Muriel Gray - Furnace

‘Hi. You’ve guessed. We’re out. Try the numbers that follow, call back or leave a message. Here we go, the shop number is …’

He hung up. He hadn’t left the answering machine on, so at least that meant she’d come home and been there to switch it on. So she was safe. Cold comfort. She wasn’t answering.

He stood for a moment and let his heart slow down. What would he have said if she’d picked up the phone? This was new territory. Josh Spiller was a man, and a man who drove forty tons of truck around America. Yet right now, he wanted to put his forehead against this wall and weep. For a moment he saw himself reflected in the shiny chrome of the telephone, saw himself as he knew the girl behind the counter was seeing him; a haggard, haunted face that belonged to someone he barely recognized.

He dug his fingernails into his palm, took a breath and walked quickly out of the store. Movement. As always, it was the only cure.

Sim was worried about his lemon balm. The leaves were turning brown around the edges and there were aphid casts on the new shoots. He bent over the big terracotta pot and poked pointlessly at the sick plant with a gnarled finger. Herbs were tricky. You had to know when they came indoors to avoid the frost and when they should go out again to harden off. He reckoned this time he’d got it wrong, underestimating once again the bitter spring winds that chilled Pittsburgh, and he tutted as one of the leaves fell off with his touch.

Inside the house, Josh and Elizabeth’s phone rang. The old man straightened up and shuffled towards the open window. Sim liked it when they had their answering machine on. He could hear all their messages clearly through the window, whether open or shut, and it made him feel part of their lives that he knew what was going on, often before they did. Sometimes it was just messages from Josh’s work, and sometimes it was Elizabeth’s family. But he always listened in the hope of hearing something secret and exciting. And there was something else.

Sim had a pointless but amusing little gift. Mostly, although occasionally he got it wrong, he could tell who was phoning while it was still ringing.

He had no idea how he knew, but he did. He liked to play the game with himself as the phone rang its four short peals before the answering machine intercepted.

‘Dispatcher,’ he would say out loud on the second ring, and then slap his thigh when the familiar voice came on, droning, ‘Josh? Got a pretty high-paying load with your name on it. Call me, would you?’

Or he would mouth, ‘Oh oh, Elizabeth’s brother,’ and then look delighted when the sulky sibling’s voice left its disgruntled message. If he were ever forced to explain the process, and he knew he never would, Sim would have to say that he could see not so much the person, but the essence of the person as the phone rang, and the times he got it wrong he believed were simply the times when he just wasn’t concentrating hard enough.

Of course he never mentioned any of this to Josh or Elizabeth. Sim thought they probably knew he listened to their messages but said nothing. They were so kind. They knew no one ever phoned Sim, and he guessed Elizabeth left the window of the office open purposely so he could hear. Maybe one day he would show her what he could do. He would like that, to see her pretty face light up in delight as he performed the trick for her. Only it wasn’t strictly speaking a trick. It was real. He just knew who was on the line.

Today, however, it was habit rather than design that made him move to the window. Sim wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the message after the fight he’d heard yesterday. He’d heard Elizabeth’s car screech away after Josh had come home, and last night her crying had kept him awake, wondering whether he should go upstairs and comfort her or just leave her alone. He’d opted for the latter, so hysterical and forlorn were her wails. How could anything an old man would say heal that kind of wound? Things must be bad, he thought, for such good people to hurt each other so badly. He waited by the window as the four short phone rings completed and the answering machine clicked in.

‘Josh,’ Sim said to himself, supporting himself against the wall with an outstretched hand.

An eavesdropper couldn’t hear the outgoing message, only wait patiently for the caller to start speaking. Sim waited to hear Josh’s voice, but the caller hung up.

‘Josh,’ he confirmed with himself, nodding as he shuffled back to his herbs.

A cold wind eddied around the edge of the house and stirred the lemon balm. Two more leaves dropped from the stem and Sim cursed in Korean. He bent down again and resumed fussing with the plant.

‘Josh,’ he repeated to the herb. It ignored him, and dropped another leaf.

* * *

By Furnace standards, Alice Nevin’s house was pretty ordinary. By anywhere else’s yardstick, it was an expensive and desirable property. But unlike a Bostonian or Beverly Hills house where the lawn is God, here the front garden was littered with toys. Two plastic pedal cars lay on their sides as if there had been a collision. A ragged fun-fur horse was splayed over the porch steps and an odd assortment of tiny plastic figures were distributed so evenly around the property it was as though they had been placed there to serve some kind of gardening function. Josh stood across the street and stared up at its long white wooden porch and colonial dormer windows, wondering what he was going to do next.

She wasn’t here. Why was he?

A figure came to the downstairs window. A man. He had a crying child in his arms that looked about a year old and small heads moved about at his hips betraying the presence of more children. The man was trying to make the baby look out into the garden, pointing at things and jogging it up and down in his arms in a vain effort to comfort it. It was only a matter of seconds until he saw Josh, and when he did, he stopped moving. He stared at him for a moment, then moved away from the window.

Thinking was getting in the way. So Josh stopped thinking and walked swiftly across the street, picking his way through the toys to mount the steps and ring the doorbell. A distant dog barked, as though shut in a room, accompanied by a variety of screams and shouts that reinforced his belief that he’d seen several children. The door opened wide and aggressively fast. The man, wearing a sweat-stained T-shirt, cheap stone-washed jeans, and holding his tearful burden, stared at Josh. At this close range Josh could see that the man had eyes almost as red and puffy as his baby’s. He had been crying.

‘Need somethin’?’

It was a challenge rather than a question, a voice and demeanour Josh might have expected in a pool hall if he’d knocked a guy’s pile of dimes off the table. It was way out of place in the doorway of an elegant house. Josh felt colour come to his neck and cheeks. This was all wrong, but there was no going back.

‘Mr Nevin?’

The man’s face crinkled from aggression to suspicious aggression. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

A child screamed from the core of the house. Josh looked past the man at the sound, but it screamed on ignored.

‘I just need to know if you’re Mr Nevin.’

‘There ain’t no Mr fuckin’ Nevin. And I asked you a question.’

Josh remembered. Berry Nevin’s girl. That’s what McFarlane had said. That would mean either that Alice Nevin had kept her maiden name in an unlikely modern fashion for this small mountain town, or quite simply that she wasn’t married. The baby in the man’s arms started a high-pitched whine again and was swayed from side to side by the man in an unconscious act of comforting. It was the action of someone used to holding kids.