I Lost My Mobile At the Mall (2 page)

Two things occur to me now as I sit in The Dungeon (AKA my bedroom):

1. How come Bianca's phone was flat, when she'd just finished a long convo with Jai and I didn't hear any beeps from the battery winding down?

2. Why was Bianca's mother expecting her home for lunch when everyone knows that Bianca's mother has not prepared a meal, or eaten one, since Bianca was born?

I know the truth. Bianca was rushing off to meet Jai and had care factor zero about my bag and phone. She's right that I have to face facts. And the first major fact is that I really do need a new BF.

Uh-oh! I can hear the Queen Mother walking up the hall and greeting His Excellency the Mutt.

'Here, Harry,' she calls. 'There you go. Look at you. Good dog.'

Then the cat is acknowledged, no doubt with a dismissive regal wave.

'Camilla! Shoo! Get off that couch. You've left fur all over it.'

Then, finally it's my turn.

'Elly. Eleanor. Are you home? I've been trying to call you on your mobile,' yells Mum.

All jokes aside, this is going to be right royal torture.

It's now seven hours since I lost my mobile at the mall and as I predicted, I am dead. Dead to my family. Dead to the world. Dead, as Nan might say, as a doornail.

(BTW: What is a 'doornail' anyway and why is it so dead? I google it and find out that on big doors in medieval times the heavy metal knocker was banged against the head of a nail. Banged so often that the head of the nail was probably as dead as.)

:'-(

I'm in my dungeon feeling as if my head has been banged repeatedly. They all lined up to have a go. The first blow came from my mother.

'Elly! You are so careless! Stupid!' she yells. 'Are you thinking anything at all? Or is your brain just a few cells held together with lip gloss and nail polish?

I have to admit that my mother had me there for a moment, because sometimes I wonder the same thing myself. I try to think of things in the correct order, but with so much to think about all at once ('Why am I here?', 'Where are my sports socks?') it's easy to be distracted by shiny stuff like lip gloss and nail polish.

My mother is an events organiser – a weddings, parties, anything planner. Her business is called 'Regal Events'.
Geddit?
She values, above all, punctuality and attention to detail. I swear that my mother wouldn't mind if I smuggled marijuana to Bali as long as I was at the airport on time, had proper travel insurance and wasn't carrying a pair of nail scissors in my hand luggage.

First she rang to report my phone missing and put a bar on the number. (Which of course I would have done if I'd had a phone.
Der!
) Then she herded me into the car and back we went to the mall. Groan!

The first stop was the mall admin office, where she inspected the lost and found shelves. There's actually some really good stuff there: a couple of nice bags, cool sunnies and about thirty-seven mobile phones – none of them mine. Then she took twenty agonising minutes to carefully fill out a three-page form to report my handbag missing.

After that she dragged me about eighty kilometres – including back to Tiara and to the Hip Pip juice bar – leaving her business card sticky-taped on every cash register and pinned to every noticeboard she could find (thoughtfully bringing along the sticky-tape and pins herself). If nothing else, Mrs Libby Pickering is sure to be offered the job of CEO of Britannia Mall Crime Stoppers.

Of course there was the expected lecture on the way home about the Days Before Mobile Phones Were Invented. All very fascinating. (YAWN!) Truth is my mother would be dead as a doornail too if she didn't have her mobile. A common exchange heard in the halls of Pickering Palace:

'Rick, have you seen my phone?' My mother tears through the kitchen, her car keys jangling in her hand.

'No. Have you seen my car keys?' My father runs the other way, mobile up to his ear.

'Can I use your mobile to ring mine?'

'Can I use your key to my car?'

'Sure, honey.'

'Thanks, sweetie.'

Ring ring
.
Jingle jangle
.
Kiss kiss. Bye bye
. Slam!

When I ask my mother if I can use her phone to ring Bianca and Will, she is, predictably, outraged.

'This is a business phone, Elly,' she snaps. 'I simply can't have you gossiping away when I need it to be free for important calls.'

She then takes a call and gossips away for a good half-hour to some client or other about whether it's possible to make gerberas out of icing sugar and, even if you could, would they be suitable for a christening cake? All very important!

Meanwhile, seven entire hours of a Saturday have gone by and I haven't spoken to Will. In this time Will could have rung to tell me he loves me and then, getting no answer, wondered if my declaration of love for him yesterday was just a whim. As if perhaps the fierce sun on the beach had made me dizzy. He'll take the silence of my phone as evidence that I didn't mean what I said, when, in fact, I have never meant anything more in my entire life.

What is it about Will? Why do I love him? He doesn't say much. But then he doesn't have to. In fact, you can tell what Will is really like by the number of things he
doesn't
do, including:

• Blah, blah, blah
  , on and on about sport. Paint his face blue to go to the football or stick a hollowed-out watermelon on his head to go to the cricket.
  
• Repeat stupid jokes he read on the net or heard on breakfast radio.
  
• Do bad impersonations of Jack Black, Mike Myers, Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler or any other Hollywood star.
  
• Walk around with earphones stuck in his ears, humming out of tune and air drumming.
  
• Sit for hours on end on the couch playing stupid video games.
  
• Jump on you and lick your face to say 'hello'.
  

You'd be right in thinking that only an immature dweeb would do any of this pathetic stuff. You'd also be right in wondering what kind of girl would have a boyfriend who did. Welcome to Bianca and Jai World.

But before I get distracted by stupid Jai, here's more about wonderful Will. I might be utterly obsessed with hair (I don't know why, I just am) but no-one has hair like Will Phillips. In fact, if you stand on the steps of Oldcastle High and look across the quadrangle, it's easy to imagine the heads there as a kind of bumpy landscape. You see spiky peaks of black, then tangled bushes of brown, the odd coppery hill, and then your eye is taken by the sight of blond curls threaded with gold that glint in the sun. It's as if you were looking across the rocky, drab plains of Middle-earth to the shimmering Elven forest of Lothlórien.

That's what I feel like when I stand underneath Will's arm – as if I am being sheltered by the golden bough of a golden tree in a golden wood and I am Arwen Evenstar.
Sigh!

Will looks like an elf or a water sprite or faerie boy. He is tall and slim and has long, elegant fingers. As I said, he doesn't say much, and doesn't have to, because he is deep.

'It's kind of like I am totally connected to the universe when I'm out there in the ocean,' says Will. 'Every thing, every place, every person, just slips away and I'm just some random drop of, I dunno . . .'

Can you believe he says amazing stuff like that? He plays guitar, watches surfing DVDs and picks up rubbish on the beach whenever we walk there together, because he really cares about Mother Earth. We sit on the sand and watch the moon come up over the ocean whenever we can. Just him and me . . . and a giant plastic bag full of old soft-drink cans and busted rubber thongs.

I hope he does say that he loves me – even if I said it first and put him under pressure.

Sometimes I ask Will if he thinks of me when he's out there surfing and loses his grip on reality.

'Sure I do,' says Will. 'I use you as a marker to remember where my stuff is. You're my land anchor, Elly. You bring me back to earth.'

So, there it is. I'm Will's bridge between nothingness and real life. Without me, he'd be swept out to sea. Sometimes he laughs and calls me his 'little leg rope'. You might think that's a rude thing to say, but no surfer ever goes out without their leg rope. With out that little length of rubber, their board would smash into the rocks or drift across endless oceans.

I don't surf. I've tried a couple of times and I'm crap. Trying to keep up with Will would be needy and pathetic. I like to swim, but mostly I'd rather sit on the beach with a book.

'What are you reading now, Elly?' smiles Will. 'Read me something.'

And I do. He shakes out crystal drops from his curls, towels his tanned skin and we lie back in the warm sand and I read to him.

'That's brilliant, Elly,' Will whispers. 'You get lost in words the same way I do in the waves. Every time I come back to shore, every time you close the cover of your book, I'll bet we're both asking the same question:
What does it all mean?
'

Tonight in The Dungeon I google
What does it all
mean?
and come up with 56,000,000 mentions. Doesn't look like anyone has worked it out so far.

The second person to bang the doorknocker on my deadhead this afternoon was my father. I predicted that he would sigh and shake his head and so it came to pass.

'Oh, Elly. This is the third time you've lost your mobile,' he exhales. 'I just can't see how we're going to find the money to replace it, what with the Global Financial Crisis and everything.'

Dad is a driver for a fleet of courier trucks here in Oldcastle called (wait for it) Ascot Couriers! He works really long hours and keeps saying everyone is worried about losing their jobs, but it seems to me that this so-called Global Financial Crisis hasn't actually reached the Oldcastle part of the globe yet. Everyone is just doing what they always have. In the meantime, the GFC is the best excuse any parent has ever come up with for saying 'no':
No, you can't have a
sleepover/holiday/birthday party/new shoes/school excursion/
concert tickets etc. etc.

Taking a look out my window tonight, the queue through the London Tavern's drive-thru bottle shop looks as long as it ever did. Seems as though no-one in Oldcastle is saying 'no' to another drink.

And what, I have to ask, does the 'everything' mean in the phrase 'the GFC and
everything
'? What's Dad talking about? The GFC and the fact that Mum is never home to cook his tea? That my sister's boyfriend has a better car than ours? That Dad's going bald? That our lemon tree's got stink bugs? That the earth's polar ice caps are melting?

Under questioning, Dad has to admit that no-one's been laid off at work – yet. But he says it's the question of
What if
?

I googled that too:
What if?
I came up with 304,000,000 mentions. Again, no real answers.

What are these mysterious
everythings
and
what ifs
hanging off the end of every sentence, as if everyone's paralysed by hideous possibilities? OK then,
what if
?

How would it have been if Frodo had said, 'No way am I taking the ring to Mount Doom. Not with the orcs
and everything.
I mean
, what if
?'

GRRR! Anyway, then I asked my father if I could borrow his phone to call Bianca and Will.

'I'm on call for work, Elly,' he says. 'It's only seven hours since you lost your phone. I think you'll survive until you see your mates at school on Monday.'

Dad shuffled out of The Dungeon, and then my sister Tilly barged in bringing me a bag of chicken chips and a Diet Coke (AKA bread and water). She hurled my favourite pink stuffed pig at the wall and put her purple suede boots on my white pillowcase.

'Oooh, El, you know they're not gunna get you a new mobile, don't you?' she smirks. 'You're stuffed. You should staple your mobile to your forehead, you lose it so often.'

V.v. funny. It's OK for her. She's almost eighteen, in her last year at Oldcastle High, and has a part-time job as a waitress at The Earl Bistro. More than that, her boyfriend Eddie plays football with the Sovereigns and has tons of $$$ (I could point out that they are also both royal names, but frankly, by now, I am over it). Eddie will buy her a new phone any time she wants.

'Oh, poor you. You want to borrow my mobile and call Prince Charming?' laughs Tilly.

This one hundred and first joke about my relationship should make me want to ram that stuffed pig down my sister's throat. But instead I am so grateful that I could kiss her. I dial Will's number with nervous, rubbery fingers.

'I'm not able to get to the phone right now, but leave a message,' says pre-recorded Will.

I gabble that I don't have my mobile and that he will have to contact me though FacePlace.

Then I ring Bianca. The line's busy. So I text: HLP!No phone. Go FacePlace. LuvU. Me.

'Come on now, hand it over,' says Tilly, and I reluctantly give her back her phone. Just the weight of it in my hand made me feel better for a bit.

When she leaves an eerie silence descends on The Dungeon – apart from the muffled sound of Mum and Dad watching some crappy TV quiz show in the lounge room.

Still nothing from Bianca or Will. I've been sitting at my computer in The Dungeon, looking at my FacePlace, since nine o'clock this morning. It's about as busy as Victoria Square, Oldcastle, at nine o'clock on Easter Monday night, i.e. it's deserted.

The fact that I was wide awake at 8 am should indicate how stressed out I am. The only time I wake up this early is on Christmas morning.

Now, hours later, I've posted and poked everyone I know and it looks like I am the only human being awake on the entire planet.

I'm so desperate for human interaction that I have even replied to a two-month-old post from my cousin Anne in Toolewong. She wants to know if we might come to visit this Christmas holidays. Groan! Toolewong has won the nation's Most Boring Town Award ten years running.

I wrote back that she and Auntie Margaret should come and stay here with us in Oldcastle. The people who live here might have their strange habits, but at least we're close to the beach. Hammerhead, Wobbegong and Gummy are the names of the most popular beaches in Oldcastle. Yes, another very amusing joke. They're all named after
sharks
! Sometimes you have to wonder about the founding fathers of Oldcastle and their bent sense of humour.

Like the hilarious idea of putting a huge coalloading terminal right in the middle of one of the most beautiful stretches of beach in Australia! These days the port takes huge container ships and oil supertankers. The place is always noisy and blazing with lights. Any self-respecting health-nut shark would have racked off years ago.

But the thing is, once you get away from the port and up on top of Winchester Headland, the wharves could be a million miles away. You can see all the sandy beaches looping in and out for miles to the south, like a petticoat with a trim of frothy white lacy surf. It's so, so pretty and when I stand up there on a sunny day I think that Oldcastle is the best place to live in the whole world.

That's where I first kissed Will – on Winchester Headland. He usually stands there with his slick black wetsuit rolled down to his waist, his board under his arm, shading his eyes against the sun. Searching for a wave. This pose is now so familiar to me because Will is always on a hill or a rock or a roof looking out to sea. And if he's not there, he's in or under the water. I swear that if it wasn't for me his feet would hardly touch the ground.

Maybe he's not an elf or a water sprite. Maybe he's an angel.

Whatever he is, he's not talking to me on this sunny Sunday morning. I guess he's gone out for a surf. I need to hear his voice. What did he do last night? Where was he? Who did he see? This blackout is driving me insane.

I haven't been able to call anyone because Dad went out at dawn for a day's fishing with his mates and Mum went to the farmers' market in Victoria Square and they took their phones with them. Tilly's still sleeping and she keeps hers under her pillow. Then I hear the familiar rustle of shopping being dumped on the kitchen counter.

'Elly. Get yourself ready. We're due at Nan's in half an hour!' yells my mother.

I scramble to get dressed and belt down the hall because I know there's something waiting for me at Nan's that will rescue me from the bottom of this dark well – a telephone.

'You got yourself ready quickly this morning,' says my mother as she slams the car door.

I tell her something about looking forward to Nan's roast dinner. How it's great to do something with her and Nan – three generations of the one family enjoying a traditional Sunday meal together. As we drive I lay on the enthusiasm as thick as gravy.

I need to get to that telephone.

'Aren't you gorgeous?' beams Mum. 'I've loved my mother's baked potatoes ever since I was tiny!'

And then mother dear starts a lecture on homecooked food in the Days Before Instant Noodles Were Invented. (YAWN!) Usually on the trip to Nan's I'd have my mobile to get me through.

Im bng hld prisner.

But today I am forced to look out the car window and listen to the radio. (Mum has banned me from listening to my iPod in her exalted presence.) I punch the buttons and accidentally end up hearing the team of so-called comedians on the CASTLEROCK 64.5 FM Sunday breakfast show. It reminds me of that pinhead Jai. And then I realise I'm reminded of Jai because he's ACTUALLY on the radio!
What's he saying?

'
So, Jai from South Oldcastle, we're talking about your best sneaky revenge this morning. What you got for us, bro?' asks the host of the show, the utterly painful Bad Mickey B.

'The revenge is on my girl's best friend,' Jai sniggers. 'She hates my guts, so I got a special mirror on my FacePlace called "crap pictures of Elly" and all my mates log on and have a laugh.'

'Ha ha ha! Whoa! Good one! Two tickets to the Majestic Movieplex and a month's supply of Palatial Pizzas for you, my man.'

'Thanks Bad Mickey B. WAY TO GO CASTLEROCK FM!' screeches Jai.

And then it's on to an ad:
Beefeater Bangers – fit for a King!

OMG! OH. MY. GOD!

I turn to my mother. Did she hear that? That was definitely Jai! He lives in South Oldcastle and that was his dweeby voice. That has to be about ME!
Bad
pictures of me?
Where did he get them? I can't believe it. My mind goes into total panic. I can't remember Jai ever taking any pictures of me.

Unless he got them from Bianca! From Bianca's phone. We're always mucking around taking stupid pictures of each other on our phones. I've got one of her in a bikini we made out of silverbeet leaves. She's got one of me with a yellow rubber washing glove on my head, looking like some demented chicken. That hideously embarrassing photo couldn't be up there for the world to see . . . COULD IT?

Yes it could. I wouldn't put anything past that weasel Jai. I've never thought he was good enough for Bianca, and I've told her so. She hated me telling her, of course, but it was for her own benefit.

I yell at my mother to turn the car around. I have to get home and get on FacePlace. RIGHT NOW!

'I am not turning around, Nan's expecting us,' Mum says calmly. 'And if there are silly pictures of you on the internet then it's a lesson to you. All this technology you love so much is wonderful, but it also has its downside. You have to realise that it brings good and bad things into your life. Maybe you should just turn off your computer.'

I want to yell at her,
WHAT? What are you talking about?

If my mother didn't have her laptop and mobile, Regal Events would be dead and finished inside a week.
She
cannot be serious!

She, of all people, should understand how bad this could be. Libby Pickering is the sort of woman who goes through our digital camera and erases every single picture of her that makes her look fat, or old or even a bit squinty. (Once we went to Bali for ten days and there were only two pictures left after she'd got to the camera – even then, she was mostly hidden behind a coconut palm.) When she has finally uploaded the photos she approves of, she edits them to blur out her wrinkles and remove the red-eye. And this is for photos only the family will ever see! Not for totally excruciating shots that could be seen by THE ENTIRE WORLD! Aaargh!

I have to ring Bianca. I beg my mother for her mobile.

'Not while I'm driving. You know we have a rule about taking calls in the car. It's just rude to be prattling on and ignoring your fellow passengers.'

She is not a 'fellow passenger'. She is my mother. She's driving, but I know for a fact she can drive and listen to me talk at the same time. My mother is the Queen of Multi-Tasking. She could perform brain transplant surgery, launch the Space Shuttle, fold table napkins, head peace talks in the Middle East and make spaghetti bolognaise all at the same time. Except when it suits her. Then it's:
Please be quiet, Elly. I'm
trying to think.

Doesn't she realise THIS IS AN EMERGENCY?! I seriously consider jumping out of the moving car and then, mercifully, I see we have pulled up outside Nan's house. I hurtle up the steps and Nan's already standing at the front door.

'Eleanor!' exclaims Nan. 'Aren't you looking beautiful this morning. Come in, darling, come in.'

I kiss Nan's cheek and speedily admire the vase of pink hydrangeas on the hall stand. Then I edge past her to the oak dresser in the sitting room and grab the phone. I dial Bianca's number (which takes ages because Nan's still got one of those prehistoric telephones with the holes for your fingers. The kind you see on
Antiques Roadshow
).

'Hey, what's happening?' yawns Bianca, even though it's now midday.

I put Bianca through the full interrogation. Has she ever shown Jai the pictures of me on her phone? Has she ever let Jai upload pictures from her phone onto his computer? Does she know he's got this hideous mirror on FacePlace? Is it about me? Has she ever seen it? Who else knows it's there? Did she hear Jai on the radio?

'Really? A month's supply of Palatial Pizzas!' gasps Bianca. 'We better not talk too long, he's probably trying to ring me.'

After more intense questioning Bianca admits:

• Yes, she did let Jai see the pics on her phone.
  
• Yes, she did lend him her phone last week after his got run over by the school bus – but only for a day until he got a new one.
  
• No, she didn't know his FacePlace mirror had the pics on it.
  

Then I wait until she gets out of bed, boots up, logs on and . . .

'You don't have to worry, El. They're cute,' giggles Bianca. 'The one of you sticking out your tongue with the chilli prawn on it is hilarious! And this one of you in the shower cap! You look like a button mushroom!'

I tell her down the phone, as loudly as I dare, that the entire population of Oldcastle, Britannia, New South Wales, Australia and The Planet Earth is now viewing these pictures of me and thinking I am the Dork of the Universe! WHAT IF WILL SEES THEM?

There is a silence during which I swear I can hear Bianca scratching her head and then I hear a
ding
on her computer and I'll bet it's someone posting on her FacePlace mirror saying something like:
Hey, check out
Elly Pickering looking like a fungus!

'Do you think the free pizzas will include the cheesy crust ones, or just the plain crusts?' asks Bianca.

There's one thing that I've come to appreciate about Nan's ancient phone: you can bang down the handpiece really hard in someone's ear. It's much more satisfying than pressing a red button. I start to dial Will's number when I hear yelling from the kitchen.

'Eleanor! Come and speak to your grandmother,' calls Mum. 'We didn't drive all the way over here just so you could run up a phone bill.'

I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that because I
have
to talk to Will. My mother will have to prise this phone out of my cold, dead hands.

'Hey, Elly? What's up? I'm down the coast with my dad this weekend,' says Will.

Phew! His dad won't have turned on the radio. They will have listened to Jack Johnson CDs in the car. Will sounds lazy and relaxed. I can tell by his voice that he's been for a surf. I could tell him about everything happening back here in Oldcastle and the exploding supernova disaster in cyberspace, but I hear his voice and none of it seems to matter. It's like the cool incoming tide that sweeps the sand smooth again at the end of a crowded day on Wobbegong beach.

Instead I just tell him how I'm without a phone now and I'm not sure when I'll be getting a new one.

'That's no biggie. I'll see you at school tomorrow,' says Will. 'Anyway, you know I'm not much good on the phone. I like seeing your beautiful face when I talk to you.'

And I am imagining Will's face now – his suntanned cheeks sparkling with diamonds of dried salt. His dazzling white teeth and wide smile. His soft grey eyes and those long black eyelashes – maybe still glistening wet. I imagine the sun on his curls picking out threads of pure spun gold.

'Well, I better go, but I'm glad you rang,' says Will. 'I just wanted to say . . .'

I finish the sentence for him in my head:
I love you
Elly, with all my heart and soul.

'. . . that it's good to hear your voice. Don't forget, you're the one that keeps me paddling back to shore.'

And then he's gone and I think that maybe he did just tell me, in his own way, that he loves me! And it's like I've bobbed to the surface again and I'm floating on a piece of driftwood in a warm and endless sea.

:'-) Sigh!

After a while the smell of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and baked potatoes sends me paddling towards Nan's dining room.