The Woman Who Answered the Wrong Number

The Blue Star taxi rank on Harbour Road had a phone number ending in 8-4-1. Its bookings were taken in a small back room with a switchboard, three telephones and a kettle that was never quite off. Miriam’s flat, three streets away, had a number ending in 8-4-2. For twelve years this was the single most important fact of her evenings, and she took the calls at a little desk by the window, on an old dial telephone that had belonged to her mother.

The first year she explained. Wrong number, sorry, try one digit up. The second year she stopped explaining and started helping, because people who ring a taxi rank at eleven at night are rarely in a position to appreciate a correction. She kept a pen and a pad by the phone. She learned which drivers worked which nights, which streets flooded in heavy rain, and that the rank answered faster on its second line after ten.

By the fifth year she had a system. Regular callers got a regular response. The man who went to the hospital every Tuesday was told his usual driver was on and would be there in fifteen minutes. The students who always forgot their address were asked, gently, to look at the nearest street sign. Miriam would ring the rank on her own line, pass the booking on to the switchboard, and ring the caller back to confirm. The drivers at Blue Star began to recognise her voice without ever having seen her face.

Blue Star found out properly in the eighth year, when a driver mentioned that a passenger had thanked him for the lady who takes the bookings. The owner drove over with a tin of biscuits and an offer of a job in the switchboard room. Miriam declined the job and kept the biscuits. They came to a different arrangement instead: the rank would ring her at the start of every shift to say who was out, and she would carry on doing exactly what she had been doing anyway.

It worked because nobody tried to fix it. There was no new number, no official notice and no complaint to the phone company, only two telephones three streets apart and a woman who had decided that a wrong number was, on balance, somebody who needed help getting home. The biscuits arrived every Christmas. The drivers called her the night office.

When she finally moved away, the phone company gave the number to a dental practice. For about six months, the receptionist there took requests for a car to the station and passed them along, having been told on her first morning that this was simply part of the job. Nobody thought to explain why. She assumed every dental practice did it, and still smiles when the phone rings late.