My phone is ringing, for my wife. It’s another person calling to console her and say they’ve heard of this sort of thing happening in the area. My phone has been acting as the houseline for both of us since it happened, and if someone has to get in touch with her, they contact me, in the manner of those middle-aged couples who have joint email addresses like paul_and_janet@bt-internet.co.uk.
It would be easier if we had a landline, I guess. I’m fairly sure we pay for one, but I’ve never met anyone under the age of 60 who actually has a landline with a phone attached. It’s a bit like Children of Men; all the domestic landlines installed from 1980-2000 still exist, it’s just that no new ones have been added since then. So, I ring my dad’s, or my in-laws’ on a weekly basis, but seeing one in a friend’s house would be like seeing them light their lamps with whale oil. That getting one hasn’t occurred to us once in the week since my wife’s phone was stolen, probably speaks to an obsolescence that’s irreversible.
Yes, stolen. She was pickpocketed as she left Walthamstow train station. She was returning from a funeral, carrying a screaming baby, when a thief decided it would be a good time to slip his hand into her pocket and scarper down a sidestreet. She says she was sure it had happened almost immediately, but was too preoccupied with our bawling child to react until she got home and found it definitively absent.
It goes without saying that this was extremely distressing. She and the baby were safe and well, and phones are just things at the end of the day, but the violation, not to mention the circumstances in which she was targeted, are still very upsetting. Circumstances thrown into sharper relief when friends began ringing to say that preying on distracted mums is a known tactic in the area, just not one we’d ever been informed of.
Fear and revulsion quickly turned to anger and frustration, because phones aren’t actually just things at all, but essential components in the admin of everyday life, and an absolute arse ache to replace. Having used her phone as her bank card for the past four years, she’s long since forgotten her PIN, not to mention all her email and social passwords. Her iPhone photos and contacts are preserved in the cloud but, since she no longer recalls her Apple ID password, she must wait two weeks for it to reset, or else start a new one and lose every photograph she’s taken for the past 10 years. Taken with the £500 it cost her to buy herself out of her old contract and buy a new handset, the entire ordeal has been not just a violation, but a staggering imposition of admin that’s still not over.
On buying her new phone, she told her tale to the sympathetic cashier. ‘Was it down there?’ she asked, pointing to the thoroughfare where it had indeed happened. ‘We get half a dozen women a week coming in for this,’ she said. ‘They target distracted mums.’
‘Yes,’ she said, wearily. ‘We know that now.’
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
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