by Jackie Kay
It drove me mad. Which one? I said. Which one is true? Doesn’t matter a damn, he said. You pick. You pick the one you like best and that one is true. It doesn’t change me who my father was or where he came from and it certainly doesn’t change you, he said.
He was wrong about that. He was wrong. The stupid bastard was wrong. I’m sure he used to be right. I’m sure when I was a little kid he was right about everything. He was so right his hair shone. His black skin glowed. Even his ears looked clever. He was so right then and I went about the place trying to remember all the things he told me and the way he told them. I’d copy some of his big words. Kidology, that was one. Or colossal, that was another. Facetious, he’d say, ‘Don’t be facetious.’ And I’d say joking, ‘What does that mean again?’ And he’d say, ‘A smartass. Don’t be a smartass.’
My father didn’t like discussing his family. He had no old photographs of himself when he was a kid, not one. I suppose if I look in their house I could find some photographs of Josephine Moore hiding somewhere. Unless he cut himself up or burnt himself to hide the evidence. I hope he didn’t. I hope I can find some. If I saw a photograph of her, I could convince myself that I’m not living some weird Freudian dream, some fucked-up dream where I don’t know my father, my mother or myself. I don’t know any of us any more. He has made us all unreal. It doesn’t matter where your father came from, Colman, he said. Like fuck it doesn’t.
He was wrong. He was wrong about everything.
I’m not bothered about knowing about those blood parents of mine. My mother told me a few bits about what they did. All they do is cause pain – parents, blood parents or mickey mouse parents, all they do is mess with your head. Not to be trusted, man. Shit, I wouldn’t have kids. No way.
I came into this world weighing a modest 6lbs and 2ozs according to my mother. I’ve always remembered those numbers; I was a lightweight. But my mother told me there was a big fucking hurricane around the time I was born. Blew the trees in our street down and several slates off the roof. Made quite a commotion. The winds were stark mad when I arrived at the Elsie Ingles hospital in Edinburgh. When she came up to the hospital to see me for the first time, my mother said the nurses were full of the storm; how you could hardly tell the difference between the babies’ high cries and the wind’s.
I’m still skinny. No meat on me. Tall and skinny as fuck. When I went to India I looked like the walking dead, man. Got the runs and lost a stone and a half. My father said to me when I got back, you need to put on some weight, Cole. He called me Cole when he was being nice. My mother always called me Colman. I didn’t ask to be adopted. Why should I be grateful to anybody. I was born under a sleeping star. Somebody wasn’t paying no attention.
Some people get all the luck. There were guys like that at my school. They’d get chosen for the sports teams, they’d get the best-looking girls, they never wore glasses, especially not those extra-thick ones, or trouser patches, or naff shoes. They just looked cool. I wore glasses. Don’t any more, as you can see. I’m vain as fuck now. Whoever invented contact lenses ought to be knighted.
My father had tits. My father didn’t have a dick. My father had tits. My father had a pussy. My father didn’t have any balls. How many people had fathers like mine? Which chat line could I ring up for this one? Imagine it flashing up on the screen after a programme about father/mothers, tranny parents or whatever the fuck you’d call them: if any of this relates to you and you need someone to talk to, please ring blah, blah, blah. The line will be open for the next twenty-four hours. I could ring round the whole country and never find anybody that’s gone through what I’m going through. I bet you.
I’m going to track him down. I’m going to trace him back to when he was a girl in Greenock, to when he lived under the name of Josephine Moore. Josey. Jose. Joss. But where did he get the Moody? Or was that just Moody blues? I’ll write his fucking biography. I’ll tell his whole story. I’ll be his Judas. That’s what Oscar Wilde said, isn’t it. My dad often quoted it and laughed. ‘Every man needs his disciples but it’s Judas that writes the biography.’ Frequently, he’d get pestered by would-be biographers: the impact he’d made on twentieth-century jazz demanded a biography, the letters would say. They’ll be clamouring for it now. This is raw meat. And it won’t be the music that will bother them now.
I used to be my father’s disciple. Not any fucking more, mate. I’ve gone over to the other side.
I went into that funeral parlour and the man, the funeral director, takes me aside. He’s got a look on his face I know I won’t forget. Half awkward, half pure glee. Like things are suddenly looking up for him. He calls me Mr Moody. I think maybe he doesn’t get all that many famous dead bodies and he’s dead chuffed. Mr Moody, he says, I’m not quite sure how to put this but it had better be me who tells you rather than the death certificate. I am assuming of course that you don’t know already? He waits. I see him reading my face. Know what already, I say, thinking the guy’s a pillock. When I undressed your father to perform my routine duties, I discovered … I’m waiting for him. I think he’s going to say he discovered my father had died of some other illness or that he discovered some weird mark on his body or that he discovered my father had committed suicide. I’m waiting. He’s drawing it out. What the fuck has he discovered, that my father is still alive?
When I undressed your father, Mr Moody, I discovered that she is a woman. I was not told this. Your mother referred constantly to the deceased as her ‘husband’. I thought the guy must be getting paid to perform some sick joke on me. Perhaps they have organizations where instead of sending a live kissogram to a birthday party, you send a weird deathogram to a funeral parlour. The man must not be the real man. I tell him I want to see the real undertaker, the mortician, whatever the fuck you call it, your boss. I said, is this your idea of a joke, you sick bastard? Who has put you up to this? I’m shaking him. Pulling his stupid thin lapels back and forth. This is all quite understandable, he says. Don’t fuck with me, I says. He takes me through to where the body is. Through to the cold parlour and shows me my father. I see him naked and it is only now that I realize that this is the first time in my life that I have seen my father naked. The funeral man shows me some surgical bandages that he says were wrapped tightly around my father’s chest to cover his ‘top’. I take a quick look. But that look is still in my head now. It has stayed in my head – the image of my father in a woman’s body. Like some pervert. Some psycho. I imagine him now smearing lipstick on a mirror before he died.
I walked out of that place as fast as I could. I said thank you for letting me know to the funeral man. The sky was bright blue that day and it was sunny. Hot. I was sweating. Everyone was complaining about the weather. I remember wondering if I’d ever be able to talk about anything so ordinary ever again. What a fucking luxury it seemed to me to stand around and say, isn’t it hot? A woman in a white top said to an old woman who was dressed for winter, ‘Isn’t this insufferable. Freak hot weather. Freak’s the word.’ I ran along repeating that to myself, ‘Freak’s the word.’ I stopped and hung down to my toes and took a deep breath. My heart racing. Then I started up again. I was soaked. My hair was stuck to my head. My trousers were wet. The streets were on fire. Maybe I could just melt, I remember thinking, just melt away.
That’s my daddy. The one with the orange tie. See. See, standing next to the man with the big drum. He is My Daddy. See his trumpet. That’s his. His third trumpet. Slim Fingers, his friend, give it to him. That is his favourite. He looks smart, doesn’t he. He is good to the trumpet. His eyes close like he sleeping.
My daddy finish and people clap. Clap, clap, clap. I stands on my chair and claps too. I have on a sailor suit. I just gets it. My mummy says, Sit down, Colman. But my daddy comes and picks me up, swings me in the air, high, high, through all the big smiles. Then sits me on his big shoulders. Says, All right, wee man. Everybodys crowds round us. Smacks my dad on the back. I’m going to fall off. I could. They could make me
fall off doing that.
All right, wee man.
Yesterday I got rat-arsed. This morning I woke up with a disgusting taste in my mouth. Like that Billy Connolly joke: your mouth’s like a badger’s bum. Too many fags and pints, but it was the whisky that finished me off. I could never take whisky. I went into a pub I’ve never been into where I knew nobody and just sat myself down on a stool at the bar like I’ve seen depressed guys do in movies. I don’t know how I got home. Woke with a fucking crashing headache, thumping, and tightening the screws, going into my temples deep. Took a couple of Panadol. My stomach felt like a wobbly egg. Nothing in the cupboard. I went round the corner and bought some bread, but forgot to buy butter. Dry toast. Dry toast and tea. Hardly fucking breakfast at the Savoy, but there you go. I’ve always been a ‘moany wee shite’ – his words. Now he’s given me something to moan about.
I went round to their house yesterday. It was strange. It felt like the whole house had died, not just my father. It gave me the spooks. The hall was all quiet and stealthy when it used to shake with music. The post was piled up on the floor. I had to move a mountain of the stuff before I could even get in. I went straight to the bureau in the hall and got out the old leather bag. I took the envelope marked certificates. I took all the adoption stuff about myself. I peeped in the envelope marked ‘Colman’. Inside a white envelope fell out. A fresh envelope. My name on the envelope in my father’s writing. You couldn’t mistake his small, loopy writing. Under my name were the words, ‘To be opened after my death.’ Creepy.
But I couldn’t open it. It’ll just be a list of excuses and reasons. I’m not interested. I’m really not interested. I can’t remember much of what I was saying yesterday. Sammy. I remember talking some crap about Sammy. You can run, but you can’t hide. I’d discount a lot of that as junk. I think it’s better to start all over again. From the top. When I went to the shop this morning I saw the back of some woman that looked like my mother and she made me feel like shit. She had a scarf over her head and was hurrying because the rain just started coming down. I don’t know where she was going, you never know where people are going, do you. All these people rushing about, they’re all going somewhere. London’s full of fuckers scurrying along. Even early in the morning, you can’t avoid them. I can’t get my head around it. Suddenly the rain was coming down vicious and I lost her, the woman that looked like my mother.
They kissed each other often enough. I’d catch them in the kitchen, or on the stairs, kissing. They had that special air of having something between them. I thought all parents had that. They passed looks. They said, ‘Just a minute.’ I always had to knock on their bedroom door. They taught me that from when I was small. My mother got into a double bed every night for the past thirty odd years and slept with my father, a woman. I am not being funny, right, but I think that’s completely out of order. It’s not because I hate gays or anything like that. If my mother had been a lesbian or my father a gay man, I don’t think I would have got all het up about it.
What is it that is eating me? I’m not a bitter guy. Don’t get me wrong. Please. It’s probably the fact that my father didn’t have a prick. Maybe it’s just as simple as that. No man wants a fucking lesbian for his father. Maybe for his mother. But for his father! My father wasn’t a man like myself, showing me the ropes and helping me through puberty when everything was mad and changed at the same time. The voice suddenly goes like something falling through a floor. The face gets itchy and rough. When you wake in the morning, rub the cheeks and get a shock at the stubble. A fright. So, fair enough you’re going to be a man soon. These changes are normal. Everyone goes through it. My father went through it like his father before him. The shock of pubic hairs arriving unannounced, one at a time, then suddenly they’ve all sprouted like salad. The boy is gone. My father once said to me, I know what it’s like, son, when I was going through some fucking teenage torment. I remember it myself. But he didn’t, did he. That was an out and out lie.
What was his puberty like? I mean he’d have got his periods, wouldn’t he? That’s disgusting, isn’t it? There’s no way around it. The idea of my father getting periods makes me want to throw up.
My mother always told me it was all right for me to be naughty sometimes, but lying, lying was the scourge of the earth, the worst thing for a child to do. Own up, Colman. I think that was her expression. I am cut up. Since my father died I’ve been walking around, half alive myself, sleepwalking, with this pain chiselled into my chest. Jagged. Serrated. Nothing makes it disappear. Not Milk of fucking Magnesia. Not Rennies.
A mate of mine’s mother was carted off to the loony bin when he was eleven. He wasn’t told nothing. Your mum’s gone off for a little holiday. He knew it was no fucking holiday from the wild look in her eyes. Will I ever forgive them? No.
He is sitting on the edge of my bed, my daddy. He pulls my yellow blanket back. I am too hot. I am too hot and it is too early for bed. He gives me a spoon of medicine. I open my mouth wide and wait for the spoon to be put in my mouth and wait for my daddy to say, Brave boy. Because it is nasty horrible stuff. My daddy smells of his trumpet club. He takes my hand and sings, Dreams to sell / Fine dreams to sell / Angus is here / with dreams to sell. Then my daddy is sleeping. He does a loud snore. Then he catches his breath and suddenly wakes. He pats my head. Strokes my head. Hair just like mine, he says. Then he pulls my cover right up to my chin, says, Coorie in, son, Coorie in. I am still not sleeping. I hear voices under the floor. My daddy is singing another song to my mummy. I hear next door’s dog bark like he is angry. I hear children playing out in the street. I hear Sammy shouting. Then they drop their voices. Then I hear the house breathe.
My father had a lifelong terror, phobia whatever, about hospitals. Makes a lot of sense in hindsight. He was so scared of doctors, he passed that on to me. That’s what parents exist for: to pass their phobias on generation to generation. Fuck, if I so much as saw a white coat man, I’d wet myself and have a big Marks and Spencers. That was our family word for tantrum – I had my first big tantrum in Marks and Spencers apparently in the food bit. I went bananas because my mother wouldn’t buy me some fancy chocolate bar. My mother said that her ears went bright red with shame. I was doing some high pitch scream and jumping up and down on her feet at the same time. So every time after that when I was about to lose it my mother would say, Don’t you do a Marks and Spencers on me. My father thought of doctors as a whole breed apart; he had a million different words for them. And jokes. What’s the difference between God and a doctor? God knows he isn’t a doctor. Shit like that. If he wanted to insult somebody he’d say they wrote like a doctor, talked like a doctor, smiled like one. Needless to say, when he got ill, he just point blank refused to see one. This is 1997. I’m still not sure what he had wrong with him. Something to do with his liver. He said, the last time I saw him, My number’s up, Cole. Like life was a fucking game of poker. I was destroyed. I tried to persuade him to see a doctor, but he was having none of it. I read somewhere that dying women are braver than dying men. He was definitely brave. But not brave enough to tell me the truth. And my mother didn’t want me to stay the night, that night. She wanted to be on her own with my father.
So I went out with my mate Brady who has left nine messages on my machine, man. The first one just said, Fucking hell, Cole. Ring me.
The day I went to the funeral parlour I still had the remains of a hangover. I puked in the toilet of the creepy place before I left. I puked everything up until I’d nothing left but bile. Bright yellow bad tasting bile. I’d never seen a dead person before. Never seen someone there and not there like that. Still and stiff. Unreal. The smell of disinfectant not the smell of people. The cold air spinning round the room. The sick noise of that big fan, its arm whirling around like some bad conductor.
My father looked fake. Everything about him. His skin looked like it was made of silicone. His eyes were closed, but I got the feeling that if someone opened them, the bright orange eyes of s
ome huge doll would blare out at me. His hands looked like plastic gloves, as if they had never ever held a trumpet, as if the trumpet was just a dream the dead body had. I wanted to touch him to check he was real and not some waxwork, but I couldn’t. I was too freaked out. I was scared shitless. I’ve never been so frightened. Someone had put powder on my father’s cheeks. I don’t know if it was the funeral man or someone else. The funeral man told me my mother was expected in later in the day and she was going to bring his suit, his best suit. That’s what she wants her to wear, he said as if it was all beyond him. I’d forgotten my mother. I’d forgotten all about her. That meant she knew. Well, of course she knew. I went to the toilet and then I ran and I kept on running through streets I didn’t know in that cruel heat.
I phoned my mother and said things to her I can’t now remember. She begged me to come round and see her. I told her she’d be lucky if I went to the funeral. I could feel how hollow her silence was, like I’d just scooped out her voice. But I couldn’t stop. Ranting, man. Fucking ranting. Strung out, rattling. She said some balls like, Colman, try and understand. And she said sorry over and over again till that made me sick too. Colman, I’m sorry. Sorry, Colman. Colman. Colman. Colman. I started feeling dizzy at the sound of my own name.
