Authors: Jackie Kay
‘Stop calling me Cole, that’s what my pals call me. You’re not a pal.’
Edith Moore. Edith Moore is in front of him at the seaside, holding the hand of a small girl, his father. The girl has a mass of curly black hair, like himself. She is deaf. The girl takes a liking to him and starts to play with him. Then she leads him down to the basement. They are suddenly in a rich house. All the time, they are speaking in sign. Suddenly the whole place starts to fill with water. Water leaking in from everywhere. Colman puts the deaf, curly-haired girl on his back. He is going to have to save her from drowning
.
He climbs stairs, frantic. Spiral stairs leading up to the webbed feet. Spiral stairs that crumble underneath him. He takes two semi-circle steps at a time. He has got a little girl’s life on his back. He has to save her. Has to save her. Has to
.
*
He wakes up sweating. He is lying in bed next to Sophie Stones! Fuck, how did that happen? He can’t remember anything. The last thing he remembers is the bar. His watch lights up in the dark. It is 4.00. He gets up quietly and picks his stuff up from the floor. His silk boxer shorts, his trousers, his shirt. He stuffs the lot under his arm and creeps to room 310. But he hasn’t got his fucking card. He is standing outside in the corridor, starkers. Totally ridiculously naked. He puts his hand over himself to cover himself, protectively. Christ, he can’t stand in the buff like this for the rest of the night. His clothes! Thank God he brought his clothes out. There they are lying next to his door in a bundle. He must have dropped them. He picks up his trousers and rummages through the pockets for the card. Nothing there. He pulls his trousers on in a hurry. Shit. Nothing for it but to face reception at four in the fucking morning and ask for another key.
What does the ghost writer do if the ghost gets cold feet? If the ghost gets the ghouls, the spooks, the heebie geebies. What does the ghost writer do when the ghost is no longer interested in the material? Does that make the ghost writer redundant? How does a ghost writer convince a ghost that the subject is worthwhile?
Fact: ghost writers often fall in love with their ghosts.
Fact: like biographers, they get haunted by their material. Very soon they are incapable of keeping a clear boundary between their life and the life of their subject. Many ghost writers believe they are the real authority on their subject and not the ghost themselves. They tend to get irritable if their subject disagrees with them.
It dawned on me falling asleep drunk last night, just as I was falling asleep with Colman curled up beside me. It turned her on. Dressing up as a bloke and blowing that horn turned her on. There has been too much talk about Joss Moody just wanting to play the trumpet. There have been articles about how there were no women jazz musicians in the 1950s. There has been some sympathetic murmuring. Some people who are very understanding.
But if you told those people that it was nothing to do with the trumpet, if you told those people that it was fuck all to do with the trumpet, what would they say to that? Would they still offer understanding? She liked wearing those bandages, didn’t she? She liked the big cover up. Going about the place taking everybody in. Going to the Gents. She got a buzz going to the Gents, didn’t she? Slicking down her hair. Getting a new man’s shirt and taking out the pins, the tiny pins. Shaving. Working up the lather.
Most of all, she liked the power. The power: the way women treated her, the way men treated her. Walking down the street with that walk that she must have practised. I’ve got her on video. She studied that walk all
right. She didn’t just wake up one day and decide to be a man. She must have practised first. She must have given it a lot of thought. It can’t have been easy for her, hiding like that. Stressful. Whenever I’m hiding something, I find it raises the anxiety levels. My heart beats quick with deceit. She moved town, didn’t she? She moved away from Greenock then she became a man. Had to find a city, Glasgow, and then a bigger city, London. She couldn’t risk staying in touch with her own mother, not for long. When was the last time Edith Moore saw her daughter? I hope Colman thought to ask that. She’s studied that walk. That cool look. Yeah, she liked playing the trumpet all right, but there was more to it than that. She liked being a man. Pure and simple.
The public might hate perverts, but they love reading about them. Why? Because everybody has a bit of perversion in them. Every person goes about their life with a bit of perversion that is unadmittable, secretive, loathed. I know this. I have my own skeletons in the cupboard. So does Sarah, although she’d never admit it. There are some things families never talk about.
When I wake at 7.10, Colman is gone. I never even heard him leaving. I get up and look around the devastated room. The bottles and the glasses and my clothes fanatically folded on the chair, though I have no memory of folding them. There’s a note on the dresser. ‘No can do. Sorry, mate, Colman.’ I grab it and screw it into a ball, a
tight paper ball. I aim it at the waste paper basket. Bastard. Fucking bastard.
I turn the tap on in the bathroom.
Mate
. He is trying to humiliate me. He knows he can’t turn back now. There’s too much at stake. I’d be a laughing stock. I’ve told everybody about this book. I’ll sort him out later on. It was just the drink. Just the drink talking. I shouldn’t have allowed us to drink so much. I wanted him to talk, not walk. He’s probably still asleep next door. Better let him sleep it off.
I found out that my father was not a man but a woman ten weeks ago when I went to the funeral parlour in North London where his body was laid out. If I were to say I was astonished, that would not be strong enough language. I was in total shock. I felt betrayed. I couldn’t actually believe it. But I had to believe it. There were the parts of a woman’s body for all to see. On the person who I thought of as my father, the breasts and pubic hair looked disgusting. Freakish. He might as well have turned into an albino. That would have been less shocking. His pubic hair and breasts looked grotesque, monstrous. I was so shocked by this and by my own reactions that I decided to write a book.
I thought that if I wrote a book about it, it might help other people. I know that not many people will ever find themselves in my position (count yourself lucky) but on the other hand unusual things happen to
many people and anybody that has had anything freakish happen to them will relate to this book. I had to write this book so that I could understand my father and so that I could understand myself.
I look over what I’ve written. It is only a rough, but I’m quite pleased with the effect. Good idea to say ‘he’, that’s what Cole does. I can touch it up later, after breakfast, here and there, change a word or two. Maybe take out that (count yourself lucky). Colman is bound to see from this that I’m not going to write the usual Hack book, that I’m not The Ghost Writer From Hell. I have my sensitivities too. He will probably be flattered by how well Sophie understands him. I’ve got him under my skin. Isn’t that a jazz song? That could be the title. Yes! I do my triumphant fist. Especially now, if the whole book is written as Colman.
Under My Skin
. Utterly brilliant. I will propose it to him. Later, after a bottle of good wine and a good dinner. We could try that Thai tonight. He might be surprised I’m still speaking to him. I’ll miss Colman when we finish this book. Silly Cole and his stupid note!
The seagulls are flying in the shape of a letter from the alphabet. V. One seagull is a rebel and is going off the other way. My eyes follow it. The sky is bleached. It is windy. I walk down to Kepper by the coastal path, the sea below me. I have grown old with this sea in my life. The wind is the sea’s wild dancing partner. It bites my face, scratches the back of my neck. I remember taking Colman’s small hand and holding on to it tightly, walking down this same path into the village. I remember always ending up carrying his fishing net. I wonder if he remembers any of that?
When the papers first started printing their terrible lies I felt faint. I was horrified at what I read. I imagined every person I knew reading those headlines. I imagined Joss reading them. For that first three days, I felt my whole life was ruined. Not just by Joss’s death, but by the reporting of his death. But now, the newspaper articles have moved on like crows in search of other carrion and I have become yesterday’s news. If Colman does this book, it will all flare up again. I can’t take that. I have to do what I have to do. I have written to Colman telling him if he does this book, I will never see him again. I have
written to her too, Sophie Stones, to tell her if she proceeds with this book, I will be contacting my lawyers. What would your parents think of you doing a book like this against people’s will, surely they wouldn’t approve, I wrote. I thought if she has had any upbringing at all, that will trouble her. I have written the hotel in Glasgow’s address on the two white envelopes.
‘How are you, Mrs Moody?’ Mrs MacGonigal asks me in the post office.
‘I’m fine,’ I say. ‘And you?’ I slide my letters under the hatch.
I got a lovely letter this morning, forwarded on by our secretary. A wonderful letter, from a group of women jazz musicians that want to form a band. They want to call it The Joss Moody Memorial Band. It has given me hope. I am not sure whether Joss would actually have liked the idea or not. But I like it.
The local bus follows the old coastal road round to Lair. The sea on the right of him. He sits by the window, staring out. It’s been so long since he’s been down this road. The hills in the distance; he recognizes the shapes. The Giant’s Forehead, the Long Finger, the Sleeping Hare. This is the third bus he has been on today. From Buchanan Bus Station Glasgow, to St Andrews, from St Andrews to Pittenweem, from Pittenweem to Kepper.
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.
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.