The Big Music (7 page)

With his father.

And Callum.

With the sound of Callum’s dogs – and:

‘Come in! Come in!’ Callum is calling to them. The sound of their barking … Close …

And with those notes, these variations – first the one, then the other …

The hold on the awful drop, the ‘G’ to ‘G’ … It’s broken.

With his father.

And Callum.

And himself standing here.

So the theme can be released now, he can hear the way it goes free –

all the extra notes of the variations let in –

with the singling and the doubling and the three of them together …

The music’s hold on him broken with this change, this turn, that lifts him, like in a dream.

A lovely dream.

Iain’s hard behind him, though, and the sound of the dogs’ barking is no dream. The whole day like a charge for him.

When Helen had let out that cry this morning, the sound of her, he’d never heard anything like it – when she realised what the old man had done. When she’d stood at the dining room doorway, saw them all at the table but that the baby was not there, was not with Margaret, or with them at all … How they’d rushed from the table to look through the House and realised that he was gone, too, the old man not in his bed. ‘No!’ she’d screamed then. ‘No!’ And Iain was out in the grounds in a second, and away looking down to the river, up the back paddock, but he’s nowhere to be seen, the old man who’s stolen their child, he’s nowhere there or out beyond the green, past the stand of trees, the little burn – Iain’s looking but nothing, nothing. So he’s to the shed then straight away for the Argocat and his gun. Because Helen … She’s like a daughter to him, his daughter, and of course he would protect her, do anything he had to do to protect her and her child –

As she ran screaming out onto the grass!

Flying out of the House, no shoes on her feet, like she was burning – screaming! That sound of her like a wound in the air, against the bright of the day. Like something he’d never heard before, her flying out of the House and screaming as she runs to be on the hill for to find him and to bring her baby home.

And only Iain can make it right. Bring the Argocat round, keep the engine revving on the grass while Margaret can talk some sense into her, that she must get some things and go with Iain now, to look for the old man who has her child. Only Iain can wait – while Margaret is gentle with her, calming her. Telling her that she must gather up her things, Helen must, to take with them. While he’s keeping the engine running, found a jersey of the old man’s so the dogs can get a scent. S taying there with the engine running until Helen is back with a bag, with the baby’s things – but then they’re off. Straight off across the flat towards the hill and the dogs up ahead already like a banner streamed out before them – and still, only Iain. Only Iain. For this is his family. They’re his family. And they need him here. His wife. His daughter. His granddaughter. Though
Helen’s not to be comforted and she’s crying, there’s that sound of her, but Margaret is managing to calm her even so and tell her that he, Iain, will make it right.

That he’ll go after …

Him.

For whom he’s loosened out the dogs. Had them smell the air. For he’s like a criminal, the old man who’s been living amongst them. Stealing out of the house with their baby in his arms.

A criminal. A thief.

So, yes, take a gun.

Take dogs and a gun as he would for any criminal, for any hunt upon the hill. If he may need it, to take a shot at the criminal’s foot or at his knee. If he has to, to bring him down. He’ll do anything he needs to do, Iain will. To make it right. To protect the child. And quickly pack the sack with a jersey and some blankets, the things Helen has got together, provisions, milk, and medical things. Throwing them on the Arogocat that’s sitting running on the grass, the motor turning over, and he gets in, Helen beside him, and he manages to soothe her, too, like her mother soothed her, with low words. Like soothing an animal. Telling her that they’ll get her baby home, the dogs have picked up a scent already, that she’s not to worry. Chucking the motor into gear then and the tyres spin, catch. Increasing speed and increasing – and they’re away. Keeping it to himself as the Argo ploughs down the hill towards the river that it’s even crossed his mind for a second that he’d need a gun. That the idea of what an old man would want with a child, and a damaged man, a man with his mind not right and with his own family far away from him … Would occur to him at all, make him want to take it … Keep all those thoughts to himself. And keep the other simple fear in place instead: the simple fact that not enough’s been provided for an infant out on the hills, carried any distance or cared for by someone who is frail and sick and weak. That she’ll be hungry, frightened and very cold. A baby who is very, very cold.

That most simple fear perhaps the most dangerous part of all.

For the criminal has nothing with him, nothing.

To protect a child from the weather, to keep her from the sudden cold – and though the dogs have a scent, he could be anywhere out there …

Anywhere.

But for the white blanket.

The white blanket that Iain will see.

The flag to bring her home.

And it won’t be long now, though it will seem like hours to the mother – after crossing the river and up the first hill’s long side – Iain catching in the glass the glimpse of white on the face of Mhorvaig and sending the dogs ahead straight up in that direction. After turning the engine up a notch, and they’re up there and over, and they’re starting to climb again …

So no time, it will take them no time at all then. Though it feels like hours to Helen … No time. To get him, the criminal, to bring him in. Rising up on the first side of the hill and over, down the dip and back up again, the tyres taking the rock and the peat in one action. With the weight of the gun at Iain’s knee, the sound of the baying dogs …

And the temperature dropping, after that bit of rain before, and it’s much colder here than it was back down on the flat, but they’ll get there, Iain will, up the green face where he first saw the glimpse of white in the binoculars’ glass – ‘There!’ – and so fast over the tops and the baby alive when he comes upon her, so he’ll wrap her up in a thick blanket and have her back to her mother, back into her mother’s arms, Helen’s crying, she can’t stop crying while she holds her daughter close.

‘It’s okay’

‘It’s okay’

‘It’s okay.’

And Johnnie?

Well, he won’t get to his boulder. Won’t manage the child into the
valley
like he’d been planning. Won’t feel either the bite of Iain’s bullet at his knee – for Iain in the end would have no need to use the gun.

Only cut the motor and run across with Helen, to take the baby from the arms of an old man standing there, talking aloud to no one, to
himself, out there on the hill, talking about nothing, pee running down his leg and tears in his eyes.

For Johnnie …

Look all around you, man, the air is clear and you can see for miles. The shadings of the green. Last of the heather’s prime across the sides. The blue sky shining from edge to edge, and standing so still here to admire it all, out there against the hill, the spot of white so clear upon the empty landscape Iain didn’t even need the glasses to catch sight of what he’s been looking for.

‘There!’

With the dogs starting up, leaping and wagging and spread out in a pack across the heather, and the sound of the Argocat can’t put out the sound of their wild baying –

‘Get him!’

Yet for Johnnie, at this moment, there’s no sense of the glass’s cast, or the naked eye. No sound of the motor getting closer, closing in. For he’s just out here on a hill with his father and his son and the music singing for the three of them together in this lovely place. Three generations, three times for the Urlar to sound. Three. Three. Three. And no sense of what he’s done – only his mind away and reeling out here in the air, the song in his head of a man at the close of his life and what words come into that, there are no words, or language or time. Only a tune.
25

And he smiles, laughs then. Thinking how crazy he is and knows it, a fool and nothing to stop him now, nothing in his mind, no limits, no stops. For the ground’s down, the music that he wrote, that has been
written
before and all filled with the darkness coming, the final sleep but then he’ll have the next part to save him.

Because ‘F’ to ‘G’ he might have been singing to her before, and ‘F’ to A’, like they were his notes to sing, but it was her, all strong and round and
new. Fresh life out of old. That’s what she is, the little one. What they’ll need to understand, when he’s gone from them entire and the baby too, hidden away in their secret place and they’re not getting her back. Not ever. For they’ll all come to understand it one day, that she’s like the line of the notes set in front of everything, the pattern of what follows all because of her …

And how beautiful it is.

Though he doesn’t know yet how it will be, how she’ll come out of the ground and turn into the deer that leaps off the edge of the hill and takes a crown upon her head …
26

Though he can’t see or hear yet the space between the notes and how she’ll leap into that space, gathering up in her crown all the variations of the tune … Some sense of it has begun. Been with him for a while, it seems, before the morning and the day, before his father and his son, before the laying down of the ground upon which he still stands, the beginning was there, of the music’s plan. The knowledge that’s in her, the little one. And they’ll understand at last, all of them, what he needed to do. To make a new music from the stubborn’ness of old, find the fresh sequence he will be playing soon, soon, when he gets her to the hut, to be alone with her there. The crying done by then. The sky itself gone away and replace it only with music.

Of course he shouldn’t be surprised by time by now, and he isn’t, not really.

Even before he stopped taking the pills there was a growing sense of having left daily life for a different kind of world where the days and nights and months were all the same. Moving around from room to room, from breakfast to lunch and to tea with no awareness of his presence
anywhere
he stayed, going as easy from one dark place to another as though he were a shadow or a kind of ghost.

Certainly that is what it has been like for him long enough, well before these papers were being gathered. Time become unmarked that way, days lived in with no dates, no words to record them. There’s one week in
summer
that’s like a week in the spring, and that in turn’s fast gone back into winter again or to the autumn. And all the weeks are like the week before, and the month to follow. The past is there, one man’ s history written down and lived in, maybe, but with nothing to say for it that he can make sense of. No one to listen. He’s there in his chair or in his bed, taking only into himself his story with its memories that may have made him happy once or sad. Of his weeping one day, or his breaking on another into song.

Will all be in the tune.
27

It’s what Sutherlands know, anyhow, time. The way time goes. As so many of the families who live around here know it, how, in the end, you keep in silence all the information you once carried, how, in the end, things don’t change. And maybe it seems to this one man that he’s gone through youth to strength to age in no more than a splinter of life, in just a fraction of hours played out beneath the sky, but in this too his life is no different to the others before him. Time keeps the people who live here still that way, it holds. So they may have been cleared off their farms and crofts, some of those families long ago, or people left, or said they would never return, even so they were staying, too, somehow, all of them, kept deep in to old time, old ways. So they may have lived in Nova Scotia or New Zealand or somewhere far away, on the other side of the world, yet they remained here amongst the hills. In their thoughts, their memories, ‘Nothing changes’ they might say. ‘I don’t mind.’ All their lives gone into the same silence of the sky.