Juliette stood alone in the phone box around the corner from her flat, a piece of paper propped up on the scratched black ledge in front of her. It was the torn-off back of an envelope that she’d received from her bank a couple of weeks earlier, and she had written the phone numbers on the patterned blue side of the paper, not the plain white side, for some reason she couldn’t fathom now. The digits were hard to decipher, blue writing against a blue security pattern, the ink smudged and messy, almost as if she’d wanted not to be able to read it. There were only three numbers in W3, and two in W12. She’d copied out the fourteen others she’d found in the rest of London, just in case.
Juliette paused before she pressed the last digit of the first number. Should she really be doing this? What would Cynthia say if she knew? She’d be devastated, that’s what, Juliette acknowledged, especially at her daughter doing it behind her back. Why hadn’t she told her at least?
Juliette stood and watched her breath in the dankness of the booth, little puffs of white going nowhere, just fading into nothingness. She took so long deciding whether or not to punch in the last ‘7’ that eventually the phone must have thought she’d completed her dialling, and the wrong number tone screamed into the thin air like a warning. She clacked the receiver into the cradle, to stop it.
Why on earth was she doing this? It seemed insane suddenly. She thought of her own mother in Berkshire, kind and well-meaning, but ultimately unconnected to her. She thought of who her real mother might be.
What harm can it do, Juliette thought in the end. She wouldn’t say who she was. She ran the forefinger of her left hand along the length of the number as she dialled it again. Her nail was thick with over-painting, but there were no actual chips in the bright-pink colour today, just a steep ridge of varnish that ran across the nail a quarter of the way down from the cuticle, where it had grown out from the last time she’d painted it.
The phone took forever to connect, but eventually those familiar thrum thrums started and Juliette’s heart started to beat faster and louder, and she very nearly hung up but her breath had come up into her mouth so she closed it and it made her feel giddy and fluttery, and she was so distracted that she kept the call going until at last her heart settled down and she almost felt ready to speak, if anyone would ever answer. After twenty or so rings, just as she was about to give up, there was a clatter and a knock and a rustle and a few moments of silence, and then an impatient breathless voice finally said, ‘Hello?’
Juliette panicked and went to put down the phone, but instead she froze and held the receiver away from her, in limbo, as if it were contaminated, which it was.
‘Hello?’ said the voice again, sounding far away, disembodied in the glass box. ‘Who is it?’
‘Um, is Elisabeth Potts there?’ said Juliette, putting the receiver back to her ear at last. It reeked of stale saliva.
‘No, there’s no-one of that name here,’ said the voice, irritated now. ‘You’ve got the wrong number.’
‘Sorry, bye,’ said Juliette, and as she hung up her ears burned red with shame.