Ten per cent. I saw the number at the bus stop, and I did nothing about it.
I was going to my aunt's flat on the other side of the city, and I had been there twice — but both times with the map open in my hand. The phone died between two stops, in the middle of a sentence.
Bus 44 is not bus 14. I know that now. I sat there for fifty minutes with the black screen in my pocket, and I got off at the last stop, in a district whose name I had never even heard. Then it started to rain.
"I should have charged my phone," I said out loud, to nobody. "I shouldn't have left the charger on the table. Somebody must have moved it — I put it in the bag myself." (Nobody had moved it. It was on the table.)
I could have asked the driver. I did not want to look like a boy from a village on his third day in the city, so I walked instead, soaked to the shoulders, past shut gates.
At the end of that street one window was still lit: a tiny bookshop, and an old woman carrying boxes out to a car in the rain, one box at a time. I carried the rest. It took eleven minutes.
She gave me tea in a plastic cup and asked whether I could read English. Her grandson had an exam in April and nobody in the family could help him with it.
I have taught in the back room of that bookshop two evenings a week for a year and a half. It pays for my own books.
So: I should have charged my phone. I have said that sentence a hundred times in my life, and that was the only night it was wrong.