The Devil's Music Read online

  I’m going to write her real name in the sand with my new spade.

  On Saturday night, Auntie Jean and Mummy talked about Elaine when I was in bed. They thought I couldn’t hear. Mummy was crying again. They said about her going away into a Home, and I thought of Gladys at school who has warts on her fingers and smells like left-over gravy. She lives at the Barnardo’s Home. We whisper ‘Fleabags’ behind our hands. I’d rather be dead than be like Gladys.

  My new spade is red metal with a wooden handle. It’s got a sharp edge that cuts through the sand. Susie has my old spade. It’s small and rubbery with swirls of red and blue and green like plasticine colours rolled together.

  I carve an E in the sand, five paces high and three paces wide. By the time I’ve drawn the bottom line of the E, the top line has gone blurry, rubbing itself out. I stand and paddle my feet up and down, up and down on the sand to make sinking sand. Real sinking sand comes when you’re not expecting it and suddenly you’re up to your ankles in slime. Sometimes there are hard bits under your feet, the bones of people who’ve drowned. I paddle more. My feet sink lower and lower until cold sand rings my ankles and my feet are deep under heavy wetness. Now Elaine’s ‘E’ has melted back into the sand.

  The man digging for lugworms has thrown Honey’s stick for her but she brings it back to me. He starts digging a new round hole. My hole has nearly filled up with sand and water again so I kneel over and use my arms to heave out more sand. It slides all over my bare legs. When I take my soggy jumper off, the chilly wind gives me goose bumps.

  I make my hole deeper, but water and sand come back to fill it. I have to be much faster. The metal disc with Honey’s name on it jingles on her collar as she jumps and leaps all around me. She starts to dig with me, her paws flying. Sand sprays up between her back legs. I copy her, cupping my hands, chucking sand between my legs; panting.

  If Elaine is not all here, like Mummy says to people, there must be a part of her that is somewhere else. Like Grampy says Granny is in a better place. Really, she’s dead. I know, because we visit her headstone in the graveyard and leave her favourite flowers there. But Grampy talks to her and blows a goodbye kiss.

  Elaine starts again with her whimpers. I feel sorry that she just lies in the carrycot and can’t get out and play with us in the sand so I shiggle the sides of the carrycot a bit more to try and make her laugh. She doesn’t do her giggle much any more, even when I lick the bottoms of her feet. Mummy says she’s sore somewhere, they don’t know where. I think they mean in her head. She wears nappies still, so perhaps it’s them that make her sore. Or perhaps she’s hungry because she only has milk from a bottle or sometimes mushed-up food. No nice food like chocolate, or even Parma violets which are only little. I thought she’d like them.

  Now she’s crying and coughing with a sound like she’s going to be sick. I still can’t see Mummy and Susie coming back from the ice-cream van. I push the canopy back and see that Elaine’s head is squashed right up at the top of the carrycot and her hair is stuck down and wet with sweat. I put my hands under her arms and try to sit her up. She’s heavy and very wobbly. She can’t sit up by herself yet.

  She takes a deep breath in. Her face goes red. She opens her mouth wide and screams. I lay her down again.

  I’ll have to wash the sand off. She’s different from me and doesn’t like the feel of sand on her skin, which I do know already so I wish I hadn’t touched her with my sandy hands. I lick one of her fat feet and explain how to make sand go soft by pressing down so that the water comes through, or by squeezing the sand in your fist. That’s how to make drip people, I tell her, but her mouth is big and wet and red with screaming.

  Honey has gone for a swim. Her head is a dot in the water.

  Elaine doesn’t stop screaming even when I play Boo! over the side of the carrycot.

  The man digging holes is looking again.

  I’ll fetch some nice clear water in the bucket to wash the sand off her and stop her being so hot and cross. I tip Susie’s slipper shells out of the bucket. I’ll have to run because I’m not supposed to leave Elaine. I’m in charge. The tide is far out, the sea a grey line.

  Honey comes back from the sea and starts shaking her head from side to side. I grab her collar and drag her away from Elaine just as she starts to twist her whole body faster and faster and seawater droplets fly out, spreading everywhere and spattering me.

  Now Honey’s here, I can go. I spread my towel on the sand. Elaine is heavy, but I just manage to lift her out of the carrycot. I lay her on her back. She stops crying and gasps a little bit, screwing up her eyes because the sky is big and bright even though the sun keeps going behind the clouds. She stops crying and kicks her legs like she’s happy.

  The bucket is full to the brim but water sloshes out when I run, so I have to go back to fill it up again. This time I walk, watching the water in the bucket, my legs moving straight and hard. Ripples of sand press into my feet. Splashes of water spill and leave dark patches on my salty-white skin.

  I’m on to the flat sand now. Honey is trotting in a circle round and round Elaine and I can see Mummy walking across the pebbles with the ice creams, taking huge steps because she doesn’t want them to melt. Susie is left behind. She stops and shakes her head, holds up her arms. What a cry baby.

  Elaine is probably even more sandy now because I can see that she has rolled over on to her tummy to play on the heap of wet sand by my pool. I am pleased that she has done that. Honey stops going round and round and sits down next to her. She points her nose in the air and starts to bark, loud short barks.

  The lugworm man throws down his spade and he’s running past me, his hands pumping like he’s trying to win a race.

  Mummy reaches my pool and, for a second, she stands very straight. My tummy slops downwards. The ice creams fall out of her hands on to the sand. Honey dips her nose to them. Mummy scoops Elaine up and wraps her arms round her. Mummy lifts her face up to the sky and her mouth is in a big O with a high sound that doesn’t stop.

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  I strip off my sweatshirt, tug my T-shirt over my head. I’m fired up, working on the table that’ll hold all the strands in place as I work the sinnet. My brain’s tight as a wire, hands busy with hammer and brads, the counterweight bag of BB shot, the seven-inch wire spikes to weight the sixty-one bobbins. I’m just about to begin driving inch brads into the places I’ve marked on a paper disc, drawn up with reference to Ashley’s and attached to the table top, when there’s a rap at the front door.

  I hold the hammer, listening. Outside the sun-room window, above the veranda, strips of canvas from the old tent arch and billow. Perhaps whoever it is will go away.

  Another rap; then nothing.

  Sarah arrives at the back window of the sun room. She has flowers in a cone of paper and stands there for a minute looking up at the canvas, unaware of my presence behind the salted glass. Or so I think, until she puts down the flowers and begins, laboriously, to write something with her finger on the salt.

  OPEN UP GRUMPY OLD SOD

  She looks quizzical for a second or two, then puts a line through ‘OLD’ and writes ‘YUNG’. So she knows I’m here. If I don’t open up, it’ll be another relationship ended before it’s started. Women read rejection into everything.

  ‘Here!’ she says when I finally open the door of the sun room. She clocks my bare chest, raising an eyebrow as she shoves the cone of paper at me and gestures upwards to the canvas. ‘Looks great. It reminds me of something.’

  The flowers, white freesias, are up against my chest and the fragrance is overwhelmingly tender.

  ‘Don’t you like flowers?’

  I haven’t yet taken hold of them.

  ‘What’s the matter? Touch a nerve? Is it the white?’ Her words fire out in rapid bursts, an interrogation.

  She can’t possibly know. We’ve spent only a few hours together; some drunken fucking, not much talking. ‘Thanks. I needed that,’
was all she’d said afterwards, fiddling with Rizla papers and tobacco. ‘Give me a knock next time you need shelter from a storm.’ Made me laugh.

  ‘Some people don’t like white,’ she goes on, a hand over her eyes because the sun is so bright. And I wonder if that’s true, why she would say that. White is the christening shawl, Elaine not quite visible on my mother’s lap. My mother’s hand on the kitchen table, clenched around a handkerchief.

  ‘It’s not the white.’ I take the freesias from her. ‘Thanks. I’ll put them in water.’

  She doesn’t follow me into the kitchen but stays outside, staring up at the canvas.

  ‘Chatwin!’ She’s triumphant, when I return.

  I join her under the slapping canvas and look up. Chatwin? My face must reveal my ignorance.

  ‘Bruce.’ She’s emphatic.

  There are glimpses of blue as the canvas soars and dips.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘His photographs. Not from Patagonia – from Nepal? I’ll have to look it up. He does the same thing – fragments of cloth against a sky.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘No? He was a travel writer, dead now. You’ve never read ...? It’s his photographs I love. All that old wood – ancient doors and packing cases. I’ve got a book. I’ll show you.’ She looks at her watch. ‘Must dash now: tango. Taxi’s waiting. The flowers are to say thanks. For your hair. Photo’s great.’ She jerks a thumb upwards. ‘I’d like a picture of this too sometime.’

  It’s not finished and it won’t work as a fixed image in only two dimensions, but I don’t say this.

  ‘Hmmm – yes.’ She hesitates a moment longer, looking up. ‘OK. See you?’

  I nod.

  A wave and she’s off.

  Drying sweat chills my bare skin. Two minutes’ interruption is worse than two hours’. The canvas smacks. Clutter is littering my head again.

  Chapter 2

  The thick fog carries the algal smell of the river: nasty driving weather. In the few paces between car and shop, your face is damp.

  You push open the door and the bell tings. Dead leaves scuttle. When it was that summer was finally finished you can’t recall.

  As your eyes adjust to the gloom, you see someone waiting at the counter and your heart smatters at your ribs like a trapped bird. You haven’t seen him for such a long time. He seems like someone from your distant past. You stop, steady yourself by studying the tins of Vim and boxes of cleaning paste stacked on cluttered shelves just inside the door.

  Oxo

  Surf

  Fairy soap

  Mr Coyne rings up a total. ‘That’ll be five pounds, two shillings and sixpence, thanking you,’ he sings out cheerfully.

  You hear the rubbery slop and shuffle of his boots on the floorboards as Ian strides across the shop in his enormous wellingtons.

  ‘Guid tae see ye.’ ‘Good morning.’ You and he speak together. His laugh vibrates the space inside you.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine, an yersel?’

  ‘Perhaps ...?’ You nod toward Mr Coyne who is peering expectantly over his half-moon spectacles.

  ‘Oh, no hurry today,’ Mr Coyne says. ‘Quiet day, is Wednesday. You two take your time.’ He reaches up to a switch and the fluorescent tube above spats into life. His glasses glint as he pushes them on to his balding head. ‘But come in properly, love, and shut the door. Keep that damp air out.’

  You close the door and, swinging round, almost collide with Ian, standing so very close and still. Adrenalin leaps like fear in your throat, something in your core shivering and alert to the height and breadth of him, a mere few inches from you. He’s so much broader than you remember. You lower your head, pretending to rummage in your handbag for a shopping list.

  There must be words that will place him safely into the role of odd-job man, a decorator that you and Michael employ occasionally; the son of one of Michael’s patients; a youth, but your mind founders. He’s likely to have heard about Elaine, so you must be ready to steer the conversation in the right direction. You’re getting better at that, fending off enquiries.

  Mr Coyne leans on the counter and realigns the collecting box for the Spastic Society by the till. He folds his arms, magpie-eyed.

  ‘My husband and I—’

  Ian’s head lifts a fraction and harsh light from the fluorescent tube rests in a bar across his face. His cheek and brow bones are prominent, so too is the bridge of his nose, which looks as though it may have been broken, giving his face a fierceness that reminds you of a boxer’s face you once stitched – the same visible strength in the arrangement of bone and muscle, the line of the brow. A raw masculinity. You’d put your forefinger under the boxer’s chin, lifting his face to the light to stitch it. The graze of the bruised, stubble-pricked skin against your fingertip, contrasting with your own skin’s milky-white smoothness, had made you yearn for the roughness of sex, its urgency.

  Blushing, you concentrate on the simple act of tugging at the leather fingers of your glove to loosen it. ‘My husband and I were very pleased with the work you did for us during the summer.’

  The glove is off.

  ‘We’re wondering about the bathroom.’

  Ian’s sheepskin jacket smells of apples and bonfire smoke, of autumn.

  ‘Would you perhaps be interested in giving us an estimate?’

  He runs a hand downwards over his beard. You wonder, if you reached a palm to its springy warmth, what it would feel like. The blond hairs below his knuckles gleam in the light. He’s stopped smiling. ‘When did ye hae in mind?’ He’s polite.

  This close, in the white glare of the fluorescent light, you notice again how long-lashed his eyes are, the lashes so thick they clump together, as if wet. It’s almost impossible to wrench your gaze away. Focus on the other glove.

  ‘Let me see, shall we say next Friday?’

  He slaps the back pockets of his trousers. ‘Ach! Diary’s in the boat. I’ll be needing to telephone and confirm.’

  ‘Thank you.’ You and Michael haven’t discussed the bathroom. You’ll have to try and bring it up this evening, when you get back. Your mind scrabbles. Yesterday’s shopping list, clutched in your hand, is crumpled and blurred.

  Ian hesitates. Then he strides back to the till, pulling out his wallet.

  On the shelves behind Mr Coyne’s head are two packets of mothballs with a picture of a moth with open wings on the box. Summer evenings, windows flung open; a moth fluttering around the light bulb.

  ‘Guidbye.’ Ian nods.

  ‘Goodbye.’

  Stepping up to the counter, you pretend to consult the list to give yourself time to catch your breath. When the doorbell’s tinkle tells you he has left the shop, you can hardly bear it.

  Outside, minutes later, Ian’s outline is just visible through drifts of fog as he makes his way along the towpath towards his boat. He must have called in somewhere else while you were trapped in the shop behind Mr Coyne’s dirty blinds. You hurry to the towpath, but Ian’s loping strides leave you further and further behind. He’s almost disappeared.

  ‘Ian.’ His name, half under your breath, is swallowed by the fog. No one behind on the towpath, no one else around; you try again, ‘Ian!’

  He’s at the bend in the river. Chest tight, you stop and yell through cupped hands: ‘IAN!’

  At last he hears. He pauses for a moment, looking back, and gives a small wave. It dawns on you that he can see you standing there on the towpath with your shopping basket, waving, but he can’t read your mind. You hurry towards him, damp air filling your lungs, and he signs ‘T’ with his hands, as you used to if he was sanding in the house, or using some noisy piece of machinery.

  By the time you get to the houseboat, you’re out of breath. The boat sways beneath your feet.

  ‘I’m sorry about ... about Mr Coyne.’

  Ian has his back to you, filling the kettle and there’s Billy Eckstine’s old song ‘My Foolish Heart’ on the wireless. He sw
itches it off. He’s wearing a navy blue Guernsey sweater that’s unravelling at the cuff.

  ‘He’s such an old gossip.’ You try to laugh, but feel a blush rising. Heat belches from a wood-burning stove in the corner and the boat tips towards the stove, towards Ian. The fog outside, the heat and the slope of the floor in here – your senses feel smothered. No, you mustn’t faint again. Once is too often. You unbutton your coat, push up the sleeves.

  ‘So—’ He pauses and rests the kettle down on the wooden draining board, a tension about his shoulders and neck. His hair, as usual, is tousled curls. ‘Are ye no wanting the bathroom tiled?’

  ‘No. Well, yes.’ It’s impossible to speak. ‘My throat – I was shouting. I need –’ You swallow. ‘I’m sorry – may I have a glass of water?’

  He nods to a shelf behind you so you reach for a glass, then squeeze past him to the sink, every nerve ending aware of his body, the muscular bulk of him. Gripping the edge of the draining board, you pause before leaning across to turn on the tap, then the boat rocks a little and he’s moved away, his breathing noisy in the tiny space.

  Water gushes into the glass, a sparkling torrent.

  What on earth are you doing here?

  The glass is filled to the brim, water spilling over, streaming over your hand, your wrist. Tears well up. Briefly, watching him on the towpath, you’d thought you could talk to him about everything. Of course you can’t. You can’t even talk to Jean. Or Hoggie. You bite your lip, hard, to stop the tears, because it’ll be the second time you’ll have gone to pieces in front of him and there’s a limit. Water is sluicing over the glass, swirling and gurgling down the plughole. The boat rocks and tips as he moves across and stands behind you.

  ‘Come awa and sit down,’ he says, his words a caress barely audible above the gurgle and rush of water. He knows then, must have heard. At least now you don’t have to summon the words to tell him yourself.

  You sit on the sagging settee while he rinses a couple of teacups under the tap and wipes them on a ripped hand towel. He has taken his wellington boots off and his feet are bare. Clean and white; naked. He has long, lithe toes with a sheen of blond hair. A stack of rolled canvases leans against the wall and a tattered telephone directory lies open, pages ripped from it and littering the floor – screwed-up balls of paper smeared with paint. Several jam jars filled with paintbrushes stand on the windowsill. Again you smell turpentine and linseed.