The Phone Call I Answered Before It Rang

I was washing up, phone face-down on the counter, silent, dark. And I dried one hand, picked it up, put it to my ear, and said, 'Mum, what's wrong?' — before it rang. Before the screen lit. Before there was any call to answer. I did it on total autopilot, the way you scratch an itch, and I stood there for a few seconds with a dead phone against my ear, saying 'Mum?' into nothing, feeling the specific idiocy of a person answering an unrung phone, wondering what on earth had made me do it.

And then the phone rang, in my hand, against my ear, and the screen lit under my cheek, and it was my mother, and her first words were the answer to the question I'd already asked the silence: what was wrong.

It wasn't a catastrophe, which almost makes it stranger — a real emergency you could argue some sixth sense smells coming. It was a middling family crisis, my father in a minor way unwell, a decision to be made, my mother upset and needing to talk it through. Nothing that sent a shockwave ahead of it. Just my mother, picking up her phone in her kitchen to call her daughter, and her daughter, in another kitchen, picking up first, answering a call that hadn't been placed, greeting her by name, asking what was wrong, three full seconds before the network knew anything about it.

I didn't tell her, that night; she needed to talk about Dad, not about me being briefly clairvoyant over the washing up. But I've turned it over since, and the thing I keep landing on is how ordinary it felt in the doing. No premonition, no dread, no cinematic chill. Just my hand and my mouth acting a few seconds ahead of the world, answering a mother who was, at that exact moment, deciding to call, so certainly already my mother-about-to-call that some part of me apparently rounded up.

It's happened once more since, smaller — I said 'yeah, on my way' to a text from my husband that arrived while I was saying it, asking where I was. He laughed. I laughed. But I think about the washing up, and 'Mum, what's wrong,' spoken into a silent phone that then rang with exactly what was wrong, and I've started to wonder whether the future doesn't arrive all at once, cleanly, at the stroke of now — whether it leaks backward a second or two, and most of us just aren't holding a phone at the right moment to catch it.