In a small town set upon the flat plains of England’s far flung eastern lowlands there once lived a very pleasant young man. He came from a very pleasant family with a father who worked hard and diligently and with a mother who stayed at home and brought up her children until they were old enough to attend the local senior school. The young man had a pretty older sister, who married well enough and settled down to raise her own family. He also had two sets of doting grandparents together with a host of happy aunts, contented uncles and aspirational cousins.
On leaving school with good, but not necessarily spectacular qualifications, the young man found a job in the retail sector. He progressed through a variety of jobs in a variety of shops until, at the age of twenty-one, he decided that he had made sufficient progress in life to get married. He had a reasonable salary, some nice perks and had just been promoted to the responsible role of Assistant Shop Manager with a very caring company selling mobile telephones.
Late one Thursday afternoon in the run up to Christmas the shop was full to bursting with young teenagers on the way home from school or college. One of the young man’s employees called him over to authorise a sale to a young lady and as soon as the young man saw her he knew that she was the one that he would marry. He saw her standing there in her black puffer jacket, with her long black hair and her belly button piercing, and his heart started to pound. She was perfect. She was cute beyond belief, especially in the way her nose twitched as she chewed gum.
Now it was, of course, very presumptuous of him to dare to say to her: “Fancy a drink on Friday?”, but he dared, for he had a good job, was full of the confidence of youth and he knew deep in his bones that there was many a young lady who would be glad to join him for a drink.
The young girl gave him the look. He loved women with attitude. She signed the contract for her phone, said nothing at all to him, and walked out of the shop. It was all a code, thought the young man, and having noted down her address, her home telephone number and her date of birth, he started to plan for his future. She was called Tiffany, according to the form, lived just a few streets away from his own home, and she was seventeen years of age; a perfect match.
The next morning the young man rang a local florist and arranged for a bouquet of the finest mixed winter blooms to be sent round to her house, hoping that she would be shocked, surprised and then intrigued by this wonderful gift. He dictated a cryptic message to the florist, signed himself as The Telephone Man, and even remembered to put his own mobile number on the bottom of the card. He had, of course, already stored the young woman’s new number in his own mobile phone’s memory.
When Tiffany arrived home from another hard day at the grindstone of academia, her father called her into the living room. On the coffee table there was a huge bouquet of flowers and an opened message card. Tiffany’s first reaction was one of sheer joy.
“At last”, she thought, “my prince has come”.
She clapped her hands together, dreaming of DJ Reckless, the wizard mixer of trance and acid bass at the student union, with whom she was madly in love.
“Who the hell is The Telephone Man?” growled her father. He was, of course, unprepared for this only too visible sign that his little princess was growing up. “What have you been up to?”
It dawned on Tiffany that her father had opened the card that had come with the flowers, which was an outrageous breach of privacy. She deserved more respect than that.
“Ugh!” she mumbled before giving her father a look that she hoped would convey the message that he was a complete embarrassment to her. Then she ran up the stairs, slammed her bedroom door and turned the volume button on her compact disc player up to maximum.
Over tea there was an almighty row that ended with Tiffany crying, her mother shouting at her father and the bunch of flowers being thrust head first into a wheeled dustbin standing out on the pavement ready for emptying the next morning.
The young man stood in the shadows on the opposite side of the street and watched as Tiffany’s father thrust the blooms into the dustbin and slammed down the lid. He was disappointed, of course, that the flowers had not been allowed to brighten up his darling fiancé’s home for longer, but he thought that he understood.
“Well, her father is just being protective”, he said to himself as he rescued a single red rose from the rubbish, “but no matter, she will be mine”.
He walked down the street towards his home plucking the petals from the flower as he repeated that lover’s mantra of old: “She loves me, she loves me not”. He was overjoyed when he plucked the last petal from the now bald flower head and found that she loved him.
For a whole week Tiffany wracked her brains trying to work out who The Telephone Man might be. She looked long and hard at a telephone engineer who was working in the street, which resulted in her hurrying home in tears, her ears ringing with the sound of wolf whistles. She checked with her college friends to see if anyone went by the nickname, but she couldn’t find anyone who she could identify as the sender of her flowers. She did see a young man, who seemed oddly familiar, watching her at the Friday night rave in the student union, but then boys always watched her and she was hopeless with names and faces.
The young man bided his time and was rewarded for his patience the very next Saturday afternoon. A gaggle of young girls came into the shop to look at the latest mobile telephony wonder in pink and there, in the middle of the group, was his princess. He knew exactly what to do. He rang the number of the display model that they were looking at. Instead of the usual ring tone, the phone burst into life playing Tiffany’s favourite dance tune. She was delighted and grabbed the phone out of her friend’s hand, flipped open the clamshell display and pressed the connect button.
“Hello”, said a voice, “this is The Telephone Man. I’d really like to take you out for a drink. I’ll even give you that beautiful pink phone…in exchange for a kiss”.
Tiffany stood there in a state of shock. The Telephone Man! She turned around very slowly and looked at the young man who had served her when she bought her current mobile phone just a few days ago. It all came flooding back. She shut the pink phone and thrust it back into the hand of her bemused friend. Tiffany’s cheeks matched the colour of the pink phone’s case perfectly.
She stormed out of the shop closely followed by her coterie of giggling young ladies and once they were all outside in the mall they held a heated debate about The Telephone Man. There were differences of opinion, ranging from weird through cute to typical boy. After a couple of minutes one of Tiffany’s friends was nudged and prodded back into the shop. She walked up to the young man and said, “She says if you kiss me, can she have the phone?”
“No thanks”, said the young man. “No disrespect, love, but either I get a kiss from her, or I keep the phone”.
“Shit!” said Tiffany, on hearing her friend’s report. “Oh well, in for a penny, but you’ve all got to come in with me”, and so, surrounded by a multitude of sniggering young girls, the young man got his kiss and Tiffany got a really good deal on a mobile phone that would be the envy of everyone at college.
For the whole of the next week Tiffany was a rock and roll goddess. Whenever she received a call or a text message her phone made her the centre of attention. It was so much fun showing everyone how bright and pink her mobile phone was. The other kids and quite a few of the lecturers thought her ring tone was really funky and they all agreed it was definitely a cool bit of kit.
The following Saturday Tiffany received a message on her wonder phone from the young man. It read: “Wht abt tht drnk? Free calls 4 life = 10 X”.
Tiffany understood the text message only too well. For 10 kisses she could get the young man to fix her account so that she never had to pay for another top up ever again. Perhaps he wasn’t quite so bad after all. He clearly liked her and even if he was a little geeky, a kiss or two couldn’t really hurt.
Later that day, and as before, the girls assembled outside the shop and one of Tiffany’s friends was sent inside to ask, “She says you can have two kisses and she’ll think about a drink”.
“Sorry, no deal”, said the young man, “ten kisses and the drink or she pays forever like the rest of you”.
“If I kiss you can I have free calls?” asked the girl.
The young man smiled sweetly and told her that he couldn’t possibly be unfaithful to Tiffany. Once again, surrounded by her giggling friends, Tiffany went into the shop, kissed the young man ten times, and said that she would definitely think about a drink but could he wait until next week as she already had plans for Saturday night. The young man agreed to wait another week, gave the young girl a new sim card that was already prepared, and sneaked an eleventh kiss just for good measure.
Another week went by, during which Tiffany called everyone that she knew over and over again. She sent text messages by the score and took pictures of everything and anything that moved, but, and much to her delight, every time that she checked the credit on her phone it was full. She was over the moon with her new pink phone and her limitless line of mobile telephony funding. In fact, Tiffany started to see the young man in quite a different light.
“He’s not that bad, I suppose”, she said to one of her friends on the following Friday night as they walked into the pub. “I mean, it’s all a bit freaky, but he’s got a job and a car and seems keen enough. I think I will meet him for a drink…as long as you and Robbie come along too”.
The following morning Tiffany woke up and checked her messages. She tried to send a text to her friend to arrange to meet up outside the phone shop, but her phone wouldn’t work. She checked her credit and checked the battery but she couldn’t find anything wrong. “Typical”, she thought, “that nerd’s making sure I turn up at his shop today so he can ask me out for a drink”.
Later that same morning Tiffany and her friends were in no mood to compromise as they approached the place where the young man worked. Demanding kisses for free telephony services was one thing, but being mean and spiteful just to get your own way was something else. As one of her friends had said, it was disrespectful; it was definitely not the way to win a young woman’s heart.
They all marched in to the shop expecting to see the young man lurking in the shadows, but he was nowhere to be found. Instead, there was a new man, older and stern looking, standing behind the counter. Tiffany was momentarily confused by this new situation, but then she remembered that she had stored the young man’s mobile number in her phone. Even if she didn’t have any credit she could display his number and call him on one of her friends’ telephones.
As soon as she pulled the bright pink mobile from her pocket the older shop manager spotted it and walked up to her.
“Would you be Miss Tiffany Lemon?” he asked.
“Might be…” mumbled Tiffany.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to return your phone. It appears there’s been a problem, as it were. The young man who sold you the phone was acting outside of his sphere of authority. Oh, and these gentlemen want a word too”.
Tiffany looked over her shoulder and, to her horror, she saw two uniformed policemen rocking backwards and forwards on the heels of their big black boots. She nearly fainted as they explained that, while she was not under arrest, they felt that it would be in her best interests to accompany them to the local police station. Tiffany was escorted out of the shopping centre by the two big and burly police officers, put into the back of their patrol car and whisked off into the busy Saturday morning streets.
The next few hours were, indeed, some of the worst in Tiffany’s short but eventful teenage life. Her father went berserk when he was informed that Tiffany was helping the police with their enquiries and was quite ready to give her a good thrashing and to call her all sorts of nasty names. Then, when he heard all of the details concerning the young man, who was, as it was now becoming clear, quite widely known as The Telephone Man, he realised that it had, in fact, been a very close shave for his daughter. After all of the questions were done with and the lady from social services was satisfied that all was well, he was simply relieved to have his little princess back at home, safe and sound.
It transpired that The Telephone Man had stolen many, many kisses from young girls in exchange for free pink mobile telephones. He had stolen even more kisses in return for doctoring telephone sim cards. He had even persuaded some of his many and varied young, female customers to join him for a drink. In fact, he was now on remand waiting for a court date to answer charges relating to a number of accusations of very persistent stalking.
Within a day or two the local press got hold of the story and the whole situation became public knowledge. It was a dreadful shock for the young man’s family. His father refused to talk about his son, preferring to bury himself in his diligent duties at work. His mother felt unable to attend any more coffee mornings, preferring a gin and tonic with her mid morning biscuits. His sister, while feeling very sad for her brother, found herself looking at her own baby son in a strange new way.
But, as Tiffany’s father said as he downed another large brandy late one evening, “Now it’s that young perv’s turn to be pretty and vulnerable”.
And as fate would have it, at exactly the same time that Tiffany’s father said this, the young man was lying on his bunk bed crying his eyes out. Of all the dreadful shocks experienced that day, nothing compared to the sudden and degrading catastrophe that he had just suffered as he’d bent down to pick up the soap in the prison shower.