The Big Music

by Kirsty Gunn

  ‘It’s okay’

  ‘It’s okay’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  And Johnnie?

  Well, he won’t get to his boulder. Won’t manage the child into the valley like he’d been planning. Won’t feel either the bite of Iain’s bullet at his knee – for Iain in the end would have no need to use the gun.

  Only cut the motor and run across with Helen, to take the baby from the arms of an old man standing there, talking aloud to no one, to himself, out there on the hill, talking about nothing, pee running down his leg and tears in his eyes.

  For Johnnie …

  Look all around you, man, the air is clear and you can see for miles. The shadings of the green. Last of the heather’s prime across the sides. The blue sky shining from edge to edge, and standing so still here to admire it all, out there against the hill, the spot of white so clear upon the empty landscape Iain didn’t even need the glasses to catch sight of what he’s been looking for.

  ‘There!’

  With the dogs starting up, leaping and wagging and spread out in a pack across the heather, and the sound of the Argocat can’t put out the sound of their wild baying –

  ‘Get him!’

  Yet for Johnnie, at this moment, there’s no sense of the glass’s cast, or the naked eye. No sound of the motor getting closer, closing in. For he’s just out here on a hill with his father and his son and the music singing for the three of them together in this lovely place. Three generations, three times for the Urlar to sound. Three. Three. Three. And no sense of what he’s done – only his mind away and reeling out here in the air, the song in his head of a man at the close of his life and what words come into that, there are no words, or language or time. Only a tune.25

  And he smiles, laughs then. Thinking how crazy he is and knows it, a fool and nothing to stop him now, nothing in his mind, no limits, no stops. For the ground’s down, the music that he wrote, that has been written before and all filled with the darkness coming, the final sleep but then he’ll have the next part to save him.

  Because ‘F’ to ‘G’ he might have been singing to her before, and ‘F’ to A’, like they were his notes to sing, but it was her, all strong and round and new. Fresh life out of old. That’s what she is, the little one. What they’ll need to understand, when he’s gone from them entire and the baby too, hidden away in their secret place and they’re not getting her back. Not ever. For they’ll all come to understand it one day, that she’s like the line of the notes set in front of everything, the pattern of what follows all because of her …

  And how beautiful it is.

  Though he doesn’t know yet how it will be, how she’ll come out of the ground and turn into the deer that leaps off the edge of the hill and takes a crown upon her head …26

  Though he can’t see or hear yet the space between the notes and how she’ll leap into that space, gathering up in her crown all the variations of the tune … Some sense of it has begun. Been with him for a while, it seems, before the morning and the day, before his father and his son, before the laying down of the ground upon which he still stands, the beginning was there, of the music’s plan. The knowledge that’s in her, the little one. And they’ll understand at last, all of them, what he needed to do. To make a new music from the stubborn’ness of old, find the fresh sequence he will be playing soon, soon, when he gets her to the hut, to be alone with her there. The crying done by then. The sky itself gone away and replace it only with music.

  insert/John Callum

  Of course he shouldn’t be surprised by time by now, and he isn’t, not really.

  Even before he stopped taking the pills there was a growing sense of having left daily life for a different kind of world where the days and nights and months were all the same. Moving around from room to room, from breakfast to lunch and to tea with no awareness of his presence anywhere he stayed, going as easy from one dark place to another as though he were a shadow or a kind of ghost.

  Certainly that is what it has been like for him long enough, well before these papers were being gathered. Time become unmarked that way, days lived in with no dates, no words to record them. There’s one week in summer that’s like a week in the spring, and that in turn’s fast gone back into winter again or to the autumn. And all the weeks are like the week before, and the month to follow. The past is there, one man’ s history written down and lived in, maybe, but with nothing to say for it that he can make sense of. No one to listen. He’s there in his chair or in his bed, taking only into himself his story with its memories that may have made him happy once or sad. Of his weeping one day, or his breaking on another into song.

  Will all be in the tune.27

  It’s what Sutherlands know, anyhow, time. The way time goes. As so many of the families who live around here know it, how, in the end, you keep in silence all the information you once carried, how, in the end, things don’t change. And maybe it seems to this one man that he’s gone through youth to strength to age in no more than a splinter of life, in just a fraction of hours played out beneath the sky, but in this too his life is no different to the others before him. Time keeps the people who live here still that way, it holds. So they may have been cleared off their farms and crofts, some of those families long ago, or people left, or said they would never return, even so they were staying, too, somehow, all of them, kept deep in to old time, old ways. So they may have lived in Nova Scotia or New Zealand or somewhere far away, on the other side of the world, yet they remained here amongst the hills. In their thoughts, their memories, ‘Nothing changes’ they might say. ‘I don’t mind.’ All their lives gone into the same silence of the sky.

  No wonder, then, the place seems lonely. Or that old Johnnie has that kind of quiet that’s deep in, darkness born of isolation and become quite starkly lodged in him by now as one specific illness of the mind. For a doctor may say that it’s as though it’s because he’s been allowed to carry on in a certain way, doing what he wants, following the lead of his own thoughts for so long in his life, without listening to others, without taking into account their needs, that he’s given himself a kind of depression, mental heaviness and instability come from living in a world that may as well have no other people in it at all. And a generation or so ago there would have been no pills, no doctors. It would have been called just loneliness then, just loneliness his condition and that word for keeping himself close to himself: a ‘canniness’ – for going out to seek the company of others that way. Like his father before him, who kept his own counsel – no matter how many pupils or pipers or musicians he saw, no matter how many people came to the House for lessons or instruction or recitals. So did the son have that same kind of spirit. A holding on to himself. A holding in.

  Perhaps it had always been that way. The Sutherlands always a family who kept themselves from others, even from the old days28 when the door was open to strangers and those who wanted to hear music or take instruction. They were set back then from those who came to them. Maybe that’s why now, with his father’s Winter Classes long over, and the recitals and competitions that used to take place at the House all finished and done and even his own friends don’t come back here any more, too much time has gone by … John Callum MacKay doesn’t really hear the silence.

  It’s what comes of living in this part of the Highands – so they might have said in the old days, too. That silence is what comes from staying in this particular place with its unchanging hills and grasses. That the landscape itself will make for a man that kind of narrow holding – and all the music in the world, all the concerts and the playing, won’t take away the feeling in the mind of being isolated and wanting it, to be in this beautiful lonely place, as John’s father had wanted it. And his father before him. And his father’s father. And to be used to it, too, the sense of nothing else exists. So it is a sort of madness is what John has, maybe, and he’s been diagnosed for it, finally now, towards the end of his life, and been given tablets to help it a little, the amnesia
and the confusion, and tablets too for to regulate the beat of his wild, undependable heart. Because although he may have called out into the air as he drove away ‘I’ll not be back!’ and gone miles and years from the hills and his father’s music – his father’s ‘Damn music!’, what he used to say for a long time when anyone asked him about it, in the midst of parties or a busy London street – still the silence of being alone would always be with him like a return, like part of the tune his father played.

  So he’ll play his own ‘Lament for Himself’ – is what he knows about himself by now, this one John Callum MacKay, when this story begins – I don’t mind – that it’s always been this way. Pills. Quietness. Nothing counting for anything. Only hills. Only sky. The past is there but it’s like an empty cloth spread out with small things set against it, and all he can do now is try and hold on to the small things, the details and remember them, see them, turn them into little notes and embellishments that maybe later he can use. There are certain small things he knows, for example, that already he has seen, that come into his mind as phrases, little sequences of notes. There’s the sound of his mother’s singing, for example, or the tap of his feet as he sits as a boy on a low stone wall, banging the backs of his shoes on the slate. These the kinds of small things that could be useful in the tune. There’s the Grey House behind him with some parts that are known to him, others not. The table in the dining room, that is known. Or the whisky bottle and the glass water jug. Or here another room where they’ve moved him, next to the little sitting room by the hall’s bright light, and the bed is made up for him. And here again, from the dark room, he sees quite clearly, under the eaves at the top of the house, another room that is long and low that is also his room, used to be, long ago, and in it he can see …

  A ball.

  A wooden ship.

  A little toy dog.

  … As if he could touch them. Though he never goes into that room now. He could pick them up. The ship with its pale blue funnel and the red and white ball. Because he was a child, once, in that room. He was a boy schooled by his mother there, down one end where there’s a desk and a board with chalks and he kept books on a shelf by the desk and he did his chanter practice on the chair that sat in the corner. See the room? He’s in the room. There’s the sound of the room.

  Could be in the tune.

  That he had ‘My Room’ on a piece of paper once, and stuck upon the door. That could have its own particular note, a run of notes. Of course it could. Something lovely to play, for he loved that room, and later, much later he went with Margaret there …

  But it’s nowhere near where they’ve put him now.

  For where they’ve put him now is in this other little room down the hall from the old Music Room29 where his father took lessons with pupils, where the men used to tune up or practised their chanters or sorted their reeds. And it’s dark here. In this old part of the House where his father’s pipers would always be. There’s nothing in here. It’s just dark. Whereas in that other room at the top of the House where he first learned from books and talked and played with his mother … The notes are everywhere around it.

  It’s because the room was his mother’s room and from the beginning … That there would be little runs of phrases and embellishments that would want to gather there in the Schoolroom at the top of the House where she could teach him to read and write and tell him stories and hold him on her knee. And she would have gone in there to sit, after her son had been sent away to school she would have sat at his little desk, thinking of him, thinking of how quickly the time has passed since he was born, then he was gone.

  And I wonder …

  Putting this together now, inserting this paper …30

  Did she get used to it? His mother? The sending away of her little boy, the saying goodbye before either of them were ready? Getting used to the particular kind of silence that follows the leaving of children, the road that stands open at the gate to take the children away? For it is another kind of loneliness, this other inevitable kind of silence that carries with it no sense of choice. As minute by minute, one thought after another, the children take themselves apart from us and all the contents of their conversations, all their many words, only preparation for that single word: goodbye.

  They write a letter home maybe, but then the letters rarely come. Less talking then … And less … Less … So in the end you may as well come to think of the wind, the grass as your children. The garden, all the little flowers. May as well make silence your daughter or your son.

  narrative/2

  The people at the House and what they thought of him

  Iain

  It’s all just more work for them. Is how he sees it. For his wife. His daughter. They just work for him as they always have, from back in the early days. Just more work, more cleaning, more meals. More sheets to strip and replace on the beds, more tidying away to do after the big parties at night with the pipes going until dawn, and the glasses cluttered through the sitting room and in the hall, and the door left open sometimes into the morning from where they’d been out drinking or pissing in the grass, for all Iain knows, taking their pipes out there and playing like idiots, God knows, to the moon.

  He hates it, this kind of work. For Margaret, Helen. The clearing up. The sorting out. He always has, and now, with him back here to stay – and all right there aren’t the parties any more, and there haven’t been for a long time, even so – the old boy’s so off with the fairies he can’t sit to anything but needs help with it all, with this or with that. And it’s Margaret who has to go running. Running after him and sometimes they’re together alone, she’ll be drawing back the covers of his bed or something like it, far too near him in a room.

  It’s too much.

  And it’s been going on too long.

  And look at him out there on the hill today. Like a child. A child that’s wet himself and is crying.

  Like a little boy.

  And Iain hadn’t known what to do, say.

  Though he hates the work of him, the way that other seems to draw to himself all thought and care …

  Yet he found himself, Iain did, out there out on the hill with him – and for the first time – what?

  Felt …

  Well, he’d gone over to him, anyway. Where he was shivering. Got a blanket on him. Got him home again.

  Margaret

  (from transcript)31

  I’ve never minded his little spells. You get old, that’s what happens and we should all be prepared for it and hope we’re treated with some patience when the time comes. Certainly we’ve gone here long enough in the same way, with things not changing and, yes, it’s been hard, sometimes, and there were days when he’d be gone for hours and I’d be worried about him, I wouldn’t know where he was, but I’ve never minded John, never.

  When he took the child, though. That shows at last how it’s different from before. That he’s gone that far. It makes everything different from how it was, no more pretending we can let time hang and drift. For it shows that he has well passed by now any kind of sense, those kinds of refinements in his mind, I mean, that he could do such a thing. And it’s been like that for a while, I suppose, but I didn’t want to see it, but now I do. That his mind must be fully gone.

  31 As described before, these transcripts are excerpts from a wealth of recorded and written material kept as part of the archive of The Grey House and are available for perusal and use. Further details of domestic life can be found in Appendix 8/i as well as in the List of Additional Materials, and in later sections of ‘The Big Music’.

  And I’ve got Sarah on the phone. After I called her today, to let her know there’s been this change in him. And I’m guessing she wants him back down there so she can keep an eye on things with him. But I won’t tell her everything about what took place here today. Just let it hold a few more days even. I want to tell her instead: let Callum come. Send Callum. Ask him if he’ll come up and see his father. Let his father see him
, it’s what his father needs. I’ll call her myself and ask her: can Callum come?

  Helen

  (part transcript)

  What’s that poem that she loves? That home’s the place where, when you need to go there, they take you in?32

  It’s how she feels here.

  ‘And now,’ she says, ‘I have a daughter to look after. I have her to keep me. To hold me – for she, more than anyone, makes this place my home. In having her here with me. Reliving my mother’s life that way. Returning to have her here as though it were my right.’

  So, yes, it is the poem that she loves. For though some might say she could have married her baby’s father, or could have chosen not to have a child at all, instead she made the decisions that would bring her back here, to the House where she herself grew up and came of age – because she knew that she could return here, that she’d be safe. And now that she is here … It’s as though that choice has become a responsibility: to make The Grey House her home again, reclaim her old room and lay out papers there upon a desk, turn on the lamp, start writing.

  In this way make somewhere for her daughter to grow up in where she might feel she could also belong, say: I came from here. This is where I was born. So she can grow up as Helen did, so give her the same wild places and the air and in time this very room where Helen sits now with the window open into the night. It is how Helen can make something for her daughter that is strong, to give her somewhere she can step out from, into the world. That she may go to the ends of the earth and know always who she is because she belongs to that one place, and that place was her beginning.