The ad says: No need to talk. Live call, just listen.
∞
When Friday gets home, Owen is already back from the shipyard. Owen works for Thornycroft: Thornycroft build warships. Owen is a technical illustrator: he draws components for manuals that naval engineers use to fix things on boats built by Thornycroft. They met there during Friday’s brief stint as a conventional administrator in Thornycroft’s engineering design office. One day a staff party, a few phone calls, some dates. One day, a home together.
He’s home now, reading a book intently. The apartment is silent – Owen brings home the intensity of his work and focuses it straight into his reading. That silent intensity. That internalisation. Soon enough Friday will disrupt the stillness, filling their home with noise and talk and activity. But first she goes to shower, as she often does, only pausing to call out her arrival to Owen.
The apartment comes to life during the evening mealtime. Owen and Friday find an easy rhythm in the kitchen preparing a meal together. Perhaps not everything is covered, not all ground is gone over, but the day in summary is exchanged while pans are heated and vegetables chopped. Friday of course has the most to say and the most that goes unsaid, but Owen is on form too. Peppers are diced and tomatoes washed while Friday expresses her disappointment with the participation of men in her birthing programmes. Owen boils rice and speculates on design office politics. Friday drizzles olive oil and flash-fries chicken while self-appraising her handling of recent case studies. At the dining table they laugh. This is Owen enjoying Friday’s company, and Friday enjoying Owen. This is Friday and Owen shining. While Owen wipes down the kitchen surfaces and fills the dishwasher, the telephone rings. It is a pre-programmed ringtone. Sex with Friday.
This is how it works: Somewhere is a man looking at an ad. Maybe in Stockport. Maybe Derry or Wrexham; on a rig in the North Sea with a mobile phone and a few minutes assured privacy. (Maybe he doesn’t care, assured or not). The ad says: Cutie. The ad says: Slow sexy handjob. The ad says: Call me. This man, he likes the look of the woman in the ad. He’s turned on by all the pictures and lurid promises he knows aren’t real. He’s hard. The ad says: No need to talk. Live call, just listen. He calls the number and connects at three pounds sterling per minute to an exchange in The Bahamas. Silver Star Communications (Bh.) Limited patch the call through to one of their UK operatives. Friday’s phone rings with that special tone, and Friday gets one pound a minute to keep the offshore rigger on the line. To keep the horny man from Stockport busy long enough to make it all worthwhile. For Silver Star. For Friday. For Stockport man.
Friday might get ten calls in an evening. She dials a service number to log in to the system, and another one when she’s done. Maybe one call in ten goes over five minutes. Mostly she’s lucky to get sixty seconds from the average heavy-breathing, anonymous and otherwise silent punter. Her vocal techniques vary and she likes to mix it up over the course of an evening, but often just the sound of a real woman’s voice at the end of the line is enough to finish the sexually frustrated rigger a few weeks past his last shore leave. Or the sociopath in the smalltown bedsit with dark longings and a hunger never to be sated. Or the lawyer addicted to pornography. Friday always has a feeling about her silent callers. That’s how she knows about Chick. The writer. The man who can go fifteen minutes, thirty minutes before hanging up. It’s her technomystic power.
The line goes dead on the last call of the night. Friday hits the stop clock, makes a note in her log, and dials out of the system. Owen has already gone to bed.
