The Big Music

by Kirsty Gunn

  Just as he’s never been here at the House this time of year before – when it’s so dark now, and so cold.

  As he turns from the window, turns.

  And there on the sideboard by the whisky is a recording of one of his father’s tunes. He picks up the recording.

  And terrifying, yes. To be back in this country of his father’s now, at the time of his father’s leaving it. To be in a place of such emptiness and bitter beauty, bitter cold. There’s the endless light but also the dark this time of year, like a cloak to cover them all until the spring will come again as it will come but how long to wait …

  And here’s the recording in Callum’s hand, written on the case, from fifty years ago:

  Ceol Mor/23.41

  So that everything – Callum is aware of it now – is here where it needs to be. This House alone in the landscape, and his place in it, lit rooms in the dark. Beyond the thick glass of the window, the fires, lamps in small rooms, the entire hillside falls down around him, all the air, the storms, all the riverfalls, coming in off the lochs, the straths, down from all the high streams …

  And looking back through the dark through the window, from out in the open land, there’s his father’s chair, the pipes lying like an animal at his feet silent for now but any minute he’ll pick them up in his arms, his father will knock the bag into place beneath his arm, straighten the drones which start up that second, tuning them – the first ‘A’ – then a better – higher – ‘A’ to ‘A’.

  This.

  And this.

  And this.

  Callum turns on the CD – turns the volume right up – and his father begins to play.

  insert/John Callum Sutherland

  No wonder he got to London after Edinburgh so fast!

  ‘No wonder!’

  There’s his own voice saying the words!

  ‘Johnnie!’ he calls out – or is that his father? Calling for him?

  ‘Johnnie!’

  Or is it his own voice he can hear?

  It’s all dark here, in the room – only it must be his father talking. Or his grandfather. His grandfather or his own voice he can hear – or could be any one of them, all of them in this together – and it is no wonder either! That he got himself fixed up there, in that big city! Away from his father and the flex and with his own business, too, and nothing to do with the old man by then, nothing at all! So he would put himself apart! From that old man and from his land and his music and all his concerns! So he would get out of bed on it, so he would! Just get up right now and take him on, his father. Like on the hill before, this morning, and he’d had a few words with him then, after all the time they’d been apart, they’d met and they’d spoken – and he’ll say a few more words with his father now, too, if his father’s here in the room. For it was a good thing, it was, that he did it! Went away! A man would do it! Set himself apart from his father, well apart, so he can make his own way in life! He feels it still – the setting of himself away from this place and from the past. So let him stay up there, he’d thought back then. His father. Let him. With his mother. Let the pair of them sit up there if that’s what they want, what they want to do.

  ‘I’ll not be back to crouch at their fireside, listen to the silence all around!’

  ‘I’ll not be back!’

  Is what he used to say – to friends, to people he once knew. And he can hear now that they are his own words he is listening to in the dark. ‘I’ll not be back!’ they say. As though the words themselves are company, and talking back to him as though they are familiar as those people who were out on the hill with him this morning, his father, his son – and someone else. The boy who was himself once. He’s here, too. That boy who remembers the touch of his mother’s cheek, the scent at her neck. The rough tweed of his father’s cuff and the crack of the flex at the back of his leg, the smart of that clear knowledge at the burn and cry of his skin, the blood that came and the ugly mark that his father didn’t care for him at all. Hated him even. That is him, too, who is lying here. The same boy. And they put a needle in him today, to keep him quiet, and they took him away with them, sure enough. Off the hill. Away from all the light and the air …

  But he came back.

  Remember?

  That day at the funeral when everyone was there?

  He came back then, to stay. And everyone his father had ever known was there that day – though who were they? All those people? He didn’t know them. Like a whole life come up to take his mother by the hand and every one of them a stranger. With the piobaireachd being played by a soldier – ‘MacKay’s Lament’, and it was one of his father’s favourite tunes – a grey tune in the grey air. Thin and high and lovely through the upper register on a day that had cold in it then too, winter, and he’d come home then, hadn’t he? With the tune? To lie here, himself the stranger.

  Is how his thoughts are running now. Fast and low.

  So it’s his own life, not his father’s life, that’s come to nothing. So the pills are flushed away and the food is not taken. None of it matters. For the thoughts are running low and fast and lovely. Up before dawn this morning and away from them all like a hare on the hills, away from the dogs, gone, and not his scent left even to guide them.

  Is in his mind now.

  To have left them all and be away.

  Up at dawn and to the Little Hut, he’ll get there. Out on the hills and far from them all to the secret place and the child with him – to stay there with him for the rest of it, for the tune to be done. New life coming out of old. Green shoots for the grouse to feed on after the heather’s been burned way back to soil.

  And they won’t find him then, old Johnnie. Won’t find the old grey hare for he’s gone.

  narrative/3

  The people at the House and what they thought of him

  Helen

  And I don’t know who Callum is. Or where he belongs. His father no longer there in the little sitting room where he used to wait. After a time, I suppose, he stopped waiting – for his son to return home. And it’s been a while, anyhow, since he’s been able to sit up for any length of time in that chair of his. Though right up until yesterday he asked to have the recordings of certain tunes played at night so he could hear them from his bedroom. As though he were still in the little sitting room, perhaps, on his own and with a dram. Listening to the same recordings or playing himself, like he used to, all the tunes he’d composed over the years. The Music Room they used to call it, in the old days.

  Even so, though it’s quiet now, my mother will go through to light the fire there. Each evening, early, she’ll crouch at the grate and put the match to the clean arrangement of twigs and paper I set for her in the morning. I’ve watched her, still kneeling while the flame catches, flares up and starts through the paper and the peats, staying close, making certain the fire is good. Then she returns to the kitchen, heats through soup, rolls, puts the water on to boil for tea. It’s her routine, part of who she is. What she does keeping faith with a certain order, is how I think of it. Her present embodying all that is in her past.

  When I come down from my bedroom – for Katherine is settled now and sleeping – to take the things through, the tray with the tea on it, the soup and the bread, my mother is away upstairs and Callum is standing at the chair where his father used to sit. There’s music playing, he’s turned the stereo on, something of his father’s though the notes are too bright on the recording and not as sweet and soft in the embellishments as when he used to play the tune himself in this same room. The volume is up high enough for Callum not to notice me open the door, but not so loud that I can’t still hear the dogs, intermittently now, but they’ve been at it ever since he arrived, poor beasts.

  I set the tray down on the small table by the window and Callum sees me.

  There is nothing, at this second, we can do, either of us, or say.

  Iain

  He could have gone out to the kennels at least – but he’s not done that. Thoug
h the noise won’t let up until they’ve satisfied themselves they’ve seen him, got the smell of him.

  But he never went.

  ‘Be quiet!’

  So I was the one yelling at them. When I’d taken his damn bag from him and you’d have thought then he might have turned back – there’s one old retriever there who he’d still remember if he bothered himself at all. But he just walked on ahead into the House empty-handed.

  Like his father before him.

  You could say that.

  No thought for anyone else.

  And –

  ‘Be quiet!’ I’d shouted at the dogs – but animals. They know. And you can’t always will them. No amount of what I said or did was going to stop them wanting out and into the House if they could, and all over him, knowing something was different here, someone come back only they’ve not been able to get the scent from his hand to know if he belongs here, if he’ll stay.

  Helen

  Callum says, after a few beats, ‘Helen.’

  The tray is there. The soup. The tea.

  He is facing me so I can see how he’s changed.

  ‘Helen’ he says again – and then, like someone’s just told him to, turns away to put the music down.

  ‘I heard about the baby’ he says then. ‘From your mother.’

  He’s been drinking. He fiddles with the volume control, turning it up, right up and then down, then up again, too loud.

  ‘And my father’ he says. ‘Margaret told me about that, too. What he did. About yesterday and taking –’ Suddenly it’s quiet. He’s turned the switch off completely.

  He straightens up to face me.

  ‘She’s fine now’ I say. I look fully at him, into his eyes. I can see everything there.

  ‘She’s okay’ I say. ‘She’s sleeping.’

  And I want to fall against him.

  Fall.

  Like I always wanted to fall. Like Katherine Anna should be his daughter. Like I should be his wife.

  Fall, Helen.

  Fall.

  Fall.

  Margaret

  He looked awful when he got in. Frightened, is how I’d put it. His face – like that. Like a knife. And tired, of course he’d be tired, after that long drive, coming all that way – but something more than tiredness in him. Reminded me straight away of how he used to be when he was young, getting up here at the beginning of the summer, the way he used to arrive with John, the two of them together, the tall father and his son, getting out of the car.

  That was long enough ago.

  Long enough.

  But he was up early this morning of course, Callum, and that may be part of it, why he looked the way he did – it was three o’clock or thereabouts, he said, when he left London. So it would have been like driving through the middle of the night for most of it. And that might explain something of his appearance – the feeling showing in his face of being shocked out of time, kind of. Leaving his wife and finding himself back here with us, his father in the condition that he’s in.

  And I had to tell him, and straight away. What his father had done.

  And Iain also told him that Helen had come home, that she’d had a child.

  So there’s also that.

  As well as everything else.

  And it’s a lot. For him to be taking in.

  His father. And Helen. Helen’s child …

  Not his child.

  A lot to find out about so soon in and of course it would show on his face, poor man. Poor boy. Always the look on his face when he arrived, all those years ago, of shock and fear and not knowing where to put himself, what to do, who to be.

  Callum.

  It’s all right, son. Come here to me.

  Helen

  ‘A baby’ he’s saying. And I can see the whisky bottle on the sideboard behind him yet even with the drinking it’s as though there’s light around him. Here in this room, as I see him, after so much time away from us … So it takes time for me, just then, to hear what he’s saying, to take him in as I do, everything about him, with the light collecting all around him, holding him, so it does take time …

  But it takes time for him, too.

  Callum.

  There so close I could reach out and touch him, my hand at the side of his face. The light holding us both like a press, taking away all the air between us. Then he says my name again – ‘Helen’ – and in one movement comes towards me and at that moment my baby starts up to cry.

  ‘You should go to your father’ I say.

  Though he doesn’t seem to hear me, his face clouded by tiredness and the whisky, and he’s looking at me as though I might have said something different, as I might have, with the light all about him, about us, I might have … But my daughter is there, needing me, and his father is waiting and …

  ‘He’s been asking after you’ I say –

  And that breaks it. My words. Katherine crying upstairs. Whatever it was, holding us before, the press of light, and time and timelessness. He seems to stumble.

  ‘I know what happened’ he says, but he seems confused now. By me. By his father. By the idea, maybe, of the two of us together – two names, two people side by side in his mind. ‘I know what my father did’ he says. ‘Margaret told me – your baby –’

  Your baby.

  Those words in his mouth.

  He looks away.

  And for a minute, though she’s crying now and I must go to her, I want to stay. Tell him everything, tell it all. For it’s true, she is my daughter, Callum – and nothing to do with you – my child who was picked up from her basket yesterday morning when she was sleeping and taken off to the hills …

  Your baby.

  My child, who I thought, yesterday morning, I might never see again.

  My baby.

  My child.

  My daughter.

  And nothing to do with you at all.

  But not as simple as that either. And part of me wants to explain that to him, to Callum …

  Your baby.

  About the way she was taken – because otherwise how could he ever understand? About why his father would steal my daughter away as he did, to have her with him up there in the hills? Because if I don’t tell him, none of it makes any sense to him – why would it? And part of me wants to tell him now, everything, the story of us together, how his father is wrought in with us here, so twisted into the makings of this place, to me and Margaret and my child, our lives here and Iain, too … That nothing’s as simple as: Your baby.

  Though, God knows, I wasn’t happy that John took her off the way he did. God knows that it was a terrible thing, to take a baby away like that, a terrible thing and it’s right that Callum would be horrified by his father when he heard about it, and ashamed … But if I could just explain to Callum, too. How his father’s carrying away of my daughter, my daughter, and my mother’s daughter’s daughter …

  If I could just explain:

  ‘It’s not as simple as you might think.’

  Not as simple – as though his taking her were a crime or confusion or bad intent – when:

  I want to say to him:

  ‘Your baby, my Katherine Anna …

  ‘She’s your father’s granddaughter, too.’

  And from the moment she was born all she’s heard is the sound of the pipes playing on our father’s recordings, Callum. Our father. So she knows them like you and I know them, all the notes, all the semibreves and embellishments of that strange mismatched scale of his. Our father. You know how he sounds, Callum – and for her, too, he is also familiar. Her hands forming little fists up at the side of her head as she slept those first days but still hearing that particular music of our father through her dreams …

  If I could say all of these things, but of course I don’t say them.

  So that Callum will never know, any more than his father will know … That none of this could ever be as simple as: Your baby. That although, yes, it was unknown to me that my daughter wou
ld be taken by an old man, and so early in the morning that he could get far, far away … And, yes, terrible for me to be blank and powerless with the fear of what might happen, then, what he might do … Yet it’s also not strange that my daughter would be so taken.

  ‘When it was her grandfather who took her, Callum’, if I could say that. ‘My father. Your father. So she’s part of him, my Katherine Anna. That’s why he wanted her out on the hills, now he’s old and dying and can hear only silence in the air. That’s why he wanted to keep her with him, to hold her in his arms.’

  But I can’t say any of it. I have to go to my baby now. And he knows nothing, Callum. Nothing. He doesn’t live here. He wasn’t here yesterday when it happened, when his father stole my child away. He hasn’t seen his father, not for ten years, more. He doesn’t know him, the reasons for what he did, why he might have done it. Though he may go on talking about it, saying now, ‘I don’t know what I can do to make up for my father, Helen. If only I’d been here. I could have stopped it. Could have stopped him. I could have helped you.’

  Callum.

  And starting to be distraught now, like he used to get upset when we were children, worrying about something, something to do with his father, what he should be doing, what he’s not doing. Something wrong.

  ‘It’s okay’ I say to him. Quietly, gently.

  I have to go.

  ‘Shhh …’ I say, ‘There’s no need …’ for I’m calming him down. ‘Shhh …’ – like I used to when we were young. You don’t have to say anything, Callum. You don’t have to do anything at all.

  Because there’s nothing he can do. As there was nothing he could do then, either, when he was a boy – to feel better about his father. He doesn’t know him. He was never there to know. So just leave it at that, Callum. Let him go. Forget about your father. We can take care of him here. We’ve taken care of him for a long time. Just go in and say goodnight like you have to.

  I must go. My daughter is crying. All I can do is go to her – so I’ve turned to leave but Callum says then, ‘Tell your father I won’t be needing him tomorrow.’