Free The Big Music by Kirsty Gunn Page A

him, anyway. Where he was shivering. Got a blanket on him. Got him home again.

Margaret
    (from transcript) 31
     
    I’ve never minded his little spells. You get old, that’s what happens and we should all be prepared for it and hope we’re treated with some patience when the time comes. Certainly we’ve gone here long enough in the same way, with things not changing and, yes, it’s been hard, sometimes, and there were days when he’d be gone for hours and I’d be worried about him, I wouldn’t know where he was, but I’ve never minded John, never.
    When he took the child, though. That shows at last how it’s different from before. That he’s gone that far. It makes everything different from how it was, no more pretending we can let time hang and drift. For it shows that he has well passed by now any kind of sense, those kinds of refinements in his mind, I mean, that he could do such a thing. And it’s been like that for a while, I suppose, but I didn’t want to see it, but now I do. That his mind must be fully gone.
    31 As described before, these transcripts are excerpts from a wealth of recorded and written material kept as part of the archive of The Grey House and are available for perusal and use. Further details of domestic life can be found in Appendix 8/i as well as in the List of Additional Materials, and in later sections of ‘The Big Music’.
    And I’ve got Sarah on the phone. After I called her today, to let her know there’s been this change in him. And I’m guessing she wants him back down there so she can keep an eye on things with him. But I won’t tell her everything about what took place here today. Just let it hold a few more days even. I want to tell her instead: let Callum come. Send Callum. Ask him if he’ll come up and see his father. Let his father see him, it’s what his father needs. I’ll call her myself and ask her: can Callum come?

Helen
    (part transcript)
     
    What’s that poem that she loves? That home’s the place where, when you need to go there, they take you in? 32
    It’s how she feels here.
    ‘And now,’ she says, ‘I have a daughter to look after. I have her to keep me. To hold me – for she, more than anyone, makes this place my home. In having her here with me. Reliving my mother’s life that way. Returning to have her here as though it were my right.’
    So, yes, it is the poem that she loves. For though some might say she could have married her baby’s father, or could have chosen not to have a child at all, instead she made the decisions that would bring her back here, to the House where she herself grew up and came of age – because she knew that she could return here, that she’d be safe. And now that she is here … It’s as though that choice has become a responsibility: to make The Grey House her home again, reclaim her old room and lay out papers there upon a desk, turn on the lamp, start writing.
    In this way make somewhere for her daughter to grow up in where she might feel she could also belong, say: I came from here. This is where I was born. So she can grow up as Helen did, so give her the same wild places and the air and in time this very room where Helen sits now with the window open into the night. It is how Helen can make something for her daughter that is strong, to give her somewhere she can step out from, into the world. That she may go to the ends of the earth and know always who she is because she belongs to that one place, and that place was her beginning.
    That when she needs to go back there, that same place would take her in.

Margaret
    Helen’s young. That’s all. Don’t mind her large ideas, then. And her quietness you could take for fierce anger, that sense of her independence and opinions and her clear sense of a way – but no. She doesn’t have that certain kind of ire. She’s herself. And I know why she keeps to that room of hers, reading and writing, the window open to the seasons the way she has it open. Even in