Putting Love On The Line

The Sunday Age

Sunday April 16, 2006

John Elder

AS TELSTRA plans to scrap phone booths in their thousands - and children are put on pre-paid mobile plans in even greater numbers - I tell the following story by way of a lament:

In 1968, my father called me from a country town phone box to say happy birthday. I'd turned 10. We spoke briefly and excitedly - and then he had a chat with my mother about life on the road and when he'd be home. This was probably my first phone call from anybody.

Two years passed before the telephone rang for me once more. It was a Saturday morning. "Ann-Marie Murphy," my mother said wryly, holding up the phone and then handing it to me but in no great hurry to go elsewhere.

With the receiver stuck under my armpit I explained that Ann-Marie was a girl I'd been talking with on the bus. We lived in the coal and potato country of the Hunter Valley - and Ann-Marie lived even further out of town that I did. She was pretty and Catholic and very friendly, all of which made her exotic. My mother looked at me with narrow eyes. As if I was a paddock that may or may not be on fire.

I said something like: "She wants to show me a picture in a book."

"What book?"

And so I told how the previous evening, when it was lightly raining and misty and the country was very green, Ann-Marie had told me the view was like a picture of Ireland she'd seen in a book and that's where her family were from. Then she'd asked for my phone number. She seemed to be offering a whole new world.

"Is your mother still there?" said Ann-Marie, at the other end of the line.

Two minutes later I was put outside for the day as per the rules of the house.

We lived on a farm with an orchard where we buried the weekly stew from the toilet pan and that was my only chore of the morning. "Burying the body," as my mother called it.

Hanging up the shovel, I got on my bike and rode to the little village on the highway three miles away - to the phone box outside the general store. It was Ann-Marie's idea. It was a damp and windy morning and no one bothered us for a long time. I rode home for lunch.

In the evening, I found the phone box occupied: two older girls who were part of a group that liked beating up the quieter boys. Scratching and tearing and so on. The general store turned off its lights and still the girls kept talking. They hung up when a man arrived. He seemed to freak them out.

In those days, village phone boxes had stories told about them. I'd heard about this man who got dressed up in a jacket and tie to call his sister on a Saturday night. I'd seen him around in his work clothes but never dressed for the phone box. I sat on my bike and looked at him while he talked - until he made a face that said bugger off. After a little while he hung up and drove into town for the evening. It all seemed so mysterious.

I wanted to tell Ann-Marie all about it but her phone was engaged. I don't know how many times I tried to get through. I was still going when my mother drove up. I put the bike in the back of the ute and tried to think of something useful to say when she said, "What the hell are you doing?"

Ann-Marie lost interest in me after a couple of weeks. She needed more than love from a phone box and for a while I didn't have anyone to call. But that's all right. Phone box love is not a way of life. It's not meant to take over everything else. It's about going out into the rain to hear somebody else's voice. It's the call of the wild.

© 2006 The Sunday Age

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