The Devil's Music (3 page)

    Honey is circling, nose down. Round and round Jelly and our pool. I see Jelly has rolled on to her stomach. Honey sits down. She barks once; twice. The man digging for lugworms pauses and looks up, a foot on his spade. Goose bumps rise on my arms.

    And now my mother is racing, skidding down the steep shingle slope, a clutch of ice-cream cornets held high. Pebbles bounce and slide. Far behind, by the row of beach huts with their shuttered doors, Susie holds her arms high, hands like starfish, stiff in the air.

    My mother reaches the pool. She stands rigid. The ice creams topple and fall. She bends to scoop Jelly from the sand and wraps her arms around her. My mother lifts her face to the pale sky, her mouth wrenched open.

    And that’s when I hear the high-pitched sound, a keening that goes on and on and doesn’t stop. It doesn’t stop when the lugworm man throws his spade to the ground and begins to run, doesn’t stop when the bucket drops at my feet, doesn’t stop when I’m crouched low, hands covering my ears.

I hoist my rucksack on to my back and step across the gap between the train and the platform’s edge. Fag butts and a paper cup marked with lipstick lie on the grey chippings below.

    Susie’s not expecting me. I sit on a metal bench on the platform and wait for a plan to materialise. Cold seeps through my cut-offs. Becomes an ache spreading across the surface of my skin then deeper, into my thigh muscles. My toes grow numb. In the rucksack there are only odds and ends of clothes. Leaving Triopetra was a sudden thing. I packed Ashley’s
Book of Knots
and Grandfather’s sailor’s palm; the new length of rope. Not much else.

    Last time I came back – two, maybe three, winters ago – it wasn’t great. Susie and I yelled and screamed at each other. I manhandled her, shoulders like bundles of twigs under my hands, out of Richard’s study, locked the door and held the key up above her stretching reach. Richard walked in the front door. A whining child in pyjamas was crying ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy,’ from the top of the stairs; Susie pushed and slapped at my torso. We were both breathless. Richard slung me out. Not physically, of course. No. He gave me a lecture, delivered in his vicar’s voice. Wax melting on a church candle. Susie must have told him things. He won’t want me back at The Vicarage.

    On the opposite platform, a sign over a door says ‘Lost Property’. I imagine the stifle and weight of shelved belongings: suitcases, umbrellas, overcoats, scarves. Parts of people’s lives they wanted to leave behind.

    A train pulls in. A slam of doors; a voice on the tannoy. The shriek and clank of wheels on the track, leaving. No one else left on either platform.

    The daylight is fading. I’m fidgety, missing the Cretan mountain smell of wild thyme and baked earth, the cicadas’ pulse. I could catch the next train back out of here.

    Running a palm over my face tells me the beard is thick. I finger through pocket fluff for some string to pull my hair back into a ponytail and walk up the slope to the exit. The road is slick with drizzle. After some trouble with coinage, I phone Susie from an old red phone box at the station entrance.

    ‘
Andy?
’ Her voice is hollow. ‘Where are you?’ Breathing and gurgling saliva down the line; she must be holding one of the kids.

    I tell her.

    She says, ‘Stay there. I’ll come and pick you up.’ Her words are clipped, as if she doesn’t quite have the time to pronounce the sounds. Or perhaps it’s the way I’m hearing them.

    ‘I’ll need a few mins to get organised. But ... Andrew?’

    ‘Yes?’

    ‘
Please
don’t disappear. Stay put.’

    I wait with my back to the red brick of the station wall. The rain stops. A blackbird clucks and tuts. Trees stir in the dusk. Bare branches of a silver birch are joined and black and the limbs of other trees grope upwards, rooks’ nests anchored in high clumps: a cluttered sky. No horizon. No stars. I wrap the cracked rawhide of Grandfather’s sailor’s palm around my hand, fit my thumb through the thumb-socket, press my index finger into the metal needle rest.

    That last time, I’d caught Susie bent over the computer in Richard’s study. She was chewing on a fingernail, a frown line scoured between her eyebrows. She leapt up; a glass of water tipped. Her hand shot out to grab it and water sloshed over the papers on Richard’s desk. She flapped both hands at me, eyes popping, and rushed from the room. I went round the desk to see what I could save from disaster. There was a Google search: FIND MISSING MOTHER.

    Zeros, too many of them.
Results 1–10 of 10,900,000 for Find Missing Mother
.

    I bent and pulled the plug. A fizzled ping and the screen shrank away.

    ‘Why don’t you want to find her? Why won’t you help me?’ she’d sobbed, pummelling my chest.

I catch sight of her hurrying across the station forecourt, a slight figure in a cardigan that’s too long in the sleeves. She’s dragging a protesting blond kid and drops her keys twice. When she sees me, she starts to cry, mouth twisting. Her head turns from side to side. I ease the rucksack from my back, wondering if I should put my arms around her. She leans into me, so I do. She’s skeletal, back ribbed and bony beneath the cardigan. But her belly is firm, pressing into me, the only substantial part of her. She must be pregnant yet again. She wilts, head bowed against my chest. Beads of drizzle hang heavy in her hair.

    The blond kid drapes himself around Susie’s leg and scowls up at me, tugging insistently at the bottom of her cardigan. Eventually she rubs her cheeks on her cuff and straightens, holding me at arm’s length.

    ‘I always forget how big you are, the way you sort of
loom
,’ she says. ‘And you look like a tramp, as usual.’ But she’s smiling, her heart-shaped face looking up at me. She curls her fingers around my wrist. ‘I’ve left the twins in the car. Come on.’

    A cassette tape playing a song about ducks – QUACK QUACK QUACK QUACK – is audible yards from Susie’s old Volvo estate. A caravan covered with green algae is hooked up on the back. Presumably Susie has hatched a scheme to park it up somewhere as my temporary accommodation. In the back of the Volvo, two half-dressed blond kids in matching jumpers bang on plastic buckets with spades and an assortment of toy cars. The seat is littered with discarded socks and apple cores and the boot is crammed with stuff. Susie straps the bigger kid in the back, speaking to me in breathless half phrases. I’d forgotten how she talks.

    ‘Aren’t you going to get in?’

    I hesitate. A decision seems required. Right now it’s neither here nor there where I am but it must be warmer in the car, so I fold myself into the front seat. Inside, the car is steamy and smells of hot plastic. Susie fiddles with the ignition.

    ‘Andy, I’m really, really glad you’re here.’ Her hand touches my knee, patting. ‘I was worried about space in the car. I half thought you’d be with someone.’

    There’s usually someone, but never for long. The girl who has started cleaning at the taverna often looks my way, curling a strand of hair behind her ear and smiling, but she’s related somehow to Vasilis, or perhaps she’s just the daughter of a friend. Either way, it’s not a good idea. I stick to tourists.

    I can’t concentrate on what Susie’s saying because the tape is on full volume and the three boys in the back aim guns that fire nothing but a noise like a siren. The twins are in nappies. Babies with guns. And still she talks, raising her voice: Richard this, Dad that; the boys; church jumble sales. She talks at me as if there isn’t much time to say it all when really she’s saying nothing. I wonder if she talks like this to everyone or if she simply talks to fill the gap there is between the two of us.

    In Crete when I think of Susie, she’s wearing white school socks yanked up to her dry little knees and folded over. I picture the way she used to stand on the pouffe singing along to Dana, watching herself in the mirror above the fireplace. She didn’t talk much then. Hardly at all, to me. She’d just give that little tilt of her head and flounce out of the room whenever I lifted the needle from her record to put Hendrix on instead.

    We stop at a red light.

    ‘He’s dead.’

    Her words startle me. I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand.

    ‘Three days, he lasted.’

   
Father wipes the soles of his polished shoes, shakes out an umbrella, stoops to place his bag by the radiator in the hallway. I can’t see his face, only the rain in spatters on the shoulders of his gabardine Mac
.

    So he hung around. When Susie phoned a couple of weeks ago, the splat and whiz of a cartoon in the background, the official prediction was twenty-four hours max.

    He’s gone.

    I shift down the seat. My rucksack takes up most of the room in the foot-well. Coiled in there, waiting for me, is the new length of yarn-tarred hemp, its smell of salty, windswept miles. The dip and curve of the strands is thick as muscle. This is what gives rope its strength, the laying together of strands which have been twisted in opposite directions. Rope is bound together by the friction of its parts.

    ‘Andy, where on earth have you
been
?’

    I wish she’d concentrate on driving, instead of turning around in her seat all the time to look at me.

    ‘Thought I said.’

    ‘What?’

    ‘On the phone. That I wasn’t coming back.’

    She rolls her eyes. ‘Yes, but. Now. Here. You. Are.’ Each word has exaggerated emphasis. ‘Besides, when I phoned the taverna again, what’s-his-name said you’d left Crete more than a week ago.’

    ‘Vasilis, his name’s Vasilis.’ But the windscreen wipers scrape and thud and Susie’s still talking.

    ‘– yet
another
of your well-timed disappearing acts. The next thing you’re going to tell me is that you walked all the way, dressed like that!’ She gestures in the general direction of my sandals and cut-offs. ‘I suppose you’ve forgotten what England’s like in October?’ Shaking her head, she lifts both hands from the wheel and drops them.

    I take a breath, to make some sort of reply, but can’t think of one. Nobody asks the questions I want to answer. The last October I spent in England must have been the autumn after ‘O’ levels. The autumn I bought an afghan coat and hitched across Europe. Susie was all teeth and braces. She had a crush on Bobby Moore and practised kissing her own reflection.

    When Susie phoned Triopetra to tell me about Father’s stroke, there was the hiss and crackle of long distance. It got me thinking about the distancing effect of time. I lay in my hammock strung across the balcony, watched the moon set, the sky throng with layer upon layer of stars. I thought about ways to use rope to connect my ideas about time and distance with the stars, moon and sky. Before I left, I’d sketched out some knotwork, bought the yarn-tarred hemp. Shroud laid: four strands, right-handed, around a central core of plain laid rope. My fingers itch to hold it.

    Susie clicks her fingers in my line of vision. ‘Andy?’

    ‘Yes?’

    ‘You know this is tricky. The Vicarage ... Richard ... Guess there’s no way you’ll stay at Dad’s? Even now?’

    ‘No.’ My fingers tremble.

    ‘
So
...’ her voice holds a bubble of anticipation, ‘I thought we’d drive down to The Siding!’

    I concentrate on the swish of the wipers across the dark windscreen but see mudflats at low tide, a rushing sky. My teeth chatter. I can’t manage my limbs. I fold my arms across my body and clamp my hands under my armpits.

    Thirty years. I thought I would never go back.

    ‘Richard thinks it’s a good idea to give the whole place a lick of paint before it’s sold.’

    She still does as she’s told then. Daddy’s Good Girl. But The Siding cannot be Richard’s to sell. There’s something she’s not saying. A hot nausea washes over me. I push up the sleeves of my sweater and reach for the toggle on my rucksack.

    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.