Connection Lost

Connection Lost

Frances doesn’t answer her phone any more. It’ll just ring out. So I don’t call. Connection lost. She’s still in my contacts. I can’t bring myself to delete her. She’ll always be there in my memory. So she stays in my phone’s memory.

Cancer took her. Aggressive, metastasised, spread everywhere. She was thirty-two. We used to talk while she was on chemo, then she graduated to radiotherapy and we there weren’t many of those precious calls left. 

They cut bits off her, trying to help. Her breasts, then her internal baby-making stuff. All in less than a year. She worried such a lot, said she was ugly. She wasn’t ugly. She was my beautiful wife. She was so sorry she couldn’t give me children. Physical bits are not what matters. Frances was whole for me. She still is.

I’m not really sure where exactly I am. Turned off the motorway a while back to get out of the traffic. At least these roads are clear. Can’t use Google Maps because there’s still no signal. Looks like a B road, lots of straight stretches. Bare trees and open fields. Darkening sky. I think I’m headed north-west. I’ll soon be home. Back to Frances. Back to where we used to connect.

I would call her on the drive home. She used to pick up on the first or second ring. She wanted to know where I was, how I was, how my day had been. It was like she lived for me. Now she’s died. If you can die for someone, she died for me, because everything about her was for me. She loved me. Wherever she is, I hope she still does.

It’s like daylight with the full moon through the spiky trees. I think that’s the Sour Nook pub and restaurant just ahead. Frances and I used to go there. I’ll pull over, for old times’ sake. I mean, she’s alive for me. We still have a connection. Maybe there’s a trace of her. A memory.

I’m parked and I’m in through the double door. Pubby smell, bright lights and bouncy carpet, a dozen fried foods, stale post-work suits, noise and beer. Guess what, they still have a payphone in the hallway. Who uses them, these days? And it’s ringing. Who’d have thought it. Somebody out there, calling the Sour Nook, in the middle of nowhere, on the landline. Good luck to them. Somebody will pick up.

But what if it’s Frances. She’s watching from heaven. She saw me stop and she’s calling me. But it can't be her because she doesn't want to talk to me. She doesn't answer when I call her. I pause, my hand trembling. I reach out toward the phone.

I lost the connection to Frances. It's hard to talk about. She was ok about me accepting the submariner’s contract, although I knew she didn’t like it. Twenty percent extra pay to compensate for being incommunicado three months at a time. Trident patrol. Nuclear deterrent. We had to stay undetected, circling under the north polar ice cap. I’m not supposed to know that’s where we were. But where else could we have been, ready to fire at Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and Pyongyang at a minute’s notice?

It was an understandable mistake and it was pure bad luck I was on the phone with Frances at the time. Two minutes every two weeks, we were allowed. She could talk to me and I could hear her but I couldn’t talk to her and she couldn’t hear me. She just got a confirmation from the duty Wren at Faslane that we were connected. We ran at periscope depth, trailing the receive-only antenna on the surface, hoping it wouldn’t be detected. 

There are always Russian subs trying to spot us and I don’t blame the skipper for getting it wrong. With hindsight, it was probably the root of a massive berg. Whatever, he slammed the boat into dive and the trailing antenna went under. Frances was in the middle of telling me her news. The worst news. Six months at best, and here I was for three of them in this tin can under the waves, God knew where.

The line just shut off. Connection lost. No signal. I wanted to tell her I loved her. I did. She knew that. She must have known. She must.

There was no point going to the skipper. I’d seen the standing orders. Even if a seaman’s life was at risk, his orders were not to surface. Let the man take his chances. National security. So I took mine. Stuck under umpteen metres of water, while the woman I loved prepared to spend the rest of time buried under two metres of earth.

Heaven knows where the skip bolted us off to. Probably the bottom of some Norwegian fjord, after the fast dive. Anyway, by the time we got back to Faslane, Frances was dead. The consultant had got it wrong. The skipper called me to his cabin as we sailed up the loch. “I’m sorry, I have some very bad news for you,” he said. I turned straight around and walked out. He looked shocked. Ratings just didn’t do that when they were invited to captain’s cabin. Connection lost.

I put the cold, heavy, plastic handset to my ear. “Sour Nook,” I hear myself say. My voice sounds kind of dead. But not as dead as what speaks to me down that old, long-disconnected landline.

“John.” The monotone voice rings, reverberates and rests. Silence.

I swallow. “Frances? Darling?”

“Yes.” A voice from the bottom of a grave.

“How are you?” I cannot think of anything else to say.

“Dead, you stupid fuck. I died while you were pratting about on that stupid submarine. How do you think I am?” Her words echo into silence.

I hyperventilate and struggle for words. “Frances, darling, I’m sorry. Sorrier than you can ever know. I didn’t want to go on that bloody boat. I wanted to stay with you. But orders are orders. I didn’t have a choice.

Silence, then dial tone.

Connection lost.