You've Dialled The Wrong Number, Little Jo
A Mirror, Mirror fanfiction
~1986~
Nicholas always cringed, just the slightest bit, whenever he picked up the phone in the shop and a child's voice answered on the other end.
Children rarely had valid reasons for telephoning an antique dealer, meaning it was either a mistake or else a prank. He would have been a good deal angrier about the pranksters wasting his time if he didn't pause and reflect upon the various kinds of mischief that entered his own head in childhood – he hadn't exactly been an angel.
But that morning was different – in spite of the infantile inflection, he recognised the voice on the other end almost immediately.
He couldn't help the corners of his mouth turning upwards. It had been so long since he'd heard an older version of this voice with its familiar Sydney accent.
"I'm afraid you've dialled the wrong number, little Jo," he said, swallowing hard and speaking slowly so he wouldn't burst out laughing – something he was in real danger of doing, provided he managed to avoid crying.
Young Josephine Tiegan would be about five years old now.
About the right age for her parents to teach her to use the phone for an emergency, to call for help, but also the right age for her not to quite grasp the concept of what constituted as a strict emergency, or the concept of not dialling random numbers and expecting help – particularly phone numbers which turned out to be entirely outside of Australia.
Poor Andrew and Catherine Tiegan were going to have a fit when they saw the bill this month.
"Not-uh, it's gotta be the right number," the little girl on the other end argued. "If it's a wrong number, how come you know my name?"
Difficult to argue with that logic. "In that case, what can I help you with today, Jo Tiegan?"
"I got heaps of homework from school and Mum's busy – do you know anything about adding numbers?"
The repressed desire to laugh was probably going to make his ancient appendix burst, but it was worth it to be having this conversation at all. "Do I! Why don't you just tell me the numbers you're trying to add, and I'll talk you through it."
A responsible adult would have told her to hang up before she got into trouble – luckily, however, despite being eighty-two years old and running his own business, and a general air of maturity that had hung around him even when he was still young, there was a part of Nicholas that would never quite be a responsible adult.
Never really.
And so, a solid half hour ticked by (each second punctuated by the hundreds of clocks in the shop, lining the walls and piled precariously into corners) while old Nicholas helped little Jo Tiegan with her homework.
He admired that, even as a small child, she was honest enough not to ask him to just give her the answers outright – which frankly, he would have done, since her sweet little voice was having rather a softening effect on him and basically turning the hapless old man into a giant pile of malleable putty – refusing to cheat.
Nicholas hadn't felt so much happiness in decades as he did in the course of this one thirty-minute phone conversation.
But, of course, it had to end – it must.
A voice broke in, Catherine Guthrie Tiegan's: "Josephine, who are you talking to?"
The littler, closer voice suddenly quailed, losing its former confidence. "I think I better go, mister. Bye."
"Indeed, I think you had better," he told her. "Best of luck at school tomorrow, Malenkaya." It was the first time in years he let himself speak his native language – even just the single word. He'd had so little cause to use it, no one had tried to speak Russian to him for ages, and moreover he had been trying to actively disguise his childhood accent for decades now. However, given Jo was still just little enough that, however bizarre their interaction, she likely wouldn't remember the exchange by the time she was fourteen and they met again, he risked adding, before he heard the click of the call ending, "Ya tebya lubloo." I love you.
It didn't matter if she heard, or that she wouldn't understand even if she did hear, it only mattered he had the chance to say it.