The Big Music (21 page)

So, Margaret.

Just –

‘Margaret
…’

Is what his father used to say.

‘Just so.’

She’s the one who’s made it possible for him to stay away.

And by now – well, he’s used to it, Callum is. With his father the way he is, the life he’d chosen for himself a quiet life and alone … So Callum is used to not having to come here. Until just now, and his mother’s phone call – because really, what’s the need? Really, why bother? When –

Don’t bother.

Is all his father ever said to him. When he was a young man and newly arrived at the House after a long drive, or a boy coming to wish his father goodnight and always Margaret would take him through –

Took your time, didn’t you?

So, really, why would he bother? Come all the way up here? When –

Don’t know why you bothered

– is all his father ever used to say.

But there was Margaret then. She was always here. And she would help him, take him through to his father – and she would stay on in the sitting room with them, she’d ask Callum questions, she’d talk to him and his father both. ‘How was the journey?’ ‘Tell your father how well you’re doing at school.’ ‘At university, how is it there?’ ‘Have they given you a pay rise yet?’ ‘How’s the business?’ ‘How is your wife?’ ‘How are your boys?’ All –

Margaret.

Back then. All –

Margaret.

Margaret.

Margaret.

As the air would soften around his father then, as he looked at her.

As she stood there with them both, by his father’s chair.

Margaret,
his father’s eyes said to her and everything could be soft.

Margaret.

Margaret.

Margaret.

But she can’t take Callum into the dark bedroom to see his father now.

The soup is untouched, and the roll, and tea, where Helen left it. He’s had too much to drink and should take something to eat but his mouth is ashen and his stomach turns at the thought of food, at the sight of it, there on the tray.

The light in the hall casts a dim glow down the little passageway off the sitting room, down the east side of the House where his father sleeps these days, no longer in his own room upstairs but down here where he can be looked after, in that little single room with its single bed. It’s the place where, Callum knows, they’ve all been brought – all his grandfathers, his father’s father, and his father before him. All the long line of Sutherland men. All the Roderick Johns. The John Callums. All brought down in
their time to the bedroom on the ground floor, the first bedroom,
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where they can be looked after and then laid out in. The narrow room where they come to die.

Callum has had a fair bit to drink but he’s steady on his feet, and he must go in there, to that same room. After all these years away and now he must see his father, with Margaret not here to guide him, he must, and be strong, go in there. He will be strong. So he pushes wide open the door of the sitting room and goes down the hall to where his father is, and the room is dark where he is but the moment he steps inside it the voice comes from the bed –

‘Daddy?’

His father’s voice.

‘Daddy?’

His father calling for his own father.

Christ.

Who’s been dead for – what? Thirty years? Forty years?

Calling out, ‘Is that you?’

‘No.’

Callum steps towards the bed. ‘No, Dad’ he says. ‘It’s Callum here.’

There’s a pause then, a minute, half a minute, a mark of time. Callum’s eyes adjust to the darkness, and he can see … The bed, a form outlined upon it.

‘Callum?’

‘Aye.’

‘Callum?’

And –

Where did that come from, just then? That Aye?

Yet ‘Aye’ he says again, when his father asks him for the third time, ‘Callum?’

So it’s started.

Aye.

The being home.

The being here.

It’s started and it’s finishing here.

All at once Callum is exhausted. He sits down on a chair in the corner of the room. He could sleep now. Right here. Close his eyes. As though all the day has just come down upon him, on his shoulders, on his head … So all he wants to do is close his eyes.

‘My Callum?’ his father says. ‘Or are you someone else’s boy?’

‘No, Daddy’ he replies. ‘It’s me.’

And what was that Margaret said before?

Light as a leaf.

So how? Is all Callum can think, right this second. How? Now his eyes have adjusted fully to the dark and he can see fully the frailty of the figure lying here. That’s calling out for his father like a little boy … How could … That? Get up onto any hill? Get out of bed even? How do anything when what is here before him is just a shape, the outline of a man, beneath the bedclothes? When what is left is no more than a voice, a shallow breathing in the dark? How could that … Even be his father? Yet it is.

They’ve given him something …

Margaret had said that the doctor had been.

To help him sleep.

And, yes, Callum thinks now: Just sleep. Is the best thing. For his father. For him. Is what he wants to do, sleep. Here … In this room …

Let the dark come down heavy on his own head and sleep, sleep.

And just as he does, feels himself pulled right down into the centre of unconsciousness where his father and all his father’s fathers are waiting … There’s movement from the bed, a rumple of sheets, the figure trying
to right itself, to heave itself up – and in that second Callum is awake, is up and over to the bed. He lays his hand on a thin restless arm, his hand enormous upon it, and there’s a sigh then, and the figure lets itself fall back upon the mattress.

For a space, an intake of breath, nothing happens. Then Callum hears his father’s breath starts coming again, shallow but even. In. And out. And in. Out. Like a dry strip of paper let out of an old machine, one breath, another breath. In. And out. Tick. Tock. Goes the machine. Then a word. One word. Two words. More words:

First, ‘Callum.’

First, his name.

Then –

‘The dogs.’

Two words. Then –

‘Were barking.’

Tick, tock.

‘Before …’ say the words. First one, then another. ‘When we …’ they say, ‘were out … today.’ And on the hill …’ they say. Printing, breathing. In, and out. Upon the page.

‘Callum.’

And there’s a gap then. His father shifting in the bed. As though the last of the words that have come out from out of the dark have gone back into it again, printed back into silence.

So it is still again.

And only the breathing …

The quiet …

Is left. The figure on the bed who is his father but who is also barely anyone at all.

Callum takes his seat like before in the corner of the room. He’s wide awake now. He won’t be sleeping. All he can think, like before, is … How could that … Whisper? That … Figure, beneath the sheets … Take itself … Anywhere? Do … Anything? Though his mother had said when she called that his father had been missing, and Margaret told him that it was all yesterday morning his father had been gone, away up over the hill,
and with a baby in his arms, and singing to himself Iain had said when they came upon him, and calling out … How could that … Story? That Margaret told … How could it have happened at all? When what is here in the bed is no more than a shape in the bed, no more than an outline of a sheet on the bed …?

But, despite his thoughts, there’s a shift now in the room and his father has turned his face towards him in the dark and he’s speaking to him again, and stronger now than before, sounding like himself again, nearly, only quieter, saying, ‘I knew when I saw you today on the hill, Callum. I knew then that you’d come home for good.’ Then he says ‘Come here,’ and he pats the sheet beside him. ‘Don’t sit way over there on your own’ he says. ‘Come here to the bed and sit with me. For when the dogs found you on the hill you were so thin. Callum, you were forlorn. Come over here, boy, and sit with your father now.’

Callum can’t speak. This could never happen. First the dark and the strangeness of the dark and now – and now to have to go over there to the bed and sit with his father in that close way. To be with him, close. No thoughts can even attach themselves to that idea, no words, no phrases. Even so, going over to the bed is what he does all the same, like
sleepwalking
, in a waking dream. He goes over to the bed and sits down on it beside where his father is lying. Though it could never happen, he sits beside his father’s body. He covers his father’s hand with his hand, though he would never do that either, touch his father’s hand. Still he does, he sits there. He holds his father’s hand while his father speaks.

‘I knew of course it was you they’d found’ he is saying. ‘Always missing you, since you’d been gone. That was them barking, they were after you before. But of course you would come home to them. To give them a good run. And to be with your grandfather, too, of course. Out in the hills. I know. I said to my daddy that of course my son would come home.’ He shifts again in the bed, sighs. ‘Though he wouldn’t believe me’ he says, and his voice is quite regular by now, as though this dream Callum is having is a conversation anyone might have, one man to another, father to a son. ‘He wouldn’t, Callum’ his father is saying. ‘He was always stubborn, my father. They played the pipes for him at the end and they gave him a flag,
did you know? That they gave him a flag to wear? But he wouldn’t have worn it. He wouldn’t have dressed himself that way. It was a suit he always wore, my father, even in the House. The suit had a hard cuff.’

He makes a swift gesture then, brings his hand up from the bed as though to strike his own face – and for a second, as his father had loosed his hold, Callum’s own hand grazed the side of his father’s face. For a second he’d felt the dry rub of stubble on his skin.

‘It was a harsh cuff’ his father says. ‘And he had his hand there, like this –’

And now with his hand he does fully strike his own face.

‘Here –’ he says, and hits himself again. ‘When I played I’d angered him, you see. And the cuff … It had an edge.’

He goes to strike himself a third time – but Callum stays his hand, and his father turns his face to the wall, a cry coming out of him that’s like a child’s cry. ‘I was bad to play that way! For I had no right!’

And he is weeping now, Callum can hear. A kind of dry, silent weeping. He has a fist brought up to his mouth, a bony little fist that used to be such a hand, the hand on the steering-wheel driving north, remember? Remember that huge hand? No, he can’t. Callum can’t remember. He can suddenly not remember any of it any more. The room’s dark, has taken it all into itself. All those days when he feared the size of that hand, could not look his father in the eye. All the – Christs! You took your time! All those days – because where are they now? In this dark? Where is he? The man who said those words? Banged his hand on the wheel? Shouted? Christ? He’s not here in this little room, not in this bed.

‘I angered him.’

Not in the dry sobs, the tiny cries.

‘I played badly and there was a cuff and there was a flex.’
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Not here in the face against the wall.

‘And I had the cuff at you, Callum. The cuff was at your own soft
cheek. When you were just a boy, you were just a boy …’

‘No, Dad.’ Callum leans over from the chair and lays his hand again on the arm of the figure who is lying there. This figure he doesn’t know, who is his father. ‘You never taught me the pipes, Daddy’ he says. ‘That wasn’t me. I’ve never practised for you. Getting the notes right … That was you. It’s you who plays. Your father who taught you. I have never –’

‘Shhh …’

His father closes his eyes.

‘Don’t trouble yourself’ he says, he’s drifting back into sleep.

His breathing slowing again, settling …
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‘You’ll know by now …’ he says. ‘I’m not going anywhere … And can you hear that?’ he says, but it’s a whisper, his voice already gone far away by now, and sounding far away.

‘How quiet it is?’ he says.

Callum places his hand upon his father’s little head.

‘The dogs were barking before’ his father whispers, ‘but they’ve stopped now that Callum’s come home.’

Him answering his wife even now, after all these years, as ‘Aye’ not ‘Yes’ because he knew how she hated it, and he wanted her, it suited him, to have her hate him.

‘Aye, taking the pills like the doctor says’ he tells her, just to keep her quiet. ‘Oh, aye’ so he’ll tell her that he’s been swallowing them. Like an old boy off the hill’s how he makes out with her now, to annoy her, like he’s never lived anywhere but here.

What’s your name again, missis?

He could say to her that!

Hah!

And it would make her wild.

What’s your name again then, my dear?

As if he wants to be a stranger! That’s how he could behave! As though to have never been married to her! That he wasn’t even with her in London, as her husband, all through that time. That Callum was not the baby they took home from the hospital that day – in London, too. And don’t think he’s going back there either. With Callum. He’s staying right here.