She stops. Takes out a tissue and dabs her eye.
“I don’t know how you knew. What you told me . . . I don’t want to know how you found out. But after you left me, I looked under the fridge. And the ring was there. He was so thin by the end, it must have fallen off his finger and rolled there. Anyway, David, I wanted you to know. I found the ring and the vicar’s arranged for it to be put in the grave with my Eric. It means a lot to me. I’m glad you told me what you did. I’m glad . . .”
And she hurries on, up the hill. David watches her go, knowing that she isn’t angry with him anymore. But now she’s something else. She’s scared.
That afternoon, the telephone rings again.
“You don’t know me,” says the voice, and this time it’s a woman, brisk, matter-of-fact. “But I met someone and they gave me your number. They said you might be able to pass a message on.”
“Oh yes?” David can’t keep the dread out of his voice.
“My name is Samantha Davies. I’d be very grateful if you could talk to my mother. Her name is Marion and she lives at Number Eleven, St. Edward’s Square, Newport. Could you let her know that I think it’s quite wrong of her to blame Henry for what happened and that I’d be much happier if the two of them were talking again.”
Once again, the phone goes dead.
This time David doesn’t just walk into it. This time, he makes inquiries. And he discovers that there is a Marion Davies who lives at Number Eleven, St. Edward’s Square, in Newport, which is the largest town on the Isle of Wight. Mrs. Davies is a retired piano teacher. Last year, her eldest daughter, Samantha, was killed in a car accident. Her boyfriend, Henry, was driving.
David doesn’t pass on the message. He doesn’t want to get involved with someone he has never met. Anyway, how could he possibly explain to Mrs. Davies what he has heard on the phone?
The phone . . .
It begins to ring more often. With more and more messages.
“The name’s Protheroe. Derek Protheroe. I got your number from Samantha Davies. I wonder if you could get in touch with my daughter in Portsmouth. She’s seeing this young man and he’s lying to her. He’s a crook. I’m very worried about her. Could you tell her her father says . . .”
“It’s my mom. She’s missing me so much. I just want her to know that I’m not in pain anymore. I’m happy. I just wish that she could forget about me and get on with her life . . .”
“Do you think you could tell my wife that the bloody lawyer’s made a mess of the whole thing. I added a codicil to the will. I don’t suppose you know what that means but she’ll understand. It’s very important because . . .”
“Miss Fitzgerald. She lives in Eastbourne. This is her sister . . .”
On and on. After a few weeks, the phone is ringing six or seven times a day. Brothers and sisters. Husbands and wives. Sons and daughters. All wanting to get in touch.
And David doesn’t tell anyone.
He wants to tell Jill, walking home with her from school. But she’d freak out. She’d think he was crazy. And he’s afraid of losing her, his first real love. He wants to tell Jonathan Channon, his best friend. But Jonathan would only laugh. He’d think it was all a huge joke even though it doesn’t amuse David at all. And above all he wants to tell his parents. But they’re so busy, struggling to get the hotel ready for the next season. They’ve got plumbing problems, wiring problems, staff problems, and—as always—money problems. He doesn’t want to burden them with this.
But he knows. He is in communication with the dead. For some reason that he cannot even begin to understand, the Zodiac 555 has a direct line to wherever it is that lies beyond the grave. Do cell phones have lines? It doesn’t matter. The fact is that a tiny gate has somehow opened up between this world and the next. That gate is the cell phone. And as word has gotten around, more and more of the dead have been lining up to use it. To get their messages across.
“Tell my uncle . . .”
“Can you speak to my wife . . . ?”
“They have to know . . .”
Bach’s Toccata and Fugue. Every time David hears the sound, it sends a shiver through his entire body. He can’t bear it anymore. In the end he turns the telephone off and buries it at the bottom of a drawer in his bedroom, underneath his old socks. But even then he sometimes imagines he can still hear it.
Diddley-dah.
Diddley-dah-dah . . .
He has nightmares about it. He sees ghosts and skeletons, decomposing corpses. They are lining up outside his room. They want to talk to him. They wonder why he doesn’t reply.
Mark and Jane Adams get worried about their son. They notice that he’s not sleeping well. He comes down to breakfast with a pale face and rings around his eyes. One of his teachers has told them that his work at school has begun to slip. They’re worried that he might have broken up with Jill. Could he be into drugs? Like every parent, they’re quick to think the worst without actually getting anywhere near the truth.
They take him out to dinner. A little restaurant on Smuggler’s Cove where fresh crabs and lobsters are dragged out of the sea, over the sand, and onto the table. An intimate evening. Just the three of them.
They don’t ask him any direct questions. That’s the last thing you do with a teenager. Instead, they gently probe, trying to find out what’s on his mind. David doesn’t tell them anything. But toward the end of the meal, when the atmosphere is a little more relaxed, Mark Adams suddenly says, “What happened to that cell phone we gave you?”
David flinches. Neither of his parents notices.
“You haven’t used it in a while,” Mark says.
“I don’t really need it,” David says.
“I thought it would be useful.”
“Well, I see everyone anyway. I’m sorry. I don’t much like using it.”
Mark smiles. He doesn’t want to make a big deal out of it. “It’s a bit of a waste of money,” he says. “I’m paying the monthly rental.”
“Where is the phone?” his mother asks. She wonders if he’s lost it.
“In my bedroom.”
“Well, if you don’t want it, I might as well cancel the rental.”
“Yeah. Sure.” David sounds relieved. And he is.
That evening he gives the telephone back to his father and sleeps well for the first time in a week. No Bach. No dreams. It’s finally over.
One week later.
Mark Adams is sitting in his office. It’s a cozy, cluttered room at the top of the hotel, tucked into the eaves. There’s a small window. He can see the sea sparkling in the sunlight. Outside, an engineer is working on the telephone lines. The hotel has been cut off for two hours. Mark has spent the morning working on the accounts. There are bills from builders and decorators. The new microwave in the kitchen. As always, they’ve spent much more money than they’ve actually made. Not for the first time, Mark wonders if they might have to sell.
He glances down and notices the cell phone sitting on a pile of papers. He flicks it on. The battery is fully charged. He makes a mental note to himself. He ought to cancel the line rental. That’s a waste of money.
And then there’s a movement at the door and suddenly Jane is there. She’s run all the way upstairs and she pauses in the doorway, panting. She’s a short woman, a little overweight. Her dark hair hangs over her eyes.
“What is it?” Mark asks. He’s alarmed. When you’ve been married as long as he has you can sense when something is wrong. He senses it now.
“I saw it on the television,” Jane says.
“What?”
“David ...”
David is away from home. There’s a school skiing trip to France. He left this morning with Kate Evans, Jonathan Channon, everyone in his class. They flew to Lyon. A bus met them at the airport. It took them on the two-hour drive to the resort at Courcheval.
Or should have.
“There’s been an accident,” Jane explains. She’s close to tears. Not because she knows somethin
g. But because she doesn’t. “It was on the news. A bus full of schoolchildren. English schoolchildren. It was involved in a crash with a delivery van. It drove off the road. They said there were a lot of fatalities.”
“Is it David’s bus?”
“They didn’t say.”
Mark struggles to make sense. “There’ll be a hundred buses at Lyon airport,” he says. “It’s spring break, for heaven’s sake. There are schools all over the country sending kids to France.”
“But David arrived this morning. That’s when it happened.”
“Have you called the school?”
“I tried. The phones aren’t working.”
Mark glances through the window, at the engineer working outside. Then he remembers the cell phone. “We can use this,” he says.
He picks it up.
The phone rings in his hand.
Bach’s Toccata and Fugue.
Mark is surprised. He fumbles for the button and presses it.
It’s David.
“Hi, Dad,” he says. “It’s me.”
Twist Cottage
I never knew my mother. She died in a car accident the year after I was born and I was brought up, all on my own, by my dad. I had no brothers and no sisters. There were just the two of us, living in a house in Bath, which is down in the southwest, in Avon. My dad worked as a history professor at Bristol University and for ten years we had nannies or housekeepers living with us, looking after me. But by the time I was thirteen and going to a local school, we found we didn’t really need anyone anymore, so there were just the two of us. And we were happy.
My dad’s name is Andrew Taylor. He never talked about my mother but I think he must have loved her a lot because he didn’t remarry and (although he doesn’t like me to know it) he kept a photograph of her in his wallet and never went anywhere without it. He was a big, shaggy man with glasses and untidy brown hair that had just started to go gray. His clothes always looked old, even when they were brand-new, and they never fitted him very well. He was forty-five. He went to the movies a lot. He listened to classical music. And, like me, he was a big soccer fan.
The two of us always got along well, maybe because we always had our own space. We only had a small house in Bath—it was on one of the backstreets behind the antiques market—but we both had our own rooms. Dad had a small study on the ground floor, and when I was ten, he converted the attic into a play area for me. It was a little cramped with a slanting roof and only one small window but it was fine for me; somewhere private where I could go. In fact, we didn’t see much of each other during the week. He was at the university and I was at school. But on weekends we went to the movies together, did the shopping, watched TV, or kicked a soccer ball around . . . all the things that every father does with every son. Only there was no mother to share it.
We were happy. But everything changed with the coming of Louise. I suppose it had to happen in the end. My dad might be middle-aged but he was still fit and reasonably good-looking. I knew he went out with women now and then. But until Louise, none of them had ever stayed.
She was a few years younger than him. She was a mature student at Bristol University. She was studying art but she had taken history as an elective and that was how they met. The first time I met her, she’d come over to the house to pick up a book and I have to say I could see what my dad saw in her. She was a very beautiful woman, tall and slim, with dark hair, brown eyes, and a very slight French accent (her mother lived in Paris). She was fashionably dressed in a silk dress that showed off her figure perfectly. The one thing that was strange, though, was that, for a student, she didn’t seem particularly interested in either history or art. When my dad talked about some gallery he’d been to she was soon yawning (although she was careful to hide it behind a handkerchief) and whenever he asked her about her work she quickly changed the subject to something else. Even so, she stayed for tea and insisted on doing the dishes. My dad didn’t say anything after she’d gone but I could see that he was taken by her. He stood in the doorway for a long time, watching her leave.
I began to see more and more of Louise. Suddenly there were three of us going to the movies, not two. Three of us having lunch together during the weekend. And inevitably, there she was one morning when I came down to breakfast. I was old enough not to be shocked or upset that she’d stayed the night. But it was still a shock. I was happy for him but secretly sad for myself. And . . . well, for some reason, she worried me too.
My dad and I spoke about her only once. “Tell me something, Ben,” he said, one day. We were out walking, following the canal path as it wove through Bath Valley. It was something we often liked to do. “What do you think of Louise?”
“I don’t know,” I said. In a way she was perfect but maybe that was what worried me. She was almost too good to be true.
“You know, there’s never been anyone since your mother died,” he said. He stopped and looked up at the sky. It was a lovely day. The sun was shining brilliantly. “But sometimes I wonder if I ought to be on my own. After all, you’re almost fourteen. Any day now you’ll be leaving home. What would you say if Louise and I were to—”
“Dad, I just want you to be happy,” I interrupted. The conversation made me feel uncomfortable. And what else could I say?
“Yes.” He smiled at me. “Thank you, Ben. You’re a good boy. You’d have made your mother proud . . .”
And so they got married at Bath Registry Office. I was the best man and I made a speech at the lunch afterward, tied a plastic dog poo to the car and threw confetti at them as they drove away. They had a week’s honeymoon in Majorca and even that should have rung a slight alarm bell because my dad had told me that he’d really wanted to visit some of the historical towns in the South of France. But Louise had her own way and they must have had a good time because when they got back they were happy and relaxed, with deep suntans and a load of presents for me.
I suppose the marriage was a success for about three months but it all went wrong very quickly after that.
Although she agreed to come with us when we visited the new Tate Gallery in Millbank, Louise suddenly gave up her art classes. She said it bored her, and anyway, she wanted to spend more time looking after my dad. This sounded all right at the time and she may even have meant what she said. But the house got messier and messier. It was true that Dad and I had never been exactly tidy. Mrs. Jones, our old cleaning lady, was always complaining about us. But we never left dirty mugs in the bedroom, tangled hair in the sink, or crumpled clothes on the stairs. Louise did and when Mrs. Jones complained one Tuesday morning, there was a nasty argument and the next thing I knew was that Mrs. Jones had quit. Louise didn’t do any more cooking after that. All the food she ever prepared seemed to have come out of cans or out of the freezer and as my dad was a bit of a health freak, mealtimes were always a disappointment.
Of course, neither of us had expected Louise to cook and clean for us. That wasn’t the idea. My dad was really sorry she’d decided to give up her classes at the university. The trouble was that she didn’t seem to want to fit in and the slightest argument always ended with her flying into a rage, with slamming doors and tears. At heart she was a bit of a spoiled child. She always had to have her own way. Shortly after she moved in, she suddenly insisted that Dad let her have my attic room because she wanted somewhere to paint. Dad came to me very reluctantly and asked me if I’d mind and I didn’t argue because I knew it would lead to another fight and I didn’t want him to be unhappy. So that was how I lost my room.
Dad was unhappy, though, and as the first year shuddered slowly by, I could see that he was getting worse and worse. He lost weight. The last traces of brown faded out of his hair. He never laughed anymore. Louise had told him that his clothes were old-fashioned and made him look middle-aged and one day she had given the whole lot to a charity shop. Now my dad wore jeans and T-shirts that didn’t suit him and actually made him look older than he had looked before. He wasn’t allowed
to play classical music anymore either. Louise preferred jazz and most of the time the house was filled with the wail of trumpets and clarinets, fighting with the constant drone of the television, which she never seemed to turn off. And although she had loaded a few canvases and paints into my old room, she never actually produced anything.
My dad never complained about her. I suppose this was part of his character. If I’d been married to her, I’d have probably walked out by now, but he seemed to accept everything meekly. However, one afternoon toward the end of the summer, we found ourselves retracing our steps along the canal, and perhaps remembering our conversation from the year before, he turned to me and suddenly said, “I’m afraid Louise isn’t a very good mother to you.”
I shrugged. I didn’t know what to say.
“Perhaps it would have been better if I’d stayed single.” He sighed and fell silent. “Louise has asked me to sell the house,” he suddenly blurted out.
“Why?”
“She says it’s poky. She says she doesn’t like living in the town. She wants me to move more into the countryside.”
“You’re not going to, are you, Dad?”
“I don’t know. I’m thinking about it . . .”
He sounded so sad. And it should have been obvious to him, really. The marriage wasn’t working, so why not divorce her? I almost said as much but perhaps it was as well that I didn’t. For things came to a head that very night and I realized just how poisonous Louise could be.
The two of them argued quite often. At least, Louise did. Generally, my dad preferred to suffer in silence. But that night my dad got his bank statement. It seemed that Louise had bought herself a whole load of designer clothes and stuff like that. She’d spent over a thousand dollars. He didn’t shout at her but he did criticize her. And suddenly she was screaming at him. I heard the whole thing from my bedroom. It was impossible not to.