The Red Telephone Box

He had the number on the back of his hand. She had written it there herself, under the orange glow of a streetlamp. All he had to do was make the call. The Red Telephone Box 

Transcript

Telling Tales

The Red Telephone Box

One event, two moments in time

Short Story by Jeff Price

By the time seven o'clock came, a thin drizzle of rain had begun to hang over the estate of council houses Jack called home. He could see the red telephone box from the top of the street. Jack had two questions on his mind: was there a queue, and if there wasn't, was it working? Thankfully, the rain had put off almost everyone except someone in a dark jacket who he could hear shouting. The next moment they were banging the receiver against the back wall and kicking out the small panes of glass in the bottom of the door, sending shards of glass and Bakelite scattering in every direction.

Jack ran as fast as he could. He needed that phone box.

He had the number on the back of his hand. Pam had written it there herself, in eyebrow pencil, under the orange glow of a streetlamp on the way home from the youth club last Friday. "Ring me," she had said. It didn't matter that the rain began to blur it. He had been ringing her in his head ever since, the number etched into his memory until he knew it better than his own birthday.

He had noticed her almost as soon as he walked into the church youth club that night, though he would have denied it if anyone had asked. It was she who made the first move, crossing the floor with a boldness that made his stomach turn over.

"Would you like to dance?"

He would. Very much.

They talked like they had known each other for years, family and friends, school and the particular problems of being fifteen in Newcastle in 1968. She had a soft voice and a laugh that seemed to catch him off guard each time, and by the end of the night he was fairly certain he had never met anyone quite like her.

He had walked her home through the leafy streets of Fenham and somewhere along the way had quietly slipped his hand into hers. Her stomach tightened for a moment, and she smiled and looked up at him.

"Thanks for a great night. I really enjoyed myself," he said.

"Me too."

"Do you like the pictures? There's 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Plaza on Saturday. Would you like to go?"

"I don't know, I mean I'd like to go, but there's some kind of family thing going on this weekend. Ring me on Friday." She took an eyebrow pencil out of her handbag and wrote her number on his hand. His parents didn't have a telephone. The fact that she did seemed remarkable to him.

And now here he was, running towards a telephone box in the rain, watching a man in a dark jacket reduce it to shrapnel.

As Jack reached the box, the man opened the door. Jack was about to say something when he saw the fire in his eyes and realised one wrong word and he'd end up like the phone box.

Arthur Blenkensop was just settling down to listen to the BBC news at six when he heard the shouting and the sound of breaking glass. He went over to the window and peeked out at the road in front of his house.

"Betty, there's someone knackering the phone box again. Call the police!" As Arthur made his way to the front door, the cat, suddenly disturbed from its late-afternoon nap, remembered it was time to be fed and ran towards the kitchen.

"Bloody cat," Arthur muttered to himself as he almost tumbled over the fleeing animal.

Arthur grabbed his jacket and went out into the cold, damp night air, just in time to see Jack running towards the phone box and, in the distance, a shadowy figure disappearing up the street.

"Is that him, Jack?" Arthur said, pointing in the direction of the fleeing figure.

"Yes."

Jack could see the shattered remains of the telephone receiver lying on the floor.

Jack knew Arthur. He often complained when he or one of his friends kicked their ball into his garden or, worse still, hit the window. He would bend Jack's dad's ear about it at the Catholic Club on a Sunday afternoon, and that meant another scolding from his dad.

Jack looked up at Arthur, his voice heavy with disappointment. "I needed to phone my girlfriend," though he liked the way the word sounded, even if they had only just met and had never kissed.

"Don't worry, lad. Look, here comes the panda car."

A Morris Minor pulled up. Constable Barrass, reluctant to leave the warmth of the car, wound down the window.

"What's up, Arthur?"

Arthur quickly explained what had occurred, gave a brief description of the lad and pointed in the direction he had run off into.

"OK, we'll have a look. I'll let you know if anything happens."

As the panda car sped off into the gloom, Arthur turned to Jack.

"That's the last we'll see of him tonight. He'll be back in the warmth of the nick before you can say Match of the Day. Come on, Jack, we've got a phone you can use."

Jack and Pam spent the next two years in a fury of love, but love and lust are never enough, and Pam met someone new in sixth-form college. Jack spent the next month in mourning, only to fall head over heels for a girl in a saffron sari he met in the Handyside Arcade.

Jack managed to get into university and did a social work degree, and on the 1st of November 1974 he started work as a social worker with Newcastle City Council.

But then again, the cat had not yet had its say.

In his haste, Arthur didn't see the cat in time, and before he knew where he was he was lying in a heap in the hallway.

"Bloody cat, I'll swing for that little bugger!"

"You all right, Arthur?" Betty called, as he brushed himself off and tried to regain his composure.

"Yeah, just call the rozzers." With that, he was out the door, just in time to see a young man in a black jacket standing over the wreckage of the phone box.

Arthur ran over, and before the vandal could escape, he had him by the collar.

"Got you, you little bastard!"

"Get off!"

"I saw you kicking in that box. The coppers are on their way. I'm sick of little bastards like you wrecking everything on this estate."

"It wasn't me, it was someone else. They went that way." He pointed up the road, but Arthur wasn't having any of it. He had him and he wasn't going to let him go.

Arthur knew who he was. He was Peter Johnson's boy. He had lost count of the number of times the lad had kicked his football at his house or into his garden. They always said it was an accident, but Arthur knew better.

At that moment, a blue panda car came around the corner.

"Caught him red-handed, Constable. I saw him with my own eyes from my house over there, and I came straight out and nabbed him. He's Jack Johnson."

"It wasn't me, I keep telling him, the bloke ran off down the street when I got here. I came to phone my girlfriend."

"What's her name then, this girlfriend?"

At that moment, Jack's brain froze. "It's… it's…" but the word wouldn't come. It was locked in a box deep in his memory, and the more he tried to remember the more confused he became. He looked down at the back of his hand. The number, already blurred by the rain, was gone entirely.

"See, I told you," Arthur said triumphantly. "Can't even come up with a name. He's always around here causing trouble. I've had to tell his dad dozens of times about him and his mates."

"All right, sir. We'll need you to call into the station tomorrow and make a statement, but in the meantime, thank you. We'll take it from here."

"Right, son, you're coming with me." Constable Barrass opened the car door.

"But it wasn't me. I was going to use the phone box to call my girlfriend, and I saw someone attacking it. They went off that way." Once again he pointed up the street.

"Save your breath, son, that man saw you. Now get in the car, we're going to the station."

He never forgot the look on Arthur's face, not malice, just certainty. That was the thing that stayed with him. Not the police station, not the cold back seat of the Morris Minor. Just the absolute, unshakeable certainty of a man who had already made up his mind.

Jack never did get in touch with Pam. But the sense of injustice it left in him eventually found a purpose, and on the 1st of November 1974 he started work as a social worker with Newcastle City Council. Sitting across a desk from a fifteen-year-old who couldn't quite explain where he'd been or why, Jack would always say: "Take your time, son. I'm listening." He always was.