The Devil's Music Read Online Free PDF Page A

birthday cake: four candles.
        Then, wearing lipstick and pearls, she bends to kiss my head goodbye. And Grandfather rides me down the garden in a wheelbarrow. The wheel rolls and bumps; my shoes bang on the metal. Grandfather holds up a piece of rope and tells me ‘cnotta’ is an old English word that means to join together.

Chapter 6

    Father screws up our blue tissue waves. He pushes them into the metal thing with legs in the garden. He stamps with his wellingtons on Susie’s boat until it is the cardboard lid of the laundry box again and he squashes the lid into the metal thing too, on top of our blue tissue-paper waves. Then he strikes a match and sticks it through the metal cage. Another match and another until all our waves are on fire. There is smoke. Susie cries and rubs her eyes. I hold her hand and wish very, very hard for our tissue-paper waves to get huge as a house, and crash down, to grow into huge roaring waves that can knock down even a grown-up and fill their mouth and ears and nose with the rush and burn of salty water. I wish for a storm. A storm with waves like the ones in the painting halfway up the stairs, big and black, making everything else in the whole wide world silly and small.
        But our tissue-paper waves are soft, like at low tide when the sea is shallow and warm and I lie on the sand while the sea washes over me, quiet as if it’s dreaming.
        Father is burning our dreaming waves.
        ‘They were only little waves,’ I say, nearly to myself.
        ‘I beg your pardon?’ He holds the top part of my arm. His mouth is wet and red. I say it again, moving my lips to make the words come out.
        ‘They were only little waves.’
        Father walks me fast to the kitchen. Mummy looks up at his face and starts to get out of her chair, but she has baby Elaine in her arms and before she can be properly up, Susie runs to put her head in Mummy’s apron and pushes her back down on the chair.
        In the hall, Father opens the door of the cupboard under the stairs with the toe of his Wellington boot and bends me through the gap. He kicks the door shut. I am in the dark. The key turns with a clunk.
        The cupboard under the stairs smells of shoe polish.
        I am in the dark until I can see sense.
        I hold my breath and close my eyes. Grampy tells me about the Lapland witches who tied wind knots to sell to sailors so they didn’t have to whistle for a wind to sail by. Whistling is the Devil’s music. It can make a storm come.
        I don’t have any enchanted knots in the cupboard under the stairs. It’s dark. I don’t have any string to tie even a Reef Knot. Left over right, right over left and under, his fingers on my fingers, Grampy tells me the Reef Knot is one of the simplest and best of the uniting knots.
        In the cupboard under the stairs I suck hard on my thumb, my teeth on the bone.
        After this is the first time I run away to Grampy’s.

Chapter 7

    I wake to the sound of the sea, the ripped lino of the kitchen floor slippery beneath my hip. I roll on to my back. The white painted wood of the railway carriage ceiling curves above me. Last night’s gust and surge of wind and waves has ceased. Today, there’s a distant sighing shuuush followed by a pause like an intake of breath, a gathering of the next long curl of water.
        No sounds of movement yet from Susie and the boys in the caravan; it’s early. No voices. No rain. A grubby sheepskin jacket and the old binoculars hang from a nail in the wall. I get up.
        But once on the pebbles I can see the tide is far out, the sea yawning back over damp stretches of sand. Wet sand: gleaming and ridged for miles and miles. The smear and squelch of it, thick as wet paint. Adrenalin flares. My body wants to be far away. Fast. I press the heels of my palms to my eyes. I’ll have to turn back. But then, at my feet, are the pebbles: black, white, grey, tan, brick-orange, dark red. Ahead,