Monday
I have my first appointment of 2020 with my life coach. Apart from suggesting I take up the xylophone as a relaxing hobby, we look at how I might break my four-hour-a-day phone habit.
My life coach agrees that I could get fit AND write my novel, if I stopped scrolling, checking, texting, listening to podcasts, Instagramming, tweeting and reading news all day.
His phone is mostly inactive. He just turns it on twice a day to check his messages and speak to clients. The rest of the time it just sits in a drawer on aeroplane mode.
“Experiment perhaps with going for a walk without it,” he says. I shudder involuntarily.
At home, I Google where to buy a xylophone and find I have just lost an hour mindlessly scrolling. Hate self! Why so addicted to small powerful computer?
Leave it in a drawer as I have to get enough sleep because tomorrow I’m going on TV and I want to look HOT and RESTED.
Tuesday
South Yarra, 10am
Today I am on TV! I’m hardly ever on TV. But the people at Studio 10 want to interview me about detoxes and since I did an extreme one in 2014 I’m an expert.
In the city I get my hair blow-dried and makeup done. “Give me a helmet!” I tell the stylist. “I am going on TV.” Hairdresser says nothing, so I say it again in case she didn’t hear. “Lots of spray please – it must be firm for TV!”
Others are excited about TV. My parents, sister-in-law and three-year-old niece are gathering at my parents’ house to watch me at 10:30am.
Windswept day in Melbourne. Hope helmet stays in place. Get cab to Channel Ten. They promised Cabcharges. Cab is expensive. Spent all money on hair.
Run up to reception on level 4 to collect Cabcharges. Leave my laptop in cab as security to reassure driver I won’t do a runner. Cabbie is going to loiter on Toorak Road. I need to be quick. Rain! Laptop! Hair!
Reception doesn’t have Cabcharges. Reception rings various people. Sends me to security. Security doesn’t have my name on the list. Who am I? What am I doing here? Why do I want Cabcharges? Reception rings someone called Matt.
Matt takes his time (three minutes) to come to reception. Feel sick about driver being towed with my laptop. What if I never see laptop again?
Matt has Cabcharges but looks confused.Who am I? What am I doing here? Have I got the wrong week? No! I don’t! Oh maybe I do? “You are not on television today,” he says. “You have made a mistake.”
Matt says he’ll come to cab with me to sort out driver.
Outside it’s raining. Hair is destroyed – but who cares. I am not on television any more. Must tell excited family or else they will watch Studio 10 all morning, confused, looking for daughter.
Where is cab? It has my laptop in it. See cab – it is parked. Then it is … moving. I’m waving frantically – I start to run. I am running along Toorak Road – on the actual road – in the rain with flat hair (not good hair) and Matt is also running and the cab is driving and we catch it and Matt pays for the cab and goes back up to Channel Ten and I sit in a coffee shop across the road from the TV station and text my family (“wrong day, I’m not on telly”) and sit staring at the Channel Ten logo and try not to get upset about the 15 minutes I had good hair and only three people saw it.
South Yarra, 6pm
After catching up with my friend Chris, we split an Uber to Fitzroy, where I’m going to dinner and he’s going on a Tinder date.
In the Uber I suddenly panic. “Where’s my phone?? I don’t have my phone!!”
Chris has known me for nine years, and although he’s heard secondhand about me losing stuff, he hasn’t actually been there – in the eye of the storm.
Immediately he’s ready, like a sniper.
He starts ringing my phone. No sound.
“I got sand in it and it doesn’t ring,” I explain.
He grabs my backpack and starts unzipping all the areas and plunging his hand in trying to find the phone while also apologising for going through my bag, but I can see he’s actually panicked. I tip my handbag on to the seat, freaking out.
Chris finds the phone in a weird side pocket.
“What the hell is it doing there?”
Chris literally slumps back in the seat and shakes his head. “It’s stressful to be you.”
Fitzroy
I have dinner with Osman Faruqi. He tells me not to worry about not being on television because there is always a chance something could go terribly wrong live on air, which would ruin my career and reputation. I could become some sort of infamous meme, and that is all I am known for for the rest of my life and it’s the top line of my obituary.
“So it’s a good thing you didn’t get on TV.”
After dinner, Os is going to a bar in the city. I’m going home. It is raining hard. My hair will be even flatter. Outside the pub someone is calling my name. The cries are coming from the ground. I look down and it’s Chris and his Tinder date, sitting on the ground under a ledge where the kegs are rolled. They are vaping in the rain.
I’m so thrown by this (what are they doing here? Why are they sitting on the ground?) that I almost miss my Uber. Check phone. Check number plate. I say goodbye to Chris and say hello to Nick, my driver.
On the journey home we talk about energy-efficient air conditioners. Nick is a great guy. Five stars.
Twitter time! At home I search my bag and backpack and realise with a terrible, sick feeling my phone is missing. Like missing missing. Really missing.
I boot up my computer. 12%. Charger at work! Must find my phone. Must find Uber driver! Arghhh.
Find my phone is turned off. Uber driver can only be contacted by phone. But I have no phone!! DM Os on Twitter.
“I lost my phone!”
Os tries ringing it, but I tell him there’s no point because it got sand stuck in it in 2015 and doesn’t ring.
“Are you on your laptop? Try that to see where it is. Otherwise give me your Apple ID and I can try to log in,” suggest Os.
I get Os to phone Nick, the driver.
“Hmm he says he can’t find it. Pulled over and had a good look. Maybe it’s in the pub? I don’t understand how you could have lost it between the pub and your house. You must’ve had it to call Uber.”
I message Chris and tell him that my phone is really gone. If he’s still at the Napier could he have a look … on the ground?
Chris messages back.
“This is absurd! You had it in hand when you left.”
It is absurd. It was in my hands. It was 8:30pm and I’d been drinking mineral water.
How could it have just disappeared?
Distressed, I contemplate life without it. In the void, I see a xylophone.