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Catching Up

Posted on March 31, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

They were on the telephone with each other, exchanging news about their respective days. It was a conversation punctuated by long silences, grunts and murmurs. She had twisted the telephone cord around her index finger as she listened to him tell her about college. It was a love-hate thing for to listen to him because she hadn’t quite forgiven him the fact that he had managed admission into the only college she’d ever wanted to go to. She was easily angered if she thought that something she coveted was being taken for granted so she liked it even less that he was blasé about every day he spent in the place.  She was glad he was in there because she hoped to absorb some of the aura of the coolest college in the city, by osmosis if nothing else.

They were an almost-at-the-end-of-their-teenage couple who had met in an almost routine suburban-boy-meets-suburban-girl scenario and both of them would have had difficulty remembering the exact day they decided that they were an ‘item’. Like most such couples they fought, made up and fought again.  Most of their quarrels, when they were begun by her, started out of her having felt left out or slighted or not being part of something he either took for granted or thought of as too trivial to involve her in. Most of those fights quickly boiled down to a single point-emphasising exercise, that she was frustrated by his inability to understand that she needed to have his complete attention when they were together, on the ‘phone or otherwise.

As they talked she noticed that the pauses in his speech sound unnatural. She could also heard sounds from his end of the telephone line where there should have been quiet. He was supposed to be home alone and he didn’t live in a noisy area.  Without letting on that she was suspicious, she flipped on the television set, switched channels and listened until she was hearing the same sound patterns over the ‘phone. Her lips tightened when the screen lit up with an afternoon re-run of Baywatch.

She refocused on keeping her voice neutral while attempting to achieve optimum ear-eye co-ordination until she was predicting the pauses in his voice almost before they occurred. Predictably enough they coincided with some swimsuit-clad babe’s appearance on screen. With great effort she smothered the rush of anger but despite her best efforts given the situation, her next few words had trouble travelling down the telephone line because of their lack of warmth, “What are you doing?”

He sensed the drop in temperature but chose to play it nonchalant, “Nothing.”

She pressed the receiver hard against her ear, concentrated, heard nothing and wondered whether she’d been wrong. The anger retreated to a nearby waiting room as she picked up the thread of conversation. Just when they had settled back into the rhythm of each other’s words she noticed the pauses creeping back into his speech and yet again they coincided exactly with certain feminine movements across her now-muted, still-on television screen. She injected unnatural pauses of her own into the conversation and when it elicited little reaction she injected a little incongruence into what she was saying to him. It took less than five minutes to confirm that he wasn’t paying attention to her. The anger sped through her quicker than normal, she gripped the receiver harder as her mind raced over previous slights. Instances where she’d felt taken for granted or occasions on which he should have called or visited or written and hadn’t. The memories assumed the properties of a fast raging, free flowing liquid that washed over her and threatened to drown her in minutes. She thought of all those times she’d caught him looking at other girls when he should have been paying his undivided attention to her and the benign television re-run became the metaphorical final straw.

Inexplicably, she was reminded of the time he’d told her how it felt so real when she licked her telephone receiver, how he had sworn that it felt like she had actually licked his ear…

If it worked once, maybe it’ll work again…

She focused on his silence yet again and realised that he’d switched the sound back on his television.

The bastard doesn’t even care if I know that he’s watching TV!

She made sure that there were no traces of irritation in her voice when she asked, “Which ear are you listening to me from?”

“Hunh? Why?”

“No… just.”

“Left.”

“Okay…”

She looked at her index finger, really stared at it and imagining it stretching into a long slim cane like the ones blind men used to tap pavements all over the world. She imagined its tip narrowing until it resembled a well-maintained billiards cue. He was still silent but she could hear his breathing down the line as she transferred the phone to her right ear. She had to concentrate because she could never hear as well through her right ear. When she was satisfied that he was still there she concentrated on her finger for a moment, tapped the mouthpiece once and disconnected.

Amitav Nanda was found three hours later when his mother returned from work. Her screams drew the neighbours who called a doctor and the police. The post-mortem examiner followed the tiny trickle of blood out of the dead boy’s ear and found a wound that could only be rationalised as his having been stabbed from ear to ear with a very thin, very long object. There was no sign of forced entry and the only thing out of place was the phone that was still off its hook.

At a city newspaper, a reporter joked that something the guy’s girlfriend said must have gone in one ear and come out the other. His colleagues rebuked him for making fun of the dead and went back to work, silently giggling over the mental picture he had generated.

Nobody ever connected the unexplained death to his girlfriend.

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