The Shop With the Blue Shutters
Malcolm was eating cold toast at his desk when the call came in, at eight minutes past four.
The woman on the line was calm in the way people are calm when they have decided to be. Her father had gone down in the hallway, she said, and he wasn't answering her, and she had put a blanket over him and left the front door open.
Malcolm asked for the address. She gave him a house number and a street, and the street was one syllable he didn't catch, so he asked her to say it again. She said it again. He asked her to spell it for him, slowly.
She spelled it the way people do, with the first words that came to hand. “S for sugar,” she said. “A for apple. L, L, O, W.”
What he heard the first time was F for sugar, which is nothing at all, so he asked her to repeat that, and the second time he heard S. By then he had the street written twice on the screen in front of him, and the trouble was that both of them were real: Sallow Road was in Bardhill, and Fallow Road was two miles the other side of the ring road. At eight in the morning either of them would have been an easy question for anybody.
His own training used the other alphabet, the one with Sierra and Foxtrot in it, so he offered it back to her. Sierra, was it? She said yes. He asked whether it might be Foxtrot instead. She said yes to that as well. She wasn't misunderstanding him. She was frightened, and to a frightened person on a phone at four in the morning every question sounds like the one you are supposed to agree with.
So he stopped spelling.
“What can you see out of the front window?” Malcolm asked.
“A shop,” she said. “Karim's. The one with the blue shutters, right opposite.”
The control room keeps a list of named buildings — pubs, schools, corner shops, the places people give as addresses because that is how a town is actually laid out inside a person's head. He typed four letters of it. One address came back, with a postcode and a map, and the crew that had been sent toward the wrong side of the ring road turned at the lights and were at the door in ninety seconds.
Her father had broken a wrist and was talking by the time they got him up. Malcolm had been on the phone with her for eleven minutes, and four of them had been about a shop.
In the debrief somebody asked what had been wrong with the line. He said there had been nothing wrong with the line; he could have heard the clock in her hallway. He said the spelling had never been the problem, because both spellings existed, and because every letter he had offered her, she had agreed to.
Then he said, though nobody wrote it down, that he was going to start learning the shops.