So I’ve just finished dinner and I go to pay and it’s not there. It’s just not there. It’s not anywhere. I’ve dumped my bag on the counter and am rifling through it with increasing panic. So many crumbs! Why? Was there a biscuit in there? Not eaten? The card was there – when? – this morning at the ATM, then … ?
I retrace my steps and the angle of the wallet when I went to pay for the coffee at the market and the crush of the crowds. Maybe it fell out then. Maybe I left it in the ATM? Maybe it’s been stolen?
I’m in Bali, writing a travel piece – so, you know, lucky me. Right now I don’t have enough money to pay for dinner. I am on my own and all I have is a few crumpled Australian dollars – sitting brightly where the credit card should have been.
The staff have gathered around me. The manager is called, and … the bouncer. Why have they called the bouncer? I look at my phone, as if I expect it to tell me where my credit card is. But tonight the oracle is without answers. A small group is now surrounding me – as though I’m a grifter – trying this trick all over town to get that free glass of rosé and Mexican food.
“Yeah, yeah, there’s this new chick with this old trick. She gets a rosé and a beef taco pretends her card is gone and then backs out of the restaurant, blushing and apologising and we never see her again … ”
They register the loud Australian banknotes and the bouncer takes me outside, and from the dark, a teenager in a singlet makes room for me on his motorbike and I understand that I am go with him, somewhere on this bike and get my money changed. We ride for a long time, turning on to a dirt road towards the sea to a little shop with a dim bulb where an old woman counts out the rupiah. I am worried about the lack of helmet and the roads wet from tropical rains while at the same time registering the pleasure of the rain and the feeling of riding through the dark in a foreign country on a stranger’s motorbike, while not wearing a helmet.
I’ve lost half a dozen bank cards and credit cards this year alone and wonder if the cause is carelessness, a “slippery” wallet (the damn things just won’t stay in), or is this a bellwether for an unbalanced life – the same way some people become more clumsy or have more accidents when they feel overwhelmed.
I remember a time before cards, walking quickly alongside my mother, to get to the branch before it shut at 4pm or 5pm. This was country Victoria in the early 1980s. The passbook in her hand, with its ledger, the handwriting of the teller, alongside the dollar amounts, the stamps, solid like a passport, each stamp telling its own story of the withdrawal or deposit counted in five-, 10-, 20-dollar notes.
I’m sure for those involved in the seismic transition from passbook to card, it was epic. But for me it seemed seamless. One minute you had no access to money on the weekend or after hours. (Can you imagine? Can you even imagine?) Then you had these ATM machines and these cards – as slim as playing cards but instead of fake magic, they were real magic – giving you money anywhere and everywhere. Even letting you “overdraw”. It was the best. But when you lose them life becomes medieval, difficult and you find yourself at the mercy of others.
I once lived in a seaside village in south-west Victoria in the converted ballroom built below the mansion of my landlord. He was a benevolent dude with John Lennon specs who spent a lot of time on boats. He had a mansion and a yacht because he was one of the big cheeses who brought Eftpos to Australia. Whether he told me this or not, or whether it was even true - the fact of it struck me as miraculous. I guess Eftpos had to come from somewhere but …
Yet I want to go back in time and make it differently, recreate it BIGGER. Credit cards are too small. They are too important to be the size of business card, to be slim enough to fall out of a wallet unannounced.
A bank card needs to have the weight it deserves. It needs to be the size and shape of a brick. When you lose it or it is stolen – man you’re going to notice it – because it’s going to be the equivalent of someone trying to wrestle a brick off you. When you drop it on the ground it should shatter the earth like a wrecking ball.
Or maybe it should be implanted in our fingertips and there’s fingerprint recognition technology and if someone wants to take it, they’ll have to chop off our hands. A brick or a chip … That’s what I need.
Jacket required
Sometimes the new world saves us. It was winter when I lost the last batch of cards. I scarcely had time to create and remember one new pin when the new card would go missing – and I’d get messages like this one on Facebook messenger from strangers that tracked me down: “Did you lose your credit card? I found a card with your name on it on the ground outside Civic Video in Bondi.”
My poor card – unguarded, just lying out there in the street.
… What was it doing outside Civic Video?
The day or so before I lost my credit/debit card, I was in Taipei, covering an art biennale. I left my favourite jacket in the hotel wardrobe and flew out of the country. When I landed in Indonesia I was desolate. My favourite jacket! Lost in Taipei! I tweeted about my sadness and the fine Australian journalist Annabel Crabb with her legion of followers, retweeted with a call to anyone passing through to retrieve it.
Oh no! I left my favourite coat in the hotel room in Taipei !!
— Brigid Delaney (@BrigidWD) November 22, 2016
Anyone flying Taipei/Sydney soon??? https://t.co/L4Xy3Memkz
— Annabel Crabb (@annabelcrabb) November 23, 2016
My jacket back IN Australia before me!! thank you Ben and Annabel for staging such a great rescue. I LOVE TWITTER & ITS POWER FOR GOOD XXXXX https://t.co/RbMbRPnJpe
— Brigid Delaney (@BrigidWD) November 25, 2016
The jacket beat me back to Australia by a week – rescued by a good samaritan from Adelaide.
I am still here in Indonesia – without my credit card, haggling with hotel staff, but dreaming that it might be possible to go backwards, like the people who choose flip phones over smartphones. It’s the past again. I’ll carry wads of cash in my shoes, and passbooks and travellers’ cheques and have money coming in from Western Union, like a character from a Graham Greene novel. And this thing that I’m going through again and again, will happen no more. And if I lose my jacket – tough.
