You cannot compete for attention with a mobile phone baby when it rings.
∞
Mid morning. Half way through her house calls, Friday’s mobile phone rings. Friday is half way through a visit, half way through a conversation with Helen Bostock-Cope. Friday is half way through a sentence when the phone rings, and she stops talking abruptly to take the call. No matter how much she loves to talk, she will always kill a conversation stone dead for the mobile phone. She’ll leave you hanging in the air, existence temporarily on hold, while she switches to line 1. Often it’s a conversation about nothing, or she will try to end it quickly by explaining she is “with a client right now”, but the conversation will happen anyway. Friday will interrupt you at the crux of your argument, with a hand held palm-out in the air and an overly sincere apology, just to read an incoming text message. This phone is Friday’s infant child, needy and whining, and she is beholden to it. No matter how trivial, she attends it on demand. No matter how important and valued you are, you will always come second to Friday’s mobile phone baby.
Friday signals an apologetic resignation to Helen Bostock-Cope when she answers the phone. She has already checked the screen so she knows who’s calling, but she answers like she’s got no idea. “Hello? This is Friday Solovide. Can I help you?”
She knows who is calling but she likes to sound pleasantly surprised when someone identifies themselves, the way you feign mild delight when you meet someone you know in the supermarket. Friday holds Helen Bostock-Cope with a benign gaze for a moment, listening to the voice at the other end of the line but maintaining a conscious link to the real world. For the time being. She says, Hello. She says, It’s a bit difficult right now. She says, Can you call back? I’m with a client. This is not for the benefit of the caller, this is for the benefit of Helen Bostock-Cope. Her duty done, she relinquishes her gaze and is at once fully absorbed in the call. Helen Bostock-Cope no longer exists. For the time being. The call is brief and the conversation, at this end, is clipped. Friday smiles a genuine smile to the caller who can’t see her.
The conversation ends and Friday is back in the room. Helen Bostock-Cope, who had gone quiet, passive, still, who was thinking, who was waiting, who was paused, comes back to life. Suspended animation unsuspended. Reanimated. They pick up from where they left off, as if nothing had happened. Helen Bostock-Cope does not mind this interruption into the stream of her existence. She has a mobile phone baby too. It is what she would’ve done. It is what everyone does, when they adopt a mobile phone baby. When they become the fawning parent of a communication device. They forget how to communicate. Friday’s phone will ring twice more on her rounds, needy little whining gadget. The man at the other end, he’s not needy, but he wants to see Friday. And when she meets him, he wants her to turn her mobile phone baby off. Friday is happy to oblige: this is her time too.
