Read by Clive Greenwood (5th story in podcast, at 1h 17m 50s)
Jenny calls me on the landline, our old number.
‘Pick me up,’ she says, ‘I can’t seem to find my way home.’
She sounds frightened, young, lost. But she was all of these things in the end. The end, her end. She was 28.
‘Where are you?’
I can ask nothing else. I hope that the call doesn’t wake my wife.
‘Everything looks different. The roads have changed. I’m on the school side, coming from Brow Lane. But it doesn’t look right. It’s so dark.’
The roads were changed years ago. We got a by-pass. She couldn’t have known.
My wife sleeps on the sofa. Her book has fallen onto the floor, and her tea has gone cold. She is exhausted after the operation, muzzy after the painkillers and anaesthetic. Wispy tufts of hair have settled over her eyes; I brush them away. Her hair has thinned a little with her illness, and strands of grey nestle amongst her dark blonde. She had it cut short. When we were married, she piled it on top of her head in a majestic top knot. It looked beautiful.
She had hoped to delay the operation until after our anniversary, but the consultant wagged his finger – That will not do! We have been married for sixteen years. She wants to get to seventeen, and seventeen more. I hope that will happen. It is possible. We never managed a family, but we accepted that wasn’t meant to be. But we have plans. Ambitions.
Jenny’s voice comes through again, ‘David, are you there?’
Only Jenny ever called me David. To my wife, and everybody else, I’m Dave.
‘How can you be calling me?’
‘I got a mobile phone, remember?’
I can imagine her saying: ‘Silly David.’
‘I want to come home now. But it’s all so bloody dark. I don’t know where I am.’
She makes a sound like a sob.
‘Please come and get me. It’s cold here. Water is pouring in.’
I can hear faint noises that sound like water and crumbling rock.
My wife stirs a little, taking a sudden deep breath, releasing it with a shudder.
Our wedding photographs line up on the shelf behind her head. The older couple with everything set up for a comfortable life. The photographs of Jenny and me were taken by her brother with a borrowed camera; they’re now wrapped in tissue paper in a sealed box in the loft.
‘Please come and get me.’
‘I can’t, Jenny. You know I can’t.’
‘I want to come home now.’
Her voice is like a child’s when waking from a bad dream.
‘You are my husband. You love me. We have this big future together, remember? Three children. A beautiful garden, a room just for books.’
She loved books. The library we have now would surely have met her approval. Perhaps she would have had more volumes about plants and nature. She was always outside. I think of Jenny as a young woman with a swag of thick brown hair that swung across her face when she laughed. She had bony shoulders, a straight back. I loved to run my hands up her spine, to trace her collarbone and jawline, the soft skin of her neck. But the details of her face are now only clear to me in the photographs. I haven’t looked at them for years. Today, she would maybe have had some grey hair, a few lines, gained some weight. We would have been married for almost thirty years. The woman on the phone sounds like someone who could be my daughter.
‘I did love you. Very much. But you are dead.’
‘Do I sound like I’m dead? Come and get me. I’m frightened, David. Really frightened.’
Her using my name again is chilling. An image, a memory of us dancing at our wedding floods into my head. We had a live band. Everyone was dancing. Everyone was laughing. I whirled her round, her white dress spun like sugar smoke. She smelled of sweat and life and hope. We were married for five years.
‘Don’t leave me. You don’t know for sure I’m dead. You never saw my body.’
That’s true. There were no bodies found. Campers caught out by a landslip, Jenny amongst them. She’d joined a group of plant enthusiasts for a weekend’s foraging. The hillside collapsed after excessive rain. Three of them were never accounted for, perhaps swallowed by a forgotten mineshaft. They found only traces. A tent, a walking boot, a primus stove, a book. I was sure that was the book she had been reading.
Another wedding, low-key. Small exclusive restaurant. A few friends. No family. No dancing.
The woman on the phone is young, she wants to dance, taste happiness, life.
For years, I expected Jenny to return, claiming amnesia. She’d be brown, healthy from outdoor living on some farm, suddenly remembering her past. I didn’t change the phone number, even when we moved here.
The phone goes silent. Perhaps I can hear the sound of running water, or blood pumping in my ears. My wife opens her eyes. I try to smile reassuringly.
She smiles back at me.
‘It was so cold,’ she says. ‘Like I was underwater. But I’m home now, David.’
(c) Elizabeth Stott, 2024
Elizabeth Stott was born in Kent & studied physics. Her short stories & poems have appeared in magazines & anthologies, as short story collection & as a Nightjar Press chapbook. In 2023, her poetry pamphlet, The Undoing, was published by Maytree Press.She is writing more of these things.
Clive Greenwood filmed Jury of 12 & Helen Razor for Amazon, Phyllis McGuinness for Baby Cow & films Somebody’s Daughter & Movie Magic. On TV: Celebrity Murder Mystery Channel 5, The Rebel on UK Gold & filmed & dubbed Ukrainian TV series Cossacks. He has a short play in the new writing night at Shakespeare’s Globe. Recent stage is Witness for the Prosecution at County Hall & Hancock’s Half Hour playing Kenneth Williams. www.spotlight.com/9094-6721-0711
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