The Eavesdroppers

by Rosie Chard

  “Or defraud the National Health Service,” said Eve under her breath.

  “Ah, but . . . ” said Stanley, wallowing in the pause he’d forced on the room, “you’ve heard about fillings, haven’t you?”

  “From what point of view?” said Violet.

  “From a listening point of view. The metal can transmit radio waves.” Stanley looked pleased with himself.

  I felt faintly queasy. I flipped my notebook open. “Maybe in future you could let me know if you are planning to establish a new position.”

  Violet tittered; I didn’t know why.

  “What about you, Eve?” I said, turning towards her. “Did you get your notes in a way that was a little more, um . . . moral?”

  Red tinged her cheeks. “Moral? Mr. Harcourt. I . . . I can’t believe you asked me that. My morality is un . . . impeachable.

  I faked a smile. Jack seemed far away. “Feeling alright down the end there?”

  He looked startled. “Yes, I was just thinking of . . . something else.”

  “Everything alright?”

  He smiled brightly. “Yes, sure. Everything’s fine.”

  Looking back, this was the moment I should have taken note. Inside that airless room, accompanied by the sound of biscuits being crunched and notes being scribbled in notebooks, I should have stopped chewing so loudly on my chocolate digestive, and really listened.

  EVE decided she didn’t like the bench. Its edge, made rough rather than smooth with use, often snagged on her tights, and her back would ache after time spent without support down where she needed it, right behind her kidneys. Yet this was the best spot to catch what she needed to catch.

  Jack’s final word at the previous group meeting had caught in her mind, but she wasn’t sure what he meant. First she’d thought of the weave of baskets that she’d made in craft classes at school. They invariably went wrong and she’d be left with a mess of missed stakes and reeds out of line. Her lounge carpet had a weave, but it was tight and impenetrable, surviving even her big scissors when she dropped them on it whilst trying to cut coupons out of the newspaper. She closed her eyes and fingered the weave of her sweater – she’d knitted it herself – what did it mean? What did he mean?

  She pulled out her notebook and f licked through the pages, shivering when a breeze floated up on the turn. Every night she read and re-read the contents, correcting her spelling, sometimes rewriting whole sections on a new page. The days between the meetings had started to feel long. She liked to listen to the others’ reports and she liked to lay her elbows on the table just like them, but in spite of her attempts to suppress it, her counselling antenna was always up. It took all her strength to keep her hands off the leaflets that lay quietly in the bag at her feet. The eavesdroppers were all in need of a leaflet. But so far she had managed not to let her mind identify who needed what.

  The draft behind her kidneys increased so she pulled her sweater tighter round her body, got up off the bench and sat on the broken chair beside the big dryer. It was always cozy there. Even when the machine was empty there would be residual heat. She tucked her bag beneath her seat, leant her head against the warm metal and closed her eyes. Just as she started to make an inventory in her mind of the leaflets she’d gathered that morning, someone walked into the launderette. She couldn’t see who it was as they were obscured by the dryer, but her hands were already in her bag, feeling the inside.

  She was sharing the room with a man, a sixth sense told her that, but the sounds coming her way told her more: feet smearing the floor, a big sad sigh. This person was definitely in need of her type of ear, but then she remembered she was at work, withdrew her hand from her bag and peeped out from behind the drier.

  A large man sat on the bench with his back to her – a particularly big back. He wore an old-fashioned tweed jacket, the threads a worn mesh of grey and brown, a bit like her father used to wear, but tight at the top of the arms. His hair looked greasy and a few straggly locks were tucked into his collar. She sat back, plucked a leaflet out of her bag, and listened for whatever might come into the air.

  The blue washing machine abruptly stopped, the dryer by the door finished its cycle, and then Eve clearly heard the gentle tap of fingers on a mobile phone. Then big back spoke.

  “Bobby? . . . yeah, it’s me. Yeah, yeah, it’s done. Ready to go. What do you mean you lost it? On the fucking bus? Tell me you’re joking. Bobby . . . next time I see you . . . yeah . . . yeah . . . the next time I see you I’m gonna kill you.”

  Eve gazed down at her lap and tried not to breathe. Then, silently, she placed the leaflet, Vintage Tailoring as Therapy, back into her bag.

  CHAPTER

  17

  Saturday came. This meant the noise of the city changed; weekend people walked the pavements in meandering groups, the small shops closed so tightly they looked as if they would never open again, and the sound of the street was turned down. Instead of hordes of gusting taxis seeking a rat-run, the air outside my building was disturbed only by the occasional lost driver, scanning the blocks of flats for numbers while grinding through low gears. This respite in my working life meant I could watch rubbish daytime TV and eat my supper on the sofa and be the slob that I was. My flat was my natural habitat, the place where I could whistle tunelessly any time I wanted and leave a half-eaten sandwich on the side of the bath.

  I’d been one of the lucky ones. With Breadline Britain being shouted from the news stands and the Job Centre running out of chairs, I had managed to get a job which paid reasonably well and that I vaguely enjoyed. Social researcher was never an occupation that crossed my mind as a boy, but somehow I’d drifted into social sciences, got through university by the skin of my teeth and more by chance than burning ambition ended up in a research company that remunerated me enough to pay my rent, cook the occasional steak and down a pint or two in the pub on a Friday night. I’d even managed to beat down a mortgage-broker in a way that everyone said was impossible and bought my own ex-council flat in central London before the final wave of app developers came to roost. My place was never going to make the cover of Ideal Home magazine but I cleaned it up, painted it white, bought a few chairs that my mother disapproved of and got on with my life. That was until the Planning Application notice arrived. Nailed to the tree outside my building, the leaflet was written in letters too small for the average person to read and it had passed me unnoticed until my neighbour, an elderly lady who always smelt of fresh gooseberries, took hold of my elbow as I passed her on the stairs, guided me back outside and held her magnifying glass over its title. An entire section of the street opposite our flats was to be removed and replaced, in an ‘aesthetically pleasing way,’ by a large new government building that appeared, judging by the poster that was subsequently put up on the corner of the site, to have the urine-coloured walls of a building society headquarters from the 1970s. No more Victorian sash windows jammed open with a stick when the rope frayed, no more moss-encrusted roof tiles slipping out of place, just rows of gaunt workers in pale, over-lit rooms. I’d reconciled myself to progress, to the narrowing of my view, but I had not yet got used to the noise. Weekday mornings began at 7:00 am with a shout from the street, followed by a rumble in my floorboards as equipment was moved into position, started up and finished off with a thud. And every thud would be followed by another thud. Every tremble of my coffee mug would be followed by another tremble. And so it went, the shouting of workers, the piling, the digging, the endless filling, until I began not to notice the building going up opposite my home. Until that moment.

  As I pressed my nose against the window, I noticed the builders had made a mistake.

  Suppressing the urge to rub my eyes, I focused on the small corner of the building that had caught my attention. The wind had lifted the corner of the tarpaulin and it was flapping up and down like a giant petticoat, leaving the concrete exposed. But it wasn’t straight like I had expected from the marketing poster. It was slightly curved.

  I
wiped my breath off the glass and returned to the room. I turned on the radio, sat at the kitchen table with my notebook and pencil and assumed the position of a casual scribe. A play was on air and a relaxed conversation slid out of the casing and wafted towards me. I scribbled frantically, but even with this gently paced dialogue it was hard to keep up and I felt new admiration for my team’s recording skills. But harder than recording the words was maintaining a posture of innocence while recording the words. My shoulders kept tightening, my eyes insisted on turning towards the radio. Then another thought. What reason could the writing be for? What implied purpose would draw suspicion away from such a feverishly scribbling pencil? Too detailed for a shopping list, too fast for a letter.

  I stopped writing and dragged the table and chair over to the other side of the room, opposite the full-length mirror. I sat down. Again I rushed to keep up with the words pouring out of the radio, which were faster now as the characters reached a climax of feverish recrimination. I listened; I scribbled; I looked in the mirror. In the rush to record the words I forgot to look innocent. I froze in mid-word and stared at myself in the mirror. There was a man writing something he shouldn’t. No one would be fooled by that. Nobody likes an eavesdropper.

  STANLEY was sure the dictionary was where he had left it – top shelf next to the tea caddy. He got it down and held it towards Beryl. She hadn’t been interested in her cuttlefish that evening, gazing sadly out of the kitchen window while he tried to attract her attention to it, so he’d decided there was nothing like a good definition to perk her up. He sat in his chair, held the dictionary up and read aloud. “Surreptitious means, ‘kept secret, especially because it would not be approved of.’”

  Beryl blinked.

  “A secret. Did you hear that Beryl? Does that mean it’s wrong?”

  Accompanied by a rush of creaking bones Stanley got out of his chair and put his face to the side of the cage. “Oh, Beryl. Just a word and I’d be happy. Please my darling, just one word.”

  Beryl preened her breast feathers. There was no sound in the kitchen, just the drone of a far-off plane high in the sky. Stanley made himself a cup of tea and buttered a slice of cold toast he’d found on the draining board. He addressed the cage from the kitchen table. “Actually, Beryl, I smelt a lady’s blouse today.” He sipped his tea. “Oh, yes. In the dentist’s waiting room.” He bit into his toast; the crunch startled Beryl. “She was a bit like you, Beryl.” He laughed. “A bit on the haughty side.” He glanced back at the dictionary and read the definition again, putting great stress on the first two words, “Kept secret, especially because it would not be approved of.”

  CHAPTER

  18

  Sea Kale Cottage

  121 Battery Road

  Lydd-on-Sea,

  Kent

  October 15th 2018

  Dear Mr. Harcourt,

  Your non-communication concerns me deeply. It suggests that things are worse than I thought, or that you doubt my integrity. I need to speak to you as soon as possible regarding this matter. I don’t travel easily. The train from Victoria Station to Lydd goes every two hours. Let me know when you are coming.

  I watch for the postman.

  Yours sincerely,

  Raymond Watt.

  I felt a disagreeable churn in my stomach as I finished reading the latest letter. ‘Your non-communication concerns me deeply,’ concerned me the most deeply. His nibs didn’t like to be ignored. His nibs didn’t travel easily. I held my finger beneath the third line. Where the hell was Lydd, anyway?

  I sat down at my computer and clicked on Google Maps. I zoomed in and moved sideways, then zoomed again, and there it was: Lydd-on-Sea, England. It did exist, it was beside the sea, but it wasn’t a real town, it was what my geography teacher would have called ribbon development: a single row of houses squeezed between the sea and an area of dry-looking ground. Something big seemed to have gouged stripes into the earth.

  I zoomed in further, the sea became shiny, the stripes evolved into lines of vegetation and the dots on the beach were suddenly full-grown bushes, clinging to what looked like shingle. As I activated Street View I thought I’d accidently clicked on the Nevada desert, but then I saw an English bungalow: red bricks, net curtains pulled to, in case a mermaid should see in. As I walked digitally down the coast road, I wondered if Watt lived in one of the little houses with tarmac gardens and broken concrete walls. Were those his kids’ toys piled up by the front door? Was that his van being done up on the concrete? A Union Jack had been caught by the camera in mid flap and I couldn’t help but wonder – was that his?

  It’s amazing how much ground you can cover in Street View and soon I was running along the Dungeness Road, past army training grounds, past the big horizon, along the empty ground, not a soul in sight, then zooming out. I was flying, faster and faster until I saw a brown Cortina pulled to the side of the road. I felt guilty as I zoomed back in again, but angelic surveillant that I was, I came down, down, down and looked inside. There was the face of a man at the window; he was looking straight at me.

  Sometimes when you close your eyes a shape remains on the inside of your eyelids, a memory of the last thing you have seen. Just a moment, then the image fades and the object has truly gone. But that face inside the car, it lingered, it slipped inside my eyelids and stayed there. It faded, yes, it slowly vacated the sore, soft skin covering my eyes, but then it lingered in my brain. Wretched, accusing, staring face.

  I opened my desk drawer and found a notepad in the back, ancient stationary that had not been exposed to light for decades, and then dug out a fountain pen. The pen was dry from lack of use and I had to shake and shake until the ink flowed and I could draft a response. A simple reply, no less and no more than was needed. The ink dried slowly on the paper.

  Wilson Inc.

  29 Craven St

  London

  October 17th 2018

  Dear Raymond whoever-you-are,

  I’ve never heard of Lydd and I’ve never heard of you.

  Stop pestering me.

  Do_ not write to me again.

  W. Harcourt.

  I licked the envelope and sealed it. My letter would be pushed through his letterbox. A rebuttal yes, yet contact would be made. Would it be moved to the kitchen table, placed next to the newspaper and scrutinised? Would I regret it?

  MISSY rubbed a finger across the molar at the back of her mouth. It was warm back there, and for a second she sucked her thumb, trying to relive a time that was lost. She hadn’t been to the dentist since one of the women noticed a brown tooth as she bit into an apple and her body was knuckled into the dentist’s chair and she was left alone with the masked face, the pink water and the breath of the dentist inside her nose. Sometimes she thought about that day, and then her teeth would ache and her gums bleed. But you didn’t need good teeth to sit in a public toilet for hours every night. You just needed to be able to settle your buttocks comfortably onto the seat, protect your back from any breezes drifting up from the floor, and breathe. Quietly. And only occasionally would the smell of the bleach and sound of fingers rattling the lock force her to remember her childhood and carry her back to the place where the toilet was the only sanctuary, to the place where she cut her teeth as an eavesdropper.

  Her sitting position required no variation and it was only when she heard more than ten heels clicking on the tiles outside the door – she had learned to count feet in pairs – that she ever felt the need to open the toilet door and let someone else have their turn.

  She chose her own footwear with care; whoever might be down there would see her coming before she saw them. A great believer in first impressions, she wanted whoever observed her feet descending the stairs to see the person she really was. So she wore party shoes – silver, shiny, sexy.

  “Look at that bloody pouch, Ang. I’ve got to get some exercise.”

  Missy jumped as a voice erupted close by.

  “Stop beating yourself up or you’ll get a sla
p.”

  “Look at that bloody cellulite. I feel so ashamed.”

  “You can get vitamins for that.”

  Missy held her breath. This was her time, the brief moment that allowed her to draw a picture in her head of the owners of the voices. Muffin waists, she envisaged, rolls of neck, bags too full of stuff.

  “Oh, Ang. That mirror’s soul-destroying. I didn’t feel fat before I came in here.”

  “I like that bag, where’d you get that?”

  “Dunno. Just giving it an airing. God, look at that cellulite; it’s all over the place. This blue druggy’s light doesn’t help either. I look like a bloody ghoul.”

  “Yeah, why do they have that?”

  “Dunno, stops them finding a vein or something . . . ”

  “Ugh, put it away, will you. You’re making me feel queasy.”

  “Thanks a bunch, Ang.”

  “You know I’m only joking. Let’s get out of here. This light’s making my head ache.”

  “Oh, Ang.”

  Perfume still hung in the air when Missy emerged from the toilet. She looked down at her wrists. Her veins, normally so big, were invisible. She pulled up her sleeve and looked at her arm. The freckles were gone, rubbed out by the blue tone of the light; she now had the smooth, perfect skin of a newborn. She looked at her other arm. Perfect too. Finally, she pulled up her shirt, stood on her toes and examined her naked belly in the mirror.

  Five minutes later Missy emerged into the High Street. She paused, rummaged in her bag, pulled out her notebook and began to write under the borrowed light of the street lamp – choppy, slanting words that she hoped she would be able to make sense of later. Then she stopped and held her pen off the paper. How do you spell ‘cellulite’?