“Thought I’d see if I could get this one working again, show the kids what our old phones were like, although I’m not even sure if it’ll switch on after the battery’s been dead for so—”
“It does,” she says. “I powered it up when you went out to the chip shop.”
“You got it working already?”
“Well.” She gets up and fetches it from the side table. “It switches on, but there’s not a lot to see, really.”
Daisy holds out a small hand, sticky with ketchup.
“Can I have a look, Mummy?”
Jess gives our daughter’s hand a quick wipe with a piece of kitchen roll.
“Used to love these old flippy phones,” she says, sliding the Motorola over. “First time your dad ever asked me out on a date was via text from one just like this.”
“Gross,” Leah says. “Don’t need to know the details, thanks.”
Daisy swipes at the screen with little fingers, frowning in frustration when nothing happens.
“It’s broken,” she says, tapping and swiping. “What’s wrong with it?”
“It has buttons instead of a screen, Daisy.”
“Why?”
“That’s how phones used to be, before your sister was born.”
The handset reminds me of a child’s toy and it must be five, six, seven generations old, like the great-great-great-grandfather of my iPhone. An old Ford Cortina next to a Tesla.
Daisy presses buttons at random. “Does it have Balloon Pop or Numberblocks?”
Jess shakes her head. “I shouldn’t think so. Let Daddy have a look.”
With a disappointed frown, our youngest goes back to dipping her chips in the small lake of ketchup on her plate. Callum picks the phone up instead, flipping it closed and open a few times before losing interest. He slides it between two Styrofoam boxes of thick-cut chips toward me.
The screen on the little Motorola shows a half-full battery icon and the time as 00:29—the clock resetting when it powered up, presumably. Opening it up, there is a blue backlight behind the buttons that was probably incredibly high-tech when the phone first came out but now just looks quaint. I know the SIM card will have long since ceased to work, but it has a nostalgic aura that I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s like a little piece of my own history, stumbling across an old friend from back in the day.
There are nine icons arranged in a square on the home screen, basic options for texts, calls, settings, and so on. Thereare no stored messages—sent or received—and nothing shows in the call log. Did these things even have email? Nothing happens when I select the option marked with a blue and green globe; there is nothing in the Calendar option either and no high score recorded in a rudimentary game called Hungry Fish. There are also no bars of reception, no network listed. I assume it’s so old it would be 2G, or maybe 1G—far too primitive to connect to today’s modern 5G network. If the contract was even still being paid, which it probably wasn’t.
“Bit of an anticlimax,” I say, returning to the main menu screen. “Looks like it’s never been used.”
Jess pushes her plate away and comes around the table to sit next to me, perching on a stack of plastic packing crates.
“I did find a couple of curious things on it while you were out,” she says. “Let me show you.”
She leans over, pushing small silver buttons. The menus are choppy and slow and the home screen display has a lot more in common with the clunky display on our landline than any modern smartphone. The media option shows one picture in the memory, but the screen is so small and pixelated it’s impossible to tell what it is. It’s slightly blurred, maybe a hand, a thumb, or the side of someone’s face? The camera is very primitive and the tiny square screen likewise, barely an inch across and painfully slow to load even this single picture.
“What is it?”
She shrugs. “Could be the previous owner? Here’s the other thing—it’s a bit cryptic.”
She clicks buttons to get to the phonebook, which lists a single number. But instead of a name it’s simply listed asUSE THIS. Nothing that suggests who it belongs to.
“Maybe it was an unwanted gift,” I say. “A backup phone for a grandparent to contact their grown-up children? Just one number to make it as simple as possible instead of them having to scroll through pages of names or numbers.”
Jess nods. “Mum tried something similar with Grandad.”
Her grandad Eric had refused all efforts to join the mobile era, had never yet sent so much as a text message and only ever turned it on to make a very occasional phone call. After which he’d turn it off again and put it in the kitchen drawer, forget about it for another week or two.
