Chapter 3
Chapter 3
S ir! Sir! Moss has got a clarsach in his mouth! Again!”
Struan McGhie put down his guitar carefully, with a sigh, looking round the large room, with its climbing bars and terrible acoustics. Music lessons took place in the gym hall. As did gym, lunch, assembly, performances, and... basically it was the only free space in the school. They tried to keep the windows open all year round.
“Moss, unhook,” he ordered, and the little boy removed his jaw from the small ancient harp that was missing its top E string, but was otherwise tuned beautifully.
“All right,” Struan said, slowly so they’d understand. “Now we’re going to try again. I just want clapping, and if we can, the left of the room and the right of the room are going to sing your different tunes, but AT THE SAME TIME.”
The faces were wide-eyed with concentration. There was a general belief that kids under twelve who weren’t particularly gifted couldn’t sing in harmony. Struan thought this was nonsense and had spent much of his last eight years as a music teacher attempting to disprove it.
“Chaidh mo lothag air chall.
O hù gur h-oil leam.”
Half of the children started to sing, on his left-hand side, sweet and quiet and low. He nodded. Now they had to sing the next section whilst his right-hand side came in.
“Chaidh mo lothag air chall...”
He made sure that the strong singers were equally divided to help the less sure on each side, and let both rip. Annabel O’Faoilan was right up there with the girls on the right, bang in, straight on the note, no bother. Okay, the timbre of her voice tended toward the tortured cat end of the register, rather than the soft gentle melody he was aiming for, the one that made all the parents cry at the end of term when the voices separated, but she was too good an anchor for him to ask her to pipe down.
On the left, Moss, the usual trail of snot from his nose forming a permanent furrow to his lip, had his eyes tight shut behind his thick glasses, desperately trying to force the other tune out of his head and stick to the first one. Struan joined in with whichever side was struggling.
“mo lothag dhan fhèithidh ‘s mòr am beud dhi dhol ann...”
If it were up to him he would keep dividing the voices into four, even five, but he knew when not to push his limits with St. John’s Primary 6s. And it still sounded rather lovely; any gaps in technique more than made up for by the purity of the voices.
Even Hugh McSticks, who had started off as a consummate grunter when he sung, unable to lift his voice off one single note at a time and sounding not entirely like a ship passing in foggy water, had managed to soften down and relax enough to follow the tune, and if he wavered in and out of the thirds for his group or the others, well, that didn’t matter at all. Just as Struan was cheerfully thinking this, Hugh McSticks suffered a drop of about an octave mid-note, which he personally didn’t seem to have noticed at all, which meant the lovely soft song sounded like it was finishing by crashing into an elephant.
Even with Hugh, they all finished roughly at the same time, some of them even remembering to look at him conducting and quieting their voices at the end, and he grinned at them broadly. He glanced quickly over at Oksana, their guest child from Ukraine. He didn’t ever call her out. But it didn’t escape his notice that she never sung a word.
“This is going to be great!” he said. “We’ve got the Easter concert tied up. We’re going to embarrass the heck out of the Primary 7s—they’re done for.”
The children liked that, and beamed.
“What about the Primary 2s?” said Khalid, who had an unbearable sister in Primary 2 and as such was concerned about the outcome.
“I’m not sure about the Primary 2s,” said Struan sympathetically. “I think they’re dressing up as rabbits and hopping about a bit to look cute with their teeth out to a Disney song.”
There was a collective groan.
“Well, that’s not fair!” said Khalid.
“I agree with you,” said Struan. “I would like to tell you life is not a competition.”
“But it is,” said Khalid, unhappily.
“But musically we’re going to be the best. And I was thinking...”
He pulled out a leaflet that said: “Wick Musical Festival.” “You guys are getting so good, we might enter the music festival!”
There was a bit of an ooh, and a clamor to look at the leaflet.
“Well, as long as you keep at it. Remember, Chaidh MO is the emphasis...”
The bell rang and they instantly jumped up to charge for the door.
“... and, a bunch of other things, but you’re no longer listening,” said Struan, as they charged out, school bags flying. He managed to catch the clarsach as Moss knocked it over en route. He was theoretically responsible for making them line up and walk quietly back to class, but he never quite seemed to manage it.
He rubbed his eyes. He’d been out late the night before playing in a pub with his band, and it had gone on late, and he’d got home to find his girlfriend Saskia fast asleep, or at least pretending to be fast asleep, and her suitcase pulled out of the cheap broken cupboard he’d been promising to fix for months.
Struan knew she hated him doing gigs and staying out late, even though when they’d first met she had basically loved the fact that he was a musician in a band, and now she couldn’t bear it. His music career wasn’t enough to live off, therefore he also had his teaching career, which he also loved, and which paid the bills, but it wasn’t enough to keep him creatively satisfied, which meant he was always doing slightly too much, and then drinking a few too many beers. It was starting to show (when he was young he was so skinny he couldn’t keep weight on, so he wasn’t exactly sure how this had happened) and he was absolutely exhausted all the time. And Saskia also didn’t like coming to gigs and hanging out at the side listening to the same songs with an adoring smile on her face anymore. This was a familiar pattern.
She was still the prettiest girl in town, but he saw that smile less and less, alongside lots of remarks about how they should get out of this hole maybe? (He wasn’t entirely sure if she meant the flat or Carso.) He was rather proud of his flat, a lovely two-bedroom near the newsagent, so he was always handy for Viz magazine and Irn-Bru, and with no neighbors after the shop closed he could practice all night and play his records and not bother anybody. Struan liked Carso and had his regular gigs, so he wasn’t sure what she meant by that either. The hinting was getting more and more fervent.
Struan was thirty-two; he’d been down this road before. Girls thought the idea of going out with a musician was dreamy, until the fourth time they stumbled over the accordion coming back from the bathroom in the dark, and couldn’t plan any weekend events all summer because he was booked solid for ceilidhs, weddings, and dances. Then of course she wasn’t nuts about the teaching—he kept bringing home the kids’ colds for starters and, once, their nits, when he was trying to show Wee Shugs how to play the drums and must have got within hopping distance, a mistake he had done his best never to repeat. Anyway, there would be lots of hints coming his way about auditions for bigger bands and bigger tours in cities with which his family would fervently agree.
The suitcase was probably a sign, he had thought, and gone and opened a solitary beer in the kitchen, even though he knew he was up for school in the morning. Saskia was gone by the time he woke up, at twenty to nine, throwing himself in the shower and into an old T-shirt, which was far too cold for the weather, for a morning wrestling with his Primary 6s.
Ach. Maybe when everyone kept telling you your life was a failure, you should listen to them? Maybe he should do what Saskia was telling him and just move?
He glanced round the flat as he got home that evening. Saskia was nowhere to be seen. He sighed. The flat was nice. But maybe she was right this time. Maybe he should have one more shot at the big time, before it was too late?