Читать книгу Love Is A Thief - Claire Garber - Страница 5

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

In 1990 a man called Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web. He was trying to find a way for particle physicists to access the same information at the same time from wherever they were working in the world.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

As with so many things in life, the end result turned out to be a little different from the initial objective. The seed he planted grew into something so far-reaching it touched every single one of us in an infinite number of different ways.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

The Internet now provides us with free accessible education. It can teach you a second language, how to cobble a shoe, how to install a new kitchen or build a satellite that will orbit the moon.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

You can run your business off it, meet the love of your life on it, find the recipe for a mushroom risotto before fixing your own kettle then learning the origins of the word ‘broken’.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

You can also see images of just about anything you want. I’ve seen the inside of an atom; the surface of Mars; the expression on Mandela’s face the day he was released from prison.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

But what the Internet has most recently shown me, its greatest gift of all, is a set of photos of my ex-fiancé on holiday with what I can only assume is his new girlfriend. And in these photos, although I’m no Tim Berners-Lee, I’m pretty sure I can see his fully functioning, fully operational, Internet-connected mobile phone. The very same phone he currently seems unable to answer.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

‘Well, she’s obviously not going to get off the floor,’ Federico said, to my grandma. They’d stopped speaking to me about 45 minutes earlier. They spoke about me, around me, over me, across me, but never actually to me. My grandma reached down and tried to take the phone from my hand but my fingers were stuck around it like a human claw or a strange device that unconventional men might purchase in Soho.

‘Darling Kate, you need to give me the phone,’ she said, trying once again to prise it away. I gripped on as if it were my only remaining portal back home. A small circle of people had formed around us. Apparently it’s not commonplace for a 30-year-old woman to sit in the middle of Heathrow Terminal Five, surround herself with her own luggage and start weeping.

‘Just one more try?’ I pleaded with Grandma while Federico wandered from person to person regaling them with stories of the origins of my tears.

‘Well, I told her that, yes, I did. I told her when she moved there. I said, “You can’t trust the French,” and not on account of their political history, of which I am a great great fan, especially that adorable Marie Antoinette—have you seen the film? Fabulous costumes, fabulous, although terribly restrictive of the female form. No, I mean on account of the language barrier. Because how do you ever know if you are truly understanding one another? Who, for example, decided that a pomme was an apple? And what if they were pointing to a tree when they said pomme, but we were looking at an apple because we were a little bit hungry so we called a tree an apple, and now the French are confused by Tesco’s obsession with stocking as many different varieties of edible tree as is genetically modifiably possible to create? Well, it’s a complete disaster is what it is!’

‘How can he be with someone else?’ I pleaded to my audience of 19 women of varying different ages and a security guard called Albert. The other security guard, Jim, had gone to speak with UK Border Control, who were concerned I was a suitcase-laden bomber. ‘How?’ I asked them again. ‘If one person is meant for one person then he must be feeling incomplete and restricted, like a piece in the wrong puzzle. He’s in the wrong puzzle!’ I said, getting high-pitched and red-faced. And I don’t think anyone thought Gabriel was in a puzzle, unless a puzzle was a dirty great metaphor. ‘So? What should I do?’

‘Perhaps she could try him one more time?’ one lady nervously suggested to Grandma. I looked around the human fence surrounding me and they all nodded confirmation. My grandma sighed and rolled her eyes. So I switched my phone to speakerphone and pressed redial for one final try. I held the phone in the air so everyone could hear. I looked at everyone. Everyone looked at me. Then we all looked at the phone.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel,’ the phone said. ‘I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

Then everyone went a little bit silent. Actually I don’t think you can be a little bit silent. It’s an either/or sort of thing. We were silent. And no one would look me in the eyes. So I switched off my French mobile for the last and final time and I handed it to my grandma, who put it straight in the nearest bin.

Then I just sat there, on the highly polished floor of Heathrow Terminal Five, I just sat there, surrounded by every single one of my possessions, and I wept, and I wept, and then I wept some more. If every teardrop were a piece of my soul they would never be able to put me back together.