Phone on a hot Florentine roof

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On our fourth morning in Florence, my boyfriend dropped his iPhone out of the bathroom window in our top floor rental. This was quite a feat. Not only was the window built into the wall of the boxy little shower, it was also small and only opened about 45 degrees. Where most would look at the window and think ‘I will open that window to stop this nice bathroom developing mould’, my boyfriend instead saw a handy little platform on which to prop his smartphone while showering. I suppose this is all part and parcel of the sort of outside-the-box thinking that attracted me to him in the first place.

Amazingly, the phone did not fall while it was literally bridged across the gap between the open window and the wall. Instead, it was the last minutes of the shower that proved fatal. My boyfriend went to pick the phone up with wet hands — putting a huge amount of faith in Apple’s ‘waterproof’ claims — and it escaped from his sudsy grasp, tipping through the cracked window. In an instant, the slanted pane was transformed from a sturdy brace into an incredibly effective ramp, depositing the device onto the barrel-shaped terracotta tiles of the roof below.

I found out about all this when he entered the bedroom a few minutes later, wrapped in a towel, concern screwing up his boyish features.

“Please don’t be annoyed,” he said tentatively. “I’ve done something really stupid”.

I racked my brains trying to pre-empt what this terrible thing could be. I was coming up with a blank. I knew he had a propensity for mischief — on an early date he regaled stories from his youth ranging from ‘light arson’ to releasing hundreds of crickets in his secondary school. “Like Just William?” I’d asked, but because he wasn’t born in 1954, he had no idea what I was talking about.

Still, the duration of a shower seemed too little time to get into real trouble. Plus, the only occasions I got annoyed with him were when he was right about something and I didn’t want to admit it. So what could he possibly have done?

He was still looking at me sheepishly, wet and rumpled.

“What is it?”

“I’ve dropped my phone onto the roof”.

This was a relief. Phones were replaceable. After all, I’d replaced mine — lost, stolen, dropped too hard at the security checkpoint in Granada’s train station — many times over. I said as much and it became apparent that we had very different philosophies on the matter. No, he was going to rescue it, obviously. There were things of sentimental value on there, not backed up. But to carry out such a plan, he needed my phone to message the Airbnb host for the downstairs neighbour’s details. They weren’t answering the door and their balcony was a crucial part of the recovery mission.

At this point, I decided to go and see where the phone was for myself, to judge how foolhardy an endeavour this would be. Approaching the bright airy kitchen, I heard it before I saw it — unbelivably the device had survived its fall and the Financial Times podcast he had been listening to was still bleating away. Stephen Bush was being nasal about Labour’s dire local elections prognosis. I prayed that few of the neighbours understood English, for their own sake.

I poked my head out of the kitchen window. There was the phone, wedged between the tiles. To get it would require a ladder, a scramble and a lot of luck. There was a perilous drop directly to the right, four stories down to a stone courtyard. I pictured my boyfriend’s ‘big Irish head’, as he called it, smashed and spilling its contents across the slabs, like Piggy’s in Lord of the Flies.

“Let’s just buy a new one,” I said, returning to the bedroom.

“No,” my boyfriend said, distractedly. He was bent over my phone, exchanging messages with the Airbnb host, still swaddled in the bath towel. “It’s expensive. And I can get it”.