The Eavesdroppers

by Rosie Chard

  The woman on the seat in front of me – middle-aged, felt hat, lower managerial – reminded me of someone. It wasn’t her appearance, nor her clothes, it was something else. It wasn’t until the bus had passed Euston Station and I’d got off that I realised what it was. The way she sat in her seat, the shape of her neck and head, she was a dead ringer for Eve in her listening posture.

  Stanley, king of the dole queue, was definitely working by the time I arrived at the Job Centre. As expected of a true eavesdropping professional, he failed to acknowledge my presence until I had sat down next to him. Even then he merely turned the page of his newspaper as a way of greeting and looked at me with empty eyes.

  “Been waiting long?” I said.

  “Nope.”

  His surliness impressed me and I would have nodded approvingly had he not abruptly moved seats in a sham progression towards the reception wicket. I lingered a couple of moments longer, basking in the subterfuge, then, with a neutral nod of the head in his direction, left the building and headed off in the direction of the bus stop.

  I spent the next couple of hours finishing off my rounds. James would be sure to extract great amusement from my freshly crafted role as inspector of eavesdroppers, yet I rather liked how wise it made me feel: authentic, academic almost.

  I found Violet holed up in Reynolds, the cafe on Angel St., where she seemed so absorbed in her computer (a cover she had suggested at the first meeting) that I swivelled on my heels without speaking to her – a movement honed to perfection on my great aunt’s threshold many years earlier – and headed for the Tube station.

  ‘Travelling the Tube: Bayswater to Blackfriars’ had been Jack’s note on the schedule and only then, as I approached the halfway point of my inspection, did I fully appreciate the uselessness of this snippet of information. But with fresh ears on my head, and sandwiched between two friends deep in conversation I began to enjoy the intensity of his laboratory as I journeyed underground to Eve’s part of town.

  I didn’t frequent launderettes often. I didn’t like the thought of strangers viewing my dirty clothes and there was something unsettling about the ragged ring of detergent that crusted around the jowls of the powder container that I only went there when my washing machine broke down, which was hardly ever. The place was humming with activity when I entered and I was hit fleetingly with guilt as I noticed the number of people wrestling with bedding, sheets all creased and duvet covers inexplicably stuffed with socks. Eve was reading some sort of leaflet when I arrived. She stuffed it into her bag when she saw me approaching.

  “Hi, Eve, What have you got there?” I asked as I sat down beside her.

  “Oh . . . hello,’ she replied. “It’s just some paperwork I had to look over.”

  I couldn’t imagine, even for a second, what paperwork Eve might have to look over. “So, how are you,” I said, all matey and chipper.

  She fingered the clasp of her bag. “All right, thank you.”

  My inspector fantasies shattered round me as I suddenly realised something quite basic: the eavesdroppers did not want me around. They just wanted to be allowed to get on with their jobs like the professionals they were. “I was just passing and thought I’d drop by, but I see everything’s fine.”

  “It is fine,” she said, with minimal use of her lips.

  “See you at the next meeting, then.”

  “Yes.”

  I peered back through the window after I’d left the premises. Eve sat on the bench, her back to me. I don’t know what it was, the curve of her neck, the way her hair fell over her ears, but she reminded me of someone else.

  VIOLET’S heel went down the same drain cover on her way home from the cafe, as if choreographed by God. It had been a long day, and this second encounter with the city’s drainage system irritated her. She pulled off both shoes, held one in each hand and continued along the cold street barefoot. She was cautious at first, imagining unspeakably sharp things lurking in the pavement cracks, but it wasn’t long before she enjoyed the feel of the stone beneath her feet and strode towards the bus stop with all the vigour of a young gazelle. She’d always looked elegant in bare feet. She should have been a yoga instructor. But yoga instructors have to bend their bodies for money. She was free of all that; she was a self-employed listener. She had two jobs now, the hallmark of the successful freelancer, and she knew there would be more. Once news of her time-management skills got out she’d be fighting off the offers of work.

  She felt a few spots of rain on the top of her feet so she paused beneath a shop awning, put on her shoes and checked her hair in the window. Just a single bolt of static was enough to force a hair vertical and she built time into her day to spit and smooth and render herself symmetrical again. She rested all her weight on one leg and thought about her first day as a ‘dropper of eaves.’ That clever play on words had come to her during the first meeting at Wilson Inc., but she’d held it in. Who knew when a droll little quip like that would come in useful?

  She was tired. Doing data entry in the cafe, although now only her ‘bread and butter’ job, took energy and a certain amount of concentration, but ‘dropping of eaves,’ now that was exhausting work. Conversations in the cafe, the fog of words that dipped in and out of her consciousness, had drifted easily round her before she’d taken on her new job, but now she was actually being paid to focus, to take note, to even, – and this was her learned interpretation of the task in hand – sort the wheat from the chaff. But there were trade-offs. Her status as a highly paid listener meant she could hover in the vicinity of attractive men without it being a sign of desperation. And there had been a particularly appealing attractive man in the cafe that day. She hadn’t actually seen him of course, but she had heard him. Sitting somewhere behind her, he had ordered a latte with two shots of coffee and one sugar and hot, not lukewarm. But what really got him underlined in her notebook was his muttered comment as a woman entered the cafe and headed towards his table – ‘I see a thing of beauty coming my way.’

  She’d mouthed the sentence to herself, feeling so calm and content that even the sight of Bill Harcourt at the window had not dented the pleasure of her day. She’d seen him off with one of her special looks and felt confident he wouldn’t be back in a hurry. Funny bloke, she’d thought. His eyes watered a lot and he said one thing when he really meant another. She’d had a boyfriend once whose eyes watered a lot and she’d spent their time together with a hanky balled in her fist, ready to dab.

  Violet shifted her weight onto her left leg and studied her face in the shop window. Such authority, such confidence in the line of that jaw. She took out her mobile and checked the time. “Too early to go home,” she said to her reflection.

  Her voice had been with her for her whole life. Squeaky as a child, it had dropped drastically when she reached puberty and she’d spent countless sleepless nights worrying that she was turning into a man. But then it rose again and levelled out. Now it was smooth, so silky smooth. She should have been a newsreader. “Much . . . too . . . early . . . to . . . go . . . home,” she said again. Would he like her voice? Would he find it a thing of beauty? She was beautiful, no doubt about that, but her voice, would he want to listen to her speak?

  She opened her notebook, held the most recent page up to the light of the window display and read her final entry.

  Woman in cafe: Let’s meet here again next Wednesday.

  Man in cafe: Sounds good. I’ll be here. We can talk privately.

  CHAPTER

  16

  I let a week pass. Violet sent me several emails a day requesting details of our next gathering, but I held off making any arrangements and only when Eve called requesting a new notebook did I book a meeting room, buy some chocolate biscuits and raid the stationary cupboard for pencils. I ordered extra coffee. There was no telling what mood the eavesdroppers would be in after a few days with their ears in the pricked-up position so at the last minute I rushed out and bought a second packet of biscuits which I pil
ed up artfully on a plate on the table. I wasn’t in the mood for the small talk that their intermittent arrival engendered so I went to the Gents and spent a long time washing my hands, fiddling with the hand drier and planning my entrance before returning to the room. Someone had closed the door when I got back, but I could hear the gentle rumble of voices within. And then – I can hardly bring myself to recall it – I moved forward and pressed my ear to the door. At first I heard nothing, but then a throat was cleared, and a nose blown twice in quick succession, which seemed to release conversation.

  “He’s got a bloody nerve.” The pitch of Violet’s voice resonated perfectly with the room.

  “Who’s got a bloody nerve?”

  I didn’t recognise the second voice and had fleeting thoughts of gatecrashers before I heard Violet’s reply. “Him.”

  “What d’ya mean h–?”

  I pushed down the handle and rushed in. They were all there, all of them. They’d already started on the coffee. Missy and Eve sat together at one end of the table like a pair of involuntary twins, both in yellow sweaters and coffee moustaches on matching lips, while Stanley, Violet and Jack, all assembled at the other end, dispatched a wave of communal guilt in my direction.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said.

  “S’okay,” said someone there.

  “How are you all?” I said breezily, taking a seat at the end of the table.

  “Hungry,” said Stanley, eyeing the biscuits.

  “This is your reward,” I said, “for the best report of the day.”

  Violet sighed; Missy twisted a tie-dye hanky round her forefinger.

  “Seriously though,” I said, realising before it was too late that my words implied I thought I’d made a joke. “How are things going?”

  “Things are proceeding,” said Violet.

  “Yes,” added Stanley. “Proceeding quite nicely.”

  Were they taking the piss? It was disturbing to think I didn’t know. “Good,” I said. Was I such a humourless git? A suit with no flare? “Before we start,” I said, “I want to mention . . . something about your listening technique.” They waited. “It’s more a question than an instruction.” Still they waited. “It struck me, it can be quite easy to talk to people, can’t it.”

  “What do you mean, Mr. Harcourt?” Stanley said.

  “When you’re listening, it can be easy to say something . . . you know, to the person you’re listening to. . . .”

  “Why would we speak to them when you have employed us to listen?” said Violet.

  I looked round my circle. “So, no one has ever got chatting to someone they have been eavesdropping in . . . on.”

  Indignation rippled around the table: Violet huffed, Eve allowed a cartoon tut to pop from her lips and Stanley projected his offence with tightly folded arms on heavy elbows.

  I ducked – I was getting good at ducking. “I take that as a ‘no’ then.” I turned to Jack. “So Jack, can you tell us something of what you heard in the last few days?”

  Jack was a back-of-the-room sort of bloke, always the last to go. But he smiled an engaging if worried smile, opened his notebook and began. We all strained to hear.

  His report was structured by the layout of the London Underground. It began at Leicester Square – I could see a tiny logo beneath his fingers – where he’d heard a detailed description of something swishing round in someone’s mouth – continued several times round the Circle Line during which he’d recorded cries of communal complaint as someone insisted on bringing a ladder onto the train, before finishing with a quotation, quietly said, but word perfect. “It’s like greengrocers’ apostrophes . . . you only see them in . . . greengrocers.”

  “What’s a greengrocer’s apostrophe?” asked Eve.

  Stanley seemed to glow. “It’s when greengrocers get their grammar wrong.”

  Missy bit a fingernail. Her hair had been shoved behind her ears again; it made them stick out from the sides of her head. “Do you mean they get all their grammar wrong?” she said.

  “No,” Stanley said, “just their fruit and vegetable grammar.”

  Violet sighed. “It’s where a simple plural is turned into a singular possessive.”

  “So,” I said, worried that the conversation might be moving into uncharted waters, “anyone beginning to see a pattern out there, any hints of something we haven’t heard about before?”

  They all seemed to be thinking. I could almost hear it, the brains churning. “Anyone?”

  “It’s a bit soon to say.” Stanley sharpened his pencil in a pedantic way; it was maddening.

  ‘I agree,” added Eve. “We are still in the initial training phase.”

  “You don’t need any more training, Eve,” I said. “This is meant to be about ordinary people listening to other ordinary people and making surreptitious notes.”

  “What does surreptitious mean?” asked Missy.

  “Look it up,” said Violet.

  “But–”

  “That’s what needs the training,” said Stanley.

  “How do you mean?” I felt a prick of concern that I was about to be unveiled as incompetent, a dread that had plagued my whole life.

  “Well,” Stanley continued, “don’t we need a bit of camouflage training and . . . stuff?” He adjusted a cardboard poppy in his lapel.

  “You’re being ridiculous,” said Violet, opening her notebook and clearing her throat in an elegant way. “Three percent of my overheard conversations were about how bad the coffee was, eighteen percent were about how good the coffee was, eleven percent were about the weather, twelve percent involved telling off children, and forty-seven percent were about . . . ” she glanced up from her notebook, “desire.”

  “That’s not a hundred percent,” said Eve.

  “Desire,” she repeated, closing her book and resting her hand on its cover.

  We all waited for whatever was going to happen next, to happen.

  Scared to ask, I asked, “Can you elaborate?”

  Violet had a mole on the top of her lip. I noticed it for the first time as she looked back down at her notebook and began to read. Over the ‘lovely shirt,’ ‘great tits’ and ‘cleavage going spare,’ there was a discernible creaking of chairs and soft clearing of throats.

  Yet unease over the revealing of sexual detail was not confined to the older members of the group and even Jack reddened during the unravelling of Violet’s notebook. But she surged on relentlessly until she’d taken us inside an alarming amount of underwear and described every part of the human body in distinctly non-scientific detail.

  “Was this was just one session in the cafe?” asked Eve, her cheeks flushed.

  Violet took us all in with a single glance. “One session.”

  “You know what I think,” said Missy, “it’s not all about who fancies who. If you’ll listen for just a minute, I have an idea about what they are all talking about out there.”

  “What are they all talking about out there, Missy,” I said, expecting an almighty tangent.

  “Themselves.”

  It’s funny how the social mores of group situations don’t often allow time for thinking, time to sit in silence and process something that someone has said, but at that moment there was a tacit agreement that that was what we needed. I could hear a creak in someone’s chair but still no one spoke. Then mini conversations started up just with eyes, but still no one spoke, until Missy opened her mouth. “Did I say something wrong?”

  “Not wrong, Missy,’ said Stanley. “Profound.”

  Missy twisted her hanky even tighter around her finger. I worried the dye would stain her skin.

  “Yes,” I said, “you’ve really given us something to think about.”

  A chair groaned again.

  I opened my notebook and went to make a note, but stopped. “How shall we categorise this observation?”

  That silence again. But that silence was good. It was what I needed.

  “Missy’s big idea,” sai
d Stanley, helpfully.

  “Noted,” I said, writing fast, then adding a bracketed note. “So, Stanley, how did it go at the Job Centre?”

  “Didn’t go.”

  “You didn’t go? Why not?”

  Stanley hooked his forefinger into his mouth, pulled back his cheek and pointed at his exposed gums. “’entist.”

  “Are you saying ‘dentist’?” Eve asked.

  “Yes,” he replied, releasing his cheek, which remained red. “The one on the Caledonian Road.”

  “You had a filling?” I said.

  “Yes. I’m National Health so it wasn’t a problem.”

  “What wasn’t a problem?”

  “Getting it done free.”

  I looked at his eyes, red and watery, as if he’d been rubbing shampoo out of them without success. “You mean getting the filling was just a ruse?”

  His eyes lit up. “What a lovely word. What does it mean?” He moved his hand onto his dictionary, always within reach.

  “Erm . . . a trick or something . . . a deceit.”

  “I suppose it was a trick of sorts,” he said. “I told them I’d been in pain since Thursday and Aspirin hadn’t even touched it.” He looked round unrepentant. “How else was I supposed to get in there without making anyone suspicious?” He yanked back his cheek with his forefinger again and showed a triplet of tea-coloured teeth to everyone at the table. “Did a good job, didn’t they.”

  Eve’s mouth was open too; she appeared to have forgotten how to shut it.

  “Isn’t that immoral?” said Violet.

  Stanley turned to her. “I know it’s a bit dodgy, Vi, but Mr. Harcourt said we had to use guile to set up our positions.” He turned to me. “Guile was the word, wasn’t it?”

  Guile had indeed been one of the words I’d slipped into my welcome speech. I’d imagined it would appeal to my team’s sense of adventure, their undoubted love of James Bond films, but as I gazed at Stanley’s raw gum I realised I had better choose my words more carefully in future. “I didn’t intend that you spill blood for this job, you know.”