Trumpet (28 page)

Seeing them through the fog, catching a glimpse of a hand or a boot, or a hat or a shoulder, catching somebody wipe their face with their fist through the wraith mist, my father felt as if he too was disembodied. His own body became broken up by the fog; his left arm missing, his left shoe. Close up, people would rear up and reveal something real. He never forgot that first welcome. If he closed his eyes, he told me, he could still see it. Odd that his memory would trail back time and time again to recapture mist, fog, lack of substance. Memory is a strange thing, he said to me more than once. It will catch what you would think it couldn’t catch, the slippery, the runaway, the taste of wet air. But he couldn’t remember what he wanted to remember. He would read many books to see if they might remind him of what he wanted to remember: the hot dust on the red road, the jacaranda tree, his mother’s hot breath on his cheek. The trouble with the past, my father said, is that you no longer know what you could be remembering. My own country is lost to me now, more or less all of it, drowned at sea in the dead of a dark, dark night. Sometimes, he said, leaning close to me like he was telling me a ghost story, sometimes you think you hear your own country wailing in the
wind, just before the drowning. It will always haunt me, he said, my country, my own one.

My father turned up in Scotland. Fate is a beautiful and terrible thing. When my father was six, his father persuaded a Scottish captain of a ship to take him back to Scotland and give him some kind of education. When the ship arrived into Greenock, next to Port Glasgow, Robert Duncan-Brae was there to meet it. He knew the captain and the crew of HMS
Spiteful
and offered to take my father and give him a home. Life, he told me, was like a fork of lightning. He could see exactly where one decision violently parted company with another and a new future flared up before him.

It was the first time my father had ever been in a horse and carriage. He couldn’t make the horse out at first. It was like a creature of his imagination, half-hidden in the fog; he would never forget the sound of it moving from hoof to hoof, impatiently waiting to be off, knocking on the cobbled road. He heard the horse shake its breath out onto the street and lift its huge head up towards the Gods. The horse had reins around its face which the man at the top of the horse kept pulling. They were a distinguished family, those Duncan-Braes. Mr Duncan-Brae helped my father up the steps to the carriage and my father fell asleep to the sound of the horse’s hoof-beat on the road. It was like percussion. It was like music he already knew.

When he got to the big house, he was given a bowl of porridge. It looked like the fog with lumps in it. He was hungry. He swallowed it down with a spoon. It had no
flavour at all. He shovelled it down him. He was put in a bed and allowed to sleep for a very long time. The Duncan-Braes were not unkind to my father. But he missed his mother, his country, his mother-country. My father had a wonderful singing voice and could sing from memory just about any folk song I wanted. Every time he sang a Scottish folk song, he’d have this far-away look on his face.
Heil Ya Ho, boys, Let her go, boys, Swing her head round, And all together
.

I’ve never heard of a double-barrel named family that was short of a bob or two. My father became the Duncan-Braes’ servant. He polished Mr Duncan-Brae’s shoes till he could see his own dark face. He polished the silver, the dark wood, the hard kitchen floor. He dusted the many books in Mr Duncan-Brae’s library. He taught himself to read. He loved the inside world of books, he luxuriated in language, always making a stab at a new word, even if he got it wrong. He remembered saying for ages, ‘That is a well accomplishment.’ The cook didn’t like his fancy black tongue. It made her seethe with inferiority, he said. Actually, it frightened her. Who was he to go about the kitchen with his sharp curved words, glinting about the place like her carving knives. He got fed up with being a servant. The cook and him didn’t get on. When he was eighteen, he told Mrs Duncan-Brae that he wanted away.

‘Missus, I’d like to be a painter,’ he said. On the long journey over to Scotland on the ship, he had painted a couple of cabin doors and loved it. So he left the Duncan-Braes and became apprenticed to a Dundee house painter, earning a plausible living, practising his trade. Someone
painted a picture of my father which I’ve left for you amongst the bits and pieces. The picture’s called Mumbo Jumbo which has made me more angry than anything I can remember. He’s not given a name. Even the name he was given, John Moore, was not his original name.

That’s the thing with us: we keep changing names. We’ve all got that in common. We’ve all changed names, you, me, my father. All for different reasons. Maybe one day you’ll understand mine.

When I was eleven, he died, my father. I remember my mother’s pinched face. Her terrible hush. I remember the awful quiet in our house without him. The dreadful dream-like quality the whole thing had. How I kept expecting for months to wake up and find him real again. I remember the sadness in my mother’s baking; once I caught her weeping into her dough. She never got over it. I never got over it. We were both changed for ever by the death of John Moore. There was no one to look at me like he did, with shining, adoring eyes, no one to clap in rhythm when I danced and sang. My mother’s love was sensible, but different. Not like him. I missed holding his black hand in the street. Looking at it, comparing it to my own. I was on my own then. Looking at my own hand, trying to remember my father’s lines. They were darker than mine, his lifeline, his heart.

Maybe you will understand, maybe you won’t. I knew you’d come here. I knew you would come looking for stuff. I’ve left it all for you, my letters, photographs, records, documents, certificates. It is all here. Mine and your own. I sat down here this morning all set to destroy
all of this. Burn the lot. I stopped myself. If I do that I’d literally be burning myself. I couldn’t do that to myself, to my music. But most of all, I couldn’t do it to you. I thought to myself, who could make sense of all this? Then I thought of you. I am leaving myself to you. Everything I have got. All the letters I have kept hidden. I’ve discovered a strange thing that it is probably only possible to discover when you are dying – so don’t try it! – I’ve discovered that the future is something else entirely. That our worries are too wee. It is quite simple: all of this is my past, this is the sum of my parts; you are my future. I will be your son now in a strange way. You will be my father telling or not telling my story. (I wasn’t born yesterday.) The thought of you going through all of this would have made me ill a few years ago. You will understand or you won’t. You will keep me or lose me. You will hate me or love me. You will change me or hold me dear. You will do either or both for years. But I am going. I am off. My own father is back by the bed here singing. The present is just a loop stitch.
Heil Ya Ho, boys, Let her go, boys
.

Can you remember sitting on my shoulders? Remember sitting on my shoulders. Remember playing my trumpet. Do you remember fishing on the old boat with Angus? I’m being silly: remember what you like. I’ve told you everything. My father came off a boat right enough.

The woman walked down the hill and into the harbour. The bus had arrived already. She walked quicker. Just as she turned the bend, where the fishing boats pondered on the water, she saw him. He was walking towards her. He moved so like his father. A bird startled her by flying close to her head. It seemed the bird had come right out of her. She watched it soar right up into the sky, its wings dipping, faltering and rising again, heard it calling and scatting in the wind.

‘They Can’t Take That Away from Me’. Music and lyrics by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin © 1936, 1937. (Renewed 1963, 1964.) George Gershwin Music and Ira Gerschwin Music. All rights administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of IMP Ltd.

‘The Man I Love’, Music and lyrics by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin. © 1924 WB Music Corp. (Renewed.) All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of IMP Ltd.

‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B’. Words and music by Hughie Prince and Don Raye © 1940 MCA Music Publishing Ltd. Reproduced by kind permission.

‘Ain’t Misbehavin (Savin’ My Love For You)’. Lyric: Andy Razaf, Music: Thomas ‘Fats’ Waller and Harry Brooks. Copyright © 1929 (Renewed) Razaf Music Co., EMI Music Publishing, and Chappell & Co., Inc. Rights for the British Reversionary Territories controlled by Memory Lane Music Ltd., London and Redwood Music, London.

‘All Right, You Win’. Words and music by Watts and Wyche © 1955 Munson Music Co. Peermusic (UK) Ltd., London. Reproduced by kind permission.

‘Honeysuckle Rose’ Lyric: Andy Razaf, Music: Thomas ‘Fats’ Waller. Copyright © 1929 (Renewed) Razaf Music Co., and Chappell & Co., Inc. Rights for the British Reversionary Territories controlled by Memory Lane Music Ltd., London and Redwood Music, London.

Every effort has been made by the publishers to contact the copyright holders of the material published in this book, but any omissions will be restituted at the earliest opportunity.