The Devil's Music (6 page)

    ‘They were only little waves.’

    Father walks me fast to the kitchen. Mummy looks up at his face and starts to get out of her chair, but she has baby Elaine in her arms and before she can be properly up, Susie runs to put her head in Mummy’s apron and pushes her back down on the chair.

    In the hall, Father opens the door of the cupboard under the stairs with the toe of his Wellington boot and bends me through the gap. He kicks the door shut. I am in the dark. The key turns with a clunk.

    The cupboard under the stairs smells of shoe polish.

    I am in the dark until I can see sense.

    I hold my breath and close my eyes. Grampy tells me about the Lapland witches who tied wind knots to sell to sailors so they didn’t have to whistle for a wind to sail by. Whistling is the Devil’s music. It can make a storm come.

    I don’t have any enchanted knots in the cupboard under the stairs. It’s dark. I don’t have any string to tie even a Reef Knot. Left over right, right over left and under, his fingers on my fingers, Grampy tells me the Reef Knot is one of the simplest and best of the uniting knots.

    In the cupboard under the stairs I suck hard on my thumb, my teeth on the bone.

    After this is the first time I run away to Grampy’s.

I wake to the sound of the sea, the ripped lino of the kitchen floor slippery beneath my hip. I roll on to my back. The white painted wood of the railway carriage ceiling curves above me. Last night’s gust and surge of wind and waves has ceased. Today, there’s a distant sighing
shuuush
followed by a pause like an intake of breath, a gathering of the next long curl of water.

    No sounds of movement yet from Susie and the boys in the caravan; it’s early. No voices. No rain. A grubby sheepskin jacket and the old binoculars hang from a nail in the wall. I get up.

    But once on the pebbles I can see the tide is far out, the sea yawning back over damp stretches of sand. Wet sand: gleaming and ridged for miles and miles. The smear and squelch of it, thick as wet paint. Adrenalin flares. My body wants to be far away. Fast. I press the heels of my palms to my eyes. I’ll have to turn back. But then, at my feet, are the pebbles: black, white, grey, tan, brick-orange, dark red. Ahead, the shingle banks appear more uniform in colour, predominately orange-brown. The stones are glistening wet and slide beneath my weight. Smaller stones, like gravel, roll and bounce down the slope. I focus on the crunching sideways slip of each step. Unable to look across the sand towards the horizon, I can walk parallel to it.

    The sea has sculpted the shingle banks into curves and scoops. I will collect the smooth black pebbles. They warm in my hands and lend a weight to my pockets as I clamber over the rough wooden breakwaters. The breeze invigorates. Perhaps, after all, this will be all right.

    I tramp for a while then, testing my courage, lift the binoculars and look up. Careful to keep the blue arc of sky in my circle of vision, I move the binoculars steadily downwards until I find the smudged line of purple. The horizon: that distant place which both does and does not exist. Sunlight catches on the slow roll of a distant wave and throws into sharp relief the shadowy underside of its curl. Two flocks of
Calidris canutus
, Canute’s favourite bird, perform their characteristic aerobatics. One flock shows the dark plumage of their upper parts, the other forms a loose diamond of white as they turn and reveal their silvery undercarriage. Towards the mudflats another dense flock is feeding, long bills plugging in and out. Their continuous low twitter sounds close, intimate. A woman in a bulky waxed jacket and wellingtons is striding across the mudflats. She’s tall. Long, slender legs. I glance at my watch; time to head back.

Muffled thumps and shrieks come from the caravan. The boys must be up.

    The twins are wearing nappies and vests. They bare their teeth and roar at me from under the table, scratching at each other with clawed fingers. They chase around the caravan, waving bits of toast and jam. The caravan rocks. I stand in the doorway, reluctant to step inside.

    ‘Why are
you
here again?’ the biggest kid asks, peering sideways at me up through his blond fringe.

    ‘Andy, sit down. I know you don’t like to be inside for more than five minutes, but you haven’t stopped fidgeting.’

    Susie’s hair is shoved back behind her ears. She’s surrounded by towers of folded bedding, miniature pairs of jeans and T-shirts, piles of what looks like shiny wads of folded plastic. Disposable nappies, I guess. Her voice strains, bright and brittle, above the kids’ noise. Her tea has skinned over. Her egg sits untouched in its egg cup. Now she’s crying again, leaning her forehead on one hand, face hidden in a scrunched-up tea towel. Her other hand, nails bitten, cuticles ragged, lies on the narrow table amongst a collection of multicoloured socks neatly sorted and rolled into pairs. How can she stand all this?

    When she was about six, Susie used to press straight lines into the sleeves of her bottle-green school jumper. Every Sunday. The way our mother had done. And she pinned back her fringe with a round plastic slide. It irritated the hell out of me, the way that slide dragged down because it was too chunky for her thin hair. She was always fiddling to get it just right.

    Susie’s still in the tea towel. Buses and Beefeaters. I slide in beside her at the rickety table and contemplate putting a hand over hers. Instead, I dig a teaspoon into the sugar and load it.

    ‘Susie.’ Crystals tumble over each other. I tip the spoon. Sugar sprinkles from the edge of the spoon back into the bowl. ‘I shouldn’t have come.’

    ‘What?’ She lifts her face from the tea towel. It’s a mess, bloated and wet. ‘Aren’t you going to help me?’

    I can’t imagine why she might need my help. I get up to cut myself a slice of bread and open the caravan door wide. The biggest boy tumbles out on to the wet grass. Susie seems not to notice. Getting to his feet, he stands with a hand shoved down the front of his pyjama bottoms, clutching his willy.

    Susie has stopped talking. She’s gazing out at the tamarisks, a hand on her belly. It reminds me.

    ‘How long  ...?’

    ‘The baby? Oh ages. I just look enormous because, well, I’m not exactly voluptuous, am I? That’s why it shows so much.’ Susie strokes the swell of her belly. The self-absorbed caress makes me think of masturbation. That focused concentration.

    ‘And have they, you know, said anything?’

    She laughs at me, hand covering her mouth. ‘I can’t believe you still do that.’

    ‘What?’

    ‘Pull your ear lobe about! Look at you.’

    I slide my hand into my pocket.

    ‘I’m sorry. It’s just so ... weird.’ She bites her lip. ‘Where were we?’ She reaches for a balled pair of socks and separates one from the other. ‘I expect you’re thinking about Elaine,’ she says, not looking at me.

    My hand fists in my pocket. I concentrate on opening it, stretching my fingers one by one to touch the edge of the pocket seams. A curlew mews, plaintive and invisible, somewhere in the pale sky outside. The boys are lugging buckets filled with pebbles. Even though it’s freezing cold, one of the twins has taken off his vest and dropped it on the grass. One of the adhesive tabs on his nappy has come unstuck.

    Susie picks an imaginary piece of fluff from a sock. ‘No. It was nothing hereditary. It was the labour – way too long. Something like thirty-six hours, Dad said. It all went wrong then. Maybe lack of oxygen, I don’t think they knew. No,’ she tosses her head, ‘I may be small but I can push them out easy as peas from a pod.’

   
She’s not all here
, is what they said about Elaine. I’d lick the soles of her fat and placid feet to bring her back, giggling. Or so I thought then – that I could bring her back.

    And I used to lick colours too, to feel them. Beige linoleum and the thick spread of red polish on the front step. The float and slide of pale blue Formica and the kitchen table’s silvery edge that swooped like a slope. Bakelite door handles, dark as chocolate. Also, smells: the powdered down of my aunt’s cheek, my mother’s hair, sunburned after a day in the sun.
Stop that this minute
. I licked surfaces: the rollers on the Acme wringer; the sheen on the coal in the bunker; the humming fur of ice inside the refrigerator.
What is the matter with you?
It became another thing I did in my room with the door shut. I think there’s a name for it now.

    Susie wipes her face.

    ‘Sorry, I can’t seem to stop doing this.’ She swallows and sniffs and rubs her nose. ‘It’s ... Poor Dad. He went on loving her.’

    Listen to her: Dad, Dad, Dad. She never got away from him. I pinch soft bread from the middle of the chunk of bread and roll it in my palm until it’s a doughy ball I can drop on to my tongue.

    ‘I looked, after he ... I don’t know what I was looking for, really, but I found a half-empty perfume bottle, “Tweed”, in the dressing-table drawer with his shaving stuff. The top had corroded and it had leaked into the drawer. That must have been hers.’

    She gives another little shake of her head.

    ‘I was only five. There’s so much I don’t remember. Dad started to talk a bit at the end. He said they put you on liquid sedatives when it all happened. Would they
do
that to a nine-year-old child?’

    I start on the crusty edges of the bread, tearing with my teeth. I stuff large bitefuls into my mouth until it’s rammed. I can’t speak.

    Susie sighs. ‘Well, let’s not trawl through all that nightmare stuff now. There’s enough to cope with in the present.’ She finally takes a sip of tea and wipes her mouth. ‘Because there’s his will. He’s left her everything, Andy, including The Siding. Never divorced her – can you believe it? After what she did? So, unless she’s dead, she’s next of kin. We have to decide what to do.’

    Bread is wedged to the roof of my mouth. I give it a poke with my tongue.

    ‘I’ve never thought,’ I use my forefinger to dislodge the bread, and swallow. A solid lump sticks in my throat, ‘that she might be dead.’

    A sudden riot and squabble of sparrows. What I’ve just said is a lie. I have thought my mother through many different scenarios, including death.

    ‘Well,’ Susie speaks under her breath, ‘I just want to know, that’s all. If she is still alive, she can bloody well go to hell.’

You shouldn’t let your father stand there so long in this heat. He’s forgotten his walking stick again, left it at the post office or in his greenhouse, or somewhere he can’t lay his hands on it. His head’s bowed, the fingers of one hand loosely holding his panama hat as if he has just this moment lifted it in greeting. As he closes his eyes and his lips move, a lump of longing swells in your throat.

    His face has the same distracted look as – more than five years ago it is now – the day your mother died. You’d been up very early, trailing along the streets with Andy in the pram because he was fractious with a tooth coming and Michael hadn’t got to bed until half past four that morning. When Andy finally dropped off to sleep, you called in at your parents’ for a cup of tea before heading home back along the river path. They were always up early.

    But the milk bottles were still on the step, the newspaper sticking out through the letter box. The thought of their breakfast table with its seersucker tablecloth, the kitchen filled with sunshine and the smell of toast, made you realise how hungry you were as you rapped again at the door. At last, just visible through the yellow glass, Dad swayed along the hallway. He kept the door chain on, peering out through the gap.