Noah's Heart

by Neil Rowland

  My parents came from the same Wiltshire village. Dad collapsed while he was chopping wood in the yard; whack, split, whack, split, until his heart did the same. A fork of inner lightning struck him down in front of our eyes. Although at the time we thought it may have been a joke. He subsided into the mud and puddles and we stood around him; huddled, calling to him, patting his cheek and hands as we tried to revive him from the stony fit. We couldn’t pull him back, we could only watch as his limbs turned to lead. Doctors and nurses were not closely located to our village. There was nobody to save his life on the bumpy road to the hospital. They had the benefits of a traditional community, but family friends and neighbours couldn’t save him. I always want to look to the future, although there are drawbacks. Sometimes we fail.

  When Dad suffered that coronary I was eight; which is the age of our youngest boy today. Dad passed away in the back of our next-door neighbours’ Morris. Mum was there to keep him company, on the way. Unfortunately he ran out of the road. Grandma was looking after me, while I waited for my parents to return. She chatted without looking at me, as she made and baked an apple pie. I was lucky to survive my heart attack, recalling that experience. After all I got a reprieve; another chapter, or maybe just a rewind.

  I was edging towards peril as I entered those middle years. As the decades went by, like some poor guy clinging to a log, the river of life plunging to a fall. You don’t listen to these stories while you are fit and young. I should have demanded regular check-ups from Homer. I informed him about my father and my grandfather. But I was as taken-in as the doctor, that a regular busted gut in the squash court was proof against a dodgy pump. I gave up smoking French cigarettes and fat cigars in my early twenties. I drink only moderately most of the time. Yes, I played those racquet sports, I joined a running club (half marathons along the Avon every summer month), I launch up in my hot air balloons... but still I was squeezed to the point of death.

  Following the scare I get back to my car. I drive a Citroen DS 23 circa 1964. Man, they can see me coming in Bristol, as if I’m wrapped from head to foot in surgical bandages. My infatuation with this car began with the French new wave cinema. I used to yearn for Anna Karenin or Jeanne Moreau. I would pose with a Galloises on my bottom lip. My accountant has advised me to get rid of this monster. My wife always had the same advice. Plus she was embarrassed to be seen in the thing. She loathed the ugly-beautiful machine, more outdated with every passing year. But as long as my heart puts one beat in front of another, I’m not going to sacrifice my identity. She will never convince me that Dylan is not a great artist, by emphasising his musical shortcomings: As long as I’m living and breathing that old Citroen’s safe from the auto-graveyard.

  The engine fires and I’m cushioned on the suspension. The machine is still in remarkable condition. Home is in Clifton, that elegant, historic and most expensive area of our city (let’s be upfront). The rows and crescents reach to the rocky gorge edge and lean apprehensively over the rim. As a young guy originally from a rougher part of the city, I wasn’t against jeering at people who lived in this district. Not only were they unreachably better off, but they seemed very comfortable and dull subjects. I’d turn my nose up above an unfiltered cigarette. I required a good education and decades of hard work before I was one among them; strange where your passions and enthusiasms will take you. Nowadays I’m clinging to the cliff face with my fingernails, from both a financial and health viewpoint. I’m not so ready to sneer at my neighbours, but I’m at risk of plunging down into fizzy lager territory. My brother has always lived there, by the way; with no appetite for change or movement.

  As soon as I return to Big Pink I call up the new doctor. I want to get his take on my heart stopping experience. Could he reassure and chase away the after-images of my latest scare? Or am I doomed to wander middle earth?

  This is a shame, because I hadn’t spoken to my doctor for weeks. He practises his trade under the name of Voerdung. But I was almost eager to forget him. I got through to his surgery, checking that Luke, our eldest son, is out of ear shot. He’s oiling the wheels of his skateboard on the kitchen table.

  I related to Voerdung what had happened to me in the shopping centre. I made it sound a punishment for spending too much on music and clothes. That is, I tried to describe the experience, but I am baffled by what took place, except for the sensation of being kicked around the sternum. Listening to me, responding with some manly throat sounds, he promises to fix an appointment at the hospital. If there’s another episode over the weekend then I should call an emergency number.

  “You all right now, Noah?”

  “As we speak,” I concede.

  “Sit tight and relax over the weekend. Right?”

  I’m grateful for the lifeline, but am I losing my grip?

  This could be described as the long weekend. Hard liquor had a powerful draw - it had an action hero appeal to the thirst. I’m afraid of another heart attack, collapsing at home; the problems it would cause, the scene provoked, the lasting family impact. Why couldn’t Voerdung put me safely back into a hospital ward? He was spilling the ball as Timpson used to do at rugby. They wouldn’t even allow that guy to carry the bucket and sponge, to be frank. You could say he’s been unfortunate, but then what about me?

  I kept my date with love-interest Rachael that evening. She invited me to a Tibetan barbecue held by some friends in Totterdown; animators of children’s books. I didn’t want to pour cold water over the Tibetan charcoal. I met this woman at the squash club. She’s dark, with some French ancestry; slightly plump (despite the running around) enveloped in a bitter sweet mist of perfumed sophistication.

  Now and again Rach’s younger sister, Marcia, would show up at the club. Marcia is an England squash squad member, so it turned out. She insisted on having a game with me and, inevitably, trouncing me; like Federer having fun with the lower ranks. Apparently she liked to put herself up against the guys. Man, she whipped me around that court like a wet towel, while she barely shuffled her toes. From then on I was apprehensive that Marcia would show up at the club. I still had the picture of her flexing her knees in preparation of our game, putting on entirely redundant sweatbands and checking that her laces were tied. The memory of that thrashing put me off the idea of squash and any other hard sports.

  Marcia was hot looking though; dark haired and coltish as Lizzie Taylor on Black Beauty, or whatever they called the nag. She was definitely too hot to handle though, not only when the door of the squash court was locked behind us. Man, that was a very lonely place; no man’s land would look better. I was trapped in there like a dog belonging to a single yuppie. I anticipated a knock up with Miss Sabatini, only to find Miss Navratilova there instead. Marcia was hard and humourless on the court and every point was a matter of life and death, even at fourteen nil.

  But I was determined not to be a loser with Rachael. I could see her as more of a double’s partner. So I tried to take that demolition of my sporting prowess gracefully. I was storing up my rewards in heaven. They considered me a great sport and never let me buy the drinks afterwards, even when I ordered more than one; doubles too.

  Thank god, this summer Marcia is away backpacking in the Himalayas, with her fire service chums. Rachael remains cheerfully and pleasantly plump on the British Isles. She runs an antiques shop and auction house in Clifton; ageing beauties being her passion in life. She’s also a divorcee, from an American hotelier who couldn’t stay out of his guest rooms. She’s the best listener I’ve encountered since Elizabeth shut her ears to my complaints forever.

  “I thought you were going to buy a new shirt today, Noah. What happened then? Did it explode?”

  “Not exactly,” I demurred.

  “Then where’s your jeans? The Levi’s? Haven’t they shrunk down in the bath to your shape yet?”

  I kept the painful truth close to my chest.

  But I didn�
�t say anything at the barbecue that evening. There were no fish on the grill, but it brought back memories of Crete. I picked out a folding chair and stayed under a passion flower. Painful memories returned with interest and, most likely, I didn’t look so great either, despite all efforts. I didn’t enjoy taking probing questions about my erratic ticker; not until the doctor looked up the appropriate page in the manual. There were a handful of local BBC celebrities there, but they didn’t come forward to interview me. Rachael was the only woman who even looked at me.

  After the Totterdown party I invited her back for coffee. My kids were out experimenting for the evening. Unfortunately my sexual appetite deserted me, even as she was in the mood for a bedroom killing. She thought I was more comfortable in the squash court than on a mattress; which was obviously a subjective opinion. I didn’t confide my own bedroom secrets to her. I knew that she wanted to spend the night with me. Her blood’s always bubbling away like a Jacuzzi. Of course she wanted a lasting and meaningful relationship. Obviously she had the wrong guy there.

  Troublingly she drove off in tears, adding me to her list of snubs and disappointments. Should I have been more open about my situation? Maybe this was the final nail in the coffin of our relationship. I thought how I appeared through her warm brown eyes. One moment my squash shorts were around my ankles, the next I was filling my hot water bottle. At times my heart gets too full and I can’t part with the truth.

  In the small hours Angela returned home, with her posse of friends and hangers-on. Waking with a start I heard them around the house. But I stayed there and waited for them all to leave. It was hard to deal with more than several invisible dangers at the same time.

  Chapter 5

  The consultant in Bristol wasn’t able to explain the reading on my Richter scale. She was equally as baffled that the organ had tried to beat me up again. She directed me back towards London; more state of the art equipment, tests, light shows and psychedelic effects. This was turning into the ultimate bad trip. But would I recognise the encore?

  I decided to make this second trip by myself, without bothering family and friends. They would be upset, confused and anxious at my recall. I made numerous business trips to London by train; at least the journey was nothing strange or new.

  Part of me didn’t want to learn the truth. What was the chance of returning home again with a positive attitude? As I faced the crush-hour I resembled an official warning on the dangers of a stressful life. Except that I have not lived a particularly stressful life. But I looked as unsavoury as a vampire who’d lost his nerve and the will to bite.

  A distressing deja-vu came on me, as I made my way about ‘Little Britain’ in London. Hadn’t I already undergone that drawn-out, terrifying and excruciating surgical procedure? Would they insist on putting me through the same performance again? They would need to take another reading, until they gained a deeper impression of my scars, to say what had gone wrong.

  There was no ex-wife and living woman to hold my hand this time. Everything was too recognisable from before. I was taken into Cardiology and re-introduced. Meanwhile there was time to kill until my appointment. I gazed about at the new set of cardiac patients and their companions. They looked out of sorts, laughing nervously, flushing, twitching, hands wringing. If you caught their eye momentarily then they would look away. They were mostly beginners at this game. Few of them had faced surgery, or knew what to expect. They’d hardly smelt any sterilising fluid or seen a powerful lamp on the ceiling. I’d already been through it all. Now I was back for some reason.

  I drifted away, making up for lost sleep, when I was roused by the sound of my name. I was being summoned. I shook myself and took my number. From this point a friendly nurse led me to the office of Anthony Wickham. This was another gentleman of the heart. But appearances can be deceptive. Call me paranoid.

  “Come in, come in, dear chap,” he told me.

  This sounds generous, but the greeting was uttered with monotonous routine. The sound of his voice was like a sticky door forced open.

  I tried to look vigorous and fearless. As if I could brush off any bad news. Heart conditions just require a tough attitude, rather like Afghan tribesmen. Then I managed to slam the door behind me. This noise ricocheted around the whole building. Somebody had applied a few drops of oil recently. This had the effect of shattering my nerves. I carried my broken nerves behind me, as I stumbled into the guy’s office, like a sack of pebbled glass. Mr Wickham hadn’t even flinched. Yet he was inconvenienced by my floundering posture.

  “Don’t worry about the blessed door,” he told me.

  The place wouldn’t have overshadowed a prison isolation cell. There I was trapped inside with a dusty white coat, which owned the power and authority to pronounce a death sentence. No wonder I was nervous.

  “Come along, please take a seat,” he told me, stretching out a long bony arm while avoiding eye contact.

  He was scratching some arcane script on to a papyrus scroll with some quill gifted to him by a great grandfather.

  “So here I am again,” I offered.

  Mr Wickham cleared the dust from his throat and gazed up in surprise from my medical records. Or at least I assumed they were my medical records.

  “Excellent, Mr Sheer, sit back and relax for a minute, can’t you?”

  I speculated whether his sense of humour was generally very dark. Meanwhile he was scratching, interpreting, leaving me to shift on the knuckles of my backside. Perhaps noticing my discomfort he attempted small talk on the perils of modern public transport. Only some kind of primitive noise worked up from my diaphragm in response. The subversive heart was smashing away to its own tune. I was wondering what he would come up with next.

  Wickham was an extremely tall, bony and craggy guy. He was a Geralde Scarfe caricature peeled off the page. He was gaunt and shadowy in the face, as if emulating his patients. His eyes spotted me over half-moon lenses and under long spiky eyebrows. His voice sounded exhausted, but became incisive when interrupted.

  The hands were enormous and fidgety as if they were tempted to chop something. Probably he was never more content than when cutting a dash in the operating theatre. But frankly I wouldn’t trust him with the back of my television set.

  “As I understand the situation, in your own words, you suffered another coronary incident,” he remarked. “Can you describe the particulars of the event?” His bedside patter was decidedly lukewarm.

  “I’ll do my best. I went out to town the other Saturday afternoon. I was going to bring my CD collection up to date, with the latest Dylan... and there’s always good stuff coming out of the archives... official release of bootlegs, you know. Then suddenly I got this terrible sharp pain in my chest. Knocked me backwards,” I recalled. I coughed, as if to illustrate, but it was the dingy ambience of the room.

  “I understand,” he said. He was scrawling more esoteric symbols across my record again. Already this was shaping up like another biography of Brian Wilson and his brothers.

  “A definite heart pain,” I added. So that he couldn’t make any mistake.

  “Ah ha. Did you recognise the symptoms?”

  “Most of all it was the pain.”

  “Pain?”

  “Extremely.”

  “Ah ha. This wasn’t some kind of anxiety attack, Mr Sheer?” His yellowed eyes turned up briefly over the cut spectacles.

  “It made me anxious, but that wasn’t the cause,” I argued.

  His gaze held me uncomfortably and he made a small hole of his mouth. The longest hairs of his eyebrows fluttered in a secret draft.

  “Therefore you have convinced yourself, have you, that you suffered another heart attack?”

  Had it really been another heart attack? I thought again about that incident around the shops, as I’d been doing over the days and weeks following. I could design kites and
make balloons, but I couldn’t pinpoint my own faults.

  “This was different,” I offered.

  “Then you wouldn’t say that it was a heart attack?” he challenged.

  “It didn’t feel the same as the first time.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  I shifted my bones. “The pain was more centred,” I explained. “It was more intense and focused.”

  “Ah ha. Is that really the case?” Wickham intoned across the space.

  “I could have reached inside my own chest, if that had been possible...and even pointed to where the pain was coming from.”

  “Towards your heart, do you mean?” he declared.

  Constant aches across my shoulders, neck, displaced pain, tingling along the arm; a feeling of breathlessness, exhaustion, that is.

  “No, this time I felt something different.”

  “Can you be more exact?” he commented.

  “I’m not the consultant,” I pointed out. “It was just as if somebody put a knife into my heart, to be honest with you.”

  “Oh really,” he mumbled, note taking. “A knife.”

  “So what do you think?” I appealed.

  He raised his spidery writing hand for a moment with a groan. “After we have concluded a few tests, we may be able to locate some more specific factors,” he told me.

  Sure enough I underwent these ‘tests’; questions, probing, analysis, during the rest of the day. I was connected to tape, needles, stickers and electrodes, the works. They subjected me to another angiogram, yet another ECG (electrocardiogram). All the contours of a bad trip relived, in other words. As if they hadn’t made a strong enough impression on me first time.

  To finish up the gig they took another set of x-rays of my chest. The radiologists expended a lot of time and effort with me. This puzzled me because it was a new approach and didn’t seem connected to the heart. Their fondness for my company rightly roused my suspicions. I was beginning to feel like a revolutionary new drug. All this was enough to give Tim Leary a queasy stomach. This was the mother of all bad radiation. There were reasons for being paranoid.