Calling Home

The coins drop, clunking into the phone box. There’s silence and then faint clicking sounds as my call is connected, followed by the familiar ringing tone. In my father’s house, some 1200 miles away, all of his three phones are ringing: upstairs and downstairs and out in the double-garage and workshop. I cringe at the thought: I have not spoken to my father in some three years. It’s funny the way parents place all their own abandoned hopes and desolated dreams onto their children, the things that they themselves didn’t attain when at the same age.
Three rings, four. Father will be scrambling in from tending the garden, turning off the sprinklers, putting down his rake, and wiping the dirt from his boots on the rough and tattered mat. Five rings, six. He’ll be methodically washing his hands, rolling them under the faucet of the downstairs washbasin - the smell of Solvol spreading its dim clean cheer. Two hours behind, it must be about midday there now as father dries his hands on the washroom towel. Then smoothing his silvered hair, he will be walking purposefully to the phone. Seven, eight rings. Then a click and a machine whirring, echoing down the line’s scratchy connection. ‘I am sorry but I can’t come to the phone right now. If you leave your name, number and a short message, I will return your call as soon as I can.’
My attention wavers over the Telstra advertisement mounted over the phone set. A new calling card is available: ‘Keep in touch with friends & family with Telstra’s easy-save option. An easy way to keep warm this winter’. Someone has taken a marker pen and added a moustache and goatee to the smiling woman in the photo, who is standing in a phone box, around which is superimposed a large fireplace replete with an antique hearth and grill. Above that someone has spray-painted over Telstra’s logo with the words: ‘Fuck Off and Die’. The last letters ‘i’ and ‘e’ don’t fit on the frame and they have dripped and run over the window of the phone box like rude uninvited guests.
The answering message ends and there is a shrill beep. As I hang up the phone, I can hear a voice down the end, whispering in static through the receiver: ‘Hello? Hello? Is anyone there? Is anyone there? Hello?’ I can’t be sure. I cut it off seconds later by jamming the receiver down on its cradle. I lift it back off again and then jam the phone down again and again, violently, until the thing comes away in my hands. Plastic splinters flying about the little claustrophobic booth. I jam it down repeatedly until just the metal cabling hangs limply from the box: frayed colourful wires, like nerves trying to move a limb that is no longer there; a phantom muscle movement. I kick the booth door open and walk quickly back to my apartment in the projects.

Image sourced from: http://www.clubvw.org.au/images/phone_box.jpg