The Devil's Music (37 page)

    She’s hiding in a hotel room like Bess.

A hole was cut into the ice. Underneath the ice, I freed myself from the manacles, escaped from the trunk. But I couldn’t find the hole. The current had carried me away downstream.

The policemen looked for her by the river. Father was cross.

    ‘She has taken all her clothes,’ he told them. ‘That’s not the action of a suicidal woman.’

    But if he has murdered her, Hugh said, he might hide her clothes on purpose to trick the police. That’s what Hugh’s parents think.

    Auntie Jean and Hoggie and all her other nursing friends must think that too, because they went up and down the towpath, calling, beating snowy hedges with rolled umbrellas.

    They went out in boats.

    ‘If it makes you feel better to waste your time,’ Father said.

    Houdini was an illusionist. He made people think one thing when really he was busy doing something else.

    I escaped from Mrs Hubbard and ran to Mum’s favourite houseboat in case she was there. By the weir, I lay in the ivy, its metal smell on my hands. A dead leaf in my hair when I got into bed. No one tells me to wash. Most nights Father takes the torch and goes out into the dark. When I ask him where he’s going, he says out for a breather.

I press myself against the tree trunk and poke my tongue into cracks and scrapes in the bark.

I am able to hold my breath underwater for three minutes. So I have three minutes to find the hole cut into the ice. If I do not reappear in three minutes, something is wrong and my assistant must jump in and look for me.

   
After three minutes, my assistant was too frightened to jump into the icy river. Instead, he threw the rope down the hole and into the water.

They looked through photographs and chose one. Father put notices in the newspapers, Auntie Jean put missing notices on lamp-posts and inside the parish council noticeboard, Hoggie put missing posters up on hospital noticeboards and at the cinema. They chose the photograph taken on the beach at The Siding, me and Mum by the breakwater. Mum smiling, saying ‘
Cheers!
’

Then five minutes was up, and everyone thought the great Harry Houdini was dead underneath the ice.

   
Newspaper boys called, ‘Houdini drowned! Houdini Drowned!’

   
Bess cried.

   
But there was a little bit of air trapped between the ice and the water. I swam in the dark, my mouth up near the ice so it stuck to my lips when I tried to take a breath. Pitch dark. The water made plipping noises. At last I found the end of the rope my assistant had thrown in.

   
Seven minutes after they’d thrown me in, I climbed out through the hole. The crowd cheered and threw their hats in the air.

   
My teeth chattered and my body took hours to warm up, days to stop shivering. But I survived.

Seven minutes – is that right? The ice was seven inches thick, I remember that. But how many minutes did Houdini stay underwater?

    It’s very important to get the facts right.

    Father said to Jean, ‘There’s no knowing what went on in her head.’

    Although it’s Houdini’s most famous trick, some people say it never happened. They say the man that did Houdini’s publicity made it up. There are lots of different versions of the same story. I don’t know how to find out which one is true.

    One version says he jumped off the Belle Isle Bridge into Detroit River on 27 November 1906. Other people say the Detroit River never freezes because it flows too fast. Some say Houdini was in Europe on that date. Houdini himself says he performed the trick in Pittsburgh. But Houdini played Let’s Pretend.

    I can see the manacles, feel them all heavy on my wrists; the trunk like a coffin shutting my body in. Alone. The tip and fall from the bridge, the slopping creep of freezing, watery dark – I can feel these things too, but I don’t know exactly, what really, actually, in real life, happened. There are too many different stories about Houdini’s most famous trick.

    Houdini used seizings to secure together two ropes so that neither would give or slip when under strain. Seizings kept him safe.

    I’m up high now. The sky moves beyond the uppermost twigs.

    ‘She will be back soon.’ Father tells us over and over. ‘She’ll be back.’

    ‘She’s tired.’ Auntie Jean pulls off her woolly hat, scratches her head with both hands. ‘She’s just gone on a little holiday.’

I open my eyes to the blue sky but close them again. I add my voice to the voices in my head:

    ‘You will be back soon. You are somewhere with a blue sky.’

    Father shouts at Auntie Jean, ‘Why on earth did you let her out of your sight? How could you let her out on her own?’

    Auntie Jean jabs her cigarette in the ashtray.

    ‘She’s a grown woman, Michael.’

    ‘She’s a grown woman, Michael.’

    ‘She’s a grown woman, Michael.’

    ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy,’ Susie calls at night.

    I pull the pillow over my head.

The whole sky moves as if it’s falling. Auntie Jean’s voice is shouting from the garden. She’s small and pointing. Then her hand covers her mouth. My foot slips. Hands graze, grabbing branches, but my chin hits a branch, then my stomach, and my body bounces and flops and breath is punched out of me until at last I hold tight to a big branch with all my arms and legs. The rope has gone.

    ‘Andy! Andy!’ Auntie Jean’s voice comes up to me. ‘Hold on. I’m coming.’

    I breathe the green roughness of the branch. Auntie Jean is all blurry. She hitches up her tweedy skirt and climbs the ladder.

    Her hand’s on my foot and she’s saying in her sing-song voice, ‘Well now, Houdini. Let’s see if we can get ourselves out of this pickle, shall we?’ She pats my foot. ‘What we’re going to do is this: I’m going to look for a good place and take one of your feet and put it in the good place, all right? We’ll do that, one foot and then the other one, and we’ll get out of here in no time at all.’

    Her voice is bright and cheerful like I’m a baby. For once I don’t mind.

    When I’m on the rope ladder, my arms and legs start working properly again. Auntie Jean jumps off the ladder and flings herself on the ground, her skirt still all pulled up and her arms and legs out like a starfish.

    She’s laughing and saying, ‘Oh dear God, Oh dear God. What will you get up to next? Come and lie down here with me.’ She pats the grass. We lie and look at the sky and the clouds through the bare branches.

    ‘Doesn’t the sky look better from down here? When you’re safely on earth?’ She picks some grass and throws it at me. ‘You need to keep your feet on terra firma, Andy, that’s what I advise.’

We’re all having scones that Mrs Hubbard has baked. There’s jam and cream and butter. Father comes in from the hospital.

    ‘We’re celebrating some expert tree climbing,’ Auntie Jean says. ‘Come and have some tea and scones with us, Michael.’

    The doorbell rings. I look at Auntie Jean.

    ‘I’ll tell them you’re not in, shall I?’ she says. I don’t know how she knows I don’t want to see Hugh and Stephen today.

    ‘It’s not necessary to start telling lies,’ says Father, and he gets up to answer the door.

    We hear a voice and it’s Mrs Reeves, not Hugh and Stephen. Her talcum powder smell dusts into the kitchen.

    The police have said that, as far as they know, Mrs Reeves is the last person to have seen her. This means she is a Very Important Person in their investigation.

    Everyone in the kitchen is quiet. We jump when Father puts his head round the door. ‘Jean,’ he says, beckoning.

    Mrs Hubbard clatters plates into the sink. ‘Upstairs, you two,’ she says. ‘Shoo!’

    Later the doorbell rings again. I’m at the top of the stairs just in time to see a policeman take off his hat in the hallway and follow Father across the hall to the sitting room. Father closes the door.

    Next day Father has already gone. Auntie Jean scrubs jam off Susie’s cheek so hard she squeals and cries, ‘I want my mummy’ and kicks Auntie Jean’s leg with her new Startrites.

    Auntie Jean grabs hold of Susie’s shoe. ‘Don’t we all, Susie? Don’t we all?’ She lets go of Susie’s foot and slams out into the hallway.

    Susie and me are left on our own in the kitchen. We look at each other. We look at the closed door.

    Then Auntie Jean comes back in, tying the knot of her headscarf under her chin. ‘Get your coats on, both of you, or you’ll be late for school.’

After school I go to the hospital instead of straight home like I’m supposed to. The hospital bed looks very narrow because grown-ups usually sleep in double beds. Grampy has lots of white pillows piled behind his head and a tube with sticking plaster squashing the veins on his hand. His eyes are closed. The hand lies limp on the bed.

    Grampy’s eyes half open. ‘Hello, Treasure,’ he mumbles. ‘Help yourself to some grapes.’ Grampy pats the bed with the hand with the tube attached. ‘Come straight from school, have you?’

    The ward is stuffy. I get my shoulders out of my blazer, letting it slip down my arms. A nurse walks down the aisle towards Grampy’s bed so I wriggle it back up again.

    ‘Want me to hang it up for you?’ she asks, holding out her hand.

    I take my blazer off properly and hand it over, not looking at her.

    Grampy’s breathing is still noisy. The skin on his neck is floppy and loose; his pyjamas aren’t done up properly. There are one or two straggly white hairs on his chest.

    ‘Come on, I won’t bite.’ When Grampy holds out his arms, the tube and the see-through bag move too.

    I go nearer to the side of the bed, and drop my satchel on to the floor. I lean towards Grampy and his smell is dirty, wrong, like the back seat of the bus. I sniff into the neck of Grampy’s pyjamas and jiggle my knee against the metal side of the bed to stop myself from crying.

    ‘When are you coming home?’

    Grampy stops patting and rubbing my back. ‘Eh? What’s that, duck?’

    Grampy’s hearing aid is on the bedside cabinet. Grampy’s hand finds mine on the white sheet and holds tight. His eyes under the tufty white eyebrows are the same as always.

    I look right into his brown eyes. They are purple at the edges. ‘Has Mum been?’

    Grampy puts a hand up to my ear, where my hand is pulling, then his head falls back on to the pillows and his Adam’s apple moves. His head moves slowly from side to side. He struggles upright and leans forward to speak.

    ‘I’ve missed two episodes of
Thunderbirds
while I’ve been in here. Might wander down to the children’s ward tomorrow.’ He winks. ‘But can you fill me in for now?’

    ‘I haven’t seen it, Gramps. Sorry.’

    Grampy’s legs and feet make lumps in the white coverlet.

    Grampy talks about the pretty young nurses and the hospital food that he’s enjoying. ‘Stay and have a taste of their Spotted Dick,’ he says, his hand on the white sheet squeezing mine. I don’t know what to say. No one knows I’ve cycled to the hospital on the way home from school. They’ll get worried.

    ‘Don’t seem to have much go these days,’ Grampy says with his head back and his eyes closed. ‘Just have forty winks. Don’t run off.’ His hand goes soft and still and his head drops a little to one side and his eyes roll about under his eyelids.

    There are lots of cards on Grampy’s bedside table and flowers in vases. A nurse comes to change the water in one vase and she checks a see-through bottle at the side of the bed. ‘Lovely Granddad you’ve got,’ she says and smiles. She is quite pretty, Grampy’s right.

    Grampy goes on sleeping. I think of the high bed under the slopy ceiling in his house and Grampy’s snores coming through the wall. I think about the arm of the wooden bear in the hall with Grampy’s coat and hat hanging on it and the brass pot between the bear’s legs with Grampy’s sailor’s palm and the linseed oil.

    When Grampy wakes up I will ask him to tell the story of how he killed the snake in India and came home with the snake skin to hang on the wall.

    Grampy should have a doctor who knows about knots. On page 75 of
The Ashley Book of Knots
, Clifford Ashley writes about surgeons. He says there are two types. Firstly, the surgeon with a nimble and intuitive mind. He is almost always endowed with light hands and sensitive fingers which enable him to tie excellent knots. Secondly, there is the methodical, reasoning mind of the heavy-handed surgeon. His clumsy fingers are only able to manage, at best, the Granny Knot.

    Grampy says a Granny Knot is a False Knot and can jam very hard under strain and should not be used for any purpose whatsoever. Grampy’s doctor must have a nimble and intuitive mind. I don’t know how to find this out. I don’t know who to ask.