Lucynda Storey-Erotic Romance Writer

It’s not often that a book absolutely blows me away.  Maybe I’ve just read too many, or they all sound the same, or I don’t see the creativity they once had. 

Tonight, though, that streak of luck or curse, or whatever you want to call that singular malaise, was destroyed.  The book in question? Calling, by Jack Brokenshire.  For Jack, the book is somewhat of a biography.  For me, it provided a rich insight into how to look at our notions of heaven, hell, and the place in-between…earth.  It’s paranormal, it’s slightly religious, full of strife and curses and unanswered questions that finally get, at least this author’s idea of how they should be, answered.

The premise?  Well, what if you found a phone, and you could actually call someone that had died?  What things would you talk about, what would you ask, and would you be ready for the answers?  How would owning such a phone change your life, especially, if others could use the phone and talk to their lost family and friends?  What would happen to you when you became a media darling, and nothing you could do would destroy mankind’s faith in you?

Heavy questions.  Heavier answers. Answers that aren’t always what you might expect in this story that doesn’t quite fit any genre, yet manages to mingle with several.

Here’s a small excerpt:

My father had been dead for decades before I thought about picking up a phone and calling him.

We twist and turn our way through life like emotions in action:  sometimes hurrying, sometimes stopping altogether. Contracts of contact come and go between us, creating happiness or pain or nothing at all. Dull years, mad years, and bright years tumble through us, burying us in their minutes and hours and weeks and it seems as if the wild variety of it all makes a gamble of our times but we are wrong.  

We think that life is just a little thing but we are wrong. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier. Over the years, I’d become more sophisticated in avoiding memories of him, so sophisticated that it was automatic. He became a simple series of black and white photographs I kept folded in my wallet; the credit cards and cash alongside them were more significant to me, at least that was how it felt.

I sat in a crowded bar surrounded by amateur drinkers, the kind of people with busy eyes and easy friends who are comfortable with strangers. I like strangers and I like them to remain strangers, but that’s a sign of my sharpened bar room skills. The queue for drinks grew and faded, people came and went through the door, and the music tricked us all into thinking we knew more about music than we did. I was sitting on my own on that night.  No one was available to join me, so I was busy doing nothing but drinking my cold beer.

People entered the bar in groups; some happy, some silent.  As the place filled up I found the drinks going down me in an ever increasing rate. I was nervous—it’s never good to drink alone and the feeling of being on your own makes even the most confident of people self-conscious.

As the drunk in me emerged from the cover of my sobriety, the thoughts began to tumble. I wanted to go home to my wife. She could make me feel normal again. But as I ran my fingers through my own hair for the twentieth time, my courage returned.

Funny how these little actions always seem to make things feel better.

I must have examined every mark on the wooden table in front of me, every light in the roof and every stitch in the curtains behind me, trying to look disinterested and cool in my isolation. It was during one of these deliberate examinations that I first spotted a young man getting a drink. At first, I thought he was alone, but as he grabbed his drink and paid I noticed he had a mobile phone trapped against his ear and he was talking, perhaps too loudly.

 “Hi dad,” he said in a bright tone. “I’m in a bar with some time so I thought I would ring you.” I envied the bastard; the drink had made me moody. He wasn’t on his own like I was; he was using a phone to avoid the countless physiological leaks of loneliness. My mood swang against him once I knew I couldn’t strike up a conversation with him:

Bang! There went my chance to look normal in this place.

The bar filled up slowly, but still he yammered at his father. I needed to use my phone. If I copied him, we’d both look stupid but both looking stupid was better than just me sitting here, friendless. But who could I ring? All of my friends were doing other things, some were even doing sports. I couldn’t ring my wife; she hated to talk to me once I started drinking.

I took a risk and assumed that by the time I got my old phone lined up I’d think of someone.  It was a bad risk because for the life of me I couldn’t think of a single person who I could risk ringing.

Loneliness, like a landslide in my head, suffocated me for a moment or two. I ran my finger along the phone’s keypad, and out of complete bitterness, I imagined what it would be like if I could ring my long dead father.

The other guy was still talking to his dad.  Even after a full ten minutes, I could hear him cracking the “in” jokes that bind people together. I had no “in” jokes with my dad, or “out” ones for that matter, but the envy in me was so powerful that I started punching the phone’s keys. I prepared to pretend to talk to some imaginary friend on the end of the line; even that would be better than sitting alone with an unused phone glaring at me. I thumped away at random and prepared my opening act for the audience of drinkers around me. I figured I would pretend to be talking to one of my mates, at least I could keep the one sided conversation partially credible.

But all of this was ruined when I heard the ringtone; quite by accident, I must have called a real number.

“Hello?” 

I had to think quickly, which was impossible with the full load of fool fuel I had taken in, so I tried to copy the other drinker’s call to his father. At least I could make it look like a genuine wrong number.

“Hi, can I talk to my dad please?” I waited for the inevitable “you must have the wrong number” but it didn’t come.

“No problem, just hang on a moment and I’ll go and get him for you.”

I had no notion of what to do. I lifted my beer and took an enormous gulp, confronted by a cul de sac of my own making.  After only a few seconds, came the turning point of my life.

“Hi. How are you son?”

It was my dad.

Initially, I thought I must be mistaken, but by the end of his second sentence I knew something massively wrong had happened.  “Come on then, say something! This is pretty fabulous, right?”

It was my father—no doubt at all.  I had rung the afterlife. 

This book is now available at Aspen Mountain Press.  Be prepared to be blown away.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 12:10 am and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.