No Telephone to Heaven

The fourth chapter of No Telephone to Heaven opens with a flashback to Paul’s Christmas party. This flashback details the burgeoning friendship between Clare—who has a drunken, unsatisfactory sexual encounter with Paul—and Harry/Harriet, who thereafter comforts Clare when she becomes sick in the swimming pool.

The narrative then switches to Clare in the “NO TELEPHONE TO HEAVEN” truck as it makes its way through the countryside. On the truck, Clare briefly recalls an experience wherein she attempted and failed to adopt a child from an orphanage—an “institution for light-skinned foundlings”—because she had wanted to “save” a child from this “colonial contrivance” (92). She then reflects back on the early days spent with her father in America after her own mother’s departure.

Clare recalls watching a great deal of television in those days, feeling a sense of unfillable “loss” (93). She compares the “magic of television […], her ability to conjure images by switch, to change the images as she wished” (93), to her experience of media in Jamaica. In Jamaica, they did not have television and were not privy to films or programs outside of those shown in public cinemas. Clare reflects on the lack of control viewers had over what they saw in Jamaica, and how, in a sense, this condition was not so different from “the little black box catching waves in the Brooklyn apartment” (93).