Heart

Music:

Telephone Call from Istanbul- Tom Waits 

"I got a telephone call from Istanbul
My baby's coming home today
Sell me one of those if I shave my head
Get me out of town is what Fireball said
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat
Never drive a car when you're dead"

Content Warning:

Strong language

Transcript

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Heart

The village was suddenly invaded by a thick, winter mist. Down by the quays, it obscured the clinking sail-boats, it seemed to rise from the water like a steam, hiding the distance beyond it. The mist sidled moodily into the churchyard, hugging the base of the church and making indefinite, slanting vaguenessess of the gravestones. The spire of the church was the only vertical in the village tall enough to rise above the newly gathered mist.      

Full of its twelve rings, the throat of the bell-tower solemnly announced noon. The long, slow announcement, (the bell-tower’s most substantial), seemed to nudge the day forward towards darkness. Darkness would come soon. In the current month, the world would be in just about total darkness by five o’clock. The white night of the mist would soon be lost to something else, a darker domain where mist mattered less- (though, it can do pretty things to the light of streetlamps for sure).

Down a private little path between two buildings, (signposted Church Way), a dark cranny which did not wish to be disturbed, there was a house, a neat red-brick house with a dark green door. Number Nineteen. The door (with central letterbox and cat flap beneath) was bordered in a shallow cream threshold. There were old-style chimney pots, which unlike most of the terraced houses by the station, did regularly produce dark smoke. Number Nineteen had a functioning fireplace. The horrid-looking telly aerial stood erect beside the old, round chimney pots. When the fire wasn’t going and there was no smoke, crows, black and impudent, would perch on the aerial. Either side of the door there were little round-bottomed hanging baskets. Because of the season, they were flowerless. Just two suspended globes of compacted winter soil. Other than the slight waviness of the roof’s bottom border, (amplified by the gutter-pipe), the house was a picture of the picturesque, a picture of order and symmetry. The Healeys had lived there for twenty years: Martha Healey (nee. Ambrose), and her grown-up son Felix.

Twenty-eight-year-old Felix was secretive about his activities. His mother suspected that he might be a member of some online incel community. He wasn’t. He was tired because he had stayed up until five in the morning, and then risen shortly after ten. Not enough sleep. He had internet addiction issues. He’d scroll and scroll and search and search and every page led to further pages, windows begat windows, each more ostensibly interesting than the last. The algorithm, body- and soul-lessly playing the role of friend, ear, confidant, fed Felix what he wanted and led him further and further down corridors, deeper into the burrow they had dug together. Clickbait, articles, Wikipedia pages devoted to a wide gamut of subjects that led to further Wikipedia pages via the “See Also” section. He used to view a lot of pornography but no more, not since age verification, a forlorn wall he would not bypass. On YouTube, he’d watch clip after clip showing paedophiles being exposed by paedophile hunters, police force malpractice, taped Mel Gibson rants, and filmed podcast episodes- the baggy, three hour ones. Joe Rogan shows, conversations with the cancelled and controversial, things like that. The character of his absorption wasn’t healthy, his determination to face the glare of the phone-screen deep into the night was an affliction and it was impairing his ability to function. He learned interesting things, saw interesting things through this small, strange window- barely bigger than his own palm. But he knew that he was paying a price, a bigger price each week that passed. But his shy, laconic manner prevented him from doing very much about it, or asking for help. 

In good time for a two o’clock start, he walked slowly up the street towards the village hall. He had seen the poetry group advertised in the Co-op several months ago. He had texted the number provided with a forlorn feeling in his heart, the same forlorn feeling he got whenever he attempted anything new. But, though initially very timid, he had gone to the poetry group and had enjoyed it. So he had gone again, and again. This was his fifth session. 

It was a recital group, the members each came prepared with a poem they had learned by heart and a brief statement about what the poem meant to them. Poems were often recited twice, sometimes even three times, so that their meaning might be better gleaned- a poem’s entirety is rarely graspable on one hearing. He couldn’t really articulate why he liked the group, (Helen, he supposed), nor why he had a fondness for words and poems in the first place. He had nearly completed a degree in English Literature- he had pulled out abruptly in the second month of the final year. It was his only real passion, the sole subject about which he had ever been serious. 

His obsessive disposition and his information-hungry brain were conducive to the learning of poems. Because of their age, the members very seldom managed to successfully memorise their chosen verses. This gave Felix a secret, guilty feeling of superiority which he sorely needed and probably deserved. The only group-member between Felix and the others in age was a man called Arthur. He’d had a stroke. Felix had often seen Arthur around the village and he remembered him so clearly as he had been before his stroke; he could visualise the stark contrast of before and after. Before his stroke, Arthur had been alert, confident, swift, rather gregarious, a little portly. Since it, he was tremorous and unsteady and slow. His voice, once stentorian, was now thin and quavering. He attended the group as a form of mental exercise and brain-healing. He was also a poetry-lover and once upon a time a very adept memoriser. At group-meetings, he often grew frustrated with himself, with the new feebleness of his faculties. He never said anything or cursed audibly, but the inner turmoil showed in his face. 

Felix came armed with “Love Again” by Phillip Larkin. He hated contemporary poetry. Larkin was, for him, the gold-standard, and contemporary poetry in its sickly, insufferable mixture of platitude and incomprehensibility, was the opposite of Larkin’s verse from every conceivable viewpoint. Felix enjoyed vigorously agreeing with the old, bespectacled poetry-group folks, about the terrible shape verse was in. The profanity in the Larkin poem would give them a little shock, but that shock would be swiftly soothed by the articulate despair of the poem’s final lines. He cursed the hill he was walking up, (the whole high-street was on an incline). He was red-faced and out of breath. 

            From his back pocket, he took out his mother’s shopping list and looked at it. He would pay for the shopping with his card, using funds his mother had transferred to his account. Disability benefits supplemented with savings. All his mother’s savings were being drained, fast. Felix’s inheritance from his father was entirely gone.     

Felix sighed, deeply, as he read the list. He put it away, finding the column’s order, length, and islands of specificity repugnant. He had learned his lesson. She would become enraged if he didn’t purchase precisely what was written down. He himself was addicted to food and still her appetite amazed him. The indignity of what she consumed confounded and infuriated him; he saw no obvious sign that it was killing her- other than her great size. Frankly, this frustrated him.

            The door to the village hall was supposedly automatic. Arthur was at the entrance, just ahead of Felix, fruitlessly stabbing the OPEN pad. Arthur noticed Felix approach and acknowledged him with a look of saddened, well-meant recognition, a look to which Felix was well used. Arthur was frail and used a cane. Felix grabbed the handle of the door and opened it. Arthur went in first, muttering a thanks, and Felix followed.

            Felix had forgotten his two pound contribution. In fact, he had never once contributed to Verse from Heart but he didn’t feel much guilt about this. There was no card machine of course. The clanking contents of the collection tin went most of the way to covering the cost of tea, coffee, and biscuits. 

            In the backroom they had block-booked for the whole year, Felix took a seat. He was acknowledged, in general, with friendly smiles and mouthed Hellos. Helen, who ran the group, had a sadness about her. One couldn’t fail to be aware of it, and yet it wasn’t at all depressing- she wasn’t depressing. She was very very friendly. She noticed people’s vulnerability, and often acted as an emissary between hurt parties. Her relationship with poetry was pure and poignant, she always chose well and shared what she chose in a clear, uncomplicated manner. Everyone settled and the noises of greeting and preliminary chatter all went quiet.

            Helen performed her usual duties, made her usual noises, said “we’ve had apologies from”: and would then list the absent regulars. The names of the attendees were all written down on torn-up bits of paper, folded up, and placed in a bowl. The tossed bowl of names determined the order of recitation. 

            At poetry events of any kind, a participant’s nature is exposed. If they are attempting to conceal their nature then the concealment is expressed in what they read and in the way they read it. Everything comes out: their politics if they are political, they apoliticality if they are apolitical; their sex, their sexual orientation, the extent of their interest in sex; their class, their education, their background, their job, the jobs they’ve had, their aesthetics, their illness, their wellness, their ability, their disability; what interests them, what disinterests them; what they understand literature’s purpose to be; the sort of parents they had; how lonely they are; whether they are more interested in language or more interested in mental health. The choices are revealing of why each person is present. 

            Most of the session consisted of the usual fare, by turns intriguing and imperfect. Spoken song lyrics, picked for their nostalgia and eroticism; old-style nonsense verses- also connected with nostalgia- (delivered, in one case, in an idiotic voice, with props to boot); a bit of doggerel; a poem about Gaza; solid entries in major verse anthologies, happened upon by accident; one or two interesting curiosities; one psalm; a few incredibly (even absurdly) well-known verses- clearly, those who had chosen them had no understanding of quite how well-know they were: in one case this fact made no difference to the reading- in the other it was distracting, even fatal. Arthur waywardly recited, with many hesitations, “Phenomenal Woman” by Maya Angelou. Felix thought he had never heard anything so ridiculous. Throughout Arthur’s stumbling recitation, Felix couldn’t help chanting inwardly to himself: For fuck sake, Arthur. For fuck sake. But, for whatever philistine reason, the poem spoke, or had spoken, to Arthur and that was evident in his delivery. Still, by this time, Felix’s name had not been pulled out of the bowl. Helen was next. 

            Throughout the session, Felix had felt himself discovering, with bleak satisfaction, that the event was as poor and lacking as he had always secretly believed it was. When Helen began reciting “Nirvana” by Charles Bukowski, that changed. He began to really listen.

            She deliberately gave no introduction. She just began as soon as her name was read out. She said the poem, an immensely plain-spoken and moving lyric, with amazing slowness, with deep, introverted solemnity. Felix wondered if she was impersonating Bukowski or Waits, their stylish languor. She wasn’t exactly present while she spoke. She was elsewhere; and yet all those in attendance were somehow included and carried along with the poem’s moody narrative beats as she sounded them in her clean, pleasant voice. The delivery wasn’t at all lugubrious, just deep. She shuddered with relief when she’d finished speaking. She had changed colour and her posture was somehow unusual. She was so thin; but quite how thin and grey Felix had never really noticed. The room was clearly gripped but Felix’s rapture was particular. He sat there, moved, not quite tearful but almost, enormous in the little churchy chair.    

            “Now, that poem meant a great deal to my husband, Jack,” Helen resumed in her lightly Northern voice, having let the final creak of the tyres in the snow work its full quiet magic. She spoke with great staccato deliberation, the words chosen as carefully as possible in the long pauses that continually intervened. The listening ears weren’t quite sure what was to come. “He was a big fan of Tom Waits, and Tom Waits famously recited the poem on one of his albums. Now, Jack passed away seven years ago. And, just before he died, he told me this story. When he was told by the hospital that his cancer had metastasised and he had no more than two weeks to live, he left the hospital and went to a café with his friend, Rob. I went somewhere else with my friend Peggy. He and Rob went to this café, just a normal, regular, greasy spoon café. And they ordered a pot of tea for about £1.20- he always loved a bargain. And he and Rob just sat in that Romford café, drinking their tea, for about three hours, not saying much, apparently. Anyway, towards the end, the light changed. And…this sun-beam shone down and came in through the café windows.” She was an enchanting story-teller. She was, at that moment, inside that café, witnessing what she imagined was witnessed. “And he told me that the colours…the colours were just…everything, every teapot, every fork, every face was just absolutely radiant.” She began to cry at this point. She continued to tell the story with such restraint and dignity. “And he told me,” she went on, “that…that he was just so grateful to have been alive.” She cleared her throat and the need to cry retreated. It was such a pleasant display: to see someone manage their emotions so aptly rather than just allowing them to overwhelm her. “So, it just goes to show. Even in an ordinary, little café in Romford, you can…well, anyway” she couldn’t quite finish the thought but everyone understood what she meant. Perhaps there were no words for what she wanted to express, none that would convey the precise emotional character of what she wanted to say. The poem had expressed it well enough. She thanked them all, lastly, for indulging her. Most had begun to cry: there were sniffs. She had finished. And there was just one candidate left.

            For whatever reason, Felix couldn’t recite “Love Again”; the poem remained locked inside him. He didn’t care about sullying the mood that had been established by Helen’s story. It was simply that the poem was no longer true, he no longer believed in Larkin’s ability to speak for anyone but himself. After what it had listened to, he couldn’t tell that room of love’s blasphemous denouncement. The deadly line burned him with its ferocity: “Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt.”

 The problem was that while Helen’s tribute to her dead husband still lingered in the air, (which had aligned so beautifully with a poem, and with the purpose of this gathering), the meaning of Felix’s poem was unable to arise from its particular circumstances, unable to drift higher and become universal. 

Instead of reciting “Love Again”, Felix took out the shopping list from his back pocket. He could remember and reliably recite other poems but, at that moment, he felt there was nothing in the whole world that he was competent to speak aloud, except his mother’s shopping list. He realised that, in her week, the penning of her shopping list was her only creative act, the only act into which she put any substantive effort, the only change she effected on the earth. Since Helen had ended, he hadn’t reacted much and the curious room seemed propitiated by the little scrap of paper he freed from his jeans. 

            “Erm…” he began, in his shy, nasal voice. “No introduction. Sorry. Haven’t memorised it.” And then he read the list aloud, exactly as it was written, in a voice very different to his usual one, with ceremonious grandeur even in its most demotic and abbreviated places: 

·       Weetabix

·       Pasties

·       3 Toblerone

·       Marshmallows 

Here there was an ephemeral, uncertain laugh.

·       Coffee 

·       Mackie’s trad. vanilla ice-cream. 3 tubs (not Walls)

·       5 Prawn cocktail crisp (6 x 25g)  multipacks

·       Medium Roasting Chicken

·       2 Bags spuds

·       Steaks (usual)

·       Sausages (plenty)

·       Bacon (plent.)

Here he imagined his mother consuming these items. He pictured her wide, avid mouth, and envisaged her fat, frantic hands. He saw her, huge, in her whining chair.       

·       Two bottles wine (red, not French) 

·       Tampax super plus

·       Bog roll

·       Red and green peppers

·       Beef mince

·       Mayo (no Low fat)

·       Milk (ditto)

·       3 Tiger loafs

·       3 Packets of ham

·       Philadelphia

·       Cheddar (Cathedral City Mature. Not Extra Mature)

·       After Eights

·       Garlic breads

·       Febreze (spring awak.)

The silence when he had finished was immensely uncomfortable. The members of Verse from Heart, sitting in their little ring of chairs, all looked confused, each face somehow affected. None of them looked bored, or absent. They searched, most of them disapprovingly, for a justification that Felix’s “poem” was an attempt at humour. If he hadn’t been attempting to be humorous then was he serious? If he was serious then what exactly was he being serious about, what was he trying to say? He was a fat young man, they all saw that, was he trying to expiate some guilt, turn the sorrow and chagrin of his condition into poetry. There wasn’t much to cling onto, there wasn’t much to be enthusiastic about in Felix’s shopping list. At least it was comprehensible. That sort of poetry pretending not to be poetry usually had something more to offer than the experience of listening to that shopping list had been able to offer. 

And yet there was some arresting magic in the ordinary. When it was alienated from the texture of everyday life, given a bloated context, framed in the white space of silence, it was somehow effortlessly profound. But, they all asked themselves, was such a shopping list really that ordinary. So specific. It was a lot of food.

“Lot of food,” Arthur said. 

It certainly was, they all agreed.  

“It’s a found poem,” Felix said- he thought- diplomatically. 

At seven minutes to three, the meeting was concluded and the members dismissed. The room’s few windows were very small and high and narrow. No-one had noticed that it had started snowing. The mists had retired into memory. But the snow was falling, really falling, soundless and eager, the whole long way from the white skies to the whitening streets. It was as though, gradually, on the grey slope of the road, patches of white, geriatric hair were beginning to sprout.