The Devil's Music Read online

  Susie eyes the marline spike warily as I pull it out. ‘Do you have to wave that thing about in here?’

  I ignore the question, twisting the rope firmly to the right to angle the point of the marline spike between the arch and swoop of the strands. The rope’s too new for me to use my fingers to force an opening. I’ll work a multi-stranded Button Knot, the knot sailors used to prevent un-reeving; a knot that will never be undone. This one will be a Star Knot, one of the most distinguished and individual of the Button Knots. To make a five-strand Star Knot, I’ll need to splice another strand to the core of the rope. It has to be a five-strand Star Knot. The reason will come to me, sooner or later.

  Rain splatters on to the windscreen from the tunnel of trees above. It’s dark. I separate the strands. The kids whine and demand biscuits at regular intervals. The tape is still on full volume. Yet again, Susie’s left hand reaches up to adjust the rear-view mirror, drops down – fingers stretching over the plastic stems of indicators, wipers, lights – falls lower, groping to check the hand brake is released, up again to fiddle with the fan and heat setting on the dashboard.

  ‘That all right for you, Andy?’

  ‘Fine.’

  I want to lash out at something. My knees are wedged up against the plastic dashboard, which makes cracking eggshell noises every time I shift position.

  Susie glances over her shoulder at the kids before lowering her voice. ‘He’d been eating black cherry yoghurt, Andy, all alone in that big empty house. He must’ve sat there all night by the time Mrs Hubbard found him. Spilt across his lap, it was, his trousers; the pot on the floor. Dad was always so ... He’d have hated it, people seeing that. I tried to clean him up. With my hanky.’

  I focus on working the knot snug. Sudden death: the easiest way to draw a crowd.

  Susie glances my way. ‘Say again?’

  I must have spoken out loud.

  ‘Houdini. Houdini said that sudden death is the easiest way to draw a crowd.’

  ‘Well,’ Susie shoves hair behind one ear and glares ahead at the road, ‘in this case there were the usual absentees.’

  Chapter 3

  You are empty, brittle as a shell, the blood in your ears the sea’s ghost. The clock ticks; your lungs rise and fall.

  Her cry comes from a long way off, like a breath catching. It’s a struggle to get up off the bed and go to her. In the box room, she lies on her back in the cot, her body rocking a little from side to side, not thrashing about or screwing up her face as the others used to. Jean says she’s just a placid baby; undemanding, but you know there’s something. Not something wrong; less than that. Something not quite right; an absence. Michael won’t speak about it.

  The house is cold; it’s late. You lower Elaine back into her cot and pat the blankets down around her. The pallor of her face with its high forehead reminds you of the head of a china doll.

  In the bedroom, you lie again on the candlewick bedspread, limbs limp, hands motionless, only the edges of your mind alive. There’s greyness; a desire to sleep that creeps up on you even as you finish dressing in the morning. Beneath you, the freshly laundered sheets are tucked down tight as the grave.

  After a while you summon the energy to hitch up your skirt, unclip your stockings and haul yourself upright to roll them down, pushing the flimsy fawn-coloured rolls until they slip past your knees, your toes, one after the other, like so much shed skin. You fall back on to the bed, eyes closed. Sleep is easy. Dreams are colour and energy; in them you are present again.

  It’s exhaustion, Jean says. Not enough rest. Getting up to both Susie and the new baby in the night, finding yourself with your hand on a door handle, not knowing where you’re going. She says it in front of Michael, flicking open her compact and powdering her nose, her eyes darting towards him. She loves to get him riled.

  ‘Wretched uptight Presbyterian,’ she mutters behind his back. ‘Don’t know how you put up with it.’ She twiddles the dial on the wireless to find the Light Programme and sings along with Max Bygraves at the top of her tinny voice.

  You must get up soon and tidy away the children’s game. Perhaps Jean is right, it’s just exhaustion. Two babies in less than a year – you’d felt so foolish discovering you were pregnant again. You’d conceived the very first time after Susie’s birth. Michael came in from seeing a patient, woke you, and everything was over before you even thought of fixing yourself up. Afterwards you lay awake thinking about his hands on other women’s bodies. His hands gentle against a woman’s distended belly as a contraction comes, or firm on the inside of her thigh as the crown appears. You wondered if it had been a breech that night, or an umbilical cord around the neck; perhaps a stillbirth or the fluid chaos of haemorrhage. You imagined the mask, the gown, the lunge of his forearm. Imperative to ensure that the mother survives.

  And after that night, as if your body was resolutely sealing itself, your milk had started to dry up. For Susie’s bobbing head at your breast, the urgent searching lips squaring to scream, you’d felt a dream-like detachment. So different from when Andy was born.

  Into your mind comes a picture of Michael. He’s outlined against light streaming in through the bay window of your bedroom, head bent towards Andrew, only a few hours old, cradled in his arms. Michael looks back towards you on the bed. His face is wet.

  ‘Look at him,’ he says. ‘Just look at him: our beautiful son.’

  The front door: a slam. You must’ve dropped off. You hear the rubber seals of the Frigidaire, the scrape of a pan on the stove. Michael. He’ll be making hot milk – a difficult delivery then. Chair legs against the lino. The metallic twist as he opens the whisky bottle. He’s drinking downstairs. Elaine’s quiet. A car going up the road throws its headlight beam across the wall; the curtains not even drawn yet.

  Then, splintering wood; a thud on the landing.

  ‘BLOODY HELL.’

  It’s Michael, grunting as if he’s been punched.

  You stumble to the door in time to see him rise to his feet and disentangle himself from the mess of sheets and washing line that was the children’s game. They have spent the afternoon sailing across the landing in the two halves of a cardboard laundry box. Andy snatched up the blue tissue paper wrapping the clean sheets and tore it into strips which he wrinkled and spread all over the landing linoleum to make the sea. Susie joined in, shrieking as she scooped shreds of tissue in her chubby arms and flung them into the air. Michael must have slipped on a wave.

  Andy pushed Susie to and fro across the landing in her half of the laundry box, his socks slipping on the lino. You’d helped him hang the dirty sheets, huge as mainsails, between one bedroom door and another, meaning to take them down before Michael got home. Skipping ropes are still strung out across the landing and the two halves of the laundry box are moored to the banister with Midshipmen’s Hitches and Crossed Fastenings. Now washing line hangs from the newel post, the banister broken.

  ‘Michael! It was my fault. I fell asleep. I forgot to clear this ...’

  ‘Go back to bed. I’ll deal with it.’

  ‘But it’s not ...’

  ‘GET BACK TO BED.’ He kicks the laundry box and shoves open Andy’s bedroom door. Wood cracks and shudders against plaster.

  ‘Michael!’

  He rips the covers from Andy’s bed. You hope the mute curve of Andy’s sleeping back will stop him and he does pause, his hand slowing as he reaches down. But then he drags Andy out of bed, across the floor on to the landing.

  Andy, half-asleep, clutches on to his pyjama bottoms with his free hand.

  ‘Look at this! Look at what you’ve done now!’ Michael’s face almost touches Andy’s.

  You try to move towards them, but your thighs have no bones.

  Michael shoves Andy towards the banister, jaw hard against his ear. He mutters through gritted teeth, tendons in his neck taut and swollen.

  ‘Clear it up. Just DO it.’ The words spit out and he lurches down the stairs. Andy kneels down.
/>
  Your bare feet make no sound. Andy freezes when you kneel to pull him towards you. His body heaves with silent sobs and his face is sodden with tears. You cradle his head and stroke his hair but he struggles away, his fingers reaching for the hitches and fastenings around the banisters. Neither of you says a word. You start on the knots too, fingers gradually becoming surer. You both pause when you hear the clink of bottle on glass, and you half rise, but there’s no other sound and you’re almost finished.

  Andy is shivering, so you squeeze into bed beside him and curl your body around his, feeling the occasional shudder of his rib cage. You breathe in his sleepy skin smell of salt and pencil sharpenings, the faint perfume of washing powder from his pyjama top. His breathing steadies. Warmth spreads through your body. A door closes downstairs; Michael will be sleeping on the sofa tonight.

  You must be careful not to fall asleep here. You slip out from between the covers and creep across the landing to peer in at Susie’s sleeping form. Back in your bedroom, perched on the edge of your bed, your mind is jerking and snapping.

  When, eventually, you sleep, you dream Andy is lost and while a policeman stands with his clipboard in your sitting room, you run to the rope walk, your mind seeing him there, but when you get there the walk is covered with a long shed where chickens scratch and squawk. Andy stands at the far end, silhouetted against light that comes in through a door. He turns when you call his name, but he can’t see you.

  You must keep calling.

  Chapter 4

  We’re on a long car journey. Susie’s leg is next to mine on the seat. We’re squashed in the back with Elaine in her carrycot. It’s hot. All the way we sing We Love To Go A-Wandering and Casey Jones, Steaming An’ A-rolling, me and Mummy and Auntie Jean. We’re all going to The Siding.

  Honey is in the back of the Traveller. Her nose is up to the gap at the top of the window. Her ears have blown inside out and she smells of wet pebbles.

  My legs are stuck to the seat. I lift them up, one at a time, like pulling off plasters. Susie copies me and we lift our legs up and put them down again, watching our skin stretch. Auntie Jean passes us sherbet lemons to suck and Susie cries when her mouth gets sore.

  When we get there, Honey pushes out of the Traveller, her tongue curly and panting, her whole body wagging as she gallops round and round, knocking into chair legs and door frames and skidding on the lino, her claws clicking and the tip of her tail bleeding because it hits things when it wags so hard because she loves it here. Me and Susie want one of the special plasters from the tin to put on Honey’s tail but Mummy says she will be better off without it.

  Susie doesn’t like the pebbles yet. I help her but she is too slow so I run over the pebbles and kick my new stripy canvas shoes off at the edge and run and run over the wet sand towards the sea.

  The sky is huge and high, up from the sand and up from the sea. Wind and sky rush in my ears. I can breathe in whole sky. I run, stop, fill myself with sky right up to the very top until I am fat and full like a balloon. Then I shout it out. Susie copies. We can shout at the tops of our voices and still the sand and the sky go on being big and flat and happy.

  Father has not come down to The Siding with us. Patients don’t have holidays from being ill and babies come when they feel like it. They don’t wait to be born. Usually they don’t even wait for the night to be finished. Father might come down on Saturday or Sunday.

  Father says when their bedroom door is shut we must not go in there. Do as I say, Andrew.

  Back up the beach I can see Auntie Jean stand and stretch her bathing cap over her head, pushing her hair up inside, the rubber straps dangling over Mummy, who sits in one of the stripy deckchairs with her pot of Nivea, putting a blob of white on her arm and rubbing it in. The hospital blanket with Mummy’s old name sewn into the corner is spread, lumpy on the pebbles. Mummy’s old name is the same as Grampy’s and Auntie Jean’s. There is a tartan vacuum flask with tea for Mummy and Auntie Jean and sponge fingers in the plastic picnic bag, lemon puffs and crisps with blue paper twists of salt. We don’t have to wash our hands first.

  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.

  Chapter 5

  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.