legends · 4 min read ·
Helpline Volunteer, Haley
A crisis-line volunteer discovers that her most regular caller is sitting in the empty chair across the table.
You are given a script and you are told not to use it. That was the first thing the trainer said, in the church hall, in the autumn I joined. "The script is a ladder," she said. "You get on, you climb for a while, you kick it away."
I have done Tuesday nights on the line for four years. I won't say which one. We are asked not to. A room above a dentist's, a table with two phones, a kettle, a box of tissues nobody touches. You wear headphones. You say the words you are given, that you are there, that you are listening, that there is no hurry. You say them in a voice that is not your own.
Most calls are what you would expect. Loneliness. A man who rings at the same time every week and talks about the weather. A woman whose husband has just gone into a home. I am good at it. I am a slow, plain person with a lot of time.
The first call from Haley came on a night in March, at ten past one. The screen showed no number. I said the words.
"Hello. You're through to the line. I'm here, and I'm listening."
"Hello," said a young woman. "Is it all right if I just talk?"
"Of course."
"I don't know how long I've got."
That is a thing you hear. You do not pounce on it. You say, "Take as long as you need."
She talked for fifty minutes. She had a soft, level voice, with a trace of somewhere northern. She said her name was Haley. She talked about nothing. About a house she'd lived in. About the sound of the road in the early morning. About the way the light came into a particular room, at a particular time. At the end she said, "Thank you. I feel as if I've been somewhere."
She rang the following Tuesday. Same time. The screen was blank again. She talked about a bus. About the smell of a coat. She said that she was frightened, but she did not say of what. She said, "It's getting harder to find the words."
I said, "You're doing well."
Over the weeks she became a fixture. I came to look forward to her, I admit, as one does to a regular. I wrote nothing down, as the rules require. But in my own head I built her a face, and a flat, and a kettle.
In June she rang and her voice was thin. It had a hollow in it, as though she were speaking from the end of a tunnel. I said, "Haley, where are you tonight?"
"I think I'm in the line," she said.
"In the line?"
"I think I'm in the wire. I think I've been in it for a long time. I just talk and someone answers. If nobody answers, I stop." She laughed, a small dry sound. "I've been trying to remember whether I rang you, or whether you rang me."
I said, with great care, "Haley, I'd like to know something. Is there somewhere I can send someone to see you?"
"I don't think there's a somewhere," she said. "Is there? I've tried to think. There's the room above a dentist's. There's a table. There are two phones."
I looked at the table.
"It's a very nice room," said Haley. "I can see it. I can see you. You have a green cardigan."
I do. I was wearing it.
"I think I'm sitting in the other chair," she said. "Across from you. I think I've been there since March. I can see the kettle. I don't think you can see me. But it's lovely to have someone to talk to."
I took my headphones off. I put them on the table. The room was silent and bright and the other chair was where it always is, pushed in, with a coat folded on the back that has hung there since before I started. I looked at the coat. I had never asked whose it was.
The phone in my hand was still on. I could hear her on the line, tiny, patient, saying my name.
I'm still on the Tuesdays. The charity has asked me to retrain. They say I have a talent. They say there's a note on the system that says, in the log for every Tuesday since March, *calls attended by volunteer; caller unknown.* They say it's a clerical error.
I have never asked her to leave. Some nights I turn the second chair a little way towards mine, the way you do for a guest, and I say, to the room, to nobody: "I'm here, and I'm listening." And from the coat, from the chair, from the very quiet air, comes a long sigh of relief.