The Calling

CHAPTER 16

At thirty-two, Caitlin Pearce has been a Samaritan for five years — since a few months after Megan Harris committed suicide.

Megan wasn’t a close friend, just someone Caitlin knew from uni; they saw each other mostly at weddings and birthdays, the occasional hen night, dinner parties. They spent a week in Faliraki as part of a group of seven or eight.

Caitlin didn’t even know Megan was unhappy. If anything, she’d been a little in awe of her, for Megan seemed as carefree as she was lovely.

After the funeral, Caitlin began to wonder if Megan had in fact been tired-looking and withdrawn at some of those boisterous girls’ nights out. Or perhaps that was her own guilt talking. Caitlin knew that survivor guilt taints memories of the suicide, that people left behind look for signs that simply may not have been there.

One evening, Megan had gone home from work and taken an overdose. Her flatmate found her in bed the next morning. Eight days later, Caitlin was sitting on a hard church pew in brand new funeral clothes and brand new funeral shoes that pinched her feet. And she sat dazed, looking at the coffin.

The instant permanence of it hit her hard; the fact that somebody could simply pop out of the world like a bubble.

It made the world seem less real. Caitlin slipped into what she now recognizes as a mild depressive illness. Everything felt like a film set; everyone she knew seemed like an actor. She looked through the rainy window of her fifth-storey flat, out at the London cityscape and thought: That looks really realistic.

After a few dismal months, she decided to do something about it; to do something good. So here she is, answering calls to the Samaritans, three volunteer shifts a month.

Right now it’s 5.38 p.m., and at the end of the line a young man is sobbing. When Caitlin asks what he wants to talk about he says, ‘It’s my dad. I want to kill him. I want to fucking kill him.’

‘What about your dad makes you feel like this?’

There is a long silence on the line. At the end of it, the caller says, ‘He took the baby. Emma. It was my dad.’

Quite often, you get a crank call. In your bones, you know it for what it is, but you have to take it seriously — because what if you were wrong?

‘Baby Emma?’ she says.

‘I was waiting in the car. I called the police, but they were too slow. She was all purple and wriggling. And then she got sick, like really sick, and he wouldn’t take her to hospital.’

Caitlin controls her voice. ‘And how did you feel about that?’

‘Fucked up. All fucked up in my head. I want to kill him. I honestly do. It would be so much easier if I could just kill him.’

Caitlin’s hands are cold.

‘There’s this family,’ says the caller. ‘The Daltons. He likes them.’

‘Likes what about them?’

‘Their little girl. They’ve got a daughter. He wants her to make babies for him. He says he’s never tried it with a virgin. She’s only little. She’s only eleven.’

Caitlin’s scared of flying, and she’s got the feeling now that she gets when boarding an aircraft, like her blood sugar has crashed. Her hands and feet are cold. Her voice is weak.

Samaritans never call the police, no matter what a caller might say; it would transgress their code of absolute confidentiality. And you categorically cannot offer advice. But it’s not advice Caitlin wants to offer; it’s an instruction.

Whether the caller is telling the truth or enumerating a strange fantasy, she wants to tell him to stay where he is and wait while she dials 999 and has him picked up for his own sake.

She casts around, looking at the other desks, all the bowed heads.

‘I hate him,’ says the caller. ‘I hate him. I don’t know what to do.’

‘What do you think you’ll do?’

‘What he says. Cut them up.’

‘You’ll cut them up?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I have to.’

‘Why do you have to?’

‘Because he’s my dad.’

Caitlin glances over her shoulder. Her shift supervisor, Matt, is there. A short man with wispy hair and a prominent facial mole.

He pulls up a chair and just sits beside her. Offering his support, just as a presence. Suddenly, Caitlin knows she’s way out of her depth.

‘I don’t want to do it,’ the caller says. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

Don’t do it! she says, but only inside her head.

She looks into Matt’s calm eyes.

‘I have to go,’ says the man on the line. ‘I’m in the garage with the dogs. He’s coming. We’re leaving now.’

Before Caitlin can speak, he’s hung up.

He leaves behind an atmosphere on the empty line. You get it sometimes, when something really bad has happened. It spreads like a cloud.

Matt takes Caitlin to a little office upstairs. She clasps a mug between two hands, blows on the surface of her tea.

She says, ‘How can we do it? How can we not tell someone?’

‘Because it’s not our place to do that. Our promise to our callers is that everything they say is confidential.’

‘But what if he’s telling the truth? What if there’s a family out there tonight, the Daltons or whoever? And he’s going to cut them up?’

‘Cate, I understand how you feel.’

‘All the respect in the world, Matt, but I’m not sure you do.’

Matt tells her about a time he answered a call from a woman who’d taken an overdose. She just wanted someone to be there on the phone with her as she died. Matt had to respect that. So he sat and listened as she slipped away.

Years later, the suicide troubles his dreams. In his dreams he sees her clearly, although in life he never saw her face. He sees her so clearly that sometimes he thinks she’s actually a ghost. In the dreams, he asks her name. She tells him a different name every time.

‘If you break one confidence you break them all,’ he says. ‘And then being a Samaritan stands for nothing.’

Caitlin nods.

Then Matt says, ‘Would you like to speak to somebody?’

She laughs because — well, because that would be ironic.

She says no, she’s fine. And by then her shift’s over, so she puts on her coat and says goodbye to everybody.

She pops to the loo and fiddles with her make-up. Then she goes to get drunk.