A Charged Phone in a Shed Is a Phone Somebody Is Using

She was looking for the long screwdriver.

That is how it started, and Nell has told it enough times now to know that this is the detail people do not believe, and it is the only part of the whole thing she can prove.

The gutter bracket on the back of the house had come away in the wind, and Barry was at his brother’s, and Nell had decided at about eleven on a Tuesday morning that she was perfectly capable of doing it herself.

The long screwdriver lives in the shed, on the shelf, behind the tins of screws.

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She moved the tins. Behind them was a folded tarpaulin, which had not been there — or which had been there, she supposes, but folded differently, and further back.

And under the tarpaulin was a margarine tub with the lid on.

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She did not touch it for four hours.

She put the tarpaulin back, went inside, made a cup of tea that she did not drink, and sat at the kitchen table until the light went orange.

Then she went back out and got it.

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It was an old handset. The cheap kind, three years out of date, the sort of thing that costs thirty pounds and comes in a card box. There was no case on it. There was a charging cable in the tub as well, coiled, with the wire wrapped the way Barry wraps a wire.

It was switched off.

She pressed the button and it came on immediately, and the screen showed a battery at seventy-one per cent.

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That was the detail that made her hands go cold. Not the phone. The charge.

A forgotten phone in a shed is an old phone. It is junk, it is something that got put somewhere and stayed there, and there are four of those in every house in the country.

A charged phone in a shed is a phone somebody is using.

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There was a PIN.

She tried his birthday. She tried her birthday. She tried their anniversary, and then the dog, and then the house number twice, and then she stopped.

She stopped because on about the fifth attempt she caught sight of herself reflected in the shed window — a woman of fifty-nine in a coat, in her own shed, in the middle of the afternoon, typing numbers into a phone she had found under a tarpaulin — and she thought: I am in a television programme.

And she found that she minded that more than she could account for.

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She put it back exactly as she had found it.

In the tub. Lid on. Cable coiled to the left of it, the way it had been. Tarpaulin folded and pushed to the back, tins of screws in front, in the order they had been in, which she had to think about for a moment and which she got right.

She was careful about the angle of the tarpaulin.

She remembers being pleased with herself about the angle, and she has never been able to explain that to anybody, including the counsellor they saw for four months the following year.

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She did the gutter bracket herself, with the long screwdriver, which had been on the shelf the whole time.

Then she put the screwdriver back, and shut the shed, and went in and started the dinner.

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Barry came home at about six.

He put his keys in the bowl and said his brother had got a new car and that it was too big for him, and that there had been an accident on the bypass, and asked whether she had had a good day.

Nell said, “Fine. I did the gutter.”

“Did you? Good.”

“It was only the bracket.”

“Right,” said Barry, and went to wash his hands.

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She did not say anything for a fortnight.