The Big Music (11 page)

Certain roads you get to a part of them, turn a corner, say, come over some kind of a hill, and you feel … No going back now. The road there to take you and all you can imagine is the place that lies ahead and who’s there, who’s waiting.

Callum Sutherland, he’ll be like me enough that way. A man in his car now, coming along that exact same piece of road I’m writing about, and it’s early morning, a grey light and soft and cold, but look at the place, darling, all around you. You can’t help but see it, feel your heart clench like a little fist behind the bones of your chest as you sit forward slightly in the seat of your car with the land falling away like blankets on either side.

Beallach Nam Drumochta.

The Pass.

It’s a part of the journey they talk about a lot here. About the length of it, time taken. The road north altogether, when you get up this far, is something they’ll always ask after but this stretch of road in particular –

‘Did you make it over all right?’ Iain will ask it, or my mother. Someone in the pub at Rogart, in the midst of a high summer although there were winds, so asking ‘Drumochta, how was it? You managed okay? In all this air?’

They used to ask me, too, the same, and I became used to my own answers given. How there was no traffic on the road, or there was a bit, or a report in the paper about another accident on the long stretch coming back off down the hill, someone taking over on a bad corner, and though the road’s improved still it’s bad in places and dangerous and fast. But Callum would say nothing, would he? About any of those things? Nor the excitement for the journey, the way the light opens out and the size of the country unfolds itself before you. He wouldn’t feel himself entitled. To speak about his sense of the place that way because what right does he have to claim that kind of attachment, the idea of coming back to somewhere that’s so familiar, so known, when he’s never lived here, wasn’t born here? When this is where he’s only ever come for his holidays is all.

Is what he’ll think. What he’ll believe.

And anyway, his reasons for coming up this time drawn out from necessity, not desire – the call that came through from his mother, the arrangements he had to make.

And he’d have had his wife asking, his family: Do you really need to go up there? Now? When who knows how long your father will go on, how he’ll treat you when you get there? When maybe this is just a turn of his, something temporary, and he’ll go back to the way he was and nothing much wrong with him in the first place that’s not just to do with age and his stubborn will? For all this is his decision, it’s not yours, Callum. Come from where your father’s decided that he wants to live, at the other end of the country, and that that’s where he’s going to stay – but nothing to do with you, is it? What your father’s decided? Who he thinks he is? It’s not for you to be dealing with, is it? And Callum might be thinking that, too. For certainly his wife would be asking, and his sons. Does he really need to come all the way up this road to be here?

Yet even so …

To think of the son coming back up here to be with the father …

Though it’s against his will, perhaps. Against his wife’s desire to have him stay.

Still, it’s hard not to see it as returning. Though it was his father used those words,
the return
, and Callum himself may never use those words. Even
so there he is in my mind now, looking for the House in his windscreen, though he’s miles away. And there’s the excitement even so. In the getting up. The getting over. Of Drumochta,
2
and the rise of the road as the
journey
takes form beneath him, the distance and the time closing up any space between the last time I saw him and now. So it does mean something else, coming back, after all. That’s more than duty. More than need. That’s more than his mother’s insistence on the phone that he’s the only one can talk to his father and get through to him, stir up some kind of recognition in his mind. That’s more than all those things. So that he’s switched the headlights off five minutes or so ago to let himself have a good sense of it, the land, the pale colours. Up there on the tops, looking north.

And …

Callum.

Callum, Callum.

Of course you are entitled.

You’re the son. You’re the only one.

Look for us in the windscreen of your car and we’re waiting for you.

The call came through yesterday while he was at work.

His mother, in that quick way of hers of talking. ‘Your father’ she would have said. ‘They’ve told me at the House he’s bad again. It’s been that way a while it seems. But not taking the medication so now they’re worried enough to let me know.’

There would have been a moment then. I can see it, imagine it quite clearly: when the phone rang; when Callum picked up. A moment when he would seem to be taken by surprise – still thinking about what he’d just been doing, plans for a project laid out on the white desk in front of him, his eyes still on the drawing he’s just completed.

‘Callum?’

And someone else, maybe, speaking to him at the same time from another part of the office, and him nodding, holding up his fingers when he picks up:
two seconds.
Mouthing the words, then saying to his mother, ‘Okay, I’m here.’

Because at that point, though the call had been half expected, his father not well, he knew that, and his mother concerned, still he hadn’t been thinking about any of that just then, about his father, and I think he might have wanted to prevaricate, not quite take his eyes from the papers in front of him to listen to his mother, to answer her straight away. Not quite ready to take the weight of the content of the sentences she was passing over to him, down the line.

Now they’re worried enough to let me know.

So he just said ‘Okay’ to her then. ‘Okay.’

For there was a big commission, perhaps, come up at work, that’s what the plans were on the table, a busy time after the long summer break and suddenly deadlines ahead of him, a building to be finished in the first stage same time next year. And there were to be meetings. And accountants, lawyers. I don’t know. Reschedules to be drawn up,
alterations
made.

So ‘Okay’ he might have said, like trying to put it off, the moment when she would ask him what she was going to ask him to do. ‘Okay.’

‘These people’ she would have said then. ‘They tell me now what’s been going on. That he’s been out roaming on the hills, it turns out, is the latest. For weeks, apparently, this has been going on, and on his own. After all this time and they tell me now. These people. How can you get through to these people?’

And he might have laughed then.

‘Mum –’

But she would have said, and insisting, no choice in it at all, ‘I want you to go up there, Cal. I want you to. To bring him back and I’ll take him for a while. If he won’t stay in hospital at least I can make sure he gets back onto a proper care programme here. With the right attention, the right medication –’

And he would have replied then, a different tone in his voice, ‘He’s not
going to want it.’

So it would have been his mother’s turn to laugh, though not a real laugh. ‘It doesn’t matter what he wants.’

‘But he’ll not agree’ Callum would have said. ‘He’ll not let himself –’

‘Cal.’

‘Be taken.’

Sarah wouldn’t have heard. ‘You’ll have to go up there’ she would have told him, the laugh of hers never a real laugh. ‘As soon as you can, Callum. Get up to the House and bring him back here to me.’

And all this was – when? Yesterday? Only yesterday and yet already it feels like another phase of his life, that he was another man altogether who had stood there at his desk in his office with a cup of coffee in his hand, the plans laid out before him, when the phone rang and interrupted. And though in so many ways his mother’s request was not unexpected – when he looks back on it now he’s here, on this road, driving back up North to be with him again – still it was like he was someone barely connected to his father that moment, when his mother talked to him that way. As though his father was someone else entirely, with no mind or past or will that Callum had ever known. As though he were not someone who he’d grown up with, learned from. Who had emotions he was familiar with, the impatience and judgement and rage like his father has had rage all through his life and when Callum was a boy he had to suffer that rage, when he had to make the journey up north with his father for the
summer
and his father hated the driving to get there. As though, for those moments when Callum had stood with the phone in his hand and heard his mother talking, he was unconnected to any of those memories he might have had, unconnected to the idea of this journey, even, with the boy grown up, the father old, and he, the son, the one who was driving …

But all that’s gone now, now he’s here. Now that he’s actually on the road, on his way. So it’s the day his mother called him that’s become the time that’s unreal, that’s not linked to this present, the feeling from yesterday already gone from his mind, of his distance from the past. All gone because now it seems like it was only minutes ago that he was last on the Pass, and as the incline of it increases, gradually, and now the day
is lifting … Everything else has slipped away. The day before. The night. The wife in bed with him this morning in the dark, the two boys in their room. The streetlights and the oily wet of the road where he lives, pulling the car out of the drive … All of it gone by now … Left way behind him, in another country, and it’s all that’s ahead of him now, not the other, that is the real.

It’s the light does it. How it takes you to another place, casts off, eclipses all the skies you’ve seen before, all the places you have been. I’ve felt the same way coming back up here, and approaching the Beallach Callum looks out and it’s as though the entire sky of the world is open, poured out, let loose down upon the hills. Like there was never such a thing as darkness here, like there could be no darkness, only this bare, clear air. There are the clean open flats of the moors, pale grey and dun and heather streaked with dark and peat, and blackish watery burns some places coming down cut with broken stones, rocks, and all of it, the sweet land, available to him somehow, that sense of reaching out to it like you might take it, all of it, be able to gather it into yourself and make it yours, a universe of endless land and sky and distance and pick out the
mountains
for your stars.

But it’s the road keeps you from disappearing. The grey of it, and thin, with no place much for passing. You have to concentrate on that, don’t you, think about that, the present moment of your driving, or you’ll run into trouble, no doubt about it. That’s what they say up here, remember? When they talk about the journey. And since childhood, for Callum, that memory’s been in him, through all the years of the road being difficult to manage in certain stretches, and it holds him to common sense,
concentrating
on that, being reminded, as I wrote before, of coming along here with his father, and lagging behind caravans or estates hitching trailers, maybe, or boats, and his father’s frustration, then. His rage.

Christ, get a move on, man!

His hands gripping the wheel.

Christ!

With those eyes of his trained on distance. For first: Drumochta. Then Bonar Bridge. Dornoch. All the places he was wanting to get past, to get through, to get there, get there. And terrifying, that cry of his:
Christ!
Like the man would himself put a sword through Christ’s side, Callum used to think, as a boy, he could see it, that image. His father! Christ! Like any second they could die! Like they could crash into the back of something! Drive off the road! His father’s profile as he sat beside him in the car,
seeing
his father out the side of his eye, not daring to say a word, not wanting to breathe even … For fear of what his father might do.