All best friends were once strangers. So why does it feel like a brave, even brave thing to reach out to someone you don’t know, to make platonic connections in the modern world?
Let me tell you about my friend, Pauline. Like all good friends, we make a point of catching up at least once a week, talking for hours about everything and nothing. But Pauline and I, while always there for each other, are unlike more conventional companions because, as well as being born 50 years apart and living several hundred kilometers apart, we have never met. We are phone friends.
It was the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and I was watching cat videos on YouTube. An advert popped up – a charity for older people trying to combat social isolation through weekly phone calls. Thirty minutes a week was the commitment. A simple chat can change an older person’s life, so they said.
There were rules, of course. You only had to talk on the phone, only to know each other’s first names, never to meet in real life.
Now I volunteer for various elderly charities, but at the time I didn’t think much of it. Still, the idea immediately resonated. Maybe it was an age thing. I had just turned 30, a milestone no one can fail to ignore, and I began to wonder what mark I was leaving on the world, what my future held, who I was. And then there was Covid, of course.
It is no coincidence that it all started in 2020. Was it a sense of privilege I felt during the pandemic that drove me to sign up for these calls? Have I tried to clear my own conscience? A young man in a nice apartment with a nice boyfriend, never goes without food, or work or, for that matter, company.
I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who found myself pondering those big existential questions during those difficult weeks, months (years, wasn’t it?).
It was around that time that I took a break from my work in television to finish writing my novel, as indulgent as that sounds, and I had some time on my hands, to put it mildly. And so, after completing various selection procedures, security checks and training programs, the calls began.
“You watch a lot of television?” I ask.
“Natural!” Pauline answered. “I never have the TV off! It became a kind of friend. What are you looking at?”
She hit me against it. I compiled a mental crib sheet of shows I assumed she would watch in preparation for the call: Countryfile; Cash in the Attic; Countdown. I had been watching them for the previous week in case the conversation dried up.
“I watch reality TV.” announced Pauline. ” I like Made in Chelsea.”
I spit out my coffee. “Really?”
“Sure. I watch it on E4. And that other one in Essex. Haven’t missed an ep of it yet.”
Of course, on paper it shouldn’t really work. Our lives are poles apart. And yet, despite all our apparent differences, there is more that unites me and Pauline than divides us. Somehow it works.
A few months in and there is little we haven’t discussed. And not just what we watch on TV, but memories from our past, dreams for our future. With each call we get to know each other a little better, we become more comfortable to reveal a little more of ourselves. But how sad, I think, that it took a national pandemic before that happened. This friendship, and countless others across the country, would never have blossomed without it.
“My cat, Muriel,” I said, one day, “she turned five yesterday. We threw her a party. She tried Pawsecco. It’s nettle and ginseng, lightly carbonated. I sound crazy, don’t I?”
There is a moment’s pause. “It’s nice to hear how you yourself sound more,” she cut in, out of nowhere. “Are these the tablets?”
“Sorry?”
“The tablets you told me about – are you feeling better? Happier?”
It was a few weeks earlier that I found myself confiding my mental health issues to Pauline over the phone. I’m usually pretty reluctant to talk about stuff like this, even with my closest friends, but maybe that’s one of the benefits of a phone friendship, not having to look another person in the eye.
“I think so,” I tentatively answer, although I know it’s true, I feel much more myself, but there’s something about the fact that it’s coming from Pauline that somehow oppresses me.
“I’m glad you noticed, Pauline. I feel much better. Thank you.”
There is a simplicity in our relationship, I realize, a connection deeper than I could have imagined when I first signed up for these calls. I guess sometimes in life we’re not sure what we’re looking for until it appears right under our eyes or, in my case, ears.
“I hope you don’t mind,” said Pauline, “but I was talking to a man from the electricity board the other day and I came to you. I called you my friend. Is that OK?”
“Of course you’re my friend,” I reply, but it’s just as I say the words that I realize it’s true. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t take comfort in knowing that someone is there for me as much as I am for them. Someone who is always on the other end of the phone. True friendships are neither transactional nor philanthropic. They are mutually beneficial. Life enriching.
Pauline sighed deeply and I heard her shake her head. “If only I had more gays in my life.”
I start laughing. She is forever extolling the virtues of homosexual people. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, I’ve always had an affinity with gay people. Men and women.”
I smile into the phone.
“There’s another name for someone like you, Pauline.”
“There is?”
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“Yes, and it rhymes with bag-night.”
There were many moments that were anything but sweet. Thinking about her situation one day, during one of our chats, I am overwhelmed by her confinement, the cruelty of it all, and a thought comes to mind, one that I have yet to fully consider. What happens when Pauline is no longer with us? When I ring and there is no answer?
“Are you still there?”
“Sam?”
“Why are you crying?”
There’s an ugly guttural cry that comes out of me that I can’t control. I grab the pillow I’m leaning against and press my face into it, suppressing all the anger, the sadness, the shame of it all.
It’s a disease in our society, I think. Where older people are invisible and neighbors are a nuisance and no one cares about anyone but themselves.
“Let’s talk about something a little more cheerful,” Pauline suggests, and suddenly she’s the one comforting me. “How’s Tom?”
At the mention of my partner a smile appears on my face. I smile
“He has a beautiful accent, doesn’t he?”
“He did,” I replied. “Aren’t I happy?”
The week before, she heard Tom on the phone to his mother while we were sitting on the couch together.
“And may I say there is something very attractive about an Irish accent?”
“You are,” I say. “And there is. It’s like butter, Pauline. You should hear the things he whispers in my ear.”
There was a naughty cackle over the phone. “I’m glad it’s not just me.”
“How do you look, Pauline? I’ve never seen you, have I? We only know each other’s voices.”
I immediately regret the question. In all the hundreds of hours we had talked, I had unconsciously painted an image of Pauline in my mind and I was reluctant to let that image shatter.
“I know how,” she said, “I’ll tell you how I used to look.” I feel myself breathing out.
“I had long blond hair, reddish blond, really, and a heart-shaped face. Hare colored eyes, a fine nose and a cupid’s bow mouth. Everyone always commented on my neck – it was long, like a swan’s. And I used to wear a lot of jewelry – no sense, of course.”
I beam into the receiver, closing my eyes to try to imagine her.
“I have to let you go,” I add, realizing what a ridiculous thing that is to say.
“Would you call again when you get a moment?”
“I will! Why would I stop calling?”
It went beyond volunteering, I realized. It’s been almost four years. Hundreds of hours of conversation. Countless stories. Laughter. Secrets. And now tears. It is no longer charity, if it ever was. We are friends, simple as that. I will keep calling Pauline, of course I will. I will keep calling until she doesn’t pick up.
Pauline’s name has been changed for confidentiality. The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers by Samuel Burr (Orion Fiction, £14.99) is available from guardianbookshop.com for £13.19
