by Jackie Kay
I was a traditional boy in an untraditional house. I was always going about the place freaked out and embarrassed. My parents were not like other people’s parents. Whenever they came to my school they stuck out like a sore thumb. I don’t know what it was. A different life makes people look different. Even their skin. Their clothes were more glamorous. They didn’t look like they worked a nine to five. I wanted parents that looked like they worked a nine to five. It was bad enough with all that jazz never mind this. My life was unconventional. A lot of my childhood was spent on the road. Touring. Place to fucking place. I’d have been happier at home watching Star Trek with a bowl of cornflakes. Too much, it was. All that razzamatazz. Other kids envied me and I envied other kids. That’s it. Grass always greener. Kids of bohemian parents long for a square meal on the table every night at five-thirty. My mate Sammy knew that Tuesday was fish pie day and Wednesday was steak and kidney. I’d have loved that. When I stayed in my mate Sammy’s house, I loved everything being regulated. But Sammy hated it. I kept saying we could swop. I mean I’d already swopped from the mother who had me; so why not again. But Sammy lost his bottle and couldn’t ask. I suppose I was boring as fuck. I’d have liked to have been made to have a bath every night in the same house in the same town. My mother was strict about my homework. Had to take it around with me wherever we went. I remember practising reading in dingy old jazz clubs before my father went on. I liked that. Sitting at a brown table with a Coke and a book. A lot of the time my mother would not want to go with my father on the road on account of my schooling. But he was unusual for a jazz man. He wanted his family with him. It’s pretty ironic really. If we didn’t go with him, he’d come back with a hangover and a hang-dog look on his chops. He got nervous or superstitious if we didn’t go. And pissed.
I used to think he had affairs at times like those. All men are bastards, including myself. I used to think I was quite cool being able to think like that. Once, I even asked my mother how she’d feel. Just to stir things up a bit. Send the dust flying. She said he never would be unfaithful and gave me an odd smile that makes perfect fucking sense now. See that’s what I mean. I’m going to have to go back over my whole life with a fine-tooth comb and look for signs like that. I’ve got to do it. Jesus. It’s embarrassing, that’s the worst of it. Pricks saying, Really, Cole, didn’t you know? Bastards asking me questions. I’m so embarrassed I could emigrate. Just get the fuck out any fucking where. That’s what I wanted to do when the shit first hit the fan. Just get the fuck out of this country.
I couldn’t miss his funeral. No matter what he’d done to me. Just couldn’t miss it. I considered it. Kept me awake the whole night before the morning of his funeral. But I’m too superstitious.
I never liked jazz. Everybody who came to our house, all they ever talked about was jazz. I got so bored I could have bored a hole in my own skull. If I was a fanatic I’d have been over the moon. But I wasn’t. Some of my father’s friends suspected me. I don’t know what of. Maybe they thought I didn’t deserve him for a father. Probably they thought I was a sulky, yellow pain in the ass with no personality. Those guys liked personality. They liked people speaking out and being outrageous. I was not at all extrovert. I liked the dark corners of sulking. I liked sliding along the walls of our house in a state of chronic depression. I liked counting the blackheads of my acne. I didn’t care. I was in my own world. I pretended I didn’t give a flying fuck what my father thought of me. But I did. I suppose I wanted him to be proud of me as a man, as a black man. I fucking worshipped him.
I goes in my father’s bedroom. I am six years old. I opens their wardrobe. My daddy keeps his trumpet in here. I opens the big silver box, and there it is, all shiny inside. I touched it. I did touch it. Then I strokes it like I’ve seen my father do and it purrs. I runs my fingers over the keys then along the fur, the purple fur in the box. My fingers are burning hot. I tells it a story about a magic trumpet like itself. Then my mum finded me. I can’t make anything up. She says, Colman, what are you doing? Get out of your father’s trumpet. So I close the silver lid and push it back into the wardrobe. Daddy must have forgotten to take his trumpet, I says. I hope it doesn’t make him bad luck, I says. As if I was worried about it.
How did they pull it off? I mean you have to get a marriage certificate and stuff like that. How did they do it? I’m not sleeping nights trying to work this one out. Part of me thinks, Chuck it in, Cole. Give it up. But the other part of me is pure obsessed with it. Every time I try to put it out of my mind, some other fucking question pops up like a fucking jack-in-the-box.
How did they get me? I mean no adoption agency would have done that then, would they? I mean they don’t even do it now all that easily. I was reading some rumpus about some couple of blokes that wanted to adopt this little boy. I mean fair enough; good luck to them, it’s not my problem.
There’s nobody else. No brothers or sisters. Just got me. They got me from the Scottish Adoption Agency in Edinburgh. 1962. I was born in 1961 but they had to wait a few months.
They told me that agency was extremely pleased with them given my colour. They said the agency called them ‘a find’ as I remember. A find. I am the same kind of colour as my father. We even look alike. Pure fluke. Or maybe I copied his smile so much I look like his carbon copy. Anyhow this was long before all this transracial adoption business. So it was an accident. Funny how bad luck can turn into good luck and then back to bad luck again. Story of my life. I’ve always been a self-pitying bastard. Now I’ve got good cause, I have. I’d rather have had some bod that was an army officer, some wanky accountant, some asshole businessman, man, any fucking ordinary man would have done. I think the agency must have thought they’d have had trouble placing me if Joss and Millicent Moody hadn’t come along.
We moved from Glasgow to London when I was seven. I got rid of my Glasgow accent. Well, almost. Some people claim they can still hear strains of it. My father clung on to his. Determined that everyone would know he was Scottish. When I came home with my cockney accent, my father got all cut up. He’d shout, ‘Speak properly!’ Seriously. It was a fucking nightmare moving down here with that accent. I got ribbed. Non stop. Got it both ways. London was seething, racist. I don’t remember much about Glasgow. I remember the inside of my gran’s house in Kirkintilloch. All her ornaments. The smell of her mints on her breath. Her big high bed. I only had the one gran, my mum’s mum. My dad’s mum died before I was born. My memory’s shit. I got a bike once for my birthday. Must have been six. It was bright green. Brand new. I thought I’d never learn to cycle, then one day I suddenly did. That’s it. My father kept telling me I was Scottish. Born there. But I didn’t feel Scottish. Didn’t feel English either. Didn’t feel anything. My heart is a fucking stone.
I’ll go down their house and look for the important papers bag. My mother’s not there now. She’s gone to Torr. I’ve got keys. I’ve always had keys to their house. I’ll let myself in and raid the bureau. My mother kept anything important in an old leather bag that looked like a doctor’s bag. All the shit is in there. Do people get a marriage certificate? I fucking don’t know. There must be a birth certificate though. I’ve got no idea what it says on my father’s death certificate. I suppose it must say Joss Moody. I’ll need to find that out too.
I’ve never been a nosey bastard in my life. I wasn’t the sort of kid who hung about and earwigged at the door or at the top of the stairs. If something forced me to listen, I’d listen. But this. This is different. I’ve got a right now. It’s my life. I can go and snoop and prowl and sneak about the place. I can take things out and not put them back. I will. I’ll do any of it. I don’t care who it upsets.
My father was nice to everybody. Even though he was famous. He was pleasant to people. Smiled and talked to fans. Wrote bits of letters to people. See, all those people, they’ll be as flabbergasted as me. The fucking Joss Moody Fan Club will have to close down, man.
We were poor till I was ten. I didn’t get h
ardly anything new. Well, except that new bike. Everything else had been worn by somebody. I wore other people’s kids’ clothes that my mum got at Oxfam. I used to imagine the boys that had worn the dufflecoat before I did. What their life was like. I used to imagine them as I was doing up the toggles. My dad hung out in those really grotty jazz bars. More dens than bars. I can still see myself sitting there, wrapping up my empty crisp packet into a fake cigar, puffing. Exciting, they were, when I was very little. He always practised in the top room of some pub because the Wee Jazz Band, or the Delta Dog Swingers, or the Jugg Stompers or the Joss Moody Dream Band or the Shoogie Woogie Boogie Men or whatever – I’ve lost count of all the weird names my father had for himself – couldn’t afford a decent place to practise. He was always coming back then, looking deflated because some pub had turfed him out and said they needed the room for a function. That way of living seemed to go on for ages. We went to Torr every summer because it was cheaper. My dad was always counting his takings. He’d get me to sit on the floor, spread out a newspaper, and build pounds, towers of sixpences, threepenny bits, crowns. I liked doing that; it made me feel rich. I didn’t like it when my father took all the money and put it in a plastic bag to be taken to the bank. I never understood why the bank deserved our money. I’d get a shilling for a pokey hat from the van.
When we moved down to London I still called an icecream a pokey hat when I was with my parents and called it an ice-cream with my mates. There were lots of words like that that I used because it cheered them up. I was practically schizophrenic. But now I come to think about it, I wasn’t nearly as schizophrenic as him. Doing what he did is in a different league from saying mocket to one person and dirty to another.
If he was angry with you, you knew about it. It was worse than a slap or a slinging match. He’d just go all cold and quiet on you and it’d give you the creeps. He’d say things like, ‘Colman, I’m disappointed in you.’ Once he was really angry with my mother and my mother was all upset. She put a tea towel over her face and cried underneath it. I tried that. Put a tea towel over my face and cried when he was angry with me. I made big sighs behind it like I’d seen my mother do. Big sighs, made the cotton breathe with me. But my father never seemed to feel guilty like we wanted him to. If he was angry, he was justified. The tea towel never stopped him. Throwing the towel in. When he was seriously angry his face darkened like the sky when it’s about to pour down. Heaveeee.
There’s hardly any particular times I could talk about. Everything gets all jumbled up. I haven’t got a fucking clue what happened when I was nine. Don’t remember my ninth birthday. Not really. I do remember a few things. Like once I was on this bus with my mother and this black man got on. This was in Glasgow. So I’d be six or something like that. And somebody said something horrible to him, called him a fucking ape or some shit like that. And my mother, in a fucking flash, was on her feet giving the guy dokey. Saying she was ashamed to come from the same country as him and that he was pig ignorant. Pig ignorant. I remember that expression because it made me laugh out loud. Then I remember him staring at me, the nasty man, and saying to my mum, ‘No wonder,’ or something. And the black man who had been called an ape, I couldn’t take my eyes off him, was just sitting with his eyes low, looking at the bus floor. Embarrassed as fuck I expect. Then my mum grabbed my hand and we got off that bus and walked home. We’d got off too many stops early and I had to half-run to keep up with her rage. I don’t think she told my dad about that one. Just as well it hadn’t been him. I remember wishing my mum had just kept her mouth shut and not said anything. I was scared people were staring at me. It made me look at my own colour of skin when I got home. Maybe that was the first time I really noticed it. And I was sort of surprised by it. That’s about the longest memory I’ve got and unfortunately it doesn’t really involve my father, does it.
What gets me is why he didn’t tell me. I can understand him keeping it from the rest of the world maybe, if he thought that was the key to his success, but why couldn’t he tell his own son? Sometime or fucking other. I’m over thirty. I’m not some adolescent or some ‘wee boy’. There was plenty of times he could have said something. I never had a bath with him or saw him or her naked. But then plenty kids never saw their parents naked. That isn’t all that unusual. I mean some parents were just uptight. Kept their fucking privates to themselves. Sammy got to see his dad’s willy. Sammy’s family were dead casual about all that. Once I saw Sammy’s mum’s bra hanging on the back of a chair in their living room. I stared at it for fucking ages. Sammy said his dad’s willy was so big it worried him. He didn’t want one that big, he didn’t think it looked nice. He made it sound really horrible. Said it was the size of a big carrot and had lots of dark hairs at the top. Wild. I was appalled and fascinated. I tried for a couple of weeks after Sammy saw his dad’s ‘wee man’ to get to see my dad’s, but it never happened. The door to their bedroom was always shut. Tight. And I was probably a bit relieved. I never pulled it off. Just as well. Imagine if I’d been confronted with a big frigging mound of venus.
My parents liked Sammy. He was the only one to get to come to Torr with us. I used to be convinced that my father liked Sammy better than me. It made me jealous. Sammy and my dad talked more, laughed more. Once my father even gave Sammy a shot of his trumpet which drove me mad. He told Sammy he’d got the hang of it really quickly.
Things are falling into place. He never taught me to swim. No wonder. Where would he have got changed? Said he couldn’t swim. He never went to the doctors, said he was terrified of them. Even the urinals. He never fucking used the urinals. Said they were common and you could catch things and there were unsavoury men who could be dangerous. When I stop to think about it; which is what I have done; stopped to think; stopped my whole life just to think about this, talk about this; stopped seeing my mates; stopped my job; stopped sleeping at night; when I stop to think about it, it is spilling out all over the place. Everywhere I look it rears its head. Waves a menacing hand, says Hello There, I’m over here. I’ve made a complete idiot of myself. I am what my father called an eedyit. Eedyit.
Before I became Colman Moody, I was William Dunsmore. If I’d stayed William Dunsmore all my life I’d have been a completely different man. Definitely. I mean a William Dunsmore’s smile would be different from a Colman Moody’s smile. All my facial expressions would have been different. I bet even my walk would have been heavier if I’d been William Dunsmore. Heavy-footed. Maybe a bit lopsided. One of my favourite things, when I was a kid, was imagining what I’d have been like if I’d kept that name. I remember the day she first said the name. It seemed incredible that I could have ever been William Dunsmore. I laughed and said the name again and again. ‘William Dunsmore? Are you sure?’ I asked her. I didn’t like the name William or Willy or Bill. I was pleased to be called Colman, not William. But now I’m not pleased, not pleased at all. There’s not that many Moodys around. You just need to mention Moody and people think of the trumpet man that turned out to be a woman.
In fact if my father had wanted immortality, he couldn’t have connived a more cunning plan. This one puts the tin lid on it. If the jazz world was so ‘anything goes’ as my father claimed, then why didn’t he come clean and spit it out, man? The 1960s were supposed to be cool. Flower people. Big joints. Afghans. Long hair. Peace. Why not a woman playing a fucking trumpet, man, what was wrong with that?
I never fancied boys; no. I’ve always been one hundred per cent heterosexual, except for those times when I was about sixteen and my mates and me would have a joint and a communal wank listening to Todd or Genesis or Pink Fucking Floyd. Or watching the Old Grey Whistle Test on the box. I don’t like that hippy music any more. It was just a phase.
We didn’t talk a lot about me being adopted. To tell you the truth, I didn’t give a toss about my real parents. My thinking was if they weren’t interested in me, then I wasn’t interested in them. Simple as that. My mother would tell me that this other woman would have
loved me and found it hard to give me up. I just said yeah, yeah, and privately thought, Bollocks. I mean, if you love a kid you keep them, if you don’t, you give them up. Simple. Money don’t matter, what people think don’t matter. If you want a kid and you get a bun in your oven, you’ll fucking cherish the whining squirming brat, or not. I mean you don’t give your own kid the bum’s rush when it is first born and call that love, do you? What caring mother chucks her baby out on its raw arse and calls it love?
If I’d got the chance I’d have probably liked to see a photograph of my mother and one of my father. I don’t even know which one was black or where the black one came from. Haven’t got a clue. People are always coming up to me and asking if I’m from Morocco, Trinidad, Tobago, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Jamaica. Some asshole the other week was convinced I came from Hawaii. You look identical to the people there, he said. Stopped me dead in the street and says, Hey, are you from Hawaii? I dunno, I says. Then I thought the next fucker that asks me where I come from, I’m going to say, yes, I come from Hawaii, Morocco, Trinidad, or any place they ask. What does it matter anyway?
My father always told me he and I were related the way it mattered. He felt that way too about the guys in his bands, that they were all part of some big family. Some of them were white, some black. He said they didn’t belong anywhere but to each other. He said you make up your own bloodline, Colman. Make it up and trace it back. Design your own family tree – what’s the matter with you? Haven’t you got an imagination? Tell me really, that’s what I kept saying, tell me where your father was really from. Look, Colman, he said. Look, Colman, I could tell you a story about my father. I could say he came off a boat one day in the nineteen hundreds, say a winter day. All the way from the ‘dark continent’ on a cold winter day, a boat that stopped at Greenock. Greenock near the port of Glasgow when Glasgow was a place all the ships wanted to go. He came off that ship and although it was cold and grey, he liked it. He liked Greenock so he settled. Or I could say my father was a black American who left America because of segregation and managed to find his way to Scotland where he met my mother. Or I could say my father was a soldier or a sailor who was sent here by his army or his navy. Or I could say my father was from an island in the Caribbean whose name I don’t know because my mother couldn’t remember it. Or never bothered to ask. And any of these stories might be true, Colman.