The most terrifying piece of information that a stranger can give to you
is a telephone number. Telephone numbers have proven to be the direct cause of hours
- even days - worth of worry for me and I have been known to carry a person’s number
around with me for weeks on end, fretting about it like a stinking corpse
buried beneath my floorboards. Should I call the man that I met in the bar on
Friday night? What if he is an axe-wielding psycho killer? Or worse, the
absolute love of my life? Do I really have the qualifications and experience to
call and apply for this job? What if I’m seriously under-qualified and the interview
panel laugh at me? But the most undeniably heart-stopping moment is when you
are poised by the telephone, punching the numbers into the handset and waiting
for the connection to ring through. What if the cute guy from the bar doesn’t
remember me? What if I babble like an incompetent idiot and the company rejects
my job application?
If I am honest, I considered
conveniently misplacing Leonard’s phone number at first, but after a day or two
I decided that it would be rude to ignore his kind offer and besides, he appeared
to be quite a persistent character so there was a good chance that he would drop
by the church once in a while in the hope of bumping into me. I decided to call
him around mid-afternoon on Friday 5th of December and invite him to attend a Sunday
School-led carol service that was scheduled to take place that Sunday afternoon.
It was billed as a community event and an informal affair, so it seemed
appropriate to invite him along. I agonised all morning over when would be the
best time of day to call - taking care to avoid meal times and any post-lunch
naps that an elderly man might take – and he answered the phone with a
distracted and distant tone to his voice which suggested that he had forgotten
me at first, but he quickly became animated upon hearing my name. The
conversation that followed was rather stilted, but no more than expected for a polite
exchange between strangers. He was pleased that I had contacted him so soon
after our initial meeting but he was disappointed to inform me that he would be
leaving that very evening for a weekend in London, so we made arrangements to
meet during the following week and compared our diaries to find a day that suited
us both. It transpired that Leonard lived very close to the university but
thankfully he was sensitive to the implications of inviting a young woman to
his house and so he proposed that we met on the ‘neutral ground’ of the
university campus instead. After my Greek class on Tuesday afternoon was an
obvious choice as it allowed ample time for a pleasant chat but it was late
enough in the day to make my excuses and leave if I felt uncomfortable for any
reason.
Leonard’s attempts to put me
at ease were reassuring but they did nothing to stop me worrying about our
meeting for the entire duration of that weekend. I shared my reservations with
my boyfriend Alex who, in his typically overprotective way, asked several
probing questions about Leonard’s intentions, most of which concerned his age
and vigour. Alex and I met during my first year at university and we have been
living together since the start of my second year. He was in his final year of
a BA in Business Management when we met and he has recently accepted a position
in a high-ranking company in the centre of Birmingham (which seems to be absorbing
a great deal of his time, but that is another matter). I have discovered that Alex
can be painfully insensitive and oblivious to causing offence at times, but he
shares my concerns when it comes to family matters, financial worries and everyday
anxieties with the kind of unspoken understanding that is common between two
people who have formed a close bond. Fortunately Alex agreed that Leonard seemed
to be a harmless old man and he thought that my apprehensions were entirely unfounded,
adding, with a sarcastic grin, that should ever harm come of it then he would
instantly deny any agreement with our meeting.
