When I was growing up, if you wanted to hear from someone and he didn’t make contact, there was always faint hope that he had tried you and missed you. There was a certain sweetness and bloom in that “missing”. For everyone knew the phone always rang the minute you stepped into the bath or left for work or popped to the shops or fell heavily asleep. And we took comfort from this. The dim possibility that efforts were being made on your behalf could be enough to maintain the myth of potential togetherness for a few weeks more. He missed you and you missed him. It was perfect, a paradigm of longing, the crux of romance. It was the thought of the thought that counts, that counted. If it was yearning that appealed rather than any actual meeting, this was a fine state of affairs. You had the idea of things developing mysteriously without the frightening reality. It was like a Shakespeare play where muddle and misunderstanding divide those who truly belong together. Perhaps it would take a storm and a shipwreck or the donning of disguises for the proper order to be restored.

And then, if you wanted to hear from someone so much that the waiting was unbearable, you could take it out on the phone itself: kick it off the hook, unplug it or set it outside on a chilly windowsill as a sort of punishment. Hah! Blaming the messenger, or the non-messenger, the phone was sometimes viewed as an instrument of torture. A watched kettle never boils and a phone that’s being glared at just won’t ring. The handsets of my friends were frequently cracked and chipped where they had been flung across the room in moments of frustration. Phones were regarded with a great deal of loathing, but also awe. They wrecked lives and they transformed them.