Free The Big Music by Kirsty Gunn Page B

winter I’ve seen the casement wide open to the air and the cold inside the room like glass.
    She’s young, still. That’s the all of it. And, as I say, I know why she stays in the room. The window open in the way of her imagining she might be leaving, as I know she does, imagining leaving all the time. Although I think it’s here she’ll stay.

Iain
    Anyway, it’s not like he needs to feel sorry for the old fool. He can go to hell and no way back. After what he did this morning, taking a child away from her mother …
    There’s nothing about him that is fit.
    And it’s been going too long, with his mind poor, and getting weaker, and that means even more work to do for Margaret and for them all.
    Helping him.
    And never once a word of thanks.
    Just like through the old days. The ‘Bring the Land Rover down’ days, the ‘Get the dogs ready for the morning’ and the ‘We’ll be needing the rods’ days. The ‘Tidy up the place a bit after, the bottles and so on, at the riverbank …’
    Never once a word.
    Of thanks.
    And not today either. Out there. After getting him in. There was no thanks for that either – and the state he was in. The fool. Acting like –
    ‘Iain, I’m back!’
    But no. Not like that, like before. Not ‘fool’ like that. Today …
    Was different.
    Crying and alone out there today on the hill. Wet through to his trousers and not able to stand.
    That was not like he used to be.
    ‘Iain, I’m back!’
    Because look at him, Iain thinks. Lying through in that little room in the dark. He’s not back anywhere, the old boy.
    He’s not back and he’s not going.
    Anywhere.

Margaret
    And Helen? Yes, I can understand her kind of dreaming. I’ve been like it myself. Parts of me still feels what it is to be that girl who wanted much, much more than home could give. To go in amongst the hills or across the flat cliff paddocks or to be taking a boat around the top of the firth in a little schooner, deep into the cold of the North Sea … I imagined these voyages, saw myself on them. Taking the train south or way across to the west. Visiting Edinburgh, maybe, Glasgow. All the cities. Going away as I did to the university for that year in Aberdeen.
    Little came of it all, I know. Those dreams of mine, when I was a girl,or thoughts or plans. In the end it was only a ride on the bus, sixty miles away. That’s how far I went away.
    Still, one might say my restlessness has come out in Helen.
    If it didn’t come out in what went on between me and John Sutherland , you could say it’s come out in my daughter. All my restlessness, in the end, all her travelling and her shifting my idea of what it was to change.
    Because when I think of it, the way it was for me when I went to John those nights back then, when I was younger, the way I went up to the room we shared at the top of the House and waited for him there … Some nights when he had his friends in, too, and he’d be late, but still I’d wait for him … All those times. Or I would go to him where he sat, in the evening or at the table after dinner. I would put my hand to the back of his neck, to the soft dent at the base of his skull and he leant back into me then … All those times. Those small, small times … It was a yearning, a moving in me, kind of restlessness, maybe, that wanted to be near him and the small times with him could be enough. To have me inclining towards him, that I needed his leaning back. For all during those years I had a good husband who loved me, and we looked after each other, Iain and I have always looked after each other.
    My Iain Cowie.
    My shy, shy man.
    What restlessness must have been in me to take me away from you? To wait in another man’s bedroom that he’d made for me under the eaves, at the top of the stair?

Iain
    And, yes, he put a blanket across the old boy’s shoulders today, because anyone would have done it.
    Like he’d hope someone might do that for him, when the time comes and he’s alone and