The Argument (First Person)

The Argument (First Person)

(First Person – Past Tense – This is derived from the original)

I changed trains at Darlington. I hurried along the platform to the waiting diesel train, climbed aboard, threw my bag into the overhead rack and threw myself into a seat. The carriage was almost empty and smelled like a damp dog. Rivulets of condensation ran down the inside of the window, as he settled to watch the rain outside.

People started to join the train and a couple took the pair of seats opposite him, on the other side of the chipped Formica-topped table. He was wearing a stained khaki jacket, and holding a bundle wrapped in a black bin-liner, which he stuffed into the luggage rack. She was smartly dressed in tight jeans and a tailored black jacket. They were obviously together, because they kept exchanging glances.

Outside, the guard blew his whistle. The steady rattle of the diesel rose to a roar, and, with a jerk, the train lurched forward and pulled out of the station.

The man in the khaki jacket leaned towards the young woman and said something which I did not catch over the roar of the diesel. She shrugged her shoulders and looked away, out of the window, at the passing buildings.

 (16th October 2016 – 217 words)

This is the original version, scribbled in a few minutes in class. I’ve transcribed it here with very few alterations.

Listening is what I do best (First Person - Loving)

(First person – Loving, Kind – Present tense)

Listening is what I do best. I sit here in the twilight listening to someone I cannot see and who cannot see me. We are supposed to be anonymous, but that is a fiction. I usually know who is sitting there, and they certainly know who I am. In a sense though, I’m not me at all, but someone else entirely.

They come to me with their troubles and the things that are troubling them: the things that weigh down on their shoulders and make them sad. I listen to what they say, and give them relief for at least a little while. They come to me with their misdemeanours and I give them the means to wash themselves clean again. Like little children they will get dirty, but they will be clean for a while, and that is important.

Listening is one of the great services I provide. It is so personal, so private and so intimate. Of all my sacred duties, this listening is one of the greatest, behind that greatest service of all, when I am lost, transformed, transfigured and they are fed.

I have heard so many things here, from the serious to the trivial, but who am I to say what is trivial? That is why the listening is so important. It is important that they feel that someone has heard them, and I feel it is important that, through me, he hears them, that he hears their cries and, in his mercy, through his grace, grants them forgiveness.

Now I hear sounds from the adjoining space. What will I hear in a few moments? Yes, there will be the formula, and the excuses, but what will I hear? Perhaps I will become witness to some tragedy, or complicit in some felony, I cannot tell. These things I do know: This is important, it matters to them and it matters to me. It is important that listening is what I do best.

(9^th October 2016 – 348 words)

Listening is what I do best (Cheerful)

Listening is what I do best

(Third person? – Friendly, Cheerful – Past tense)

“Listening is what I do best” he used to say. Then he would lean back, take a long pull from his pint and create that pregnant silence for someone else to fill. And he was good at listening. When someone started talking, filling the silence he had left, he would lean forward, his eyes focussed on their face and follow what they were saying intently. His grey eyes opened wide as he followed their words and he would nod or shake his head to demonstrate that he understood the significance of what they were saying.

Jack was certainly a good listener but he was a good talker too. That was why people used to join him at the table and buy him drinks. People would even hover behind those who were seated and strain to hear what he said. When the first speaker had finished, Jack would pick up the thread and start weaving his own story.

Jack’s stories where the stuff of legend. He didn’t talk about the usual pub topics of: politics, sport, current affairs or the state of the nation. Instead he would take whatever the first speaker had been talking about and slowly turn it into something else, something strange and other-worldly. As often as not, he would start with “I remember when…”, telling the audience about some event in the distant past. Then the magic began. He would draw people into the story as slowly it became more and more bizarre and eyes opened wider and jaws dropped lower.

The best tales involved fishing. None of the audience doubted that Jack had once been a keen angler, but in his tales he had landed fish that should have required a trawler to bring them ashore. The “ones that got away” were larger still. People recounted one occasion when Jack described himself riding one particular monster down river like a surfer until it eventually escaped him in the sea.

Jack was certainly good at listening, but most of the regulars in the pub, and plenty of visitors, thought that what he was best at was telling stories!

(7^th October 2016 – 363 words)

Listening is what I do best (First person menacing. Present tense)

Listening is what I do best

(First person menacing. Present tense)

Listening is what I do best. I am good at so many things, but listening is certainly the thing I do best – listening and, perhaps, waiting.

My hearing is good, but listening is so much more than just hearing. I have learned to listen very carefully. I am not listening for conversation, oh no! I am waiting for the slightest sound which disturbs the silence. I turn my attention first in one direction and then in another. I focus my attention in each direction in its turn as I search the darkness. I don’t want to miss anything.

I can feel the coldness which surrounds me. I can feel the darkness. Sometimes I think that I can touch it and feel its texture. Sometimes it feels cold and slick like polished metal and sometimes the coldness feels soft and yielding. Then it is like stroking a fish.

In fact, all my senses are acute. My eyesight is at least as good as my hearing, but I don’t use sight very much in the darkness. My sense of smell is subtle and delicate. I can usually smell things before they come within reach. Finally, there is my sense of taste. I long to experience taste again. I am so cold and I am so hungry.

If you come this way, then do not think that you will evade me. I am sitting here patiently in the cold and the darkness. I am waiting for you and I am listening. Listening is what I do best.

(7^th October 2016)

(I’m talking to you! Yes, you! You’re peering at me over the top of the screen on my laptop. Your head is just above the webcam and your fingers are either side, just like Chad or Kilroy. I wonder what you are like. I’ll never know.)

"Peter"

If you go to the same place, at the same times, repeatedly you start to notice people. It was true when I commuted through Waterloo railway station in London twice every day and it is true now. Faces seemed to stand out from the crowd. Staff or passengers lost their anonymity and I began to recognise them and look for them. Sometimes they faded back into the background but sometimes they remained, pricking the curiosity. I would wonder: what are they like? What do they do? What are they called? Then I wouldn’t notice them anymore and ask myself if something had happened.

If these moments of recognition occur among the thousands streaming through Waterloo each day, imagine how much more likely they are in a small country town in rural Ireland.

Peter, let’s call him that, because it is so much kinder to give him a name, even if it is not the one he would recognise, was such a face which stood out from the crowd. I started to notice him around the town. Mostly I would see him in the morning, but sometimes in the evening too.

I don’t remember the first time I noticed Peter, but I am sure that the first thing I registered was the coat. Most men don’t wear coats these days, but Peter does. He wears a shabby, charcoal grey, knee-length overcoat, come rain or come shine. After the coat, the next thing I noticed would have been the elbow crutches which he uses to steady himself. The crutches are explained by the orthopaedic slipper he sometimes wears. His face is weather beaten and florid, beneath a tousled mop of dark greying hair.

Peter isn’t a man whose company I would seek out. In fact, I would probably avoid him, because the final part of Peter’s ensemble is the beer can. Almost every time I see him he has an open beer can in his hand. I feel that he is a man who needs, rather than enjoys his drink. I have seen him engaged in earnest negotiations with a local publican at 10 in the morning and I have seen him in the evening, leaning against the door jamb watching the traffic climbing the bridge on the road out of town. He was sipping from his can with others sitting on the window sill beside him. I imagine him as a cat, lying in a place it finds comfortable. But this is not a relaxed cat fast asleep with its legs in the air, or a sly, alert cat observing through slits but a sick cat (disinterestedly) watching the world passing with faded, watery eyes.

Then he was gone. Since starting to write this I have realised that I haven’t noticed Peter for several days, possibly even weeks. The cat is no longer lying there watching the world go by. Peter is no longer in his usual spots as I pass. Another face has differentiated itself from the multitude for a moment and then disappeared again. Perhaps he has changed his habits, perhaps I have, or perhaps something really has happened and he is gone for good.

Before I came out this evening

Before I came out this evening

(written evening 27^th September 2016)

The cat is waiting at the door, waiting to be let in, so that it can walk around, sniff its bowl, turn its nose up and scratch at the mat to be let out again. Either that, or get under my feet as I prepare tea.

I must check the “best by” dates. Should we eat the things which are a day over-due? What if we all die of food poisoning? If we all die, then it won’t be a problem, will it?

The cat is asleep on the chair. The food is prepared and ready to be served. My satchel is packed and ready to go. I have the time for the journey planned. Everything is ready – Ready to go.

Dinner is served! Fresh fish supplemented by the TV dinner that we should have given to the Mother-in-law on Saturday but was overlooked. That was past its best by date. What if we get food poisoning? What if the Mother-in-law gets food poisoning? Oh no! Don’t think that. I like my Mother-in-law, better than I like the cat anyway.

Time to go! Kiss the wife, pick up the satchel check the pockets of my jacket. Everything’s there. We’re off!

Jessie Bannatyne's Singer sewing machine

A few years ago (5 or so, I don’t remember), I inherited a sewing machine from Jessie, one of my cousins. “Inherited” in both the formal and informal sense. I went to her funeral, and stayed a couple of nights. When you are travelling several hundred miles and finishing up on a Hebridean island, it is almost unavoidable. The day following the funeral, some of the women were packing things up and asked me “do you want anything?” There was the sewing machine in a store-room so I said: “I’ll have that.” Naturally, it didn’t turn, but I didn’t care that much. Actually, I really do like the idea of having a sewing machine, and this is one of those hand-cranked ones, so it was ideal and of course it was free.

Jessie Bannatyne's Singer Sewing Machine (circa 1921)

A couple of weeks ago, in the evening something prompted me have a look at it. The first thing I found was that the reason it wasn’t turning was simply a tangle of threads around the lower bobbin. A few snips and a couple of tugs with some rat-nosed pliers and everything was moving. A squirt of WD40 down the appropriate holes and it was running freely. Since then I’ve fitted in a trip down to Cork and bought it a bottle of proper Singer oil (almost certainly an unnecessary extravagance, I’m sure 3-in-1 would have been adequate, but what the heck), and a replacement rubber friction wheel for the bobbin winder. That is the only replacement part it has required. I haven’t totted up the total expenditure, but at 1 rubber wheel, 1 bottle of oil, 1 paper of 5 needles and 3 reels of thread for parts and less than a couple of hours labour, it isn’t much!

Some research on the internet shows that the serial number of the machine was allocated in December 1921. That may well mean that it was made the following year. Asking round the family we have concluded that it was probably bought new by my Grandmother (also called Jessie btw). She used it for a while and then gave it to her daughter when she married and took over the farm. She in turn gave it to my cousin Jessie (my family do it to confuse!) who was a spinster and eventually it came to me.

So there you have it. Early 20^th Century over-engineering at its best! Made in Clydebank and finishes up in the South of Ireland via the Hebrides. 94 or 95 years old, three generations of women using it for dress-making, making curtains and all those other things and it’s still going strong and the only part it needed was a replacement rubber wheel! They don’t make them like that anymore!

I can see from the picture that this is before I fitted the replacement wheel. And in case you are wondering, the tatty towel in the background was issued to me when I was working shifts at British Steel’s Lackenby Steel Plant in 1979/80. I used it to test the machine, by joining it Ends-to-middle. I still use the towel to wipe my hands when I go to the gym!