Eleven Times Before Four
Saturday. I'd gone into town for a tin of green paint for the shed door. This was going to be the weekend I painted it, the way the last eight were.
After the shop I was going to my sister's for tea at five, out past the ring road. I'd said I'd text her from the bus so she could meet me at the stop. If I'm ten minutes late, she says she was about to ring the hospitals. It's what she says instead of hello.
My phone had said two percent on the bus into town. It died in the queue at the hardware shop. At the front was a man buying one hinge who had questions about it. My hand went to my pocket and came back with a black brick.
So I read the paint tin. Touch dry in one hour. Not for floors. I read it again, in case it had changed.
My hand kept going back to the pocket. Once for the time, though there was a clock over the till. Once for the name of an actor. Once to check the brick was still a brick. After the third I started counting.
I wasn't checking for anything. I didn't want to be the only one with nothing to look at. Everyone else had a screen to stand behind, and I had a tin of paint and a man with a hinge.
There were chargers on a hook by the till. I didn't buy one. I've got one at home. But my sister was still waiting to hear which bus I'd be on, so when I got to the front I asked the woman at the till if I could use the shop's phone. My sister's number is the only one I still know by heart. I rang her. Four o'clock bus, I said. If I hadn't known her number, she'd have stood at her stop all afternoon and met every bus that came.
That left an hour and a half with nothing in it. I sat on the bench at the bus stop outside, with the tin between my feet. For twenty minutes my hands didn't know what to do. Then they held the tin. Then they were just hands, on a bench, on a Saturday.
Across the road a man in a blue van was trying to park. He took six goes, and on the fifth I nearly got up to help.
By four o'clock, when the bus came round the corner, I'd reached for the phone eleven times. It had nothing to tell me, every time.
On the bus I thought about the Saturdays when it didn't die. I'd have looked every time, something would always have been there, and the van would have parked without me.
When the phone dies, you don't lose the afternoon. You get it back. Most of what it was taking was attention you didn't know you were giving.
Next time it dies, don't buy a charger or borrow one. Let it stay dead until you're home. If someone is waiting on you, borrow a phone for one call.
My sister was at her stop when the bus pulled in. She said she'd been about to ring the hospitals.
When I got home I put the phone on charge. In the morning it had nineteen things to tell me. I had one for it: a man in a blue van took six goes to park, and I saw every one.