They've Invented Sheila Again
(Sunday afternoon at Maureen's kitchen table, above the shops on Northgate. Kyle's phone lies face down between the mugs.)
Maureen: You've been staring at that thing since you sat down. Turn it over, it won't bite you.
Kyle: It's not that. Nothing's happening on it, that's all.
Maureen: What's supposed to happen?
Kyle: You put your photos up, right, and people either like you or they don't. If you both like each other, you can talk.
Maureen: And if they don't like you?
Kyle: Then nothing. You never find out. That's the whole design, Gran.
Maureen: Hm.
Kyle: What?
Maureen: Nothing. Go on.
Kyle: No, say it. You met Grandad at a dance hall. That's the opposite of this, isn't it? Everyone watching, nowhere to hide.
Maureen: Is that what you think we did? Walked across the floor in front of four hundred people and asked?
Kyle: Well, didn't you?
Maureen: Not once in my life. You sent somebody. Our Sheila would go over and ask his mate whether he was interested, and his mate would ask him, and if the answer was no, then nobody had asked anybody, had they.
Kyle: Hang on.
Maureen: You'd dance with somebody else and that was the end of it. Nobody was embarrassed. Nobody watched.
Kyle: That's the app.
Maureen: That's the app?
Kyle: That's exactly the app. I've been turned down about four hundred times and I don't know a single name.
Maureen: Sheila knew every one of mine. She'd tell me on the bus home, over chips.
(Kyle laughs.)
Kyle: So the app is Sheila. How do you flirt through Sheila, though?
Maureen: You didn't. You flirted with Sheila and she carried it across the floor for you.
Kyle: Sixty years and we've built Sheila out of software.
Maureen: And she still can't get you chips.
Kyle: Did it work, then? With Grandad?
Maureen: I fell in love with a man who couldn't dance, so you tell me. Sheila asked him. He said yes before she'd finished the question. Forty-one years.
Kyle: And you never had to cross the floor.
Maureen: I crossed it at the end of the night, love. Everybody crosses it at the end of the night. He got a kiss at the bus stop and the number of the shop, because we hadn't any phones.
(Kyle turns the phone over.)