Summary
"Today’s Television"
Edith Moore does not sleep well but she wakes up every day at 6 am. She often thinks of the past because the present is so dull. She lives in the Larches, an elderly community with nosy neighbors and a warden who walks around to see if they’re all still alive. She lives frugally and eats plain fare. She misses her daughter Josephine, whom she has not heard from for four months. The last time Josephine visited she was wearing a man’s suit and brought chicken curry. Edith did not know what to make of this foreign food.
Some memories are more vivid now, showing up like old relatives. She thinks of John Moore, her husband. He had such vivid dark skin and dark eyes. She misses him. After he died Josephine was all she had and she doesn’t come anymore—“if nobody knows you how can you be yourself?” (221).
"Interiors"
Colman is nervously getting ready. He arrives at the neat bungalows and begins knocking on Edith Moore’s door. No one answers and he’s getting a little desperate. He is close to tears. Neighbors begin looking, not used to seeing outsiders. He tells them he is here for Mrs. Moore.
Edith is out shopping, grumbling to herself about the old people at the Larches who want to take up her life with their conversations. She likes being alone. She comes back to her place and sees Mrs. Tweedy outside. Why is she out when it is going to rain? Then she sees a tall, dark young man who looks familiar somehow.
Colman is frightened and wishes he could run but he does not. He searches the woman’s face for anything that might remind him of his father. It begins to rain. Edith knows people are flummoxed by the unexpected visitor and she loves their shock. Amid the downpour, Colman tells her he is a friend of Josephine’s. She smiles and invites him in.
Inside Colman’s hands shake and his eyes twitch. Edith asks if he’s seen Josephine recently and Colman does not know what to say except that it’s a long story. Edith cuts him off; she doesn’t want to know yet. As Edith goes and puts the kettle on, pleased with her unexpected guest, Colman begins to worry that she might start baking for him and that he has no idea what to say and he should have practiced.
"Style"
Sophie is shopping, something she sees as blood sport. She is glad she is slim (though not as slim as her sister, she has to admit). She loves designer labels and showing off. Even more than shopping, though, she loves her job—the gossip and the goods. Colman is at Edith Moore’s house right now and it excites her. She is going to buy the right outfit and Colman will like the look of her.
It is raining and she stops into a café. She picks up her mobile phone and calls Colman, leaving him a message that asks how it went and if he wants Thai for dinner. She goes to her hotel home and draws a bath. She wonders why he has not called and starts to get irritated with everything. It is 8:15 and she is fully dressed but there is no word from Colman.
"House and Home"
Millie recalls wrapping bandages around Joss’s breasts every morning. It was simply a daily ritual, and she never thought about it. When dressed he was such a handsome man. Those bandages are still here and she’s not sure what to do about them. She also sees his trumpet as lonely and lifeless, so she puts it under her bed.
"Features"
Colman leaves Edith’s warm and comfortable home with a photo of young Josephine with her curly hair and pleated skirt and wide smile.
He strolls down the road, wondering how Joss could have stopped going to see her. He is thick and heavy with sadness and he knows he cannot see Sophie tonight. When he gets back to the hotel, he hears her TV on and chooses not to listen to the voicemails that he knows are from her—the Hack, he’s been calling her in his head now. The phone rings and he lets it go on. When Sophie leaves another message, he is delighted that she sounds wound-up. He feels like her hostage but he smiles and plans to just let her pay by ignoring her.
"People: The Old School Friend"
May Hart knew Josephine Moore when they were young girls. She’s been dreaming of her a lot recently and misses her deeply. Josephine was the only colored girl in class and was so lovely.
When the journalist called she decided to talk to her, but was shocked at how Sophie’s teeth—the body part that sums up a person more than any other—were so bad. This made her not want to talk to her but she sat there and answered Sophie’s questions. When Sophie pulled out a photo of Joss Moody and told May it was Josephine, she became transfixed, recognizing the girl in the man. Her memories flooded back; she and Josephine were “blood sisters” and closer than anyone. After Sophie left, though, May felt sick. She felt that maybe she had she done something wrong. She cleaned everything the journalist touched, finally throwing the glass Sophie drank from to the floor in despair.
"Editorial"
In the photograph of Josephine, the girl is bright and smiling, but she looks different every time Colman looks at her. He cannot decide if her eyes suggest that one day she will be something special.
"Good Hotels"
Colman drinks more Scotch to pluck up the courage to tell Sophie he’s out. He does not want to do the book; there was no contract, so he should be fine. His father keeps coming back to him and he won’t leave.
Colman knocks on Sophie’s door.
"The Stars This Week"
Edith Moore puts her kettle on. She thinks, “Tonight has an edge to it, as if the darkness itself was anxious. The moon is out already” (257). She can’t even open her book to read.
"Good Hotels"
Sophie is shrill and angry and she protests Colman’s decision. He shrugs that he has morals and she is incredulous. Colman tells her he is Joss Moody’s son and Joss will always be daddy to him. Sophie tries to change his mind but he will not be swayed.
That night Colman dreams of rescuing a deaf and curly-haired young girl in the house, carrying her up the stairs of a rich house so she does not drown. He simply has to save her. He has to. In the early morning Colman realizes he has slept with Sophie, and stumbles away from her.
"Editorial"
The narrator gives a series of questions and statements: what happens when the ghost writer loses the ghost? What if the ghost gets the spooks? Most ghost writers fall in love with their ghost, and they can’t keep a clear boundary. They believe they are the real authority on the subject, not the ghost.
"Interior"
Sophie thinks she knows Joss: Joss liked the coverup, Joss liked the power and prestige. “She” liked the swagger and the cool look.
When Sophie gets up, she finds a note from Colman saying sorry mate, he can’t do it. She angrily crumples it and throws it into the wastebasket. She knows she can change his mind, though. Her thoughts move to how she’d write the book from Colman’s perspective. It will be so good and Colman will be immensely flattered how she captured him. She will call it Under My Skin. It is such a brilliant idea, Sophie thinks gleefully to herself.
"House and Home"
Millie is walking along the familiar shore. For the first time in a while she feels a glimmer of hope, for this morning she received a letter from a group of women jazz musicians who want to form a band called The Joss Moody Memorial Band.
"Travel: The Coast Road"
Colman takes the familiar bus route to Torr. Once he is an hour away he calls the butcher’s and asks Bruce to relay a message to his mother: he is coming to see her on his own, and that last part about him being alone is crucial. Back on the bus Colman take a deep breath and opens his father’s letter. He is ready for it.
"Last Word"
Joss writes of his own father’s journey. He came off the boat into dense fog, fog that stretched its cold fingers out to his cheeks. This was the turn of the century when he arrived in Scotland. It was a place with stock-still people, “chiseled into the crag” (272). They seemed unreal as he disembarked from the ship; they seemed to have been waiting forever.
His father would tell Joss that memory was a strange thing, for it would “catch what you would think it wouldn’t catch, the slippery, the runaway, the taste of wet air. But he couldn’t remember what he wanted to remember” (273). His father would say, “My own country is lost to me now, more or less all of it, drowned at sea in the dead of a dark, dark night” (273). When his father was six, his grandfather sent him with a Scottish captain of a ship to take him there and get him an education. His father worked in a big house for the Duncan-Braes as a servant. They were not unkind but he missed his mother and his country. He loved books and he loved painting, and eventually quit the family to become a house painter. His name wasn’t even John Moore; it was given to him.
Joss writes that he, his father, and Colman all have this in common: they keep changing names, all for different reasons. Maybe one day Colman will know why Joss changed his. Joss concludes by saying he’s left Colman everything—his letters, photos, records, documents. Maybe Colman will understand or maybe he won’t; maybe he will keep Joss or lose him; maybe he will hate him or love him; maybe he will do both for years. Joss is leaving himself to Colman, and Colman is his future.
"Shares"
Millie watches the young man walk towards her, so very much like his father. A bird wheels overhead as if it had come right out of her. It rises and falls, “calling and scatting in the wind” (278).
Analysis
Kay’s moving and haunting novel comes to a close with as many questions as answers. We know that Colman is pulling out from the book, has read Joss’s letter, and is prepared to meet his mother and reconcile with her. We know Sophie is pursuing the book but we don’t know what the final project will be like, or if Millie or Colman will sue her. We do not know what Colman said to Edith, though clearly their meeting was thought-provoking and meaningful to both. And finally, we are left still not knowing everything—how could one?—about Joss.
What Kay does do is give Joss the last word. His letter is not full of the “excuses” Colman once thought it was; in fact, it says nothing about Joss as Josephine or his decision to live as a man or anything at all about that. Instead, Joss writes of his own father’s experience coming from the West Indies via the African diaspora to Scotland. The basic info is this: John Moore comes to Scotland as a young boy. He is given a new name, becomes a servant, and then starts his own house painting business. He dies when Joss is eleven. When he dies, Mark Stein writes, “Joss not only loses his connection to Africa, and a guiding hand, but also someone who could ‘clap in rhythm’ . . . to his singing and dancing.” Joss has a Scottish mother but he’s lost his connection to Africa. It is not surprising, then, that he embraces an art form that is nothing if not a transcultural force; maybe it isn’t surprising either that Joss spends his life working through his identity and coming to finally see that there isn’t anything fixed about it at all. For Joss, who was many steps removed from Africa, “the African diaspora is viewed . . . not as a collectivity of blood relations but, instead, as an imagined community, one that relies upon affiliation, not filiation.” Moody’s album, Fantasy Africa, can be seen as his attempt to work through these concerns.
This is an entirely new opening up of the novel’s historical and racial themes and it shows just how symbolically and, at times, literally, similar John, Joss, and Colman’s narratives are. Ryan D. Fong writes that the “pea souper” of a fog John Moore confronted on his arrival in Scotland is an effective metaphor for the way Joss in particular condenses “national, racial, and gendered identities.” All three men get new names, with varying degrees of trauma associated with them. Joss attempts to tie the three together, and “demands a reimagining of kinship and identity by invoking a nationality of affect as well as a shared history of painful, transformative renamings within postcolonial and queer contexts.”
Joss’s letter also tells Colman that he is leaving him all of his papers and records and documents and such, thereby giving Colman the putative answers he has been seeking and control of Joss’s legacy. While Stein suggests “Joss’s papers will not provide Colman with all the certainty he seeks,” it is an important gesture that “forges a material connection between the two.” Mandy Koolen sees Joss’s passing down of his papers as a way to resist “the silencing of his past that he has experienced all of his life.”
Notably, Colman does not get the last word. It is clear that he has shed most, if not all, of his anger, that he is ready to see Millie and ready to love his father openly again. However, as Koolen suggests, perhaps Colman’s silence, coming after his “verbose transphobia,” is an indication that “he has entered a more contemplative, empathetic, and trans-sensitive state of being.”
