A Weekend Without a Signal

The rule had been announced in a school letter three weeks earlier, and Callum had read it with growing alarm. During the residential trip to a tiny island off the west coast of Scotland, all phones would be locked in a plastic box in the teachers' room. "A weekend of real life," the letter had called it. Callum, who could not remember the last time he had spent an hour without checking his messages, called it a punishment. He handed over his phone on the ferry with the expression of someone surrendering a passport. For the first few hours he behaved like a man suffering from a mysterious illness. He kept patting his pocket, reaching for something that was no longer there. When the group stopped to look at seals resting on the rocks, he found himself wishing he could photograph them, and was annoyed to realise that he was actually looking at them instead. By evening he was bored, and by ten o'clock he was desperate enough to join a conversation at the fireside between the ferryman, Mr Gillies, and two of the teachers. They were talking about the sky. "You'll see more stars tonight than you've seen in your whole life," Mr Gillies promised. "There's not a streetlight for miles." Callum had expected this to be an exaggeration. It was not. When they walked out onto the beach later, the sky seemed to be overflowing; there were so many stars that the familiar patterns he had seen on his phone's astronomy app were almost lost among them. Nobody spoke for several minutes. Then a girl from his class, Priya, whom he had barely noticed before, quietly began naming the constellations she knew. The next morning, when the box was opened, Callum was surprised to find that he felt no relief. He had forty-two new messages, but not one of them was as interesting as the night before. On the ferry home he took out his phone, then put it back in his pocket and watched the island shrink behind them. He did not become a different person overnight. But the following week, he asked Priya if she could lend him her star chart.