The Devil's Music (5 page)

    If Father does come down to The Siding, he does not wear canvas shoes or have bare feet on the beach like the rest of us. He wears his shiny lace-up shoes and socks.

    I can run with bare feet on the pebbles. I have bare feet all day but Susie does not like the sand between her toes. She stands with her legs straight and cries.

    And sometimes we eat fish and chips with our fingers, or tea will be poached eggs and mash. Me and Susie make nests with the mashed potato and mix in the gold top creamy milk with our forks and Mummy and Auntie Jean smoke Senior Service and say let’s not tell Daddy. Auntie Jean has made an ashtray out of a chipped cereal bowl with blue and white stripes. It sits on the glass top of the green wicker table.

    Father threw a packet of Mummy’s cigarettes on the bonfire. His neck was lumpy with shouting.
How many times do I have to tell you?

    I like the sand between my toes when I slip them down in the cool between the sheet and the edge of the mattress and listen to the wood pigeons, fat and gentle. My bedroom has a curvy ceiling and rope shelves for luggage because it was once a carriage in a Pullman train. I put my box of cars and
The Mountain of Adventure
and my book on Houdini on the rope shelves above my head. On the window it says ‘SMOKING’ in back-to-front capitals and I can smell the smoke from Mummy and Auntie Jean’s cigarettes and they laugh. This is what I can hear: the creak of the wicker chairs and Mummy and Auntie Jean laughing and Honey’s tail thump thump thump on the floor.

The click of the indicator wakes me. We turn left into Sea Lane, entering the village. A sign over a café, ‘Fish ’n’ Chips’, flashes on and off. Two ride-on toys, a pink elephant and a yellow giraffe, are chained together, and a Mr Whippy van is parked up on the forecourt by some stacked picnic tables.

    ‘This is what people mean when they say a place is “dead” in winter.’ Susie speaks under her breath. The boys are still asleep.

    ‘I suppose.’

    ‘But,’ her voice is flat, ‘it makes it easier, that it’s so different.’

    I say nothing. I don’t know if it will make it any easier.

    We reach the T-junction with West Beach Road. ‘Strictly Members Only’ announces a sign for the sailing club. Behind us, the caravan jolts and sways along the pitted mud track as Susie negotiates puddles hiding craters in the road. The twins loll in their car seats, mouths drooping and soft with dribble; a sock dangles. The older boy has undone his seatbelt and is curled among the empty crisp packets and plastic dinosaurs. He’s clutching a red beaker with a lid and a spout. It has leaked on to his trousers.

    I crane forward to peer out at the low buildings huddled behind tamarisk and hydrangea bushes. The headlights pick out a line of white-painted breeze blocks evenly spaced along the verge, a metal beer barrel with ‘NO ARKING’ in black and gold stick-on lettering and, further on, lumps of concrete. The drizzle gives way to a sudden downpour.

    ‘Goodness!’ says Susie between gritted teeth, whacking the windscreen wipers on to full speed. ‘I suppose there used not to be so many cars.’

    ‘What?’

    ‘All these “No Parking” signs.’

    A couple of lobster baskets on the verge are lit up, garish with fluorescent tape, in the beam of the headlights.

    ‘They certainly don’t want anyone stopping, do they?’ Susie tosses her head. She’s pissed off.

    I used not to feel a trespasser here. I belonged. But every place has several histories, both personal and collective. During the war, Grandfather told me, this was a ‘No Go’ area. The permanent residents were shipped out of their railway-carriage homes and the specialist army and navy engineers moved in, to carry out top secret work on the concrete Mulberry harbours. Here, trespassers must be particularly unwelcome.

    Many railway carriages have gone, or are unrecognis­ able. We pass a sprawling bungalow. The caravan’s bulk sets off the intruder spotlight. Displayed in the brightness is a Spanish-style ‘villa’, fenced and gated with black metal rods topped with golden spearheads. There’s a huge water feature, Cupid dribbling water from his chubby penis, El Vienza in looped writing across a white wall.

    Susie snorts. ‘At least it’s not Dun Roamin.’

    ‘It’s grim.’

    ‘The estate agent says the few remaining Pullmans are worth a bomb. There’s one up for over 350,000. Amazing, when you think they tried to demolish the lot in the sixties.’

    Not so amazing though that Richard wants it done up in order to sell. If I’d met the bloody man before Susie married him I’d have warned her off. Stood up at the wedding and shouted my protestations.

    Ahead an official-looking sign says ‘Car Park Closed. Turn Back Now.’

    Susie changes down into first gear. ‘I don’t think I can turn this thing around here.’

    ‘No, no, keep going a bit further—’

    I stare out into the dark. The Siding is just before the track turns into a footpath; the last house but one. ‘There!’ A low roof above the tamarisks. ‘There it is!’

    Susie steers the Volvo on to the grassy verge, watching in the rear-view mirror as the caravan tilts and follows. Just before she switches off the headlights, I notice gates across the end of the road, chained and padlocked.

    We sit and gaze out at the shadows of the tamarisks flailing in the wind. The car ticks.

    ‘Well, the rain’s stopped, at least,’ says Susie, as she turns to check the boys. ‘But listen to that sea.’

    Pebbles shift and rumble, like distant buildings collapsing. Susie hugs her arms and rubs her hands up and down them, although the car is very warm. The windscreen is misting over.

    ‘Come on then.’ She flings the door open.

    Wind hurtles through the car. Crisp packets and chocolate wrappers fly up from the foot-well and out into the night. We totter towards the sea, the sound of it drowning everything. At the top of the shingle bank, we stop. Foam surges phosphorescent in the black. It’s a struggle to breathe, like being smothered with too much air. Susie tugs on my sleeve, hair across her face, as she mouths words that are snatched away. I nod, and we allow ourselves to be buffeted back towards the car.

    The twins sleep on, legs akimbo, but the older boy is stirring. I stand by the car while Susie rummages through the paraphernalia in her shoulder bag. Through the car window, I watch her pile things on her lap: a blue dummy with a fraying ribbon, a baby wipe smeared with chocolate, a half-sucked rusk. The skin on her knuckles is chapped and sore, and she’s wearing her wedding ring on her right hand because of the eczema on her left. She jams her thin hair behind her ears.

    When I can’t wait any longer, I open the car door and duck my head in. ‘The key?’

    ‘It’s here, I know it is, somewhere.’

    ‘There’ll be one in the coal bunker, almost bound to be.’

    Fumbling in the glove compartment I find a torch, and switch it on. It goes out. I bang it on the car seat and light flickers back.

    The sliding door at the base of the bunker is stuck. The rough edge of the concrete grazes my fingertips, but then the door shoots up and jams halfway. The torch beam dims. I switch it off and, groping in the dark, find a loop of string in the coal dust just inside the opening: the key.

    Susie has unhooked the caravan and is winding down the legs. I should help.

    ‘Susie!’ I shout, waving the key.

    She nods and sticks a thumb in the air. ‘Great. I’m going to get the boys into their beds. You go and have a look.’

    The paint has cracked and peeled from the front door and, where the pebbled glass should be, there’s a square of hardboard. Susie is moving about in the caravan, dealing with the boys.

    The key turns, but the door won’t open. I kick once or twice, then throw myself against it at shoulder height. I’m in the hallway. A peppery smell. And something sweet, like rotting apples. I reach for the light and find the familiar dome of Bakelite casting, the switch with its rounded end. I wipe my fingers on my jeans, swaying in the sudden brightness. The hallway stretches away like a tunnel. There’s a ting from the light bulb and darkness again. I grip the radiator with one hand.

    ‘OK?’ Susie is at my arm.

    ‘Yes. It’s nothing. My sandals are wet; slippery.’ I smile to reassure her but in the wavering torchlight, patches of brown linoleum in the hallway are disintegrating. In places it lifts away from the floorboards, shifting and treacherous beneath my wet soles.

    Susie flicks a switch in a doorway. Nothing happens. Again, she flicks the switch up and down. Click click click.

    ‘Why don’t we do all this tomorrow, in the light?’

    The batteries are almost out. Each time I hit the torch with the flat of my hand, the beam lasts only seconds before fading. The last time, nothing.

    ‘It’s no good getting belligerent with it. I’m going back to the boys. You sleeping in the car?’

    ‘Probably.’ I put a hand to the wall. It reverberates with the pounding of the waves.

    ‘Don’t forget the kids’ll have us up at crack of dawn. Night.’ She kisses her hand and waves it at me, then trots across the wind-flattened grass, head down.

    In the kitchen, the noise of the wind is louder, gusting against the window. The glass panes rattle. Moonlight comes and goes through tamarisks. I edge through the moving light and shadow to the sink and try the cold tap. It’s stiff and then loose. No water. I try the hot tap. It wobbles on its pipe: nothing.

    I stand, perfectly still in the middle of the room. The walls creak. Wooden boards shift under my feet. The sea’s turmoil surrounds me. Raindrops streak down the glass and collect along the bottom of the window pane. With them, images from family cine films, black and white, jumpy, cluster in my mind. My mother, dark hair waved and parted to the side, holds out a birthday cake: four candles.

    Then, wearing lipstick and pearls, she bends to kiss my head goodbye. And Grandfather rides me down the garden in a wheelbarrow. The wheel rolls and bumps; my shoes bang on the metal. Grandfather holds up a piece of rope and tells me ‘cnotta’ is an old English word that means to join together.

Father screws up our blue tissue waves. He pushes them into the metal thing with legs in the garden. He stamps with his wellingtons on Susie’s boat until it is the cardboard lid of the laundry box again and he squashes the lid into the metal thing too, on top of our blue tissue-paper waves. Then he strikes a match and sticks it through the metal cage. Another match and another until all our waves are on fire. There is smoke. Susie cries and rubs her eyes. I hold her hand and wish very, very hard for our tissue-paper waves to get huge as a house, and crash down, to grow into huge roaring waves that can knock down even a grown-up and fill their mouth and ears and nose with the rush and burn of salty water. I wish for a storm. A storm with waves like the ones in the painting halfway up the stairs, big and black, making everything else in the whole wide world silly and small.

    But our tissue-paper waves are soft, like at low tide when the sea is shallow and warm and I lie on the sand while the sea washes over me, quiet as if it’s dreaming.

    Father is burning our dreaming waves.

    ‘They were only little waves,’ I say, nearly to myself.

    ‘I beg your pardon?’ He holds the top part of my arm. His mouth is wet and red. I say it again, moving my lips to make the words come out.