
42
I stepped out onto the cold London street at three in the morning. I shivered. I pulled a cigarette out of my
pocket and held it in my mouth. A small shape flitted across the sky. The final scaffolding had been removed from the building across from my flat and there it stood, self-conscious in its nakedness. I needed nakedness: I wanted the fresh start of a newborn. Now that the project was over, the files closed and the eavesdroppers had returned to their homes I wanted to find a space where I could forget.
I tipped my head up and took in the whole façade. Rather than being up on a pedestal like other buildings in the area this one touched the ground and curved in a gentle arc. I crossed the road and stood at one corner. Something made me want to measure it, so I paced its length – sixty paces that I almost lost count of – then I pressed my chest against the front wall and looked up. At least forty feet of concrete towered above me. Then I stretched out my arms and spreadeagled myself against it. The wind rushed passed my ears. I could hear my own breath. I could feel my heart thumping in my chest. I could hear the hum of the concrete. What could it hear? Was it listening? Was it listening to me . . . ?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Sandy Vincent, Phoebe Chard and LeeAnn Knutson for reading early drafts of the manuscript and offering so many useful thoughts and suggestions.
Thanks also to Quiller Barrett for telling me about the Citizens Advice Bureau.
I am indebted to everyone at NeWest Press for their customary expertise and enthusiasm, especially Doug Barbour, Claire Kelly and Matt Bowes. I am also grateful to Michel Vrana whose design and cover elegantly reflects the spirit of the book.
A special thank you to Nat, Phoebe and Ollie.
Finally, I would like to thank all my friends and family, near and far, who sent me anonymous fragments of conversation from which The Eavesdroppers grew.