Playing for Dolly
© Suzanne Bosworth
Published by Books Ireland

  Seven o'clock on a January morning. Parked in his Porsche in a remote highland forest, Jeremy the record producer was grabbing a couple of hours sleep.
  Dark greyness fingered over the arc of the turning earth. A bird bubbled and trilled.
  Jeremy turned, pulling his coat over his head.
  Like the thin sound of an index finger on a wet crystal rim, a note of music stretched into the lightening air. The note patterned and skeined, a filigree of sound wound and threaded into the dreams of the dreamer and he half turned still dreaming onto his back. Celtic mists drifted and soft rain fell. A dark-eyed girl stood desolate by an empty fishing boat. Ancient forests hung grey and still. A snail trailed over runes carved in lichened stone. Children capered in rags and feathers. Slowly the music coaxed and tickled and stroked his ears and eyelids.
  For a few sightless minutes Jeremy stared ahead. Then he sat up. Rubbed his eyes. Fiddled with the ignition key and lowered the window to see the pale wash of yellow and green sunrise and soft white riming on the grey grass and hedges. His breath clouded white in the clean iced air. Water dashed through the forest.
  In amongst the trees in a small clearing a man stood playing a violin, swaying to the tune. He wore threadbare fingerless gloves. His hair and beard were white and flowing, his clothes thick and dark. A small black and white mongrel, one ear cocked and head to one side, sat looking up at him.
  Not a breath of air. Just glorious exquisite music against a backdrop of rushing water and the high descant of birds singing, calling, flapping through the trees. Music that made you want to cry or smile or gaze dreaming into a flickering fire. For a while Jeremy was quite lost.
  His watch peeped eight o'clock. He shivered.
  A thought gathered and grew. He held his dictaphone out of the window and recorded some music, took a Polaroid and drove back to the city to arrange a meeting with the PR agency.
  "It's not going to be easy to market him," shrilled Calliope. "He looks like the final ghastly moments of a charity jumble sale."
  "So he's different," said Jeremy. "Anyway, you're selling his music, not having his babies."
  Mack the Fiddler was tracked down one Sunday afternoon and persuaded to play a couple of tunes, after which the studio technicians constructed vast and quite astonishing versions of them.
  Mack listened to the demo tape and marvelled.
  "You've buggered it up," he told them. "Where've them drums come from? I haven't got drums. Or trumpets. It's just me and my dog, see, in the forest. And the fiddle. That's the point."
  "But it adds so much more, don't .you think. More commercial. Mass appeal."
  "Mass murder, more like. Stuff it."
  A tradition sprang up of Jeremy; Calliope and Kent, the rights lawyer, visiting Mack on Saturday afternoons taking along a bottle or two of something interesting. They were all very jolly and chatty. They were his friends. Sometimes they took a marrowbone for the mongrel until one Saturday the mongrel sicked up over Calliope's white suede and mink boots.
  "Poor old Dolly," he said to the dog who dashed about and grinned obsequiously showing all her teeth. "Better out than in."
  The next weekend Jeremy went down alone: Mack was leaning on the gate waiting for him.
  "Heard your car. Thought you'd be back," he said through his whiskers. "Wasn't so sure about them other two buggers. Now then."
  This time they went into Mack's other room. Jeremy padded round looking at wood carvings on the wall and framed monochrome photographs, grainy and faded, of smiling men wearing large caps and women in headscarves standing in fields of flowers, their faces in heavy shadow.
  A violin hung by the window. Some yellowed sheets of music were framed and hanging over the fireplace. There was a photograph of a younger Mack with some men in suits and a gentle-eyed woman in a long shining dress, soft blowy hair down to her shoulders.
  "Who's this?"
  Mack looked at the photograph.
  "Katarin. Zurich '59."
  He went through to the stove and lit the gas under a saucepan of water. A second later he was jiggling the gas tap.
  "Bugger. Running out. You got any coins?" Jeremy went through and pushed three pounds into the meter. He stayed crouched on the floor for a moment and said, "Come on Mack. Tell me, why won't you sign?"
  Mack chewed a corner of his beard. "Sit there," he said pointing to a large green corduroy armchair. "This'll give your brain a good scrubbing."
  Jeremy sat.
  Mack took an old black vinyl record from its torn brown cover, lifted the lid of a gramophone and carefully set the record on to the central pin. It clacked down on to the turntable, the arm moved across and there was a background hiss and then a violin singing through a muted fusillade of scratches.
  The purest soprano voice Jeremy had ever heard issued from the gramophone speaker like rain from a Saharan sky and, without knowing at all the reason why, after a few bars Jeremy was crying.
  The voice flew and soared, each note reaching into the forgotten rooms of his head and his guts and holding fast. For days, years he sat drawn into the patterns, caught in the embroidery of gold and silver threading through and around figures and forms half seen and half remembered.
  For a few moments the violin sang on its own, sweet and gentle, of love, of loss of acceptance. His body felt tugged, touched, dragged in several directions. Dustsheets that for years had covered and muffled those silent rooms were drawn away and the songs glanced and shimmered and lay like sunlight on the newly bare pictures and cupboards and old worn places.
  Only when the music had ended and there was stillness for a couple of minutes could he drag himself back to the tiny room and the sound of Dolly as she snuffled Mack's hand and her collar jingled as she scratched at a fleabite. The mug of tea by his side was lukewarm.
  "First thing tomorrow," said Mack, "You're coming with me to the forest."
  "What was the music?"
  "Strauss. Four Last Songs. Chokes most people the first time."
  Jeremy woke the next morning to Dolly pushing into his sleeping bag and leaning on his shoulder.
  "Porridge on the table," said Mack. "And boots by the door."
  The crystallised grass and leaves crunched underfoot and their breath frosted into clouds in the semi darkness.
  Mack stopped. "Quiet. Listen."
  Jeremy heard the stream rushing, birds stirring and whistling.
  "Now really listen," said Mack. "Really listen."
  It was difficult at first what with Dolly panting and Mack moving around on the cracking grass and he tried hard not to breathe so as to make less noise.
  He heard the quiet openness and the roaring silence and his ears moved to catch the tiny sounds of the forest. Quick rustles in the undergrowth. The shirring of the top branches of trees. The knock and rub of twigs.
  Mack tuned his violin and Dolly scuttled to sit beside him eagerly squirming her bottom around to sit comfortably on the grass. Mack’s face was skull pale in the gloom as dawn began to break, his hair and beard a distant blue.
  Jeremy sat on a fallen log and watched and heard Mack's strong hard fingers moving and working on the gut. The chance tap of wood on wood, a breathing in and out. He saw Mack's eyes close on a line of silver and open with a phrase, his body bend and form the notes that spread and bubbled up and splashed over into the air.
  Finally Mack ended with a flourish and bowed low to Dolly who leapt and sprang about and barked and rolled her eyes madly.
  Jeremy watched. "Tell me about Katarin."
  "Katarin," said Mack, "was a gift from God. And she married me. She was the most beautiful singer I've ever heard. When she heard Strauss's settings for the poems she loved them and she sang them in a way that no one else ever has or will. Some other people heard her too. Outsiders. They came and listened and then took her away and made recordings. End of story."
  "Fame and fortune?"
  "Died of TB. All that running around. She'd needed the clean mountain air." Mack's smile was bitter. "They lied to her, you see. They told her it would make people happy. It cost everything. Nothing left. She was twenty-three." Mack threw a stick for Dolly who dashed and plunged through the trees to fetch it.
  "There's always the record," said Jeremy.
  And wished he hadn't.