1. Mobile
From 'Passages' by Jean de Lier
The pale green of the digital clock registered 12.49. His glasses were on his nose, the mobile phone in his left hand and the light was on. The Burlington Magazine lay unread beside him. He was not refreshed.
He spent most of his life these days clutching his phone like a sort of Marshall’s Baton or relay staff, except that he only ever passed the relay on from one hand to another as activity required. Sometimes he was obliged to put it down, and then occasionally he couldn’t find it. So he would ring from a house phone and leave a message for himself, if it was not immediately audible. “Where are you?” the message would say, “where are you?” Sometimes he called for the phone without dialling. Occasionally he had left it in the car, once he retrieved it from the counter of a bank. Having spent a lifetime without a mobile phone he now felt naked without it, like a topless matron, or an Arab woman without a scarf.
He used the phone to call those people encoded on it. Sometimes someone phoned him, or he sent or received a text message. But mostly the phone acted as a kind of phallic comfort blanket to let him know the world had not forgotten him; at least if he was remembered he was ready to answer. He would always answer the call.
But now he wanted sleep and the phone wanted charge. It was ringing.
She had spent the evening alone at home, not answering calls pretending to her ex-lover that she was out having fun. She wondered whether he was having fun, and she was quite jealous of the women he only imagined he was dating. She pretended to her son that she was busy socialising while the boy was indeed out clubbing; and she pretended to her estranged husband that she had to stay at home because he had left her too poor to do anything amusing. Maybe she wasn’t pretending or maybe she pretended mostly to herself; she even sometimes pretended to be happy. At about the time when she pretended to come in, when she would have come in if she had been out, she took a bath before going to bed. Sometimes her husband would ring and guess, wrongly, that she had really been out.
She lay back in her bath, holding her platinum hair clear of the water. In the bathroom mirror, she liked the colour – her stylist had done well. She admired her smoothed legs, rubbed a little soap around her breasts and under her armpits, noted with approval that the skin was still tight everywhere, now including the neck where the Botox had done all it was advertised to do. One or two moles on her back were a little bumpy but she couldn’t really reach them and they blended perfectly with the pale freckles on her light clear complexion. Later she would renew the HRT patch, but for now she was comfortable and relaxed. Only the lonely hot bath could enclose and envelope her in its warmth and easeful comfort without making other demands, allowing her to be at ease with herself. The bath had always been her best friend, and now, reaching for the phone, her lifeline to the outside world, she caressed it, awkwardly, failed to catch it and watched it drop smoothly into the soapy water.
Aaaarghhhh. She leapt up and wrapped it in a towel and herself into the bath robe. The last time this had happened she had needed a new phone. Help. She had intended to ring a friend, another marital cripple; perhaps she was not really sure, she had just wanted to have the feeling of sharing the moment, holding the phone, pretending to ring, intending, pretending, but it was late and now, urgently, she had better ring the one person in her life who could perhaps help.
She had need of advice, someone to hold her hand, give reassurance that she was doing the right thing. She couldn’t afford to pay for another phone. At this hour of the night, help was not easy to get except for greater emergencies than a wet phone.
He had always claimed to sleep lightly, to rise often in the night anyway. Months ago, in the brief period of their love he had wanted to be called as often as possible, not accepting her feeble excuses for silence. She in turn sometimes felt embarrassed, had little to say. She used to ring anyway, she had rung from the bath before, titillating him with accounts of the nakedness she now denied him when they met. Tonight, naked and wet and getting colder, she was more concerned about the phone.
He was more concerned about sleep, though he liked her body. He was familiar with her body and might have been aroused if given half a chance. He was not given any chance.
“Take it off”. He commands, taking charge. “Open”. The phone. Press the button in the middle, not too hard. Stroke the back and pull it down, slide the whole cover off, gently, gently, revealing all, all there is to reveal. It’s wet, watery and damp, she reports. Slide your finger over the SIM and remove the catch, more damp, more water. Remove it. Blow it gently, breathe on it gently, open mouthed, now dab with a little tissue. Do not rub it any more. Shake the phone as dry as you can. Lay the SIM and the phone and the battery on tissue in the warm airing cupboard. Thank you. Thank you so much. You’re sweet. So kind.
Silence. She gets back into the now cool bath and tries to catch the former mood again. She runs some more hot water, looking down at her own slim body. She soaps her breasts again, small and yet firm and not injected, caresses her own buttons gently, sliding her hand down and then up her leg. She wiggles her toes in greeting and hopes the mobile will be alright. Without glasses she can’t really see her toes.
Eight miles away he turns the light off, but he is wide awake. His phone is charging. He gets up and relieves himself again, takes an eye shade from United Airlines and covers his eyes in the dark – sometimes that helps. He can hear a police siren in the distance, a train rumbling a mile away; he can imagine the feel of the hard smooth touch of her scarcely yielding body, kind, gentle but unresponsive in the dark. Sometimes she had yielded, a few times, he remembers, she had melted, liquefied, softened, smiled, laughed at his love making, regained that magical youthful beauty that a woman of a certain age can recapture only at orgasm. Lover and child and goddess. But she had closed down again and gone beyond his ability to arouse her. Friends! We will stay friends. No flame, no fire. She had fled, and he had let her go, no sense flogging a dead horse, other fish in the sea, stay friends. Listen to her woes and advise about text messaging and wet phones. And an erring husband, her stupid, weak, mean and obstinate husband whom she wanted back more than anything in the world.
Difficult to be sure, but he thought sleep had come at about four o’clock. Before eight he had a text message to wake him, “thanks”, her phone was working. It was dry. They were both dry, each alone. He got up.
And he carried his own phone in his left hand as he descended the stair to breakfast.
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