Trumpet (7 page)

If he was angry with you, you knew about it. It was worse than a slap or a slinging match. He’d just go all cold and quiet on you and it’d give you the creeps. He’d say things like, ‘Colman, I’m disappointed in you.’ Once he was really angry with my mother and my mother was all upset. She put a tea towel over her face and cried underneath it. I tried that. Put a tea towel over my face and cried when he was angry with me. I made big sighs behind it like I’d seen my mother do. Big sighs, made the cotton breathe with me. But my father never seemed to feel guilty like we wanted him to. If he was angry, he was justified. The tea towel never stopped him. Throwing the towel in. When he was seriously angry his face darkened like the sky when it’s about to pour down. Heaveeee.

There’s hardly any particular times I could talk about. Everything gets all jumbled up. I haven’t got a fucking clue what happened when I was nine. Don’t remember my ninth birthday. Not really. I do remember a few things. Like once I was on this bus with my mother and this black man got on. This was in Glasgow. So I’d be six or something like that. And somebody said something horrible to him, called him a fucking ape or some shit like that. And my mother, in a fucking flash, was on her feet giving the guy dokey. Saying she was ashamed to come from the same country as him and that he was pig ignorant. Pig ignorant. I remember that expression because it made me laugh out loud. Then I remember him staring at me, the nasty man, and saying to my mum, ‘No wonder,’ or something. And the black man who had been called an ape, I couldn’t take my eyes off him, was just sitting with his eyes low, looking at the bus floor. Embarrassed as fuck I expect. Then my mum grabbed my hand and we got off that bus and walked home. We’d got off too many stops early and I had to half-run to keep up with her rage. I don’t think she told my dad about that one. Just as well it hadn’t been him. I remember wishing my mum had just kept her mouth shut and not said anything. I was scared people were staring at me. It made me look at my own colour of skin when I got home. Maybe that was the first time I really noticed it. And I was sort of surprised by it. That’s about the longest memory I’ve got and unfortunately it doesn’t really involve my father, does it.

What gets me is why he didn’t tell me. I can
understand him keeping it from the rest of the world maybe, if he thought that was the key to his success, but why couldn’t he tell his own son? Sometime or fucking other. I’m over thirty. I’m not some adolescent or some ‘wee boy’. There was plenty of times he could have said something. I never had a bath with him or saw him or her naked. But then plenty kids never saw their parents naked. That isn’t all that unusual. I mean some parents were just uptight. Kept their fucking privates to themselves. Sammy got to see his dad’s willy. Sammy’s family were dead casual about all that. Once I saw Sammy’s mum’s bra hanging on the back of a chair in their living room. I stared at it for fucking ages. Sammy said his dad’s willy was so big it worried him. He didn’t want one that big, he didn’t think it looked nice. He made it sound really horrible. Said it was the size of a big carrot and had lots of dark hairs at the top. Wild. I was appalled and fascinated. I tried for a couple of weeks after Sammy saw his dad’s ‘wee man’ to get to see my dad’s, but it never happened. The door to their bedroom was always shut. Tight. And I was probably a bit relieved. I never pulled it off. Just as well. Imagine if I’d been confronted with a big frigging mound of venus.

My parents liked Sammy. He was the only one to get to come to Torr with us. I used to be convinced that my father liked Sammy better than me. It made me jealous. Sammy and my dad talked more, laughed more. Once my father even gave Sammy a shot of his trumpet which drove me mad. He told Sammy he’d got the hang of it really quickly.

Things are falling into place. He never taught me to swim. No wonder. Where would he have got changed? Said he couldn’t swim. He never went to the doctors, said he was terrified of them. Even the urinals. He never fucking used the urinals. Said they were common and you could catch things and there were unsavoury men who could be dangerous. When I stop to think about it; which is what I have done; stopped to think; stopped my whole life just to think about this, talk about this; stopped seeing my mates; stopped my job; stopped sleeping at night; when I stop to think about it, it is spilling out all over the place. Everywhere I look it rears its head. Waves a menacing hand, says Hello There, I’m over here. I’ve made a complete idiot of myself. I am what my father called an eedyit.
Eedyit
.

Before I became Colman Moody, I was William Dunsmore. If I’d stayed William Dunsmore all my life I’d have been a completely different man. Definitely. I mean a William Dunsmore’s smile would be different from a Colman Moody’s smile. All my facial expressions would have been different. I bet even my walk would have been heavier if I’d been William Dunsmore. Heavy-footed. Maybe a bit lopsided. One of my favourite things, when I was a kid, was imagining what I’d have been like if I’d kept that name. I remember the day she first said the name. It seemed incredible that I could have ever been William Dunsmore. I laughed and said the name again and again. ‘William Dunsmore? Are you sure?’ I asked her. I didn’t like the name William or Willy or Bill. I was pleased to be called Colman, not William. But now
I’m not pleased, not pleased at all. There’s not that many Moodys around. You just need to mention Moody and people think of the trumpet man that turned out to be a woman.

In fact if my father had wanted immortality, he couldn’t have connived a more cunning plan. This one puts the tin lid on it. If the jazz world was so ‘anything goes’ as my father claimed, then why didn’t he come clean and spit it out, man? The 1960s were supposed to be cool. Flower people. Big joints. Afghans. Long hair. Peace. Why not a woman playing a fucking trumpet, man, what was wrong with that?

I never fancied boys; no. I’ve always been one hundred per cent heterosexual, except for those times when I was about sixteen and my mates and me would have a joint and a communal wank listening to
Todd
or
Genesis
or
Pink Fucking Floyd
. Or watching the
Old Grey Whistle Test
on the box. I don’t like that hippy music any more. It was just a phase.

We didn’t talk a lot about me being adopted. To tell you the truth, I didn’t give a toss about my real parents. My thinking was if they weren’t interested in me, then I wasn’t interested in them. Simple as that. My mother would tell me that this other woman would have loved me and found it hard to give me up. I just said yeah, yeah, and privately thought, Bollocks. I mean, if you love a kid you keep them, if you don’t, you give them up. Simple. Money don’t matter, what people think don’t matter. If you want a kid and you get a bun in your oven, you’ll fucking cherish the whining squirming brat, or not.
I mean you don’t give your own kid the bum’s rush when it is first born and call that love, do you? What caring mother chucks her baby out on its raw arse and calls it love?

If I’d got the chance I’d have probably liked to see a photograph of my mother and one of my father. I don’t even know which one was black or where the black one came from. Haven’t got a clue. People are always coming up to me and asking if I’m from Morocco, Trinidad, Tobago, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Jamaica. Some asshole the other week was convinced I came from Hawaii. You look identical to the people there, he said. Stopped me dead in the street and says, Hey, are you from Hawaii? I dunno, I says. Then I thought the next fucker that asks me where I come from, I’m going to say, yes, I come from Hawaii, Morocco, Trinidad, or any place they ask. What does it matter anyway?

My father always told me he and I were related the way it mattered. He felt that way too about the guys in his bands, that they were all part of some big family. Some of them were white, some black. He said they didn’t belong anywhere but to each other. He said you make up your own bloodline, Colman. Make it up and trace it back. Design your own family tree – what’s the matter with you? Haven’t you got an imagination? Tell me really, that’s what I kept saying, tell me where your father was really from. Look, Colman, he said. Look, Colman, I could tell you a story about my father. I could say he came off a boat one day in the nineteen hundreds, say a winter day. All the way from the ‘dark continent’ on a cold winter
day, a boat that stopped at Greenock. Greenock near the port of Glasgow when Glasgow was a place all the ships wanted to go. He came off that ship and although it was cold and grey, he liked it. He liked Greenock so he settled. Or I could say my father was a black American who left America because of segregation and managed to find his way to Scotland where he met my mother. Or I could say my father was a soldier or a sailor who was sent here by his army or his navy. Or I could say my father was from an island in the Caribbean whose name I don’t know because my mother couldn’t remember it. Or never bothered to ask. And any of these stories might be true, Colman.

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?