I got the number in January when I moved to Ohio and switched carriers, and the calls started in March.
Sunday, six in the evening, from a landline with a 419 area code. The first three I let ring out, because I was twenty-nine and I have never in my life answered a number I don’t recognise, and because Sunday at six is when I was usually asleep — I worked nights at a distribution centre then, ten-hour shifts, and my whole life was upside down.
The fourth one I answered by accident. I was reaching across the bed for the alarm and I hit the wrong thing.
A woman’s voice, quite loud, immediately, no pause:
“Bernadette. Did you get the thing about the roof?”
I said, “Sorry — I think you’ve got the wrong number.”
There was a silence, and then she said, “Is that not Bernadette?”
And I said no, I was sorry, and she said “Oh,” and then, “Oh, I am sorry, that’s me being a fool again,” in a bright embarrassed way, and she hung up before I could say it was fine.
I felt bad for about ninety seconds and then I went back to sleep.
The next Sunday at six the same number rang, and I answered it because I’d been up since four and I was in a decent mood.
She said, “Bernadette. Did you get the thing about the roof?”
Word for word. Same seven words, same slightly indignant emphasis on roof.
And I want to explain what happened in my head in the next second and a half, because I have gone over it a lot and I don’t think I decided anything at all.
I had time to say wrong number again. I’d said it a week ago and it had gone fine, she’d been perfectly cheerful about it, no harm done. That was available.
What I actually heard, underneath the question, was a woman asking the same question for the second week running as though the first week had never happened. And I did the arithmetic in about a second — the identical sentence, the identical time, a landline, the specific brightness of that’s me being a fool again — and I thought: oh.
So I said, “No, Mum. What was the thing about the roof?”
Her name was Eileen. It took me four weeks to get it, because you cannot ask someone their name when you are supposed to be their daughter, and I ended up getting it from the way she said “Eileen Fahey speaking” when the call connected badly one week and she thought she was answering rather than calling.
Here’s what a call was like, and this is the thing people never expect.
They were nice. They were genuinely nice. She was funny — properly funny, dry, with an enormous amount of opinion about people whose names I never learned. There was a Marjorie who was, by Eileen’s account, a menace. There was an ongoing situation with a man called Ronnie and a car park. The roof came up most weeks, and I never did find out which roof, and I stopped needing to.
She asked about my job. She’d ask “Are they still working you into the ground?” and I’d say yes, and she’d say “You want to tell them,” and I’d say I know, and she would say “You won’t though,” in a tone of total loving disgust that I have never been able to describe properly to anyone.
She never asked a question I couldn’t answer. Not once in fourteen months. That was the strangest part. I braced for it every single week — for how are the children or did you see your brother — and it never came, and I came to understand that the questions she still had were the ones she’d asked a thousand times, and they were all questions about right now.
Twenty minutes, sometimes twenty-five. Then she’d say, “Right. I’ll let you go.”
And every single week, at the end, before she hung up: “Love you, pet.”
And every single week I said it back.
I did not tell anybody for eight months.
I want to be honest about why, because at the time I told myself it was because it was private and hers, and that was about a third of it.
The rest was that I knew exactly how it sounded. I pretend to be a stranger’s dead — well. I didn’t know she was dead yet, in those first months. But I knew that “there’s an old lady who thinks I’m her daughter and I’ve been playing along since March” is a sentence that gets a reaction, and I knew the reaction would be either that’s so lovely — which would have made me want to put my head through a wall — or the other one.
The other one is the reason I nearly stopped twice, and it’s a fair question, and I’m going to put it here rather than pretend nobody thought of it:
What gives you the right to be somebody’s daughter?
I didn’t have an answer. I still don’t have a clean one. What I had was six o’clock on Sunday, and a woman who was going to make that call whether or not anybody picked up, and a landline in a room somewhere in the 419.
In November she called on a Thursday.
That had never happened. Fourteen weeks of Sundays and then a Thursday, at about half past two in the afternoon, and I picked up expecting nothing in particular.
She was crying.
Not distressed-crying. Quietly, the way people cry when they’ve been at it a while already and have got used to it.
She said: “Bernie, I can’t find the — I’ve looked everywhere, and they keep moving things, and I can’t find your father’s watch.”
And I said the only thing I could think of, which was, “It’s all right. Where did you look?”
And she went through it — a drawer, a tin, a bag she keeps by the chair — and she talked herself down over about eight minutes while I said mm, and yes, and what about the tin again, and eventually she stopped.
Then she said, in a completely different voice, flat and clear and absolutely present:
“He’s been dead nineteen years and I still put the radio on for him.”
And then, about four seconds later, brightly: “Did you get the thing about the roof?”
I sat on the edge of my bed in Ohio and I understood two things at once. That I had just been let into something. And that I had no idea, none at all, who I was actually talking to, or where she was, or whether there was anybody there.
That was the week I started looking.