The Devil's Music Read online

  ‘Cannabis to treat rabies? Sort of makes sense when you think they use it for multiple sclerosis.’ She’s looking up at the sky. ‘Scary disease, rabies. The fear of water – where does that come from?’

  I don’t know the answer to this.

  ‘The French call it “La Rage”, don’t they? They used to chain people up – grisly.’ Her face lights up with a smile. ‘OK. Let’s do it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘First tango lesson.’

  ‘Now?’ I’m drained from talking.

  ‘Here is ideal. Take off your shoes. Close your eyes. We’re going to walk, and you’re going to keep your eyes closed. No cheating. The most basic tango pattern is la Caminata, the Walk.’ She slips her arm around my waist. ‘Feel the clues you get from my movements. I’m not going to say anything.’

  The tide is high, halfway up the shingle banks, so I can relax: no wet sand. I close my eyes. We wander together over the shingle, me with eyes closed and faltering steps, body tensed to guess when to step up or down, when to move to left or right. She doesn’t say anything to me except, ‘Relax,’ which she says quite often.

  Gradually, a space opens up inside my head. My soles burn less and instead my body grows acutely aware of the varying sizes of pebbles beneath the arch of my foot, the slope of the shingle bank, the salt air on my lips, the sound of the waves – a constant presence – and the pressure of her hand, elbow, thigh against my body. Eventually level concrete is rough underfoot again. We come to a halt. I blink in the shadowless light.

  ‘We need food,’ Sarah says.

  In the kitchen, she puts on music she calls ‘techno tango’. As she cooks, holding her head high, back straight and breasts out, she tells me about Buenos Aires and immigrants who composed the original tango music. Every now and then she flips one long leg up and around the other, a quick flash of movement, fluid from the knee.

  I sit at the table and watch her. ‘Are there steps?’ I say, thinking of the onetwothree, onetwothree of a waltz.

  But Sarah shakes her head and gesticulates with one hand, chasing the eggs round the frying pan with a spatula in the other. ‘Some of the steps are the same as other walking dances, like the quickstep, but tango dancers relate to their partners very differently. You touch throughout – and it should be an emotional connection, as well as physical. We talk about el alma del tango – the soul of tango.’

  Her words, the concepts behind them, don’t sink in. The kitchen is cosy and my face is glowing from being outside. I try to remember whether or not I slept last night. I stifle a yawn as she’s scooting the bacon and tomatoes on to two plates. She stops mid-sentence.

  ‘I am interested,’ I say, hurriedly, ‘just tired.’

  ‘Mmmm ... You an insomniac or something?’ She sits down opposite.

  I shrug.

  ‘Well, I’ll bore you with tango another time. It’s my passion, I guess. Eat.’

  I’m too weary to query her and only when she’s chucked me out because I’m fidgeting and she wants to sleep, do I wonder what place sculpture has in her life, if tango is her passion.

  There’s a half-empty bottle on the kitchen table. It’s dark outside. The kitchen smells of wet paint. A woman I went out with briefly, years ago, was a professor, something to do with anatomy. I had a cleaning job at the university where she taught. She had big tits, looked good in a white coat and was into playing games, sex in uncomfortable places. Once she smuggled me into her laboratory, which smelt of gas and formaldehyde. She pretended I was a student. There was a soft hum from the fluorescent lights and the brush of starched fabric as the real students in their white coats bent over the wooden dissection bench. They were scraping tissue away from the undersurface of the cerebellum, near the stem of the brain, to reveal a knot of fibres, made of nerve cells. It was the size of a fingernail.

  ‘That’s the amygdala,’ my girlfriend announced to the students, tapping the almond-shaped knot with the tip of her scalpel blade. ‘It processes fear, houses memories of fear. And anger, we think.’

  She described the appearance of inclusion bodies in the amygdala of patients with rabies, a discovery that first led to the connection of fear with anger.

  ‘In rabies, the regulator for fear is turned up and up – but we don’t know much about it, nor why fear seems to be indelible.’ She detailed the neural wiring of the amygdala, explaining its complex connections to the senses. As she spoke I heard rain, smelt shoe polish, felt small round holes pressed against my fingertips: a bundle of nerves.

  Chapter 4

  He is in the box room. He is taking Jelly’s cot to pieces. They have been arguing in the kitchen. She has gone into the garden.

  A scraping on the landing. He is moving the piece of wood that covers the hatch into the attic. He carries a side piece of Jelly’s cot up the stepladder. The attic light bulb shines on cobwebs like witches’ hair. When his legs come down out of the attic, I run and bite his leg as hard as I can. My mouth is stuffed full with material, choking. The ladder wobbles. His foot lashes out.

  ‘For pity’s sake, Andrew, stop behaving like an imbecile.’

  He nearly falls down the ladder. He picks me up. I swing my legs and kick him. He smacks my face, hard, so that my teeth clunk. There is blood in my mouth. My cheek burns.

  in the dark

  I told Hugh and Stephen about Jelly when we were swapping marbles. Stephen said it was all for the best because Elaine was a Spasbo. I punched his nose. Stephen kept saying but she is she is Andy she is a spaz and I punched Stephen every time he said it again and again until Stephen’s nose dripped blood all over his poxy yellow aertex shirt where Stephen’s poxy initials were embroidered in poxy cross-stitch.

  In the cupboard under the stairs I press the pads of my fingertips over the woodworm holes and wonder what else is in the dark, on the other side of the small dark circles.

  Houdini wasn’t born Harry Houdini. He was born Erich Weisz in 1874 in Budapest. Some people never grow out of playing let’s pretend.

  One day I let my alarm go on ringing and ringing. I put my head under the covers and breathed in my warm bed air.

  ‘Andrew! This is not the way to behave.’ His voice was low and hard.

  ‘Please, Andy,’ she begged. ‘You need to get dressed for school.’

  ‘Andrew. How many times do I have to tell you?’

  ‘Not Andrew,’ I told them. ‘Houdini. I am Harry Houdini the Handcuff King.’ If they don’t call me Houdini I won’t hear.

  In the dark of the under-stair cupboard, I listen for The Voice. It will tell me what to do. It will give me commands. But Houdini’s Voice doesn’t come so I tell myself stories instead.

  Here is a true story I tell myself in the dark of the cupboard under the stairs. It’s 1906. Houdini is locked into a cell on Death Row. The cell door clangs. There are metal bars, cold and lumpy. They taste of blood. A dirty mattress has shapes like brown countries on a map and there’s a toilet without a seat in the corner. The toilet is brown inside. There are dark corners all around the cell and brown tiles. Brown is the colour of old blood. The key turns in the lock and the jailer walks away, keys going jingle jangle at his hip.

  In the sole of his left foot, Houdini has hidden something to pick the lock. He picks the locks on every single cell on Death Row and all the murderers escape. Pale thin men with striped clothes like pyjamas. Death Row is filled with echoes and shouts and cheering from the murderers.

  This I will not tolerate. Pull yourself together.

  Chapter 5

  You are in a jostle of bodies, juggling a warm glass of white wine, cubes of pineapple with cheese on a cocktail stick that you’re lifting to your mouth, and a tipsy Mr Robertson, whose nose is too close to your cheek as he asks you if he has ever told you how much you remind him of Ingrid Bergman, a dark-haired Ingrid Bergman, and you’re trying to smile and say, ‘Yes, yes, really, you know you have,’ as you turn away towards the buffet table, holding your glass higher in an attempt t
o put some space between Mr Robertson’s body and your breasts when, far across the crammed hall and above the crowd, you glimpse broad shoulders and the back of a head of coppery hair and it’s so unexpected, hours into Mr Robertson’s retirement party, among Michael’s colleagues and wives, the Friends of the Hospital – Ian.

  Your knuckles knock against Mr Robertson’s watch as he raises his hand to your hair and wine is spilled, your blouse wet and clinging.

  The kitchen is crowded with ladies laying out trays of green cups and saucers for tea and coffee, but you manage to make your way through to the sink. In the hall, the jazz band is just starting up – the opening bars of something by Fats Waller. Michael will want to dance. Dancing means no need to make conversation.

  There’s a pile of unused tea towels by the sink, neatly folded blue and white. You use one to blot at your cleavage. As one of the ladies squeezes past with a tray, a palm rests in the hollow of your back, a light pressure. Good: Michael. You can dance and conceal the damp patch until it’s dried a little.

  ‘Oh, look what I’ve done!’ You sigh, about to make some comment about Mr Robertson as someone else edges past between the sink and the kitchen table, and the man behind you – staggering in the press of bodies – leans against you to make room. Your buttocks brush against his groin as you turn, your shoulder squashed at an angle against his chest. Not Michael, but Ian. His face so close you can see, just at the base of his nostrils, the roots of the coppery hairs of his moustache, the way they pierce the skin. There’s a glimpse of tongue and lower lip through his beard and alcohol on his breath mixing with a spicy, moist smell, an unfamiliar aftershave. You catch him staring down at your breasts – the clinging damp patch on your blouse – at your mouth, and you notice tiny flecks of green in the brown of his eyes when they meet yours. A jolt; the spark of attention: male, sexual. And an answering buzz between your legs. His eyes slide to your lips again, head dipping forward, and for a startled moment you think he’s about to kiss you. He must have had too much to drink.

  ‘Ian.’ You lift both hands to his shoulders, one still clutching the crumpled tea towel, to hold him at arm’s length. ‘Have you come to ask me for a dance?’

  ‘Excuse me.’ Someone else squeezes awkwardly past the two of you.

  Ian stumbles again, his beard at your ear. ‘Jive?’

  You laugh. ‘Let’s just get out of everybody’s way.’

  You must have been mistaken, because he doesn’t seem drunk at all once he’s on the dance floor and, to your surprise, he’s a better dancer than Michael – better at leading. The two of you lunge and slide at first, and you’re aware he’s feeling his way, judging your ability. Michael is occupied with twizzling a petite blonde who smiles up at him admiringly, so you relax, forget about everything else, and focus on the way Ian tugs you hard towards him, a palm to palm hand-hold at shoulder height before he sends you spinning with an exhilarating increase in velocity, catapulting away and bouncing back.

  ‘That was good.’ Ian takes a carton of cigarettes from the back pocket of his trousers.

  The two of you have joined a few other couples cooling down outside. His jacket is around your shoulders. Eyes on you as he lights up, he raises his eyebrows in query. In the past, at home, you’ve refused his offers of cigarettes, but the fleeting pull of intimacy in his gesture is irresistible. Your blood is still pulsing from the dancing as you slip the cigarette between your lips and lift your chin, keeping your eyes on the flare of the lighter he holds towards you. He’s watching your mouth.

  ‘Caught in the act!’

  Jean plumps herself down on the bench beside Ian and, head on one side like a bird, introduces herself as your younger, single sister. She smiles at him coquettishly.

  ‘I’ll have one too while you’re at it.’

  Later, touching up your lipstick in the Ladies Room, you accused Jean of flirting.

  ‘And why not?’ she replied, eyeing you in the mirror. ‘It’s not as though I’m going steady at the moment and, as far as I can tell from his avid attention to various ladies here, neither is he.’

  And you could see Ian enjoyed it, the way Jean monopolised the conversation, making him throw back his head and laugh, then coaxing him back into the hall to dance with her.

  Michael rolls into bed beside you, his hand plunging between your legs.

  ‘Feeling better tonight?’ His breath is vinegary.

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘We’re all right, aren’t we? Now? We’ve got through this?’

  You concentrate on keeping your limbs relaxed, determined that your body will not reveal antagonism, but the hand staying there, his touch, persistent and careless as his words, forces you to shift on to your side to escape his thumb’s rubbing insistence. He misreads the movement, slides his hand up under your nightie and begins stroking, over and over, the same spot on your hip.

  ‘You seem more your old self. Dancing, having fun.’

  You put a hand on his, to still it. He kisses your cheek, your neck, your ear, and pulls your nightie higher. There isn’t really a choice. You will submit to his advances, go through the actions at least, because then he’ll leave you alone. He’ll go to sleep. Refusal will put him into a rage. There’ll be an argument.

  ‘...yourself again,’ he’s murmuring as he lifts his body over yours. ‘My party girl.’

  Afterwards, lying awake, your mind slips back to Ian’s body pressed against yours in the crowded kitchen, that electric kick. Surely he felt it too. Or perhaps that’s not the way it works, perhaps you merely gave yourself away. And, remembering you still have not talked to Michael about the bathroom, you imagine Ian back in the house, picture him – hands behind his head, shoes off, long legs stretched out beneath the kitchen table – and summon up other occasions, an alternative series of events unfolding.

  Chapter 6

  Today is bad. Afternoon. Low tide. Sarah’s not there. Dull skies crouch overhead and the horizon is missing, lost where milky grey sky merges with milky grey sea. Wind slices up through the floorboards, lifts and rattles loose weather-boarding, gusts at the window panes like some hefty beast prowling. I’ve had a drink but it hasn’t helped. I can’t shake off an image from last night’s dream. Walls rising up, again and again, looming so high they must topple. Windows with bars. Always the same fucking walls, fucking bars on windows. Again and again. The retching fear.

  I need to get out. Confront the wet sand. Its expanse.

  Outside, wind punches into me. White-foamed waves are roiling. The sea’s roar is all I can hear. Spray flies, my face soon damp with it. Flocks of birds migrating south, wheel across the dead sky. And four swans, necks stretched out. Salt on my lips, my hair tacky with it. The sea heaves. Once again the shingle banks have been pounded by the overnight storms into dramatic slopes and troughs, pebbles heaped high against the breakwaters. I stop at the edge. Rivulets of seawater drain from the pebbles and carve waterways into the sand. I step on to it with one foot and watch damp sand swell around the sole of my trainer. Almost imperceptibly, my foot is sinking. My vision pulses in time with my racing blood. I have to turn away, step back on to the pebbles, heart smacking hard as a squash ball.

  On the way back, I try again at Sarah’s door. No answer. She hasn’t been there for days as far as I can make out. Can’t remember what she told me about when she’d be back. I walk west, out into the wind and rain, away from the wet sand and away from the shabby, ramshackle houses.

  NO PARKING ON ANY ROADS. THIS IS A PRIVATE ESTATE.

  I head for the salt marshes. Rain trails down my back. A curlew picks its way over mud covered with webbed prints. A few yellow petals flutter on the straggly clumps of gorse. Only three o’clock and so gloomy a light or two already glimmers across the reservoir from the caravan park on the other side. Scum congeals at the water’s edge, where it can rise no further up the mud. Wind knives at my face and ears so I turn back towards the houses. Some new wire-and-wood fencing protects newly planted wisps of go
rse that are struggling to grow. They don’t stand a chance. Tough as it is, gorse grows distorted here, burned by the savage salt-laden wind.

  I’m hungry again. I forget to eat.

  I kick at a piece of masonry along the road.

  I’ll phone Susie.

  The phone box smells of urine. There is graffiti on the concrete floor. I get halfway through dialling Susie’s number, then put the phone down. I rest my forehead on the back wall of the phone box and read the cards advertising tarot readings, telephone sex, a ‘Dreaming Workshop’.

  Try again.

  ‘Andrew! I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon!’ Susie’s voice is bright. I picture her in the steamy kitchen of The Vicarage. ‘How’re you doing?’ A whistle blows, shrilly, over and over again in the background and there’s a loud rhythmic clanging.

  I run a hand over my face and beard.

  ‘Andy?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Can’t hear?’ A door closes, muffling the background noise. ‘Sorry, is that better? The boys have the music box out – got to keep them occupied somehow in this atrocious weather.’

  ‘Susie ...’

  ‘You sound a bit rough. Have you got a cold? Are you keeping warm enough? Is the water sorted out yet?’

  ‘I ... No.’ I pull the collar of the sheepskin jacket up. I don’t know where it came from; it’s way too large and scruffy to be my father’s. ‘I need to know—’

  ‘OK. Fire away. How’s the decorating going? I was thinking of coming down this weekend, wasn’t I? I thought I’d bring—’

  ‘About Elaine.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘Elaine.’

  ‘What about Elaine?’

  ‘About what happened.’

  ‘I told you—’