The Eavesdroppers

by Rosie Chard

  He smiled blandly as I searched his face for ordinariness, and then I glanced down at the first page of the manual, but before I had a chance to find my initial question he asked, “Have you ever had a budgie?” I had. A rancid old bird with a nasty peck that terrorised my whole household up until the day it died. “His name was Trevor,” I said before I could stop myself.

  So my first interview began. I told him ‘Trevor’ stories for longer than was decent, and then he began to tell me about himself. Stanley Stipple was his name, a Londoner ‘born and bred’ – I’m sure I saw his chest inflate as he said it – and he’d spent his entire working life as a janitor in a school that he loved. He was heartbroken when he’d been made redundant at the age of fifty-eight. He’d been even more heartbroken when his wife Beryl died soon after. ‘I miss her,’ he said, in a sentence with no surface. And he missed their social life too. He loved anything sociological he insisted. He had spent the previous few years cobbling together odd jobs to augment his pension: road sweeper, shelf stacker, shelf sweeper. I was beginning to wonder if this man was more of a talker than a listener when he slapped a forefinger to his lips.

  “What–”

  “Schhh! Please. Just a moment.”

  I watched in silence as he closed his eyes, crushing his eyelids together like a constipated baby, then smiled. “There’s a thrush on the roof. It’s calling for its mate.”

  I looked towards the window. “I can’t hear it.”

  “That’s because you haven’t learnt to hear it. That takes time.”

  Then he began talking about Beryl. A couple of minutes passed before I realised he wasn’t talking about his wife any more but a feathered version of her, a budgerigar that shared his life. This bird, with her ‘blue breast’ and ‘cheeky curve’ to her beak, would cock her head when Stanley spoke to her. But she never passed on secrets. Not to anyone. And when Stanley had finished telling me about the budgerigar that waited for him to come home at night he told me about the birds in his garden. He described the whistle of the skylark, the kra kra of the rook and the barely audible scratchings of the wren. Never mind the damp in his bones from sitting too long in his hide, he could listen to bird conversations from dawn to dusk.

  I smiled to myself as I ticked a small box in the human resources manual. My first eavesdropper had been found.

  Jean betrayed anxiety in her eyes as she popped her head round the door announcing, “a Miss Veil to see you.”

  There was a slight delay during which I had time to skim page two of the manual, and then Violet Veil entered my life. A tall, rakish woman, she sat down, swiftly plopped a large, fancy handbag on my desk and proceeded. I don’t know how she did it but before I could utter a word she had asked me what my qualifications were. I laughed in case it was a joke, but no, and then she launched straight into her next question and soon I found myself nodding like an overeager schoolboy, summoning a ready smile and outlining my suitability as an employer. She seemed satisfied with my replies, nodding in a beautiful way, and even flipped open the human resources manual while I struggled with the answer to what were my ‘three worst faults.’ I battled to turn things round, but I was distracted by her appearance. She reminded me of a Cleopatra doll my sister had had as a child: unblemished skin, black eye-liner and bobbed black hair that I imagined would remain perfect should a crown ever be placed upon it. She wore a mannish business suit which outlined her body so rigorously I found myself wondering how she had managed to insert herself into it.

  Finally, I managed to squeeze out a question of my own. “What do you currently do for a living?”

  She frowned, but didn’t reply.

  “What’s your normal job?”

  Her lips seemed an odd shape. “Data entry. Freelance”

  An image of Cleopatra tapping gold-leafed fingernails onto a laptop came to mind. “You mean . . . ?”

  “Yes, putting raw numbers into spreadsheets.” She smiled. “But I can do it anywhere – in the park, in the pub, even in the cafe. That’s where I do my listening. Anywhere.”

  “What do you hear?”

  She tilted her head to one side. “Everything.”

  “You sound adaptable.”

  “I am.”

  “And, do you have three months to spare to work on my project?”

  “Oh, yes. As I say, I am adaptable.”

  “Right. Well, er . . . you sound quite sui–”

  “I am a perfect fit.” She stood up, shook my hand with silken fingers, and left the room.

  I slumped back in my chair. Eavesdroppers. What sort of breed were they? This Violet, she’d filled the room and trodden on my toes before I had time to move my feet. I’d thought I wanted quiet people who’d blend, but maybe the bland personalities I’d envisaged didn’t blend. Maybe a brash woman in a hurry was just one of life’s types, the sort of person who was so loud that nobody noticed them. She had unnerved me, but she was confident. Maybe I needed some confidence in my team.

  I rubbed my eye, remembered I shouldn’t, even now, then rammed a square of chocolate into my mouth and chewed rapidly before the next knock on the door could come.

  I decided to be a little more circumspect with my next candidate, a thready-looking woman in her sixties, wearing a brown shirt and pleated skirt rather like the outfit my mother would have worn in the 1940s, but as she settled herself down with a lot of fuss over how her pleats were arranged atop her seated legs I couldn’t help but wonder what sort of pet she had. Not a cat for sure, no hairs impaling her jacket, yet something about her face, small black eyes, ginger hair turning grey, brought a middle-aged guinea pig to mind. I could almost see such a creature sitting on her lap, its heart racing, its distended bladder ready to give. Much to my relief the incessant fidgeting came to a halt and she looked at the wall to the left of my shoulder with a theatrical angle to her head.

  “I must be frank with you,” I said, forgetting the manual’s insistence on making your candidates feel at ease, “you’ll have to drop that if you want this job.”

  “Drop what?”

  “That thing you’re doing; I can tell you’re listening, but pretending not to.”

  She laid her hands in her lap like a pair of gloves. “But you asked for a listener,” she said, lifting her hands again, placing a newspaper cutting on the table and pushing it towards me. “It says, here in the advertisement.”

  “But you’re not supposed to show you’re doing it.”

  “Oh.”

  She recalibrated. I could tell by the way she rearranged her body on the chair, smoothed out another pair of pleats and looked dreamily out of the window. “Better?” she asked, without looking at me.

  I smiled to myself; there was more to listening than I realised. “Much better. So. . . .” I glanced down at her letter, “So Eve, tell me about yourself.”

  And she did. But she wasn’t at all animated, she just kept staring out of the window as if listening to something elsewhere. Only her lips moved and she told, rather disconcertingly in the third person, the story of ‘Eve.’ Eve had spent forty years as a school administrator, typing out letters, filing in forms, clipping the occasional ear. Eve lived in a flat. Eve worked for the Citizen’s Advice Bureau. Eve was an expert listener. Eve lived alone.

  I’d always wondered about the Citizen’s Advice Bureau. I could never quite believe that in a world of cynics and muggers and corrupt politicians there could be roomfuls of kind, gentle people amongst us whose sole purpose was to listen and dispense advice over lukewarm mugs of instant coffee. All for free.

  “But why does she . . . why do you want this job?” I asked, seizing on a gap in her speech.

  She sent out a shortfall signal, a masking gesture illustrated on page seventeen of the manual in which a smile begins then drops away, but kept her face towards the window. “I need a change.”

  I’m no detective but I sensed she was lying. “Okay, Eve,” I said, perhaps a trifle brusquely, “I don’t think I have any more question
s. I’ll let you know my decision in a day or so.”

  She turned and smiled. “Thank you. I’ll be waiting.”

  I flicked through the manual after she had gone. Nothing in there about third person narrators. Or pleats. Just a tiresome list of misconduct issues and performance indicators, but I felt compelled to plough through a couple of pages in case it prepared me for what was coming next. I was feeling bored and exhausted by the time the penultimate candidate entered the room.

  ‘Missy, not Melody,’ as she insisted in her first sentence, was by far the strangest of the bunch so far. Her clothes verged on what James would have haughtily described as bohemian, a multicoloured dress, no make-up, a soily scent and grime beneath her nails. I thought I saw a petal in her hair.

  Yet her handbag was spotless inside. I don’t usually pay attention to the inside of women’s handbags but the interior of this one was a deep, velvet red, which gaped open like a great slack mouth. As she rummaged inside for a tissue, I wondered how far my definition of ordinary was going to be stretched.

  By the time she was ready I had my first question waiting. “Are you working at the moment Mel – er, Missy?”

  She laughed; a spot of spit landed on my forearm. “I’m a radio analyst.”

  “Oh. What is that exactly?”

  “Well . . . ” she said, pausing as if she were about to translate something from another language, “they need people to give feedback on programming. Not the individual shows but the whole picture. They want to know what it’s like to listen to the radio from morning till night.”

  “So, do you?”

  “You mean listen?”

  “Yes.”

  “I do.”

  “All the time?”

  “When they need me, yes.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking, Missy, how did you get a job . . . like that?”

  She smiled. “Pure chance. I overhead two producers talking on the other side of the cafe one day – said they could do with someone who could listen to their radio station twenty-four hours a day and report on the big picture. Someone with the ears of a bat.” She met my eye. “I presented myself.”

  “And you get paid for that?”

  She flashed a wider smile. “Oh yes . . . but it’s not enough.”

  “Is that why you’re here?”

  “Yes – no. I’ve always been a bit of a snoop. I like hearing about other peoples’ lives.”

  “What about your own life?” I tried to picture her in charge of a warship.

  “I don’t listen in on my . . . friends, if that’s what you mean.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. I mean have you . . . ” I glanced down at the human resources manual, “ . . . have you got any hobbies?”

  “I like to barty – I mean party.”

  At first glance my final candidate seemed too good-looking for the job. His profile was perfectly proportioned – he tended to look to the side when he spoke – but when he turned to face me I saw his eyes were at slightly different heights and his nose was lumpy in the way that suggested time spent in a rugby scrum. Or more likely, judging by his thin frame, time spent on the receiving end of a playground bully. The potential hunk, who might have drawn unwanted attention, was actually a regular bloke when viewed full frontal. The way he moved was not so alluring either. Clearly a shy sort, he had slipped awkwardly into the room and, misjudging the height of the chair, sat down with a thump. I wondered if he would be too shy to sit by himself in a pub, but at twenty-four years old he was the only candidate to fit into the twenty to twenty-five age range.

  “Got any pets?’ I asked.

  “None.”

  He had a quick smile – teeth on full display before I had even finished my sentence. And he wouldn’t meet my eye, preferring to address my ear when he spoke. I could see how it might get on my nerves. I folded my arms over the manual and flashed my toothiest grin. “Got any vices?”

  He showed me his profile. “I’m . . . writing a play.”

  Clearly too cocky about my powers of observation, I studied the side of his face with renewed interest; I’d labelled him a trainspotter or, at the very least, a gamer of several years standing.

  “But it’s not very good,” he said, turning to face me.

  I smiled. “So, that’s why you do it, is it?”

  “Do what?”

  “The listening.” I leant back in my chair.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re gathering information to use in your play?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How long have you been doing this, Jack?”

  “Since I was a kid.”

  “You understand the information we gather in this project is not for use in a play.”

  “I understand.”

  “So you have a good ear?”

  “Oh, yes. I hear everything – the words, the undercurrents, the things unsaid.” He made eye contact for the first time. “I can hear the inside of a pause.”

  I felt a flash of satisfaction. “Jack.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like to offer you a job.”

  My office smelt different after they’d all gone, a mortarous mix of mothballs and nail varnish, plus something I couldn’t identify. It took me a while to read all my notes as I’d got bored with writing and had tried out some half-remembered shorthand, but gradually I began to form a picture of these people who, one by one, had warmed the chair opposite me. Strange lot, I thought as I put the human resources manual back on the shelf. Strange and a bit motley. But then, strange and motley might be exactly what I needed. I wanted ordinary, but too much ordinariness might draw attention.

  I looked down at the list of names. Was I going to get along with them? I wondered. I thought of how much kudos the project might bring me in the company. The corridors would be awash with people who knew who I was. And – my pen hovered above ‘Eve’ – I didn’t have to like them.

  STANLEY was tired by the time he reached home. He could never be bothered to hang up his coat on the hanger so he chucked it over the banister and went into the kitchen to make himself a cup of tea. Beryl seemed like an ordinary bird for a moment, one that you’d see in a tree, but then she angled an eye at him and he knew she was waiting.

  “I got the job,” he said quietly.

  Beryl blinked.

  “It’s for three months and it’s going to be a doddle. I even get expenses. What do you think of that?” He held his face close to the cage. “Free cups of tea, Beryl. Free.”

  Beryl blinked again, then cocked her head; she seemed to be listening to something in the garden.

  Stanley washed his hands at the sink then went outside. His garden wasn’t very big but large enough to grow a few tomatoes and build a hide. His neighbour on one side had made a fuss when it first started going up but Stanley had stood his ground and continued weaving branches through the timber frame and now it was perfect. Here he’d spend his evenings, listening to the birds as they talked to each other. They always had something to say, some long-winded report about what was going on up the street or, in moments of drama, a high-pitched command that sent every bird up into the tree tops where they’d balance on twigs and get ready to come back down. They’d been wary of the hide at first, leaving a circle round it that none dared step into, but now they all knew that the clump of dead leaves wouldn’t bite and Stanley could listen without being noticed. He had brought Beryl out there to see it once, but he’d felt tears bulge up in his eyes when he saw her cage sitting on the grass. He had never done it again.

  But tonight he was happy. He had a new job. And his new job involved listening to people, not to birds, who are touchy and irritable and overreact to everything, but real people, maybe even the sort of people who might be interested in an elderly man with neither money nor wife. He went inside the hide, sat on his chair and settled down to listen. The evening air was cool, the right temperature for transmitting sounds smoothly into his ears.

  “Fuck yo
u!” bellowed a male voice from the street. “I’m an arborist.”

  “A fucking what?” replied another.

  “A fucking arborist. I cut down fucking trees.”

  Stanley pulled his scarf tighter round his neck, peeped through a gap in the hide and gazed up at the trees in his garden. His birds lived in trees. The canopy was their whole world. When trees were cut down, everything changed.

  CHAPTER

  11

  It took a lot of effort to arrange the first team meeting, and I rued the day I set up a project involving so many people not born of the digital age. The group’s emailing skills were idiosyncratic at best, and as a two-hour turnaround type of person I felt increasingly irritated by the white space of my inbox. Missy didn’t even own a phone so I resorted to putting her invitation to our first meeting in the post, a surprisingly satisfying process of folding up a piece of paper so precisely that it fitted inside an envelope, licking the edge, (while banishing fleeting thoughts of ground-up horses’ hooves) and positioning a stamp in the top right-hand corner.

  Something – a desire to show my efficiency right from the start perhaps – made me line up the meeting room chairs around the table like an eighteenth-century butler, measuring the exact distance between them with the span of my hand, yet for some reason I felt worried as I waited for my new team to arrive. Would they gel instantly and be friends for life? Or would they form factions, quarrelling and backbiting and spatting over territory? And what would they think of me? I wondered. Would they see me as the morose social researcher I was or would I become their friend too?

  It wasn’t long before I heard the first of them coming down the corridor. Already I could identify Eve’s laboured walk, not the movement of a heavy person but the weary gait of a woman who had succumbed to a life of fallen arches and feet that are trouble to lift. But it wasn’t Eve who poked her head round the meeting room door, it was Violet, lips polished, eyebrows a solid brown.