Trumpet (22 page)

Joss told me a few days before he died more about being a girl than he had ever done in a lifetime of marriage. Two days before he died he had an unusual request: a tin of ambrosia creamed rice. His favourite pudding when he was a girl. He had said those words, for the first time in his life with me: ‘When I was a girl my favourite pudding was ambrosia creamed rice.’ I spoon-fed him a little bit of the rice and that was his last meal. He told me to remember the bandages, to remember and put the bandages back on. So I unbuttoned the pyjama jacket, managed to pull it off. It was hard work. I wrapped the bandages around his chest for the last time. The bandages that were part of our life together. I wrapped them round and round tightly till his small breasts flattened underneath the cream-coloured bandages. I did not cry when I was doing this. I had no way to express this feeling I felt. It was worse than anything I have ever felt. I still have that feeling. That same sickening feeling. I had it this morning when I woke up and thought for a moment that Joss was alive. I put his pyjama top on and did the buttons. All this must have taken a very long time. I put a fresh sheet over him and another blanket. I would call the doctor, the undertaker, get him moved soon; but first I had to tell Colman.

I wanted to wash my hands now. Wash my hands and my face with cold water. I could still feel the other Joss in the room, hovering. The spirit Joss. The kind understanding
one. I stood up on my own two feet. I went into the hall and stared at the black phone. I stared at it for ages trying to remember Colman’s number. It came to me some time later. I know it must have been quite a while because the dark shades deepened. I had looked at my watch when Joss died. It was 1.12 a.m. when I came back into the room and found him dead. I had heard that in hospitals they are strict about the time of death as well as the time of birth. I wanted to get the time right. That night before he died, I had left the room for a couple of seconds to phone 1 2 3, so that I could be sure that my time was the same time as the rest of the country. The disembodied voice told me it was nine-thirty and twenty seconds. It is half-past two. Colman’s number enters my head, fully formed – 802 0464.

I cradle the phone. I say to the spirit that I know is still there: I’m going to phone our son. I’m going to phone our son. I push the numbers. My fingers feel barely strong enough to push the numbers. I get Colman’s answerphone. I have always hated them. How can he have it on at a time like this when he knows his father is dying? I hold on waiting for the bleep that everyone tells you to wait for. When it comes it frightens me, it is so loud and thoughtless. I say, Colman? Colman, are you there? And the real Colman is on the line in a flash. Your father died an hour or so ago, Colman, I say. Can you please come round?

I don’t know what I would have done without him. He came round, quite soon I think. But he didn’t want to see his father. He said he’d rather remember him alive. If
only he hadn’t changed his mind. If only he’d never gone to the funeral parlour. It wouldn’t have made any difference, I suppose. Somebody was bound to tell.

When Colman came he started behaving in a way I had never witnessed: he became super efficient, organized, understanding. He made hundreds of phone calls. He made me many cups of tea. I wanted to ring the undertaker myself. I had to think now of the person lying in that room as Joss’s body. I remember noticing daft things. A neighbour of ours that had never been all that friendly weeping in the street when the body was carried out, early on Monday morning. I watched at the doorway. I had to watch him being taken away. I had to make myself. A little boy, two houses down – his name has gone – came running up to me. Did your husband die? Did your husband die? he asked till his mother came rushing out and shooshed him. I stared at him for a moment then I said, ‘Yes. My husband died.’

My husband died. I am now a widow. That is what I will tell them if they come and ask me. My husband died. I am now a widow. My husband died, I am now a widow.

Why can they not understand how ordinary that is? Many women have become widows. Many women have gone through what I’ve gone through. Many women know the shape, the smell, the colour of loss. Many women have aged with loss. Grief has changed the face of many women. I am not alone. I have to tell myself this. I am not alone.

I am lying to myself. I am always lying to myself and I really must stop it. I am alone. My friends don’t know how to talk to me or write to me any more. They are
embarrassed, confused, shocked. Perhaps angry. I don’t know. Perhaps they are angry like Colman is angry. I don’t know. Perhaps they want to know how I ‘managed’ it.

I managed to love my husband from the moment I clapped eyes on him till the moment he died. I managed to desire him all of our married life. I managed to respect and love his music. I managed to always like the way he ate his food. I managed to be faithful, to never be interested in another man. I managed to be loyal, to keep our private life private where it belonged. To not tell a single soul including my own son about our private life. I managed all that. I know I am capable of loving to the full capacity, of not being frightened of loving too much, of giving myself up and over. I know that I loved being the wife of Joss Moody.

I managed to live with a genius. Not easy, I can tell you.

Maybe all widows feel misunderstood. The widow who takes to her bed and pulls her curtains down, does not do the done thing – pull herself together, put on a brave face – perhaps she feels like I do. I am putting on a brave face. I have pulled myself together.

Today is Sunday. The fifth Sunday without Joss. I have made myself a brunch. My scrambled eggs are not as good as his. My coffee is always too weak. My bacon is overdone. I sit down at the wooden table at Torr and eat. Joss would approve of my making a Sunday brunch in his honour, in his absence. Later, I will go out and get a newspaper. I haven’t read a whole newspaper for quite a
while. Those disgusting articles scared me off. But today I quite fancy a couple of the Sundays.

If they come I will be ready for them. I will tell them all about being Joss Moody’s widow. I will not be shy. Now that I come to think about them, I realize that I actually want them to come. I know that if I actually see Colman and he looks straight into my eyes, he will not be able to do this book. Not possible. When they come for me in the morning, or the morning after that, or the afternoon after that, or the following week, I will be ready.

1958
Millie’s Song
(Centre)

1960
Night Hiding
(ACR)

1963
Prodigal Son
(ACR)

1966
Fantasy Africa
(Heygana)

1967
Moody Moanin’
(Power Label)

1968
Wee Blue Bird
(Sugar)

1972
Torr
(Sugar)

1975
Rainstorms in Italy
(Columbia)

1979
Blues in a Wild C
(Columbia)

1982
Rubric
(Columbia)

1985
Slow
’
n
’
Moody
(Columbia)

1987
Sunday Brunch
(Columbia)

1991
Joss Moody
(Columbia)

1994
The Best of Joss Moody
(Columbia)

Joss Moody, trumpet player, born 1927; died 27 July 1997

He must have been away with his father at least seven or eight times in the past five years. Little trips, a couple of days with the band. If there is a Toblerone in the mini-bar, the hotel scores top marks. If there’s a white bathrobe in plastic in the wardrobe, it scores top marks too. The only time Colman ever wore a dressing gown was on the road with his father. It was fun. His father always insisted Colman have his own room. If the room service menu includes a hamburger in a seeded roll or a steak sandwich, it’s doing not bad. If it has Sky TV and a movie channel, it’s in with a shout. If it has none of these little luxuries, it stinks. This one, in Glasgow, has the lot, the whole package. Colman checks for everything, sees it’s all there, then feels depressed. He doesn’t know why. Feels himself sinking. There is no old man to meet in the bar for a drink.

‘What do you like?’ she asks him, pulling her white napkin over her black silk dress. ‘Would you like a gin and tonic to start?’ ‘You order everything for me,’ Colman says and watches Sophie’s eyes. Her eyes are large. Her
lashes long. Her hair is blonde; she wears it up. A few long fallen strands of hair line the edge of her cheek. Her cheeks are high and sharp. She tilts her head to one side, looking at the menu. Her lips are slightly open as she thinks. She’s wearing a bright lipstick, a startling red. Her lips are not full, and not thin. The bottom lip looks as if it could belong to a different mouth from the top lip. ‘Are you sure you want me to order for you?’ Sophie asks, looking up from the menu. ‘Sure, positive,’ he says. The waiter comes and she orders two dover soles and a bottle of Chablis. ‘That’s us then,’ Sophie says.

Colman can’t think what to say. When the fish arrives, he is relieved to have something to do. He lifts the bone out carefully. It is pleasurable to airlift the bone to safety. He puts it at the side of his plate. The fish is excellent. Sophie Stones talks incessantly about the book. She calls it, ‘Our book.’ It’s starting to grate on him. ‘Our book.’

Alone in my hotel room, I go over and over Colman in my mind. Strip him bare. Picture his back completely bare, his arse, his thighs, the inside of his thighs, his balls, his cock. All of him. It is not a game any more. It is not even a story. Tonight for the first time, I felt sorry for him. I felt sorry for myself. Feeling sorry for him only made me want him more. Damn, Colman loves his father. He loves his father. It agitated me to discover that instead of hate or fury or spite or repulsion, the emotion, that I saw clearly written across the wide high bones on Colman
Moody’s cheeks, was love. Love! It was like the first time in my life I’d really seen it.

I take off my black silk dress and hang it up. I put on the white towelling bathrobe and run a bath, pouring the bubble bath in. I slide underneath the foamy bubbles, close my eyes. Something is wrong. Must ask him what is the matter. Tonight, at dinner, he was on about how he couldn’t meet these people, how it would do his head in, I had to do it. Wanted to meet Mrs Moore on his own. (Had to give in to that.) I mentioned this Torr place to him and he just about blew up. Not going to visit his mother. Not taking me up the road to Torr. Couldn’t do it. He said, ‘I’m not taking
you
!’ as if I was tainted or something. It hurt my feelings. As if I was the gutter press. I might write for the
Daily Sky
, but I’m freelance. It annoys me when people assume we’re all the same. Colman didn’t even pause on my hurt look. He loved that place, Torr, he said, with its windy roads, the wind on the top of the cliffs, the wild walk down to the harbour, the boats. The men fishing, endlessly, patiently fishing. The smell of fish and rain. The little café that’d been there since he was a kid. Torr was sacred. Couldn’t be touched. Neither could his mother. She needed to be left in peace. No matter what she’d done. She must be grieving, he said, as if it had just that moment occurred to him that his mother would be grieving. ‘Grieving badly, man,’ he said. I didn’t know how to react. I wanted to say to him, ‘Look, you’ve got me all wrong.’ I didn’t want to risk it, to risk antagonizing him. I had to play it cool. People
often get cold feet just before they spill the beans. Quite common. Not the first time a great story has pulled out on me. A scoop scuttling backwards. Never thought I’d have any problems with Colman Moody though. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘it’ll be good this book. It is just trying to explain the phenomenon of your father. It’ll help other people.’

‘That’s bullshit and you know it,’ Colman said. ‘Phenomenon of your father!’

So I tried to soothe him and calm him down, but when he gets worked up he gets worked up. Bloody hell, I thought to myself, he must have been a handful. I felt a moment’s fleeting sympathy for Joss and Mill Moody. Let’s both get a good night’s sleep and talk about it in the morning, I said. Chill out.

When I first wrote to Millicent Moody, I had Colman’s word that we would visit Torr together. At the time of the second letter, Colman seemed less sure of the visit. He told me his mother would never cooperate with such a book in a month of Sundays. Then he wondered for a moment what a month of Sundays would actually be like. That’s the kind of thing he does – goes off at a tangent.

Colman is awake in room 310. He is smoking and drinking whisky from the mini bar. Glenfiddich. Now that his father is dead, he will always drink malts. After years of hating the bark and the flame of a peppery malt, Colman now finds himself relishing it. Strange that – how your mouth can suddenly switch allegiances. From now on it will be one ‘wee nip’ after another. Colman knows
all their names. His father was a malt fanatic. Glenfiddich (if there’s nothing better), Glenmorangie, Laphroaig, Jura, Lagavulin, Port Ellen, Talisker, Cardhu, Braes of Glenlivet, Ardberg, Caol Ila. High peat, low sweet. No more Jack Daniels or Bells or Teachers or any other common stuff. Colman sips away, smiling to himself. High peat, low sweet.

Sophie Stones has found out Edith Moore’s address. Colman looks drunkenly for the bit of paper Sophie had given him. Here it is; Number 12 The Larches. A sheltered housing scheme, one of those places where old people don’t lie dead for days unnoticed, where they can ring a red bell and see somebody before they drop dead. How would he feel if he was an old woman living in a house with an emergency bell and some stranger turned up out of the blue with a blonde journalist asking questions about her estranged daughter, Josephine Moore. Maybe he should let it be, let sleeping dogs lie. Maybe he shouldn’t visit her at all. What a shock he was going to be. Fuck. She might have a heart attack or something.

The idea suddenly occurs to him that he needn’t mention anything to Mrs Moore about his father. He could simply say he was a friend or something. Wouldn’t that be kinder than the truth? But it would be tricking her, lying to her. How can lies be better than the truth? Good lies. What they call ‘white’ lies. Lies that are harmless, innocent, told from the mouths of innocent harmless white people. He isn’t that, is he? Can a black guy like himself tell a white lie? If he says Josephine Moore was his mother it would stop the old girl having
to hear about all the transvestite stuff. The tranny stuff has just about knocked him out so what would it do to an old woman? What would he say to Edith Moore? My father was a black man when I was a little boy. He was a famous black man who had a beautiful face and a high laugh. My father played the trumpet. He was so good at it that the whole world loved the sound of his trumpet. He played his trumpet so brilliantly that people listening would suddenly remember things they thought they had forgotten. His trumpet told stories, he used to say. Old, old stories. That was all, he would never say what the stories were exactly. You tell me, was what he said. As a treat sometimes, he would ask for ingredients to his story. Everyone present had to give one. Whatever you could think up. A butterfly. A chest. A little girl looking through a keyhole. Hair. A baby ape. An old woman in a house by the sea. And then he would make up a song on his trumpet, a song that would tell the story of all these things together, and sometimes it was possible for each person to recognize the music of the butterfly, of the wooden house, of the little girl. My father was a trumpet player. Internationally known. At the time of his death, he had made fourteen albums. He had won several awards and had played with other famous musicians of his day. My father was brought up in a small Scottish town called Greenock. His mother was white and his father was black and in his day this was very unusual. Does any of this ring a bell? My father was your daughter. Colman Moody tips the last of his third Glenfiddich into his glass. Drink always makes him rant in his head. He quite likes it. He’s
one of those guys that is actually more articulate, at least to himself, when drunk.