The Devil's Music (29 page)

    Outside, the feathery tamarisk branches blow like hair in the wind. Right now, I’d like to go into the sun room and close the door. Leave the women and kids to get on with it.

    Sarah plays with the tip of her plait, fanning out the hair between her thumb and fingers, inspecting the ends. She sweeps her cheek with the little brush of hair, staring into space, preoccupied.

    ‘Has she.’ I make it a statement rather than a question. I’m not going to be manipulated into a conversation I don’t want.

    Sarah looks up. ‘Has who what?’

    ‘Susie. Told you.’

    ‘Oh. Yes. She says you’re not at all keen to trace your mother.’ Sarah rolls her head around, bending her neck this way and that, rotating her shoulders as if warming up for a dance session.

    ‘I’m not.’

    Sarah lifts her feet from my lap, swivelling off her chair to stand behind me and slide her fingers deep into my hair. She massages my scalp. It’s like a drug. My shoulders sink, my eyelids grow heavy. The sensation gradually blankets my thoughts. Sarah’s breath tickles my ear.

    To keep the edges of myself clear, I bite my lower lip. ‘He drove her out, our father. Now he’s dead.’ Staccato words. ‘That’s the story. Perhaps now she’ll get in touch – but that’s up to her. Unless she’s locked up.’

    ‘Locked up?’

    I raise my eyebrows at her.

    ‘You mean ...? But she wouldn’t be in an asylum,’ her fingers pause momentarily, ‘or whatever, after all this time, would she? Though you
do
hear ...’ The circles of pressure on my scalp begin again. ‘Anyway, Sue gave the impression—’

    ‘Susie needs money.’

    ‘Money? She didn’t—’

    ‘Our father left everything to our mother. If she’s dead, doesn’t make a claim, it will all come to us two.’

    Sarah says nothing for a while. She continues massaging my head. I close my eyes. My mind floats and bobs.

    ‘It’s quite romantic that he never remarried, isn’t it?’

    ‘
Romantic?
’ My eyes fly open.

    ‘Well, he had a lonely life. She is sorry for him, Andrew.’

    Sarah doesn’t know what she’s talking about. No idea.

    ‘Now his life is over. She’s carrying a new one. It’s a balance. She’s a mother; she wants to confront her own mother. Makes sense to me. Karma, if you like. If Susie wanted the money, why would she make any attempt to find her? No. I reckon anger is what drives our Sue and, what’s more—’

    ‘Bloody hell!’ I sit up straight.
Karma?

    ‘What?’

    ‘You sound like some kind of counsellor.’

    ‘Not surprising.’

    I’m wide awake now, ducking my head away from her hands.

    ‘One of my many accomplishments.’ She perches a hand on her hip. ‘I’ve worked in Marks and Spencer’s underwear department too. Very nice uniform,’ she says, pouting provocatively over a shoulder at me, boobs up.

    ‘Sarah—’ My chair scrapes the floor. Sarah is missing the point. No one, so far, has mentioned Elaine.

    ‘Shh! Sue must have dropped off.’ Sarah looks at her watch and picks up a long woollen scarf from the back of her chair. ‘I’d better shoot. Tell her goodbye. Only came round for a coffee.’ She winds the scarf round her neck several times. ‘Forgot you said she was coming down.’ She’s not meeting my eyes.

    I put a hand on her arm and feel the gritty powder of dried clay on her skin. ‘Can I show you something? Before you go?’ I want to see if she understands what I have done with the jelly shoe.

    I lead her through to the sun room.

    ‘What’s all the secrecy?’ she says, as I reach up to unbolt the door. I say nothing, all the time watching her face, noting her lifted eyebrows, the wry smile, the saucy glance up into my eyes. We stand in front of the upturned cardboard box on the table. I put my palms to its sides. Wait.

    I lift the box. She looks down.

    Sees the wooden box and frame, the jelly shoe with its toe immersed in freshly set concrete. Her face sags. Her head drops. A hand covers her mouth, fingertips pressing white into her cheek. Her pupils are huge.

    I want her to stand like that, holding that intake of breath, to go on staring, like a woman grieving at a grave, because, today, yesterday, ever since I poured dark wet concrete around the pink plastic tip of the jelly shoe, I haven’t been able to lift the cardboard box to look at it myself.

    Finally, she takes the cardboard box from my hands and replaces it. Neither of us says anything. She picks up each of my empty hands and kisses my fingertips. We walk out of the sun room and Sarah closes the internal door, sliding the bolt across.

    In the kitchen she put the back of her hand against my cheek. ‘I’m sorry, Andrew.’

    Now perhaps she understands why I have no wish to see my mother.

    Her plait swings as she reaches for the door, then she pauses. ‘Oh, I’m up in London for a few days. Be in touch when I get back.’

    She holds on to the ends of her scarf and steps out into the wind.

    I begin to clear the table and wash the plates. The nooses are made, waiting to be hung from the rafter in the sun room. I’ll attach the jelly shoe to one. I haven’t yet decided what to hang from the others but they will be against the ceiling almost, and the rope ends will hang down to suggest the ropes of a bell tower. But the jelly shoe in its bed of concrete – this still needs some work – will rest on the ground, the rope end high and out of reach. Like an unreachable note. The Devil’s Music. Because one of the final things I did, while Elaine was still here, was practise my whistling.

‘You awake, Andy?’

    The sitting room is shadows. Outside, a full moon lights up a mackerel sky. It must be late afternoon. The wind has dropped, but the sea swell is heavy. Bad weather drawing closer. I lift my feet from the chair and stretch my arms above my head. ‘Am now, aren’t I?’

    Susie doesn’t laugh. ‘I didn’t mean to fall asleep.’ She lowers herself gingerly on to the sofa. ‘I do it all over the place. Put the children to bed and wake up, fully dressed, on one of their beds or on the floor in the middle of the night.’ She sighs. ‘I’ll have more energy once I’m not carrying this extra weight around.’ She rests a hand on her belly.

    ‘Will you get someone in to help?’

    ‘
Someone?
’ she echoes sarcastically. ‘Like who?’

    ‘Well  ...’

    We both stare out at the moon.

    ‘Andy ... don’t be cross with me, will you, but because I hadn’t heard a thing and it was getting me down, waiting and not doing anything constructive so, when I found it, her address in America – I was having a clear-out, getting ready for Christmas – I sent a Christmas card.’

    She’s not making sense.

    ‘Sent a Christmas card?’

    ‘Yes. Most likely it will never reach her, she’s bound to have moved, we haven’t been in touch for years and years, but ... it’ll probably be a dead end.’

    ‘Susie, hang on a minute,
who
have you sent a Christmas card?’

    ‘Hoggie.’

    ‘Hoggie?’

    ‘Yes. Believe it or not I had to write “Dear Hoggie” because I’ve no idea of her first name.’

    ‘Harriet Amelia.’

    ‘What?’

    ‘Harriet Amelia Hogg!’ I always loved her name. And it strikes me, although her hair was red, it was like Sarah’s – long and wild – and she sometimes let me take out the combs and Kirby grips that kept it in place, and play with it. ‘Harriet Amelia Hogg. Remember?’

    ‘You’re not cross? I should really have consulted you first.’

    ‘Yes.’ I run a hand over the stubble on my jaw. ‘Susie, even if—’

    ‘I know, I know. Even if we find out where she is, she may not want—’

    ‘That’s not what I was going to say.’

    But I don’t know what I was going to say.

    We sit in silence once more. The twins clatter and burble in the kitchen. The moon races through the sky. The logical part of my brain works out it’s the cloud skimming the sky, not the moon. The visual confusion of speed and stasis is disorienting.

    Sudden silence from the kitchen.

    ‘MUMMY!’ A shriek.

    Susie jerks and hauls herself to the edge of the seat, using the arm of the sofa to lever herself up. She pauses. ‘I meant to say,
she’s
nice. Sarah.’

    ‘Yes. She said to say goodbye.’

    ‘I’m so glad she’ll think about Christmas. She was brilliant with the boys. She got kids?’ Susie is on her way to the kitchen. Both boys are wailing now.

    ‘Christmas?’

    ‘What?’ Susie shouts from the corridor.

    In the kitchen the twins have dolloped glue and glitter on to newspaper, cotton wool stuck to their fingers and jumpers. The yoghurt pot containing the glue has fallen on to the floor; both twins are still seated at the table, their faces screwed-up and red from yelling.

    ‘Only a glue emergency,’ says Susie, feet apart and breathing heavily as she watches the white puddle of glue spread on the lino.

    ‘I’ll do it.’ With the end of a cardboard tube I scrape the glue back into the pot.

    ‘Bread and jam for tea before we go home?’ Susie asks nobody in particular. She takes eight slices of white bread from the bag and lines them up on the bread board, spreading a thin layer of the butter substitute she’s brought down with her.

    ‘When’re you coming up? Shall I come down and get you? Hungry, boys?’ She’s struggling with the lid on the jam jar. She passes it over. The outside of the jar is sticky. I twist off the lid and stand, holding it and the jar. She notices my expression. ‘What?!’

    ‘Christmas?’

    ‘Yes, you know – big happy family time of year that’s about three weeks away. Or had you forgotten?’ She snatches the jam jar and begins spreading the buttered slices. ‘You had, hadn’t you?’

    ‘I don’t usually—’

    ‘I know you don’t usually.’ She presses two pieces of bread together with her palm and hacks them into quarters. ‘You don’t
usually
do family funerals; you don’t
usually
do family weddings!’

    Here we go again.

    She starts on another two slices, waves the knife at me. ‘But this year you’re here, not in some goddam foreign country miles away, and—’ she wipes her nose on the back of her hand ‘—and our father has just died.’ She fishes up her sleeves for the lump of tissue.

    ‘AND,’ she continues, voice shrill, ‘I’m just about to give birth to your nephew or niece, so it would be nice, just for ONCE, if you deigned to spend Christmas with your FAMILY!’

    She flings open a cupboard door to find side plates. A sense of helplessness washes over me. The Vicarage: all of us cooped up there for days on end.

    Susie puts two quarters of jam sandwich on to each of two plates. ‘Eat up, boys,’ she says brightly, putting the plates on the table and kissing each child on the head before walking towards me. ‘What were you planning?’ She’s lowered her voice, is almost hissing at me. ‘To stay down here and spend the whole time pissed out of your brain?’

    ‘Susie, I just haven’t thought—’

    ‘No. You wouldn’t.’ The skin is tight around her mouth. ‘That phone call last week,
were
you drunk?’

    ‘I’ve left home, Susie. I’m a grown-up.’

    ‘Yes, but ...’ Her voice is suddenly flat. ‘You sounded – weird.’ Her shoulders droop. ‘I was worried.’ She’s chewing the inside of her mouth. It would be so nice to see her smile for a change.

    ‘OK, OK.’ I hold up my hands, palms towards her, apologetic. ‘It was the rain. You know how it gets to me. Here it’s so noisy – with the wind – there’s no escape.’

    Susie shudders, nodding.

    ‘I’d a bit to drink at lunchtime then, after I phoned, I slept it off.’

    ‘Another thing that drove everyone crazy.’

    ‘What?’

    ‘You not sleeping. Wandering about in the middle of the night.’ She rubs her forehead with the heel of her hand. ‘Oh, let’s not argue. Why don’t you come back with me now?’

    ‘Christmas is three weeks away!’

    ‘Don’t sound so aghast.’

    I think rapidly. ‘Susie, you want to get sorted here first, don’t you?’

    ‘I suppose.’

    ‘Sit down. Let me make you some tea.’ I pick up a quarter of jam sandwich from the breadboard and offer it to her. She shakes her head so I pop it, whole, into my own mouth, pick up another quarter and do the same, checking the boys aren’t watching. I lick jam from my fingers. And, obscurely, she’s smiling, her heart-shaped face lighting up. I smile back. ‘Tea, then?’

    I’ve got my back to her, filling the kettle when she says: ‘You’ll come, won’t you? It’ll be so nice to have you for Christmas.’