Authors: Jackie Kay
When she first saw the breasts (and she thought of them again driving home, how strange they looked, how preserved they looked) she thought that they weren’t real breasts at all. At least not women’s breasts. She thought
Mr Moody must be one of those men that had extra flab on top – male breasts. But they really were too big for that. They were even a different colour slightly from the rest of the body. Also, the doctor was struck by how young these breasts looked compared to the rest of the body. They hadn’t aged. It took her pulling down the pyjama bottoms for her to be quite certain. Doctor Krishnamurty wondered at the woman waiting for her downstairs.
She got her red pen out from her doctor’s bag. What she thought of as her emergency red pen. She crossed ‘male’ out and wrote ‘female’ in her rather bad doctor’s handwriting. She looked at the word ‘female’ and thought it wasn’t quite clear enough. She crossed that out, tutting to herself, and printed ‘female’ in large childish letters. Then she put the medical certificate in the envelope, wondered what the registrar would make of it, sealed the envelope and closed the door on the dead woman. The last thing she saw before the door had closed completely was the bandage lying curled on the bed like a snake.
She handed Mrs Moody the medical certificate certifying the death in an envelope. She gave Mrs Moody a searching look, but found nothing in her face to indicate anything. She decided to say nothing except, ‘You will need to take this envelope with you to the registrar when you go to register the death.’ Mrs Moody nodded, said politely, ‘Thank you, doctor,’ and the doctor left. She drove off in her white car at quite a considerable speed.
The pale, bloodless light dawned on her.
He never hit me. Never raised a hand or a fist. A belt, a buckle or a boot. I’ll say that for him. Not once. Hardly ever raised his voice. Didn’t need to. He’d hold my hand in the street. Liked that. Holding my hand in the street for people to see. Father and son out and about in the street. People that didn’t know I was adopted said things like, ‘You’re your father’s spitting image, you are.’ What I wanted when I was a kid was to look like my father. You could write a list of things after his name. Good-looking. Talented. Charismatic. When I was little, I could coast, bask in his glory. ‘Joss Moody’s son.’ It was all right, it was, being Joss Moody’s son. Only when I became Colman Moody did everything start to become a total fucking drag. It’s a tall order when you are expected to be somebody just because your father is somebody. The children of famous people aren’t allowed to be talentless, ordinary fuckwits like me. It’s the enhanced gene pool theory. Except I didn’t have his genes which should have got me off the talent hook scot-free, but didn’t somehow. I never figured that out. I mean, what am I? Colman Moody the guy who tried to be an au pair in France and got knocked back. The guy who did two years of a four-year
course. The bloke who hung out in India for a year taking people on trips on his rubber dinghy. The guy who flopped his A-levels first time round. Colman Moody, son of Joss Moody, the famous trumpet player. You know the one. The one who pretended to be a man and fetched up a woman at his death. Conned his own son. That boy must have been thick. Two planks. Colman Moody the guy who didn’t do nothing.
I can tell you things. I’ll tell you things, no problem, anything that interests you, right. But my life isn’t all that eventful. Scandals don’t make events happen, do they? I mean it has only become eventful now; after his death. Then the life, the one I thought I knew I’d lived, changed. Now I don’t know what I lived. It suddenly isn’t the same life. It’s a whole different ball game. Know what I mean. I haven’t got the same life.
When I’d tell people I was adopted they’d say things like, you could have been brought up in another part of the world, with rich parents, poor parents, Mormons, communists, fascists, bankers, Catholics, Methodists, zoo-keepers, serial killers. You could have gone straight to a cold old orphanage. Yes, Cole, you could have been a Barnardo boy. Or one of them poor sods that’s been abused by those psychos in care. Let’s face it, a pal of mine said, adoption is a lucky dip. Lucky you ended up where you did. I’d like to find some of those fuckers now. Ask them what they think of this. The children of lovers are orphans anyway. I forget who it was that said that. Some bright spark. It about sums me up.
I was a traditional boy in an untraditional house. I was
always going about the place freaked out and embarrassed. My parents were not like other people’s parents. Whenever they came to my school they stuck out like a sore thumb. I don’t know what it was. A different life makes people look different. Even their skin. Their clothes were more glamorous. They didn’t look like they worked a nine to five. I wanted parents that looked like they worked a nine to five. It was bad enough with all that jazz never mind this. My life was unconventional. A lot of my childhood was spent on the road. Touring. Place to fucking place. I’d have been happier at home watching
Star Trek
with a bowl of cornflakes. Too much, it was. All that razzamatazz. Other kids envied me and I envied other kids. That’s it. Grass always greener. Kids of bohemian parents long for a square meal on the table every night at five-thirty. My mate Sammy knew that Tuesday was fish pie day and Wednesday was steak and kidney. I’d have loved that. When I stayed in my mate Sammy’s house, I loved everything being regulated. But Sammy hated it. I kept saying we could swop. I mean I’d already swopped from the mother who had me; so why not again. But Sammy lost his bottle and couldn’t ask. I suppose I was boring as fuck. I’d have liked to have been made to have a bath every night in the same house in the same town. My mother was strict about my homework. Had to take it around with me wherever we went. I remember practising reading in dingy old jazz clubs before my father went on. I liked that. Sitting at a brown table with a Coke and a book. A lot of the time my mother would not want to go with my father on the road on account of my schooling.
But he was unusual for a jazz man. He wanted his family with him. It’s pretty ironic really. If we didn’t go with him, he’d come back with a hangover and a hang-dog look on his chops. He got nervous or superstitious if we didn’t go. And pissed.
I used to think he had affairs at times like those. All men are bastards, including myself. I used to think I was quite cool being able to think like that. Once, I even asked my mother how she’d feel. Just to stir things up a bit. Send the dust flying. She said he never would be unfaithful and gave me an odd smile that makes perfect fucking sense now. See that’s what I mean. I’m going to have to go back over my whole life with a fine-tooth comb and look for signs like that. I’ve got to do it. Jesus. It’s embarrassing, that’s the worst of it. Pricks saying, Really, Cole, didn’t you know? Bastards asking me questions. I’m so embarrassed I could emigrate. Just get the fuck out any fucking where. That’s what I wanted to do when the shit first hit the fan. Just get the fuck out of this country.
I couldn’t miss his funeral. No matter what he’d done to me. Just couldn’t miss it. I considered it. Kept me awake the whole night before the morning of his funeral. But I’m too superstitious.
I never liked jazz. Everybody who came to our house, all they ever talked about was jazz. I got so bored I could have bored a hole in my own skull. If I was a fanatic I’d have been over the moon. But I wasn’t. Some of my father’s friends suspected me. I don’t know what of. Maybe they thought I didn’t deserve him for a father. Probably they thought I was a sulky, yellow pain in the ass with no
personality. Those guys liked personality. They liked people speaking out and being outrageous. I was not at all extrovert. I liked the dark corners of sulking. I liked sliding along the walls of our house in a state of chronic depression. I liked counting the blackheads of my acne. I didn’t care. I was in my own world. I pretended I didn’t give a flying fuck what my father thought of me. But I did. I suppose I wanted him to be proud of me as a man, as a black man. I fucking worshipped him.
I goes in my father’s bedroom. I am six years old. I opens their wardrobe. My daddy keeps his trumpet in here. I opens the big silver box, and there it is, all shiny inside. I touched it. I did touch it. Then I strokes it like I’ve seen my father do and it purrs. I runs my fingers over the keys then along the fur, the purple fur in the box. My fingers are burning hot. I tells it a story about a magic trumpet like itself. Then my mum finded me. I can’t make anything up. She says, Colman, what are you doing? Get out of your father’s trumpet. So I close the silver lid and push it back into the wardrobe. Daddy must have forgotten to take his trumpet, I says. I hope it doesn’t make him bad luck, I says. As if I was worried about it
.
How did they pull it off? I mean you have to get a marriage certificate and stuff like that. How did they do it? I’m not sleeping nights trying to work this one out. Part of me thinks, Chuck it in, Cole. Give it up. But the other part of me is pure obsessed with it. Every time I try
to put it out of my mind, some other fucking question pops up like a fucking jack-in-the-box.
How did they get me? I mean no adoption agency would have done that then, would they? I mean they don’t even do it now all that easily. I was reading some rumpus about some couple of blokes that wanted to adopt this little boy. I mean fair enough; good luck to them, it’s not my problem.
There’s nobody else. No brothers or sisters. Just got me. They got me from the Scottish Adoption Agency in Edinburgh. 1962. I was born in 1961 but they had to wait a few months.
They told me that agency was extremely pleased with them given my colour. They said the agency called them ‘a find’ as I remember. A find. I am the same kind of colour as my father. We even look alike. Pure fluke. Or maybe I copied his smile so much I look like his carbon copy. Anyhow this was long before all this transracial adoption business. So it was an accident. Funny how bad luck can turn into good luck and then back to bad luck again. Story of my life. I’ve always been a self-pitying bastard. Now I’ve got good cause, I have. I’d rather have had some bod that was an army officer, some wanky accountant, some asshole businessman, man, any fucking ordinary man would have done. I think the agency must have thought they’d have had trouble placing me if Joss and Millicent Moody hadn’t come along.
We moved from Glasgow to London when I was seven. I got rid of my Glasgow accent. Well, almost. Some people claim they can still hear strains of it. My
father clung on to his. Determined that everyone would know he was Scottish. When I came home with my cockney accent, my father got all cut up. He’d shout, ‘Speak properly!’ Seriously. It was a fucking nightmare moving down here with that accent. I got ribbed. Non stop. Got it both ways. London was seething, racist. I don’t remember much about Glasgow. I remember the inside of my gran’s house in Kirkintilloch. All her ornaments. The smell of her mints on her breath. Her big high bed. I only had the one gran, my mum’s mum. My dad’s mum died before I was born. My memory’s shit. I got a bike once for my birthday. Must have been six. It was bright green. Brand new. I thought I’d never learn to cycle, then one day I suddenly did. That’s it. My father kept telling me I was Scottish. Born there. But I didn’t feel Scottish. Didn’t feel English either. Didn’t feel anything. My heart is a fucking stone.
I’ll go down their house and look for the important papers bag. My mother’s not there now. She’s gone to Torr. I’ve got keys. I’ve always had keys to their house. I’ll let myself in and raid the bureau. My mother kept anything important in an old leather bag that looked like a doctor’s bag. All the shit is in there. Do people get a marriage certificate? I fucking don’t know. There must be a birth certificate though. I’ve got no idea what it says on my father’s death certificate. I suppose it must say Joss Moody. I’ll need to find that out too.
I’ve never been a nosey bastard in my life. I wasn’t the sort of kid who hung about and earwigged at the door or at the top of the stairs. If something forced me to listen,
I’d listen. But this. This is different. I’ve got a right now. It’s my life. I can go and snoop and prowl and sneak about the place. I can take things out and not put them back. I will. I’ll do any of it. I don’t care who it upsets.
My father was nice to everybody. Even though he was famous. He was pleasant to people. Smiled and talked to fans. Wrote bits of letters to people. See, all those people, they’ll be as flabbergasted as me. The fucking Joss Moody Fan Club will have to close down, man.
We were poor till I was ten. I didn’t get hardly anything new. Well, except that new bike. Everything else had been worn by somebody. I wore other people’s kids’ clothes that my mum got at Oxfam. I used to imagine the boys that had worn the dufflecoat before I did. What their life was like. I used to imagine them as I was doing up the toggles. My dad hung out in those really grotty jazz bars. More dens than bars. I can still see myself sitting there, wrapping up my empty crisp packet into a fake cigar, puffing. Exciting, they were, when I was very little. He always practised in the top room of some pub because the Wee Jazz Band, or the Delta Dog Swingers, or the Jugg Stompers or the Joss Moody Dream Band or the Shoogie Woogie Boogie Men or whatever – I’ve lost count of all the weird names my father had for himself – couldn’t afford a decent place to practise. He was always coming back then, looking deflated because some pub had turfed him out and said they needed the room for a function. That way of living seemed to go on for ages. We went to Torr every summer because it was
cheaper. My dad was always counting his takings. He’d get me to sit on the floor, spread out a newspaper, and build pounds, towers of sixpences, threepenny bits, crowns. I liked doing that; it made me feel rich. I didn’t like it when my father took all the money and put it in a plastic bag to be taken to the bank. I never understood why the bank deserved our money. I’d get a shilling for a pokey hat from the van.
When we moved down to London I still called an icecream a pokey hat when I was with my parents and called it an ice-cream with my mates. There were lots of words like that that I used because it cheered them up. I was practically schizophrenic. But now I come to think about it, I wasn’t nearly as schizophrenic as him. Doing what he did is in a different league from saying mocket to one person and dirty to another.