Network Error

Ellie was in the kitchen when the message came in. The dishwasher had scattered and then baked food debris onto every item of glassware she had put in it. Now she was up to her forearms in soapy water, picking dried pasta sauce from otherwise clean glasses, and so when her phone beeped, she didn’t check it straight away. She was working on that, the not jumping to attention at every notification. Besides, on the other side of the large, open plan living space, Max was flicking through Netflix on the sofa, somehow ignoring Lilly, who had been talking into her screen for nearly an hour, and beyond the bi-fold doors, she could see Gareth watching the new robotic lawn mower trundle around the garden. She knew it couldn’t be anything important.

“Bus running late, be home soon.”

It had come from Lilly, though Lilly had been home for an hour and a half already.

“Lilly, did you WhatsApp me earlier?”

Ellie watched her daughter glance up from her screen, how the lowering light shone through the window behind her and brushed past her cheek as if it were too soft, too perfect, for even light to pass by without touching.

“Yeah, I said I was going to be late.” Lilly turned her eyes back to her screen and transformed her face from angel to adolescent in a heartbeat. “No, just my mum,” she said, and Ellie had lost her attention.

It wasn’t the first time. Sometimes messages came in hours after they were sent. Gareth had texted her from the airport a week ago. “Just landed, do you want me to pick anything up from the shop?” When the bleep of the phone had woken her shortly before her alarm, Ellie had read the message, looked at her husband asleep beside her in bed, put her head back on the pillow, and enjoyed ten more minutes before the day began. The worst had been a message from Max at the weekend. He had said, simply “help”. When she had arrived, breathless, at the door of his bedroom, he had shouted at her from bursting in without knocking.

“But you called for help,” Ellie had defended herself.

“No I didn’t,” he had said, and she had shown him the message in proof. He had looked at the screen of her phone. “I sent that yesterday.”

“Really?” she had questioned. “It only just came in. What did you need, are you ok?”

Max had continued writing in the notebook open on his lap. “Forgot my towel” he had said, and that had been an end to it. No resentment, no recriminations. Ellie knew how lucky she was. She had always worried what the teenage years would do to Max’s gentle, forgiving nature, but so far, though he had lost some of his easy verbosity in her presence, he had not become the monster her friends described living with.

Ellie pushed the door to the dishwasher closed and opened the app on her phone to set a cleaning cycle running. Everything ran by app now. The central heating, the burglar alarm, even the dishwasher. Apps to switch things on, turn things off, even apps that warned her that her usual train might be busy next Wednesday due a sporting event, or reminded her when the milk was going out of date in the fridge and offered to order more. The mundanities of their lives mediated by machines. It was remarkable, really, how often they still managed to run out of bread or arrive places late and soaked for want of an umbrella.

The second message flashed onto her phone screen as the dishwasher whirred into action. “Sophie is having a really hard time. Is it okay if I stay over?”

Ellie called over to where Lilly still sat chatting and laughing into her phone. “That’s fine Lilly, just make sure you feed the guinea pigs before you go.” Lifting her face to squint across the room, Lilly stared at her, brow furrowed, head tilted to one side. “It’s fine to stay at Sophie’s tonight,” Ellie clarified, then called “Hi Sophie” loud enough for the phone to pick it up.

“Mum, I’m talking to Charlotte. I’m not even going to Sophie’s until after dinner.” Lilly sounded exasperated with her mother’s idiocy and Ellie’s inclination was to assume she had made a mistake. She looked again at her screen. “Bus running late, be home soon.”

“Sorry, never mind,” she mumbled, but Lilly had returned to her call already.

It was dark by the time the message came again. “Sophie is having a really hard time. Is it okay if I stay over?” Ellie frowned. She was in the midst of an argument with Gareth over money, one of the few areas they clashed on. His ‘spend now, let tomorrow take care of itself’ attitude left her living in a mild state of panic, and it was not the first time this dispute had bloomed between them from the seed of a minor suggestion. This time, Gareth had paid for an upgraded subscription on their Family Plan. “But now we can get predictive data on where they’re going to be, not just where they are now,” he had said, as if they were forever having to intercept their teenagers before they did something terrible.

“We don’t need it,” Ellie answered, “they’re sensible kids, they let us know where they are, and besides, they deserve some privacy. We never had that stuff growing up.” She brandished Lilly’s message in front of Gareth’s nose. “See!” Vindicated, she replied quickly. “Of course, did you feed the piggies?”

It was an hour later, with the dispute unresolved, that Gareth declared an impasse by retreating to bed, where Ellie knew he would sit and scroll through forums and message boards that validated his argument. She poured herself a glass of wine and sat on the sofa, flicking on the TV. She could hear Max’s music, respectfully low, humming from his bedroom, Lilly was at Sophie’s, Gareth was cooling off in bed, and despite the argument, she felt a sense of peace settle over her.

When two messages came in, one after the other, she was impressed with herself when she didn’t grab for her phone before the “ping” had finished sounding. On the TV, dinner party conversation was serving to introduce a cast of characters in a murder mystery she had been looking forward to watching, and only once the women were withdrawing to leave the men to their port did she flip her phone over to read them, flicking open her message list with an absent minded twitch of her finger.

Lilly Daws

“Bus just pulling out now. I got on the 47 instead, the 3 never came. Home soon.”

Ellie frowned. Nothing bad had come of it of course, but she had come to count on good phone service, not messages delivered hours out of time. What if Lilly had needed help of some sort?

She returned to the list and opened the second unread message.

Max Daws

“Mum I love you. I’m safe but I don’t know whats happening. I love you all.”

Her finger hovered over the screen as she re-read the words, straining her ears even as she did so for noise coming from his room. Music still played, some band she apparently “wouldn’t have heard of”, but otherwise, the house was still. For a minute, her body remained folded into the cushions, uncertain, and then she found herself making for the stairs, down the hall and to his bedroom door, where she knocked and did not wait to enter.

“What?” Max looked up from his phone screen, where he was reading an article of some sort.

“You okay? What’s going on?” It’s normal, Ellie told herself, for teenagers to feel confused about stuff. Right?

“Nothing. Why?”

“You texted….” Ellie opened her phone and held it out for him to see.

“help”

“I told you,” Max said, patience fraying slightly, “I forgot my towel.”

Ellie turned the screen to her face and read the message.

“Yeah, sorry,” she said, “I… thought… Sorry, I must have got confused.”

Max rolled his eyes, unruffled by his mother’s idiocy, as if it was an ineffable fact of life that adults were incapable, and Ellie retreated to the hall. She looked again at the message chain.

“Breakfast?”

“Pancakes?”

“Can you bring me a drink?”

“Please?”

“help”

And that was it. With her thumb, she dragged the screen upwards, just in case there were more below, but nothing. She dragged down, refreshing the display, but the same information reloaded. “I’m losing the plot” she told herself, “I need more sleep,” but her gut still felt hollow, and her heart still beat a little too hard in her chest.

On the sofa, Ellie finished her wine and made it half way through the murder mystery before she realised she had seen it before. Disappointment mingled with relief as she took herself up to bed, where Gareth had fallen asleep with the light on. Checking in on Max, she found him dozing on his bed. She eased his phone from his hand and turned off the music, then covered him with his blanket, before sliding into her own bed, allowing the gentle snore of her husband to soothe the jitters from her core.

He was gone, by the time Ellie woke. She could hear him, downstairs, clattering in the kitchen, two male voices muffled by floor boards and carpet but still identifiably Max, who not so long ago had sounded like a boy, and Gareth, who’s steady rhythm had always been soothing to her. Cocooned in morning light and softness and the hum of voices, Ellie allowed herself to lay still, neither awake nor asleep, her mind wandering, until she heard the click of the front door closing, and something inside her woke up.

“Where’s he going?” She shouted to Gareth as she ran down the stairs, throwing open the front door without waiting for a response. “Max? Max!”

“Ellie? Ellie, what’s wrong? He’s going to that fair in the park with Conner, he said you agreed it last week?” Gareth had appeared beside her, still holding a frying pan in his hand. Ellie’s stomach made a nauseating plummet.

“I’ve changed my mind,” she said, “quick, ring him, get him to come back.”

“Don’t be daft,” Gareth was moving back inside the house now, turning away from her as if there was nothing to be done. “It’ll be good for him. You wanted them to have some independence didn’t you?”

“Gareth, please, I have…” Ellie scanned her self for what she had, after all. “I have a bad feeling. Please.”

Gareth stopped at the entrance to the kitchen and looked at her. “Ellie, he’s going to be fine.” He sounded so sure, so confident, that tone she had always leant on when a decision had felt too big or the world had felt too chaotic.

"No, he's not, something bad is going...."

"El, I promise you, he's going to be fine."

“Do you think?” she asked him, "It's just I..."

“Of course he is, he’ll have a great time. You’re picking him up at 5 by the way.”

It was quiet, at home, just the two of them. Ellie knew Gareth was right, reminded herself of all the times she had hated the kids going on school trips, reasoned that she couldn’t keep them at home for ever just on a feeling. And yet the feeling persisted. She stayed busy, cleaning, cooking a batch of chilli for the freezer, ironing school shirts. She stayed busy scrubbing the grout in the shower, and vacuuming under the beds. She stayed busy pulling down curtains to wash and dusting cobwebs from the high ceiling above the stairs. She stayed busy, kept moving, and she waited for the day to be over.

When the message came, she was already primed.

“Mum I love you. I’m safe but I don’t know whats happening. I love you all.”

To the west, where the park punctuated the city with a flat expanse of green, sirens started to converge, and Ellie started to run.