Back in the flat I conducted a brief, futile search around the hall. I had to have been dreaming: it was the only explanation.
I was shaken from my gnawing displeasure by the phone. I went to go and get it, but to my dismay it rang off. I picked it up and heard the dialing tone.
Losing my temper, I threw the receiver back at its cradle. It bounced off and I had to control myself and reposition it more carefully.
As I swayed through the Piccadilly Line tunnels on my way to work, I hoped for his sake that Egerton wouldn’t come near me today. The mood I was in, I was liable to twist his unpleasant cheap polyester tie around his furry, animal neck until he choked to death. That way the day, which had started extremely badly, would yield some small pleasure.
The train stopped in the tunnel before King’s Cross and the bank clerk in the Oxford Street suit behind me huffed and tutted. I squared my shoulders against his pathetic noises. Such irritability on the part of other passengers was always worse than the wait for the train to go again. I told myself that if he tutted again I would turn round and ask him to be quiet, but mercifully the train moved.
“Good morning to you,” Egerton practically shouted as I stepped into the office. He was striding past the door, clicking his fingers purposefully as if they were part of the dynamo which powered his ceaseless activity. He always placed stress on the you. Perhaps he thought because he hadn’t yet been smacked in the mouth or taken out by precision bombing that people liked him and his studied eccentricity. They didn’t.
I rang Melanie but she said she couldn’t talk—too busy. We said goodbye. “I’ll ring you later,” I said, but she hung up and I didn’t know if she’d heard me or not. So I rang her back.
“Melanie,” I began.
“Alex. I’m busy.” She sounded pissed off.
“Are you all right?” I asked anxiously.
“Will you stop asking if I’m all right?” She was pissed off.
“Sorry. Look, I only wanted to make sure you’re all right.”
“I’m busy. I’ve got to go.”
Again she hung up. I hated being hung up on, but I couldn’t possibly ring her again. So I waited. Five minutes. Then pressed redial. This is stupid, part of my mind told me. I knew that was right. It was stupid, destructive, doomed to failure. But I couldn’t leave the phone alone when it sat there, saying, go on, use me. Phone her back. You might as well.
“It’s me,” I said quickly. “Listen, don’t hang up. I just want to apologize…”
She hung up.
I had to get up and walk around to try and calm down. But Egerton’s animated hand movements between keyboard and phone, and chin and coffee cup, just put me more on edge. I left the office and walked round the block, wondering what I could do about Melanie. I couldn’t leave things the way they were. I’d upset her and I needed to let her know I was sorry. It wasn’t just for my own peace of mind. I needed to know she wasn’t angry with me. Maybe it was just for my own peace of mind. But if she was still angry with me, ringing her again would only make her angrier.
When I got back to the office I rang a mutual friend, Steve.
“She’s all right, Alex,” was Steve’s opinion. Then the conversation veered away from Melanie and I formed the impression that Steve knew something he wasn’t telling. Something about Melanie.
“Is everything all right, I mean, does she still fancy me?”
“Of course she fancies you,” Steve said before once more steering the conversation into some gloomy sidetrack that seemed to lead nowhere. I allowed myself to be drawn along, as the feeling grew inside me that Steve had placed a particular emphasis on the word fancy, suggesting that yes she still fancied me but that was all and the least of my worries. I wanted to ask him if she still loved me but didn’t dare in case the answer was either no or an awkward silence.
When I got home I rang Holly, one of Melanie’s friends whom I knew well enough to chat to, and asked her if she thought Melanie still cared for me.
“Of course Mel cares for you,” Holly tried to reassure me. I was sure she stressed the verb and once more I was too cowardly to use the word love.
Now I began to convince myself that Steve and Holly were on the same track: they both knew the same thing about Melanie. Maybe it was that she still found me attractive and was fond of me but no longer loved me. Or that she had met someone else or that she had come out. Whatever it was, I worked myself into such a state of anxiety that when the phone rang I found myself virtually paralyzed. I tried to extricate an arm—they were folded around my body and I was rocking gently on the chair—but couldn’t and the effort dragged me off the chair and on to the floor.
Meanwhile the phone rang off after only one or two rings.
Who was trying to contact me? If I managed to answer, would a familiar voice soothe me and calm my fears or would some malicious interloper take delight in confirming my paranoid fears? I had a strong feeling that the world wasn’t as simple as I had always imagined. Not all lives proceeded at the same pace and there were different tracks.
It seemed to me that someone was trying to get through to me, but something about me or my flat was blocking them. Something needed to change, but I didn’t know what.
The phone rang while I was cleaning my teeth. I thought I would just carry on because it would ring off after one ring and I wouldn’t get to it. But it continued to ring and I still brushed.
It rang a third time.
I dropped the brush in the bowl and ran through to the other room, reaching for the phone. But it had fallen silent. I picked up the receiver and listened to the dialing tone for a moment.
I drifted off to sleep determined to catch the postman out in the morning. As soon as I heard the alarm I reached across and silenced it, then slid out of bed. I stood in the cold kitchen while the kettle heated up, and drank my coffee looking out of the sloping skylight, through which I could see only sky. The dawn was a gentle clash of violets and oranges. The coffee in my cup went down slowly. At quarter to eight I moved into the hall and took up a position two meters from the front door. If the postman came, if the letter box was lifted, if a delivery was made, I would see it. There would be no question that I wasn’t fully awake. I squatted and waited, patient in the pursuit of my objective. Nothing happened. I heard someone downstairs lock their door and leave the building. I wondered about Melanie without taking my eyes off the letter box. Did she love me? What would she say in her letter if one should arrive? That she loved me and I should stop worrying or that I had been right all along and she didn’t love me at all?
My haunches tingled with pins and needles then went numb. Straining my ears for sounds with which the postman might betray his approach, I began to notice a hum in the flat. Electrical appliances, storage heaters, the immersion, all would no doubt contribute, but it seemed as if the flat itself were alive and trying to tell me something. It was the first time I had sat and listened so intently. Normally I played a compact disk or boiled a kettle, switched channels or ran a bath. At night when I lay still, I covered my ears with the duvet.
Now, however, for the first time, I was listening to the flat.
I thought that maybe it was telling me not to take my eyes off the letter box. But I couldn’t live like this—watching the letter box every morning.
The humming seemed to acquire a rhythm, a beat, like a clock, as if my flat was in tune with the universe, a quartz clock. The flat was part of the great design. I felt it protecting me, like a mother or the mother’s womb itself. I watched the door. The flat hummed. It felt completely right.