The Devil's Music (25 page)

   
Unnatural
.

    ‘Why would you, of all people, be like this?’ Jean had said, after Susie’s birth.

    A telephone rings from behind a closed door and is answered straight away, then, at last, a woman with red lips sashays into the room with a clipboard: a questionnaire to fill in. Her stockings and petticoat make rustling sounds beneath her narrow skirt as she walks.

    ‘Just some family medical history for our records,’ she says, as she shakes your hand and Michael’s. She rustles around to sit beside Michael. Her sweater is tight over her breasts. Fluffy angora – too girlish for her age. Smoothing her skirt along her thighs, she turns towards him. Oh ruddy well let him answer the questions then. You dab your forehead. The Ladies: where is it? You must powder your nose before seeing the psychologist.

    The angora woman has raised her eyebrows in query, red lipstick lips curved in a smile; she’s asked something you haven’t heard. She repeats the question – the children’s birth dates – Michael never remembers. He takes over to supply the details of childhood illnesses: chicken pox; mumps; measles.

    The woman writes in the column beside Elaine’s name: MENTALLY DEFICIENT.

My book on Houdini says he thought the freak world was normal and straights were freaks. Houdini performed at freak shows. One day, Bess and Houdini arrived at Huber’s dime museum in New York to do a performance with the other freaks. There was Unthan the legless wonder, Emma Shaller the ossified girl, and Big Alice the fat lady. Houdini and Bess waited in the entrance hall. While they waited another exhibit was unloaded: an electric chair.

    It was the electric chair from a prison in Auburn, used to electrocute a murderer.

    Houdini cannot forget the electric chair arriving at the freak show at the same time as he arrived with Bess.

    There is a reason for everything. He knows.

    He thinks about the chair a lot.

    In 1910, when Huber’s dime museum was sold, he bought the electric chair and took it home to put in his Manhattan brownstone. Bess hated the chair and, when Houdini was away, she got someone to help her carry it down to the basement.

    But Houdini liked to sit in it every evening so he missed it straight away and brought it upstairs again.

    In this empty house there is a big chair with arms and a dust sheet over it.

You are ushered in to the psychologist’s room. The three chairs are empty.

    ‘Andrew’s next door.’ The psychologist gestures towards a panelled door in the opposite wall. ‘We have lots of games and toys there to keep him happy.’

    He moves to the desk and notes something down. His fountain pen is black and gold. For some reason you think of that first meeting with Michael in the hospital corridor and it makes you feel hopeful.
Hope
, that’s what Jean always says,
stay hopeful
.

    He replaces the cap of his pen. There are raised veins on the back of his hands. You must tell him about everything; all of it. You put your handbag on the floor at your feet. It will be a relief.

    ‘Now, let’s put all this aside for a moment,’ he waves a hand across the wad of notes on his desk. ‘We’ll begin with a few details about your pregnancies. Can you tell me what age you were when you first conceived?’

    Those somnambulant weeks before Andrew’s birth: the baby’s weight pressing down between your legs; the hard stretching of your skin with the bulge of a heel or an elbow; expectation a heavy ripeness as you stood in thick fog on Westminster Bridge with Michael, queuing to file past King George’s coffin.

    ‘I was twenty-seven – no – I’m sorry – twenty six.’ You correct yourself. It’s not Andrew’s conception that you remember, but his birth: Michael cradling Andy, moving his nose over the downy head, breathing in the baby smell of scalp. Michael, accustomed to other women’s babies, handled his own newborn with practised skill.

    Your eyes fill. What have you done? What have you allowed to happen?

    ‘Take your time.’ His gentleness makes your throat constrict. ‘There is plenty of time.’

    He waits, unruffled. His stillness is calming.

    ‘I’m so sorry.’ Clear your throat. ‘When Andrew was born  ...’

    The fragile boughs of the silver birch at the window signal an indefinable loss. You see Michael, standing in the light of the bedroom window, caressing a miniature foot, his lips to the wrinkled sole.

    ‘Perhaps you would like one of these?’ The doctor comes around his desk, proffering a box of tissues. He tugs up his trouser legs as he sits on a chair beside you.

    ‘I think that things were – Michael couldn’t – he didn’t like—’ Weeping distorts your voice and makes it difficult to continue. ‘I think I might have loved my son too much.’ You press a tissue to your mouth. Tears stream down your cheeks.

    After a while, he puts a hand on your shoulder.

    You shake your head, eyes filling again. ‘It’s my fault.’

    He lifts his hand from your shoulder. ‘There’s no reason to apportion any blame. Perhaps we should get you a cup of tea. Let’s fetch Janice, shall we?’

    The fluffy woman arrives in a talcum waft of Coty’s, murmuring solicitously as she guides you to the door. She goes back for the box of Kleenex. Michael stands and enters the room with the psychologist. The door is closed.

    Janice brings a tray with tea in a teapot and four lemon puffs on a plate. The ritual of pouring – milk jug, strainer, sugar cubes and tongs, the teaspoon stirring – steadies you, but one bite of Lemon Puff and the nausea washes through you again. The teaspoon clatters down in the saucer and you ask Janice where you can go to powder your nose.

I whack the chain on the floorboards.

    ‘Found it down by the river, near the boatyard,’ I tell them, passing it through my fists, squeezing my fingers around its hardness. I whack it on the floorboards again.

    ‘You stole it?’ says Stephen, his mouth all loose. He pushes his glasses up his nose.

    ‘I’ve got a padlock.’ Hugh ignores him. ‘It’s on my bike.’

    Hugh and me look at each other. We’ve already got some handcuffs here, hidden in the pile of coal in the coal cellar. My new Timex says a quarter to four. It’s Pancake Day today. Today would be a good day to do it. Stephen probably eats loads of pancakes.

    ‘How long would it take to go and get it?’

    ‘Let’s all go,’ says Hugh. ‘I’ll get Mum to give us some lemonade and biscuits and while you two distract her, I’ll sneak into the garage and get it. Pretend I’m spending a penny or something.’ Hugh snorts and the two of us double up with laughing. ‘Spending a penny’ is what Stephen says to our mums when he wants to go to the loo at our houses.

    ‘Why do we need a padlock?’ Stephen asks. He doesn’t want to run all the way there and back again to our den because he runs like a duck.

    ‘Stay here then, if you want.’

    Stephen looks at his feet. He’s wearing black plimsolls like the ones we wear for P.E. at school only his are too small and his fat feet bulge out over the elastic bit. He won’t wait here by himself. Hugh’s been here on his own, I know. I crawled through the broken bit of fence one afternoon after school and peered in the French doors and Hugh was lying on the floorboards in a patch of sunshine reading the
Beano
. Blimey, he didn’t half jump when I rapped on the window.

After half an hour or so, the door opens again and the psychologist shakes Michael’s hand in the doorway, and you stand, stuffing your balled-up handkerchief into a pocket, waiting to be invited in. But the appointment time is over. The psychologist will send a written report; another appointment in six months’ time.

    ‘I didn’t take off my cowboy hat,’ Andy says, jutting out his chin in the way that Michael does. ‘He asked me to.’

    You crouch down to wrap your arms around him and bury your face in his neck. Your eyelids are swollen and stiff. Andy wriggles away.

    ‘Did he make you do pictures too, Mummy?’

    Perhaps you could have managed some drawings. A picture of Andy licking the soles of Elaine’s feet and making her laugh, that funny little yelp she used to give. A picture of Andy curled on your father’s lap. Andy locked in the cupboard under the stairs. Pictures would have been much easier.

    You take hold of Andy’s hand. He twists in your grip but you keep holding as the three of you pass through the corridors lined with closed doors and the sounds of muffled voices, down the stairs and out on to the glittering pavement. There’s a cold wind. Andy finally slips from your grasp and shoots at the pigeons, his fingers held like a gun.

    Ptchew! Ptchew! He shouts and leaps along the pavement.

    Michael keeps looking at his watch. He’s calculating whether or not he’ll be back in time for evening surgery. The tyres and wheel hubs of the cars parked along the kerb are dusty and worn. You pull your car-coat closer.