The Fandom of the Operator

14

The evening after I’d had that conversation with Barry, I was wide awake and ready for action. And I was wearing a pretty nifty disguise.

Lazlo Woodbine was a master of disguise. He possessed, amongst other things, a tweed jacket, which when worn without his trademark fedora and trenchcoat literally transformed him into the very personification of a newspaper reporter. I did not think that particular disguise would be suitable for what I had to do, which was to infiltrate Developmental Services, so I chose another, which was.

I wore a white coat.

I confess that the white coat idea wasn’t mine. The idea came originally from a friend whom I’d known in my teenage years. A chap called Mick Strange. Mick came up with this brilliant scam for getting into anywhere. By getting in, I mean getting into events, or into virtually anywhere that you would otherwise have to queue up and pay to get into.

The scam was simplicity itself and although nowadays it is attempted (with minimal results) by many, he thought of it first. In order to get in, to virtually anywhere and everything, all you had to do was put on a white coat and carry a large light bulb.

I saw him do it at Battersea funfair and also at Olympia when Pink Floyd played there. He simply walked in, wearing his white coat and carrying his big light bulb. He looked official. He looked like an electrician. He got in. QED. End of story.

I arrived back at the telephone exchange at nine of that evening and clocked on for my overtime. I went into the bulb booth, woke up Barry, who was already having a kip, told him to remain alert, changed into my white coat, which I had brought in stuffed down my trouser leg, and took up my light bulb, which I had secreted in my underpants, and which had got me several admiring glances from young women on the bus. Barry didn’t ask me what I was doing. Barry didn’t care. I asked him to wish me luck, though, and, very kindly, he did.

“Good luck,” said Barry.

“Thank you,” I said. “Very kind.”

And then I went off down the corridor and got into the lift.

Now, OK, I confess, I had a sweat on. I had to keep wiping my forehead. And I was upset by this. As a child I had been brave. A very brave boy indeed. But it seemed that over the years, as Sandra had said, I’d lost it. Lost myself. But I was now determined to get myself back. And definitely do it this time. Not like when I’d made that drunken promise to change the world and liberate the slaves of the system.

And I’ll tell you this, when that little bell rang and the light flashed in the number 17 button and the lift doors opened, I was almost brave again.

Almost.

Nearly almost.

I straightened the lapels on my white coat and I held my light bulb high and I marched along the corridor, noting that this was a somewhat swisher and better-appointed corridor than the one seventeen floors beneath that led to my bulb booth. But I walked tall and true and I marched, I fairly marched, towards room 23.

And when I got to it, I didn’t knock. I opened the door and I walked right in. And I didn’t half get a surprise.

Room 23 was a very big room. And when I say big I mean big. It wasn’t so much a room as an entire operations centre. It was vast. And it was high, too. I figured that they must have knocked out the ceilings and floors of the eighteenth and nineteenth floors too to accommodate all this equipment and all these walkways and gantries and stairways that all these men in white coats who were carrying light bulbs were walking along and up and down and all around and about.

I fairly smiled.

And then I joined them.

And then a man with a white coat who didn’t carry a light bulb but instead carried a clipboard (which singled him out as a “technician”) stopped me.

“And where do you think you’re going?” he asked.

“I’m not quite sure,” I said.

“I thought so,” said the technician. “Let’s have a look at that bulb.”

I held up my bulb for his inspection.

“That’s an XP103,” he said. “North end of the Mother Board, gantry five, level four, row ten.”

I looked at him.

“Hurry, then,” he said. “A missing bulb is an accident waiting to happen.”

“Indeed,” I said. “North end, you said.”

“Gantry five, level four, row ten. Hurry along.”

So I hurried along. And it did have to be said that when it came to bulbs, the lads in Developmental Services had the market cornered. I had never seen so many bulbs all in one place at one time ever before in my life.[18] One entire wall of this vast department was all bulbs, so it seemed. Thousands and thousands of them, all flashing on and off and some just flickering in between.

I felt almost sick at the sight of them. Having had only the one to deal with myself, this was all very much too much. A bulbsman’s nightmare. I’d had dreams like this myself.

“Hurry,” said the technician once more, for I had paused in my hurrying.

I hurried along gantries and up stairways until I was out of the sight of that technician and then I stopped and took stock. What the fugging Hull was all this? What was a Mother Board? What did all these bulbs do? I almost asked a fellow white-coater. Almost. But not quite. I knew what the answer would be: “Don’t ask me. Do I look like a Grade A bulb supervisor first class?” or something similar. So I didn’t ask. I milled about, looking as if I was busy, and I listened.

I couldn’t understand much of what was being said. It all sounded terribly complicated and technical, but then I suppose that it would. Being so complicated and technical.

And everything.

I overheard the word “interface” being used a lot. And a lot about “frequencies”, getting the frequencies right. And the dialling codes. “Exactitudes” regarding the dialling codes. It was all a mystery to me.

And then some oik in a white coat accosted me and asked whether I was “the new bob who wanted to speak to his granny”.

“Yes, that’s right,” I said. “Is she here, then?”

The oik rolled his eyes. In the way that folks often did when talking to me. “Well, obviously she’s here,” he said. “Do you have your dialling code worked out yet?”

“Not as such,” I said.

“Which means ‘no’, because you can’t do the calculations, am I right?”

“You are,” I said.

“Good grief,” said the oik. “Didn’t they teach you anything at the Ministry?”

I shrugged.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you to the supervisor.”

“I’m fine here,” I said. “I’ve got to get this XP103 to the North gantry.”

“So why are you on the East gantry?”

“I was heading north,” I said.

“No, you weren’t. Come with me.” And he rolled his eyes again. And I followed him.

“Mr Baker,” said the oik, tapping a white-coated man upon the shoulder. “Mr Baker, the new bob here, who wanted to speak to his granny, he hasn’t worked out his dialling code yet. Is it OK if I show him how to do it?”

Mr Baker turned and stared at me. He was a man of middle years, perhaps in his middle thirties, and he looked strangely familiar to me. I was certain that I’d seen him before somewhere.

And, oh yes, I had.

He was one of those young blokes I’d seen in the restricted section of the Memorial Library so long ago. I did have a good memory. Sometimes.

“Go ahead,” said Mr Baker. “But make it quick. He only has a three-minute window. No longer, do you understand that?”

“Absolutely,” said the oik.

“Absolutely,” I said too.

“Follow me,” said the oik, and I followed him. He led me down a couple of stairways and along as many gantries. “This will really freak you out,” he said as he did so.

“I’m not easily freaked out,” I said.

“Yeah, right,” said the oik. “Everybody gets freaked out the first time.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Why?” The oik turned and looked me in the eyes. “You’re either very brave or very stupid,” he said.

“I’m very brave,” I said. “Why?”

“Why? Because most people do freak out when they speak to a dead relative the first time.”

“A dead relative,” I said, stopping all short in my tracks.

The oik stared at me. And then began to laugh. People seem to do a lot of that too when they talk to me. “Oh, very good,” he said. “Very good indeed.”

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“No,” said the oik. “That was funny. Pretending that you didn’t know what FLATLINE was all about. You almost had me going there. Very funny indeed. Good gag.”

“I’m so glad you liked it,” I said, as my brain did cartwheels. Speak to a dead relative? That’s what he’d said and he’d said it with a straight face. And FLATLINE, that was out of hospitals, wasn’t it? When people flatline, they die. The line on the electrocardiograph goes flat. FLATLINE, phoneline? Phoneline to the dead? It made some sort of sense.

“I hope she coughs up whatever it is,” said the oik. “What do you want to know – where she hid her savings? It’s usually that. Mind you, I can’t sneer because it’s unoriginal. I did just the same when I had my turn. I asked my mum whether she really told my sister that she could have the radiogram. I really wasted my turn and I won’t get another one for five years. So I’m not going to be stupid next time. I’m going to ask my mum whether she had any pirate’s gold hidden anywhere. I hope you’ve come up with something good for your first go. Don’t mess up like I did.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said: “Do you think that’s fair? Just the one go, every five years?”

The oik drew me near and he whispered. “No, I don’t,” he said. “But when the service goes on line to everyone, we’ll be able to make as many calls as we want. So I suppose we’ll just have to be patient for now, won’t we?”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“Come on, then. Let’s get it done.”

“Right,” I said and I followed him some more.

He led me to a rather extraordinary thing. Not the sort of thing I was expecting at all. I was expecting some kind of Frankenstein’s Laboratory sort of thing. Lots of electrical lightning flashes and big wheels turning.

The oik led me to a telephone box.

A classic English big red telephone box. “Go on,” he said. “Go inside.”

“This is it?” I said.

“Of course,” he said. “What were you expecting, Frankenstein’s Lab?” And he laughed again.

“Of course not,” I said. “But about the dialling code?”

“I can’t see how you can forget something so simple. You dial in the full name of the deceased and the date of their departure. Then times the figure that comes up on the screen by the age of the person when they died and take away the year they were born and, wallah, you have your dialling code. Do you really need me to do that for you or can you figure it out for yourself? How hard can that really be?”

“Not hard at all,” I said. “I don’t know how it slipped my mind.”

“Probably because you’re a twonk,” said the oik. “Now go in, do it. Three minutes is all you get, understand?”

“Of course,” I said.

“And don’t think you can go on for longer. You can’t go over three minutes. When you reach three minutes a signal goes to the bulb booth on the ground floor and the bulb-monkey will switch you off.”

“The bulb-monkey?” I said, and I said it very slowly.

“The retard who mans the bulb booth.”

“Right,” I said and I said it through gritted teeth. “The retard, yes.”

“So, do your stuff, have your go and speak to your gran.”

“Right,” I said. “I will. Thanks.”

“Then get that XP103 in place.”

“I certainly will.” I entered the telephone box and the door swung shut behind me.

It was strangely quiet in there. Not that it was all that noisy outside. But in here it was quiet. It had a kind of peace. But there always is a kind of peace inside a telephone box. It’s probably all to do with “shape power”, all that “power of the pyramids” stuff. Certain environments are special and that’s due to their shape. I read about that once. About underground burial chambers that resonate certain notes, like chanting voices and suchlike. The ancients apparently knew all about this sort of stuff, but we in our educated wisdom have lost the knowledge.

But certain people, it appears, seem to know intuitively all about it – certain designers, like the man who designed the telephone box, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. He also designed Battersea Power Station and Bankside Power Station, which is now the home of Tate Modern.

He was a bit of a genius really.

My hand hovered above the telephone.

Dial up my granny?

Now, why would I want to dial up my granny?

I’d never even met my granny – she’d died before I was born – and I didn’t know the date of her “departure”.

So, really, I couldn’t call up my dead granny, could I? So who could I call? Who did I know who was dead and I could call?

Stupid kind of question really. Ridiculous question. The whole thing was pretty ridiculous. Ludicrous, in fact. Although … Well, although the oik wasn’t taking it as a joke. This wasn’t a joke. This was FLATLINE and this was what FLATLINE was.

My hand continued to hover.

And then slowly, so slowly, I took up the telephone handset and put it to my ear.

And then slowly, so slowly, and somewhat falteringly, I dialled the letters of my father’s name and the date of his “departure”. Then I multiplied the figure that came up on the screen by the age of my father when he died and took away the year he was born.

And then, all a-tremble and right on the cusp of a freak-out, I listened.