Lillian

I didn't realise when I woke up this morning that I was going to write a spooky story in its entirety, nor quite what it was going to be about (apart from an unnerving memory from my childhood about a wrong number and a light in a haunted house). Then I remembered today was Halloween, so I thought: Why not post it here? This one is just for paid subscribers (there's a free post coming in a couple of days) but remember that for a minimum of £2 per month (or £20 per year) you can get access to everything I post (including these two other recent spooky stories) and my entire archive.

Today, as we are all only too aware, a ringing phone is invariably something to hide from. Who, of our friends, actually calls us any more, unless it is to convey bad news? As for the other people who use the phone, unscheduled, to speak to us, what do they fundamentally boil down to? Scammers, digital rogues and - arguably more dreadful still - strangers who wish to encourage us to fill in some form of paperwork. Soon, it occurs to me, I and all the individuals I have known and loved will be dead, and there will be nobody left who remembers the time when a ringing phone was something to run ecstatically towards… something, even, to fight with close family members for the privilege of reaching first.

When I was a child, being raised my grandma Lillian, the two of us never technically came to blows in our efforts to beat one another to the telephone, but I will not sugarcoat my recollections of life of that time and pretend that, where the phone was concerned, we did not edge perilously close to animalistic violence on a number of occasions. I was renowned as the third best sprinter in school and my bedroom was a full four yards closer to the phone socket than Lillian’s but, even so, I knew that, once that healthy analogue bell began to trill, my best efforts to reach its source before her would always be futile. When I fumble for my most enduring mental picture of Lillian, in her prime, at around the time of her 60th birthday, it is Phone Lillian that wins through, rather than, say, Baking Lillian or Pressed Flower Lillian or Compost Lillian: Lillian in mid-stride across the hallway of our small cottage, skilfully ducking roof beams, with a luminous anticipatory smile on her face as she wonders who will be waiting on the other end of the line this time: her best friend Mindy Bagthorpe, from Breadsall, with more gossip about the new couple who have cohabited, out of wedlock, in the converted piggery behind Old Staythorpe’s turf farm, or Tutminster, the woodsman, with news of an imminent delivery of his most pungent and well-seasoned ash.

Mindy Bagthorpe, of course, had been at the hub of events from Day One, joining the two of us, along with Mr and Mrs Hendrickson from number 32, for what Lillian called her “little phone party” on the glorious June day in 1981 that the phone company came over to install the line. I was six, these were the innocent days long before caller ID, the nationwide paranoia of 1471 and my reductive concept of the telephone as a device primarily designed to facilitate flirtations with members of the opposite sex, and I was learning more of life and its many dizzying facts almost hourly. The night of that party I couldn’t sleep for sheer excitement and, around midnight, ventured downstairs to mix myself a glass of underdiluted budget brand lime squash. Mindy Bagthorpe, who I hadn’t initially noticed was still awake, on an armchair, sipping from a tankard of brandy seasoned with soluble compound analgesics and reading James Joyce’s A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man by candlelight, apprehended me and insisted I made a window in my schedule for a "bedtime story". I understood little of the narrative that ensued, but that, as Mindy Bagthorpe explained, was because I was at a natural disadvantage, and I needn’t worry my little head about it. The only way to read Joyce’s books, she continued, was precisely as they had been written: blind drunk.