Grumpy Oldie Man
Matthew Norman
‘It would be an affront to describe her as relaxing company in a retail outlet’
By the simplest metric, the curious matter of my mother’s multiple Vodafone contracts wouldn’t have sent Sherlock Holmes scurrying to and fro between his armchair and the Persian slipper that held his tobacco. It is only one third of a three-pipe problem.
That said, the solitary pipe is the one I’ve been fantasising about fashioning into a makeshift, metal noose to evade the filial duty to resolve this mystery.
Not being a drug dealer (so far as I’m aware – our parents’ capacity to astound us is almost limitless) or a prostitute, my mother contents herself with just the one phone.
It isn’t a smartphone. It is the Bennyfrom- Crossroads of phones. But it makes and receives calls, and sometimes consents to the sending of texts. Not being massively techno-savvy, my mother seemed happy with that.
Yet, for two years, she has been paying for two phones that do not exist. It was to cancel these contracts that we embarked on a family outing to Carphone Warehouse.
Be it crystal clear that I love my mother beyond words. She uses that phone to call me several times each day, and sometimes accidentally in the middle of the night. Even at 3.23am, I am thrilled to hear from her. But it would be an affront to journalistic integrity to describe her as relaxing company in a retail outlet.
Until last week, I assumed the most challenging of these was a restaurant. At the age of five, I watched her reject seven consecutive cups of tea (inadequate strength) in a Wimpy. Decades later, I heard her send back a Scotch in a more formal joint because ‘this ice is too cold’.
If half a century of experience had barely prepared me for the two hours in a wildly overheated Carphone Warehouse, God knows how it affected the guy who served us with none.
I assume he won’t see this, due to being in the Zurich clinic where 36 psychoanalysts are treating his post-traumatic stress in three teams of 12, working eight-hour shifts around the clock.
But he has my sympathy for being caught in the crossfire between a mature customer to whom all technology is baffling, and a multinational apparently keener on keeping accounts than customer satisfaction.
If hindsight would later establish the first hour as a breeze, it felt like a tornado. During his five calls to Vodafone, my mother stood by the counter (she had rejected a stool) tutting, grimacing, and wondering if he knew what he was doing in what might be termed a stage whisper. But only if the stage was in Glasgow, and the whisperer was determined to be heard in the back row while performing in Truro.
The belated arrival of a chair wasn’t the change of luck it fleetingly appeared. All it presaged was that the doubting of his competence came from nearer the floor.
Somehow, by the end, she had not only replaced her phone with a nearidentical model. One of the mystery contracts had been cancelled. I think. She might have added a fourth to the roster. We won’t know until the bank statement.
‘Hopeless,’ she said as we left, ‘absolutely hopeless. An hour to get me a chair.’ She had a point. In all ways, furniture and otherwise, the venerable are poorly catered for in this milieu. ‘Now we must go to Vodafone and cancel the other one. Immediately.’
I’m not certain if those words induced a blackout or whether the mind blanked out the next moments to protect me from flashbacks.
What I do recall is that my first words, on recovering the power of speech, were a declaration that not before Judgment Day would I accompany my mother to such a venue again.
In a Vodafone shop the following day, we found a chair by the counter and a sweetheart behind it. Although we were there for only an hour, Usam’s patience had me wondering whether to petition the Vatican to break with tradition by make him the first Muslim saint.
During one of his calls, he passed me his real phone so I could enquire about a refund of the small fortune my mother has paid for her imaginary one.
I asked for Vodafone’s head office number. ‘I’m sorry,’ said the voice at head office. ‘I don’t have access to that.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But who do you work for?’ ‘Vodafone.’ ‘And where do you work?’ ‘Head office.’ ‘Then perhaps you’d give me the number.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I don’t have access to that.’
Finally, after another contract had been cancelled (I think; see above), my mother announced that she would return, alone and often, for tuition about the new phone, which is so minimally different from the old one.
‘I used to come here all the time,’ she told Usam. ‘There was a lovely chap called Sylvester, but he moved to Enfield. Then there was Amit. He didn’t stay long either. He went to Northampton.’
Usam headed urgently for the room in the back. What drew him there might remain as eternal a mystery as that of my mother’s multiple contracts. But if I had to guess, it was to fill out a form requesting an instant transfer to the store in Ulaanbaatar.