The Telephone Engineer

By Robert William Saul Harvey

Walter Copeland has trouble with his landline and he reports the fault. When the telephone engineer arrives to correct the fault Walter can hardly believe his eyes, or his luck.
Unfortunately, after finishing the work at the Copeland residence, the telephone engineer disappears...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert William Saul Harvey
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005928704

Robert William Saul Harvey

Robert was born in 1949 in the small Scottish hamlet of Douglas West, Douglas in Lanarkshire, but moved to England when his father, a miner, had to move south for a job.Having left school at the age of fifteen, without any qualifications whatsoever, he started work in a small engineering firm. He soon got fed up coming home covered in dirty grease and having a spotty face so, after six months, decided that engineering was not for him. With nothing to lose, he ran away to sea, so to speak. He joined the Merchant Navy and happily spent three and a half years travelling the world and getting paid for it!Meeting his future wife at the age of nineteen convinced Robert to leave the sea and settle down. There were not many jobs around for a nineteen-year-old and he ended up doing bar/cellar work until deciding to get married at the age of twenty. That was when he joined the Royal Air Force, in which he spent nine years as a Clerk Secretarial, attaining the rank of Corporal before leaving in 1979.After applying for various jobs, Robert finally got one with the National Coal Board in a colliery Stores Department. Ok, this would do him for a while, whilst he looked around for something better. Thirty years later, as a Supply and Contracts Manager, he retired from the Coal Industry at the age of fifty-nine and now has an allotment where he plays at growing vegetables (very nice they are too), and spends his spare time dabbling on his laptop; bliss.Now, with seven books on Smashwords, an eighth under construction, and number nine in the pipeline, who knows where it will stop?Second in the series, Beryl's Pup is now also available.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Dressed in his favorite two-piece, cheap cotton/polyester mix, light-gray jogging suit and dark brown slippers, no socks, Walter Johnathan Copeland III threw an angry snarl at the telephone sitting in the cradle of its Home Hub—itself sitting on a small round table in the corner of the lounge, opposite his reclining armchair—when it fell silent on the second ring.

Bugger! he hissed, wiping beads of sweat from his brow with an arm of the lightweight sweatshirt, wishing he had earlier had the sense to wear an arm-less Tee and lightweight shorts instead.

He should have known better.

Why had he not heeded the pretty weather girl on the TV the previous evening when she warned him it was going to be another helluva scorcher today?

If only he had the sense to listen to what the weather girl was saying, he would now be wearing T-shirt and shorts and nothing else. Perhaps, then, he would not be sporting two large damp patches, one under each armpit, or a third damp patch under his crotch, which had already begun to annoy him to the extent he had to keep pulling his jogging pants and his undershorts away from his bloody hot, itching scrotum.

Every window in the house was open wide to encourage what little breeze there was to come in and cool the place down a degree or two.

But,

It did not work too well.

He still felt as if he were sitting in a sodding oven with the dial turned up to full!

Walter was convinced this infernal heat was draining fluids from him at an unbelievable rate. If it carried on like this he would end up as little more than a pile of desiccated fat and gristle. He swore his throat had already closed up tight through lack of moisture and threw a thirsty eye at the kitchen doorway, wishing his wife would get a move on with that cup of tea she was supposed to be making.

Who would have believed it?

The last week of August.

Three weeks of almost continual downpours accompanied by thunder and lightning and now—a sodding blistering heatwave for the last four days, with no end in sight.

To top it all, for these four days, the damn phone had stopped ringing at the same point, every sodding time!

Ring, ring.

Stop!

Every damn call was the same, even though the sender’s numbers differed—something he had checked the previous day by keeping the handset on the arm of his chair and staring at the screen when the stupid thing started ringing.

Ring, ring.

Stop!

At sixty-two-years old, Walter did not need this stupid shit in his life—it had reached the point where the phone’s behavior was starting to piss him off big time, mainly because, he did not know if it was the phone playing silly buggers, or some clever spam caller trying to get through, using different numbers each time.

Bloody clever bastards these spammers.

So infuriating.

So fucking infuriating!

Walter was no expert, but he thought there might be some kind of fail-safe embedded in the phone’s internal program to make it hang up automatically whenever a spammer tried to get through, which may be the reason it kept cutting out.

On second thoughts, he accepted how such an idea might be a trifle far-fetched, even by his pathetic standards. After all, the phone was ten years old and had never acted up like this before so, it went to show, there had to be something wrong with the stupid thing.

Stands to reason, does it not?

And,

Come to think of it;

It was only recently the daily deluge of bloody annoying spam calls had stopped. No more calls about his non-existent computer having a virus, or some phony policeman trying to make him believe his bank account was being used to launder money and he needed to move his cash into a ‘safe’ account, or a stupid lawyer telling him he had recently been involved in an automobile accident that was not his fault and they would help him to claim compensation, for a huge chunk of the dosh, of course.

The list was endless.

It never ceased to amaze him, the extent some of these people would go to, to try to scam money from one’s account.

Well.

Sod them—he was too worldly-wise to fall for their stupid tricks.

How thick did they think he was?

Fuming, he sent and angry, bare-teethed glare at the handset for a few seconds, willing the damn thing to ring again.

‘I dare you!’ he thought. ‘Go on. I fucking dare you…’

Nothing.

Shaking his head in dismay, he returned his attention to the newspaper folded on his lap and reapplied his mind to the crossword clue currently taxing his brain.

‘Mode of transport used by a pushing young woman?—8 letters.’

‘Stupid bloody clue. Who thinks these sodding things up?’

As he scratched the top of his head with the blunt end of his pencil, his petite wife of forty years, Mary Jane Elizabeth, exited the kitchen carrying a mug of steaming tea—little milk, no sugar—in her right hand and a small side plate containing two chocolate finger cookies in her left.

She made her way round behind Walter’s chair and placed both mug and plate on the lower part of the display unit next to Walter’s chair. Leaning forward, she wrinkled her nose at the smell of stale sweat emanating from his body and peered over his shoulder at the crossword.

Oh, that’s easy, she said.

Ugh? What is?

She pointed at the clue giving him such grief.

That. That one there.

Like, what?

It’s a stroller.

Don’t be silly, woman. How do you get such a silly answer? Do wake up!

No, you’re the silly one, you daft sod. Look, she pointed at each square as she spelled out the word, S-t-r-o-l-l-e-r.

Walter blinked and stared at the grid.

How do you get that from the clue?

Easy. ‘A pushing young woman’. Young women push strollers around town. You see them every day. And it fits in with your other answers going down.

Shit.

She was right.

‘Clever tit!’

Walter, still fuming at the stupid telephone’s behavior, filled in the grid as directed, without further comment, quietly seething inside because, Mary had solved the clue and he had not.

He hated being bested by anyone, more so by Mary.

Just because she had gone to a Grammar School and he had wandered aimlessly through the lower stream of the local Secondary Modern, more intent on having a good time than chasing an education, she thought herself better than him, or so he thought.

In fact, Mary thought no such thing. She had no delusions of grandeur at all. To her, they were equals.

‘Asshole!’ he thought, berating himself rather than his wife.

Mary, knowing she would be unwise to comment further, quietly retreated to her very own place of safety, her personal sanctuary—the kitchen.

Walter never ventured into the kitchen if he could help it. The workings of Mary’s kitchen were foreign to him—all those modern machines: the mad cooker with the silly timer beeping when it should not be beeping, the infernal washing machine and its mind-boggling programs and a mind of its own, the fridge and freezer, both costing him a fortune in electricity by working overtime in this weather, the totally incomprehensible dials and buttons on the microwave and a host of lesser machines, with their equally confusing dials and numbers—plus, it was too much trouble for him to push his over-sized lazy ass off his chair to make the effort.

Much better to leave the machinations of the kitchen to Mary.

Anyway,

As far as Walter was concerned, having been taught such by his father, kitchens were made for women, not men. His father, a devout woman-hater since his wife, Walter’s mother, had run off with another woman after only three years together, had always told him: If the woman ventures into the lounge, the chain must be too damn long.

Think: A prize misogynist!

The reason Walter had been forced to take early retirement from the coal mine, on medical grounds, was because his lungs were knackered from breathing in coal dust over a period of thirty-eight years and his creaking knees were damaged through having to kneel in low coal seams for anything up to seven hours a day caused him to hobble around the house like an old man, not to mention what the constant bending in low coal seams had done to his aching back. Working shifts had not helped either, which was why he had been overjoyed when the Pit Manager eventually allowed him to work in the surface stockyard on permanent day shifts for the final six years of his working life, before finally kicking him onto the scrapheap with, what he considered to be, a less than perfect pension!

Walter closed his eyes and growled through clenched teeth when the telephone sprung into life again.

Ring, ring.

Stop!

This time, he did not bother looking at the infernal machine, knowing it would not ring again for a while.

But, almost immediately…

Ring, ring.

Stop!

And,

Again.

Ring, ring.

Stop!

Oh, for dubrie’s sake! he shouted, thumping the arm of his chair with a clenched fist. Enough! Fucking, enough!

With barely suppressed anger, he pushed himself off his chair amid much grunting and wheezing plus a further outpouring of sweat from every pore on his body, made the two unsteady steps across to the small round side table to one end of the couch and grabbed the handset off its Hub.

‘Bastard!’

Wheeze.

Gasp!

Wiping more sweat from his face, he pushed a few buttons to take him into the phone’s Contact List and selected the Service Provider’s number.

After pressing the green button, the call was answered on the third ring.

‘Funny, the bastard’s working all right now?’

A calm, polite and very professional female voice asked, How can I…

Click!

Silence.

Trying, but barely succeeding, to control his temper, Walter growled, For fuck’s sake!

He slammed the phone down on its Hub.

Puff.

Wheeze.

Mary! he shouted, sweat running down from his forehead, dripping from the end of his nose to land on his left slipper. Where’s your cellphone?

Wheeze.

On the unit, next to the TV, she replied, from somewhere in the darkest depths of the kitchen.

Walter puffed and wheezed like a good ‘un as he shuffled slowly across the room and, wiping his arm across his brow again, picked up the cell.

‘Don’t know why she has to leave the bloody thing all the way over here. What’s wrong with leaving it on the display cabinet, next to my chair, where I can reach it?’

He turned round and, holding onto the mantelpiece for support made his unsteady way back to his armchair, then lurched across the small space to the table next to the couch, where the landline phone lived.

Puff.

Wheeze.

Grunt.

With a huge sigh of relief, he plonked his ass on the arm of the couch and gulped in air by the bucketful.

By this time, his sweatshirt, jogging bottoms and undershorts were sticking to his body and even he could smell the non-too-pleasant aroma emitting from same, something else to annoy him. He tugged at the baggy jogging bottoms, just below his scrotum, and pulled the damp material away an inch or two, but his undershorts remained firmly glued to his skin.

‘Bugger!’

Bracing his left hand on the small round table, he pulled up the contacts list on Mary’s cell whilst trying to sit with his legs apart, something similar to that of a person astride a horse, but minus the horse.

Shit!

Puff.

No Phone Company in her Contacts List.

Wheeze.

He snatched the house phone from its Hub and thumbed through the Contacts List. Once he had the Service Provider’s number, he tapped it into Mary’s cell and put the cell to his ear, whilst clumsily returning the house phone to its Hub.

Staring, unseeing, out the window, he waited for something, anything, to happen.

The same female voice answered, this time on the second ring.

Hello. Mrs. Copeland?

A young teenage girl jogging along the sidewalk in front of his house caused his eyes to focus on her bouncing breasts and his mind to concentrate more on her than the voice on the phone.

Nice.

In an absentminded manner, he muttered, Yeah. Only, it’s me, Mister Copeland.

The female jogger disappeared from view and his mood dropped slightly.

‘How the bugger does she know this is Mary’s phone?’

Wheeze.

It did not occur to him how his wife’s name and address would have popped up on the woman’s screen the moment he rang from her cell. After all, the contract for the cell was with the same company as the contract for the house phone, both of which were registered in Mary’s name, even though Walter paid for the service.

The woman had probably been waiting for a second call from the same address after his fist call had been cut off.

The miracle of modern technology.

Like I was about to say, when I rang a few moments ago, our house phone is kaput.

Oh. I’m sorry to hear that, sir. Would you like to explain? What seems to be wrong with it? I mean…

The sodding thing rings twice then stops, he interrupted. Every sodding time!

Wheeze.

Oh. I see. She paused. Well. The first thing I suggest is; can you hold the cellphone close to your landline?

Why? I won’t be able to hear you then.

If I ring your landline, I can listen, via this phone, to what happens to the landline when I call it. That way I’ll have a better idea about…

Okay. Okay. Listen to what I’m telling you, will you? This is the wife’s cell I’m talking on. I don’t have one of my own. And the house phone’s back on its cradle, where it belongs.

Puff.

Okay, then, sir. I can see the landline is inactive at the moment. Yes. Okay. Just hold the cellphone and the house phone close together, so I can hear what’s happening. Just a second…

Huffing, Walter leaned forward and held Mary’s cell closer to the house phone, not thinking to simply lift the handset off its hub and hold it close to both Mary’s cell and his ear, and waited.

He heard faint sounds as the woman tapped at her keyboard.

Then,

Ring, ring.

Stop!

A Pause.

More tapping on her keyboard.

Again.

Ring, ring.

Stop!

He heard the woman’s voice on Mary’s cell and lifted it to his ear.

Hello. Mister Copeland?

Yes. I’m here, he grunted, struggling to contain his temper.

Right, sir. According to that little test and the data on my screen, I think there might be some kind of a break in the line somewhere. There are no works taking place anywhere in your vicinity so, that only leaves the line to your property.

Walter’s brain made a mental pause.

‘Ugh? Wouldn’t that mean…?’

Surely, a break in the line would prevent the phone from ringing at all?

‘See? Clever tit.’

He swore he heard the woman heave a heavy sigh, but refrained from having a go at her. Let her think what she wants. No skin off his nose.

Not if it is only a partial break, sir. It seems this may be the case here. I will need to send out an engineer to physically check the line, all the way from the, um, green junction box—I assume you’ve seen these green boxes popping up around town, they’re for the new fiber broadband?

Yeah. Yeah. I’ve seen them…

‘What do you think I am, thick?’

…Then what?

Wheeze.

Grunt.

Okay. The engineer will perform a series of checks on the line, all the way from the green box to your nearest telegraph pole, then from the pole to your house.

A horrible thought crossed his mind.

And how much is that going to cost me?

Grunt.

Oh. Nothing, sir. These lines, right up to the connection box in your house, are the property of the Phone Company we rent the lines from so, both they and we have the legal responsibility to maintain such lines. If we find a break, we will repair it, for free. No cost to yourself.

Another grunt from Walter, satisfied. It made a change to get something for nothing.

Good. Right. When will this engineer guy get here?

Let’s see. Tap, tap, tap. Will tomorrow be okay, about three pm, sir?

Yep. Fine. Okay. Humph. I’ll wait with bated breath.

Sarcastic prick.

No please, thank you, or kiss my ass.

The woman, well trained in her job, made polite and thanked him for his call, assured him the telephone engineer would find the fault and correct the problem, then wished him a good day.

After he grumbled a grudging, Goodbye, she hung up, probably moaning to her fellow workers about his crass behavior.

Another disgruntled Humph, emanated from Walter as he swiped red on Mary’s cell.

He dropped the cell on the table beside the house phone and, full of self-congratulations for sorting the problem out, he returned to his armchair, puffing, grunting, wheezing and perspiring, losing liquid like a sieve.

When his breathing returned to something near normal, he lifted the bottom of his sweatshirt with both hands and wiped his face.

Happier now he had sorted out the sodding phone, he lounged back in his chair and grabbed the mug of cold tea from its place on the display cabinet. After downing the drink in one and making a suitably disgusted growling shudder, he replaced the mug, grabbed one of the cookies, rammed it into his mouth and returned to his crossword.

Ring, ring.

Stop!

Oh. For fuck’s sa…

Chapter 2

Hi. I’m Marion, your telephone engineer. I’ve come to check your phone line. I’m told, it’s been playing silly buggers lately?

Walter’s mouth dropped open. Already gasping for air, he stared at the blonde, pony-tailed Goddess dressed in neat lightweight, dark-blue, two-piece overalls, standing on his doorstep. His enraptured brain failed to register the company logo on the left side of her jacket, or the small identity card she held toward him for examination.

‘Fuck me! Heaven does exist!’ he thought.

Puff.

He could not be sure if the tightness in his chest was caused by his clogged-up lungs struggling for air, or the shock of such a heavenly being filling his sight.

Gasp.

Such a beautiful smile, with white teeth and sparkling blue eyes.

Captivating.

Enchanting.

The stuff of dreams.

His dreams!

Gasp.

If this were a film, this vision of loveliness would be surrounded by a soft, hazy halo and he would be a young, fit and handsome Adonis. She would step forward, into his waiting arms. They would kiss. Then the two would make their way upstairs to…

Right.

But,

Puff.

This was real-life and Walter was no young Adonis.

Far from it.

‘Bugger! I must look a right state, standing here, wearing this dirty old T-shirt with a hole in the right shoulder and baggy, knee-length shorts, not to mention being barefoot? So glad I had a shave this morning!’

Yes? he gasped, between strained breaths, unable to take his eyes from her eyes.

Marion Montgomery Merryweather was used to receiving such an over-the-top reaction from the male of the species, especially those old enough to be her father who ought to know better.

She maintained a steady, businesslike posture. Still smiling, exuding friendly, she raised her eyebrows and waited for admittance to the Copeland residence.

When no invitation was forthcoming, she widened her smile and reminded him, I’ve come to repair your phone line?

‘Come on, you silly old duffer,’ she thought. ‘Get your shit sorted.’

Walter made confused.

Er. Um…

Puff.

Gasp!

Wheeze.

…Yes. Um. Er…

Gasp!

…You’d better come in then.

Puff.

Wheeze.

When he did not move, Marion made a brief inquiring look with a single raised eyebrow and cocked her head slightly to the right..

And? she said, putting her booted right foot forward, onto the flowery dark green carpet.

Walter, unsure, shuffled backward and stood to one side.

Oh. Er. Yes…

Gasp!

Wheeze.

…Um.

He beckoned her to enter and made sheepish, his heart pounding in his chest and a light, woozy feeling sloshing around inside his head.

‘Shit! She’s bloody gorgeous.’

Puff.

Wheeze.

His legs made unsteady and he had to shuffle sideways a few steps and grab a hold on the bottom of the staircase handrail to stop him from losing his balance.

‘Wow!’

Wheeze.

Without further preamble, Marion stepped into the small eight-by-six hall, the smell of some very expensive perfume wafting in behind her on an oven-hot breeze, and dropped her toolbox next to a half-moon table cluttered with a door-stop in the shape of a tartan cat, a plastic holder containing some squares of notepaper, takeaway menus and a telephone directory, to one side of the doorway.

Glancing at the ancient phone socket on the outer wall, about four inches above the top of the table, she made a brief nod toward it.

Er. Um…

Puff.

Gasp!

Wheeze.

…Yes. That’s the master connection box, mumbled Walter, still at sixes and sevens, his tongue slurring his words. Can I, um, get you anything…?

Puff.

Gasp!

…Tea? Coffee? Cola…?

Gasp!

Wheeze.

…Something?

Puff.

Gasp!

Twenty-seven-year-old Marion almost felt sorry for the silly old sod, but maintained her cool. This sort of thing happened to her on a regular basis. Too regular, sometimes.

She liked it better when the woman of the house answered the door. Very few women regarded her as anything other than an engineer, although some maintained a watching vigil whilst she worked, perhaps afraid she might make a play for their husband. The few women who did fancy her were often more