Phone Read online

PHONE

  Andrew Wheeler

  Text Copyright © 2012 Andrew Wheeler

  All Rights Reserved

  Malfoy’s mobile rang while he was in a meeting. He made his excuses, fumbled it out of his pocket and silenced it, then slid it with dismissive irritation onto the conference table. His assistant rolled his eyes and snorted unconvincingly, glancing nervously across the table at the businessman sitting diagonally across from them. Whatever persuasive spell Malfoy hoped he had been weaving was broken. The man adjusted his tie, looked at his watch and stood up.

  "I think we’re done here, gentlemen, in any case."

  "You will consider our offer?" asked Malfoy, stressing the second word, standing back from the whiteboard.

  "Not at that price, and not on those terms. No."

  Malfoy stifled the urge to curse, and glared accusingly at his phone. The two men shook hands formally and nodded politely to their deputies as a secretary escorted the guests from the conference room. The atmosphere was cold and adversarial.

  "Shit," Malfoy said after the visitors had gone. He slumped into his chair and speed dialled his secretary.

  "I thought you were going to divert my calls?" he snapped.

  "I did," she replied, and then paused. "Did you blow it?"

  He hung up, and absently checked his phone log while his assistant poured them both a scotch and stared at a particularly vile piece of modern sculpture in the corner of the room. Malfoy picked his nose and sighed. There was no record of any incoming calls or messages after the meeting had begun.

  "Maybe it was an alarm?" offered his assistant, peering over at him from behind the grotesque statue.

  Malfoy checked. It wasn’t. "Fuck it," he said, "and what is that bloody thing?"

  His phone rang that night when he was about ten strokes from coming inside some girl that he’d picked up at a wine bar, which completely threw him. He was drunk and distracted, and poking away fairly ineffectually in any case. Every time he thrust inside her she said, "Er." He launched the mobile across the room in frustration and lost his erection, but he didn’t really care enough to be embarrassed. He watched the business news on cable and they ate cold pizza and drank Chablis until she got bored and left.

  The following morning the phone interrupted an important international call with an incoming error message, which crashed the link. Two hours later it rang again while he was hailing a cab to take him to the airport. He shifted his briefcase to his other hand to reach into his pocket for the phone, the cab sped past, and he missed his flight.

  "You’ve got to be fucking kidding me," he growled.

  "You were late anyway," accused his secretary when he blustered back into the office to call Los Angeles and reschedule the meeting. He took off his tie and made an appointment to have lunch with his brother.

  "Looks fine," said his brother, thumbing his way through the log and menus. "Nice model."

  "Who?" asked Malfoy, looking around.

  "The phone, you dick. Concentrate."

  Malfoy munched dejectedly on his salad.

  "You look stressed. Take some time off," said his brother when they were leaving. "Go see your kids."

  His assistant reinstalled the phone’s software for him after lunch, but it rang twice during that afternoon’s finance committee meeting. "Fuck," said Malfoy.

  "You seem distracted," stated the VP of the acquisitions division.

  "No shit," replied Malfoy.

  "Aren’t you supposed to be in London?" asked someone else.

  The phone rang twice that night while he was trying to get to sleep, so he took the battery out. He didn’t have a simple alarm clock to set and forgot about it anyway, and was late for work. He missed an appointment with a sensitive client.

  "Are you calling me all the time?" he asked his ex-wife when he rang her that afternoon.

  "Why would I do that?" she said, and sounded bored. "Interrupt you banging some blond?"

  "How could you know that?" he replied defensively.

  "Aren’t they always? Reception’s fine, obviously. Try using it to call your kids."

  A week later he gave up, cancelled two appointments, and took it back to the shop.

  "Need a new phone, sir?" inquired the salesman brightly.

  "It is new," groaned Malfoy. "I’m a busy man. Give me the best."

  "Well, what you have is top of the line."

  "It’s got a glitch," interrupted Malfoy.

  "What sort of glitch?"

  "It rings."

  "Ah."

  "All the time."

  "You did say you were a busy man. This model here, however..."

  As soon as Malfoy clicked the SIM card and battery into the new purchase it rang. He smiled weakly at the salesman and answered it. The line was dead. He passed it back to the salesman, who looked at it and said, "Unknown caller. Not unusual."

  "It says that?" queried Malfoy, looking at the new phone. "That’s an improvement."

  "Latest model," said the salesman proudly, and swiped Malfoy’s credit card.

  His secretary blew him a kiss on his return. "You lost the account."

  "Which one?" he asked mournfully.

  "Smart. Both of them, actually."

  He closed the door of his office behind him and poured himself a scotch, then another one. He jabbed the redial button on Unknown Caller, which didn’t work. Then he called the helpdesk of his service provider and barked at some poor guy in India who said that they couldn’t trace an unknown call.

  "I’ve got a friend at the CIA," said his brother when Malfoy called him. "Give me your details."

  He poured another drink while he waited, then his brother called back to say that his friend could find no untraced, unlogged, unknown, or unaccounted-for calls.

  Malfoy said, "Un-fucking-believable."

  He called the phone company and cancelled his subscription, then left the office to buy a SIM card with a new phone number from a different provider.

  "Probably just a crank caller," said the pimply youth who served him, when Malfoy explained why he was changing companies.

  "But at least you get calls," offered the boy sadly. "No one ever calls me."

  Malfoy peered around the shop while the kid copied the contacts and messages from the phone to the new SIM card.

  "You sell alarm clocks?" Malfoy asked.

  He met his brother again for lunch in the bar, ordered another scotch, and sent a group text with his new phone number to his business contacts.

  "You look like shit," said his brother.

  "Fuck off," said Malfoy.

  The phone rang. Malfoy looked at it and groaned.

  "You answer it," he suggested.

  "Some weird hissing noise, very faint," said his brother, listening carefully. "Bad reception, that’s all. Maybe someone’s calling you from Belgium."

  "Belgium? Why Belgium?" asked Malfoy. "I don’t know anybody in Belgium."

  He thought for a moment, and then said, "I don’t know anybody anywhere. What’s happened to my life?"

  He ordered another scotch, called some girl, and hugged his brother as they were leaving.

  "You won’t be able to get it up," teased his brother, "you’re drunk."

  "Never a problem," lied Malfoy.

  He couldn’t get it up. He’d only just managed to push it in with his fingers and his phone had rung twice. She’d laughed conspiratorially while he was doing it and he pretended it was all good fun, but this time he was deeply ashamed, especially when she had to get herself off. As she was leaving he thought of asking for her phone number, but the look on her face was not encouraging. Then his phone rang again and he said, "Bugger it," and stomped off to the bathroom. He stared out of his penthouse window for a long time, his fingers twitching nervously. H
e ran through a mental list of all the business rivals and enemies who would have motive to stalk him, but the process left him even more troubled by the conviction that it wasn’t any of them. He couldn’t explain the reasoning, but something in him seemed to be unravelling, and he felt like he didn’t have much time.

  "Try drinking less," said his assistant the next day, reinstalling the software again and running a virus scan. The phone crashed a call to London that afternoon, rang during a difficult presentation to the PR team, and deleted an incoming mail with important sales figures from an affiliate in Geneva. His doctor prescribed him sleeping pills, anti-depressants, and Viagra.

  Four days later, catatonic, high, and horny, Malfoy tripped over a kerb when the phone rang and collapsed, ramming his erection into the pavement and breaking his nose. He was knocked unconscious, or simply gave up and surrendered, and when he woke up a few hours later in the hospital he realised that his briefcase and his wallet had been stolen. But not his phone. The expensive leather briefcase had held documents outlining that financial year’s strategies and hostile takeover targets. He was sacked.

  "Tough shit," commented his secretary when he cleaned out his desk.

  Malfoy got drunk for a week, networked half-heatedly for another, doubled his dosage of sleeping medication, and then slept through the alarm for the only decent job interview he’d been offered. He shouted drunken obscenities at former colleagues in the wine bar and was thrown out for groping the bar maid. A fortnight later he gave up the lease on his expensive downtown apartment and accepted a job as VP of a national telephone sales firm based in an arid industrial park on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona.

  The phone rang when he turned it on after landing. He blubbered pathetically, and was consequently taken aside by officers who searched his bag and person for drugs.

  "That’s a lot of sleeping pills," remarked one officer.

  "Can’t sleep," replied Malfoy grumpily.

  "Lot of Viagra, too," smirked another.

  "Can’t get it up."

  "And anti-depressants."

  "It’s fucking Phoenix."

  He showed them his doctor’s prescriptions and they let him leave.

  He rented a rundown loft with rattling air conditioning, but didn’t unpack his bags. He bought a few simple pieces of furniture, ate take-out, and slept on a mattress on the floor. In the weeks that followed the phone rang regularly. He turned it off at night and tried his best to ignore it, but became nervous, jittery, and uncertain at work. Some mornings he was late and forgot to shave. He went on a few dates with a lovely lady who had luxurious chestnut hair, but didn’t try to sleep with her. He drank too much. When his young secretary heard about his problem one hung-over morning, she thought it was cool and offered to swap personal phones for a week, and reroute his own calls through the company switchboard. He wandered around town with her pink, pimped, and plastic piece of shit for a week.

  "Any calls?" he’d ask her suspiciously each morning.

  "Nope," she’d reply, but he’d get calls from Mixie about going shopping, and the other silent ones, so at the end of the week they swapped back.

  "Mixie hasn’t rung me all week," she moaned.

  He had his number forwarded to a secretarial service, which intercepted and answered all calls to his number, without exception. But his phone still rang.

  Three days later his brother called.

  "Where the hell are you?"

  "Arizona."

  "How’s the phone?"

  Malfoy hung up. It rang again immediately and he answered it without thinking or checking the caller ID as he usually did. The line was silent.

  "Please," he begged. "Leave me alone."

  The next day at work his hands were shaking. His phone was on silent, but vibrated and buzzed across the cheap glass table and onto the floor at his first important management presentation.

  "Our third quarter objectives should be - fucking god damn it!" he shouted, and threw his pencil across the room. It narrowly missed the majority shareholder. There was uproar.

  He quit that afternoon and flew to Alaska the next morning. He abandoned his few belongings at the airport and threw the phone into the nearest rubbish bin. He spent two days in a cheap Anchorage hotel waiting for the last of his New York savings to be wired through, then bought a car, drove north, and leased a cabin in the woods beside a lake. Ten days later, hungry and bewildered, he drove through the snow to the nearest town and got drunk. He bought Bobcat Willis a beer.

  "Aliens," said Willis. "Coulda been aliens."

  He sucked his beer and belched.

  "Gotta be aliens," he decided, trying to remember a movie he’d seen. "Like, they’re tryin’ to contact you. Only you not hearing ‘em. Or something."

  Malfoy looked at him, and was silent.

  "Bullshit," he said finally. He wanted to cry.

  "Gotta better idea?"

  "No."

  "Bugger it then. Drink up."

  Later, when Bobcat had disappeared into the bathroom to throw up, Malfoy staggered across the road in the evening gloom to the supermarket. He bought a stack of frozen pizzas, four bottles of cheap scotch, a packet of cigarettes, and a crate of beer. Then he said, "Fuck," and bought a cheap prepaid mobile phone at the counter on the way out. He drove back to his cabin, drank two beers, ate half a pizza, and smoked a cigarette sitting on the porch watching the moon rise beyond the glittering snow-capped mountains. The view was breath taking, and stars reached across the sky like a chain of precious jewels. He was falling away from the world.

  "I’m done," said Malfoy softly. "I want to come home now."

  He spun the phone over and over in his hand then turned it on. The simple LED display and the numpad backlight blinked on. Then he picked up a large rock, put the phone on the ground, and when it rang he smashed it to pieces.