Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
In Reach of the Phone
I keep the telephone inside one hand's reach wherever I go in the flat, because every call that comes in turns out to be about the last thing I said to someone.
- perspective: first
The telephone lives on the hall table, and the hall table stands where I can reach it with one hand from the stairs, the kitchen door, and my chair. There is an extension lead under the landing carpet, which the GPO man disapproves of every year and wires safe every year, and a long flex that will stretch to the bathroom door if the bath is running. I have arranged the flat the way you arrange a boat: everything the hand might need, inside the hand's arc. One hand's reach. That is the whole of my housekeeping, and the housekeeping holds.
It began with Dad. My last words to him, on the Sunday call, were: not now, Dad — Thursday. He died on the Monday, so the sentence stands, and it stands the way a badly set type stands, which is to say I can feel the sentence in my mouth every time the hall is quiet. The first calls after were ordinary and load-bearing: the vicar, the district nurse, his club. Then the bank rang, and three sentences in, a stranger was speaking about my last instruction. My last instruction. It is the phrase on their forms, for the mandate on the account; he said it flatly, and read the form back to me, and there was nothing in it but forms. I stood in the hall with the receiver against my ear all the same, and heard the shape of my Sunday sentence arriving inside the bank's Tuesday one, and something in the hall got quiet in a way that had nothing to do with the hall.
Since then I do not ring anyone until I have chosen my last words. I enter a conversation the way you cross ice, from the solid bit nearest me, and I come off the line on a full stop. To the greengrocer I give complete sentences with endings. To the office I give endings even when endings are not asked for. And when I slip — it happens, the flat is small and the days are long — I ring back inside the hour, not to apologise. To move the last thing. You were right about the heavy bags, I say, or, the bus was the better idea; some clean sentence laid over the snapped one, because a last thing left lying is a debt, and debts get called on you, and I know the sound of them being called now.
I keep a card index of last things, one card per person, alphabet. It sits on the hall table beside the phone, within the arc. Dad's card has one line in my hand and has never been added to, and the single line is Thursday, and I have thought about ruling a second line under it for six years, and I do not, because the first line is load-bearing, since it is the last thing, and the last thing is what they come about.
Because they do come about. I log the calls now — not the callers, the calls: forty-one this quarter, of which nine had a third sentence that touched the last thing somebody said to me. Nine might be the ordinary grain of a city's traffic; I allow the arithmetic to sit where it sits and do not burden it. But a wrong number in the spring asked, in words that were mine from the Monday prior, for a person who has never lived in this flat, and my sister Beryl rang in June and closed with my Tuesday sentence from three weeks before, word for word, given back in her own mouth. Memory, habit, coincidence. I set the entries down; I do not set the conclusion down. A card index is not the place for a conclusion. It is the place for cards.
At night the phone is in reach or I do not settle, and three times this winter, after three, the line has done what lines should not. Not rung. Breathed. I picked up on the third breath and the exchange gave me the hum it owes and nothing has ever been on the line, and there is nothing in that — a line breathes. I put the receiver down and said the full stop out loud to the dark hall, because someone must, and because a last thing left open is an open account, and this flat is solvent, and I intend it to stay solvent down to the last card.
One hand's reach. That is the whole of the housekeeping, and the card index holds, and the full stops hold, and the lead holds. Only — when I dial out, I have to remember what I am on the far end of. My sentence lands in someone else's hall, in their reach, and from that minute it is the last thing I said to them, and their phone begins arranging itself around it the way mine has, the flex, the lead, the one free hand. And the question I keep inside the arc of my own hand, where the phone can hear it: when I ring you, whose last sentence am I?