The first time the children saw the Devil, he was sitting next to them in the second row of deckchairs in the bandstand. He was biting his nails.' So begins the horrifying story of a madman loose in a small seaside town- his prey the very young and the very old. Seen through the eyes of Hilary- a precocious, highly imaginative, lonely child- it is a chilling story about the perceptiveness of children, the blindness of parents and the allure of strangers. As the adults carry on with their own grown-up capers, Hilary is led further and further into the twilight world of one man's terrifyingly warped view of normal life. But will she have the sense to resist it?
Release date:
November 3, 2011
Publisher:
Virago
Print pages:
188
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The first time the children saw the Devil, he was sitting next to them in the second row of deckchairs in the bandstand. He
was biting his nails.
On the roof, the coloured flags cracked and streamed in the cold breeze from the sea but in the sheltered well of the bandstand
it was warm and windless, the sun held the last heat of summer. Sleepy flies droned heavily over the sand scuffed on the flagstones
by the children’s feet. From time to time the blue sky split as an American jet plane screamed low.
The audience, this September afternoon, was made up of the very young, and the very old. The children, bright as butterflies
in their summer dresses, filled the front rows of chairs; the old people huddled in rugs and scarves at the back, beyond the
aisle. The local pensioners were issued with cheap season tickets by the council: wringing their last advantage from a mean
world, they filled their seats at every performance.
Looking at the man sitting next to them, the children thought he must be old too, or sick. He wore a full-skirted naval bridge
coat and a blue woollen muffler knotted round his neck. Beneath his cloth cap his face was thin, the cheeks so hollow that
his mouth stuck forwards like a dog’s mouth.
Grinning, Hilary nudged Peregrine with her elbow. She aped the man, tearing at the sides of her fingers with her teeth, rolling
her eyes like a mad person. Peregrine watched her uncomfortably and then, as her acting grew wilder, he was seized by a fearful joy and laughed aloud.
The man turned and looked at them. A shadow crossed his face: like an animal, he seemed to shrink and cringe before the mockery
Hilary had made of him. She stopped biting her nails and moved her hand nervously up her cheek and across her hair, pretending
she had been brushing something from her face. He continued to watch her with a steady, careful stare. She fumbled in the
pocket of her cotton dress. Her voice croaked with embarrassment.
“Would you like a toffee?”
The man looked beyond her, to Peregrine. Briefly, their eyes met. Peregrine could not look away, he was transfixed. The man’s
eyes were dark and dull, dead eyes without any shine in them. They reflected nothing.
The man stirred and coughed. His thin cheeks filled out and the spit sprayed from his mouth. “You’re a nice little girl,”
he said, and smiled. It was a gentle smile, quite at odds with his appearance. He took a toffee with long, sharp fingers and
popped it quickly in his mouth as if he were afraid it would be taken from him.
Hilary said, “Are you hungry? It must be awful to be hungry.”
She was aware that it had been unkind to make fun of him. He could not help being sick and ugly. Normally, she did not suffer
unduly for her bad behaviour towards other people unless she was punished for it. Her imagination was almost entirely absorbed
by her own feelings which were, on occasion, bitter and terrible, and by the wild, dramatic happenings of her private world.
But now her conscience was aroused by the man’s sad and derelict air. Her heart swelled with pity.
“You can have them all if you’re hungry. I don’t want them.” She thrust the crumpled bag of sweets on to the man’s lap. His narrow, yellow face bent towards her. Reluctantly she looked up at the muddy eyes that showed nothing, neither hope
nor despair nor love nor hate.
The man clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Are you sure you don’t want them?”
She shook her head and lied, “I don’t like toffees.”
“What about your little brother?” Peregrine had withdrawn himself to another chair further along the row. He disliked embarrassing
situations.
“They make his teeth wobble. He’s just seven and all his teeth are falling out.”
The man edged his chair closer to Hilary’s. He smelt of wet mackintoshes like the cloakroom at school. Slowly his nervous
tongue crept out of his mouth and slithered along his lips.
Hilary hunched herself small in her deckchair and watched the stage. Uncle Jack, the Kiddies’ Friend, was making a bunch of
flowers grow in an empty can. There was only one more trick after the can and then they would have the Children’s Talent Competition.
It was always held on a special day, the last day of the season. The Fun Fair would remain open for a little longer but after
to-morrow there would be no more shows on the pier, the deckchairs would be hidden under their tarpaulin covers, the summer
would be over. The summer I was nine, thought Hilary. It will never come again. Next summer I shall be ten and then eleven and soon I shall
be old. Soon, I shall die.
The man was leaning closer still. His smell was in her nose and throat. She felt his hand stroking her knee and squirmed away.
His fingers felt cold and hard like a chicken’s foot. Ashamed, she stared at the stage, trying not to cry, pretending she
hadn’t noticed what he was doing.
Uncle Jack came to the front of the stage and smiled at the children, his perpetual, shining smile. He had stiff, curly hair like a doll. His teeth shone and his hair shone and he wore a great ring with a winking stone on the little finger of
his left hand.
“Now, children, this is what you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it? What? I can’t hear you.”
“Yes,” bellowed the children with scarlet faces and straining lungs.
“That’s better. That’s better.” He held up his hand for silence. “Those of you who have tickets, come up on to the stage. Gently, now. Don’t all
rush at once. You might knock me over.”
There was a roar of laughter. A little girl sitting in front of Hilary stood up and skipped in front of her mother’s chair.
The woman creaked forward to pick up her canvas beach-bag, enormous, sun-reddened shoulders bulging out of her dress. She
took out a green ticket.
“Here you are, Poppet. Now remember, stand up nice and straight and smile…”
Poppet took the ticket. Over her mother’s shoulder she smiled triumphantly at Hilary. She was very beautiful. She had fair,
polished hair that bobbed on the shoulders of her green, satin dress. Her eyes were wide and blue like china; beneath her
short skirt her long, brown legs looked like a miniature chorus-girl’s. The man took his hand away from Hilary’s knee. His
teeth tore at his nails again.
Poppet jumped up on to the front of the stage. Her skirt flew up showing white frilly knickers with lace round the legs. Hilary
saw them enviously. Her own knickers were voluminous, made of the same stuff as her dress and fastened with tight elastic.
Slowly, like the tide, the children flowed on to the stage. Some of them were shy: if they were little, Uncle Jack patted
them on the head, if they were big he shook hands with them in a jolly, comradely way.
Hilary sighed. Screwing round in her chair, she looked for her half-sister, Janet. She saw her, standing by the entrance to
the bandstand and talking to Uncle Aubrey. Waving her hands about in an affected way, she was quite preoccupied with her conversation.
Her back was to the stage.
Hilary felt her heart pump inside her like an engine. She turned to her brother and said, “I’m going in the competition, too.”
Blithely, he refused to believe her. “You haven’t got a ticket.”
She scowled. “I shall say I’ve lost it.”
“That’s wicked,” he accused her. “It’s a lie. God doesn’t like us to tell lies.”
Hilary saw the limpid light of Heaven shining from his eyes and hesitated. Peregrine was good: his goodness was as unquestioned
as the rising sun. She knew him to be her spiritual superior and herself to be hateful and base.
She wriggled her shoulders and flung at him, “Mind your own business.” She stood up and walked towards the stage, appalled
by her own behaviour. Her legs seemed to be moving independently like someone else’s legs. She could feel eyes sticking into
her like hot spikes.
She stood in front of the stage and looked up at Uncle Jack. He saw a stout, pale-skinned child with red hair. Her nose was
short and thick, her mouth was small and obstinate. Her plainness was redeemed by a bright, intelligent look which could be
hidden at will beneath an expression of extreme stupidity. Uncle Jack held out his hand to her. “Come on, little lady, don’t
be frightened.” His hand, soft and damp-skinned, grabbed at hers.
She said, prissy-mouthed, “I haven’t got my ticket. I did have one, though. My sister bought it for me. I put it in the pocket
of my frock but it fell out.”
Uncle Jack stopped smiling and suddenly looked quite different, mean and wary. He looked much older when you were close to
him, she decided. There was a faint-smear of what looked like face cream on the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. He hesitated
and pursed his lips.
“All right,” he said, turning away, “go and join the others.”
Hilary was bowed down with humiliation. She caught her lower lip between her teeth and blinked back her tears. From the stage,
the bandstand looked enormous, row upon row of green and white striped deckchairs filled with pale, staring faces.
The accompanist struck a chord on the piano and the first child walked up to the microphone. He was very little, a tiny boy
in crimson velvet trousers, and Uncle Jack had to shorten the stand as far as it would go. The boy wore glasses and his face
was round and dark as a plum. His voice was gruff. His song began, “I’m too small to be in the infantry,” and ended, “But
I’m in the Lord’s Armee.”
The audience clapped through a wave of laughter. Uncle Jack bent down and asked him where he learned to sing the song. The
little boy stared solemnly through his thick lenses and said, “Ford Road Mission.”
There was more laughter and he was sent to the far side of the platform where he stood by the piano, sticking out his stomach
and staring at the floor.
One by one, the children walked to the microphone. Four of them sang the same song, “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”
Poppet was in front of Hilary. As she walked to the front of the stage, her skirt bumped on her little behind. She sang, “Lover
Man,” in a soft, husky, thread of a voice and swayed her hips in time to the music. When she had finished singing, she tap-danced,
her skirt swirling high, her legs brown against her white knickers. The clapping was very loud and a group of big boys at the back of the audience whistled and stamped their feet.
Hilary took her place. Uncle Jack asked her name and announced it through the microphone. “What are you going to sing?” His
teeth gleamed at her like a toothpaste advertisement.
“See Where Golden-hearted Spring.”
It wasn’t the kind of song that the other children had sung, but it was the only one she knew. She had learnt it, during the
Easter term, for the Lent concert.
Uncle Jack patted her on the head and made a funny face. “Perhaps you’d like to tell them yourself,” he said.
He adjusted the microphone and she spoke into it. Her voice, vast and booming, filled the bandstand. She saw Janet turn and
look at her. She began to sing hurriedly, without the piano, forgetting to clasp her hands loosely in front of her but remembering
to breathe deeply and sound her aitches even when there wasn’t one at the beginning of a word. When she had finished the people
clapped, only not as loudly as they had clapped for Poppet.
She stood unhappily by the piano and saw Janet’s angry face across the line of deckchairs. She looked away from Janet and
saw Peregrine. His shoulders were hunched, his thin legs twined miserably round the struts of the deckchair. She knew the
depth of shame he must be feeling and longed to comfort him. Then she thought how generous and good she was to feel so sorry
for him and, raising her eyes soulfully, stared at the sky.
The prizes were presented; a boy who had played the mouth organ was given ten shillings as the first prize and Poppet got
five shillings for the second. All the children in the competition were given ice-cream cornets by Uncle Jack. They sat on
the stage, eating their ice cream and watching the Punch and Judy show. Hilary kept her back towards the audience, her tongue lingering over the dry, sawdust taste
of the cornet after the ice cream was gone. She had seen the Punch and Judy show several times that summer and during the
performance she watched Poppet who was sitting beside her. One of the seams of Poppet’s green dress had split. There was a
tide mark on her neck and one of her front teeth was loose. She waggled it from time to time between her thumb and forefinger.
When the show was over Uncle Jack brought Mr. Punch out of his box to shake hands with the children and then he retired into
a little room beside the stage where the conjuring things were kept.
Hilary said to Poppet, “I know Uncle Jack very well personally. I live here, you see, and he came to my Christmas party. He
cost three guineas.”
Poppet stared at her without speaking. Her beautiful oval face was pale and haughty. Hilary knew that she had committed a
social blunder by speaking to her and her spirit shrivelled. Poppet tossed her head and, jumping lightly from the stage, ran
to her mother. Lingering, Hilary saw them leave the bandstand and, as they left, the dirty man got up in a hurry and followed
them.
Peregrine was waiting for Hilary. He said, pathetically, “You ate it all, every bit. It isn’t fair. I didn’t have an ice cream,
did I?”
He looked very sad and small. She hardened her heart and reasoned with him. “You can’t always have the same things as I do.
It wouldn’t be fair to me. I’m nearly ten.”
He inquired hopefully, “When I’m three years older, will I be able to have more ice cream than you?”
“No, you won’t. Because I’ll still be older than you, even then. You’ll never be as old as me, never, never.” She spat the
words gleefully into his face.
This was too much. His eyes grew large and miserable. “It’s not fair.”
She felt savage pleasure at his distress. She said with impatient cruelty, “You’re greedy. God doesn’t like little boys to
be greedy.”
She saw the bright tears glitter at the ends of his lashes. Pleased because she had hurt him, she became indulgent and maternal.
She placed her arm round his shoulders and squeezed him affectionately. “I’ll buy you a cornet,” she promised generously.
“On Saturday, when I get my pocket money.”
Still conscious of injustice, Peregrine did not respond. “You get more pocket money than me, anyway,” he said coldly and wriggled
away from her.
Janet’s voice startled them both. It rang out above their heads, loud and angry.
“What on earth do you think you were doing? Wait till we get home, you’ll catch it.” There were red patches on her neck, she
grabbed at the children’s hands.
Hilary said in a high, carrying voice. “I went in for the competition. I know I didn’t have a ticket. I pretended I’d lost
it.”
Janet glanced hastily round her and said in a low, entreating voice, “Hilary, do be quiet. Do you want everyone to know?”
Hilary sensed, behind the reprimand, Janet’s basic dislike of her. She looked beyond Janet, at the man standing awkwardly
behind her and said pointedly, “It’s not my fault. You didn’t try to stop me, did you? Mummy said you were to look after us
but you didn’t. You were too busy talking.” Her face smarted with incipient tears.
Janet glared at her vengefully and chewed . . .
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