Call to Player

It had been coming, and when it came, it was memorable at least.  Was it fitting?  I think so.

Friday the 13^th of April 2018.  I took a path on the edge of town that I was not sure if I should take, overlooked by the new apartments above the green mosque.  It curled round to what seemed a dead end: a dumping ground for garden detritus behind the hotel.  Looking up the gully, I thought I could see a way through among the piles of limestone rubble and the pines tufted with the webs of processionary moth caterpillars.  Climbing up through the quiet woods, I glanced at my phone.  A message with his name as the heading had just arrived.  I decided not to open it yet.

A line of stones marked a hunters’ path up through the woods.  Working around uneven ground and fallen trees, I gained some height towards the ridge.  The blue patches of bay visible through the trees grew as I climbed.  The path roved through swelling patches of warm sunlight, before emerging in a clearing by a small cave full of sticks, a discarded grey man’s jacket, the evidence of fire.  Stone steps of unknown vintage rose above me, cut into a cliff of grainy orange limestone.  At the foot of these I read the message that informed me of what I already knew: that the captain of my cricket team had died of cancer after a shockingly rapid decline.

I climbed to the next outcrop and took off my shoes, sitting down among the sprigs of wild barley, the delicate star-like purple flowers whose name I still don’t know, the scrapings of last night’s foraging boar.  A single Turkish pine jinked skywards out of a fissure in the limestone.  I wondered how best to mark this moment in my own way, how to honour this irascible, combative little man.  I didn’t know him well, but latterly had come to like him rather more through shared sporting endeavours.  I became self-conscious, as though watched.

On the edge of the town below, a click from the loudspeakers on the minaret of the Karagözler mosque announced the commencement of the evening call to prayer.  I rose to my feet to listen and take in the sunlit view of the snowy peaks of the Bonçuk Daglari mountains to the north. 

Allahu Akbar
God is Great…

The muezzin waited for the echo of each preceding utterance to arrive from the far side of the bay before resuming.  In those pauses was an exquisite peace. 

Ashhadu an la ilaha illa Allah
I bear witness that there is no god except the One God…

After the last line of the azan and its rolling return came a humdrum and rather touching click as the amplification was switched off.

Before the azan was amplified, the splendour of that distant echo would have been unknown.  A nearer one, yes, running through the alleys of the town and mingling with the cries of children and the barking of dogs, but not those rolling waves of praise coming down as if sent from the mountains themselves.  What a moment, the first electric muezzin!  Was he proud?  Did he understand the significance?

Now, shoeless on a Turkish crag, with a tingling, perilous feeling in my belly from my proximity to the edge, I remembered the visiting Bangladeshi cricketers, unrolling their prayer mats and kneeling towards Mecca on the outfield of a Dartmoor cricket pitch.  A more delightfully incongruous sight one could not hope to see.  Simon, who died this morning aged 51, would have stood watching, smirking and smoking a roll-up, waiting impatiently for the game to begin.  And now…

What would he have made of this?  Me learning of his death in a south Devon hospice, the same one that provided care for me, while a muezzin issues the call to prayer over the bay.  Torquay to Türkiye.  Wanting to do something, I reached down for a knuckle-sized piece of limestone that had broken off from the outcrop.  I did the only thing I could think of before putting on my shoes and pushing on up the hillside, which was to hurl the stone off the precipice using a cricketer’s bowling action.  I gave it my characteristic tweak of off-spin just for authenticity, and watched it drop into the dark pines below.  I imagined my captain’s cry of derision or praise, as so many times before - but now never again.