'What did you think?'

It is eleven o’clock at night in the winter of 2013 and on Granville Road, near Seven Dials in Brighton, a woman is shouting into her phone.

WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU THNK? DID YOU THINK? DID YOU FUCK.

She comes out at night, to shout into her phone. I wonder if she lives with someone in her building (lovely Victorian terraced houses, high ceilings, pretty cornicing, red brick, pitched roofs, divvied into flats and some of the flats divvied into sublets, sublets of sublets, an infinite regress of sublets) and I wonder if she comes outside to spare her flatmates the noise of her arguments.

When I cannot sleep, because the woman is shouting, I think about her situation. A particular question troubles me: who, I wonder, is equal to her shouting? Just who exactly is on the other end of the line? I have had a lot of time to think about this when I cannot sleep: it troubles me.

Further questions present themselves as the prospect of sleep recedes: Is it a man? I realise I have assumed she is talking to a man—I have assumed she is heterosexual and in a relationship with a man on the other of the line. If it is a man, what is he like?

I try to sleep, but it’s hard not to listen. I wonder what she would say to me if she knew I was eavesdropping.

DID. YOU. FUCK.

Then, abruptly, she will end the call:

OKAY, LOVE YOU. BYE.

I have never seen her myself, but my girlfriend describes her as “very glamorous. Smart skirt suits, long hair, heels.”

Sometimes when I get to sleep I dream of the woman shouting into her phone.

One night a taxi driver deposited her, drunk, on the pavement outside her flat, and she proceeded to place handfuls of soil onto the tops of parked cars.

SEE HOW YOU LIKE IT, she said, several times. I imagine her saying this so loudly the aerials on some of the cars vibrate as she passes them.

#

A friend of mine worked for a small charity in Sussex and her new manager was a prick. Worse, he wasn’t very bright. One day he asked her to send a tweet.

“I want to watch how you do it,” he said, perching with one arse cheek on her desk.  She looked at him, expecting him to slip. He didn’t slip. “I’ve never sent a tweet.” He pointed at the landline phone on her desk. She didn’t have internet on her desktop computer: they weren’t allowed it. Small charities can be quite eccentric. “How do you do it?” he asked.

My friend coughed politely. “Um,” she said.

“Can you?” he said.

The way she told it, he thought Twitter was something you called up on your phone to place the tweet. The man wasn’t old, unless 40 is old.

“There’s the hashtag key on the phone, right?”

This is 100% true, more or less.

“Right,” said my friend, frowning down at some invisible point on her desk that her boss could not see.

In the pub when she tells us we all laugh a lot.

For a while my friend sublet a spare little room in my girlfriend’s flat on Granville Road.

On a winter’s night in 2013 a sea fret has sailed over the town from the channel, and on Granville Road, a mile from the beach, the air is full of salt and water softly drifting. It muffles the lights of streetlamps and cars, the empty estate agents on the Dials with their glowing displays of immaculate, unattainable houses. On Granville Road, a woman is shouting into her phone.

I wonder if somewhere on the other side of a town a man is stood outside his own flat or house shouting into his own phone.

I think about the woman shouting into her phone and I think about my friend’s prick manager and I wonder if the woman is merely trying to send a tweet.

Sometimes when I sleep I still dream about the woman. In my dream I hear her shouting into her phone and a horrible thought occurs to me: what if she has been shouting at me all along?

This tickles my innate paranoia. Suddenly I feel cold.

What if?

COULD YOU STOP FUCKING EAVESDROPPING ON ME, YOU CREEP? COULD YOU STOP WRITING ABOUT ME AND LEAVE—ME—ALONE?

Another questions disturbs me: What if there is no one on the other end of the line?

Now you reach for your own phone, unthinkingly, in receipt of some phantom notification, some ghost vibration: the body, primed for signal, invents it in the noise.

I think about the woman on Granville Road. This is 100% true. We don’t live there anymore but I suspect she’s still there now, as I write this, as you read it, outside her flat on Granville Road, shouting into her phone.

OKAY, LOVE YOU. BYE.