The Devil's Music (36 page)

   
Yesterday
was
Captain Scarlet
and
Mysterons
on telly, so today is  ...

    I’m too hungry to think.

    The wardrobe is stupendous, like a monster alien landed on the flowery carpet. It has four doors that are dark and shiny as beetle wings. Along the very top wood is carved in swoops and curves like stag beetle antlers. The panels on all four doors have swoops and curves too.

    I’m not allowed in here by myself.

    I stop bouncing and move to the end of the bed, away from the wardrobe, but it’s still there, its four big dark doors reflected in Mummy’s dressing-table mirrors.

    Once we played Sardines and I shut myself in the wardrobe. I hid underneath Mum’s fur coat. It was covered with a plastic bag that rustled. The fur was silky and smelt of mothballs. There was a leather smell too. I pushed both hands into a wobbly pair of high-heeled shoes. Green shoes, to go with the dark-green ballgown she wears to hospital dinner dances, when she wears the furry scarf thing with its rows of tails.

    I bounce, slide off the edge of the bed, roll across the floor and jump up like in
The Magnificent Seven
. I pull open two of the wardrobe doors: white shirts, sleeves sharp; dark jackets and trousers. Horrible hospital smell. One brass pole on the inside of the door has ties in lots of colours. Two brass poles along the bottom of the wardrobe have a line of shoes in pairs.

    The black telephone by the bed begins to ring. I am not allowed in here. The ringing stops. It leaves a space in the air. I slam the wardrobe door – a puff of mothball smell – and run out of the room, throwing a leg over the banisters, sliding down.

    The telephone rings again.

    I stand at the bottom of the stairs.

    I’ll go to Grampy’s, get fish and chips for tea like we did last week. Money in the bus-money box on the tallboy: lots of shillings and sixpences. Tipping coins into my hands, I fill all my pockets, shorts and blazer.

The newspaper package of fish and chips is hot and a bit wet. I won’t unwrap it. I’ll save them until I get to Grampy’s.

    I switch on the light. The kitchen table is cluttered with stuff.

    ‘Only me, Grampy!’

    The tea-plate with yesterday’s slice of chocolate cake, not even a bite gone. Next to the teapot under its cosy, another plate. Toast and marmalade. Water in a Pyrex bowl covered with a tea towel. A Vick smell. Half a cup of tea, gone yucky.

    ‘Gramps?’ I call down the dark hallway.

    Raw liver-and-kidney from a half-opened tin of cat food mixes with the Vick. It makes me cough into my hand. I run to the front room: empty. The bedroom: empty. Greenhouse? I knock over the metal watering can.

    The damp newspaper package of fish and chips is still squashed under my blazer. Pushing the toast plate to one side, I put it on the kitchen table. The smell – another cough, splattering spit into my hand.

    Sindy the cat squeezes through the half-open door, meows round the licked-clean bowl. I finish opening the tin, scrape out jellied spoonfuls that Sindy gulps as they wobble into the bowl.

    The grandfather clock in the hallway chimes half past five.

    Now.

    My head’s a muddle. My gut hurts from hunger. I should set the table. Clear it first.

    I stack plates and cups on the draining board, leaving the special chocolate cake on its flowery plate for Grampy’s pudding. The table’s sticky. A cloth, grey and crispy-dry, hangs on the tap. I rinse it under hot water, squeeze, rinse again. I get out two plates and the knives and forks. I look at the kitchen table and the newspaper package. My tummy bubbles.

    Perhaps it’s Grampy’s day for visiting Granny Clementine.

    I can’t wait any longer.

    The chips are good, fat and floury in the middle. I scrape slimy black fish-skin into the bin, put a bowl over Grampy’s plate of fish and chips, a clean tea towel from the drawer over the chocolate cake.

    Big trouble I’ll be in – they must have told me where they were all going to be. They must have told me where I was supposed to go. Only I wasn’t listening. I keep trying to fill the gap in my head. Telly, I think, but the two empty chairs in the front room and grey ash in the grate are all wrong.

Back home, the telephone is ringing.

    Where is she? She said she’d be in when I got home – and Auntie Jean. Yes, today they were decorating eggs. We were going to do some after school, when Susie got home from Brownies. At breakfast, she showed me the jelly stuff that she’d blown from the eggs into a mug.

    The inside of my nose hurts with the cold. I’ll light the fire – it’s laid up ready. But then I’m upstairs again, looking at my face in the wardrobe mirror. All that the mirror is really, is glass with silvery paper behind, that’s all. Utterly worthless. It’s not what it looks like.

    This time, Mum’s side of the wardrobe.

    Hands on the metal handles, I open both doors at once and the first thing is mothball air. The second is a shiny pole, with wooden coat hangers clacking like Susie’s castanets. No coloured sundresses, no furry sleeves of coats, no tweed skirts. Two shiny poles along the bottom. No gardening shoes, no high-heeled ball shoes, no beach shoes; no nothing.

    Inside, the wood is not shiny like the outside. Normally it doesn’t matter. Wardrobes are usually full of stuff. A wardrobe is only empty when it’s in the shop, brand new. Or when someone dies.

    I climb into the box-space to make it not empty any more.

    I wrap my arms around my knees so I’m all crumpled up. My chest is filling with something like hard pebbles. I think about closing the doors to keep the mothball smell in here too and then staying here in the dark until

    until

    but

    I get to the window. Open it; hang out, mouth wide open, coughing up the dry, cold air.

    The telephone rings. I run downstairs.

    On the kitchen table are two painted eggs, paints and some yellow chicks. On the stove are hard potatoes in a saucepan of water. Muddy potato peelings in the sink colander. The refrigerator hums.

I wait on the bottom stair by the kitchen doorway, biting my knuckles.

    The telephone rings again.

    In the toilet under the stairs I cough and spit over the lavatory pan, insides kicking, but nothing comes up. I wipe my mouth on a bit of crispy Izal paper. All of a sudden I feel so tired I have to rest my head on the cool white. I crawl back to the bottom stair. Chin on my knees. My lungs lift and fall, my heart bangs.

    The telephone rings. Lots of times.

    After a little time it gets like being on the river in Grampy’s boat, floating between two sets of trees and two skies. My head’s all empty, gliding like a swan. The house round me is cold and dark as icy water.

A key in the lock.

    Father stoops in the doorway with his bag, trilby and mackintosh with damp splatters across the shoulders, hair over his forehead. My eyes can see in the dark. Father lifts a hand to his hat; I leap. An animal screech. Father’s hands fly to his face.

    ‘Good God!’ He gasps as I land on his chest. He staggers back against the still-open door, his head cracking on the edge. Scrabbling up from the floor, I can smell his armpit sweat. Father’s hands, one on each shoulder, hold me at arm’s length.

    ‘It’s you. Good God, Andy. What are you doing, sitting here in the dark?’

    ‘Where is she? Where’s Mum? Where’ve you sent her?’ I leap up and down.

    ‘Andy, Andy.’ Father’s voice is calm, his arms holding my body against his.

    SHE’S DEAD. The words are in my head, written in capitals. Father has killed her. He has made her kill herself.

   
She’s dead
. The Voice.

    ‘Andy, what has got into you? Of course she’s not dead.’

    Father grips me, but I am thrown over the bridge into the icy river dark.

   
The ice was seven inches thick.

    Father sinks to the floor, holding me with him against his mac and its smell of shut doors in corridors. I open my eyes and see over his shoulder, through the open front door. More Siberian snow is falling. Big white flakes. One or two green leaves poke up. The path is white.

    Easter, not Christmas, but it’s snowing, white.

    I’m sinking into snow-white feathers.

    ‘Andy! Wake up.’ Father’s voice is a long way away, a long way down. I hear him from the sky. ‘Andy, can you hear me?’

    A gentle shake; my head rolls.

    ‘Let’s get you warm.’

    He heaves himself up from the floor, carrying me, pushes the front door shut with a foot. ‘Where on earth is your mother?’

    On the settee, a velvet cushion behind my head.

    ‘—get you warmed up. You’re frozen—’

   
A circular hole cut into the ice.

    A match flares. Newspaper balls ripple with red. Father’s face flickers with orange.

    ‘Why on earth didn’t anyone answer the telephone?’ Father’s on his knees beside the settee, the fire throwing orange into the room behind him. A blanket is laid over me, my body rubbed; words, voices.

   
The easiest way to draw a crowd.

    My legs are treacle.

    ‘Jean found him on the kitchen floor and took him straight to hospital, this afternoon.’ Father’s words.

    I struggle up. My mouth won’t work.

    ‘He’ll be fine. He’s having assistance with his breathing now. Why is the house so cold? In darkness? Where on earth is your mother?’

    The crack of kindling; the sooty chimney smell; the rub of rough blanket on bare skin, my legs; Father talking in questions: it all goes small and far away from me.

The telephone rings and Father goes out to the dark hallway to answer it. From the settee, I watch his head dip down, close to the receiver. It must be a secret. His voice is so quiet, I can’t make out the words.

   
And now I will begin my dance with death.

Auntie Jean and Susie stamp snow off their feet at the doorway; Susie wails and sniffs, her nose pink.

    Auntie Jean says things like:

    ‘She is a grown woman, Michael’

    and

    ‘You’ll need me to stay the night, then.’

    She makes Hot Chocolate just like Grampy, tucks Susie and me into bed together, blankets and eiderdowns pulled high, two hot-water bottles. She’ll sleep in Susie’s bed, she tells us, but her voice and Father’s voice come up through the floor all night.

    My insides are squishy like the streaks of black in sinking sand.

The days have gone past.

Houdini’s most famous exploit is the Bridge jump. Houdini wrote about it in the
Strand Magazine
, 1919. Today the top of the rope ladder easily takes me high enough to touch the first big branch that hangs over the roof of the Wendy house, but then it’s a struggle to pull myself up and swing my legs over so that they’re either side of the branch. I shuffle along, legs scraping on rough bark, towards the trunk, where I yank the coil of rope around my waist up higher and start climbing. Above me, branches move against the sky.

The ice was seven inches thick. A big crowd watched while I was manacled with two sets of the best and latest police handcuffs, shut and padlocked in a trunk and pushed off the bridge into the frozen river. Bess hid in the hotel room. She thought I would definitely die this time.

Cracks in the bark and a green smell. One or two of last year’s acorns in cups. The loops of rope tied to my belt keep getting caught and come undone. I have to keep stopping.

    From up here the lawn is a neat oblong splodged with orange and purple where Mum planted crocuses under the apple trees.