No map. No group chat. No cab app
Just mascara and hope. A dead battery is how a cute night turns into a survival plot.
It always happens at the worst percent. Not 20, when you are still a person with options. Not 12, when you can still pretend you are being sensible. It happens at 3 percent, in a toilet queue, when the screen does that little polite fade and you think, right, I will charge it in a minute. There is never a minute. There is a girl in front of you doing her lips and a song you half know and then the thing in your hand is a shiny brick.
I do not become sensible when it dies. I become feral. Properly. Like my brain has been unplugged from the only adult in the building.
The second it goes black
People talk about digital detox like it is a spa day. Cute. Try doing it in heels, half a pint in, outside a place you could not find again if someone paid you.
First thing I do is press the side button like it has personally betrayed me. Then I press it again. Then I hold it up to the light as if brightness is going to invent battery. It does not. It stays dead and a bit smug, which is rich coming from a rectangle I pay too much for.
After that the night splits in two. There is the version where I am still in the group, still laughing, still the girl who looks like she knows what she is doing. Then there is the version where I have no idea what time the last train is, whose house we said we were going to, or whether the bloke I was talking to is even called what I think he is called.
My flatmates will tell you I am cocky. Fine. Cocky needs a signal. Without one I am just a short blonde woman doing mental maths in a doorway.
What I lose that I pretend I do not need
Maps, obviously. I have lived in this city long enough to talk like I know it. Ends, overground, which Tesco is still open, which street looks fine until it is not. All of that confidence is stored in a little blue dot. Take the dot away and I am that person walking with purpose in the wrong direction because stopping looks like weakness.
Group chat. That is the real wound. The thread is where the plan lives. Not the plan we said at 7pm on the bed with crisps. The actual plan. The one that changes four times, once because someone is pulling an Uber, once because the queue is grim, once because a girl from work has appeared like a jumpscare. When my phone dies I am not left out. I am deleted. They are moving as a unit and I am a rumour in last season’s coat.
Cab app. Bank app. The screenshot of the address. The note I wrote myself that said last train and then never checked again. Even the camera, which is stupid, because I was not going to take a nice photo anyway. I was going to take a blurry one in bad light and decide later if I looked expensive.
And time. You do not realise how often you check the time until you cannot. Club time is fake anyway. Without a phone it becomes this stretchy, slightly threatening thing. Are we early. Are we done. Is my alarm for tomorrow already a problem I cannot see.
How the feral bit starts
I get louder. That is the tell. If I am still charming and a bit filthy, I am fine. If I start doing bits for the room, I am scared.
I borrow someone’s phone and immediately hate the way their keyboard feels. I type the flat group chat like I am leaving a voicemail for a hostage situation. Its els. Mine died. Where are we going. Do not leave me I am being nice. No apostrophe. No dignity. I hand it back before I can scroll anything I should not see, because I am nosy and I know myself.
If there is no one to borrow from, I do the walk. Not a walk. The walk. Fast, chin up, like I have somewhere to be. I clock exits. I clock staff. I clock the man who has been hovering and decide, in one second, whether he is a lift home or a problem. That is not glamorous. That is just being 5 foot 3 in London after midnight with no way to call anyone.
I have asked a bartender the time like it was a secret. I have stood under a bus stop map like it was an exam I revised for in 2014. I have followed a group of girls for half a street because they looked like they knew the station, then peeled off when I realised I was being weird. I was being weird. I still maintain it was practical.
The people problem
A dead phone makes you find out who you actually came out with.
There is the friend who notices in under a minute and starts herding you like a slightly drunk sheepdog. She gets the bill energy. She says we are going now and she means it. I love her. I also resent her a bit, because being looked after scratches the bit of me that wants to be the one with the plan.
There is the friend who says just come to afters and we will sort it, which is how you end up in a kitchen that is too bright, eating someone else’s bread, pretending you are still in on the joke.
There is the almost-someone. The one you were doing the look with. Dead phone kills the bit. You cannot take his number. You cannot send the stupid message later. You cannot even check if he exists in the morning. He becomes a story I tell in the bathroom at work, which is a tragic place to keep a man.
And there is me, who will flirt with a doorman for a charger like it is a personality. I have done the smile. I have done the husky please. I have stood by a socket in a cloakroom feeling like I was breastfeeding a Samsung. Ten percent feels like winning the lottery. I still do not learn.
Getting home without the little blue dot
This is the survival plot.
Night bus if I can name the number from memory, which I usually cannot, because I have outsourced my whole personality to Google. Overground if I am still in the zone where trains feel real. Walking if the flat is close enough that pride can cover the blisters. Cab if I have cash, which I do not, or if a stranger will order one and I can pay them like it is 2009.
I talk to drivers differently with no phone. I hear myself giving landmarks like my nan. Left at the Tesco. The one that is not the big one. If you hit the garage you have gone too far. I sound unhinged and local. They nod. Sometimes they know. Sometimes they do the long way and I cannot prove it, which is a special kind of rage when you work days and you know what money feels like leaving.
The worst is when you are almost there and you cannot buzz in. That is the one that makes me laugh in a not funny way. Standing outside my own building, made up, knackered, pressing the wrong button because the intercom numbers live in my notes app next to the wifi code and the thing I was meant to tell my manager.
A flatmate let me in last time without a speech. Just opened the door, looked at my face, said you look like a crime. Put the kettle on. That is love in a shared hall. I owe her wine. I owe her a charger that is not secretly mine.
What it does to my head
I joke about it because the other version is ugly.
A dead phone is not just inconvenience. It is that old quiet I do not like. No noise, no thread, no proof anyone can reach me. I can be the smug one in the mirror all evening. Take the screen away and there is a gap. I fill it with talking. Or flirting. Or walking too fast. Same trick I have used since I was small. Keep the room moving so nothing sits still.
Also I think about work, which is tragic at 1am. Rota in the morning. Radio in my ear. I cannot set an alarm. I cannot text that I am on my way if the overground dies too. The promotion girl in me is already annoyed at the night out girl. They share a body. They do not share a charger.
And money. Always money. A surge fare I cannot see. A card that might decline while I am smiling at a driver. The cheap night that becomes expensive because I lost the free option the second the battery hit zero.
What I tell myself I will do next time
Power bank. I own one. It lives in a drawer like a moral lesson. I will put it in my bag, I say, while putting lip product in instead. Priorities. I look better with the lip. I do not get home on the lip.
Write the bus numbers on a bit of paper like a Victorian. Screenshot the route while I still have 40 percent. Tell one person, out loud, the actual plan. Charge it at the pub even if the only socket is by the gents and I have to guard my drink like a dragon.
I do some of that, some weeks. Then I have a good night and get cocky again. That is the cycle. Phone dies. I go feral. I get home by some ugly mix of charm, luck and a friend who can still work her maps. I swear I am going to be an adult. I go out the next Friday with 61 percent and a wardrobe decision that took longer than my exit strategy.
The bit I will admit if I am being honest
There is a tiny, stupid part of me that likes it for about four minutes.
No one can reach me. No unread thing. No checking if he viewed the story. Just the room, the music, my own face in a bad mirror. For four minutes I am not performing for a rectangle. I am just in it.
Then I need to wee and find my people and get home and the four minutes are over. I want the brick to wake up and tell me I still exist to someone.
So yes. Cute night. Dead phone. Feral girl in mascara asking a stranger what stop this is. If you see me doing the purposeful walk with no headphones and a face like I have a plan, I do not. I have hope and last night’s setting spray. That has got me this far. It is not the same as 12 percent and an Uber, but it is a story, and I will tell it in the kitchen like I meant to do it that way.
