“ Your phone is RUBBISH Thompson!”,
Leroy Potts held the white plastic phone aloft like a trophy before throwing it down the school corridor to the cheers of his friends.
The phone clattered to a halt by the swing doors and Leroy and his fans moved away (presumably they had caught the scent of someone even less popular than Danny Thompson).
Danny sighed and went to retrieve his phone from the dusty spot where it had come to rest.
Sadly, the little phone appeared quite undamaged despite it’s ordeal. The white plastic didn’t have so much as a scratch on it.
Danny dusted it off and returned it to his blazer pocket. He was going to be late for class again.
‘If only Leroy had broken it’ , he mused, ‘then I might have convinced dad to buy me another terrible phone’.
The mobile had been a typical dad gift. Danny’s father seemed to lack the sense of self preservation required to survive from day to day at Levenhorts School.
Whilst other dads worked in jobs that had pronounceable names like ‘plumber’ or website designer’, Danny’s father worked as a ‘Fizzy Cyst’.
Danny had once asked his father what a ‘Fizzy Cyst’ did, and the resulting answer had taken over an hour and had left him none the wiser. He never asked again.
For sure, there must be worse parents out there. Danny had to admit that, since mum had left, things had been pretty rough at home but his father was at least always around when Danny needed him.
But there was always this problem of ‘the gifts’.
‘The gifts’, were always potentially quite useful, but always turned out to have some major flaw.
There had been the tennis racquet made by a company that no one had ever heard of.
Then there had been the games console that was not compatible with any decent games. The only game Danny had been able to get for it was called ‘Hedgehog’ and involved waddling around very slowly and trying not to be eaten alive by tics.
But now there was ‘the phone’.
‘The phone’ was made by some company called ‘Relatell’. Some offshoot of dad’s work that had never performed properly and so the prototype had been passed to Danny.
“I have something for you”, his father had announced two weeks ago during dinner.
Danny had tried his best to appear expectant and excited so as not to upset his dad, but his heart sank as he removed the wrapping to reveal the reject phone beneath.
“Wow dad, thanks. It’s really er…it’s really white isn’t it’.
His father had bustled off, seemingly fooled by Danny’s reaction; but the phone soon turned out to be as rubbish as all the other ‘gifts’.
It did very little despite taking thirty six hours to charge. There was only room for fifteen numbers, there were no apps or emoticons and only one ring tone that sounded like a cow going to the toilet through a sewn up bum.
No, all in all, Leroy Potts would only have done him a favour by breaking the phone.
It was time to stop trusting Leroy and take matters into his own hands.
Upon returning home from school, that day, Danny let himself in as usual and said ‘hello’ to his father, who was busy with something or other in the kitchen.
Rather than ‘crashing out’ in front of the TV though, he snuck into the garage and found his father’s pocket knife.
Then, feeling a bit like a criminal, he stuffed the knife into his blazer and quickly made his way upstairs to his bedroom.
There was no lock on the bedroom door, but Danny found a door stop and wedged it under his side of the door. It wasn’t perfect but it should slow things down long enough for him to hide any incriminating evidence.
With this done, he tipped both knife and phone onto his desk and switched on the lamp in order to better investigate how the phone might ‘meet with an accident’.
Turning it around in his fingers, he noticed a slight depression in the otherwise featureless plastic.
He opened the knife with a fat ‘click’ and probed the area in the hopes of splitting the casing.
Sure enough, something was moved inside by the knife’s questing point and the phone slid smoothly open.
Danny swore and flung the phone onto his bed. Why were useless things always so indestructible whilst expensive toys seemed to break the moment you so much as dropped them?
He snatched it up to try again and noticed that the newly opened phone appeared to have just one extra button inside.
All alone in the middle of the featureless casing. A square, postage stamp sized button bearing the symbols ‘E=mc2’.
Now, Danny was a boy much like you or I; and when confronted with a strange button, he did exactly what you or I would have done.
He pressed it.
Immediately the phone became quite hot in Danny’s hands. It started to vibrate and hum louder and louder so that Danny became quite afraid that his father would come up to see what all the fuss was about.
He was just about to stuff it under a pillow to muffle the sound when, ‘click’; the phone snapped shut again and went back to normal.
Danny studied it hoping to find some new function but other than a rather boring count down timer, there was nothing.
Danny let the timer count all the way down from ten minutes to zero, hoping that something might happen but, other than a beep to indicate the end of the countdown, nothing did.
He re opened the phone and repeated the whole noisy process to see if he had missed anything. But again, nothing happened.
He was halfway through the third countdown when he got bored and stuffed the phone back into his pocket.
Going back downstairs he slumped in front of the TV and turned it on.
News. But there appeared to be something wrong with the reception.
The newscasters face was moving very slowly. Almost frozen. Danny could see his cheeks quivering in mid sentence but no real sound was coming out. He tried another channel and another but they all had the same problem.
‘Dad, there’s something wrong with the TV’ he called through to the kitchen. But there was no answer.
He got up and went through to the kitchen to see where his father had got to.
The sight that met his eyes made his legs wobble. He gasped for breath and grabbed the breakfast bar for support.
This is what he saw:
Danny’s father was standing at the cooker, obviously in the middle of making pancakes. He had just tossed a beautifully round pancake into the air.
But the thing that scared Danny was this; the pancake was hardly moving at all. It was slowly, very slowly turning in mid air above the waiting pan. Danny could see his dad’s eyes slowly tracking it’s progress.
‘Beep’, went the phone in his pocket, and the whole scene in the kitchen suddenly returned to normal speed.
The pancake fell down and landed ‘plop’ in the frying pan, and as it did, Danny was aware that sound had returned to the world. He hadn’t really noticed that it was missing before. If he had, then he might have guessed what was going on.
I wonder if you have already guessed?
But now there was of the sound of lemon and butter sizzling in the pan and the delicious aroma of pancakes.
“What was that you said Danny?” his father asked.
“Er…nothing dad, nothing”.
Danny went straight back into the living room and switched on the TV. All the channels were fine now. He took the phone out from his pocket and studied it.
‘What and earth is this thing?’ he wondered. ‘Does dad even know about the button? He can’t know can he?’.
Dinner that night was pancakes. Danny finished his off quickly and returned to his room to further experiment with the phone.
Over the next few weeks, Danny spent a lot of time pressing the button and living in that strange, silent world of super slow time.
He pressed it during class at school, and found that he was able to get around the classroom at least once before anyone could even see that he’d left his seat.
He pressed it out by the motorway near his house and found that he could ‘zig zag’ safely in and out of the traffic without ever getting hit.
He even tried it during a day out to the amusement park, but that turned out to be pretty boring as there really is no fun in riding a super slow roller coaster!
Nevertheless, Danny was sure that he could think of some very interesting ways to make use of the phone if he just put his mind to it.
Over the next three school terms, Danny went from being very unpopular at school to being very popular indeed.
He joined the ‘cross country running’ team and became the number one runner in the school and then in the county and then in the whole country. He won lots of medals and everyone who watched the races spoke of how Danny must be ‘super fit’ because he never looked more than a little bit out of breath when crossing the finish line.
Danny was never late for another lesson or appointment ever again. He always got schoolwork in on time (even though his friends noticed that he seemed to leave it until the very last minute).
The trouble was that Danny started to feel like a bit of a fraud with all of this attention. Also, he was starting to get a bit creeped out about spending so long in the silent world of ‘super slow time’.
He began to think of ways in which he might safely get rid of the phone, or destroy it.
Finally he hit upon the idea of anonymously passing it on to someone else.
In the end, it was Leroy Potts who gave him the answer.
Leroy had long ago stopped bullying Danny due to his new found popularity. This gave him more time to bully other students however.
Danny made a decision that he would find the most bullied student in the school, and secretly pass the phone to them.
Virginia Creeper in the year below was Leroy Potts’ new number one form of entertainment. She had long ginger hair which was always ‘scragged’ back in a ponytail, huge glasses that were probably descended from a welder’s mask, and a tendency to stutter when she was anxious.
Finally, one day, Danny’s opportunity came.
He had rounded a corridor to discover a familiar scene. Leroy and his cronies had cornered Virginia and had stolen her massive bag.
“Creepy Creeper, your schoolbag is rubbish!” shouted Potts as he slung it down the corridor.
Danny pressed the button for the last time, and everything slowed down.
Walking over to Virginia’s bag, he put the phone inside along with a carefully written note about it’s use.
Then he gently placed the bag into Virginia’s hand and was starting to walk away when an idea struck him.
Going over to the ‘super slowed’ Leroy Potts, Danny pulled down his trousers. He tied Leroy’s laces together and drew a big moustache and glasses on his face. Then he did the same to Leroy’s mates.
This done, he walked off and smiled when, just a few moments later, he heard a lot of crashing and swearing coming from the direction of Leroy Potts.
Danny has since resigned from the running team but he doesn’t mind not competing anymore. Levenhorts school has found a new champion athlete in the year below and this leaves Danny free to think about his future.
He is seriously considering a career as a Fizzy Cyst!
