“What do you mean?” His accent was thick, and I almost expected him to throw a “mate” on the end of the sentence. It made me think of that social media influencer, Ozzy Man, who did reviews of seemingly banal things in an Australian accent which made them hysterical. I wondered how he would review this moment, which was getting more awkward by the second as this man in front of me regarded me with a very confused look on his face.
I fiddled with the leash in my hand. “What I mean is, does this place really not have any internet?”
He shook his head. “Nope.”
“But there’s got to be some way of getting online, right? A way that they don’t advertise.”
He looked confused. “Advertise?”
“Yes. Like some secret internet that you can only log onto from a certain place with a secret password?”
At that he half-smiled and shook his head. “No.”
“Oh, come on!” I said a little more loudly. “There has got to be something, right?”
He pointed behind me and I swiveled round.
“You can try hiking up that mountain, if you like. You might get signal there. Might not.”
I squinted off into the distance. The mountains were so far away that they looked like smudges on the horizon.
I turned back to him. “But say I didn’t want to hike across the Karoo and then up a mountain.” My tone was very conspiratorial now and I narrowed my eyes for added mystery. “Say I just wanted to check my Instagram quickly, what would I do?”
“I wouldn’t know, I don’t have Instagram.”
“You don’t?”
He shook his head.
“But you have Facebook, right? Everyone has Facebook. Even my mother has Facebook. God, she even has a Tinder account—that’s how she met Dan the dentist.”
But the man in front of me shook his head. “No Facebook.”
“Impossible,” I said. “Let me see your phone.”
He looked at me incredulously and then walked over to the counter. He picked up a landline and held it out to me.
I rolled my eyes at him. “Your cell phone.”
“Don’t have one.”
“You don’t?”
“Can’t use it here, so why would I have one?”
“For the games, maybe. For reading on. Counting your steps. Tracking your mood. Your heart rate. Taking photos. Listening to music. Counting your calories . . . I mean . . .everything!”
He smiled slowly at me. This time he looked amused and I wasn’t sure how to take it. “I usually read this thing called a book. Listen to music on a CD player. I’ve got a camera for taking photos and I don’t count calories. Don’t need to. Fast metabolism.”
“But what if there was an emergency?” I asked, feeling flustered now, thinking about all the things I couldn’t do.
“Like what?” he asked.
“Well, I could have hurt my leg when I slipped here—you should really have a sign up saying that the floor is wet, by the way.”
At that, the man pointed behind me to the doorway. I turned and that’s when I noticed the sign I’d jumped over.
Slippery When Wet.
