Claudia's Nokia

 It's a glorious Sunday morning at Annabel's café in the year 2002. Maxwell the waiter brings over Claudia and Vanessa's lattes. Claudia smiles at him, taps out the last of her SMS and drops her orange Nokia 3310 into her handbag on the floor next to her chair. Another pair of customers walk in and sit down at an adjacent table. They're a married couple from Khayelitsha. Not regular Annabel's clientele, but this is the New South Africa, and nobody pays them enough attention to notice the agitation behind their forced-calm demeanors. The man announces he is going to the bathroom, lifts his chair up and carefully places it down as he leaves the table. Chatting animatedly, neither Claudia nor Vanessa notice that one of the chair legs is hooked though one of Claudia's handbag handles. The woman pulls the chair back and the handbag with it. Her own phone rings (It's her husband, calling form the toilet). "What? Where are you now? Okay. I'm coming to get you. Stay there," she says, over the rustle of covering the handbag with a shopping packet. She tells Maxwell she's just going to fetch someone and leaves. A minute later, the man leaves the restroom and slips out of the café unnoticed. His wife is waiting for him under a tree a few blocks away. 

They walk towards Main Road Claremont and board a taxi heading for Wynberg, where they'll change to another one to head back to Khayelitsha. Moegamat is in the taxi behind theirs as they arrive at the rank. He has two phones to go before he gets to the three he needs for his next hundred Rand from the boss in Ocean view. He spots the Khayelitsha couple getting off the taxi. They're dressed well and their guard seems down. The woman has pulled Claudia's handbag from the shopping packet and is rummaging through it. She pulls out the orange Nokia and holds it between two fingers as she checks if there's change for the onward fare. Perfect. As soon as Moegamat's taxi comes to a stop, he's out of it like a flash. He grabs the phone from the woman and snatches at the purse, too. She pulls back at the purse, sending an arc of coins flying onto the pavement. Her husband tries to give chase but he trips over a street kid going for the coins. 

Moegamat sprints through the underpass and emerges at the top of the stairs on the other side as nonchalantly as he can manage. He briefly checks over his shoulder and sets off, briskly but casually towards Plumstead station. One down, one to go. He boards the train at Plumstead and sneaks into first class, walking up and down the carriages. The only person he can see with a phone out is a white rugby player type with a nice Ericsson, but this guy is too big and mean looking to mess with. As the train pulls into Retreat, he figure he might just be able to snatch it from him and jump out just before the door closes, but the guy clocks him, scowls, snaps the phone shut and puts it in his pocket. He might have better at the end of the line. The conductor comes in to the carriage and Moegamat slips back into third class while he's distracted with another passenger. He settles down on one of the hard benches and stares out at the sea as the train goes past Muizenberg and heads towards Saint James. The phones are reassuringly heavy in the shoulder bag he has resting on his lap. One of them vibrates. He ignores it. 

This life of petty crime is hard for Moegamat. He isn't getting any younger, but he has avoided Pollsmoor so far, unlike his brother and two of his cousins. He thinks of them in there as the train passes the colourful beach huts at Saint James with the aquamarine sea behind them. Eventually it reaches the terminus at Fish Hoek. He's dead tired. He's been hunting phones since the previous afternoon, but there's still work to be done. Fish Hoek is a bad place to do it. The laanies there aren't as rich as in Noordhoek and there are cops everywhere. He decides he'll walk to Noordhoek. It's a long way, but he takes it easy, resting in the shade a few times. His wandering eventually leads him to the car park at Long Beach. As expected, there are a few cars here with nobody around. This is where the surfers park, so there are usually phones and wallets in the cars. He does a quick scan of the nearby houses, the paths leading to the carpark and then the cars themselves. He notices a Mazda parked next to the storm-water drain with one of the windows carelessly left open. In a little under ten seconds, he finds a phone wedged between the passenger seat and the handbrake. If there's a phone, there might be a wallet too, so he rummages through the things in the passenger footwell, digging around in the maps, clothing and water bottles. Nothing. He tries the door pockets...

Pierre is hanging out with his buddy Josh on the patio of Josh's pad, watching the surfers and shooting the breeze. They're reminiscing about the smuggling missions they used to do during apartheid, bringing tons of weed and guns back from Zambia in the overlander that belonged to their adventure tour company. Josh notices Moegamat's legs and rear end sticking out of Pierre's Mazda's passenger window. "Hey bru it looks like someone's breaking into your car!" Pierre takes off immediately, bursting through Josh's gate and taking the stairs four at a time down to the carpark. Moegamat notices too late. Pierre's knee connects his thigh with the full force of his 90 kilogram frame's momentum down the stairs. The shock soon gives way to atrocious pain and he collapses on the tarmac. His shoulder bag hits the ground and all but one of the phones burst out and clatter into the drain. Pierre grabs the bag and frisks him, finding his phone. "Thought that was yours, huh?" he says, grabbing it back. He  pulls out the orange Nokia out of the bag. "This doesn't look like yours either. It's mine now!" Not finding anything else, he shoves Moegamat, who has just made it into something resembling a standing position, back onto the ground.

Pierre doesn't like cops, and he doesn't want to deal with them today, even if it means letting the thief go. "I'll give you ten seconds to get the fuck out of my sight before I kick you in the other leg!" he growls. Moegamat dutifully hops over to the bushes, his only option given the instructions and the state of his leg. It will take him another hour of dragging himself through the undergrowth before he realises that returning to Ocean View empty-handed would be pointless. He'll curl up into a pathetic, shivering bundle and fall asleep.

Meanwhile, Pierre and Josh have driven to a mutual friend's in Observatory, where they're smoking a joint and recounting the foiling of Moegamat's theft. He's left the orange Nokia in his Mazda, parked out on the street, and he's remembered to wind up the window this time. Maxwell the waiter wanders past, on his way home from his shift. He spots the phone and pulls a thick bolt out of his pocket he keeps for such occasions. Shattered glass rains across the passenger seat and the orange Nokia is lifted up by its fifth owner that day. Annabel doesn't pay enough and it was a slow tip day too, what with that girl losing her bag and that other couple just walking out.