'Is that an Android or an iPhone?'
He was scruffy, short and gap-toothed, walking toward me across the pedestrian crossing, ignoring the forbidding red hand above me. I was waiting to cross, idly looking at my phone.
'Doesn't matter anyway,' he continued without waiting for a reply. 'They're all the same.' He stopped in front of me, standing on the road as the traffic roared past less than a meter behind him.
'Right,' I managed to say, displaying all the fluency I'd developed in two years of creative writing classes.
'What really matters is the number,' he said.
'Oh?'
'Do you know how to use your camera,' he asked.
'Eh…'
'Come on, are you telling me you don't know how to use your camera?'
'Oh, sure I do, yes.'
'Well take a photo of this.'
He held up his phone. There was a scrap of paper taped to its back with a phone number on it, written in black marker in a shaky hand. 'This is the number you want,' he said with a note of pride.
I felt many pairs of eyes on my back, the crowd of pedestrians behind me waiting for my response. I hesitated. The red hand became a white man and we all spilled on to the road in a rush to cross, flowing around the man as a stream does around a rock, overwhelming it. I heard him sigh loudly then saw him no more.
I should have taken his number.
