Authors: Jackie Kay
When I undressed your father, Mr Moody, I discovered
that she is a woman. I was not told this. Your mother referred constantly to the deceased as her ‘husband’. I thought the guy must be getting paid to perform some sick joke on me. Perhaps they have organizations where instead of sending a live kissogram to a birthday party, you send a weird deathogram to a funeral parlour. The man must not be the real man. I tell him I want to see the real undertaker, the mortician, whatever the fuck you call it, your boss. I said, is this your idea of a joke, you sick bastard? Who has put you up to this? I’m shaking him. Pulling his stupid thin lapels back and forth. This is all quite understandable, he says. Don’t fuck with me, I says. He takes me through to where the body is. Through to the cold parlour and shows me my father. I see him naked and it is only now that I realize that this is the first time in my life that I have seen my father naked. The funeral man shows me some surgical bandages that he says were wrapped tightly around my father’s chest to cover his ‘top’. I take a quick look. But that look is still in my head now. It has stayed in my head – the image of my father in a woman’s body. Like some pervert. Some psycho. I imagine him now smearing lipstick on a mirror before he died.
I walked out of that place as fast as I could. I said thank you for letting me know to the funeral man. The sky was bright blue that day and it was sunny. Hot. I was sweating. Everyone was complaining about the weather. I remember wondering if I’d ever be able to talk about anything so ordinary ever again. What a fucking luxury it seemed to me to stand around and say, isn’t it hot? A
woman in a white top said to an old woman who was dressed for winter, ‘Isn’t this insufferable. Freak hot weather. Freak’s the word.’ I ran along repeating that to myself, ‘Freak’s the word.’ I stopped and hung down to my toes and took a deep breath. My heart racing. Then I started up again. I was soaked. My hair was stuck to my head. My trousers were wet. The streets were on fire. Maybe I could just melt, I remember thinking, just melt away.
That’s my daddy. The one with the orange tie. See. See, standing next to the man with the big drum. He is My Daddy. See his trumpet. That’s his. His third trumpet. Slim Fingers, his friend, give it to him. That is his favourite. He looks smart, doesn’t he. He is good to the trumpet. His eyes close like he sleeping
.
My daddy finish and people clap. Clap, clap, clap. I stands on my chair and claps too. I have on a sailor suit. I just gets it. My mummy says, Sit down, Colman. But my daddy comes and picks me up, swings me in the air, high, high, through all the big smiles. Then sits me on his big shoulders. Says, All right, wee man. Everybodys crowds round us. Smacks my dad on the back. I’m going to fall off. I could. They could make me fall off doing that
.
All right, wee man
.
Yesterday I got rat-arsed. This morning I woke up with a disgusting taste in my mouth. Like that Billy Connolly joke: your mouth’s like a badger’s bum. Too many fags
and pints, but it was the whisky that finished me off. I could never take whisky. I went into a pub I’ve never been into where I knew nobody and just sat myself down on a stool at the bar like I’ve seen depressed guys do in movies. I don’t know how I got home. Woke with a fucking crashing headache, thumping, and tightening the screws, going into my temples deep. Took a couple of Panadol. My stomach felt like a wobbly egg. Nothing in the cupboard. I went round the corner and bought some bread, but forgot to buy butter. Dry toast. Dry toast and tea. Hardly fucking breakfast at the Savoy, but there you go. I’ve always been a ‘moany wee shite’ – his words. Now he’s given me something to moan about.
I went round to their house yesterday. It was strange. It felt like the whole house had died, not just my father. It gave me the spooks. The hall was all quiet and stealthy when it used to shake with music. The post was piled up on the floor. I had to move a mountain of the stuff before I could even get in. I went straight to the bureau in the hall and got out the old leather bag. I took the envelope marked certificates. I took all the adoption stuff about myself. I peeped in the envelope marked ‘Colman’. Inside a white envelope fell out. A fresh envelope. My name on the envelope in my father’s writing. You couldn’t mistake his small, loopy writing. Under my name were the words, ‘To be opened after my death.’ Creepy.
But I couldn’t open it. It’ll just be a list of excuses and reasons. I’m not interested. I’m really not interested. I can’t remember much of what I was saying yesterday. Sammy. I remember talking some crap about Sammy.
You can run, but you can’t hide. I’d discount a lot of that as junk. I think it’s better to start all over again. From the top. When I went to the shop this morning I saw the back of some woman that looked like my mother and she made me feel like shit. She had a scarf over her head and was hurrying because the rain just started coming down. I don’t know where she was going, you never know where people are going, do you. All these people rushing about, they’re all going somewhere. London’s full of fuckers scurrying along. Even early in the morning, you can’t avoid them. I can’t get my head around it. Suddenly the rain was coming down vicious and I lost her, the woman that looked like my mother.
They kissed each other often enough. I’d catch them in the kitchen, or on the stairs, kissing. They had that special air of having something between them. I thought all parents had that. They passed looks. They said, ‘Just a minute.’ I always had to knock on their bedroom door. They taught me that from when I was small. My mother got into a double bed every night for the past thirty odd years and slept with my father, a woman. I am not being funny, right, but I think that’s completely out of order. It’s not because I hate gays or anything like that. If my mother had been a lesbian or my father a gay man, I don’t think I would have got all het up about it.
What is it that is eating me? I’m not a bitter guy. Don’t get me wrong. Please. It’s probably the fact that my father didn’t have a prick. Maybe it’s just as simple as that. No man wants a fucking lesbian for his father.
Maybe for his mother. But for his father! My father wasn’t a man like myself, showing me the ropes and helping me through puberty when everything was mad and changed at the same time. The voice suddenly goes like something falling through a floor. The face gets itchy and rough. When you wake in the morning, rub the cheeks and get a shock at the stubble. A fright. So, fair enough you’re going to be a man soon. These changes are normal. Everyone goes through it. My father went through it like his father before him. The shock of pubic hairs arriving unannounced, one at a time, then suddenly they’ve all sprouted like salad. The boy is gone. My father once said to me, I know what it’s like, son, when I was going through some fucking teenage torment. I remember it myself. But he didn’t, did he. That was an out and out lie.
What was his puberty like? I mean he’d have got his periods, wouldn’t he? That’s disgusting, isn’t it? There’s no way around it. The idea of my father getting periods makes me want to throw up.
My mother always told me it was all right for me to be naughty sometimes, but lying, lying was the scourge of the earth, the worst thing for a child to do. Own up, Colman. I think that was her expression. I am cut up. Since my father died I’ve been walking around, half alive myself, sleepwalking, with this pain chiselled into my chest. Jagged. Serrated. Nothing makes it disappear. Not Milk of fucking Magnesia. Not Rennies.
A mate of mine’s mother was carted off to the loony
bin when he was eleven. He wasn’t told nothing. Your mum’s gone off for a little holiday. He knew it was no fucking holiday from the wild look in her eyes. Will I ever forgive them? No.
He is sitting on the edge of my bed, my daddy. He pulls my yellow blanket back. I am too hot. I am too hot and it is too early for bed. He gives me a spoon of medicine. I open my mouth wide and wait for the spoon to be put in my mouth and wait for my daddy to say, Brave boy. Because it is nasty horrible stuff. My daddy smells of his trumpet club. He takes my hand and sings, Dreams to sell / Fine dreams to sell / Angus is here / with dreams to sell. Then my daddy is sleeping. He does a loud snore. Then he catches his breath and suddenly wakes. He pats my head. Strokes my head. Hair just like mine, he says. Then he pulls my cover right up to my chin, says, Coorie in, son, Coorie in. I am still not sleeping. I hear voices under the floor. My daddy is singing another song to my mummy. I hear next door’s dog bark like he is angry. I hear children playing out in the street. I hear Sammy shouting. Then they drop their voices. Then I hear the house breathe
.
My father had a lifelong terror, phobia whatever, about hospitals. Makes a lot of sense in hindsight. He was so scared of doctors, he passed that on to me. That’s what parents exist for: to pass their phobias on generation to generation. Fuck, if I so much as saw a white coat man, I’d wet myself and have a big Marks and Spencers. That
was our family word for tantrum – I had my first big tantrum in Marks and Spencers apparently in the food bit. I went bananas because my mother wouldn’t buy me some fancy chocolate bar. My mother said that her ears went bright red with shame. I was doing some high pitch scream and jumping up and down on her feet at the same time. So every time after that when I was about to lose it my mother would say, Don’t you do a Marks and Spencers on me. My father thought of doctors as a whole breed apart; he had a million different words for them. And jokes. What’s the difference between God and a doctor? God knows he isn’t a doctor. Shit like that. If he wanted to insult somebody he’d say they wrote like a doctor, talked like a doctor, smiled like one. Needless to say, when he got ill, he just point blank refused to see one. This is 1997. I’m still not sure what he had wrong with him. Something to do with his liver. He said, the last time I saw him, My number’s up, Cole. Like life was a fucking game of poker. I was destroyed. I tried to persuade him to see a doctor, but he was having none of it. I read somewhere that dying women are braver than dying men. He was definitely brave. But not brave enough to tell me the truth. And my mother didn’t want me to stay the night, that night. She wanted to be on her own with my father.
So I went out with my mate Brady who has left nine messages on my machine, man. The first one just said, Fucking hell, Cole. Ring me.
The day I went to the funeral parlour I still had the remains of a hangover. I puked in the toilet of the creepy
place before I left. I puked everything up until I’d nothing left but bile. Bright yellow bad tasting bile. I’d never seen a dead person before. Never seen someone there and not there like that. Still and stiff. Unreal. The smell of disinfectant not the smell of people. The cold air spinning round the room. The sick noise of that big fan, its arm whirling around like some bad conductor.
My father looked fake. Everything about him. His skin looked like it was made of silicone. His eyes were closed, but I got the feeling that if someone opened them, the bright orange eyes of some huge doll would blare out at me. His hands looked like plastic gloves, as if they had never ever held a trumpet, as if the trumpet was just a dream the dead body had. I wanted to touch him to check he was real and not some waxwork, but I couldn’t. I was too freaked out. I was scared shitless. I’ve never been so frightened. Someone had put powder on my father’s cheeks. I don’t know if it was the funeral man or someone else. The funeral man told me my mother was expected in later in the day and she was going to bring his suit, his best suit. That’s what she wants her to wear, he said as if it was all beyond him. I’d forgotten my mother. I’d forgotten all about her. That meant she knew. Well, of course she knew. I went to the toilet and then I ran and I kept on running through streets I didn’t know in that cruel heat.
I phoned my mother and said things to her I can’t now remember. She begged me to come round and see her. I told her she’d be lucky if I went to the funeral. I could feel how hollow her silence was, like I’d just scooped
out her voice. But I couldn’t stop. Ranting, man. Fucking ranting. Strung out, rattling. She said some balls like, Colman, try and understand. And she said sorry over and over again till that made me sick too. Colman, I’m sorry. Sorry, Colman. Colman. Colman. Colman. I started feeling dizzy at the sound of my own name.
I did go to the funeral, as you know. So did the jazzmen, all the old troopers from way back. Blokes I dimly remembered. Men from all the millions of bands my father formed before he stuck with
Joss Moody
. The Big Heads, The Expressos, Jazz Kiddin’, The Earl of Hell’s Waistcoat, Jazzin’ It Up. I forget all the names. Anyhow. I never saw so many men cry in my life as at my father’s funeral. Fucking Jesus. They all had huge big proper cloth hankerchiefs. I didn’t cry. I just sat listening to them playing my mother’s song.
I snatched a look at her. I wasn’t sitting next to her, but I could see her from four rows behind. I knew she wanted me next to her, but I just couldn’t. I was too mad. I sneaked a look at her when Tobias was playing her song and she was crying, not like how you’d expect, passive crying like the tears were something that was happening to her. Not big heaving sobs. Just futile little tears, man, going down her face slow. Seeing her like that, I half thought of going and standing next to her. That would have been enough for her. Just for me to have stood next to her. But then I remembered my father in that parlour, naked, and I thought, Nah, why should I?
When people left, my mother left too. She didn’t stand shaking hands as they went out like she did for my
grandmother’s funeral. Then I saw her leave in her big black limo, alone.
She turned round and looked at me and tried to smile. I looked away. That’s the closest I came to crying, man. Not managing to look at my mother. I was surprised at how many people turned up actually. Everyone in double fucking shock. Coat collars turned up and this is the summer. Looking like winter. Everybody looking like winter.
I wasn’t going to bother with having a last look. But I told myself I needed to, just so that I could get it into my head that this whole thing wasn’t a dream. The strange thing was it didn’t help, because there was my father in the coffin back to wearing one of his suits. He looked normal again. He looked like himself, except for the fact he was dead and his skin looked odd and a different colour, but apart from that, he looked like my father. I could see other people staring at him longer than you’d think they needed to, thinking the same thing as me. He was wearing a blue serge suit and a white shirt and a stripey tie and black shiny shoes. I didn’t know that you kept your shoes on in a coffin. It was the weirdest thing, but the man in the coffin and the woman that I saw in that funeral parlour really did seem to me to be two different people. My head was even more done in. He looked all right in that blue suit. He looked normal again. Dead; but normal. Better.