Prelude

A cream plastic strip on the ground on the ridge line of a hill seemed out of place: rubbish so far away from buildings and people. When uncovered it was the curved top of a handset in leaf litter, which then revealed the coiled handset cord, caked in soil and decomposed leaves. The body of the telephone, with the dial of clear plastic when working that would have rotated around numbers, only revealed itself when kneeling and using a stick to scrape away a soil clod around it. When he was able to lift the body of the thing out it was stuck by the cord that once would’ve plugged into a wall, buried in the ground.

He dug around the cord to release it, being careful not to break it, and got so far with it that he had a metre of slack, the end still buried, and was able to stand with the phone, in the bush, on a hill overlooking a channel of water, held in that indent under the handset on the body of the phone by the slots for the bell speaker in the way one held a phone decades before, when you might carry the phone with you across the room. Unless the phone was fixed to the wall and then you would have to stretch the handset coil as far as it would go, near straightened, to be across the room, or behind the door in another room for privacy, looking out a window perhaps, with a view of bush and a body of water.

It was in thinking of that, of the bodily memory of using both hands to make a phone call, that had him lift the receiver of its cradle.

The familiar click and stuttering thrum of a dial tone threw him.

He thought it must be some fluke, against logic, of long stored energy in a capacitor or a coil in the phone that would quickly dissipate, but it continued. His response to the complete irrationality of this was to put the handset back in place. He put the phone on the ground and sat looking at it, as if to collect himself, to reconfigure reality. When he lifted the handset once more it was with some relief that it was silent, but not entirely relief, and not entirely silent. When he held it to his ear he heard a child’s voice, a high-pitched boy’s voice, distant yet intimate in a way that words cannot easily describe.

Hello?

His heart was racing now.

It might, if this was some imaginary circumstance, have been easy to imagine a first reflexive response, when hearing this child’s voice, to say ‘Hello’ in return, and ask … ‘who am I speaking to?’ like you might have done in the days when phones were communal and in dialling a home number you might never know which member of a family would answer, often a parent, and if an older parent, with a special telephone voice. But it could not happen like that because he knew the voice to be his own. His voice, as a child.

In the wrenching in that second of time he was flooded and completely overwhelmed with the most terrible heartbreak for time lost, for himself lost, as if every slight and hurt and pang of love and longing had burst inside, and panicked in this way he was more than speechless — he was paralysed and sweating with both fear and a strange sense of elation, as if he, as that so-vulnerable child, all nascent mystery, had returned and was with him now.

He hung up again yet hanging up on himself made it worse. He made a strange involuntary sound then, as much a bark as a sob, as if in great pain — his body a puppet of force greater than he, fell to the ground and lay in a foetal position, trembling.

After a time, he began to breathe more naturally, and to think again, his consciousness raised that way above that inner storm, to feel the ground under his hands and smell humous and eucalyptus bush around him, sensing all that was absurd and surreal in all this, seeing the shiver of breeze in leaves that brought him back to ground.

He stood then, to see again that view from the hill of a channel through trees, and a long island on the distant shore, from the sight of which the discovery of plastic had distracted him, but his trembling legs had him sit again on that ground by the unearthed phone.

He might also have dismissed all that had happened in those seconds as neurological, a small stroke perhaps, the knife-sharp specificity of it could help make the argument for some breach of the unconscious. He knew, as surely as he had ever known anything, the specific circumstance in which that one ‘Hello’ was spoken. It was 1966, his two older sisters beside him, and there was once a photograph of this very scene, but the reality of it relived was so keen as to have had him feel cold air on the child’s, on his, face, and to touch his face to be sure.

In the photograph he was closest to the camera and the three siblings were lined up parading toys, his sisters with their new prams and black dolls, and he with a toy telephone. It must have been Christmas. Their apron-wearing mother was in one corner of the image, an unflattering blur, coming around one corner of the tin clad mining company house in the mountain side village of Williamsford, a place that no longer exists, and her a ghost with a face washer in one hand. The story once attached to all that was fleeting, forgotten, competing with so many other stories that had spiralled out from it in an overwhelming second, and the only vaguely rational analogy he could now make, also electric, was the high voltage shock that had left his armed bruised as an apprentice and sent a large spanner flying across the room and clanging on the concrete of a substation floor.

One memory among thousands, that had thrown him to the ground.

It would have been the first Christmas since he and his sisters and the baby girl, the child of their new stepfather, and their elder half-brother, had come to live there. Swinging London, Vietnam, the Australian Prime Minister lost in surf, all the many things that would have been so far away from a four-year-old boy in a remote mining village on the side of a mountain, washed up as songs and news under the staticky reception on a wireless relaying the fading signal a faraway small-town station.

In this way, the feeling of 1966ness in the scene of the photograph was fleetingly so very specific — along with the state of the girls prams, which were not new, likely second hand, but their pride in them made them new, as with the black dolls too which were a fashion at the time, and it was vague otherwise, and began to fade so quickly as he sat there having it all return, yet wash away, like waves of the sea, above and under, head in hands now, just a cork in the ocean of it.

The idea that as a boy he heard someone’s breath, his own breath, on the handset of a toy telephone from decades in the future, and puzzled, said Hello, could not even have been thought, nor yet remembered. How quickly, when objects are given names and narrative, they are contained and the emotional content within, that latent storm of rage and love and loss, is hidden. Yet that single utterance had unhinged him and held it all open… the moment of that photograph, holding the toy phone to his ear, projecting later life on it in seeming to pretend to business, seemed such a small thing for all that had imploded in on it, like a galaxy of self we like to pretend does not exist. And the photographer absent.

Sitting for what must have been several minutes on damp ground, he began to think about what he might have said to himself as a boy in that moment, and he could think of nothing. Could think only that it would be betrayal to have spoken at all, breaking the sanctity of innocence, and that sense of sweet pain came back. Yet the dark matter of silence was in it too, that which had bound all those threads to the heart, and tugging at them, that had more dragged than threw him down, the very earth wanting him buried.

Sitting there, his heart still beating fast, every telephone number ever committed to memory, in a congruent involuntary feat, begged to be recalled, from a time when people did that, to be able to call family or friends from a phone box on the street, when people made time and went out of their way to do such things, without an omnipresent monitor in their pockets. And each thread in the cord of it all contained its own small anticipated world; in the grain of voice; in the background sounds of the phone network, suggesting distance; in that surprise, event after event of each call, from person after person, wanting to hear their voices again, their breath, little habits of syntax, in connection so powerful and ordinary, and each fell from his heart like a cascade in loss, yet at the same time with joy. The crackle on the line.

With one hand he touched the index finger of the other, which with a familiar sweep, might dial a phone. He watched ants around the souls of his boots, one carrying a leaf, imagining a million ants that might rebury that object. Others carried small specks, like ashes of bone.

He wanted, strangely, for that telephone to ring.

With eyes closed behind fingers, now breathing deeply and more slowly, and with that he felt a stillness of mind enough to lift his head and look about. And a sound came as comforting as the physical touch in a voice, but now within hands reach, in the chirp of a tiny, white-eyed finch, then another, then dozens of hyperactive finches, flitting from branch to branch, not seeing him for stillness, until in time they happily diminished and together had moved on with a flock of chirps growing distant.

It seemed that hours had passed, and not just hours, but days and weeks, a life in that fleeting harvest of finches taking so many memories away in fragments.

He placed the unearthed telephone back into the depression he had made in removing it from the ground and covered it up with the ground, so you might not have known it was there. Then came a silent readjustment on the cusp of thought, and with the snap of twigs underfoot.

© Linden Hyatt 2026