It looked old and like a toy. A small white rectangular box, thicker than the flip-phone Margaret used now, with a stubby blue aerial that looked like the cap of a felt-tip pen. Three-quarters of it fitted in the palm of her hand. If she put her index finger out it balanced comfortably. The screen was small. Most of the phone was buttons made of hard plastic that clicked when she pushed them. When she lifted it up and looked over the top of it, she could see through the parts of the buttons that protruded from the body of the phone, and under the clear plastic bubbles were blue labels with white numbers and yellow Kanji and English characters. Just like on her phone, 2 was ABC, 3 was DEF, and so on. The grey screen was surrounded by a watery border of light blue. Swimming in the border were small cartoons in fine black outlines. Each picture had zip ribbons around it to show sound and movement – a vehicle raced while the front of it rotated, the antennae on an egg beeped, a square-looking duck quacked. At the bottom of the screen in bubble letters filled in yellow, bordered in blue it said TAMAGOTCHI. The small egg-like digipets had been huge and then disappeared, superseded by new games. They looked like a joke next to The Sims and Animal Crossing. She held it out. Maybe it wasn’t a phone – maybe it was a Tamagotchi in the shape of a phone? But it had three diagonal lines at the top and three dots at the bottom. One set of holes for listening, one for talking, and the numbers and the letters. It was a relic of a crossroads – phones for kids, games for phones. History would only go one way and because the phone was both it felt older than it really was. The idea of it was ancient. From here it looked like it was hedging the wrong bets.

Margaret reached for her phone on the bedside table and the weight difference was noticeable even though they were both small objects that did the same thing. Her phone was light and slim and smooth. She flipped it open and looked at the buttons, which were moulded from a single sheet of plastic – soft and easy to depress. She could flip her phone open and work it from one hand. The phone from under the bed was hard and stiff – there wasn’t a soft piece of plastic on it. She’d seen phones like it, and she’d seen Tamagotchi, but not something like this. She pushed the power button, but it was still dead.