Blast from the Past

8

The phone was on its fifth ring. After the next one Polly’s answerphone would start. She sat on the floor and assumed the lotus position. When the Bug spoke she wanted to be ready.

Polly’s yoga teacher, a Yorkshireman called Stanley, had said that yoga was the process whereby the superior, conscious element in a person was freed from involvement with the inferior material world. A tough trick to pull when you’re being stalked in the small hours of the morning, but Polly was determined to give it a go. And so she sat, as the answerphone began to clunk, her feet crossed, her knees spread like a wing nut, her elbows on her knees and her fingers and thumbs set in the required position.

She was calm, she was at ease, she was relaxed.

Her bottom was freezing.

The problem was her nightie. It was an old shirt of her father’s, and was too short for the situation; it did not properly cover her backside from the cold floorboards on which she sat. She did not wish to break position at this crucial moment of calm; on the other hand the whole point was to be comfortable, and a cold bum was not comfortable. Besides which, some ancient memory was whispering to her that this was the best way of getting piles. It was no good, she would have to move onto the rug. While remaining absolutely calm, at one with herself and in the lotus position, Polly shuffled over to the rug using only her buttock muscles to motivate her.

“Hello,” said Polly’s voice as Polly shuffled. “Nobody’s answering at the moment, but please leave a message after the tone. Thank you.”

A defiantly unfunny and matter-of-fact message. Polly’s days of using music, cracking gags and pretending to be the Lithuanian Embassy had ended the day that the Bug had first discovered her phone number. During the worst period of harassment she had got a male friend to record her outgoing message, but this had just made genuine callers think they had the wrong number.

There was no incoming message.

The caller hung up and the answerphone clicked and clunked accordingly. Furious, Polly leapt up from her lotus position (an effort which nearly broke both her ankles), grabbed the phone off its cradle and shouted, “Fuck off!” at the dialling tone. Stanley would not have been pleased.

“Now, d’you think ’indu philosophers’d go abaht ’ollering ‘Fook off!’ into’t pho-an?” he would have enquired. “No fookin’ way.”

Polly struggled to prevent her blood from boiling. Calm was required. Calm. She had work in the morning.

Perhaps it had been a wrong number after all.

Perhaps the drug baron on the other end of the line had heard Polly’s voice on the machine, realized his mistake and had gone on to deliver his threats elsewhere.

Inside the phonebox Jack put down the phone. He had been expecting her to answer personally; he hadn’t prepared himself for an answerphone. She couldn’t be out. He’d specifically had that checked. She must be screening her calls. Or else she had become a heavy sleeper over the years.

A little further up the street Peter was watching Jack. For a moment he thought that the man must have finished his calls but then, to Peter’s fury, the man picked up the phone a second time.

Polly was just about to return to bed when the phone rang again. This time she didn’t bother with the lotus position; she just stood in the middle of her room, shaking with anger and fear, and waited.

“Hello,” said Polly’s voice again. “Nobody’s answering at the moment, but please leave a message after the tone. Thank you.”

This time the machine did not clunk to a halt. Polly could hear the faint electric hiss of an open but silent line. He was there but he wasn’t speaking. Standing there, alone in the night, Polly watched the phone like it was a hissing snake. Like it was going to pounce. She itched to grab up the receiver again and scream further obscenities, but she knew that she mustn’t. If there was one sure way to give the Bug satisfaction it was to share her emotions with him. Do that, shout at him, let him hear your fear and he would be nursing an erection for a week.

“Polly?”

It wasn’t the Bug. She knew that within those first two syllables.

“Polly. Are you there?”

Within four words she knew who it was.

“Are you there, Polly?”

It was the last voice in the world that she had expected to hear.

“Listen, don’t freak out,” said General Kent. “It’s Jack, Jack Kent.”