2: Hello Mum.

Nick realised that the phone was ringing. He was completely thawed out by now; there was feeling in every extremity bar one; his thumb was clenched between the pages of the book that had clamped shut and held his throbbing digit in a vise-like grip. Using his other hand, he lifted the receiver of the white bedside phone.

He knew who it was. It had become almost routine.

“Why do you keep ringing me? Every day you ring me up. It doesn’t make sense: It would be different if we were on speaking terms, but you’re not even talking to me.
It’s not that I mind you not talking to me: I honestly couldn’t care less if you never spoke to me again.
Mother? Are you there? Speak to me! Say something!”

“-“

“All right don’t then. You can take a vow of silence and go to live in a Trappist convent on the Isle of Arran as far as I’m concerned!”
Nick felt sure that she would somehow find one with a phone in every cell.
“Don’t you even realise it’s peak rate?”
What do I care anyway – he thought to himself. It’s her money. He might as well make the best of it.
“Well, this is nice. How are you? What a cold morning. This is the coldest July on record. How’s life at the DHSS? You won’t tell me so I don’t know why I ask. I’m fine, wide awake now thanks very much, don’t mention it. My thumb is still asleep, however.”
He wished that he could join it and almost succeeded in doing so, rousing himself with a start as his head slid from the receiver.
“Hello? Hello? Hello? Are you there? Mum? Hello? Are you still there?”
His mother continued the same old dumb protest. Nick knew that she had only rung in the first place in order to hang up on him. He decided to provoke her into doing it, it was the only way to end the call; if he hung up on her she would ring him straight back.
“I suppose you’re hoping that one day you will ring up and find that I have gone,” he taunted.
He remembered the last communication her had received from her; a cutting from the Glasgow Property News advertising cheap rented accommodation. It was anonymous but it had the imprint of her unmistakable style all over it. Only she was capable of serving an eviction notice of such Jesuitical subtlety. She had tried before to put ideas into his head in this manner. It used to be the jobs section of the local paper which appeared without comment in his bedroom every week, and before that it had been little notes saying “Please please PLEASE tidy the bathroom,” or some other message of a postulant or supplicatory nature.
“Tell me, mother, do you pray for my immortal soul, or do you leave little notes for God to find lying around the church?”

He awaited the click that signalled her furious cessation of their one-sided call. Nothing came.
“Thanks for the cutting, by the way,” he went on. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I haven’t got around to moving up to Glasgow yet. You know how it is; it’s impossible to get anything done at the weekend and I’m too busy all week.”
He thought he heard a click, but he couldn’t be sure.
“Hello? Are you still there?”
It’s not easy having a proper conversation when one of the participants remains completely silent throughout. Nick’s mother was very good at it, considering silence was not her first language.
On the other hand, thought Nick, perhaps I have gone deaf. That would explain the one-sided nature of their talks. No, it can’t be that, - he reasoned, I distinctly heard the phone ringing. Unless of course I had dreamed that it was ringing.
“Oh mother, speak to me! Am I condemned to a life of answering non-ringing telephones? Are you there at all? Say something, some touching expression of maternal love, call me a lazy selfish slob, something to let me know you’re there, just a word.”

He resolved that in future he would not even answer the phone at all. He decided it would be better to ignore it rather than draw attention to himself by pouncing on the silent receiver.

It was hard enough finding the phone in his mother’s bedroom anyway; it was like looking for a fridge in a blizzard, and just as pointless. It made interior decoration much easier, sticking to white for everything – white louvred cupboards, white bedspread, white bedside table, against which the white telephone was perfectly camouflaged. What this obsessive virginal cleanliness indicated about her personality, Nick wasn’t sure, but it made finding things very difficult.

Nick was telling his mother about an invaluable little paperback that would help him ignore the phone, written by a Frenchman called Hiroute, the famous chef de trompe l’oreille recently elevated to the French Academy, called How to Sham Deafness.

Once the techniques of selective or tactical deafness have been mastered one is never again distressed by the unsolicited attentions of Old Bores, ticket inspectors or people asking you to help them push their car. This important book will change your life – it will no doubt say on the blurb when our hide-bound publishers (who seem to have made ‘Shamming Catelepsy’ their principal study) decide to translate it.

Nick would have offered to do it himself but he was unable, since he had already enrol
led in Hiroute’s Correspondence Course ‘How to Pretend Ignorance of the French Language.’ He was making such great progress, he understood less and less. It was a tribute to the genius of Hiroute that the previous month’s lesson had been utterly impenetrable. The next month’s lesson had failed to arrive altogether – Nick kept wondering if it was another Hiroutean jest or the Post Office playing up.

Despite deploying Hiroute’s techniques on his mother’s earpiece, Nick had failed to provoke the click that meant he could go back to sleep. He had also failed to bring out his mother’s potential garrulity. She was as unforgivingly taciturn as ever. He decided that the best course would be a polite brush-off.
“So this will be the last of our little chats. I’ll miss them in a way. It’s good to hear from distant relatives, perhaps we can keep in contact by sending each other blank pieces of paper.”

That colourless and helpless object; Nick’s brain, so vulnerable on awakening, like a soft creature newly emergent from the egg, had lost all hope of regaining equipoise. He replaced the receiver and realised that he was already late for work. The alarm radio had not gone off, and now it was flashing 00:00 at him. He switched it onto “radio” and from the fact that he heard the morning service deduced that it was after ten forty-five.

The cock radio was his mothers, but he preferred to have it switched to “buzzer”. When he first began using it he found that he would feel unaccountably depressed. The news came on while he was still half asleep and was affecting his semi-conscious mind with descriptions of earthquakes and aircrashes, which mingled with his dreams leaving him emotionally exhausted for the rest of the day. When he had stopped inflicting this torture on himself every morning the cure had been instantaneous.

Now his mother had set him back months; her call had produced the same depressing effect as the Today Programme without making a sound. His mind was trashed, filled with anger and garbage; the whole day was trashed. He felt like the baby turtle on his epic crawl from the nest to the sea, harassed by a hungry cormorant.

He got out of bed, convinced that he was not going to enjoy the day, and the book, releasing his thumb like a pressed flower, fell to the floor causing a muffled shockwave to startle the drowsy inhabitants of the room below.