The Devil's Music Read online

  ‘Perhaps he has too much time on his own at your house!’

  Jean exhaled. ‘Because he hid it there? But, OK, I’ll talk to him about it.’

  ‘No,’ you told her, finally taking hold of the notebook. ‘It’s all right. I’ll do that.’

  Now, you’ve started to shake again. Not because of the detail of the hangman pictures, the lists of words and terms, but because your son is nine and you have lost touch with the working of his mind.

  You sit down on the sloping river bank. From here the bottom is invisible, even at the edges. The water is brown and sluggish, its algal smell trapped by the high banks and trees on either side.

  Barbed wire; Devil’s Rope is another name for barbed wire.

  At the back of the notebook are more drawings with underlined headings; two or three pages of what look like whips. The slapping curve of the pencil lines reminds you of the circus last year. You took Andy and Susie, and watched elephants, plumed feathers on their foreheads, heave themselves on to their hind legs to balance on a red painted circle while whips swooped and snaked, never quite touching their wrinkled hides. And the lion tamer, flamboyant in red jacket and tight trousers, cracked his whip, sawdust flying up into the air at the bars of the cage where the lion plodded. The lion yawned; strings of saliva glistening. Its mane was matted. This year you had ignored the circus posters.

  Fumbling in the pocket of your sundress for the last cigarette, you realise you’ve left the house with no handbag. No key to get back in. No money. As you pull smoke deep into your lungs, your mind spins as if you’ve had a sherry or two. A gust of lightness makes your heart beat faster. Run, your limbs say, tingling, keep running.

  You run. Speed up. Heading for the houseboats, the jolt and jar of your feet on the sun-baked towpath reverberating through your knees, hips, lungs. Honey leaps ahead and back, jumping up, tongue curling out, her hot breath on your face.

  From one of the houseboats a man waves and calls out. You stop, breathing hard. Ian’s shirt, unbuttoned, flaps in a breeze lifting up from the water, the buckle on his belt catching the light. The hair on his abdomen – blond, growing upwards in lines and eddies, swirling over his chest – lies flat against his skin. You stoop, hands on thighs, the shock of seeing him catching at the breath in your throat, although it’s why you’re here.

  You brush invisible grass from your sundress. Honey sniffs and pauses her way through the undergrowth as Ian buttons up his shirt and suggests a cup of tea. There’s the smell of bacon frying. Through gaps in the gangplank, the brown river slides by. Dandelion clocks stick and drift on the water.

  The space you step into is tiny, and rocks as he steps down behind you, ducking through the doorway. The ceiling is low – he has to stoop a little – but the space is bright with the sun pouring in through windows on three sides and the ripples of light on the ceiling, reflections from the water. He strides across the floor into a little kitchenette, wiping his hands on an old cloth. His fingers have blond hairs on either side of the knuckle. There’s the bacon, and something else: white spirit, or turpentine. He fills the tiny cabin room – his height, his shoulders, the exuberant bush of his beard – glancing your way often as he stands by the small stove frying his bacon and eggs. His eyes are not the washed-out blue you’d expect with his colouring, but a curious shade of clear golden brown, like Demerara sugar. Perhaps it’s more common in Scotland. Blond lashes grow in triangular clumps at the outer corners of his eyes, giving them a languid look, dreamy. Come-to-bed-eyes, Jean would call them.

  He’s offering you bacon. You shake your head and ask for just tea, wondering how to explain why you’re here, but he behaves as if you were expected, smiling and asking about the children, about Elaine.

  And so it pours from you: levering Susie’s fingers from your arm one by one as she screams because she’s being left at the school gates while Elaine goes home with you. At bedtime, she’ll turn away and insist on Michael reading to her, as some sort of retaliation or punishment – or so it feels. One day you caught her pinching the flesh of Elaine’s upper arm. And then you tell him about finding Andy, night after night, lying next to Elaine, the cot side pulled down, his mouth to her ear. Andy says Elaine’s bad dreams wake him. In the mornings his eyes are bruised with exhaustion.

  ‘He’s like a dog, guarding her. I’m sure he’s overheard us talking about sending her away.’

  Water laps and plops while your words spill over one another, a torrent, and you need a handkerchief but have no handbag, nothing. You look away, disoriented by liquid sounds and movement in the enclosed space that dances with dust motes on streaming rays of light. The splashes of crimson paint on the floor; the copper strands in his hair and the white line across the back of his neck where his hair’s been cut shorter; his beard with its ginger glints. A dog is barking, on and on.

  Sounds float. Your ears hum; a fog of silence. The paint-splashed floor zooms upwards.

  He’s caught you, supporting you in his arms, your head resting on his chest where hair pushes against the fabric of his shirt and your cheek. There’s a smell of skin and something oily. His shirt is damp. Sweat, your tears, you can’t tell.

  He yanks off the filthy dust sheet covering a sofa, one arm still around you, the swell of his biceps at your ribs.

  ‘Here.’

  Your mind is cotton wool, his face so close you can see the pores with the blond hairs sprouting, the way they glisten. He lies you down and lifts your legs up on to the sofa. Your head falls back and your eyes close.

  ‘I’ll away fetch some water.’

  He brings water and goes away again.

  He comes back with his plate of eggs and bacon and sits cross-legged on the floor beside the sofa.

  He talks a little about his childhood and his brother, then about his painting, his voice low and deep. The vibration’s there but you can’t make out words. Your arm’s hanging down, loosely, and now and then you feel the brush of his upper arm as he lifts the fork to his mouth, the rough warmth of the hairs – or the promise of it. You wait for it, that promise of warmth, substance slowly returning to your limbs. Finally you sit up and straighten your sundress. You’re ravenous. He passes half a slice of buttered brown bread from his plate and you eat. A dog is barking itself into a frenzy on the bank.

  Honey! You leap to your feet.

  Chapter 5

  I’ve been messing with rope from the shed and forgotten about eating. Now I’m starving, halfway through opening a tin of sardines from Susie’s box of supplies, when thunder cracks overhead. The lightning is almost simultaneous and the lights go out. A pause – silence – before the downpour unleashes. In the darkness, I place the tin on the draining board and feel for the curve of the peeled back lid. Once I’ve located the sharp edges with my finger tips, I plunge thumb and forefinger into the slippery mess of the contents. Can’t see what it is, but it’s in my mouth anyway: a small chunk of fish.

  I fumble in the dark for Susie’s torch on the kitchen window sill. Momentarily, there’s a wavering light. Then it’s out. I kick the kitchen unit.

  Rain strikes the roof, vicious as the thwack of arrows. A gutter must be blocked because water courses down from somewhere and smacks on to the concrete path. Another thunder crack and glass vibrates in the window frames. The kitchen is lit by a flash of lightning. In that split second I catch sight of the opened sardine tin on the draining board and, returned to darkness, feel gingerly for the fragile pieces of fish, putting them straight into my mouth.

  The rain’s volume is disorienting. I grope my way back to the sofa, burrow down into my sleeping bag and bury my head. My hands reek of sardines. A spring coils into my back and hunger growls in my stomach. Rain crushes the room with its crescendo, flinging at the windows, pelting the roof, whipping the walls: a whirlpool of swirling sound dragging me down.

  Breathe. Breathe slowly.

  But I’m drowning in it: choking and coughing. Coughing until I’m gasping and retching. My throat co
nstricts. Panic slams through me like acceleration stress, that sudden moment when tall buildings tip, the sky swoops and the slap of the ropes ceases as they pull taut. I am swaddled in Houdini’s straitjacket, its padded bulk of stale madness, winched higher as the pulleys rattle and squeak. Ten storeys up, I hang.

  Sweating, I throw off the sleeping bag. Sit upright on the edge of the sofa. On the floor at my feet is the old rope from the shed, now in several sections. In places, the heart was grey. It needed cutting out. I grab a fraying end. Hold it to my face and inhale its mustiness. OK now – deep, slow breaths.

  Because the rope has been neglected, its end has become untwisted. I try to consider which ornamental knot I could work to the strands, try to think about back-splicing, or whipping the ends with twine.

  But it’s no use. The rain’s presence is overwhelming, flooding my head. My fingers pick weakly at the rope. I give up. Sit on my shaking hands and feel the bulk and tension of my thigh muscles. Stare at the rope on the floor. Rope: its strength. Strands twisted in opposite directions. I think of the arm of the woman next door, the swell of her muscle as I gripped it, her shock-ready stance. The curling tip of the long plait reaching her buttocks and the way she tossed it over her shoulder, her nipples pricking and tight in the cold.

  I’m drenched in the few paces it takes for me to dash to her door, and then she takes her time. She opens the door a crack and peeps out, holding up a metal lantern with a nightlight wavering inside. The wind snuffs it out.

  ‘Bugger!’ She’s muttering and fiddling with a lighter.

  I shield my face from the rain, holding up an arm.

  ‘I’m on the scrounge again,’ I shout against the wind’s gusts. Rain snakes down the back of my neck. ‘I’ve no candles. A torch—’ I hold Susie’s torch up as proof, of something ‘—no batteries.’ My sodden hair slaps like seaweed.

  ‘You’d better come in.’ A hoarse voice, almost masculine; she must have smoked a good many fags in her time. ‘I’m getting sick of this,’ she adds.

  It takes a split second to work out she’s talking about the power cuts, not me. I hope. I follow her through another door and we’re in the main room that fills the space between two parallel railway carriages.

  ‘This is the third power cut in the last fortnight. The novelty wears off.’ Her voice and our footsteps echo. The room is vast and the floorboards are bare. Light blazes from several candles in a huge candelabrum that hangs on a long black chain from the high pitch of the roof. No ceiling. All pine beams and planks. Hollow, like a drum, it magnifies the pounding of the waves and the sliding of the shingle. But I can’t hear the rain.

  ‘Wow.’

  She’s lighting a roll-up. ‘Ikea,’ she says sideways, through clenched lips, and nods upwards.

  ‘Ikea?’

  She exhales, and smoke billows out like a sigh. ‘The candelabrum.’ She nods, as if that explains everything.

  It’s a workroom. Clay-splattered sheets are draped around the room; plastic and newspaper litter the floor. The shelves hold clay heads, some life size, some tiny, hands in various positions, a foot, an assortment of junk. There’s a child’s jelly shoe. In one corner a human form, life sized, is shaped in chicken wire. I turn towards the black expanse of uncurtained window that’s melting with rain. The shock is electric: in front of the window, a naked woman is diving, her limbs outstretched, her face hidden.

  ‘Don’t touch!’

  As if I’m a child.

  ‘Of course not.’

  The sculpture is a presence, a pause of muscle and motion that draws the eye.

  Sarah moves so that she is between me and the sculpture. She stands, back towards me, legs straight, apart, one hand buried deep in the pocket of her jeans. She’s chewing the inside of her lip. The rope of hair hangs down to her buttocks. Some has escaped the plait and curls away in wild corkscrews. There are streaks of grey. I’m not good at women’s ages, but she’s older than me and that’s reassuring. Chances are she won’t want looking after.

  She steps forward, and the hand with the cigarette hovers over the soles of the woman’s feet. ‘The water source will be here somewhere, in between her toes.’

  The startling effect of pause and motion will be heightened with water flowing over it.

  Still gazing at the diving woman, Sarah picks up an almost empty glass of red wine from a wooden tea chest and drains it with one swig. Then remembers I’m there. ‘Oh – want one?’ She holds fag up in one hand, glass in the other.

  ‘Thanks. Wine’d be good.’

  After a quick search, she finds another glass on a shelf beside a smooth, curving sculpture that makes me think of a lasso. She inspects the glass and wipes the rim on her T-shirt. Wine glugs from the bottle. It’s a very large, blue glass, thick and heavy with air bubbles trapped in the glass. Very cheap or very expensive, it’s hard to say, but I like its weight in my hand.

  ‘The head’s not finished.’ She refills her own glass and turns back to the diving woman.

  Again, I notice the set of Sarah’s shoulders, the muscles in her upper arms, her bare feet. She’s strong, wiry. The joint of her big toe protrudes, giving her feet a gnarled look. There’s a silver band around one middle toe. I knock back half a glass of red. Feel better.

  ‘I want the water to run over her heels, down her legs, over her bum, back and shoulders,’ she swoops with her hand, ‘and then over her head. And I want her to have long hair.’

  The diving woman has Sarah’s feet, but more bony, and larger than life.

  ‘But,’ Sarah continues, ‘the hair’s a real bugger. I want tumbling locks, the water to swirl, not pour or trickle.’ A little red wine sploshes from her glass as she gesticulates. She must’ve had more than one already. ‘Want a towel?’

  I’m startled at her change of tack. She’s staring at my chest. Water from my sodden hair has spread across my T-shirt. Halfway down my back, there’s the cling of wet material. I bend down towards the floor, scooping a mass of dripping hair forwards over my head. ‘I could model for you,’ I joke from between my legs.

  ‘Actually ...’ Her feet, sturdy, wide, come close on the bare boards. The red varnish is chipped. ‘Actually, you know – you could. Your hair’s just about long enough. A photo ...’

  Her fingertips graze my scalp as she lifts sections of my hair between her hands and lets it fall.

  ‘And thick enough,’ she adds. The bones in her feet flex and ripple as her weight shifts. ‘Sorry, I’ll get that towel.’

  I lift my head. She’s gone. I want to touch the diving woman, run a hand over the curve of her lower back and buttocks, but instead I pull off the wet T-shirt and sit cross-legged on the floorboards facing her. The room is filled with the sound of shingle hauled forward and back.

  I down my wine and help myself to the remains of the bottle. Sarah’s fag rests where she’s left it balanced on the ashtray; smoke wafts in slow curls.

  Chapter 6

  You have made lemonade and shortbread this afternoon, you tell Ian, peeping around the dining-room door. He has his back to you, crouching with the dustpan, and he wipes a hand across his forehead, his face preoccupied and distant for a moment, his mind elsewhere.

  Today has been so hot, you say, opening the door wider, he really should have a cool drink before he leaves – maybe in the garden? His eyes seem to register you standing in the doorway, and he smiles.

  You smile back, prompting him. ‘Yes?’

  The jug, as you carry it out to the garden, is slippery with condensation. Ian’s lying on his back, sprawled like a lion on the grass, the vulnerable pale underside of his arms exposed. Ice clinks. He sits up, stretching, takes the glass from you and puts his lips straight to it. His mouth, framed by moustache and beard, is half hidden. You search for his mouth when he speaks, watching for his lower lip. He downs the lemonade in one and runs a hand over his beard.

  ‘I’ll be away hame,’ he says, looking at his wristwatch.

  The tightening of di
sappointment is fleeting because your watch tells you the same, Ian’s usually gone by now. The children should be home from school. Often they’re back in time for Andy to rush straight upstairs to change out of his uniform and disappear into the dining room. While Ian cleans his brushes, he gives Andy a sheet of sandpaper to use on the skirting board or window frames, or stands behind him at the wallpaper table, guiding Andy’s hand as he spreads the glue in sweeps. As these images pass through your mind, time hovers. You should really be loading Elaine into the pram, walking down to the bus stop to see where the children have got to. Ian should be wheeling his bicycle down the front path. Neither of you moves. A butterfly lands on the buddleia. Then from the kitchen comes a burst of noise as the children arrive, the two of them bundling in through the back door, arguing, and they’re out through the French doors, shedding bags and shoes and blazers across the lawn, stirring up the air.

  Susie is wailing and her hand goes out for a piece of shortbread from the plate as she clambers on to your lap. Her forehead is sticky with heat.

  ‘You’re a bit late today. Where’ve you been?’

  Andy fishes a book out of his satchel. ‘Just down to Grampy’s. Look what he got me!’ Although he’s holding the book up for you to see, he’s sidling up to Ian, who’s still sitting on the grass, arms looped around his knees. ‘There’s even photos. Loads.’

  Andy sits down and wriggles close to Ian, leaning into his arm with a shoulder until he’s snuggled against Ian’s bulk. A fortnight ago, Ian was a stranger. Susie still keeps her distance, round-eyed at his size, his beard, staring at him over the rim of her mug of lemonade. She’s confided to you at night that he might be the giant from the top of the beanstalk.

  ‘That’s Houdini’s Suspended Straitjacket Escape.’ Andy points at a page. His finger is stained with blue Quink.

  ‘Tha’s Houdini?’ Ian says, dipping his head to the glossy black-and-white page.