The Devil's Music (33 page)

    I brush the dust from my jeans and walk to the window. Outside, the sea is back, breaking waves gleaming white in the darkness. It’s early evening. The fluorescent tube sparks overhead. I could suggest some tango, but I’ve no music. Her face looks empty, turned in on herself.

    ‘How’s it going then?’ I say, finally, picking up our plates from the floor.

    She seems to come to, get her bearings. She takes a long final drag on her roll-up. Her latest commission, I already know, is from a friend of the couple who bought the Diving Woman. They, too, want a water feature, something similar.

    ‘My production line, you mean?’ She stubs her cigarette on the plate I’m holding. ‘It’s crap.’ Her face is sharp and white. One slip and she’s biting.

    ‘Crap?’

    ‘Yes. The nursery at Bosham House phoned me today.’

    ‘About?’

    ‘The same old thing: water features. They want some – big, bloody expensive ones, of course.’

    ‘Isn’t that good?’

    ‘Oh, yeah, I’m behind with the rent.’

    ‘Then  ...?’

    ‘Then why am I in such a foul mood?’ She pops the olive into her mouth.

    ‘Well, you’re a bit quiet, but  ...’

    ‘You don’t have these dilemmas.’ She neatly retrieves the stone between thumb and forefinger and drops it on to the plate. ‘And you don’t know how lucky you are. It’s another world out here. You live in your sister’s house, no worries about a roof over your head. She even brings you food supplies.’

    This is about money, then. ‘Well, it’s not ... I don’t—’

    ‘No, you don’t.’ She’s pacing up and down, waving her Rizla packet about. ‘You have an idea and you get on with it. No one tells you what to do and how to do it. Or, worse, gets you to make copies.’

    ‘But the point is it’s not my
work
, is it, the rope stuff? It’s just a – a hobby. It has nothing to do with other people.’

    ‘My God! The ultimate self-centredness of the True Artist.’ She gestures inverted commas around ‘True Artist’ and grimaces, before scooping up her hair in both hands and rapidly plaiting it again.

    ‘Not at all.’ She must intend to provoke. ‘I’m not an artist.’

    ‘And I am? I might as well be making concrete gnomes, except that my water features are for rich people who imagine they have taste!’

    I should have told her – I realise five minutes after she’s left and I’m alone adding our plates to the pile already balanced on the draining board – tourists constantly boss me around when I’m waiting tables in tavernas. But it doesn’t matter. It makes life easy. That’s the difference. Waiting at tables doesn’t interfere with my head. I don’t have to converse with anyone about anything at all except the food and drink. And, when I don’t feel like talking to the tourists, I simply pretend to have no German, no English. I smile winningly at the most attractive female in the group, the one I might want to get into bed at a later stage, and shrug. Usually, they quite quickly stop trying to talk to me. Vasilis vanishes into the kitchen and opens the lid of the chest freezer to hide his laughter. I’m meek, subservient, head tilted, attentive, but elsewhere. In Crete, it’s easy to be alone when I need to be. There are the lonely mountain tracks and narrow dirt paths worn by goats. The simple white mountain-top churches.

    And it’s not Susie’s house. Surely I have told Sarah this already.

    Too unsettled to stay in and get on, I decide to walk to the phone box at the far edge of the village to make the promised call to Susie. The phone box smells of curry today; there’s a takeaway carton upside down in the corner. Wind whistles through a cracked pane.
Behind with the rent
. Perhaps that’s her problem. I’d assumed she had a private income of some sort. I turn up the collar of the sheepskin jacket.

    ‘Oh, I’m so glad it’s you! I was worrying about how to get hold of you.’ The chink of crockery and Susie’s voice is breathy, coming and going. I picture her in the chaotic kitchen, phone tucked between shoulder and ear, unloading the dishwasher. ‘I thought I’d have to drive down to tell you. Hang on.’

    The clinking stops.

    ‘Tell me?’ I can’t hear her voice any more, only a sound like wind blowing across the telephone receiver at her end. ‘Susie?’

    Her voice is back, hushed and urgent. ‘—been in touch – asking me what I want her to do.’

    It must be leaves in the trees I can hear. She must have stepped outside the back door. ‘Who?’

    ‘Hoggie ... over the years ... says she must tell her about Dad ... but ... my address ... should I ... told Richard yet.’ Her voice comes and goes.

    ‘What? Slow down.’

    ‘She’s written to me. Hoggie – Harriet, I mean. I knew, the moment it landed on the doormat. I had to sit down. Mum’s in Spain.’

    I rest my forehead on the smeary glass and poke at the yellow-stained takeaway carton with my toe. Her voice is fading, tinny.

    ‘They’ve visited each other quite recently, Hoggie and Mum. She will definitely want to see us, Hoggie says. But it’s up to us. Can you believe it? I thought I should ask you. I’ve started to write back but there’s so much – Andy, I can’t believe it, can you? I don’t know what to think.’

    Outside, a Jack Russell sniffs at the door of the phone box, cocks its leg, urinates, then scampers up the road after a hooded figure in a cagoule.

    ‘I’m so excited I can hardly keep still. Andy? That’s why I was thinking – Christmas—’

    Her words pound, crashing through my head. I’m drowning. Substance and breath knocked from me. My throat constricts. I slip downwards, fumbling with the receiver, trying to bury it, with Susie’s voice, beneath the sheepskin jacket, clamping the receiver against my ribcage, shoving it, until I’m hunched on the concrete floor of the telephone box with the hard lump of plastic rammed high into my armpit. Still Susie’s voice squawks and fuzzes. My head tumbles with her incomplete phrases. Words in smithereens.

    My mother stood on the sand at the edge of the pebbles, her mouth open in a wide O.

    I withdraw the receiver from my armpit and hold it out in front of me. Let it go. Plummeting, black, shiny: the receiver twists and spins as the wire takes the weight, curls elongating and shrinking again. Finally, it dangles. Chirpings escape from little circles in the earpiece. Neat woodworm holes pressed against my fingertips in the blackness. My hands cover my ears. Silence roars in, my head awash with underwater turmoil. I tuck head and elbows down between my knees, hold on to my breath.

My eyes open. I’m gasping, my lungs tight and airless. Don’t know where the hell I am. Concrete, curry: the telephone box. It’s dark. I stagger to my feet, cramp in both legs, my whole body seized up. Was it dark before? God knows. I’m stiff with cold so I’ve been in here a while.

Outside: rain on my face; a juddery breath of salty air. I stamp my feet to get sensation back. Moonlight on the wet track. Time’s jumped; it’s night time. I must have passed out.

The impulse to run is strong. But my rucksack;
Ashley
’s; Grandfather’s sailor’s palm: I have to go back for them.

At The Siding, I stop at the gate. Susie’s Volvo is there, engine running, headlights on. This doesn’t add up. Her voice on the phone ... must have been out of my head for hours for her to already be here, now. The front door’s open, banging back against the wall. I go nearer. Susie’s in the car, slumped over the wheel.

    As I heave open the car door, she lifts her head. She’s crying. She moves robotically, holding open her arms and then, mind still reeling as if I’m pissed, my head’s on the softness of her breasts.

    ‘Thought I was too late, Andy, too late.’ She keeps saying it over and over, her breath hiccupping. ‘I thought you’d gone again.’

    Eventually we sort ourselves out and get into the house. I’m parched, downing glass after glass of water, splashing my face, my head under the tap, trying to decide whether I need alcohol or just a long sleep.

    ‘Andy?’ Her voice is thick. She blinks across the kitchen at me, looking dazed. A phlegmy cough has her shoulders heaving. ‘Andy, there’s something ... where?’ and then something happens to her face, a momentary spasm, like terror, and her eyes roll back in her head. I glimpse the whites just before she falls off the chair and is thrashing on the floor.

    A snatched thought,
Is this labour?
but the twitching and kicking of her legs and arms is so violent, her mouth foaming, that it’s obvious she’s having some sort of fit. Fuck.

    Useless objects illuminate themselves with a startling clarity: the different shades of a lifting patch of brown linoleum; the mottled blue-grey metal of the leg of the old stove; her bunch of keys fanned on the Formica table top. My thought processes move excruciatingly slowly while my body races to the door and I shout out into the empty evening for help. Nobody. I glance at the Volvo. Could I drive it? Not a clue. Quicker, safer, is Sarah’s phone. On the wall in her kitchen.

    Of course, she’s not there.

    Pick lock.

    Dial 999.

    I rant.

    A calm voice tells me to move all furniture out of my sister’s way in case she hits herself, to check her airways once the fit has passed.

    ‘She’s pregnant,’ I remember, just as I’m about to slam the phone down and run back to Susie.

    ‘Pregnant, did you say?’ The voice is sharper. ‘You’re sure?’

    ‘Huge.’

Susie lies on her back, shuddering. Her face is waxy. There’s vomit in her hair and the skin on her forehead is broken and bleeding a little. She must have hit herself on the chair leg. I touch her cheek and tell her I’m there. She goes limp and lies still. I don’t want to touch her any more.

    Quick footsteps behind me: Sarah. Her smile disappears. Her perfume wafts as she crouches down.

    ‘Andrew, for God’s sake – an ambulance!’

    I nod.

    ‘Help me, quickly.’

    We turn Susie on to her side as if she’s sleeping. Part of me wants to fetch a blanket, put it over her face and leave her be.

    Sarah bends her head close, brushing Susie’s hair back, making soothing noises as she fishes with her fingers in Susie’s slack mouth.

    Blue lights.

    Sirens.

    A stretcher and men in bulky uniforms storming in. Their movements jerking across my vision in the blue flashing light as Sarah’s fingers emerge covered in vomit.

    I’m heaving. Get to the sink, retching, just in time.

    Sarah’s striding across the grass alongside the stretcher.

    She climbs into the ambulance.

    The doors slam.

    A woman in uniform, helmet in one hand and a walkie-talkie at her shoulder, is behind me. She pulls out a mobile phone as the ambulance moves off, sirens wailing. ‘I’ll phone for a taxi to get you to the hospital,’ she says. Without waiting for an answer she speaks rapidly, sideways, into her walkie-talkie.

The taxi drops me at glass entrance doors and swings off into the night. I’m not setting foot in any hospital. It’ll take about thirty minutes to get back to The Siding on foot. I start jogging.

I hesitate before closing the front door to leave. Take a deep breath. Taste the salt. I’ll miss The Siding, its boxy rooms and curved ceilings, the rows of windows looking south to sea, the creak of the sun room’s corrugated plastic roof. I can smell fresh paint but beneath it, still that rotting apple smell. It’s comforting to think I’ll probably carry that smell with me on the sheepskin jacket.

    Chances are I won’t be back.

    I push the front door key into the coal dust just inside the coal bunker where, until a few weeks ago, it has lain for years.

    I’m on the south coast of England. I could head north; miles of land to cross. I’ve never been to Yorkshire, never seen where my grandfather made rope, where he walked the world. I’ll walk. I step off the front step into the dark.

The snow came before Christmas and it’s stayed for weeks and weeks and weeks. At Grampy’s, we’re cosy and I sleep all through the nights. One morning, snow drips from the gutters and I’m eating my porridge when Grampy blows his nose and says, ‘Let’s go to Marlow in the boat. Go and get your warm things on.’