The last period of the afternoon returned him to his own class for a geometry lesson. He was feeling close to conveying the beauty of a theorem when the school secretary knocked at the door. “Can you turn this off, Mr Sharpe? I haven’t time to keep answering it.”
“I thought it had been switched off.” About to confront Latham, Sharpe realised the policewoman must have revived the mobile. “Not you, Latham,” he nevertheless said and offered the task of killing the phone to the most numerate pupil. “Did you say you took some calls, Miss Dodd?”
“One. I didn’t think it could be for you. They just kept saying they wanted something back.”
“That will be the lady who lost it. Who can find me her number?”
All the boys began to clamour. It seemed safest to leave the job to the numerate boy, but he looked puzzled. “Says there wasn’t anybody.”
“Better stick to figures, Jarvis.” Of course the woman had withheld her number. Sharpe collected the mobile and held it out to the secretary. “Anything amiss, Miss Dodd?”
She shook her head while the class giggled at his choice of words. She might have convinced him if she hadn’t hesitated another second. As soon as the lesson petered out, having failed to recapture the communication he had thought he was establishing with more of the class than usual, he made for the office. “What exactly was the matter, Miss Dodd?”
“I just didn’t like the feel of it.”
“Which you’re saying was ...”
“Like it wanted to crawl out of my hand.” With a laugh apparently intended as disparaging she added “I expect I was distracted. I nearly dropped it because I thought someone was hiding behind the railings.”
She could do with an English lesson, he thought. The railings of the schoolyard were inches apart and less than an inch thick. He took the mobile to his classroom and set about marking homework. As he penned cross after dispiriting cross the green ink put him in mind of the glow that had led him to the phone in the tunnel. He couldn’t help growing tense in case the mobile sprang to life, and once he seemed to glimpse a figure watching him between entirely too few railings. Miss Dodd’s fancies must have impressed him more than they had any right to. When he glanced up, the street was deserted except for a momentary flurry of movement above a kerbside grid. Without doubt it was an effect of the heat, which also made him mop his forehead.
At least the street was still deserted when he left the school. Whatever his class might be up to was no longer his concern. Could the tunnel under the railway be where Jane met her customers? When he peered down it he saw nothing except litter. A low restless heap several feet long was scraping against a wall in the depths of the gloom.
More passengers than usual in his carriage on the train had mobile phones, unless he was more aware of them. The spectacle of so many people talking to nobody visible made him feel threatened with having to do so. He mustn’t allow it to turn him against using the train; his car had been vandalised once at the school, and Mr Thorn’s response had been so guarded that Sharpe had felt accused of bringing the place into disrepute. He did his best to ignore the voices all around him while he gazed out at the embankment strewn with litter that twitched and jerked with the passing of the train. He could almost have thought the disturbance was following him.
Most of the litter fell short of his station. The trees shading the streets were too mature for vandals to destroy but surely too slender for anyone to hide behind. He had glanced back only twice by the time he reached his neat two-bedroomed single-bedded house. Usually closing the door behind him felt like being sure of the rest of the day: a simple dinner with half a bottle of wine, the news on the radio, a browse among the comfortable old novels that occupied the spare bedroom, a book to take to bed. Now all this felt brittle with the possibility of an interruption. He planted the mobile on the kitchen table and watched it as he ate, and imagined it stirred furtively more than once before it started to writhe so vigorously it knocked against his plate. As he seized it and jabbed the appropriate button he thought of disguising his voice in case the caller wasn’t the owner. Disgust with the situation provoked him to demand “Yes?” Static rushed at him, bearing but almost drowning a voice. “Give it back.”
“We’ve already established I need to know where it should be taken.”
The static rose to meet him, and he had the impression, all the more unpleasant because irrational, that the speaker was doing the same. “Give it back.”
“Are you incapable of saying anything else?” All at once Sharpe’s temper deserted him. “Is it the effect of your drugs?”
There was silence or rather wordlessness for so long that he knew he’d scored a point. At last a thin desiccated aspect of the static pronounced some of “Give it back.”
“If you want your property I suggest you contact the police. I have.”
Should he have added that? Wouldn’t it make her afraid to reveal herself? Perhaps she was too brazen or too befuddled by drugs not to do so. When there was no response beyond a sluggish flurry of noises too shapeless for words, he ended the call. He felt he’d shown enough responsibility for one night, and tried to remember how Jarvis had switched the mobile off. He must have mistaken the formula, because halfway through the triumphal procession from Aids the mobile set about diminishing Handel.
Sharpe grabbed it from the low table it was sharing with Nicholas Nickelby and poked the rampant icon, then the prostrate one. This didn’t earn him much of a respite. Verdi’s procession was still on the march when the phone recommenced abridging Handel. He jabbed the keys again and thought of flinging the insistent object in the dustbin. Instead he paused the compact disc while he tramped with the phone to his bedroom, the most distant room. He shoved the mobile under both his pillows and leaned on them as if it might give in to his hopes and suffocate.
Not even its ditty did. He heard it several times during the section of the opera he forced himself to appreciate. It persisted throughout the news, after which it refused to let him read so much as an uninterrupted page. Surely the battery must run down soon, but it had lost none of its vim by the time his eyes began to ache. He retrieved the mobile from its lair to bury it under a cushion in the front room and under Nickelby as well.
How often did it ring as he laboured to sleep? He couldn’t tell when the tune reduced to idiocy was only in his head. He wished he hadn’t let the phone into his bedroom. Once, as he started awake from almost no doze at all, he thought he felt it crawling under the pillows, unless somebody was groping in search of it or something it had left behind was coming to a kind of life. He reared up to seize the light-cord, and as he uncovered the sheeted mattress he had the impression of turning over a stone. Was the patch of darkness on the sheet only the shadow of his head? Since no amount of rubbing the mark with the underside of a pillow had any visible result, he lowered his head into the dark.
He dreamed he slept more than he did. In the morning he stumbled down to glare at the phone, mockingly silent now. At least the day allowed him to put enough distance between them and, he hoped, to think how to dispose of his burden. On the train he felt trapped by ringtones, especially by the threat of hearing the one he’d grown to loathe. In the passage from the station he caught up with a trail of spicy smoke that none of his fellow commuters seemed to find worthy of remark. Was one of the boys in the street the culprit? Sharpe’s eyes were smarting with his attempts at detection by the time he reached the school.
As he trudged to the assembly hall he met Mr Thorn. “No interruptions today, I trust,” the headmaster murmured.