booth. Stephanie took a good look around; other than a few Joshua tree’s and the odd cactus there was no sign of life. Nothing moved. The nearest town of any size was Baker, over thirty miles away. Suddenly she felt isolated, alone, scared.
‘Is it safe?’ she asked her husband in a hushed voice.
‘Why wouldn’t it be?’ he snorted back.
As soon as he cut the engine they heard it, the telephone, it was ringing.
‘You hear that?’ George asked her. He opened the car-door and jumped out.
Stephanie thought he looked like an over-excited schoolboy on Christmas morning as he waddled off towards the booth. She opened her own door and jumped down. It was nearly five o’clock in the afternoon now and some of the heat had gone out of the day, there was a refreshing breeze blowing in from the west though the temperature was still up in the high seventies.
George was already in animated conversation by the time she opened the concertina door and squeezed into the kiosk beside him. ‘Got a bunch of guys from up in the north of England,’ he told her , cupping the receiver with his hand, Have a word.’ He thrust the handset in her direction.
‘Uh, hello...,’ she said uncertainly into the phone.
‘Hi,’a voice crackled back down the line, ‘I’m John, who’s this?’
‘Stephanie.’
‘Oh. hi Stephanie, tell me, what’s the weather like out there?’
And so they’d chatted for a while and it had been fun. It transpired that there were four of them: John, Ian, Linda and David. They’d just come back from a night out at the ‘pub’ and one of them had had this wild idea to call up this phone box he’d heard about in California.
Eventually John said that the call was costing him a fortune and he’d have to hang up, so they said their goodbyes and that was that.
George went outside to smoke a cigarette but she lingered on inside the booth for a few moments. There was something odd about it. The telephone looked just as new as the booth itself. There were no scratches around the coin slot, no finger-marks on the dial. The shiny black handset was unmarked. She lifted one of the directories from its holder, it was pristine, not so much as a turned up corner. And it was clean in here too, spotless in fact. There wasn’t so much as a single grain of sand or speck of dust or dead bug to be seen anywhere. It seemed impossible to believe, she thought, that the phone booth had stood here for more than sixty-years, it looked like it had been put there only that morning.
Suddenly she felt weirded out by it all. It all seemed so strange, so freaky, she felt she had to get out, she couldn’t breath.
She pulled frantically at the door, suddenly she felt certain that it wouldn’t open. That it would be stuck. That she’d be trapped here and that George would just laugh at her. That he’d climb back into the car and drive away leaving her here. Perhaps that had been his plan all the while. Perhaps that was why he’d dragged her all the way out here in the first place.
But the door slid smoothly back on its runners. She rushed out into the open, almost colliding head-on with her husband as she did so.
‘This is great, isn’t it?’ said George as he pushed past her into the phone box.
She watched him pick up the handset and deposit some quarters, then he dialled a number and waited. She guessed that he’d be calling one of his good-for-nothing beer-swilling buddies back home.
‘Tommy?’ he said into the phone a few seconds later, ‘George! Yeah... yeah.... Guess where I am, yeah... yeah...’
‘Jesus Christ!’ she thought.
She went back to the Land Cruiser, opened the passenger-side door, and fished around in the glove-box for her book. Once she’d found it she boosted herself up and sat with her legs dangling out of the car, the breeze felt deliciously cool against her bare arms and legs. It was a Stephen King novel. She loved King’s writing, she was his ‘number one fan’ in fact, she thought with a wry smile. She soon became engrossed in the story, so much so that at first she didn’t notice when the phone started ringing again.
George let out a little yelp and that was what got her attention. She looked up from her book just in time to see him running excitedly towards the booth, she quickly jumped down from the car and followed.
A few moments later they were both once more wedged into the tiny kiosk. The caller this time was a woman named Astrid, she was calling from Germany. Unfortunately her grasp of English was somewhat limited and, since neither Stephanie nor her husband knew any Deutsch, they were unable to establish much of a rapport. The conversation petered out after only a few minutes and they hung up the phone having gleaned little, other than that it was currently raining in Munich.
Over the next couple of hours they took about a dozen more calls, most of them domestic (Albuquerque, NM; Portland, ME; St Louis, MO and Seattle, WA) but some from more distant and exotic sounding locations, places such as Kyoto and Lisbon and Bordeaux and Perth.
It had been fun, sure, a few of the callers had been interesting or funny, though most had had little to say. But by seven o’clock she’d tired of it, not least because the last call she’d taken, a creepy sounding guy from Liverpool, had started by asking her if it was hot ‘out there in the desert’ and had quickly moved on to asking her what she was wearing and if she was going to need to strip off. After that she’d retired to the car to read her book and listen to her iPod.
Georges enthusiasm seemed undiminished however, he remained outside. She could see him now through the wind-shield, pacing back and forth, chain smoking, waiting for the next call.
It was getting dark out there now and the temperature had dropped quite a bit too. She was wearing her fleece jacket inside the Land Cruiser and was reading by the dome-light. She really couldn’t understand what they were doing here now, it was getting late and they still had a long drive ahead of them. What was George thinking of? Why was he so fascinated by that damn booth? She still thought there was something odd about it, in fact she thought it was downright weird.
The lights in the phone booth had also come on. The blue and white Pacific Bell logo above the door glowed weakly through the gathering gloom and the square concrete floor was harshly illuminated by the white fluorescent-tubes in the ceiling. She watched the bugs batting against the glass sides of the booth and thought again about how unnaturally clean it had seemed to her when they’d arrived that afternoon. Not a dead bug in sight.
And now that she thought of it here was another strange thing, what exactly was powering those lights? Surely they hadn’t run a cable all the way out here. ‘Weird!’ she thought again and a small shudder ran down her spine.
‘Numb bitch!’ thought George as he watched her sitting in the car reading her book. He could see she had her earphones on, she was probably listening to that gay-boy music she liked, Communards or Simply Red, one of those. He couldn’t stand that shit. She’d been a pain in the ass all afternoon, bitching and moaning about this and that, he wished he’d left the fucking bitch back home in Modesto.
He’d enjoyed taking the calls though. He thought it was pretty cool driving all the way out here and talking to these interesting folks from all over the world. He’d have a few tales to tell to his buddies down a Fat Joe’s tomorrow evening.
He took another draw on his cigarette and glanced at his watch , 19:13, he supposed they’d have to be getting back soon. If truth be told he’d intended to leave over an hour ago. The only thing keeping him here now was that bitch of a wife of his. He knew she was just dying to get out of here so he was hanging on a bit, just to kinda punish her for spoiling what would otherwise have been a fine day. Also of course he knew that once he got back in the car he’d have to listen to her goddamn bellyaching all the way back home.
Just one more call he’d decided, he’d just answer one more then they’d head back. It was just his luck though that since he’d made that decision, over thirty minutes ago now, the freaking calls had dried up. He was determined though, bloody-minded, he wasn’t leaving until he’d taken o
ne more call. Let the bitch wait!
‘Perhaps I should just leave cunt here,’ he mused. The idea certainly appealed to him. He pictured it in his minds-eye: he’d yank her from the car by her hair and give her a slap or two, then he’d climb behind the wheel, hit the central locking and, with a little wave, he’d drive off into the distance.’Bye-bye Stephanie, have fun, hope the tarantulas don’t bite.’
He imagined watching the tears roll down her pasty fat face as she hammered on the windows begging him to let her back in, pleading with him not to go and leave her here. He imagined the dawning look of horror and disbelief in her eyes as he fired-up the Land Cruiser and slowly turned it around. He imagined watching her in the rear-view mirror, a pathetic figure, down on her knees and crying in the dirt, dwindling into the distance as he sped away.
Of course he knew he couldn’t really leave her, not yet anyway. There was the money to consider. The stupid cow had two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand big ones stashed away in her private account and he was determined to find a way of getting his hands on it. Once he did though, man she was history. He could go and shack-up with Liz then.
Liz worked behind the bar at Fat Joe’s, his favourite local drinking establishment back home in Modesto. They’d been seeing each other for a couple of years now and Liz was