The village's last red telephone box is due to be taken away on the first of the month. Perpetua, who has not used it once in forty-one years of living across the road from it, is somehow the person chairing the meeting to save it. How this happened she cannot entirely reconstruct. She went to the village hall for the raffle, she tells herself, and came away with a clipboard.
村里最后一个红色电话亭，定于本月一号被拆走。珀佩图娅住在它对面四十一年，一次也没用过它，不知怎么，竟成了主持拯救它的会议的人。这是怎么发生的，她自己也不能完全还原。她对自己说，她去村会堂只是为了抽奖，结果回来时手里多了一块写字夹板。
The campaign has by now acquired a committee of eleven, a logo (a telephone receiver wearing a small crown), and a secretary who writes everything down even when nobody is speaking. Gustav, the retired postman, has brought a folder of photographs showing the box in snow. A woman from the flower-arranging group has proposed filling it with geraniums, and has been voted down: a telephone box that looks like a florist's, the committee feels, is half removed already. Perpetua listens to all of it with the grave attention of someone who has just realised that she is the only person in the room without a telephone-box story.
这场运动如今已经有了一个十一人的委员会，一个标志（一只戴着小王冠的电话听筒），还有一位秘书，就算没有人说话也会把一切记下来。退休邮递员古斯塔夫带来了一夹子照片，拍的是雪中的电话亭。插花小组的一位女士提议在里面摆满天竺葵，被否决了：委员会认为，一个看上去像花店的电话亭，已经等于拆掉一半了。珀佩图娅以一种凝重的专注听着这一切，就像一个刚刚意识到屋里只有自己没有电话亭故事的人。
The telephone company's letter, which she has read so often she can recite it, says the box recorded no calls at all last year. This is the sticking point. "Zero," says Gustav, tapping the page. "We need forty before the inspector comes."
电话公司的来信，她已经读了无数遍，都能背出来了，信里说这个电话亭去年一通电话都没有记录到。这就是症结所在。“零。”古斯塔夫说，用手指敲着信纸，“检查员来之前，我们需要四十通。”
So the rota is born. For three weeks, villagers queue in the lane with their coins, each handed a slip of paper bearing a number to ring. The box, which for a decade has been mostly a shelter for wasps, becomes the most telephoned object in the county. A retired teacher rings his own landline and lets it ring. A boy rings the speaking clock and thanks it. A man stands inside for twenty minutes, calling the brother he has not spoken to since the last parish election, and the conversation is, by all accounts, productive.
于是值班表诞生了。三个星期里，村民们捏着硬币在小巷里排队，每人领到一张写着要拨的号码的纸条。这个十年来基本只供黄蜂栖身的电话亭，成了全郡被打电话最多的东西。一位退休教师给自己家的座机打电话，任它响着。一个男孩打给报时台，还向它道了谢。一个男人在里面站了二十分钟，给自己自上次教区选举以来就没说过话的弟弟打电话，据各方说法，这通谈话很有成效。
The inspector, when he arrives, is a young man with a tablet and a damp collar, and Perpetua has prepared a speech. He listens to the whole of it, which she finds unnerving. What strikes him as odd, he says, is that the counter shows forty-three calls in one month, none of them longer than ninety seconds.
检查员来了，是个年轻人，拿着平板电脑，衣领湿漉漉的，珀佩图娅已经准备好了一篇发言。他把整篇都听完了，这让她心里发毛。他说，让他觉得奇怪的是，计数器显示一个月里有四十三通电话，没有一通超过九十秒。
"Short calls," he says. "Why short?"
“都是短电话，”他说，“为什么短？”
"Because there was a queue," says Perpetua, which is true, and which ends the conversation. Not until the inspector has driven away does she notice that her hands are shaking.
“因为有人排队。”珀佩图娅说，这是实话，也结束了这场谈话。直到检查员开车离开，她才发现自己的手在发抖。
The decision arrives by post: the box is reprieved for one year, pending a review of its heritage value. The committee celebrates in the village hall with a cake in the shape of a telephone box, and Perpetua, who is given the first slice, finds she cannot eat it. If she had known in March where a raffle would lead, she would have stayed at home and watered her plants. She suspects she would have been wrong.
决定是寄来的：电话亭获准保留一年，待对其文化遗产价值进行评估。委员会在村会堂里庆祝，蛋糕做成了电话亭的样子，珀佩图娅分到了第一块，却发现自己吃不下。要是三月里她就知道一次抽奖会把她带到哪里，她就会待在家里给花浇水了。她怀疑，那样她就错了。
That evening she lets herself into the box for the first time in her life. It smells of rain and old coins, and the shelf holds a single swollen directory. She lifts the receiver. The dial tone is longer and lower than she expected, a sound with distance in it. There is no one she needs to call, so after a while she dials her own mobile number, simply to find out what it feels like to be someone the box can reach.
那天傍晚，她平生第一次用钥匙打开电话亭的门走了进去。里面有雨和旧硬币的气味，架子上放着一本鼓胀的电话簿。她拿起听筒。拨号音比她预想的更长、更低，是一种带着距离的声音。她没有什么人需要打给，所以过了一会儿，她拨了自己的手机号，只是想知道，做一个电话亭能够联系到的人，是什么感觉。
In her coat pocket, the phone begins to buzz. She lets it ring.
她外衣口袋里的手机开始震动。她任它响着。
