Over and over and —
The telephone rang. Its noise was so loud she jumped up from the chair in which she was sitting and tears sprang into her eyes. Absurd, to be made to weep by the sudden sound of a telephone! But the tears came pouring down, whether she thought she was ridiculous for shedding them or not.
She had unplugged the answering machine a while ago (there’d been too many messages, mostly from journalists) so now the phone just kept on ringing. Eventually she picked it up, more to stop the din than because she really wanted to speak to anyone. She didn’t. In fact she was perfectly ready to pick up the receiver and just put it straight down again, but she caught the sound of the woman at the other end of the line, saying her name. She hesitated. Put the receiver up to her ear, a little tentatively.
“Tammy, are you there?” a voice said. Still Tammy didn’t break her silence. “I know there’s somebody on the line,” the woman went on. “Will you just tell me, is this Tammy Lauper’s house?”
“No,” Tammy said, surprised the sound her own voice made when it finally came out. Then she put the receiver down.
It would ring again, she knew. It was Maxine Frizelle, and Maxine wasn’t the kind of woman who gave up easily.
Tammy stared at the phone, trying to will the damn thing from ringing. For a few seconds she thought she’d succeeded. Then the ringing started again.
“Go away,” Tammy said, without picking up the receiver. The syllables sounded like gravel being shaken in a coarse sieve. The telephone continued to ring. “Please go away,” she said.
She closed her eyes and tried to think of the order in which she would need to put the words if she were to pick up the receiver and speak to Maxine, but her mind was too much of a mess. It was better not to even risk the conversation, if all Maxine was going to hear in Tammy’s replies was the darkness churning around in her washing-machine of a head.
All she had to do was to wait a while, for God’s sake. The telephone would stop its din eventually. Maybe five more rings. Maybe four. Maybe three-
At the last moment some deep-seated instinct for self-preservation made her reach down and pick up the receiver.
“Hello,” she said.
“Tammy! That is you, isn’t it?”
“Maxine. Yes. It’s me.”
“Good God. You sound terrible. Are you sick?”
“I’ve had the flu. Really badly. I still haven’t got rid of it.”
“Was that you when I called two minutes ago? I called two minutes ago. It was you, wasn’t it?”
“Yes it was. I’m sorry. I’d just woken up and as I say, I’ve been so sick … ”
“Well you sound it,” Maxine said, in her matter-of-fact manner. “Look. I need to talk to you urgently.”
“Not today. I can’t. I’m sorry, Maxine.”
“This really can’t wait, Tammy. All you have to do is listen. The flu didn’t make you deaf, did it?”
This drew a silent smile from Tammy; her first in days. Same old Maxine: subtle as a sledgehammer. “Okay,” Tammy said, “I’m listening.” She was surprised at how much easier it was to talk once you got started. And she had the comfort that she was talking to Maxine. All she’d have to do, as Maxine had said, was listen. “Do you remember that asshole, Rooney?”
“Vaguely.”
“You don’t sound very sure. He was the Detective we talked to when we first went to the police. You remember him now? Round face, no hair. Wore too much cologne.”
For some peculiar reason it was the memory of the cologne, which had been sickly-sweet, which brought Rooney to mind. “Now I remember,” she said.
“Well he’s been on to me. Did he call you?”
“No.”
“Sonofabitch.”
“Why’s he a sonofabitch?”
“Because the fuckhead’s got me all stirred up, just when I was beginning to put my thoughts in order.”
Much to Tammy’s surprise, she heard a measure of desperation in Maxine’s voice. She knew what it was because it was an echo of the very thing she heard in herself, night and day, awake and dreaming. Could it be that she actually, had something in common with this woman, whom she’d despised for so many years? That was a surprise to say the least.