Strange Times - Part 1: Temporal Telephone

[1988]

I woke up close to four in the morning; the phone was ringing at the end of the street again. If I didn’t get up and pick it up, it wouldn’t stop all night. As I walked up my street in the hot, summer night to the light of the phone-box ahead, I wondered why this thing didn’t work. Ringing at random times, phone calls to other sides of the world. Telecom was supposed to replace it this month. I stepped inside the box.

‘Don’t hang up!’ a female voice yelled as I took the phone off the hook. It sounded familiar. I put the phone to my ear hesitantly.

‘Hello?’ I asked, still sleepy.

‘Am I speaking to Ellen?’ she asked and I frowned.

‘Yeah…who’s this?’

‘Okay, listen, we’ve had this call four times already. You have dreams about writing for the New Yorker, your first crush was on Hugh, your car runs on LPG gas and you’re close to failing English’

My eyes went wide, I was no longer sleepy ‘H-how do you know all this?’

‘Listen, I’m you. I’m calling from the future. I’ve called four times and each time you don’t believe me and hang up. I’m calling about the English exam’

I put both hands on the receiver ‘Okay, this is stupid, goodbye’

The other Ellen spoke quickly on the phone ‘No, wait listen! In the future, you pass the exam and I’m giving the answers to you. Don’t ask me how it works, I don’t know either. But if you want to pass the exam, keep listening’

The future Ellen, if I believed the voice was me, told me that the exam answers would be changed last minute and left by accident in the Starling Hotel bar by a careless teacher. I listened to her advice against all logic.

‘If you want the answers, and you want to pass, you need to be at the Starling Hotel tomorrow, 6 o’clock. Don’t be late, he’ll leave then. Oh and whatever you do, don’t –‘ but she was cut off by a message from Telecom, asking me to put in fifty cents to continue. I didn’t have any coins.

I walked back up my street, shaking my head. It had to be a joke…but why didn’t it feel like one?

---

The next day at school went quick. I told my friends about the call and they agreed it had to be a prank; someone had engineered it to piss me around. We wondered who would do it, but even as we compiled lists of various boys and girls, something in my head made me think it was real.

As I walked back home from school, I passed the phone box and decided to step inside the stuffy glass enclosure. Picking up the receiver, I got what anyone who used this phone box would get: dead silence. There was nothing inside save the phone. It was probably all just some stupid prank call.

But that afternoon, as I sat frustrated trying to work through Ibsen, Huxley and Shakespeare, I wondered if that person pretending to be me – or watching me – was telling the truth. What if it was real? The phone box had never worked for anyone else, and they had provided proof about me…

'No, it’s just…some dickhead’ I said aloud

The text on the page blurred together, I re-read the same line over and over, my mind began to dull and eyes glazed over. I sighed.

‘Screw it, what have I got to lose?’ and drove over to the Starling Hotel.

The place was stuffy and hot, summer was finally on us again. Phil Collins blared across the bar, full of people piling in for cheap beer. I sidled up to the bar and tried to look normal while the waitress poured me a beer.

She looked tired, worn out, but only a few years older than me. I felt something like shame or worry twist itself in my stomach; would I end up like that? Giving up on all my plans of work in Melbourne to simply take a job in town and end up living and dying in this backwater? It wasn’t that I pitied her, or even thought less, I just couldn’t do it. I’d suffocate in a place like this. I gulped down the beer and scanned the room. Where was the teacher? I stared across the room desperately, hoping to find something.

And then, I saw him. Sitting where the caller said he’d sit, standing at the exact time, leaving something behind. It was a single sheet of blue paper on the floor. I quickly walked across to grab it before the waitress grabbed it. The answers were all there: proper discussion of Ibsen, literary technique, multiple choice answers.

My future was on this blue piece of paper.

---

As the weekend began, I spent the Saturday writing the answers down slowly onto my own piece of paper. I was a procrastinator; I’d get distracted easily and I’d only half memorised it by Sunday morning when the phone box rang.

As I walked up the street, I felt a weird shiver come over me. Ahead, a car suddenly appeared out of nowhere and crashed into a stop sign. A group of birds collided in mid-air. I picked up the phone.

‘You idiot! How long have you had the answers for?’

‘Um, a day or two—’

‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’ and before I could respond that I hadn’t due to the phone call being cut off, the other Ellen got frantic ‘The teacher knows the test is missing! He’s heading back to the hotel and if he doesn’t find them there, you’ll create a time paradox!’

I blanched ‘What happens then?’ and the voice laughed sarcastically

‘Oh you know, only the complete breakdown of the space-time continuum. Splitting universes, wide-spread disasters, cats and dogs living together…wait, stop talking to me and get back to the Hotel!’

I drove frantically across Haverbrook, peeling around corners and making my tiny Mazda hatchback go faster than any designer had anticipated.

The road suddenly disappeared and I swerved right, speeding down Bass Strait Road. I took a corner too fast, and hit another car side on. Smoke, dust, radio ceasing to play ACDC. I stumbled from the crash

‘Insurance papers are in the glovebox, sorry’ and I ran as they yelled after me. I had shards of glass in my hair and white airbag dust all over me. Clouds were falling to the ground and a section of the street ahead of me changed into a dirt road. Things were blurring at the edges, things combining, but Starling Hotel was just ahead. I’d right my own wrong.

The bar was open on the Sunday afternoon, quiet except for a few dedicated drunks. The TV rapidly switching between channels, almost epileptic in pace.

‘What the fuck is going on with this thing?’ the waitress asked as she slammed the remote. Beer glasses turned into sand and the door changed type behind me into a large medieval door.

I searched for somewhere to put the paper. As the waitress swept up sand, I put the test answers on a pile of bills behind the counter and quickly sat at one of the table. The teacher appeared, seemingly oblivious to the chaos that was going on around him. He mouthed something to the waitress, she looked around and handed the blue paper to him. He left, looking relieved. Everything stopped changing.

As the repairman towed my car home, I heard the phone box ring again. I walked up and answered myself.

‘Good job, you just averted a temporal meltdown’ said the other Ellen.

‘Serious shit’ I replied.

‘Might be some residual effects of that, you almost broke the timeline. Bound to be some shrapnel from it. Strange things, weird things, across time. This could affect your entire world...mine too. But hey... hope you’re ready for the exam tomorrow’

---

After my exam ended, I knew I had aced it, I’d done the exam three times over by now. Walking home, I came to an abrupt halt.

The payphone wasn’t there. It was gone. Telecom was busying removing it, putting up a sign reading ‘malfunctioning equipment’ and a month later, it had been replaced.

As I write this now, it’s hard to find any evidence it even existed in the first place. Writing this for the anthology makes me wonder about my story and I wonder if I’ve broken some rule by talking about it. I have no proof anything ever happened and no answers to my questions: things like this just happen and sometimes, we just have to accept the strangeness of it.

- Ellen, Age 45

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