Explore>Writing Awards>Comfort & Disturb (2025)>

This Call by Peter Marshall

A recorded message begins phone calls from prisoners in Scotland, many of whom have mental health issues. The call will be disturbing to me but I must find the strength to offer comfort.

“This call   

Oh! Not again. She’s got such a nice, relaxed voice. She sounds calm and gentle yet manages firm and assertive too. I hate hearing her voice, detest it, every time.   

   originates   

It makes me shudder as her words switch to formal, though it’s good to have a few seconds to calm myself.   

      from a   

Yes, spit it out, will you?  

         Scottish prison.   

What’s he done now? Something really stupid. It must have been something dreadful to be inside again. Where is it this time? It’s like he’s intent on a grand tour of every jail in the country. Why can’t he just take bus tours like normal people?  

            It   

               will   

                  be    

How very philosophical.   

                     logged   

There are occasions when I mishear, as if she’s said flogged. Not that it would have helped. I need to get stupid, impulsive stuff out of my system, fast. I’ll remind him that I worry about him, and I always tell him that I love him.   

                        and   

And how long a stretch is he serving now?   

                           may   

                              be   

No maybe about this. Cold, hard reality. Again! Support now, cry later.   

                                 recorded   

Oops! Did I swear when I realised where the call was coming from? I’m sure I’m not the first to curse. I’m glad my torrent of thoughts stays private.   

                                    and/or   

That’s it. The stupid nonsense you remember from school maths lessons and think about when trying to delay the inevitable. Get those Boolean logic operators out in the open. AND, OR and NOT.   

                                       monitored.   

Hah! Monitored is useless. He gets in more trouble when he’s tagged as he’s nothing but drinking with pals from 7pm to 7am. At least he can’t hear me cursing his folly. Not while the lady’s chattering away with her thirty words. That’s how these calls are supposed to work.   

                                          If you do   

He’ll regard phrases like that as a challenge.  

                                             not   

There’s the third main Boolean operator. Not that any type of logic comes into it for him. Lager (and coke) are his operators.   

                                                wish   

I wish, alright, I wish! I wish there was something different I could have done when he was growing up. Whatever I did wasn’t enough, was it? My failures when I was ill myself still torment me.   

                                                   to   

For a moment, I can dream it’s a mistaken number and it is really for someone else. But I know it’s his nightmare he needs to share, like those childhood night-torments he needed cuddled through, and now he must submit numbers of people he’ll call.   

                                                      accept    

Are you truly asking? Do I have a choice? Did I have a choice when I first met you at twenty months, rejected by a carer, rocking, your head a battering ram on the inside of our front door. Or at fourteen when you were overnight in hospital with your first big overdose.   

                                                         this call,   

Or is this your younger brother on the phone? He was thrust at me as a bundle on my doorstep by the woman with tears in her eyes, the woman who loved you as if her own baby, until she turned away. Now, you’re on tour too.   

You’ll both turn 40 in a year, and two — if the Fates stay kind to you.   

                                                            please hang up.”