The Disconnect Read online

  “Hello?” the guy says.

  “I’m Esther – River’s friend.”

  “I’m Jason—”

  There’s the sound of crying coming from somewhere – but it’s not the baby sleeping on his shoulder. “Oh no,” Jason says. He thrusts the baby at me. “Can you just … got to get his sister. River’s somewhere about …”

  I freeze. The baby nuzzles against my neck. He’s like a tiny version of River, with his light brown skin and his dark curls. I fall instantly in love.

  With the baby. Not River. Obviously.

  I just stand there, unsure what to do. Then a door opens and a lady comes out who must be River’s mum, and she says, “Oh! Who are you?”

  “I’m Esther – River’s friend,” I say again.

  She grins and says, “Let me grab Rowan from you,” as she scoops the baby into her arms. “This is what happens when I ask for half an hour to do some work. River’s just popped out but he’ll be back soon. Come with me.”

  She’s so nice. She takes me into their kitchen. “The only decent room,” she says. “We only moved in three months ago, and then the twins arrived and, well, it’s been a bit chaotic.” She puts baby Rowan down in a Moses basket and asks if I go to school with River and if I am doing The Disconnect.

  “And how’s it going?” River’s mum asks.

  “Some things are good,” I tell her. “But others … it’s kind of difficult.” And I find myself talking about what it’s like feeling left out of stuff, and how Natalie has been cheating, and how I’m scared that if I tell on her I’ll be left out of everything – disconnected for ever. Yet some things are so much better without a phone, and I’m not even sure if I want it back. “And then there’s Dad. That’s a problem.”

  But then the tall shiny guy comes in with a screaming baby, saying, “I’m sorry, but I just can’t get Gaia to settle, can you?” and River appears at the kitchen door, carrying a shopping bag that he puts on the table.

  “Sorry, Esther, come outside in the garden,” River says. “Mum, just wait, put it away, can you?”

  “Breastfeeding is a normal human activity, River,” his mum says, but she waits till we’ve left the room. The baby stops crying the next second.

  The garden is huge and there’s a shaded bit at the bottom, with a picnic table where it looks like River’s been doing homework, judging by the Maths books spread out there.

  “This garden! Wow!” I say.

  “It’s all Jason,” River says. “My stepdad. He’s really rich. He sort of insisted we move when he knew they were having twins. It’s a bit unnecessary if you ask me. I mean, it’s too much for one family. I’ve been looking into hosting a refugee. Maybe we’ll do that.”

  “That’d be a good idea,” I say.

  “I know, I keep on telling them,” River says. “But they’re a bit tired right now, and Mum thinks we need to decorate and stuff. It seems like a lot of fuss to me. I mean, the house is OK as it is, and the babies will only mess it up.”

  “Do you like having them?” I ask. “The babies, I mean.”

  He shrugs. “They’re cute. But very noisy. And I am not changing nappies for anyone. In fact, they really shouldn’t use disposable nappies at all … I’m surprised at my mum.”

  River is clearly the sort of person who cares about big stuff. Politics and pollution and the planet. I can imagine how Natalie would roll her eyes and yawn.

  But without Natalie being here to judge him, I decide that I’d much rather worry about world affairs and the environment than how many likes I get for a selfie.

  “So, what are we going to do?” I ask him.

  “About Natalie and Tommy?” River says, and screws up his face. “Er, nothing? I’m not even that friendly with Tommy. He’s a bit of an airhead, isn’t he?”

  “I thought he was your friend.”

  “Nah,” River says. “We played football together a few years back. I haven’t really got any friends at that school. Not close friends … not any more.”

  I sense that it’s better not to ask why.

  “Natalie is my friend,” I tell him. “But I don’t think I can go on being friends with her if she’s cheating like this.”

  “What if you talk to her?” River asks. “See if she’ll quit The Disconnect?”

  “But I wouldn’t like that either. We were doing it together.”

  “Would it make such a difference? I mean, would you quit if she did?”

  I think about it. Just three weeks to go now. I know I can do that. But it’ll be much harder without Natalie. She’ll be going on about stuff she’s seen on her phone, stuff that I’m missing out on, people, memes …

  Memes – I’m actually considering messing up my chances of getting £1,000 because I won’t be able to see videos of flying kittens or whatever. Pull yourself together, Esther.

  “I’m going to talk to Natalie,” I decide. “Maybe I can get her to quit. Or stop using the phone.”

  “What if you can’t?” River asks. “What if she wants you to cheat as well?”

  “I’m not cheating,” I tell him. “I quite like not having a phone.”

  “I thought it’d be harder than it is,” River says. “But I don’t like having to wait to find out things.”

  “You mean, social things?” I ask.

  “No, facts. If, say, I want to know the population of China, or the number of polar bears killed by climate change in the last year.”

  Suddenly, I am desperate to know those things too.

  “How can you find out?” I ask him.

  “I have to store everything up and look them up on the computer when I get home. But Jason thinks I should go one step further … give up the internet altogether.”

  Is he mad?

  “How could you do that?” I say. “You wouldn’t be able to find out anything!”

  “Libraries,” he says. “Ringing people up and asking them stuff.”

  “It’d take for ever.” I try to imagine how slow life would be without any internet at all. “It’s … just … we couldn’t function.”

  “I tell you who I have been looking up,” River says. “Dame Irene Irvine. She’s made so much money from mobile phones. Why is she paying us to give them up? And what advice does she need from us?”

  River’s right. I’d like to find out too.

  “So, we should go to a library?” I ask him.

  “No, we can use the computer here,” River says. “We don’t have to give up the internet completely. It was just an idea of Jason’s. To take the experiment to the next level.”

  I’m pretty relieved. We go back into the house, where all is quiet. Both babies are asleep in their baskets and River’s mum is bent over her laptop. Jason’s flopped out on the sofa and sleeping as soundly as the twins.

  River leads me to a side room that is clearly someone’s office – there are lots of box files and notebooks and two computers side by side.

  “Jason’s a journalist,” River reminds me, and I hear a note of pride in his voice.

  “He’s not a restaurant critic, is he?” I ask hopefully.

  “No, an investigative reporter.” River looks a bit puzzled. Then he says, “Oh! Your cafe.”

  “Never mind,” I say.

  “I’ll tell him about it. The food was great.”

  He types “Dame Irene Irvine” into the search engine. (Not Google, I notice, but one I’ve never heard of. When I ask why, River says, “This one doesn’t mine your data.”)

  At first there are just millions of posts and we don’t know where to start. So River adds “teenagers” to his search and “giving up mobile phones”.

  Nothing obvious. Nothing interesting.

  So he adds “experiment”.

  “Aha!” he says.

  There’s a report of a conference from 2014 on some website.

  “Irvine wants to ‘experiment’ on teens,” it says.

  Multi‑millionaire Dame Irene Irvine openly admitted that she’s plannin
g to create a GENERATION of people addicted to her mobile phones.

  She told an industry conference that “it’d be fascinating” to take phones away from youngsters, to “pinpoint” the source of their addiction to technology.

  It was crystal clear that her intention was to make sure that new products would be even MORE addictive and ENSLAVE more teens to technology.

  “If we can find the outliers, the ones who aren’t addicted, we can learn so much,” Dame Irene said.

  “I’m looking for a school to work with, to test my theories.”

  Watch out schools! Dame Irene wants to use you to suck even more kids into her grasping claws!

  “Oh my God,” I say.

  “I thought so,” River replies. “I thought it must be something like this.” He’s frowning again. River’s got the wildest scowl when he’s annoyed about something.

  “I’m going to have to quit,” he says. “I might go on being disconnected, because I think there are benefits. But I’m quitting The Disconnect. How about you?”

  14

  Snap cheat

  All day Monday at school I monitor Natalie. Will she say or do anything that makes her cheating obvious?

  No. Natalie’s very good. She manages to be fake‑annoyed that Shaquilla’s having a party and hadn’t consulted her about the guest list. She moans about missing out. She says, “But you’ll be sorry when Esther and I have our money.”

  I’m seething inside. How dare she?

  And I’m also wondering how Natalie’s doing it. Has she created false identities? Is she just a sad lurker, watching everyone else’s social media without joining in? Or does everyone know she’s cheating – well, Sophie and Shaq anyway – and they’re laughing at me behind my back?

  I wait until school’s over. Natalie and I have English together last period. Then, as we walk out of school, I say to her, “I need to talk to you.”

  “What?” Natalie asks. “I said I’d meet Tommy.”

  “Never mind Tommy,” I tell her.

  “Esther! I said I’d meet him in fifteen minutes. What is it?”

  “Why don’t you message him to tell him you’re going to be late?” I say. “On your brand‑new iPhone.”

  Natalie’s perfectly shaped eyebrows shoot up to her fringe.

  “My what?” she asks.

  “Come off it,” I say. “I saw you. We saw you. In the park.”

  I can see River coming out of the school gates. He’s going to tell me that he’s done it, I know it. He’s quit The Disconnect and got his phone back. And he’s going to ask if I’ve done the same thing. I grab Natalie’s arm.

  “Come on!” I tell her.

  Natalie huffs a sigh and says, “OK, then,” like she’s doing me a favour. She takes off, marching down the road, not saying a word even when we’re down by Finsbury Park station. Then she crosses the busy Seven Sisters Road, under the railway bridge, and weaves in and out of stationary traffic, with me following her.

  “Nat! Where are we going?” I ask her.

  Natalie reaches the other side of the road, where there’s a tall white wall with gorgeous mosaic pictures forming trees and lakes and water lilies. There’s also a sign that says “Gillespie Park”.

  “Ah,” I say. “OK.” Because our mums used to bring us here when we were small. It always felt like our secret place – the park hidden behind high walls and snaking between railway lines, opening out into trees and meadows and ponds where we’d catch tadpoles. All squashed between the Emirates Stadium and the mosque and all the busy roads and Arsenal tube station. A little bit of green in the city.

  We go into the almost hidden entrance and walk along the path by the railway line. It’s all fenced off, of course, but it’s still about as near as you can get to the line without actually being on a station platform.

  “OK,” Natalie says. “I cheated. I admit it. But I didn’t really cheat. I mean, I haven’t used the phone properly. Just to look at stuff. And take pictures and you know … just having a phone … it’s useful.”

  “You are an addict!” I say. “Why not just give up The Disconnect? Get your own phone back?”

  “Because I still feel like I’m disconnected! I’m not using it like I normally do. I’m just, you know … there are some useful apps … Twitter …”

  “You’re not even on Twitter!” I tell her.

  “I am.” Natalie looks embarrassed. “Murray Myles fandom.”

  “Oh. Why didn’t you say?”

  She gives me a sideways look. “I thought you’d laugh at me.”

  “Oh and why would I do that? Especially when I’m @murraylove?”

  Natalie almost falls over. “You what? What the actual?”

  “I love the fandom,” I tell her.

  “I do too,” Natalie says. “And I’ve talked to you on Twitter! Without even knowing it was you! I’m @murraygirl.”

  And we’re laughing out loud, because this is so strange and without The Disconnect maybe we’d never have worked it out.

  “We would too,” Natalie says when I tell her this. “We’d have had a meet‑up at some point – maybe for a concert.”

  “I don’t meet people off the internet! You could have been some pervy lorry driver called Trevor!”

  This starts us off again.

  “And I’d never have the money for concert tickets,” I add.

  We’ve reached the bit of the park that’s wider and greener, and there are mums and kids and a lot of trees. And I think about how The Disconnect has been a bit like Gillespie Park for me. A small slither of my life where I can breathe. Where there’s silence and time and it’s not all rush, rush, chat, chat like the busy streets and railway lines.

  I try to explain it to Natalie, but she shakes her head. “Honestly, I can’t think of one good thing about The Disconnect. It was Tommy’s idea to use spare phones – he’s got old ones at home, so we just bought pay‑as‑you‑go SIMs for them. I honestly thought I’d go mad without any kind of smart phone. This way, it’s not easy, but I get a little bit of that feeling. You know, the excitement when you’re looking to see what’s new. What’s happening.”

  “I don’t get that feeling,” I tell Natalie. “It’s more like I feel anxious that I’m missing something. Or someone’s been mean about me.”

  Natalie shakes her head. “You know, sometimes things happen, and people think you’re nasty, but you’re not really. You get muddled up, or you say something without thinking …”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “Your new friend Maura,” Natalie says. “I feel … embarrassed. I think I was one of the people who upset her. But I didn’t plan it or anything, it was just one of those things …”

  I wait for her to explain.

  “You know how just suddenly there’s a joke and everyone joins in, and you don’t really know why?” Natalie asks.

  “No. Not really,” I say. My voice is colder than I expected it to be.

  “Well, all I can remember is that somehow it was the thing to do, to laugh at pictures of Maura. And other girls as well. It made us feel grown up. Like, we were laughing at them for being babyish, and that meant we were better than them.”

  Part of me is desperate to know if I was one of those girls that got laughed at. And part of me wants to walk away and never see Natalie again.

  But there’s a tiny bit of me that understands what it’s like to want to fit in with the crowd.

  “It doesn’t really feel like bullying if it’s online,” Natalie finishes. “But when Maura cried, I felt terrible.”

  “But you didn’t do anything about it,” I point out. “Like telling her, or saying sorry.”

  “I felt too embarrassed. And I didn’t think she’d want to hear that I remembered.”

  I take a deep breath and say, “You have to tell her. And you either give Tommy back his phone or I will report you.”

  “That’s OK,” Natalie says. “Then you could get my money and give some of it to me!” />
  “Natalie!”

  We’ve reached the Arsenal station exit of the park, and we step out onto the quiet street. It’s so funny to think that these houses once had a huge football stadium right in the middle of them. Now there are flats there, but you can still see the breaks in the terraces where the entrances used to let fans in to see the matches. That’s London. Full of secrets and history.

  Natalie pulls out her phone. “OK,” she says. “I’ll give it up.”

  “Why would you bother?” I burst out. “I wouldn’t tell on you. You know that.”

  “But you wouldn’t be my friend any more. I know I’ve let you down, Esther, but I really don’t want to lose you. And I will say sorry to Maura. You just have to help me to do it.”

  Natalie’s crying now and so am I.

  “We’ve been friends forever,” she says through her tears. “Sometimes I feel like you’re the only person connecting me with the nice girl I used to be, before I turned into Queen Bitch.”

  I never realised Natalie knew that was what some people called her.

  “It’s OK,” I tell her. “Say sorry to Maura, be her friend, that’s all you need to do.”

  “But what about this stupid phone?” Natalie wails, waving the phone under my nose. I start thinking about how great it’d be to FaceTime Rosa and Dad … to take pictures and send them … to watch Murray Myles gifs … just to be able to find out when the next bus home was coming …

  My hand goes out to take the phone.

  And then a moped speeds up and swerves onto the pavement, its driver wearing a balaclava mask. He grabs the phone out of my hand and starts pulling at my school bag. “Oi!” I shout, and try to pull the bag back.

  Natalie’s screaming, people are running towards us, and then the driver shoves me, hard. I feel my feet leave the ground, and I’m falling – helpless – and the driver’s zooming off down the road.

  And then I crash to the ground, and the worst searing pain flashes through my foot. Deep, deep inside it I feel something go “snap”.

  15

  Download

  I cry all the way to accident and emergency, and Natalie cries too. The ambulance man tries to calm us down, saying, “It’s only a phone! You can get another one!” but that just makes us more hysterical.