The Devil's Music (32 page)

    ‘What do you think? The colour? Which? The marmalade ...’ Her eyes moved fast from one jar to the other and then she looked at me, blinked and snatched the jars away, holding them behind her back. ‘Of course it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Silly me!’ and laughed. ‘Silly me!’ She kissed the cinnamon jar as she put it back on the table with all the other jars and kissed me, squashing my face with both hands, her breath smelling of Sundays and sherry.

    ‘Now then, what have we here?’ Auntie Jean was on the back doorstep with Susie. They both had snow in their hair. ‘Let’s find out what’s on the television, you two.’ She shooed me and Susie into the hall.

    ‘Sit down now, duck,’ she said to Mum and took the jar of marmalade out of her hand. ‘No good for anyone this now, duck, is it?’ It was her baby-cooing voice, the one she uses with Grampy. And ‘duck’ is Grampy’s word. Mum’s empty hands hung down by her sides; she was smiling but then she started to cry and shake her head as well. Auntie Jean pressed Mum’s head against her chest.

    ‘Why don’t you put your wellies on and take your sister to see Gramps for a bit? Make sure you have your hats and gloves. Your Mum’s a bit under the weather. All this snow! I’m going to run her a hot bath and get her into bed with a hot-water bottle.’

    Auntie Jean used to run Mum a bath and put her to bed after Elaine was born.

   
When I say No that is what it means
. The Voice is angry like Father’s.

    Auntie Jean came to Grampy’s with clean pyjamas and took Susie to her house for the night. Mum was poorly. The day after that, Auntie Jean came round with Susie after school and said Mum was going away for a big rest. It would be fun because Susie was going to stay in Auntie Jean’s spare room and I was going to stay with Grampy and perhaps we would all go skating on the Thames.

    Susie started to cry. ‘Who will feed my rabbits?’

    I picked the scab on my knee.

Auntie Jean comes every day after school with Susie and Honey and we have tea together. Then Auntie Jean clears the table, tells me to learn my spellings and tables and takes my shirt and pants and socks away for washing.

    Grampy’s house is warm.

    ‘Let’s get a good fug up,’ he’ll say, and turns up the little metal heater he calls his Aladdin’s lamp. He has this as well as the coal fire, because of the snow. ‘What’s next on our schedule, my Treasure?’

    Grampy has two armchairs that used to face the fire but now they face a bit sideways towards the television Father bought him for Christmas. We watch
Thunderbirds
and
Crackerjack
and even
Juke Box Jury
. Grampy says he’ll watch anything, but he must draw the line at
The Flower Pot Men
.

    Sometimes we get out the sewing twine and cord and sail needles. Grampy teaches me some Two-Strand Lanyard Knots.

    A rope maker, he tells me, knows that yarns are spun, strands are formed, ropes are laid and cables are closed. These are the correct terms, but some people mix them up by mistake.

    To see if a hemp rope is damaged, he tells me, force open the strands and examine the heart here and there all the way along the rope’s length. The heart should be a little lighter in colour than corn or vanilla fudge. If it is rust coloured, or greyish, it is utterly worthless.

    Utterly worthless.

    Just before bedtime Grampy lights his pipe and has a smoke. Some evenings he goes out into the garden and makes a path to the front gate through the snow. His daily constitutional, he calls it.

    Then we make Hot Chocolate and I can take mine up to bed, while he stays downstairs and watches a bit more telly. His favourites are
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
and
Coronation Street
because it’s about up north and he says it reminds him of home.

    ‘Helps me to get out,’ he says, laughing through his false teeth because that’s what Auntie Jean is always telling him. ‘You ought to get out more, Dad.’

I’m sweating, my throat squeezed. Gale force winds and the sea’s restless prowl. Four o’clock in the morning and my body is on red alert, heart ricocheting. Pointless, as well as undesirable, to try to sleep. I take toast and coffee into the sun room to rework the Hangman’s Knots: thirteen turns to each noose, I’ve decided, not nine. Changed my mind. Not a random choice. I wonder if anyone will ever even notice. Or ask why.

    The sky lightens.

    I think of going out for a walk, but the sea is a grey scribble in the distance. Not a good idea.

    Instead, in an attempt to get my head somewhere else, I fish about in the bottom of the old trunk. There’s a dog-eared pad of drawing paper, some embroidery thread, poster paints, plaster of Paris, a pencil stub. With my penknife I slice the blunt tip of the pencil into edges and planes.

    With the sharpened pencil I doodle experimentally on the cover of the pad, adding my squiggles to faded paint smudges. The edges of the pad are wavy with damp, but the paper is thick and good quality. On the first page I draw a lasso, then another.

    I wore my cowboy outfit when they took me to the clinic: waistcoat, chaps, bandanna, holster. The Lone Ranger galloped and hollered through my head.
Yee Ha!
And hooves beat, thundering beneath the wooden chair legs. The smooth seat was a glossy conker brown. I hauled the chair around, sat astride it and laid my silver gun on the table. The doctor wanted me to take off my Stetson. I didn’t.

    The doctor called it the squiggle game, doodles with a pencil on paper. He started them off: lines that lay like string on the paper.

I added my own:

The doctor set a lot of store by them, removing his round, horn-rimmed glasses to peer closely.

    They were arguing, as usual, in the car on the way home. The hospital blanket prickled my face. To shut them out, I’d pulled it over my head.

I run pencil over paper, one page after another falling to the floor. One more – I brush the page with the side of the hand holding the pencil. A Reef Knot; left over right and under, right over left. The dimensions do not translate accurately to the page. I sketch lightly, trying to correct the pencil lines as I go, but the flat page defeats me. The act of tying a knot, as Grandfather once told me, is an adventure in unlimited space. I was nine. The first Russian astronaut had just orbited the earth.

    I rip out the page, screw it up and let it drop. I select several of the jewel-coloured twists of embroidery thread, a pair of scissors and begin to cut and tie, cut and tie, using Reef Knots to join the different coloured lengths. The knots are very small and flat, the sheen of the thread enhanced by interlocking dips and curves. Most people think, because they know how to tie a Reef Knot, they know when to use one. Not true. According to Ashley, when employed as a bend the Reef Knot is responsible for more deaths and injuries than have been caused by the failure of all other knots combined.

    After a while I stoop to the scattered pages and shuffle them. The pencil lines are different widths, thin where the pencil was sharp, thick and smudged where it was blunt – the suggestion of time passing. It gives me an idea. I select half a dozen scribbles and order them, according to thickness of pencil lines, sharp to blunt.

By the time Sarah knocks on the window of the sun room, making eating gestures through the glass, I’m surprised to see the clouds are red-bellied: sunset. The pencil scribbles are pinned on to the blistered tongue-and-groove boarding of the sun-room wall and I’ve almost finished making copies of them, using brown string and cotton rope in various lengths and widths. The cotton rope is coated with a mixture of paper pulp and powder paint, to add colour and bulk. For the final drawing in the series, a dense scribble I drew with my eyes closed, I’ve used the coloured embroidery thread, choosing turquoise and purple and royal blue from the assortment in the trunk, knotting lengths together with Reef Knots, to make one unbroken line.

    I tug the door open to let Sarah in, aware of an ache in my fingers and arms now that I’ve stopped. And, in my T-shirt, I’m cold. I pull on my jumper and collapse on the old kitchen chair, running my fingers through my hair. I’m weak with hunger and too much caffeine – my perpetual state.

    ‘Wow!’ says Sarah, stepping in for a closer look. She studies the drawings and rope work, her back to me, hands in the pockets of her overalls. The way she stands now, motionless but quivering with energy, reminds me of the Diving Woman. Sarah’s body has the same mesmerising pause of muscle and movement. Under her baggy white dungarees, she’s wearing a low-backed vest top and from her lower neck down to between her shoulder blades, the knobs of her vertebrae are visible. Fine hairs lie on her skin. The tip of her long plait grazes at the swell of her buttocks.

    ‘I love the way this one stands out from the others.’ She peers at the silky embroidery threads, then steps back to study the piles of snippings on the floor. ‘Is it finished?’

    I nod, light-headed. ‘More or less.’

    Sarah clutches her stomach when it rumbles. ‘Got any food?’

    I cut mould from a block of cheddar in the fridge, while Sarah rummages through the box of supplies Susie left. ‘It’s like a Christmas hamper,’ she exclaims holding up jars of Marmite and olives. ‘Look! Even cocktail sticks!’

    The remnants of the sliced bread are stale, so we toast it with cheese and Marmite and take our plates into the sun room, where she sits apart from me, cross-legged on the floor, shaking her head at the offer of wine. She wolfs down three slices of toast, licks the grease from her fingers and unplaits her hair, fluffing it over her shoulders. Today her hair smells of apples. She slips a tobacco tin and Rizlas from the pocket of her overalls and sprinkles a pinch of tobacco on to the paper. She runs her tongue along to seal the edge, and glances up at me, lifting an eyebrow, but she smokes in silence, gazing out at the darkening sky. I can’t work out what’s going on in her head. Haven’t enough energy to try too much. I move closer, lifting a spiral curl and wrapping it around my forefinger. The slip and cling of her hair arouses me, my cock shifting, but she leans away to spear an olive with a cocktail stick and the strand of hair slides from my grasp.