The Wrong Number Knew My Shift Pattern

The first message said: "Sorry mate, running late, be with you 6."

Wrong number. I said so.

The second, two days later: "Traffic bad. You in tonight?"

I said, again, wrong number, and I blocked it.

The third came from a different number. It said: "Don't block me. You finish at 22:15 on Thursdays."

I do finish at 22:15 on Thursdays. I have done, at that point, for two years.

I did what you are supposed to do, which is take it to the police, and they were kind and thorough and completely powerless, and they told me to keep a log, and I have a log, and it is eleven pages long.

The messages were never threatening. That is what I have never been able to make anybody understand. They were logistical.

"You'll be in at 22:40. There's no rush."
"Take the long way tonight, the bridge is closed." (It was.)
"Your car needs oil."

My car needed oil.

I changed my number. It found me in nine days.

I moved flat — I actually moved, at some cost, because I am the kind of person who cannot sleep with a thing like this in the room — and for eleven weeks there was nothing, and I started to breathe, and I got a cat, and I painted the kitchen.

Then, on a Thursday, at 22:41: "Nice colour."

I have not replied to any of them since the first two. Not once, in three years.

Here is the part that I have never put anywhere, and that I am putting here because I think, finally, I need somebody else to hold it with me.

Last month my mother died. It was expected. I was with her.

At 04:20 in the morning, in the corridor of a hospice, my phone lit up.

It said: "I'm sorry. She was very brave. Go home and sleep."

I have never been more frightened, and — and this is the thing I cannot get past, the thing that makes me feel sick as I type it — for about four seconds, standing in that corridor, at that hour, I was also, God help me, comforted.