by Jackie Kay
Most of Big Red’s mornings are hangover mornings and all of his friends, acquaintances and fellow bums know better than to ring him before three o’clock. So when the phone goes, when the phone rings and fucking rings and rings, Big Red already knows it is something not nice. And sure enough, right on the end of his line, dangling, is a woman by the name of Sophie Stones. Big Red’s hangover is throbbing enough to make him want to dress to twelve Bessie Smith numbers. He isn’t feeling well. He isn’t feeling well at all. Non communicado. She says to him, ‘You were Joss Moody’s drummer, weren’t you?’ Big Red said, ‘Aye, what’s it to you? Who is asking?’ The sleek voice comes down the line. ‘My name is Sophie Stones, I work on the Daily Sky.’ Big Red is almost ready to hang up. He loathes the capitalist press. What a bunch of weak-willed unintelligent bastards they all were. But he hangs on, out of curiosity.
‘I’m writing a book about the amazing fact that Joss Moody turned out to be a woman,’ she says. ‘Were you aware—?’
He interrupts her, ‘Nope. And you should concern yourself with the music. The guy’s a genius.’
‘Don’t you mean the girl’s a genius?’ Sophie says.
‘Whatever. Christ, do you think I’m bothered? Do you think anybody’s bothered? It’s the fucking music that matters.’ He hears her drawing her breath.
‘But did you know before the funeral?’
‘Nope.’
‘So you must have got quite a shock? Come on. This is somebody you toured with for ten years. How come you didn’t suspect?’
‘A lot of people said Moody had a baby face,’ Big Red says, ‘but I didn’t think so. I beat up anybody who said that.’
‘Can you tell me what Moody did when the rest of you were in urinals?’
‘Women think that men spend all their time gawking at the size of each other’s pricks in the bogs. I’ve more to do than watch men pish.’
‘But that’s just it,’ Sophie says triumphantly, ‘Moody never “pished” in front of you, did he? Did you never notice, touring together like you did?’
‘We were in jazz clubs. We were musicians. We werenie interested in wur wee-wees.’
‘But, come on,’ Sophie says again.
‘Naw, you come on. Away and write yir stupit book. It won’t tell us anything aboot Moody. If you want my advice, you’ll drop it. It ull only upset his family. Anyway, I’m having nothing to do with it. It’s not on.’
Sophie says, ‘We will of course be paying a handsome fee.’
Big Red pulls himself up to his full height in his hall. ‘Are you trying to bribe me? Away and raffle yourself.’ Big Red slams his phone down and goes back to bed. His head is still sizzling and his temples are singing songs. ‘Christ almighty,’ he says to himself, ‘I’m strung oot. Rattling.’ He pulls the covers over his head and mutters to himself, ‘Stupit fucking cow,’ before giving himself up to sleep.
In his dream Moody is there with his shining trumpet. He walks towards him and he says, ‘You’ve heard I’m dead, Big Red.’ In his dream, he hears himself tell Moody, ‘Yes, I’ve heard the news. Every fucker is talking about you. The jazz world is going fucking mental. You won’t believe how much you’re missed.’ Moody says, ‘Is that so?’ Big Red can’t help but notice that dead Moody is the same as live Moody. Big Red reaches out for Moody’s arm. He is about to say, ‘You bastard, I still can’t believe you did it,’ but Moody starts walking backwards through the club’s doors. They are in a big bright yellow field. Big Red is running after Moody. Moody is fit and Big Red is not. He sweats and runs. Must lose some weight, he thinks. Finally he shouts ahead to Moody, ‘I still can’t believe you did it.’ Moody shouts back, ‘Did what?’ Big Red shouts, ‘Died on me, you fucking bastard!’ In his dream, Moody’s face lights up. ‘Oh that,’ he says. ‘That. You had that coming. You needed to be the bandleader.’ Moody starts to run. In his dream he is the same age that he was when they first met. ‘Was it me?’ Big Red shouts after the running figure in the yellow field. ‘Did I do something?’ Moody turns and shouts, ‘Don’t be soft, McCall. You knew all along!’
McCall wakes, clacking his tongue to the roof of his mouth, wondering what the fuck Moody died of. He can’t remember. With all the hullabaloo, he’s just plain forgotten. Was it kidney problems? Fuck me, Big Red thinks to himself. I don’t fucking know what claimed him. Big Red lies awake in bed, trying to remember deadly illnesses. AIDs, naw, cancer, don’t think so, diabetes, naw, emphysema, no. Glandular fever. Hepatitis. Irritable bowel syndrome. (Can you die of that?) Jaundice. Kidney failure. Liver failure. Meningitis. Narcotics. Osteoporosis. Parkinson’s disease. (Hadn’t Moody been shaking strangely the last time he saw him?) Quadriplegia. Rheumatic fever. Salmonella. Tuberculosis. An ulcer, one of them exploding ones. A deadly virus. White cells. Yellow fever. (Where was the last place they’d been?) Z? Z? What the fuck begins with Z? Big Red has exhausted himself. Maybe he just died in his sleep; maybe that was it – zzzzzzz.
It’s bugging him. He can’t come up with it. He can hardly ring Millie and ask her. Maybe it’ll come back to him. The last time he saw Moody he was looking a bit jaded, but no’ bad. Just tired. He didn’t look like he was dying. If Big Red had realized he would have said different things. He would have handled it differently. It’s awful when you get deprived of a last word. There was Moody going to his grave with most people none the wiser. If he’d known, if he’d been able to tell him, ‘Look, Moody, don’t worry about me because I don’t give a fuck.’ Moody was just the same in Big Red’s head, except Moody was dead. That was the fucking awful thing. Moody was dead. No more Moody Trumpet. No more scooping pitch. No screaming. No hubba hubba. He seemed like he would just go on playing the trumpet till he dropped. Dropsy? Give in. Big Red punches his fist into the pillow saying to himself over and over, ‘I can’t get fucking comfortable.’ He dents and winds and batters the fuck out of his useless pillow until he tastes salt on his lips. It’s been years since he had a cry. At first he can’t believe those are tears sliding down his face. Then the sound comes out of his mouth and he knows. Once it starts it goes on for ages. After a bit McCall gets into it. Just fucking cry, he thinks to himself. ‘Go on, you stupit bastard, you big fat wean, cry your eyeballs out their sockets.’ He doesn’t get a hanky. He lets the snot run down his face till he has to wipe it with the back of his big hand.
HOUSE AND HOME
Her hand on the envelope. Third letter. Being blackmailed must feel like this. The sight of Stone’s white envelope makes me sink, as if the floor of my house has turned to marshland for a moment. Her handwriting now has a terrible familiarity; I don’t want to recognize it instantly, but I do – the big childish letters, the pretentious ‘e’s’ and ‘a’s.’ She uses a fountain pen evidently. Mrs Millicent Moody, 10 Sandy Road, Torr, Kepper. I hold it in my hand gingerly as if it smells. I open it slowly as if it might explode. This time she says I should reply to Glasgow. She says Colman and her are going to Scotland together to write the book. She says they are working together. Will I cooperate? I notice my hand holding the letter. It is an old woman’s hand. I shall keep this one. I can’t keep burning them. I want the evidence now. I want people to know some day that this is what has been done to me. It is like torture. I don’t know who I could trust. I don’t know whose advice to ask. There must have been somebody in that life of ours who would know how to handle this. I can’t think of anybody. I’ve forgotten them all, suddenly.
I can barely believe that Colman would get himself involved in something like this. He is not a bad boy. He can be difficult; he’s always been immensely capable of being difficult. But not malicious. I would never have associated him with sleaze. Did I give him no sense of morality at all? How is it possible for him to sell and tell the story of our life? Can he not see that lives are not for sale? I could shake him. Every time his face flashes before mine I feel so furious, so violent. It reminds me of how I used to feel when he was a boy, when he would disappear into these moods, these long domine
ering sulks for days. Those moods affected the atmosphere of the entire house. I remember I wanted to slap him. I itched to draw my hand across his sulky face and shout, ‘Snap out of it!’ Occasionally I actually did hit him. Once I had my hands round his neck and was shaking him uncontrollably. It wasn’t me, the woman who suddenly leapt out of me at those moments. I had never ever hit anyone in my life. I don’t know where it came from. One moment the hatred, the next the love. When the love came it was molten, hot, rushing forth out of all the guilt. I didn’t know I was capable of feeling violence at all before I had Colman; I didn’t know I had it in me.
It is a real plot. I have to keep reading her vile sentences over and over to convince myself it is true. When Joss was alive, life was never like this. It was real. We just got on and lived it. Everything has stopped since he died. Reality has stopped. ‘Will you cooperate?’ This is such a strange notion to me: the idea that I could cooperate with a book about my life, that I could graft myself into this life that they think I had. I am going to have to contact my lawyer and get some advice. Perhaps I can stop the book. Perhaps I can get an injunction. I can’t just sit here until they turn up. His story is not going to be my story. A story with a price tag is never going to be true. His story will not be true, even to himself. He has always been naive, Colman. I can just see how it will all go. He has never been that articulate. This Sophie Stones will be putting words into his mouth. I could never write my version of our life. I don’t know what I’d say.
I used to find the amount of publicity that Joss created terrifying. I hated the constant interviews, the articles about his life and music in the newspapers and magazines. The description of our house always incensed me. It was their myth of our house. Every word I read about Joss was a myth. It wasn’t him. When they quoted him in articles, he never sounded like himself. I used to ask him, ‘Did you say that?’ and he’d say ‘Yes.’ I’d persist, ‘Were these your exact words?’ They never were. Perhaps Colman doesn’t know that Sophie Stones is sending me these letters. What do they know about his life? What do I know about his life really? What do I know about my own life?
My life is a fiction now, an open book. I am trapped inside the pages of it. Anything is possible. My life is up for grabs. No doubt they will call me a lesbian. They will find words to put on to me. Words that don’t fit me. Words that don’t fit Joss. They will call him names. Terrible vertigo names. I can see myself holding the book out at arm’s length, to see what words they have used, sinking with them. Down to the bottom, below the green film, to where the thick black mud lies.
I won’t read it. I won’t go near it. It won’t come to that. I will stop it before it happens. No comment. No comment. When he died, I kept repeating that sentence whenever they fired questions at me. I kept saying I don’t have anything to say. I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t stop. They kept on bombarding me, more new faces every time I went out. In the end, they all looked like the same face. The same white sharp face.
I am here because I became convinced that they were stopping Joss from resting in peace. I had to get away from them so that Joss could get some peace. He didn’t get a proper night’s sleep for days before he died: he was in and out of sleep, fretful, snapping awake and dropping off, like a baby. If I could hide from them for long enough, Joss would be able to find his peace. When you die, you don’t leave straightaway. I know this. I feel it. After they took away his body, I felt Joss desperate for peace. He still hasn’t been given his proper death. The one everyone expects – a good send-off. His funeral won’t have helped; he wouldn’t have been satisfied with that funeral. No, he is still hanging around in limbo. They say that when there is trouble, the dead hang around. I believe it completely. Joss is here in me. I find myself thinking thoughts these days that I know are his thoughts.
I find myself standing over the kitchen sink with the tap running at its full capacity. The dark brown basin in the sink is overflowing. My hands are plunged into the cold water. I have no idea how long I have been standing like this. I know my hands are cold, freezing cold. I know my mouth is wet. I know that I have been looking for ages in the water to try to see if I reflect. I don’t. The letter keeps chiming through my head. It is like a bell rung in an old town to tell people that somebody is about to be tarred and feathered or publicly whipped or hung. If Joss was here we would at least be in it together. Joss has forsaken me.
I dry my hands and pour the water down the sink. I must remember things. I look out of the kitchen window. It has been raining. Tiny beads of rain have been painted on the window pane when I wasn’t looking. It is a fine Impressionists’ rain. Next door’s rowan tree is quite still, not at all flamboyant; it is not the season for flamboyance. I can see Elsa at her kitchen window peeling potatoes. The intimacy startles me. Seeing me staring, she waves at me. I wave back, suddenly glad of the human contact. If I pin myself down and remember the ordinary things, I will be able to manage. To get up each day and get washed and eat and sleep. To live a life without my companion. To live this life where I am exhausted with my own company, terrible thoughts spinning morning to night inside my head. Maybe this is what people mean when they say they are lonely. Maybe they mean they are exhausted even with their own company. If I could just say I am lonely how lovely and ordinary that sounds.
What a wonderful common sad ring it has to it. Lonely. It is light and graceful the way old women are, old women who hurry into their small houses at twilight and pull the curtains fiercely. I am just a lonely old woman. I will admit to being old now. I will admit that my body does not behave the way it used to; that my walk is not as fast; that my bones are not as strong; that my breath is shorter; that my energy is sputtering and sparking. I will admit now that I am my age, I am not the girl or the woman that I once was. Old. I have shunned the word and rushed away from it. I have laughed and said smugly to people, ‘You are as old as you feel.’ But today I feel old. It is a comfort to me. Old people should be left alone. They should not be troubled with nasty letters. It is outrageous when you think of it: fancy sending a nasty letter to an old woman! The minute I put it like that you can see how ridiculous it is. How wrong. Fancy hounding an old woman, chasing her with a pack of dogs that have all been given something of hers to sniff. Chasing her right up to the door of her house and howling and barking to get in and have a piece of her. Old women should be left in peace in the gloaming to sit and contemplate and ruminate and go over the bright, sharp details of their memories with their kind old hands, picking and peering and muttering to themselves.
I make myself a list so that they won’t surprise me. A list of potential betrayers. People who will talk for cash. Kiss and tell. There are certain people I know for certain would never divulge a single detail. Maggie wouldn’t ever talk or Ragnail or Big Red or Harry or … But there might be people Joss knew that I don’t. These swines are capable of digging anybody up. Is it possible that Sophie Stones could discover somebody Joss went to school with? Anything is possible. There is no line I can draw which says: ‘Stop here.’ It will all be over the top, crossing the boundary. All hell let loose. Money talks.
LETTERS
There were people who said he had a baby face. There were people who said he had a high voice. I’d fight anyone who said those things. I never suspected a thing.
Big Red McCall, Joss Moody Trio
I was surprised, but I don’t see what all the fuss is about.
When it all blows over, we’ll be left with his music. That’s what matters.
Soloman Davis, Joss Moody fan
I am writing the authorized biography of the trumpet player, Joss Moody. Please refer all correspondence to me. My book will look into the fascinating details of every aspect of her life. I would like anyone who knew her, who played in a band with her, or who corresponded with her to get in touch with me urgently.
Yours, Sophie Stones
We question this notion that somebody who lives their life as a man and is discovered to be f
emale at the time of death was really a woman all along. What is ‘really’ in this context? What is the force of that reality?
Transvestites Anonymous Group (TAG)
We are planning to bring out four CDs to mark Moody’s phenomenal impact on jazz music. They will be called The Best of Moody: The Man and the Woman, to acknowledge the strange circumstances surrounding the trumpet player’s death. These will be available later this year.
John Anderson, Columbia Records
What I can’t understand is how he managed to go on the road with us. I never noticed anything exceptional. That takes some doing. I mean we shared rooms and shit. I don’t remember him going to the john. I’m trying to remember him going to the john but I can’t. The point is he seemed just like the rest of us. I suppose if I’m looking for something I’d say his features had something about them – I don’t know what, something about the soft face, the lips. Once you know, it’s staring you in the face. And the laugh was way over the top and sounded a bit … girlish. But we loved that laugh. It was crazy sounding.
Sean Lafferty, UK Trumpet Society
Can we please let the dead rest in peace? Has this country forgotten how to do that?
Ann Gray, address provided
INTERVIEW EXCLUSIVE
If I stop talking you won’t have a book. If I shut my fucking trap, you’re grounded. You can’t just write shit about people if you don’t know the facts. To tell you the truth, right, I’m starting to get a sore throat. It’s like there’s fucking gravel in my throat or something. My father used to make brilliant hot toddies for things like this. Cloves and shit.
