The Big Music

by Kirsty Gunn

  And so he’d tried to stay away, Callum thinks, his father, as he himself has been away … But look where his father came to in the end. Only to his own father’s room. And Callum has been there before. For though his mother never knew, Margaret’s told him, a long time ago when he was a boy and she’d taken him by the hand to this same room, to show him: John says … When she’d touched him lightly on the head, remember? As she’d described what has already been detailed in the pages here? That just as at the end of his life this was where his grandfather came to, and his father before him, so would Callum’s father come to the same room one day. The box room.

  With the three suits waiting in the wardrobe, he doesn’t need any more, and she’ll put him into one of them on the day he dies.

  two/fifth paper

  Now that Callum has seen his father, said hello, wished him goodnight … Really, what is there left for him to do here?

  Because of course his father is not going to leave this place. What was Callum thinking? That he was just going to come back here – after all this time away? And take his father off, just like that, to London? What was he doing even letting his mother talk to him about it? I want you to go up there, Callum, and bring him home. For what home? London? Home? That’s not his father’s home. This is his father’s home. Here. Where he is. Where he has always been.

  So there is nothing he can do here. Callum. To turn this situation, change it. He’ll have to call his mother tomorrow and tell her. Tell Anna and the boys. That it’s not as simple here as he’d thought, ‘I’ll have to stay on, for a bit longer’ say. ‘Because the situation here, it’s fixed, my father’s fixed.’

  Just like Callum had thought –

  I’m not going anywhere.

  Those were the words. They’re sounding in Callum’s mind like his father has just said them. So of course he won’t be telling his father: Come with me, Dad. I’m here to take you to London. Mum wants you there. A hospital, doctors. She’s got it all worked out. He was never going to be able to influence his father in any way. Like before, in the little bedroom, those words coming for him, out of the dark … That was his father there, speaking, but the whole situation here is no longer just about one man, his father is part of something that’s gone on longer than that … His father, his father’s father … Because nothing is any longer as simple as: now. Now that his father is at the end. Now that the present has become the past, and all the pasts are collected into this one present Now. So what chance does he have, Callum, one son? Coming in so late in his father’s life to say: Come away with me, Dad. Come to London, Mum’s waiting. That’s a joke, that’s never going to happen. It was never going to happen.

  He feels exhausted. He needs to go to bed. Tomorrow he’ll make the call, tell Anna and his mother – what? That he will leave? Stay? Say he’ll come back to London but later? Or stay on, but if so, how long will he have to stay? Days? Weeks? He can’t imagine any of this. Can’t think about it. Can’t think any of it through. Realises, in the thickness of his tiredness and his whisky, that he doesn’t even know what he’s going to do this minute, this second, let alone tomorrow, anything else. Where is he even sleeping? Iain or Margaret – they’ve put his bag somewhere and he doesn’t even know where that is. Everything changed since his father’s been moved downstairs and not in his old room and everyone in bed now and asleep, so who can he ask: Where is my bag? Where am I staying? With his father no longer in his room and all of upstairs may be closed off, for all he knows, Margaret arranging things differently now, and Callum supposed to be somewhere else in the House, and not where he used to stay when he was a boy? He hasn’t asked anything. So he doesn’t know. Where his bags are. Where his bed is. He knows nothing here.

  He’s exhausted. That’s the only thing he knows. The whisky he drank earlier has left an edge of grittiness in his eyes. He wants to go to sleep. He switches off the light in the sitting room. Just think about everything tomorrow, ask Margaret about everything tomorrow. He closes the door behind him and makes his way in the half-dark to the foot of the back stairs, starts up them to the landing – but the first floor looks shut up and dark. It’s as though all the rooms are closed off, and his old room down the L-shaped end of the hall … Sure enough when he gets to it the door is closed, stiff when he pushes it – and inside it’s empty.

  So he’s not sleeping in there. He was right, Margaret has changed things – and instead the one light that’s been left on at the top of the main stair is by his father’s old room. He walks towards it, sees the door is open. Someone –

  Margaret?

  Has gone in there and placed his case by the bed, turned down the covers. Turned on a little lamp. Someone –

  Helen?

  Has been in here. In his father’s old room and prepared it for him. Knowing he’ll be coming here. Knowing he’ll be tired. Imagining him … Pushing open the door … Seeing that it’s light in here and it’s warm … Seeing his case sitting there by the side of the bed.

  And somehow …

  To be seeing that now, the case placed there, by his father’s bed with the covers turned back …

  To see his jacket there, laid on his father’s bed …

  He needs to lie down.

  To think that Helen’s been here. To think that she knew.

  That he’d end up here. That she had turned back the covers for him in that way …

  Oh, Helen, Helen – but he wants to close his eyes …

  He wants to leave this room, he must leave it. He doesn’t belong here. Not in this room of his father’s that Helen’s been to before him, with his jacket and his case.

  Please.

  Helen.

  If he prayed, he’d be praying now.

  To think he’s supposed to finish this day here. In his father’s bed. In his father’s old room. With Helen somewhere in the House. When he’s supposed to be here for his father, and none of this about Helen, but about his father, and he’s supposed to be here for his father, and he’s had too much to drink and he’s tired and he must leave this room, please, he must get out of this room …

  But she’s been here before him, Helen. She’s turned down the bed.

  And as he thinks those two sentences, he’s sitting down on the bed and it yields to him, lets him in, in a way that’s so comforting, so inviting of his rest … That in a second he knows … He’ll be asleep. Despite Helen. Despite the soft light from the lamp she’s left on for him, the low light and the heavy curtains drawn against the darkness and it’s warm here and it’s peaceful and he’s so very, very tired …

  Because he has the energy for nothing. No thought, no piece of a sentence, no desire or bit of hope. Because nothing’s going to happen here. He may as well call his mother in the morning and tell her so … That there’s nothing … Any of them … Can do … Only … Sleep.

  He’s so very tired. Starts taking off his clothes where he’s sitting, his shirt, his shoes …

  And really, what was he doing … Even thinking of doing … Coming here?

  I’m not going anywhere.

  He doesn’t know. He never knew anything, Callum. He’s always been the outsider here. Remember? And his father may have spoken to him, into the dark – but they’re not in this together, him and his father. Those few weeks each summer, they count for nothing. A few years, that was all.

  Coming here … Arriving for the first time and he was already, how old? Nine?

  He unbuttons part of his shirt and pulls it over his head.

  Yes, he was nine years old.

  He’s exhausted.

  Nine years old when he first came here.

  So tired he can’t move. As he unbuckles his trousers, still sitting on the bed.

  Nine years old.

  Nothing like being born here.

  Coming here for the first time when he was nine, nothing like. A few weeks in the summer, that was all. Arriving that first time, he was always someone who was just arriving.

  Helen there
with her mother at the door.

  What are you doing here?

  Remember?

  What’s your name? How old are you?

  Her looking at him with those steady eyes of hers.

  My name’s Callum. I’m nine.

  And him looking back at her, remember? But also not able to look.

  Well, I live here, she’d said.

  His eyes are closed by now. He’s lying on the bed. He has to take his shoes off, his trousers …

  I’m older than you but I’ll be your friend if you want.

  But for now, just lying …

  I’ll be your friend, if you want to. Do you want to?

  Looking at him.

  What?

  When he was nine years old, then ten, then eleven …

  Be friends?

  When he has to take his shoes off, then his trousers …

  Do you want to?

  When he wasn’t ever belonging.

  What?

  With the grandfather and grandmother he’d never met long dead …

  Be friends?

  And always he was just arriving …

  Do you want to?

  Always …

  Yes.

  He sits up, pushes off his shoes. His socks … His trousers, all his clothes …

  Helen.

  Please.

  Help me here.

  He gets into bed. Turns off the light. And from far away somewhere, somewhere else in the House altogether, as he falls into a deep sleep he hears a baby’s cry.

  Callum’s eyes start open. In the middle of the dark after dreams – such dreams! Has he woken? There was a cut of a cord – a flex – the harsh sting of it across his skin and – a boy, was it him? Sitting at the chanter in a big armchair? And the chair’s too big for him to sit in. His legs don’t touch the floor.

  ‘Play it again!’ comes the voice out of the dream – and he is awake! Eyes staring into the dark.

  ‘I can’t!’

  For it is completely dark here. He looks around and for a second can’t remember where he is. Then it comes back.

  That he’s in his father’s room. And it’s cold here. He feels cold.

  Part of him still in the dream – a man downstairs, sitting by the fire, but it’s cold and he’s crying, the little boy. Callum can feel the tears on his cheek. That the man would so hate him that he would whip him across the leg with the flex, shout, ‘Do it again! Play it again!’ Callum squeezes his eyes shut to stop the tears, but he can’t stop them – ‘I can’t!’ He’s cold and he’s crying.

  Then, as he starts to waken, hearing his own voice ‘I can’t!’ as he emerges from the dream, he is aware that someone is there, really there in the room with him, but not from the dream.

  Someone.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she whispers.

  He turns, and she is there, a shadow beside him, in the dark.

  ‘It’s me’ she says.

  Though he can barely see her.

  His hand goes up, instinctively, to touch her face.

  ‘I heard you shouting’ she says.

  ‘Helen?’

  ‘You were having a bad dream.’

  Then she takes his hand and puts it to her face. He can’t see her. It’s been … How long? Twenty years? Since she was last near him? Twenty years? Longer. It’s been for ever.

  ‘Helen?’

  And he can’t see her.

  ‘Shhh …’ She kisses his palm, the soft insides of his hand.

  ‘Shhh …’

  He can’t see her.

  Though she leans down to him, he can’t. Still he can’t see her.

  ‘Helen –’

  ‘Shhh …’

  Though he still can’t see her.

  ‘Shhh …’

  Still …

  Can’t …

  Still …

  ‘I’m here with you now’ Helen says.

  insert/John Callum

  It’s late. But the House is here. It’s looking after him.

  All through those years away, the false years, there’s been this place, waiting.

  And so he’d cast his eyes about the hills today, had he not? And claimed it all? The air, its sound? Only casting about him this fine day, the last of the summer in it, and the future in his arms … There was all the future then, as it’s in his head now, the fine late summer air and the Lullaby he’s made for the little one he’s carrying – and you see? He does know how to carry a child.63

  So – everything he needs, then, for the tune, completed.

  Even with the clouds slipping so there was darkness in the sky and he needs a lullaby then to stop the rain, her crying …

  Even so … Everything was there.

  As he took up his father’s life.

  And the life of his father’s father.

  Gathered up and collected in the set of notes that are playing now.

  And all of it …

  Perfectly … It’s been perfectly done.

  Where there’ll be no fault or smirring of the tune,64 the myriad of demi-semi-quavers of the third movement to mirror perfectly with their hundreds of embellishments the notes that precede it and the sequences all following in ready succession …

  Of his father, his father before him.65 One generation to the next, multiply articulated, line after line, in perfect fingerings …

  On and on and on, one movement to the next. Over one hill, to another …

  To there.

  To, ‘Hush, my darling.’

  ‘Hush.’

  And he should have married her.

  He knows that now.

  For what else is there but to hear the sound of the past coming up behind you as you walk towards the end?

  Only love.

  And, these past weeks, now … They may as well have been all his life.

  When each day he rises …

  And there’s the coldness of the rooms but then Margaret makes them warm again.

  There’s the smell of fires, the burning peat in flames and sometimes wood, and cooking. Soup, maybe, and maybe bread.

  A door opening somewhere, a far voice, a person calling out in the House. Iain it could be or Helen, or there’s the clear infant cry of Helen’s child.

  Then the nights come in again to the blackness of the glass. And dreams come …

  Like the ‘Play it again!’ or the crack of the flex. Like the sound of his own voice calling, out of the past, for his father to forgive him, ‘I promise I’ll try harder!’, and crying for his mother to come back whole out of the dead earth and pick him up and hold him …

  For people in this part of the country are lonely enough.

  There are large intervals in the music.66

  ‘I’ll not be back!’

  As though a theme all in breves67 to begin with.

  ‘I’ll not!’

  And the fingering, too, is spare.

  So, yes … Lonely enough.68

  But then there’s the dithis and the doublings as the sons come in.

  And their sons.

  So the singling.

  The doubling.

  And gradually, slowly, each white page is marked up with the variations and the turns, over time the whole manuscript crowded with the notes, the phrases, the bars all connected. Drawn in right there in black ink upon the stave, or at the bottom, on separate bars, notes jostling and calling. Filling the white space with a crowd of music …

  And yet all the while, as the theme busies itself and turns, plays and turns again, he sees himself fading, the player, this one man … His own notes getting softer, smaller, as he walks further and further towards the edge of the hill …

  For what can you do to stop a thing once you’ve started? You don’t stop it. Keep walking.

  Only to discover you’ve found the place where you started.

  Took your time to come back to us, didn’t you?69

  So just pull the blanket up, boy, right there to your chin, and listen, listen to it all around you
:

  The music that’s always been there in his head finally getting to hear itself be played.

  From childhood and manhood to age … All here, laying itself out like a map of all the places he knows and of his history and the people he has known, stranded together in this grass under his feet, spread out at his feet as he walks, further and further away …

  His own life turning to wave goodbye as he disappears over the brow of the hill …

  Then the crown, the last part, with Margaret’s note. The note that’s still to come in.70

  So that finally, with the end, there can be the beginning again.71

  Taorluath/final fragment

  The stag leaps/into vacancy … The pure air like a white page. Now that he’s stopped taking the pills and at the House they won’t know that he’s been gone. With this being the end of the summer and his last chance to make a go of things, get back up onto the hill … Look! He’s already there.

  1 Refer back to p. 8 and previous pp. 25 and 56 etc. of the Urlar for evidence of a first-person narrator involved in ‘The Big Music’ as though we have emerging an ongoing ‘note’ or particular tone in the tune. The reference to Iain Cowie and ‘my mother’ suggests this ‘sound’ or voice in the music belongs to Helen MacKay.

  2 Appendices 1–3 give full details of the region, including information about the Drumochta Pass as part of the definition of the Highland region; Endpapers and the List of Additional Materials show maps of the North East region.

  3 In later movements of ‘The Big Music’ we learn how John Callum MacKay returned to playing his father’s instrument, eventually beginning to compose music himself, after his father’s death. One of his early compositions, ‘The Return’, was always supposed to be based on his return to Sutherland after the years away – although notes and details that appear later in ‘The Big Music’ suggest that the title of that piobaireachd is ambiguous, that ‘The Return’ may also indicate his return to Margaret MacKay, whom he’d met at The Grey House some years prior to Callum Sutherland’s death. Indeed his notes show that the alternative title he gave that piobaireachd is ‘Margaret’s Song’. The List of Additional Materials shows that piobaireachd as a handwritten manuscript with that second – previously unknown – title. A full list of the compositions of JMS, as he always signed himself, is available in archive, and details of music composed, generally, at The Grey House appear in Appendix 9/ii.