legends · 4 min read ·
Landline
A daughter keeps her late mother's landline, and the mother rings to say not to open the door.
My mother's house had a landline, and when she died I kept it. I know that makes no sense. The line rental was eleven pounds a month, and nobody rings a landline now but men from the insurance companies. But the estate agents wanted the phone socket live for the survey, and then I forgot to cancel it, and then it was winter, and one night in January I sat on the floor of the empty hall with a flask and a sleeping bag and realised that the only sound I could stand was the dial tone.
I'd been sleeping there a few nights a week since the funeral. The house was on the market. I was tidying, I told myself. There is a great deal to tidy in a house where someone has lived for fifty-one years.
The phone rang for the first time on the fourteenth.
It is a cream-coloured thing with a curly cable, on the hall table, under a mirror. The ring was the ring it had always had, a ringing so loud that you could hear it from the garden. I let it go six times before I picked it up.
"Hello?"
Nothing. No breathing, no hiss. Then a click and a dial tone.
I checked the display, because it has one. Caller ID, a cheap grey LCD. It read: THIS NUMBER.
I thought that was a fault. Then it rang again, the next night, at the same time, ten past nine, and I picked it up with a cold feeling, and said hello, and a voice said:
"You've got the heating too high."
It was my mother.
I am going to describe this carefully, because there is a temptation to make it more than it was. It was not a ghost voice. It was her ordinary telephone voice, the one she kept for the bank, with the crispness, the slight effort at distance. She was not distressed. She sounded as she always sounded when she rang to tell me about the cost of something.
"Mum," I said.
"I can hear the boiler from here," she said. "You'll be paying for it."
"Where are you?"
"Where I always am," said my mother. "In the hall. By the phone. I never liked to sit down."
I stood there with the receiver against my ear, in the hall, by the phone, and the cord looped round my wrist, and I looked at the floor in front of me, where nothing was. I said: "Mum, are you alright?"
"Of course I'm all right. I've been trying to ring you for weeks. This damn thing keeps going to the machine."
"What machine?"
"The one in your house," she said. "You've got an answering machine. It says: *You've reached nobody. Leave nothing.* I don't know why you'd want that."
I said I had no answering machine. She said, "Well, somebody does."
We talked for twenty minutes. About the garden. About a woman at church. About my brother, who rang rarely. She asked me if I'd eaten. She did not ask about the funeral, or about her own death, and I did not raise it, because I did not want the call to end, and because I understood, from the shape of the conversation, that she did not know.
She rang every night for eleven days. I began to schedule my evenings around it. I went out to buy a second sleeping bag. I started to keep the heating low, because she'd mentioned it.
On the twelfth night the call was different. She was out of breath, in the way people are when they've had to hurry to the phone.
"Listen," she said. "I'm not the one who's been ringing."
"What?"
"Someone's been using this line. I told you. The machine. They have a recording. They've been leaving messages in my voice." She stopped. "I'm in the hall, and I can hear them on the other side of the glass."
"Mum, what's on the other side of the glass?"
"The front door," said my mother. "There's someone standing outside it. They've been there for days. They want to be let in and they've been telling you it was me."
I looked at the front door. It has a panel of frosted glass, and through the glass the porch light made a yellow smear, and in the smear there was nothing, but the phone cord in my hand had gone cold as a pipe.
"They say they're me," said my mother, very softly. "Don't open it. Whatever I say. Whatever I say after this. It won't be me."
The line clicked. A dial tone.
I haven't answered it since. It rings every night at ten past nine, and I leave the receiver in its cradle, and some nights I stand in the hall and watch the light on the glass. I listen to it ring out. Eight rings. Nine. Then, from the answering machine I don't own, a flat recorded voice, clear down the whole length of the empty hall: *You've reached nobody.*
Then my mother's voice, in the honest, kind, impatient way she has always had. *Darling, it's me. Could you just let me in? It's freezing out here.*