The Eavesdroppers

by Rosie Chard

  “What’s a washer,” said Violet.

  “Oh, Vi.” He looked genuinely sad. “It’s the bit that goes between the bolt and the thing you are fixing it to. It stops pressure building up where it shouldn’t. Washers are an essential part of life.”

  Violet tossed her head like an impatient horse. “I’ve never needed one.”

  Stanley’s face oozed admiration.

  I’d come to the conclusion I wasn’t very skilled at being in charge of meetings, but even I could see we were going to need more focus. “Missy, can you tell me what is on your mantlepiece?”

  Missy opened her notebook and read without intonation: “One table, three chairs, three plates, three sets of knives and forks, three–”

  “Wait, Missy,” I said. “How big is this mantlepiece?”

  She glanced fleetingly in my direction. “Normal size.”

  “So . . . how big is the table?”

  She lifted her hand slowly and pinched a length of air between her fingertips. “About this long.”

  Stanley glanced up. “Miniatures.”

  “What’s ‘miniatures’?” I said.

  Violet sighed. “Miniature things . . . from a miniature world.”

  “I . . . see.”

  “Shall I continue?”

  “Yes, please continue.”

  She pushed a wedge of hair behind her ear. “ . . . and two cocktail umbrellas.” She glanced round the table. “Full size.”

  “Mr. Harcourt.” It was Jack speaking. I could hardly catch what he said. “Why did you ask us to do this list?”

  “Bill. Please call me Bill. I thought it would be a good way of getting to know each other. I think what you have on your mantelpiece says a lot about you. And I also wanted to test your powers of observation.”

  A baby frown crossed Jack’s forehead. He nodded.

  “So, could you tell us what’s on your mantelpiece, Jack?” I said, in a tone that to my ears sounded gentle.

  He stopped nodding. “Nothing.”

  “Not even a clock?” asked Stanley.

  Jack looked diagonally at us. “Not even a clock.”

  “May I ask what’s on your mantelpiece?” said Stanley, turning to face me.

  I felt the weight of their communal gaze. “It’s being reorganised at the moment.” I glanced down at my watch; I’d forgotten to put it on. “Could we move on? I’d like us to share some of what you heard over the last week.”

  Violet was not of the shrinking type and she stood up and began to read from her notebook in a deadpan voice. “Fourth year’s all about weed. Fifth year’s all about ecstasy. This year’s . . . all about doing coke.”

  “Where the hell did you hear that?” I said.

  Violet didn’t flinch. “Some kids in the cafe.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry, Violet. Please carry on.”

  “It’s quite poetic, isn’t it,” said Stanley before Violet could open her mouth again. He’d spread his hands on the table as if to count his knuckles.

  “If you call rotten noses half fallen off poetic,” said Eve. She’d fished something out of her bag. I couldn’t see what it was.

  Stanley seemed to be straightening out the wrinkles on the back of his hand. “Sixth year’s all about doing coke.” he said, evenly. “Helps the rhythm.”

  “It’s not a poem,” said Eve. “It’s a sad indictment of society today.”

  “Could still be a poem,” murmured Jack into his notebook.

  I shifted in my seat. Static seemed to be in the air but I had no idea what was causing it. “I think it would be good to get an overall feel for what you’ve all heard,” I said, indicating for Violet to sit down. “How did you get on at the Job Centre, Stanley?”

  Stanley was pretending to smoke with his pencil. “It was more crowded than I remembered, and there was a lot of talking and . . . it was hard to hear.”

  “How so?” asked Violet.

  “Their sentences, they weren’t proper.”

  “You mean not proper English?” said Eve.

  ‘Yes.” He tapped his pencil on the side of an imaginary ashtray. “Some words I didn’t know . . . ” He opened his notebook and placed his finger on a line of writing. “Diss was one.”

  “Disrespect,” said Violet, her face utterly charming.

  Stanley gave her a sharp look. “And . . . ‘ fam.’”

  “Family.”

  It was Eve who spoke. I felt something twinge in my gut.

  “Maybe if we could have a little look . . . ?” I said, stretching my hand towards his notebook.

  “No!” He snatched the book out of my reach. “I’ll fix it. Just give me some time to work it out.”

  “Okay, Stanley,” I said. “Maybe we should move on. Eve?”

  Eve was rummaging in her bag again. She pulled out her notebook. It was filthy and dog-eared and from my table-width glance, full. She slapped it down then dragged out a pocket dictionary, equally spent. “I’ll be needing a new notebook,” she said. “This one’s full.”

  “Looks like you covered a lot of ground,” I said.

  “Just a normal day.” She pushed the book towards me.

  “Aren’t you going to give your report?” I said.

  She looked out of the window, locked into her listening pose. “No. You do it, please.”

  It was like being offered someone’s diary. I flicked gingerly through the pages, every one filled with short blocks of writing drowning in childish sketches: a cleavage detached from its body, a face covered with tangled hair, a very detailed pair of underpants, its seams gone over in thicker pen.

  “What is this, Eve?”

  “My notes,” she replied, still not meeting my eye. “Read them, please.”

  I speed read the first paragraph.

  “What’s it say?” said Stanley, craning his neck in my direction.

  “It’s a bit . . . explicit.”

  “We’re all grown up,” said Violet.

  I cleared my throat. “He placed his hand between . . . ”

  Somehow, when writing my pitch, in what seemed like weeks ago, I hadn’t imagined a scenario such as this. No doubt it was an innovative idea, but what had I really imagined my group might hear when I’d sat down in Wilson’s office and asked for permission to proceed? I wanted insight for sure; I wanted pithy comments that summed up the zeitgeist of the day. I’d wanted to hear something that no one else did. But now I couldn’t face what they were coming back with. The prude in me exposed, I glanced at the final line and felt heat wash over my cheeks.

  It was Stanley’s chance to be worldly. “You’re going to have to get used to this Mr. B. It’s a crude and filthy world out there. When people are being themselves they revert to the language forbidden by their mothers. We’re going to have to learn how to spell swear words. We’re going to have to talk about things that we don’t usually talk about. Except in private.”

  Jack levelled his eyebrows; Stanley looked appreciative; I felt idiotic. Of course he was right. It was real life that they’d be listening to. The intimacy of close friends would be laid bare; the private talk of lovers would be recorded in Eve’s square handwriting, the secrets, oh God, all the confessions, that’s what we would be discussing round the big table at the top of the building.

  “There’s going to be a lot of secrets,” said Violet, her eyes smiling.

  My mouth felt dry. “The sources of our data will remain anonymous so any secrets will remain secret.” I looked at my wrist. “Missy, we’re running of time. I’d like you to finish off with a quick summary of what you heard. Where did you carry out your assignment?

  “I went to the public toilets in Camden High Street,” she said. “The underground ones.”

  Oh shit. There are public toilets and there are public toilets. The ones at Victoria Station were benign and airy stopping off points for weary commuters and tourists, the ones in Camden Town were Victorian lavatories deep beneath the street, a subterranean world of drugs and propositi
oning, or so I imagined when my mind called for high drama. I’d never actually been to the underground toilets beneath Camden High Street. I’d never been quite desperate enough to brave the rank smell of cheap floor cleaner that wafted out of the entrance, but I knew people who had. Mates from the pub had been known to run back up the stairs, hand over mouth, before dashing across the street and begging access to the staff toilets in the Tube station. “I thought we’d settled on the loos at Victoria Station?” I said.

  “Yes, but it was too noisy down there.”

  “Isn’t that just what we need?”

  “It is. I just couldn’t separate the words.”

  “From each other?”

  “From the sound of the hand driers. They were going the whole time.”

  “So, just paper towels down at Camden.”

  “Yes. Paper towels are silent.”

  “So, what was going on beneath Camden High Street?”

  “Someone was singing.”

  “Down there?”

  “Yes.”

  “What were they singing?”

  “Opera.”

  “What, real opera, you mean?”

  “Yes. La Bohème.”

  My lips felt limp. “La Bohème?”

  “Yes. And it hurt. It echoes so much down there it hurt my ears. Then they started humming.”

  My lips regained their torque. “What were they humming exactly?”

  “I think it was an old Led Zeppelin song.”

  “Who was this person?”

  “I don’t know. I was on the toilet.”

  “All the time?”

  “Yes. I sat on the toilet and listened.”

  I looked at her notebook. There were musical notes in horizontal lines, a whole page of lines.

  “Did you jot down any spoken words?”

  “There weren’t any spoken words. Just song lyrics.”

  “No spoken words?”

  “None at all.”

  They looked expectantly at me, my eavesdroppers, waiting for a direction, a neat summing up, a lead-in to the next step. I gazed impotently round.

  “I think we might have found the weave,” said Jack quietly, from the end of the table, the badly lit end.

  Eve turned to him, prim as a seamsmistress. “What do you mean exactly?”

  “What it’s all about out there.” His voice dried. “Sex and drugs and rock and roll.”

  JACK felt a tap of tension in his chest as the tube train rumbled into the station and the doors clacked open. A compressed cross section of humankind was revealed: interlocking bodies cranked into unnatural angles, a man’s head tipped right back, a child holding its mouth aloft for air, yet, he reassured himself as he eased his way through the doors, not a single person was touching another.

  He drew in his limbs and inched further into the carriage, hung his weight on the metal pole and without moving his head observed his fellow travellers. A long-term student of the mechanics of personal space, he liked to watch the manoeuverings of a crowd. Outwardly it seemed brash: the defiant glare of a businessman in immaculate jacket and waistcoat, the sulky lip of a teenager who jumped into a seat the second it was vacated, yet after travelling on the Tube his whole life he could now see the subtleties of establishing territory. A single half-raised eyebrow could say, ‘I know you’re tired, but I’m more tired than you and I need to sit down.’ And once, (he smiled at the memory), a tiny movement of a woman’s thumb had cleared a double seat’s worth of Hells Angels.

  He hunched his shoulders and turned himself sideways to let a man squeeze past and remembered he was now at work. His ears were normally prepped for a story but Bill Harcourt wanted him to listen harder, delve deeper, find meaning in the banalities of everyday life. But the banalities were the stories. He’d never needed intense action. For him great drama was buried inside the small talk. But people talk less below ground than above. They constructed their own worlds inside their heads. The carriage was always noisy, always hot, and the pressure in the air that day seemed to make it noisier than usual. He’d have to lip read. But reading lips was hard. Vowels showed through with the parting and widening of lips, but the rest of the word rushed by, too fast to see. He settled on the face of a girl opposite who was speaking to a man by her side. Her head nodded emphasis, her eyebrows rose and fell and her teeth came and went. He concentrated harder, trying to match the lip shapes with words he knew, imagining the sound. Finally he wrote her words down in his notebook. As seen, as heard. I don’t love you any more.

  CHAPTER

  15

  I put the second letter down on my desk and observed it. I had recognised the handwriting the moment Jean brought it into my office, but the quiver in the font no longer charmed me and I felt foreboding in my hands as I picked it up again, opened it and read.

  Sea Kale Cottage

  121 Battery Road

  Lydd-on-Sea,

  Kent

  October 8th 2018.

  Dear Mr. Harcourt,

  The advertisement on page twenty-two of the London Evening Standard has been moved to the table in my kitchen where I read it every single day. And every single day I feel more worried. I repeat – be very _careful what you listen to. Sometimes, and I say this from experience, it is better not to listen too hard.

  But please listen to me. And please, reply to this letter.

  Yours in good faith,

  Raymond Watt.

  I read the letter again, looking for the meaning, trawling through the words for veiled layers of threat. But was it a threat? Was it saying to do something or not do something? And who wrote so passively like that? Had the author stood back and merely observed as another moved things around him? Was Watt a gang? So polite in tone, yet it smelt off, not just of paper and ink but something musty.

  I read the letter through one more time, and then slipped it into my desk drawer and went to my pin-up board to check on the eavesdroppers’ whereabouts.

  One idea I’d had at the end of the previous meeting was to make a sign-up sheet for the group, and as I scanned the locations I felt pleased with my forethought: October 10th: Stanley at the Job Centre, Eve at the launderette, Violet at the cafe, Jack on the Tube and Missy in the public toilets in Camden Town.

  I loved Camden Town. The High Street, in spite of the recent arrival of phone shops and loan counters, still retained some dignity; the tall Victorian arcades stood aloof from their ground floors, and the above ground part of the underground toilets, built in a time of intricate ironwork and glass pavements, was still the first object to greet visitors’ eyes as they were shoved through the station exit by the heaving crowds on their way to the market.

  I stood at the entrance, planning my next move. Although nervous about her new choice of toilet, I rather liked the male/female conundrum that Missy’s choice of listening post had presented me with. As at Victoria Station, I couldn’t enter her chosen location but I could go down into its mirror image, the Men’s bogs. And from there I might be able to extrapolate. Extrapolation was my forte after all. The Ladies’ loos would be the same proportion as the Men’s, surely? And the floor, a similar pattern. But the clientele, would there be any parallels, I wondered. I was briefly disturbed by the idea that people beneath me might be able to see up my trouser legs through the pavement glass, and I also needed to piss, so I walked down the narrow staircase to the room beneath the road.

  It was another world down there. The brass handrail was sleek with the friction of decades of fingers brushing past and the black and white chequered floor looked stupidly decorative for a surface designed to be splashed with urine. But the smell of disinfectant hit my lungs before I even reached the lower level, so I held my sleeve across my mouth and made my way to the nearest cubicle and closed the door.

  “That Elgin Marbles was shit,” assailed my ears before I even had a chance to unzip my flies.

  I stood still, my ears no longer passive containers but active receptors, straining to hear, aching to catch
something. But the room remained silent. It was as if the sentence was the final one, the end of a conversation that had happened earlier. Suddenly desperate to know who had spoken, I opened the cubicle door and stepped outside.

  “What do you mean, the Marbles were shit?” The words were out of my mouth before my mind had time to process the huge neck and bloodshot eyes of the man standing in front of me. He looked down at me; I looked up at him, my skin prickling with regret.

  “I said they were shit, because they are shit,” said the man. “Who are you, their dad?”

  I laughed. Why the hell did I laugh? The sound just fell out of my mouth. “No.” I laughed again. “I’m sorry, I was just shocked . . . surprised to hear what you said. I love those Marbles, you see.”

  “You can love shit.” He grinned. “But I don’t want to. Don’t expect me to look at those broken old bits of body.”

  It felt like a conversation was about to begin, a great debate on the beauty of Greek sculpture but no, the big man turned and started walking up the steps without another word. I watched his heels disappear from view, then saw the soles of his shoes above me as he crossed the glass above.

  Bugger, I thought as I walked up the stairs to the street. How could I break my own cardinal rule so easily? I’d interacted with the person I was listening to. I’d been ready to dispute. It was so easy – too easy. Something else to mention to the eavesdroppers.

  The top deck of the bus gave a majestic view of Trafalgar Square as I headed back to Stanley’s Job Centre – the fountains, the pigeoned crowds, the bulky shadow of the National Gallery; it was hard to draw my thoughts in. But as we swung past St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the backs of my fellow passengers heads came into view and a question came into my mind. Why do some people hear some things and others don’t?

  Not one person was looking out of the window; the whole bus appeared to have thoughts elsewhere. Everyone – apart from those in social class D – was either reading, texting or scrolling. A hundred little messages thrown into the air and heard by none. I thought of the latest letter that had wended its way up from the south coast, passed from hand to hand, hand to bag, bag to letterbox. A certain Mr. Watt had taken the trouble to find a pen that worked, get hold of some paper, compose a terse note, fish an envelope out of a drawer, lick a stamp and post a letter to me. Why?