by Jackie Kay
The next thing was a woman from the Daily Sky newspaper asking if she could come to interview her. Maggie said there was no way she was going to talk about her employers. They were kind to her. But the woman said it wasn’t going to be nasty, it was just to try to understand. Given Maggie was so close to the family, she thought she could help. Also the son, Colman, was helping. Also, there would be a sum of money.
The very next day at eleven in the morning Sophie Stones is sitting in Maggie’s front room, sipping a cup of tea – pretty cup with a saucer. The coffee table has been well polished up before she arrived. The carpet hoovered several times; you can’t get a carpet to look brand new unless you go over and over it. The cushions on the couch turned and plumped. The curtains taken down and fresh ones hung up. The sheets on her double bed changed. (Not that she will be showing Sophie Stones her bedroom, but she always changes her sheets when she has a guest in the house. It’s just habit.) Her sink scoured. Her toilet bowls bleached and shining. Air freshener sprayed. Inside windows cleaned. The front step brushed and washed. Every door in the house wiped down on the inside. All her kitchen units washed. Kitchen floor swept and mopped.
Maggie can see the girl look at the cleanliness of her home out of the corner of her eye. Too late now to tell her to go home and stop wasting her time. Anyway, it’s not every day she has a journalist in her front room. And Maggie has never seen her name in print.
The girl pulls out the tiniest little tape recorder Maggie has ever seen. She gets out a tiny tape too. Maggie doesn’t trust all these tiny things you can buy these days. ‘Just talk for a minute,’ Sophie says, ‘till I check it’s working? Tell me what you had for breakfast.’ ‘Well, I don’t eat breakfast,’ Maggie says, suddenly shy, like the tape is some kind of camera snapping her. Her voice has become self-conscious. She can’t stop it. The lilt flying up towards the sky like her voice is a helium balloon and she is running on the ground trying to get it back down. She can’t. Everything goes up at the end. As if everything is a question.
‘Say a bit more,’ Sophie says. ‘Count to twenty.’ Maggie feels silly sitting on her armchair counting to twenty into this tiny tape recorder in front of this Sophie Stones. How did she get herself into this? She must have spotted her nerves. She says, ‘Don’t worry, this is just a mini-interview.’ Tiny tapes and mini-interviews; what is the world coming to?
‘Great,’ Sophie says. ‘I’ll just ask you questions and you can answer them in your own time. Don’t rush. Don’t worry about the tape. Pretend it’s not there,’ she says, pushing it a bit closer to Maggie. The tiny thing looks quite sinister on her gleaming coffee table. ‘All right then,’ Maggie says. ‘Let’s get it over with.’ Her voice sounds all breathy now, she can hear herself breathing in and out with the rush of words. ‘What exactly was your job for the Moodys and for how long? (Tell me the years.)’ ‘I worked for the Moody family for four years.’ (She can hear her own breath back to herself. She never realized her breathing was so loud. How to shut it up? How to simply talk?) ‘I stopped two years ago because of family problems.’ ‘What did it involve?’
‘Well, I cleaned the whole house from top to bottom. It was a big house. Four bedrooms. Two bathrooms. Nice house. I liked it there. I liked seeing the place looking nice.’ (She can hear it herself. The falseness of her own ‘speaking’ voice.) ‘Of course, it didn’t stay that nice for long because by the time I came back the next week, the place was in a state again. They weren’t tidy people.’ The minute she’s said this, she regrets it. She doesn’t know what made her say it.
‘Were you ever at all suspicious about Joss Moody?’ Did he seem like a regular guy to you?’
‘If you are asking was he ordinary, no, he wasn’t ordinary,’ Maggie says. ‘The man was a musical genius. He could play that thing!’
‘I’m not interested in the music. I mean did you know he was a she?’
‘No. Could have knocked me down with a feather.’
‘Really?’
‘I still don’t believe it. You don’t think they made some kind of mistake?’
‘Oh no! This is for real.’
‘You hear about undertakers making mistakes. Look at that woman they pronounced dead and nearly buried her when they discovered she was alive.’
‘Look, it’s all fact. Her name was Josephine Moore.’
‘And that family who had to have the funeral twice because they had forgotten to put the body in the coffin! Are you sure there weren’t two bodies in the same parlour, one woman, one man, who looked alike and they just mixed them up? If they can mix up babies in the hospital, can’t they mix up the dead?’
‘So, you didn’t have a single inkling?’
‘No. Not one.’
‘What about his clothes? Did you do his laundry?’
‘They had a laundry service come and pick up his shirts and bring them back like brand new, all folded with tiny pins and covered in cellophane.’
‘So, nothing strange at all, as far as you could tell.’
‘There was one strange thing,’ Maggie begins.
Sophie leans forward tense as a cat. ‘Yes?’
‘One time, I’m cleaning his work room which was an amazing room, let me tell you. Full of photographs of musicians like himself, playing instruments. I don’t know all their names.’
‘Yes, yes. Go on,’ says Sophie Stones impatiently.
‘He had a big desk in that room. I always put back the papers exactly where I found them. But I’d lift them to polish underneath. He had strange writing, very small and curly. There were always lots of his own notes to himself about music everywhere. My eye caught a letter. I didn’t usually read his letters. It was the way the letter began that interested me. It began, “Dear Mum,” which was odd since Mr Moody told me his mother had died a long time ago.’
Sophie is right forward on her chair. ‘Really!’ she says. ‘Really!’ like she’s just won on the lottery. ‘What else did it say? Can you remember?’
‘Yes,’ Maggie says. ‘ “Dear Mum, I am enclosing some money for you. I miss you. I am very busy.” And so on. But the strangest thing was how the letter was signed. It was signed Josephine.’
‘My God!’ said Sophie. ‘So surely that made you wonder?’
‘No. What was I going to wonder? I thought to myself, Mr Moody must have written the letter on behalf of somebody else, maybe. But I remembered it.’
Sophie Stones smiles a huge mile of a smile.
‘I don’t suppose you still have keys to the house?’ Sophie Stones asks her.
‘No. I gave them back ages ago.’
‘Pity,’ says Sophie.
Maggie opens the door and Sophie Stones leaves her spotless house. Sophie takes Maggie’s hand and shakes it warmly. ‘You’ve been wonderful.’
Maggie says nothing. She watches her go down the three steps and get into the waiting taxi. She doesn’t even wave. As she turns to go back into her house, she sees the neighbour, who phoned that day to tell her the headline, standing at her window.
The money is sitting on her table. Five hundred pounds in cash. Maggie can’t stop herself. She has never in her life been handed five hundred pounds in the one gulp. She has to count it. And count it again. When she has finished counting it for the third time, she feels tired, exhausted. Maybe this is what it feels like to be rich, she thinks. Maybe the rich just get knackered all the time counting and thinking about money. She wonders what to do with it. Quickly, as if she’s just robbed a bank, she puts the money into a canvas bag, runs up her stairs and hides it in her wardrobe, behind the shoes at the bottom. That won’t do. She takes the bag from the wardrobe and puts it in her top drawer among her pants. She sighs. She pulls the money out of her underwear and puts it under her mattress. It comes to her again for the umpteenth time. Why did she do it? What could she have been thinking of? She leaves the money under her mattress for the time being. It is not a satisfactory place; she will have to do better than that. She will sleep on it. She goes
back down the stairs and puts the kettle on. She sees the keys to the Moodys’ house still hanging out of habit on the hook by her kitchen door.
TRAVEL:
London
Colman Moody lives in a ground-floor flat in Tottenham, north-east London. His father paid half of the sixty grand mortgage when he first bought it. Even so, he can’t manage the relatively small mortgage and is in debt at the moment, behind with his payments, receiving repossession threats. His damp flat, with its regular mice, ants and other livestock, is now worth twenty thou less than what he paid for it in the time when people like himself were encouraged by the government to buy. He is trapped there: the livestock, the wonky electrics that gobble up light bulbs, the smell of rotting mice under the floorboards, damp peeling paint on the dripping radiators, the kitchen units with their drawers falling through, the linoleum with its holes, its strange inexplicable bumps, trapped there unless he can get the money to split. His father told him he’d have to learn to manage his money and not do crazy things with it. But Colman has never learned to manage money. His father stopped giving him handouts. Told him it clearly wasn’t helping him. He’d need to stand on his own two feet.
He gets up this morning and staggers into the shower. The fucking shower doesn’t work properly and incenses him every time he uses it. It is either freezing his balls off or burning his back. He soaps himself, dashing in and out of the too hot or too cold water, swearing, fidgeting with the taps to try to get the blend right. Thinking, thinking all the time now about doing this book. He has been offered a sixty grand advance which would allow him to dump this heap of a flat and get the fuck out of the country. The need to escape, to go to a place where no one has ever heard of Joss Moody, where no one knows him, grows daily. He can’t imagine any more money, though he has had calls from all sort of creeps offering him dosh to tell his story. Better the devil he knows. Sophie Stones is all right underneath that slick act she puts on; it doesn’t fool him. She’s vulnerable just like he is.
Scotland, his father’s country, the country where Colman himself was born. He is going to Scotland today on the train. Sophie Stones is taking the shuttle in the early evening. Colman never flies unless he has to. Since he read that the majority of air disasters take place either in the three minutes of the plane taking off or landing, he has found take-offs unbearable. The sick moment when you are at the wrong angle completely to the earth.
Out of the shower. Dry the body. He stops to look in the mirror at himself. He can never decide if he is good-looking or ugly as shit. There are two Colman Moodys in the mirror: the boy with the glasses from the past; and the man now. The man now has got a good body, no question about that. A good sized cock, long arms, good shoulders, flat stomach, long legs. It’s the face he can’t decide on. It is as if he can’t actually see himself properly; as if the sight of himself always gives him a bit of a nasty shock. He looks straight into his dark eyes. Shadows underneath, evidence of his insomnia and the amount of alcohol he’s been packing away. Never could take whisky. His eyes seem to have got smaller, closing in on him. They used to be bigger, huge. People were always going on about his big beautiful brown eyes. His long, long lashes for a man. But now the lashes aren’t curled back on themselves and the actual eye socket is smaller, the eyelid thicker. Definitely. Shit. His one big asset is closing in on him. He stares again at himself in the mirror, at the green towel hanging over his shoulders, at his wet hair. Just get dressed, man, get out the house, he says to himself and then rubs his hair affectionately in front of the mirror, trying to be his own friend.
Think of the money. Money is uplifting. To shut these repossession wankers up, buy himself a new sound system, go on holiday, pay the gas, the electricity, the phone, buy some new black jeans. Soon, he won’t be here. He’ll be travelling on a boat, a train, foot down in the hire car. Away ta-ta. As his father would say. Away ta-ta.
Colman Moody walks down West Green Road towards the tube, light-footed. Loose stride, taking long, bouncy steps. He looks like he’s not exerting himself, like he’s walking slow and casual, but he’s actually covering a lot of ground with those long, long strides. Stepping.
West Green Road has two kinds of shops in it: barber’s shops and fish shops. That’s all the dudes in Tottenham do, get fancy shapes cut into their hair and eat fish. Colman passes quite a few guys he knows, they call out to him from the barber’s shop. They are all sitting in a row waiting to have half their head shaved off, the hair taken away behind their ears, the straggling hairs on their neck sorted. The buzzing razor going over and over the same ground. What is this thing with hair? Colman thinks. White guys aren’t as interested in their hair as far as he can see. Black guys keep reinventing themselves through hairstyles. Shapes – in one minute, naff the next.
His father liked going to a barber that was good at cutting black hair and whose customers were almost exclusively black. He liked sitting silent, waiting, watching himself in the mirror whilst the barber took his hair off in slices, slices of hair falling on to the floor. Colman always went with his father when he was a boy. They’d get done together. An initiation ceremony. His father must have had some nerve to sit in a barber’s shop full of black men getting a man’s haircut all the time knowing he was a woman. Must take quite a lot of balls to pull that off. Maybe he enjoyed it. Maybe he liked the danger of it. Maybe it didn’t feel dangerous at all. If he was to have a chance to pull his father back up out of the wet muddy grave, have a chance to wrench open the wooden coffin and sit him up for ten minutes, that would be the first question he would ask him: did he like going to the barber’s?
He stares at the fish in the window as he passes. Ghoulish looking. Dead mouths hanging open. Jelly eyes. Scaly slippery skin. Red mullets. Parrot fish. Grey mullets. Huge strange fish, exotic looking, as if someone from a children’s story had caught them under the sea in the old world, and brought them back for people to see in the new world. Eyes staring blankly at him as if they remembered nothing. As if they’d forgotten they ever were fish. Some of the guys in the barber’s shop stare like that, empty-eyed, as if they’ve forgotten who they are and have just landed some place without a past. The eyes of fish and the eyes of guys. Colman looks straight ahead down the road. A train passes over the railway bridge. The sky is a burden to itself, grey and heavy and passionate about rain. This is the strangest summer he can remember. Every day is a different weather. Not even the fucking weather can make up its mind.
Three steps at a time, down into the filthy hole of the tube. Down into the underworld of rubbish and stink and piss and poor people with their kids begging and guys holding up bits of brown cardboard that read ‘Homeless’. Gets his ticket from the ticket machines that freak tourists. Remembers to get a single. He’s not coming back. Not for a while. Pats his holdall. He’s packed one pair of black jeans, two long shirts, one pair of brand new trainers – that he’s bought with his card – four pairs of clean boxer shorts, one of them silk, just in case. A couple of sweatshirts and T-shirts, all American. One smart suit.
He passes someone at the bottom of the steps huddled between the entrance to both platforms who says, ‘Any change?’ Change in what? Change in the weather, change in government. Change – what do you mean, any change? Do you mean you want money? Well, why don’t you ask for money? If you’d asked for money I’d have given you some, asshole. Learn to ask for what you want. Doesn’t say any of this. Thinks it. But the guy shuffles back as he passes him as if he could read his thoughts. The sight of the broken man, with his dirty fingernails, filthy long matted hair, dirty beard, dopey eyes, hangdog look on his chops, and his millions of bits of rags that pass for clothes wrapped round him, his stupid mongrel dog that looks as defeated as him – but protective – infuriates him. It grates, seeing people broken like this. He is repulsed; doesn’t feel any pity or mercy. Just raging fucking irritation. Doesn’t want it in his face. The sight of it, in his face. His mother and his father were always sympathetic to poor people, to
people with no money or power but, even as a boy, he wasn’t. He still finds himself thinking these sour thoughts about people like this guy, thoughts that spring right into his head, barking. Barking. He thinks these kind of thoughts every day. Go and get a job, you useless pile of shit. The exact opposite way of thinking to his upbringing. Sponger. Waster. Parasite. Get up and get a job for fuck’s sake.
He panics for a moment. Has he got the tickets that Sophie sent him? The Glasgow tickets? Did he leave them by the phone? He can see them by the phone. Stupid fucker. He calls himself names. This is another thing he has taken to doing recently, calling himself names. He pulls out his wallet and checks through. His head is buzzing, making a high noise inside his ears. There they are. Thank fuck for that. He says that out loud to himself. Thank fuck for that. His father used to say that all the time and he’s always liked the ring of it. He looks into the eyes of the guy who asked for change. The guy’s actually been thinking he was getting out his wallet to give him some money. He gets a fiver out of his wallet and drops it into the guy’s empty box and says, ‘Now stop staring in my face.’
Colman gets on the tube and turns to look at the homeless guy who is turning the fiver round in his hand, staring at it, pulling himself up, gathering his plastic bags and his sad dog together. He’ll be off to the butcher’s to buy that mutt a bone. Colman pictures the look on the sad dog’s face when the bone is put down in the street for him to pull and tug and crunch and suck in a long, long dance of the bone in a homeless London night.
The black woman opposite him has a son that looks her double. He’s cute. He’s staring at Colman. He winks at the little man. The boy keeps staring, pleased. So Colman winks again. And again and again. The boy is two or something. He’s still staring at him. Shit, I can’t spend my whole time winking all the way to fucking Euston, Colman thinks, and turns his head away. He’s relieved to see them getting up to get off at Kings Cross. He gives the boy a nod and the boy gives Colman a smile to die for. Doesn’t cost much, Colman thinks, doesn’t cost much to nod at a little geezer and make his fucking day.