The Eavesdroppers

by Rosie Chard

  “Yes. Every time.” I pictured the graphics of a public toilet season ticket.

  “Will the company pay?” she asked.

  An image of my monthly expenses form replaced the picture of the season ticket. “Yes, but there’ll be a limit.” I thought of a number. “Ninety pence a day okay?”

  She smiled. “That will be more than enough.”

  I don’t know if it was her smile, or the thought of the underground toilet, or the combination of both, but I felt a shudder in my back, a creepy little finger of something. “So . . . Missy . . . what’s your plan?”

  “I thought you were here to tell me my plan?”

  “Yes . . . it’s just a few guidelines . . . basic ones.”

  She listened. She watched me drift further out of my depth. I had no idea what the Ladies toilet at Victoria Station looked like, let alone what its operational rules might consist of. The Men’s toilet was next door, also reached through the extortionate turnstile, down the concrete steps, but there, all comparison ended. Men could not even glance into the female zone for fear of being arrested as a Peeping Tom.

  “Where will you do the listening,” I said at last, feeling vaguely confident I’d guided some sort of line.

  “On the toilet.”

  Images, why so many images? “For how long?” I enquired, in the manner of a kindly cleaning superintendent.

  “Most of the day. On and off.”

  “Won’t you get . . . stiff?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I studied the sincerity on her face. “I didn’t intend this, Missy. I didn’t mean you to have to do something quite so . . . gruelling.”

  “I like it.”

  She did; I could see it in her face. She actually relished the idea of spending the day in a public toilet. Would I like it too? I wasn’t good at empathy but I tried then, during the great impasse that had opened up over the little coffee table on the edge of Victoria Station, to visualise getting pleasure from sitting on a toilet and listening to strangers.

  “Sometimes it’s alright to like things,” she said.

  I blinked. “I know it’s alright to like things but I. . . .” I couldn’t get beyond my querulousness, “I just want to make sure it’s safe.”

  “Safe?”

  “You know what I mean.” Her gathering eyebrows suggested she didn’t. “I’m slightly concerned . . . you might . . . you know, hear something you shouldn’t.”

  Her eyebrows gathered more tightly. “What should I do if I hear something I ‘shouldn’t’?”

  Bloody hell. “Just . . . write it down quietly.”

  “I’m going to write everything down quietly.”

  “Have you got a quiet pen?”

  She seemed to be studying my eyes. Could she see scars that I couldn’t?

  “You gave me a pencil.”

  “Of course. But Missy . . . please don’t go down there if it looks a bit dodgy.”

  She glanced at her watch, picked her scarf off the back of the chair, twirled it round her neck and stood up. “Mr. Harcourt. I am thirty-one-years old. I have been peeing inside the bowls of public toilets my whole life.”

  I watched her turn and walk back across the station forecourt. Some utterances have no reply.

  I visited the other eavesdroppers one by one. My further ‘rounds,’ as I labelled them, turned out to be reassuring. What surprised and impressed me most was the way they had all merged so quickly into their surroundings: Violet’s regal head was unrecognizable amongst the chaos of the cafe, Eve’s clothes were the colour of the washing machines and Stanley looked as if he’d been unemployed for decades, standing in the Job Centre queue with dull eyes, rounded shoulders and dry-looking hair. I thought listening without attracting attention could be difficult, but no, they all had it down perfectly. I went from location to location, having my little chats in the periphery of each, the corner of the launderette, the corner of the cafe, the intimidating corner of the Job Centre – all ripped municipal chairs and dented filing cabinets. And in each corner I had a fake run-through with each eavesdropper. We re-enacted life as a sentence was spoken, a sentence was overheard, a notebook opened with casual ease and the words noted down. But then there emerged the first difficulties. Violet couldn’t spell. ‘No problem’ I’d said, the affable supervisor that I’d become, but Eve, she couldn’t write. She could form the letters but her grasp of the pencil was loose and her speed glacial. ‘Can’t you write faster?’ I’d said, but no, she never rushed her letters. That was her mother’s most golden of rules. My own mother’s most golden of rules was never rush your dinner, but try as I might I couldn’t find any useful parallels and ended Eve’s training with a reassurance that slow had its merits but maybe there was potential to do something with her mother’s rule, not to break, but possibly bend.

  Jack’s guidelining was impossible. We sat elbow to elbow all the way from Bayswater to Embankment in the middle of the evening rush hour – the richest seam he insisted. Overwhelmed by the crush and the noise and the smell of clothes, I was ready to give up and suggested relocating to another place when he opened his notebook to reveal a dense page of notes, dated that day, timed over the previous hour. Again I’d underestimated him. Again, the shy one had had the most to offer.

  STANLEY waited a long time to get Beryl’s attention. First she had to eat some seeds from the tray, then she insisted on rubbing her beak along her cuttlefish, up and down, up and down, and finally she stared at a button on his waistcoat for a full minute before cocking her head towards him.

  “Yes, it went well, Beryl. Thanks for asking. Very well.” Stanley held his face up to the side of the cage. Beryl ruffled the feathers on the back of her neck, always a sign of approval.

  “I heard some juicy snippets,” he continued. “Oh, yes. Mr. Harcourt’s going to be pleased.”

  Beryl stretched her wings; Stanley could see the grey underside.

  “I can’t tell you too much yet, though. I need to hear the full story, you know, get all the dirty little details. And actually it’s supposed to be a secret. All my work is top secret now. I know how good you are at keeping secrets. But Beryl, my darling, we’re going to have to be extra discrete. We’re good at that, aren’t we?”

  Beryl blinked. Stanley wanted to reach out and touch the little grey eyelid.

  “I could have been one of them, you know, them up at the Job Centre. I know how people look when they haven’t got a job. They’re tired and their clothes don’t hang right. But it’s good that they’re tired because . . . can you guess . . . because they’re too tired to notice that I’m listening to them. But not just listening, Beryl, I’m recording too. I’m so official with my new notebook and pencil. Mr. Harcourt – do you remember him? – Mr. Harcourt says we have to write in the book as if we’re writing something else. What ‘something else’? I asked him. Something other than what you’re listening to, he said. So I’ve been practicing, Beryl. I’ve been writing something as if it’s something else. I knew I’d get there in the end. It’s all to do with the angle of your hand and the look on your face. Practice makes perfect. Mr. Harcourt’s going to be so pleased. Even you, Beryl, are going to be extremely proud of me.”

  Stanley sat down at the table, sipped his tea and then looked towards the cage. “Something’s bothering me though, Beryl. What if I hear something and I forget to write it down as if it’s something else?”

  CHAPTER

  13

  The next day was choppy. My traditional work, analysing questionnaires and looking for patterns in the results of focus groups, was woven with thoughts of the eavesdroppers. They’d be out there, all of them, somewhere. Listening. Since the project had started I was paying more attention to the air. In my little world of scraping chairs and rustling papers I’d begun to notice new sounds. Nothing of great significance at first: the sound of the blinds catching a breeze or the clunk of James dropping photographs into his online trash, but still these sounds were now actually heard
, registered in my mind, as opposed to unheard and passing me by. Then there was the hum. ‘Do you hear that?’ I’d asked James. ‘Hear what?’ was his reply. ‘That low hum in the background.’ ‘No. Never.’

  He thought it would be funny to try and silence the room to see if he could hear the hum. But it’s not so easy to silence a room. Even as we held our tongues and sat on our chairs like corporate statues, sounds kept coming in: the chug of a train in the distance, the swish of the lift door, the gentle sigh of air down our own noses. On the pretense of scientific research I’d done an informal survey of the office to see if anyone else had ever heard a humming noise in the background, but my hoped-for pie chart had remained a single colour. No one seemed to hear the nameless hum – no one but me.

  Apart from unidentified sounds on the periphery, I now began a new obsession, worrying not about the overheards but about the unheards. I knew humans are good at filtering information with the eyes – we don’t read every word on a page – but I didn’t know if the ears also picked and chose without our ever knowing. I so hoped the eavesdroppers’ sharpened ears were going to hear new sounds, but not just sounds, undercurrents, hidden pieces of information that would tell me something new. Now so reliant on a bunch of strangers’ ears, I was going to look a fool if nothing original came of this. Barmy Bill I’d be christened behind the cheap doors that separated every office. Did you hear about that bloke Bill who was sacked when he got amateurs to do our jobs? Did you hear how he never got a research job again? If James, always slouching on the corner of my desk in that irksome way of his, had grilled me on the subject at that moment, I might have admitted I was nervous about what was going to happen out in the toilets, waiting rooms and launderettes of London. Eavesdropper was a polite word for snoop. Nobody likes a snoop. Yet, as a social research professional it was my job to snoop. Snoop, sift and categorise. Then extrapolate. That was the joy of my job. Finding meaning in a table of data, spotting something that no one else could see and laying it on Wilson’s desk, dressed up in the delicious elegance of a graph that summed everything neatly up. But in this new plan of subterfuge and unfamiliar ears, I’d forgotten one part of the equation – people. People and their personalities. My eavesdroppers were wandering the streets in my name yet they were individuals, used to doing things their own way. The little knot of worry in my stomach began to tighten.

  But my worry was misdirected that day. It was not my newly commissioned collection of ears that created cause for concern. It was something that originated further away.

  I had closed down my computer for the day and was putting on my jacket when Jean rushed into the office with a letter in her hand.

  “What have you got there?” I said.

  “A letter for you. It came in the second post.”

  “I didn’t know there was still such a thing as a second post.”

  “It depends on the time of year,” she replied.

  I glanced through the vertical blinds striping the window – dusk already. “Right. Thanks, Jean, I’ll open it tomorrow. I’ve packed up for the day.”

  She glowed disapproval. “Aren’t you going to look at it now?”

  I sighed. “Okay, I suppose I could have a quick look.”

  The letter was in a small envelope and the address was written in a neat, italic pen. Feeling irritable and ready to dismiss such tardiness in job applicants I pulled the letter out and read.

  Sea Kale Cottage

  121 Battery Road

  Lydd-on-Sea,

  Kent

  October 1st 2018

  Dear Mr. Harcourt,

  I found a copy of the London Evening Standard in my garden today, dated 3rd of September. It had been caught in the wheels of a lorry that drove past my house. I watched it fly up as the vehicle passed my open gate. Page twenty-two was open on the grass when I went outside to pick it up. There I saw your advertisement. Your advertisement worried me.

  Be careful, Mr. Harcourt. Be very careful. Listening is a dangerous business.

  Yours in good faith,

  Raymond Watt.

  “Are you alright?” said Jean.

  “Huh?”

  “You look pale.”

  Jean’s perfume was right inside my nose. “Yes. I’m fine.”

  “Not bad news, I hope?” she said, moving closer.

  The fragrance intensified. “No. Not bad. Just . . . ”

  “Just news?”

  “Yeah, just news.” I placed the letter in my in tray. “I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”

  EVE didn’t go straight home after the first meeting. She felt light as she walked down the corridor, much lighter than the nine stone the scales told her. She wondered if this was what it felt like to experience an illegal high as they called it in the newspapers. She had never done anything illegal, not even the day she had found fifty pence rattling around the large drier and handed it over to the supervisor. And as for a high, that was something, she imagined, that came with extreme happiness. She also felt an unfamiliar throb in her chest, so unfamiliar that she hurried to the toilet on the ground floor in case she was about to be sick. But she wasn’t sick. She just hummed with something unfamiliar.

  The toilet seat was comfortable and she sat very still for a few minutes, listening to the sound of her own breathing and the drip, drip, drip of the cistern. She held her breath when she heard people coming into the room.

  “That coffee’s gone right through me. You don’t mind if I go first, do you?”

  “No. Go on.”

  A door slammed in the next cubicle, a bolt was slid.

  “So . . . what do you make of them?” Violet’s distinctive voice was close to Eve’s ear.

  ‘Who do you mean?” Missy’s voice filled the room.

  “The other eavesdroppers.”

  “Oh. They’re very–”

  “Unprofessional?”

  “No, they’re . . . nice.”

  “Even that old duffer, Stanley?”

  “Especially him.”

  Violet snorted. “I suppose he might grow on you. But . . . ” She sniggered. “What do you think about Eve?”

  CHAPTER

  14

  “So Bill, you’ve got quite the bunch working on your little experiment.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why so gloomy?”

  I met James’ eye across the desk. “I got this weird letter.”

  James’ hands hovered above his keyboard. “What sort of weird letter?”

  “I’m not sure how to describe it. It was a bit threatening, and . . . a bit . . . weird.”

  He swivelled his chair to face me. “I knew it! I knew this plan was dodgy from the start. Don’t tell me, one of your eavesdroppers has got themselves in trouble already.”

  “Actually, it’s not them.” I pulled the letter out of my drawer and passed it to James. “It’s from some bloke down on the south coast.”

  James was a slow reader. He had a habit of twitching his nose while he read and I was ready to snatch the letter out of his hands by the time he laid it down on the desk and raised his eyebrows in my direction. “Lunatic,” he pronounced.

  “Well, yeah. I know that. But why is the lunatic writing to me?”

  “He’s probably a stalker. He saw the ad, thought, ‘here’s someone I can have a little fun with.’”

  “Maybe, but I don’t like that ‘caught in the wheels of a lorry’ bit.’”

  James glanced back down at the letter. “Shit, you’re right. Is it a code for something?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Do you think I should tell Wilson?”

  “God, no! He’ll freak out. Just put it back in your drawer and pretend you never received it. He’ll get bored when he doesn’t get an answer.”

  “D’ya reckon?”

  “Yeah, I reckon. And anyway you’ve got enough to deal with keeping tabs on that crazy gang of yours.”

  “D’ya reckon?”

  “Yes Bill, I reckon.”

  The ea
vesdroppers appeared restless. They shuffled their papers; they looked in their bags; each one of them seemed to be checking their pockets for something lost. Only Jack sat still, resting his hands squarely on the table and fixing his eyes on something behind my head. The infection reached my side of the table and I found myself rummaging through the packets of saccharin beside my notebook before scanning the faces round me. Once again I was struck by how peculiar they seemed as a group. As individuals they were plain – regular citizens who might sit beside you on the bus and make no impression – but as a group they were something else: the old bird man, the queen, the frizzy-haired hippy, the pleated lady, the bloke who showed his shyness with every step.

  A week had passed since I’d sent my unaccompanied brood out into the world and now they finally managed to settle themselves into the office chairs.

  “Good morning, everyone.”

  “Morning,” they chorused.

  I had to smile. Already they were my children, my band of enthusiasts, willing participants in a scheme of my making. I opened my folder and spent rather too long running the side of my hand along the seam before turning to face them and beginning my speech. I felt irritated when other people in my department commenced a spiel, a corporate monologue packed with unnecessary detail and verbal logos, but I couldn’t help myself and it wasn’t until Violet started to examine her nails that I decided to bring up the subject of mantelpieces. “Before we start sharing our notes can you please get out your mantelpiece lists,” I said. “I’d like you to read your list out loud . . . ” I glanced round the room, “Eve.”

  Eve shrank visibly. “I didn’t do one, sorry.”

  “Oh . . . ” I cast my glance round again. No one met my eye, except Stanley, who smiled and winked.

  “Shall I begin?” he said.

  “Just the first chapter,” said Violet, staring glumly down at her notebook.

  Stanley stood up and held his book out in front of him. “One bus ticket, one set of tweezers, one unopened letter, one button, one razor blade, one piece of string, one safety pin, one washer, one photograph, one coronation mug.” He sat down.