The Heart In My Hand

Monday night, and I got my agenda. In the mail, hand delivered, like every week. My brief enclosed - faces, disputes, relevant spots on the public consciousness. Not-quite-Monday-evening-television-news level information; security level 4 or 5, I can never be sure. Somewhere just above where the average citizen sits, brewing up unsettled thoughts about this or that word in the newspaper, where I may sweep in and smooth over those cerebral wrinkles with a calm hand on the shoulder and a laugh. A familiar routine, and one that I had maintained this Monday evening up to the swift whisper of the package in the door. Sitting in the near darkness, face in full blue illumination of the Monday evening news, bi-weekly standard-issued glass of wine tight in my hand, a perfect stony calm, then the footsteps of the courier and the rattle, swish and heavy smack of the dense envelope. My exterior barren of reaction, I finish my wine - a bitter, weak white, ice cold in my hand - and retrieve the package from the doormat to review this week's agenda. Then - as the last vestiges of a grey day in the city fade from the window - I get to work.

I have to review, conceive, outline, draft, review again, re-write, edit, fact-check, proof-read and submit for further external review by Tuesday evening so my script can be fast-tracked into production on Wednesday or Thursday. Mistakes in this line of work are out of the question - this unspoken rule dictates the lines of the process for everyone involved, every faceless pen and rattling keyboard that I never see and every courier, editor, writer, producer, actor, cameraman, security officer, Office representative, director, and every other pair of hands submitting focus group data and survey information blind to their superiors, never meeting eyes with the next pair of hands along the line towards public release. A mutual silence bonds us together in fractured complicity; never quite sure of what the next step is, but knowing that once out of your hands, it is truly out of your hands.

Friday night, and showtime. A quick look out my living room window at this point reveals dancing flashes of light through thin curtains across the estate, the courtyard blue in the haze of the evening, as the weekend entertainment begins to roll across national television sets. There is no curfew, but the streets are empty. No pair of eyes is anywhere but on an LED screen. Meats for the belly I thought to myself as the opening credits blared, and belly for the meats as I dropped my gaze from the window to the TV and settled down with a glass of water. I barely recognise my work, but I know that it’s mine. When I was a real writer, before the Net went down and all this fog came down on the country, I used to worry I was lying to myself, or to my readers, when I wrote. Now the lies are written into the agenda, and I pass them on to the next guilty labourer, and I realise as I settle down to immerse myself in the blue light of the television that I could never really lie, because even by lying I’m confessing. Complicit. That’s a word that crosses my mind when I put pen to paper, but never when I’m watching. Being entertained. Being immersed. Absorbed. They won’t tell me the truth but I don’t need them to. They can’t lie to me.

Only now, in the deep blue of the entertainment’s full swing, can I feel my heart. Not that bloody vessel, so alien now to my greying and secluded life. But the locket, the locket! Heart-shaped, but cold, so cold against the skin of my chest where my real heart beats weakly from the other side. I grip the locket now, fingers curling around steel. A gaudy heart. Like a naive teenager trying to convince himself he’s in love - how I hated these symbols before - romance, plastic, poison to the Avant Garde intellectual. To any artist worth his dignity. To the world-weary, wry wisdom of real men. It was a gift, obviously - men didn’t buy such things for themselves - and the details were already faded in my mind. Once, those sentiments would have been immortalised in my work, but now this locket is all I have to hang those memories onto; the chain ripples and I see the old car; the scent of steel reaches my nose and I feel the sun; the stony cold burns into my chest and I see the top of her head. Now, this crude soul of metal is worth more than any of the coins they can bury me in, for my 'work'; my heart is sunk and only the locket remains. Closed and enclosed in my palm, and slowly warming in the folds of my skin. Almost connecting to the dense capillaries of my fingers. Sweat smoothes the silver surface, and now the locket is hot. I squeeze harder, and I can feel my pulse straining through my hand. I squeeze harder.