The Big Read: Welcome ghosts come calling

In the pantry under my stairs, on a shelf beneath the WiFi router and beside an enormous jar of preserved lemons that someone sent from Morocco, perhaps under the misapprehension that you can never have too many preserved lemons, there is a time machine.

It's a Nashua telephone answering machine, which I bought with my second or third pay cheque in 1996, when it was the sleekest and latest thing in communication technology. It's made from smooth moulded plastic, the colour of condensed milk, and it's also a fax machine although I would probably struggle to find a replacement roll of that special acidic fax paper guaranteed to fade the writing on your fax the moment it encounters sunlight, as though scrawled in vampire blood.

The machine is still plugged into my Telkom line, but it has been a long time since the days when I'd run up the stairs of my apartment block late at night and a little lonely, rushing through the door to see if the red "message" light was blinking on the machine. If it was blinking, someone had remembered you. If not, you were alone in a universe indifferent to your survival.

I haven't thought about the answering machine for years, but recently some power surge must have triggered something in the beast, because as I sat in my lounge, building a jigsaw puzzle or translating from the original Sanskrit or doing something similarly improving, I heard a distant voice. "Hello?" it said. "Hello? Are you there? I know you're there."

I do not want you to think I suffer delusions of grandeur, but I confess I did look up and say, in a remarkably unsurprised tone, "Hineni, my Lord! I'm here! What is thy bidding?"

But then I realised that God was unlikely to be summoning me to his glorious vengeful army using the slightly irritated voice of an ex-girlfriend. I thought I might be having a stroke, so I went upstairs for a little lie-down but the voices followed me and there was something about their self-conscious delivery that rang a bell, or triggered a beep, so I remembered and came back down and spent the next hour listening to old cached voice messages.

It was a snapshot of a week or so in my life a little over 10 years ago, at that jangly transition phase when landlines still co-existed with cellphones as a practical part of our everyday lives, like Neanderthals and homo sapiens, or like Zuma and the democratic pillars of the state. Oh, there were some evolutionary dead ends along the way. Did you know that there was, a little over 10 years ago, a weird Telkom service by which an electronic voice would call your landline and spell out an SMS that you'd received, one letter at a time? I'd forgotten, until I heard that ghastly undead voice spelling out, "Are you dead?" like a cold-calling telemarketer from beyond the soulless grave.

But it was good to hear some voices again - an ex-girlfriend wondering how I was, making me remember that there really was a time when she wondered that; my old friend Evan, calling exuberantly and with too many words at 2.30am from some noisy rung of hell to ask me the name of that traditional Jewish drinking song we invented at our friend David's wedding ("Hava tequila", if you are wondering, to the tune of Hava Nagila); my friend Mark apparently phoning for no other reason than to good-naturedly call me some of the filthiest swearwords I've ever heard, without so much as the dignity of a connecting clause or conjunction between them.

Of course, being answering machine messages, almost all of them are querulous demands to know why I'm not picking up, or why I'm not answering my cellphone, or where I am at this time of night. The effect of them coming one after the other, even though in life they would have stretched across days, is to make me start being fearful for this missing Darrel chap. What could have happened? Why does he make these nice people fret so? Why won't he just give them a call already? Has something dreadful happened? Oh, what will become of him?

I was obscurely moved to discover that there were so many people trying to speak to me back then. In memory it was a lonely time and I wandered the streets of a new city like a grey wraith, a faint trace of a man, not quite seen and never quite touchable. But it isn't true, and it's never fully true - there were friends and people who cared, people reaching out and continuing to reach even when I wasn't reaching back. Why was I sad, when I should have been grateful? Isn't it always the way.