Remember Me: A Novel - Softcover

Needs must, Pats, my father says. It’s a mystery to me. He doesn’t explain the words, and I’m not allowed to question. I’m going to live with an old man that I don’t know and my father can’t abide. He used to call him That Old Devil, but now that needs must, my father doesn’t call him anything at all. I’ve never met the devil, but I’ve seen his face.

Under the stairs in the pantry there was a carton which I wasn’t allowed to touch, sitting alongside other things that weren’t touchable, like the Vim and my father’s shoe polish. The carton had got lye inside, which is poison. There was a picture of the devil on the outside, to prove it. He had a red face, red hair, pointed teeth, and a tail going up in a loop, sharp as a serving fork. He didn’t look at all like my grandfather. My mother kept a photograph of him in a silver frame on the table next to her bottles of Wincarnis. I wasn’t allowed to touch that either. The picture was in black and white. When my mother did her hair, or sometimes when she slept, I would sit on the stool by her bed and stare at him, and think about the devil inside. I reasoned that his face could be red in real life, and he wasn’t smiling, so he could easily have pointed teeth. In the photograph, he looked uncomfortable. That would be the tail, doing that: he’d be sitting on it.