Free The Big Music by Kirsty Gunn

once, and stuck upon the door. That could have its own particular note, a run of notes. Of course it could. Something lovely to play, for he loved that room, and later, much later he went with Margaret there …
    But it’s nowhere near where they’ve put him now.
    For where they’ve put him now is in this other little room down the hall from the old Music Room 29 where his father took lessons with pupils,where the men used to tune up or practised their chanters or sorted their reeds. And it’s dark here. In this old part of the House where his father’s pipers would always be. There’s nothing in here. It’s just dark. Whereas in that other room at the top of the House where he first learned from books and talked and played with his mother … The notes are everywhere around it.
    It’s because the room was his mother’s room and from the beginning … That there would be little runs of phrases and embellishments that would want to gather there in the Schoolroom at the top of the House where she could teach him to read and write and tell him stories and hold him on her knee. And she would have gone in there to sit, after her son had been sent away to school she would have sat at his little desk, thinking of him, thinking of how quickly the time has passed since he was born, then he was gone.
    And I wonder …
    Putting this together now, inserting this paper … 30
    Did she get used to it? His mother? The sending away of her little boy, the saying goodbye before either of them were ready? Getting used to the particular kind of silence that follows the leaving of children, the road that stands open at the gate to take the children away? For it is another kind of loneliness, this other inevitable kind of silence that carries with it no sense of choice. As minute by minute, one thought after another, the children take themselves apart from us and all the contents of their conversations, all their many words, only preparation for that single word: goodbye.
    They write a letter home maybe, but then the letters rarely come. Less talking then … And less … Less … So in the end you may as well come to think of the wind, the grass as your children. The garden, all the little flowers. May as well make silence your daughter or your son.
     

narrative/2
    The people at the House and what they thought of him
Iain
    It’s all just more work for them. Is how he sees it. For his wife. His daughter . They just work for him as they always have, from back in the early days. Just more work, more cleaning, more meals. More sheets to strip and replace on the beds, more tidying away to do after the big parties at night with the pipes going until dawn, and the glasses cluttered through the sitting room and in the hall, and the door left open sometimes into the morning from where they’d been out drinking or pissing in the grass, for all Iain knows, taking their pipes out there and playing like idiots, God knows, to the moon.
    He hates it, this kind of work. For Margaret, Helen. The clearing up. The sorting out. He always has, and now, with him back here to stay – and all right there aren’t the parties any more, and there haven’t been for a long time, even so – the old boy’s so off with the fairies he can’t sit to anything but needs help with it all, with this or with that. And it’s Margaret who has to go running. Running after him and sometimes they’re together alone, she’ll be drawing back the covers of his bed or something like it, far too near him in a room.
    It’s too much.
    And it’s been going on too long.
    And look at him out there on the hill today. Like a child. A child that’s wet himself and is crying.
    Like a little boy.
    And Iain hadn’t known what to do, say.
    Though he hates the work of him, the way that other seems to draw to himself all thought and care …
    Yet he found himself, Iain did, out there out on the hill with him – and for the first time – what?
    Felt …
    Well, he’d gone over to