Trumpet: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Jackie Kay

  In St Andrews, he had an hour’s wait for the next bus. He phoned Bruce Savage, the butcher.

  ‘Ah, Colman, Colman, how are you?’ Bruce said. ‘Sorry to hear about your dad.’

  He was the first person to say that to Colman, that simply. It startled him. ‘Can you give my mother a message?’ Colman asked him. ‘Can you tell her I’m coming to see her on my own. My bus gets in at four-twenty.’

  ‘Rightio, no problem,’ Bruce said.

  ‘Thanks, make sure you tell her I’ll be on my own, will you?’

  ‘On your own. I’ve got the message,’ Bruce said, laughing. ‘What’s happened? Has she broken your heart then?’

  The bus rounds a high tight bend, he is on the other side of the harbour. He can see Kepper in the distance. His face, close to the bus window. The same old fishing harbour where he spent many many hours as a boy. His father and him and Angus on the old rowing boat. Waiting for the line to bite and tug, opening his tin of maggots, or his tin of fresh bait, attaching floats and flies to his line, choosing hooks. Reeling in the odd sensation and battering it with his mallet. The fish sometimes jumped out of his hand and flapped about the boat, even after it had died. It always startled him, that after-shudder of fish. Sitting in silence, him and Angus and his father. Keeping quiet for the fish, to attract the big catch. The special silence of fishermen. He can see his father now, holding up the three pounder by its tail, grinning from ear to ear. ‘I’ve pulled it off,’ his father says.

  He gets out his father’s letter. ‘To be opened after my death.’ He takes a deep breath. He is ready for it. Whatever it is, he’s up for it. He opens it carefully. It is a long letter. Must have taken him some time to write.

  LAST WORD

  You wanted the story of my father, remember? I told you his story could be the story of any black man who came from Africa to Scotland. His story, I told you, was the diaspora. Every story runs into the same river and the same river runs into the sea. But I’ve changed my mind, now that I’m dying. It is not just fever. I am not just sweating. I’m holding a candle to myself. I can see him, because he told me the story, as clearly as if I was there.

  My father came off a boat right enough, right into a broth of dense fog; the local people called it a ‘real pea souper’. He had never seen fog before. The air was damp and eerie on his skin and he was freezing. Ghost country. The people and the weather shrouded in uncertainty. Shadow people, he thought, insubstantial, no colour. He was a young boy full of fears. Life, then, he said, was something that happened to him. Other people pulled the thin strings and he moved his limbs. This new country was a wet ghost, cold fingers searching his cheeks for warmth. It was as if he walked off that ship into nothing, as if the strange grey air might gulp him down, whole.

  This was at the turn of the century. At the turn of the century you can see the old people turn back and the young people whirl and twirl forward, he said. When the century turns, everybody turns like people in a progressive reel dance. Some turn over a new leaf, some turn a blind eye, a deaf ear, some turn the long barn tables, some slip back, sliding towards the old tongue. When the pendulum of the old clock’s big hand moves forward, somebody always turns it back. Somebody who resents progress or is irritated by it or decides all change is false. Somebody who felt that the hour for the upturning of his glass was at hand. When the century turns, some people itch to betray, to desert, to escape. The turncoats walk away slowly towards the turn of the century in their long black coats. The new century arrives like a wild thing in a storm, turning up at the shore with a wet face.

  When my father first arrived in Scotland at the turn of the century, the long-standing people stood huddled together in long dark coats with their long pale faces. They stood against the rock wall of the port; they seemed as if they were growing out of the rock. Standing fast, they barely moved. They were the stock-still people, chiselled into the crag. The big ship in front of them, moored and gigantic. My father looked back at it. Strange how newly arrived ships static on the sea look so unreal. He could barely believe the great vessel had actually brought him here. It looked like an enormous fiction, the letters written in italic at its side like the title of its epic narrative, HMS Spiteful. The closer he walked towards the people waiting for the passengers to spill onto the port, the more unreal they became. The white skin was the translucent skin of a ghost. Those people looked as if they would never find who they were waiting for; the fallen and the lost, blowing on their hands to try to bring themselves to life. They had been standing there waiting for ever with their bloodless cheeks in their secretive weather. Those people, my father used to joke, were the last century.

  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 libra
ry. 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.

  SHARES

  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.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ‘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.