We cleared my dad's house in the February after he died and the answering machine was in a box in the garage under a tarpaulin, with a phone still plugged into it, and a strip of masking tape on the top with KEEP written on it in his handwriting.
That's it. Just KEEP, in capitals.
My dad wasn't sentimental and he wasn't a hoarder. That garage was the most organised room in the house, everything labelled, everything squared off, forty years of working as a heating engineer laid out like a shop. Every other box in there said what was in it. Copper offcuts. Tax 2009 to 2014. Mum's china. Practical, descriptive.
One box said KEEP.
The machine was a Panasonic, one of the ones with a micro cassette in a little door on the top, and it still worked, which I found out by plugging it in in my kitchen out of pure curiosity. The display lit up and showed a number.
42.
Forty two messages. On a machine that had been in a box under a tarpaulin for God knows how long, in a house where the phone line got cancelled in 2016.
I want to tell you about the first one because for about four minutes I thought this was going to be a nice thing.
Every message is time stamped by the machine in that flat American robot voice that reads out the day and the time before it plays. And the first one goes:
"Friday. Eleven. Oh. Four. P.M."
And then my mother's voice says, "It's me. Pick up. Are you there? Pick up the phone, love."
My mother died in 2004. I was nineteen. I hadn't heard her voice in twenty one years and I sat down on my kitchen floor with my back against the dishwasher and let the whole thing run.
The second one's her as well. Eleven. Oh. Nine. P.M. "I know you're there. I can hear the telly. Pick up the phone."
Third one. Eleven. Twelve. P.M. "Please pick up the phone."
By the sixth I'd stopped crying because something had gone wrong with the sound of it.
All forty two were left on the same night. The machine says so, forty two times, in that flat voice. Friday, between 11:04 PM and 11:59 PM.
Fifty five minutes. Forty two calls.
The date isn't in the timestamp, those old machines only did day and time, but I did find the date and I'll get to how.
Thirty one of the forty two are my mother. And her voice doesn't go the way a person's voice goes when they're upset. That's what I noticed around the sixth one and then couldn't stop noticing. A woman making forty two increasingly desperate phone calls gets hoarse, gets tearful, breaks somewhere. My mother's voice in message thirty one is exactly the same as it is in message one. Same pitch, same breath, same faint sound of a telly behind her that never changes programme.
Only the words change.
"Pick up the phone."
"Please pick up the phone."
"I need you to pick up the phone now."
"Why won't you pick up the phone."
"You have to pick up the phone before it gets to the top."
That's message nineteen. I've listened to nineteen about two hundred times. There's no ambiguity in it and there's no context for it anywhere else on the tape.
Eleven of the forty two aren't my mother.
Nine of those eleven are a man and the man is my dad.
Which isn't possible in the same way none of the rest of it is possible, except it's worse, because my dad was in that house. It was his machine. By his own account for the next twenty three years he was sat in that living room.
His messages are shorter and they're not for my mother. They're for me.
"Eleven. Thirty. One. P.M."
"Danny. If you're listening to this you've cleared the garage, so I'm dead, and I'm sorry about that. Don't play the last one."
"Eleven. Thirty. Four. P.M."
"I mean it. Thirty one of these are your mum and they're not your mum. Nine of them are me and they are me. Don't play forty two."
I was born in 1985. In October 1998 I was thirteen and asleep upstairs in that house, and my dad was fifty one, and my mum was alive and had six years left, and not one of the three of us had any way of leaving a message on a machine about clearing out a garage after a funeral that was twenty three years off.
And his voice on those messages is the voice he had at the end. Thin. The cancer voice. I know it better than I know my own.
Two of the eleven aren't either of them and those two are why I stopped sleeping properly for a while.
They're both silent, or near enough. Sixteen seconds and forty seconds. In the first one there's a sound that I had cleaned up by a bloke who does this professionally, who charged me eighty quid and then told me afterwards he didn't want the money. What it is, is a small child breathing very close to the mouthpiece. And behind that, a long way off, a hand knocking on wood in fours.
Four knocks. Pause. Four knocks.
In the second one the child says one word twice, and the word is a name that isn't mine and isn't my dad's, and I'm not going to write it down.
Here's how I got the date, and here's where I'd like to stop, but I'll finish it.
The micro cassette has a paper label and on the label in pencil, so faint I only found it under a lamp held at an angle, my dad had written 9/10/98.
The ninth of October 1998 was a Friday. That matches the machine.
The ninth of October 1998 is also the night my dad drove me to hospital with a temperature of forty and a rash on my stomach that turned out to be absolutely nothing, a virus, the kind of scare every parent gets once. I remember it because it's the only time in my life I've seen my father frightened. We left about half nine at night and we got back at four in the morning, and my mum stayed home because she had work.
So on the ninth of October 1998, between 11:04 and 11:59 at night, my dad was stood in a corridor at Wythenshawe hospital with his hand on my forehead, and my mother was in that house on her own, and there was nobody in that living room to pick up the phone, and forty two calls came in.
And my mum never mentioned it. Not once, in the six years she had left. And my dad put the machine in a box and wrote KEEP on it and then said nothing about it for twenty three years and then died.
I haven't played message forty two.
I've had it four years now. It's in a drawer in my house and I know exactly which drawer and I think about it most days, and twice I've got as far as putting it in the machine, and both times I've taken it back out, because of the thing my dad did that I can't argue my way round.
He didn't destroy the tape.
He had twenty three years and a garage full of tools and a man like him would have burnt it in the back garden and never thought about it again. Instead he labelled the box KEEP and left me nine messages telling me not to play the last one.
He wanted it to survive. He just didn't want me to be the one who heard it.
The only reason I can come up with for both of those being true at the same time is that he thought somebody, someday, might need it. And that it shouldn't be me.
So it's in the drawer. And every so often, late, when the house has gone quiet, I hear the pipes go. Four times, evenly, about a second between each one.
And I turn over, and I don't get up.