The Eavesdroppers

by Rosie Chard

  CHAPTER

  19

  “Not another one.”

  I looked up from my desk. I was reading the letter that had arrived that morning and my eyes took a second to focus. “Oh, hi James, I didn’t hear you come in. Yeah, another letter came. It’s the fourth.”

  “Fourth? What about the third, you never told me about that.”

  “Yeah, I know; I didn’t want to make a big thing of it. I wrote back, but–”

  “You wrote back! What did you say?”

  “Told him to bugger off.”

  “And?”

  “He sent yet another letter. It arrived this morning. I’m starting to feel a bit . . . bombarded.”

  James took off his coat, hung it on his peg, a place of past battles, and sat down at his desk. “Want to tell me about it?”

  I looked at my colleague. Empathy wasn’t always his strong point but quite suddenly he had it all: pleasant smile, bright eyes, non-judgemental bend to his neck. “I’ll read it to you if you like.”

  His smile sagged. “Is it very long?”

  “Three lines.”

  “Okay, let’s hear it.”

  Reading aloud had never been my strong point but I scanned the letter again, practiced the pronunciation of distrustful in my head, then began: “Your refusal to listen to my pleas deeply concerns us. I know you might be dis . . . distrustful of a stranger, but I also think that strangers are the people to which you like to listen.” I paused to let the words sink in. “I implore you, Mr. Harcourt, please come to Lydd as soon as possible and I will tell you something important.”

  “Why are you reading in that funny voice?” said James.

  “What funny voice?”

  “That . . . I don’t know, that funny growl at the end of each sentence.”

  ‘I don’t know. It’s . . . how I imagine him to sound.”

  “And who the hell is us? I thought this was just one potty bloke.”

  “Me too. Do you think it’s a cult?”

  “Nah, it’s probably some seven-stone weakling with a chip on his shoulder trying to act tough.”

  I glanced at James’ puny frame. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

  “You gonna write back?”

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

  James twirled his pencil between his fingers. It was annoying. “Yeah, I think you should. I’ll give you a hand if you like.”

  “Sure.”

  James and I spent half an hour drafting the reply. First it was long, a full page rant complete with expletives in capitals and crowded with exclamation marks, then it was smaller, more circumspect, but still we weren’t satisfied. Finally, after much milling of minds we boiled it down to one beautifully spare line:

  Dear Jerk,

  If you bother me one more time I shall report you to the police for stalking.

  W. Harcourt.

  We both tipped our chairs. My back muscles relaxed, but I noticed a fresh comment brewing on the other side of the room.

  “Bill.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re certain, aren’t you?’

  “Certain about what?”

  “That he’s a nutter.”

  “Positive.”

  James looked shifty. “It’s just that now we’ve got the envelope sealed and the stamp on I’m feeling a tiny bit curious about what he might have to say.”

  “Bloody hell, James. Now you’ve got me wondering.”

  James stood up and grabbed the letter off the desk. “Sod it! Let’s send it. Get him off our backs once and for all.”

  It was just Eve and I in the pub. She had a manky little scarf round her neck and it bothered me, the way it was too short to tie in a proper knot and seemed to be attached to her shoulders by the force of static alone. I’d felt uncomfortable when she invited me to the pub after work, but her imploring eyes had forced me to accept, and now, with a pint of beer untouched on the table I felt unusually shy. “How’s it going?” I said.

  “Quite . . . well,” she said, cupping her glass, but not picking it up.

  “Enjoying it?”

  “Enjoying what?”

  I looked for clues her eyes. “The job, the highly paid snooping.”

  “Oh, yes. But . . . that’s what I want to talk to you about.”

  “Okay.”

  “Yes.” She tweaked her scarf; it just about clung to her neck. “I heard something the other day that I thought I should tell you about.”

  My flippancy was hard to shrug off, but eventually it dissolved by itself and I settled into the posture of an earnest listener. “Tell away.” I felt a patronising urge to add ‘my dear’ on the end of my sentence, but held it back.

  And tell away she did.

  I’d expected a quick summary of her overheards – a collective noun I was under the impression I’d invented – but she pulled out her notebook and opened it onto a page marked with a yellow stickie. I tried to imagine what event could be down there on the page – a tussle over a drier maybe? a mismatched sock? – but as I looked up I saw her eyelashes were damp.

  “Eve,” I said, taking the book out of her hands and closing it, “just tell me what happened.”

  She drew in a breath. “Well . . . I was sitting on the quiet seat yesterday and two people came in. You don’t know the launderette very well but the quiet seat I like is round the corner, hidden behind the powder dispenser. It’s where I have my little chats.”

  “What little chats?”

  “The . . . my . . . I was sitting there on my own and two people came in and they . . . they . . . there was talk of waiting in the car, then what they had for lunch, then . . . at the end, there was talk of ‘duffing someone up.’ Mr. Harcourt, what does ‘duffing’ mean?”

  I remained eminently calm. “Oh, you know, a little fight, a bit of a scrap. Did you talk to them?”

  “No.”

  “No little chat?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see what they looked like?”

  “Their backs, I only saw their backs.”

  “What sort of backs did they have?”

  “I don’t know . . . big.”

  Big backs. Something caught my eye. Eve’s hand was moving inside her bag.

  “I heard something I shouldn’t have, didn’t I?” she said.

  “It’s not a case of shouldn’t,” I replied. “What’s in the air is for anyone’s ears.”

  “Is that true?”

  I wasn’t sure. “Yes, Missy. It is.”

  “Eve. I’m Eve.”

  “Oh, sorry. Eve. I apologise.”

  She gave me a long look. “What should I do?”

  “Move to another launderette.”

  “Another launderette?”

  “Yes, there are loads in your area, aren’t there?”

  “Yes. I’ll do that. There are loads.”

  “Good. Any other worries?”

  “No.”

  “Good, I’ll see you at the next meeting, then.”

  “I’m looking forward to it. Thank you for your advice.”

  I nodded and smiled, the outside of my body a suit of ease.

  I couldn’t get home fast enough. I cursed the lateness of the Tube; I tripped on the kerb. Raymond Watt’s latest letter was on the kitchen table when I got home. Where I had left it.

  JACK had an open notebook at each elbow. One was closed and thick with writing, the other yawning and empty. He looked at the white space of his play. Not a play, just a few lines of a story, a half-formed arc. He sighed. He had the setting, he had the characters, but they would not speak. Why wouldn’t they speak? He had given them a place in which to flex their muscles, a place to recoil; he had given them jobs, families, memories. He had even given them desires, fears, prejudices, but still they would not speak.

  He got up from the table and switched on the TV. The evening news was on, piling on footage of Remembrance Sunday, the previous year. An aerial view of Whitehall, a glimpse of the C
enotaph, and finally, a shaky close-up of a cardboard poppy. Jack never bought a poppy badge in the weeks leading up to Remembrance Sunday for the same reason he never signed his organ donor card, he felt it brought him closer to death.

  He sat back and watched the ranks of old soldiers as they marched across his TV screen. The November day was coming when half the country wore a cardboard flower pinned to their chests and the other half ignored it, or felt guilty, or uncomfortable, or a mixture of all three. Jack felt a loathing for war, not wanting to think about it, not wanting to be reminded that it was there, always there.

  Mesmerised by the marching pensioners, he leant forward in his chair. The band played on but he fancied he could hear the groan of damaged limbs, the creak of geriatric shoes. Yet these were the brave ones. The heroes. He watched a close-up of a wrinkled hand clutching a programme and a row of medals hanging from a hollow chest, then the marching again, marching bravely up the safe street. Bravery, he thought. What was that? Where did that aura hanging on the shoulders of the trembling octogenarians decades after the event actually come from?

  He looked down at his own skinny legs. Could they march in time? Did they have the strength to run from a bullet? But bravery, he thought again, needed an enemy in order to exist. Who was his enemy? Himself? Such was his hopeless body, it couldn’t look people in the eye, couldn’t raise its voice, couldn’t interrupt even the most hesitant of conversationalists. Would he ever feel a desire to be the centre of attention? A lifelong master of social deflection, his only skills were merging into his surroundings and avoiding an insistent gaze. His only conversations were with the characters in his plays, but they wouldn’t speak. Why wouldn’t they speak?

  He’d never had a girlfriend, but he lived in the hope that there was a woman somewhere who longed for a shy person. Yet, he felt disgusted at shyness when he saw it in others. Disgust followed by pity. Pity followed by sadness. Sad, shy them. Sad, shy him.

  ‘Speak up,’ his mother had urged him as a kid. ‘Toughen up,’ his father would beg.

  And now they were gone he tried hard to remember their words, tried so hard not to be shy.

  He’d spoken many times to his bathroom mirror; told it to ‘shut the fuck up.’ But swearing made him blush. Even in the privacy of his own home his cheeks grew warm and his voice lowered whenever it formed an expletive. And shouting. That was the hardest thing. Shouting strained the muscles of his throat and the voice that came out didn’t sound like his.

  He looked at the TV again and felt the drift of a daydream. He imagined a medal pinned to his chest. He imagined a bullet chasing him up his street. He imagined a megaphone pressed to his lips.

  Jack walked slowly towards to Bayswater Tube Station. As he approached the entrance, he saw a lone woman, ginger hair cut like Eve’s, with a tray slung around her neck, a money tin at her ankle and a look of expectation on her face.

  “Poppy, Sir?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Once inside the building he hesitated. Some invisible barrier held him back, just long enough for a swab of claustrophobia to wipe his face before he pulled his bag onto his shoulder and headed down the stairs. There was a queue at the turnstile, but he used the time productively, trying to memorise the words of the person talking loudly behind him. Then he attempted to read the lips of a woman who was at the top of the opposite escalator. Get out of my face. Let us say grace.

  Someone stood too close behind him on the way down the escalators, breathing on the back of his neck, but when Jack turned round there was no one there. A train rushed into the station as he arrived at the platform and he slipped past a dithering woman in front of him to catch the last space on the train. A man watched him through a slit in the crowd.

  The doors beeped, and then hissed shut. Just a moment without breath then Jack took hold of the pole, closed his eyes, and relaxed.

  At first he could not separate the sounds in the carriage, but gradually, over the rumble of the wheels and whine of the engine, he heard voices, French first, then English.

  “You’ll have to work quick on that.”

  “I think it’s difficult to do.”

  “Strike up a new relationship. Just strike it up.”

  The voice in the train changed, mechanical, intonation in the wrong place. This is Embankment. Change here for . . .

  Jack opened his eyes. An empty seat had appeared half way down the carriage and, checking for the presence of elderly people around him, he slipped into it. From the comfort of his seat he observed his fellow travellers. It had been drizzling outside and the toes of every shoe were wet, eyelids were wet, and there was a smell of dog in the air. An unlikely couple looked comfortable opposite him, a young man with very black skin and an old man with the purple cheeks of an alcoholic. The short distance between their elbows suggested that they would speak. Jack opened his notebook onto a new page, gripped his pencil and waited. Then noted.

  Old man: Doing anything exciting today?

  Young man: Nope.

  He waited again, but they would not speak. They just stared up at the Tube map as if they were trying to solve a mathematical equation.

  He looked down at his notes then back up at the couple. Why wouldn’t they say anything else? He could write the words for them, then they would speak. He looked down at his notes again. Was there something hidden in that simple exchange, something he’d missed?

  “Hell down here, isn’t it.”

  Glancing around the train, Jack could not see who had spoken. It was as if the play had finally started but the audience hadn’t yet reached their seats. The woman beside him pulled out a mirror and held it up to her face; a little girl opposite looked at her. A man watched him through a slit in the crowd.

  CHAPTER

  20

  The train from Victoria Station to Lydd left at eleven o’clock in the morning. I had just finished my coffee when it arrived at platform sixteen but couldn’t find a bin anywhere, so I held the empty cup in my hand like a volunteer litter collector. The train smelt of plastic and was full of men in clothes smarter than mine and I was relieved to find a pair of empty seats so I did not have to rub elbows with fabric of a superior weave.

  As the train passed out of the dry, dusty, concussed zone that is south-east London, I pulled out the latest letter, unfolded it and laid it down on the tray fixed to the back of the seat in front of me, and read. I’m satisfied that you have come to your senses. I’ll meet you at Lydd Station at 1 o’clock. I glanced out of the window, the grass rushed by and the houses had separated from one another, no longer the tight terraces of Lewisham but the singletons of Sidcup, lonely-looking homes with overgrown shrubs in the gardens and shrivelled bedding plants drooping from hanging baskets. I pressed my cheek to the window and watched the rails as we trundled round a wide curve. What was waiting for me at the end of this track, I wondered. A prankster? A lunatic? A big, mean back?

  As if under instructions from a distant controller, mobile phone conversations started up, ricocheting around the train: “Are you still on the Methodist pastoral circuit?” then, “I don’t like fish paste sandwiches, I told you that.”

  For once I didn’t feel like listening to what others were saying. I forced my attention inwards, recalling the evening in the pub with Eve in so much detail that I could almost see the condensation on the outside of my beer mug and smell the cigarettes that wafted through the door from the street. ‘Duffing someone up’ wasn’t an expression I’d heard recently. I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant, but I knew it involved physical force, a thrashing, a beating of sorts. But could it mean more? Could Eve have heard a plan for a murder?

  The train rushed into a tunnel and the natural light in the carriage vanished, only to be replaced by sickly, temporary ones. That yellow light had always frightened me as a child. My poor mother: jigging me on her lap, wiping tears off my cheeks. I felt the same surge of anxiety at that moment, suppressed a cry in my throat, and then we shot out of the other end, uncha
nged. An hour went by as the fields grew longer and the horizon wider until the announcer suddenly called out ‘Lydd-on-Sea’ in a desperate voice. I looked out of the window. Flat out there, so flat; a huge tray of ground stretched towards a wall of sky and there were things scattered about: random bushes, clumps of grass that seemed to be clinging to the ground. And I saw shapes on the horizon, nautical silhouettes: lighthouses, masts, flagpoles. And dominating all the little things I could see the big thing, the massive angular bulk of the nuclear power station at Dungeness. It unnerved me, its grey hulk seeming to hold up the sky, its pall of radioactive smoke bent sideways by the wind, going somewhere else.

  When I stepped off the train the station was empty yet an eerie feeling hung in the air, of someone having been there who had just gone. Was he hiding? I wondered. Had he squeezed himself behind a pillar, his shoulders pulled right in? I felt relieved – more time to rehearse.

  “Mr. Harcourt?”

  I turned. A man stood behind me. I’d pictured someone younger, but this person was old, so old his cheeks had a loose grid on them where wrinkles had formed in two directions, and his head looked too heavy for his neck. “Yes,” I replied. “Mr. Watt?”

  This was the moment to shake, but the man’s hands were firmly by his sides.

  “Are you ready to go?” he said.

  “Go where?” I asked.

  “To the pits.”

  “Pits?”

  “Yes, pits. One mile.” The thickness of his eyebrows barred any further comment.

  I don’t know what I’d expected from this encounter, but not this, not a hike. I glanced down at my office shoes; they looked newer than they really were. “Alright.”

  “I heard you coming,” the man said, as we fell in step.

  “Heard I was coming, you mean?”

  “No. I heard you coming when I was sitting in the waiting room. Your left heel squeaked as you stepped onto the platform and that bag in your pocket, the one that’s holding the doughnut or the sandwich you bought on the train, it rustled as you tried to find your ticket.”