The Devil's Music Read Online Free PDF Page B

stopped talking. She’s gazing out at the tamarisks, a hand on her belly. It reminds me.
        ‘How long  ...?’
        ‘The baby? Oh ages. I just look enormous because, well, I’m not exactly voluptuous, am I? That’s why it shows so much.’ Susie strokes the swell of her belly. The self-absorbed caress makes me think of masturbation. That focused concentration.
        ‘And have they, you know, said anything?’
        She laughs at me, hand covering her mouth. ‘I can’t believe you still do that.’
        ‘What?’
        ‘Pull your ear lobe about! Look at you.’
        I slide my hand into my pocket.
        ‘I’m sorry. It’s just so ... weird.’ She bites her lip. ‘Where were we?’ She reaches for a balled pair of socks and separates one from the other. ‘I expect you’re thinking about Elaine,’ she says, not looking at me.
        My hand fists in my pocket. I concentrate on opening it, stretching my fingers one by one to touch the edge of the pocket seams. A curlew mews, plaintive and invisible, somewhere in the pale sky outside. The boys are lugging buckets filled with pebbles. Even though it’s freezing cold, one of the twins has taken off his vest and dropped it on the grass. One of the adhesive tabs on his nappy has come unstuck.
        Susie picks an imaginary piece of fluff from a sock. ‘No. It was nothing hereditary. It was the labour – way too long. Something like thirty-six hours, Dad said. It all went wrong then. Maybe lack of oxygen, I don’t think they knew. No,’ she tosses her head, ‘I may be small but I can push them out easy as peas from a pod.’
        She’s not all here , is what they said about Elaine. I’d lick the soles of her fat and placid feet to bring her back, giggling. Or so I thought then – that I could bring her back.
        And I used to lick colours too, to feel them. Beige linoleum and the thick spread of red polish on the front step. The float and slide of pale blue Formica and the kitchen table’s silvery edge that swooped like a slope. Bakelite door handles, dark as chocolate. Also, smells: the powdered down of my aunt’s cheek, my mother’s hair, sunburned after a day in the sun. Stop that this minute . I licked surfaces: the rollers on the Acme wringer; the sheen on the coal in the bunker; the humming fur of ice inside the refrigerator. What is the matter with you? It became another thing I did in my room with the door shut. I think there’s a name for it now.
        Susie wipes her face.
        ‘Sorry, I can’t seem to stop doing this.’ She swallows and sniffs and rubs her nose. ‘It’s ... Poor Dad. He went on loving her.’
        Listen to her: Dad, Dad, Dad. She never got away from him. I pinch soft bread from the middle of the chunk of bread and roll it in my palm until it’s a doughy ball I can drop on to my tongue.
        ‘I looked, after he ... I don’t know what I was looking for, really, but I found a half-empty perfume bottle, “Tweed”, in the dressing-table drawer with his shaving stuff. The top had corroded and it had leaked into the drawer. That must have been hers.’
        She gives another little shake of her head.
        ‘I was only five. There’s so much I don’t remember. Dad started to talk a bit at the end. He said they put you on liquid sedatives when it all happened. Would they do that to a nine-year-old child?’
        I start on the crusty edges of the bread, tearing with my teeth. I stuff large bitefuls into my mouth until it’s rammed. I can’t speak.
        Susie sighs. ‘Well, let’s not trawl through all that nightmare stuff now. There’s enough to cope with in the present.’ She finally takes a sip of tea and wipes her mouth. ‘Because there’s his will. He’s left her everything, Andy, including The Siding. Never divorced her – can you believe it? After what she did? So, unless she’s dead, she’s next of kin. We have to decide what to do.’
        Bread is wedged to