Witness account · 4 min read · Set in Calder Row ·
The Phone That Tries Again
An office extension keeps an appointment the office does not hold, one minute a night.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: "Ronald Petrie, accounts clerk"
I keep the ledgers for the rates office on Calder Row, second floor back. Fourteen desks, one telephone on the low desk by the window, and a meter board in the cellar that the porter reads and signs each morning. The incident book lives in the drawer under the meter sheet, and it is meant for broken windows and burst pipes, not for telephones.
The Thursday of quarter-end I stayed past the night bus to close the charge ledgers. Doris Fell made the day's last calls before she went: four dials to the tally office at Collander Quay, four silences. There has been no tally office behind that number since the spring. The men were moved on, the desks went out, and the telephone there was lifted with the fittings. Doris double-presses her numbers, thumb and knuckle, an old switchboard habit off the brewery exchange, so her dials sound like a slow knock.
At 03:14, with the ledgers squared and the drawer still open, the low desk telephone reached out on its own. I watched it type her number in her habit, both presses to every digit, and settle. I lifted the earpiece and the line stood open the way a doorway stands open, no tone in it and nothing waiting.
The porter's meter sheet next morning carried one unit charged at 03:14, ordinary as coal. The night after, one unit at 03:14. The night after that, one unit. Units are units and the office pays, so I did what the book asks: an entry in the incident book, a call to the trunk engineers, and a word to the porter to keep his sheet clean and his cellar door shut.
Stanley Groves came up with a test set the following week. He read the line correct from the socket down, said the wire drops into the plaster the way it was drawn, and wrote no fault found on the fault sheet, which is the truest sentence in this account and the most useless. The porter, who signs the cellar book, wrote across his own sheet in red: third floor, sound of dialling, 03:14. That is the only written hand that agrees with me, and he will not be pressed on it, and I do not press him.
I sat the fourth Thursday at my own desk to be exact about it. At 03:14 the telephone called, as it calls. This time the earpiece filled. Not a voice. A room: the sound a room makes doing nothing, paper-dry, and the size of a tally office if a tally office were still standing. I said the office name twice. Nothing answered, nothing rang off, and downstairs the meter began to run. By the time the porter came up at seven the unit column on his sheet stood open with no total in it, because the number would not sit still long enough to be read. He took the line out at the frame, and the silence he left behind was the ordinary kind.
Groves took a transfer to the pier exchange in the new year. Doris took her leave in November and has not come back to Calder Row. The Board's ruling on the open units came as a printed slip with one box for initials: units outstanding at 03:14 are charged to the room. The slip names no room. The box of initials is filled in, small and round, and it is not Groves's hand, not the porter's, and not mine.
So there is the whole of my paper. The meter sheet agrees; the fault sheet does not; the ruling slip answers for the charge and leaves the room blank; the porter heard what he heard and signed it. I have left the incident book open on the rail since November, in case the office needs one line more from me, and it has not needed it. What I ask the open drawer at 03:14 is the one thing no paper in this building can carry: the tally office is shut, the room that answered was empty, the meter is still running, and somebody is keeping a count. Who is that tally being kept for, and paid out of which room?