3. Sep, 2021

'Call Box'

The call box stood ready, red and inviting, like a kiss and a promise across the road.  Red as lipstick, red as a Valentine, ready to ring out with the longed-for call.  From outside it was a scarlet signal, fresh as paint.  Inside, the presence of others lingered in it.  Cards with numbers were pinned up or numbers were scribbled down in biro on the block of wood behind the handset.  Graffiti told of loves, hates and mockery, of the teenagers scrapping out their rivalries by night at the nearby bus stop whose windows they regularly smashed. The acrid tang of many a cigarette smoked in it by people talking on the phone hung in the enclosed air like suspense itself.  Suspense was what Sandy carried in with her too when she entered it.  This week, would Phil call while she had the box to herself, or get into one at his end too late, when someone had impatiently rapped her out of her spot because she was not on a call already?

It was a summer Saturday afternoon and in her line of vision as she stood in the box, clothes waved arms breezily from washing lines in back gardens, sheets flickering in and out of her sight like happy ghosts.  She glanced about.  Still nobody waiting - come on, Phil!  She stared at the receiver, her nerves rising.  It was not, always, that there was a lot to say, or that it was especially satisfying to talk, not like their physical intimacy, or the prospect of it.  But if he didn’t get through, she would worry all the next week that something was wrong, or that it was over.  It was dwindling between them because Phil was down there now, and she was up here, but still it was recent enough to be fully alive and yearned for.

The phone, so silent, suddenly rang out loudly and she snatched it up.

“Hello.  Phil?” she said excitedly.

There was a short silence and then somebody said,

“I’m watching you.”

“What?  Phil?”

But the phone went dead into a clattery burr.  The voice had not sounded clearly either male or female.  The phone rang again, and she picked it up quickly, for surely, this time, it was Phil?

“Why are you outside my house?”

“What?  I’m - I’m in a phone box.”

“I know where you are.  I’m watching you.”

The phone went down again.  Was it someone from one of the houses nearby?  Was it a man, or an old woman?  Surely, they were used to seeing people using the phone box?  The phone rang again, and she watched it warily for a moment before answering and to her relief, it was Phil at the other end.  They exchanged lovers’ greetings and she told him what had just happened.  Phil was dismissive.

“Some nutter.  Probably nowhere near, just has the phone box number and rings on the off chance of putting the wind up somebody.  Don’t let it worry you.”

“Oh, I know.  You’re probably right.”

All the same, Sandy’s sense of privacy was violated, which was ridiculous, she thought.  She was, after all, standing in a public call box in an open space in broad daylight, in full view of passers-by, or people waiting to use it.  That was different, though, from actively being watched by someone she could not see herself.  This stayed on her mind throughout speaking to Phil.  They talked for a while and then he said his money had run out.  Sandy offered to ring back but he said there was a queue for the phone.  There always was at his flats, so she could never call him.  It had created a dependency on his contacting her that shifted the relationship dynamic. 

Phil had pursued her, and she had been blithely attracted but less caught up in it.  Now that she had to dance attendance on the moment of his call, if he managed to make one, it had gradually come to seem, and then to feel, as if it were all more on her side than his.  Often this troubled her and if their actual talk on the day were particularly dull, she would question what was real about their connection and what was just in her head about it now.  Just then, he had seemed a bit bored and impatient and, annoyed, she said that she had to go too because there was somebody outside the kiosk, waiting.  The minute she let him go, she was flooded with the abject misery of knowing she couldn’t speak to him for another week.  And yet, seconds ago, she had been irritated and put out. Just before he rang off, she had blurted,

“I hate this having to hang around waiting for you to call!” and he had said,

“Well, what d’you want me to do?  You haven’t got a phone, have you and I haven’t?”

Phil always answered her complexity of feeling with some practical and undeniable response.  Not for Phil creating a tangled and wistful web of emotions out of thin air.  Things either were or they weren’t, and if there was nothing to be done, well, that was not his fault, was it? Usually, she had no answer to that.  Before, it had made her smile, now it just left her frustrated. With all these mixed feelings flitting through her mind, she opened the door of the call box.  Airless and hot, it seemed clogged up with her emotions in addition to the residual ones of others in there.  Coming out, she found that there reallly was someone waiting and held the door for them to take it from her, paying no attention to them as they did.  The clotheslines called over with their waving arms as she came out to their windy greeting.

“Hold on!” a voice called her back.  She turned and saw the kiosk door open again.  “It’s for you,” said the other person and she had to go in again.

It was a man, who squeezed out by her too close to pass her the phone, a curious and knowing look on his face.  Phil must be ringing back!  Perhaps he’d realised he had annoyed her and was sorry about it.  Taking the receiver, she said,

“Hello?”

She was aware the door had not shut again behind her and the man pushed back in.

“There’s no-one there.  What are you doing?” she exclaimed.

“Well, I don’t need to ring you now, do I?” said the voice behind her and with a shock, she now recognised its cigarette ruined hoarseness as belonging to the anonymous caller.  “You’re right in front of me, hanging about waiting.  So, which are you?  Mandy?  Friendly Girl?  Babycham?  You’re all up there, aren’t you?  On that wall.  But you’re the one I see here every week.  Just waiting.  So, I thought I’d save you the trouble.”

“I come to talk to my boyfriend!” she exclaimed, outraged, frightened and finding this ludicrous all at the same time.

“Oh, I know,” he chuckled, that leer in his voice.  “Well, I’m here now, aren’t I?”

She struggled furiously as he pressed clumsily up in the small space and then clouted his fumbling fingers hard with the receiver.

“Get off me!” she bellowed.

The lines of washing flapped and waved, helplessly frantic, as if to say that they would do something if they could.  Nobody would be able to see her beyond them, she realised.  Sandy screamed.  Suddenly the pressure behind her vanished and the thick air in the box was released into the bright summer breeze.

“Leave her alone, you sick creep!” yelled, surely, Phil’s voice?

It was Phil!  He pulled her outside into an embrace asking if she were all right, while her would be assailant scuttled off.

“I’m all right.  I bashed him off me with the phone,” she said, meaning, he hadn’t been able to get his groping hands on her.  “You’re – you’re here!”

“It’s a good job I am!  I came to surprise you,” he said.  “I’m sick of all this messing about on the phone too.  I don’t know where I am with you.”

“What?  You don’t!” she cried, pushing her thick hair out of her eyes and behind her ears in confusion.

“Look, Sandy.  Do you want to be with me or not?  It’s a simple enough question.”

For Phil, Sandy realised all at once, it was.  The turmoil of uncertainty melted away as she realised that they were, after all, on equal terms.

“Yes, Phil,” she said.  “Of course, I do!”

“Good.  That’s settled, then.”

“Where – where were you ringing from?”

“My Auntie’s.  Over there.  The house behind the washing line.  Didn’t you notice there weren’t any pips on the phone?”

“No.  No, I didn’t” she said wonderingly.

“Come on.  Let’s go inside and we’ll get a cup of tea or something.  We’ll have to report that old perve!”

“He thought…he thought I was one of them!”  She began to laugh over-loudly.  “Those call girl people.  You know – who have their cards pinned up on the board in the telephone box.”

“Bloody hell!  Why?”

“He said he watched me come here every week and he thought I was…”

“Waiting for a punter!  Oh, no!”  Even Phil started laughing, aghast as he was.  “Well, you won’t have to be waiting for me to phone again.  I’m back.  I packed it in to come home and to talk some sense into you about us.  From now on, we’ll be talking in person.”

“That’s brilliant, Phil!” she agreed, hoping that it would be, and they went to go into his aunt’s house together, the washing line people waving them through the back garden with their empty, fluttering sleeves as if in mutual relief.