My Kind of Woman

41. Payphone Blues

"Thank you."

"How's college going?" He asked trivially.

"Fine. Alright yeah," I said. Then added, "a bit lonely sometimes. How is... Twin?"

That word, and that word alone, sent my mind and our conversation spiralling down in one direction. Her. Burying what had happened had been working alright, but it was her I could not bury. Once she was on my mind, I could not stop. It became painfully obvious how melancholy my life was, how unhappy I was.

"Things are fine," my dad answered naturally.

I leaned my head against the phone box. "And her?"

He said nothing.

"Have you seen her?"

"Don't call me if you're going to ask me stupid questions like that. Leave it alone, Norah," he said, voice awkward and thick.

"I can't," I whispered, clenching my teeth. Then I raised my voice a little, feeling it shape into a pleading tone. "Just tell me. It's easy. Please?"

The line clicked and died, the tone humming endlessly into my ear.

-

A little less sad than my birthday was Christmas, as by then, I had a fairly stable group of friends. I had met one boy, named Charlie, through swimming and he was kind enough to introduce me to his other two friends. Two girls, one very short girl called Karim, and another, who was overly freckled in the face named Irina. They were easy friends, ones that were almost too nice. They weren't brash with their humour like Jackie had been, nor were they unapologetic. It was easy and relaxing; I could be as quiet as I wanted around them. We all went out after the first night of snow to a winter market, where bought very simple gifts for one another. Then they all went home for Christmas and the college campus became a ghost town. I could've gone back to Twin and stayed with my dad, but I opted not to. Being there I thought would've just been painful. The positives of staying on campus during the holiday were that I had my room to myself. My roommate had flown home for the holiday and said she would bring me back something German.

But the loneliness of the buildings made for an active mind. My thoughts were so loud that they kept me awake. I tried to spend the days working on assignments my professor had given me and swimming, and even jogging across the common in the snow. But even all of that didn't tire me out. I spent many nights sitting up in bed, trying to read or simply staring at the ceiling, counting the flecks in the plaster. I realised in those nights that my tether of self-control was short. On only the third night of my college isolation, I went down to the payphone in the dark. I only had socks on my feet and a flimsy hoodie over my bed shirt, and my ankles got damp quickly in the snow. For months, I had kept her number memorised, sang it like a song before I slept, even when I was still in Twin. So, I was quick to press it into the keypad after I'd fed the machine a dollar. I was praying it was working again, that the number was contactable. My fingers were trembling as I punched it in, from the cold and my overwhelming need to hear her voice. My teeth started to chatter as I waited for the number to be registered.

But I knew. I knew really. The number didn't go through, instead, the line jumped and the intercept message was played.

"The number you have reached," the voice then read out the number I'd come to know like the back of my hand, "has been disconnected..."

I didn't use the payphone again. I soldiered on through the lonely break and greeted Charlie and the others happily when they came back from visiting family. With them, I spent the first few weeks of January being distracted from my obvious crippling unhappiness. I forced myself to appear better, be louder, be more involved, and I think they finally saw me as a proper friend, and not just a silent appendage joined to them that didn't contribute much. We dyed Irina's hair in the college bathroom and stained our wrists bright blue and did stick-and-poke tattoos with a borrowed kit that Charlie's roommate had. Karim's tattoo had to be tiny and somewhere easily hidden, so that her parents would not find it when she went back at the end of the term. Mine was a very simple fish on the inside of my ring finger that Karim drew very expertly to match my necklace.