SIREN CALLS

UNKNOWN PLEASURES
There's a phone box in a quiet side street near Euston Station which is covered in the usual wallpaper of stickers with photos of women who aren't the women you would meet if you phoned the number on them, promising various aspects of pleasure and release.
Not many people walk along that street, and of those that do, few notice the phone box or the stickers because they're just part of the city fabric, like lampposts and bike racks. The few that do usually just wonder to themselves who the hell uses a phone box these days, other than men looking for the stickers.
Sometimes though, men will stop, furtively looking around, pausing as if to tie a shoelace even though their shoes are fastened with velcro. Sometimes they will go into the phone box, note down a number. Some will even ring it and then scuttle off, heading for a flat in a narrow side street, a flat that smells of disinfectant and boredom. For them, perhaps, the phone box is part of the experience, a faded seedy London way to degrade themselves further.
One or two, sometimes, will pick up the phone, and call the number on one particular sticker, that's just above the metal shelf, on a slant, the edges peeling. ‘Call For Unknown Pleasures’, the sticker reads, and rather than a photo of a woman, there's just a silhouette.
If you were to stand in the street and watch one of the men who phones that number, you would see them look nervous, unsure, and then their face would light up, as if for the first time in their lives they had been told something good about themselves, and then they would be rapt in concentration, listening as if their life depended upon it, and you would be stood there in the street a good long while watching.

In the end, they will hang up, walk past you without even noticing you are there, their face as blank and serene as still water. They will walk and walk until they reach an obscure tributary of the Thames that surfaces now and then between grimy industrial walls, and they will find the narrow tunnel and they will splash down through it until they meet the owner of the voice they heard on the phone, the voice that brought them the only true pleasure they have ever known.

And maybe somewhere, there will be a woman who is not as upset as she thought she would be when they never come home, or a cat that cries to be fed for a while and then shrugs its way out of the kitchen window to find somewhere new.