First draft of the opening chapter to a potential story about which I don't know what yet. Well, don't know EXACTLY what yet.

1

The phone rang. Nothing about it stood out; it was simply the typical electronic bleating of a modern-day cordless. Unremarkable. There was nothing emphatic about the way I sprang from my seat as I always do when the phone rings, either. For some reason the phone ringing has always been my master. Whether I’m eating dinner, on the toilet, when I used to bathe my children or in the process of making love - whatever that is - I have to know who is at the end of the ringing. The unanswered phone is the greatest mystery of them all.

Anyway, it rang. I sat up, and with a couple of hurried strides I was looking down at the orange backlit display. It read P-R-I-V-A-T-E. “Aye”, I thought, “one of those.” The chances are that the P-R-I-V-A-T-E call is anything other than an over-eager eighteen-year-old telephone monkey reading from a hymn list of carefully scripted phrases designed to lull the receiver into a verbally incapacitated state by which the words, “no, I’m not interested, sorry” are somehow wiped from your vocabulary as they bombard you with open questions and well-crafted one-liners was pretty slim. I always look on the bright side. So I wasn’t expecting much. But then why would I?

“ello.”

“Will?” to which I hmm-hmm’ed.

“It’s me. I…I need to talk to you.” The voice was quiet, somewhat nervous, but I knew who it was.

“I’m here. Fire away.” Then I thought about it a bit. “Is everything ok?”

“When can you come over?” For some reason her reluctance to give me more information as to her condition brought out the stubborn child in me.

“Depends on how important it is,” I replied, having a pretty good idea as to how important it was. She changed tactics.

“Don’t worry about it. Look, I’ve gotta…”

“No, no.” I broke in, defeated - again. “What’s up?”

Silence.

“Ok, I’ll be over in a couple of hours and you can tell me then, yeah?”

“Ok.”

“Right, well, see you in a bit.”

“Got any fags?” I had.

“Ses.”

“Ses.”

I waited listening until she put down the phone. I didn’t know what I was listening for, or what I thought I would hear, but I was sure I heard a male voice murmur just before the phone went dead. The kind of muffled speech that could be the hollow sound of the TV bouncing off one of the white, picture-less walls of her apartment getting itself caught in my earpiece or, it could have been another man saying something in another room of the house, or perhaps just in the background.

Why would this bother me? She’s is free to entertain who she likes when she likes. Up until now, the only things that didn’t add up were that a) if it was another man, why call me and ask me to come over? and b) why not tell me the extent of what’s on her mind on the telephone?

There was only one way to find out, really. And unfortunately that required me to shower, trim my beard, deodorant, aftershave, one of those cheap-but-ok-looking plain-coloured, long-sleeve T-shirts from H&M – black - coupled with a pair of tight-fitting slightly faded navy blue jeans. The mirror told me I looked semi-decent so I smiled broadly at my reflection, showing all my teeth. It promptly bumped my score from a merit to a distinction. It was easily bought.

I considered getting my jacket on to the extent where I imagined putting my arms through the sleeves, picking up my car keys from the Redwood-carved all-purpose varnished small bowl my dad took back from California while on one of his jaunts that lay on a cream-coloured metal IKEA upright shoe cabinet by the utility room door, but a cigarette with a nice, cold tall glass of Ribena on my terrace called and told me that five minutes in their company was needed before the almost unavoidable car-ride into town.