Grotesque encounter · 4 min read · Set in The Dunmore Workings ·
Call Before You Call
A night linesman at the Dunmore pump house answers a ringing exchange at three, and the call was not dialled until four.
The pump house at Dunmore Workings keeps two clocks and neither of them is trusted, which is why Rowan Tovey goes by his own wristwatch and by the pips off the radio, and why, when the exchange bell rang on the frost night at 02:58, he wrote 02:58 into the log in pencil first, in ballpoint after.
The pumps at Dunmore have not lifted water since before the Misprint, but the shaft telephony is kept in order of a lease clause nobody has ever pasted over, and somebody pennies the winding-house clock once a fortnight and winds the exchange battery once a week, and Tovey is that somebody on nights. Third winter of it. He listens to the outside world through the instrument the way you listen through a wall.
The caller had a village accent he could not place — flat, patient, vowels broadened and delayed, the sound of an upland mouth. A woman. Not young. Not old. She said the exchange name and it meant nothing to him at the time. Then she said the thing he has heard in his sleep since and woken at exactly the wrong minute.
"Dunmore pump house. Listen to me. Do not ring out before the hour. Wait for the bell and then call. Call before you call and you'll fetch the wrong night down."
He asked, as the procedure posters insist, the caller's service number. She gave one. He wrote it. It was a six-digit number that the Post Office issued, his inspector later maintained, to no exchange in the county. He asked, because it was ten past the hour and he was now inside his own shift's arithmetic, whether she wished him to place a call, and she said, in the voice of a woman who has explained the same thing many times to people who were doing their jobs, "It's gone three by us, love. You've a minute yet. I'm ringing because I've rung. You'll pick it up when it's four."
She was, by her own account, ringing him an hour before she would dial. He checked the line clock after he rang off: 02:59 and stubborn. The frost ticked in the racks. He did what every sensible man does at 02:59 alone in a pump house with a completed form that cannot be filed, and went to the kettle.
At 03:57, four minutes inside the hour that mattered, the outsides of the call happened exactly as she had priced them. The foreman's line lit. Tovey took it. Wardrow Colliery, the far end — they were standing by to ring him at the top of the hour under standing orders from the water board. Some frost risk to a culvert. Tovey stayed on the line and the call was brief, correct, and uneventful, and the culvert held, and he has the meter docket to show the time.
The correct arithmetic is worse than the eerie version. When the morning exchange audit came through, the trunk log for the frost night showed one incoming call, received 02:58 and 41 seconds, placed 03:58 and 04 seconds. Fifty-nine minutes and twenty-three seconds before the handset at the far end was lifted. The Post Office engineers who spent a Tuesday on it could make the delta smaller than a minute, or repeat it over four nights, and could not make it happen on any other pair of clocks in the building. The effect — they gave it a fault number, FN-21/59, and the number is now itself part of the folklore of the third winters — stopped dead at the last milestone on the Dunmore road. Inside it, village time. Outside it, time. The Post Office delivered to the pump house a note saying the fault was closed.
Tovey has been out to the village once to satisfy the inspector's report that the caller's exchange existed. He found the milestone and stood with one boot each side of it, and checked his watch against the church clock over the wall, which said ten to four. The pub clock, seen through the doorway, said ten to five. He did not stay for a pint. He has not been back. Somewhere on the road behind him, as a young man at the pump house later put it, the church was getting away with it.
He still takes the 02:58 call every frost night. It comes as it came: a woman patient at the far end of a line, ringing to say she is ringing. The gap, the inspectors concede, is widening — a minute a year by their cleverest arithmetic. He does not raise the subject aloud at the pump house any more, for the reason he gave the young man once and has not bettered since: he is afraid the answer will be easy.
What he has not told the inspector, and will not, is the small additional reading he has begun to keep on the docket, in the space marked REMARKS. Every year the call arrives a little before 02:58. Last frost it was 02:31. He has begun to wonder, in the ordinary quiet of the morning kettle, what he will do in the year the call catches him finishing the previous shift — and whether a warning that arrives a whole day early still counts as a warning, or only as history.