In the end everything was laid out on the floor. All the cords were in order of appliance. There were eight chargers. She stood up eating a sandwich now and looked at all the cords and plugs and discs lined up on their bedroom floor like it was a garage sale. She looked at the chargers especially. She was scared to look at the chargers because she knew none of them would fit. She looked at her watch. There was an electronics shop that would be open for a few hours yet – a backstop, she liked that. The charger would cost a lot. A lot more than she should be spending on a whim. She needed all the money she had now that she didn’t have a regular job. She looked out the window, chewing loudly and open-mouthed, rolling the new phone over and over in her hand. Then she snapped back to the chargers. Three of them were for bigger appliances. There was a 4.5×3.0, which was probably for a laptop they’d picked up from someone and repaired and sold. Why would they still have that? Maybe they’d bought a better charger. Maybe it didn’t work? There was a Toshiba 6.3x3.0 and some other plug-looking plug. Then there were several with the flatter pins, which were more likely to be for a phone. Several people had brought them phones that weren’t working. One had stopped working because it got wet. Not very wet, their friend had explained to them. It had been in a bag and it rained and maybe two drops had got on it and then it hadn’t worked again. But then the phones got better and cheaper and people brought them phones less often and then there were phones in the secondhand shops, and they intrigued Peggy and Greta. They kept thinking about that conversation with Dell all those years ago about the device that you could take everywhere that they would always be looking at. Whenever they went anywhere, they carried an iPod and their phone. They had to attach their iPod to their laptop, then download the music and podcasts they wanted to listen to. They had a big brickish iPod. There were smaller ones, but they liked the big one – it felt like it would last longer, and they’d had it for years and they didn’t have enough money to replace it. They bought better phones. They couldn’t afford it, but the call centre job had given them an employee discount because the internet company had shares in a phone company. At least two of the chargers were from phones they had owned and discarded. She looked at the Tamagotchi phone again. Maybe they’d had three old phones, but she knew they’d never had a phone like this.