Cuckoo Song (6 page)

‘You’re lying, aren’t you?’ Triss hissed. ‘You didn’t see anything at all. You’re just trying to scare me. Liar!’

She was filled with a seething desire to strike back, and with a honey-sweet throb of power realized that, if she wanted, she could get Pen into trouble without even trying.
I can tell them
she screamed at me and made my head hurt.
As the thought passed through her mind, it started to seem to her that her head
did
hurt, that Pen
had
made her feel ill.
And I
can tell them she saw something the day I fell in the Grimmer; they’ll make her tell.

‘Girls?’ Their mother appeared at the head of the stairs. ‘Girls – are you having a row up here?’

Both girls froze, and involuntarily glanced across at each other, more like conspirators than opponents. If there was no row, neither of them would be in trouble. On the other hand, if either of
them wanted to plead a grievance, the other would have to do the same, louder and harder. Who had more to lose from a cascade of blame?

Triss had been on the verge of calling down the stairs to her parents, to tell them what Pen had said and report the illicit phone use. Now, however, her nerve failed her. Despite her rage,
there was a creeping fear that perhaps Pen really did know something terrible about her, something that Triss would not want her parents to know.

‘No,’ answered Pen sullenly. ‘We’re not rowing. I was just . . . telling Triss something I thought she ought to do. Loudly.’

‘Really?’ Triss’s mother raised both eyebrows.

‘Yes. You see –’ Pen’s gaze crept sideways to Triss’s face – ‘Triss brought me up my lunch, and I told her I wasn’t hungry. And . . . she was. So
I told her to eat it. And so she did.’

Triss’s mother looked to Triss, a question in her eyes. Triss’s mouth was dry. She had been braced for Pen to accuse her of lunch-theft. Now, for no obvious reason, Pen seemed to be
letting her off the hook. Feeling a little as if somebody had poked her in the eye with an olive branch, Triss slowly nodded, confirming Pen’s story.

‘Oh, Triss!’ Her mother sounded half-scandalized, half-concerned.

‘You see, she’s really hungry all the time,’ continued Pen, frowning deeply at her scuffed shoes. ‘
Really
hungry. And just now I was saying that she ought to
tell you, in case it meant she was still ill, only she didn’t want to because it might worry you.’

‘Triss! Darling!’ Her mother dropped down on to her knees and gave Triss a tight, brief hug. ‘Oh, you should have said! You should always tell me things that are worrying you,
poor froglet!’

‘Mummy,’ Pen asked in the smallest of voices, ‘is Triss going to be all right?’ Her brow puckered and her mouth drooped a little, as if she was a much younger child,
frightened by the dark. ‘Is she still sick? Only . . . I got really scared last night. When I saw her in the garden. She was acting all funny.’

Triss’s blood turned cold.
That little snake. She saw me under the apple tree last night. She must have seen me from her window.

Their mother looked at Triss again, no suspicion or accusation in her gaze, only the beginnings of a bewildered smile. ‘In the
garden
?’

‘I have no idea what she’s talking about.’ Triss was amazed that she managed to keep her voice so level, so convincingly bemused.

‘Yes – that’s the scariest bit,’ mumbled Pen. She reached out and wound one finger round a fold of their mother’s skirt, as if for comfort. ‘I really
don’t think Triss remembers. But I saw her, and she was crawling around in the mud and stinky apples for ages. She looked all starey, and her nightdress was mucky . . .’

‘Triss, darling.’ Her mother’s voice was very soft, and with a sinking of the heart Triss knew what she was going to ask. ‘Can you fetch your nightdress? There’s a
love.’

Inside her room, Triss tried to scratch off some of the mud and grass stains with her fingernails, but to little avail. There was no spare nightdress she could substitute. Her neck and face felt
hot as she carried the grimy, crumpled mess out to her mother, who unfolded it and surveyed it in silence.

For the briefest moment, Triss caught Pen flashing her a hard, appraising glance. The whole conversation had been a trap. Triss could only see that now that the pit was gaping in front of
her.

‘Pen was using father’s telephone.’ The words fell from Triss’s mouth like stones, hard, cold and bitter-tasting.

‘I didn’t!’ Pen’s face took on a look of simple blank incomprehension, so realistic that for a moment Triss half-believed in it. ‘Mummy – why is Triss saying
that?’

‘She’s lying!’ protested Triss. ‘She’s always lying!’ For the first time, however, she saw her mother’s see-saw teeter and threaten to settle in a new
direction.

‘I didn’t!’ Pen sounded as if she was close to tears. ‘Triss did say something about hearing voices coming from the study when she came up, and said it sounded like
somebody on the telephone, but there wasn’t anyone there! There weren’t any voices! Mummy – she’s scaring me!’

‘Girls, I want you to wait here.’ Their mother half walked, half ran to the stairs and returned a few moments later with their father, who gave them both a brief, distracted smile
that did not reach his eyes. He walked into the study, and then Triss could hear him talking loudly to the operator, asking what other calls there had been in the last day.

When he returned, he knelt down before Triss, sighed and looked her straight in the eye.

‘Think carefully, Triss. When was it you thought you saw Pen using the telephone?’

‘Just now,’ whispered Triss. His words had already told her all she needed to know, however. Not ‘When was it you saw Pen using the telephone’, but ‘When was it you
thought
you saw Pen using the telephone’.

The operator must have told him that there had been no call made from their house. What could that mean? Had Pen been play-acting with the phone after all? Could she even have put on a
performance, to trick Triss into looking crazy? Or . . . was it possible that Pen never had been in the study, and that Triss really had imagined it?

Triss’s mother put her arms around her.

‘You’re not in trouble,’ she said very, very gently. Triss’s blood ran cold.

Chapter 5

Triss’s parents were kind. Too kind. They talked everything over with her in the front room, after her father had phoned the doctor to make an appointment for the next
day. There was nothing to worry about, they told her. She hadn’t done anything wrong. It was just a silly leftover bit of illness, but they would take her to the doctor and he would take care
of it.

The doctor would see through her, she was sure of it. He would be able to tell at a glance how ill she really was.
Seeing-things
ill. Doll-killing ill. Windfall-guzzling ill. But none
of Triss’s tried and tested strategies worked.
I don’t want to go to the doctor, I don’t feel like it, it would make my head hurt, his surgery smells funny, it scares me . .
.

In the end, what made her stop trying to squirm off the hook was the expression on her father’s face. It was pained and drawn in a way she had not seen before, and made him look older. She
could not bear making her father look older.

‘Triss, there’s no need to be scared.’ He pulled her over to sit in his lap and hugged her. His jacket was full of serious father-smells, such as pipe tobacco, hair cream, and
a warm leathery scent that seemed to be his very own. It made her feel a bit safer. ‘You’ll be fine at the doctor’s. You will be my brave girl, and I will be very proud of you, as
I always am. I know you’re frightened and confused, but nothing bad is going to happen. You trust me, don’t you?’

Triss nodded mutely, her cheek against his lapel. Even as she did so, though, the memory of the strange conversations she had overheard stung her, like a forgotten splinter in her skin nudged by
a careless gesture. Her nod was a lie. She did not, could not, completely trust him.

‘And if you’re very good and very brave, then after we see the doctor, I’ll take you down Marley Street and we can buy you a new nightdress. And a nice new party dress at the
same time. Would you like that?’

Triss hesitated, and then nodded again, slowly. A new party dress meant he still loved her and that she was still Triss in his eyes. Party dresses meant parties, which meant not being locked up
in a mental hospital.

Triss felt her mother’s hand stroking her head, and with a rush of relief she felt a sense of her own power return to her. They were worried about her, but they were still on her side.
They would still do anything they could to stop her lip trembling. The feeling of safety was fleeting, however. Pen would not be satisfied with her most recent assault. Pen would be planning
something new, and Triss felt her own rage and resources rallying in preparation for battle.

Triss suffered a largely sleepless night, kept awake by her thoughts and the pattering of the rain. Even when she dipped into sleep it was puddle-thin and streaked with dreams.
She dreamed that she was in a dressmaker’s shop to be measured, but that when she took off her own frock to try on the new one she found she had another dress on underneath. She took off that
one as well, only to find yet another dress beneath that one. Dress after dress she removed, becoming thinner and thinner all the while, until it came to her that in the end there would be nothing
left of her, except a pile of discarded clothes and a disembodied wail.

But the dressmaker kept making her take off dress after dress, and snickered all the while, with a laugh like the rustling of leaves.

‘Five,’ it rasped as it shivered with mirth. ‘Only five left to go.’

Triss woke with a lurch. Her heart banged a terrified tattoo until she worked out where she was and satisfied herself that her limbs were not made of dress fabric.

‘Triss! Pen! Breakfast!’ Hearing her mother calling from downstairs, Triss roused her wits, scrambled out of bed and dressed quickly. As she was dragging a brush through her hair,
however, little brown fragments of something tumbled from one of the tangles. With sudden foreboding, Triss peered into the mirror of her little dressing table. Her shaking fingers teased a
crinkled brown shape from her hair. It was a dead leaf.

‘But . . . But I didn’t go out last night!’ she exclaimed helplessly. ‘Not this time! I didn’t! I didn’t! That’s . . . that’s . . . not
fair
!’ Her gaze misted and her eyes stung, but tears would not come. Blinking was difficult and painful.

I can’t have gone out last night without remembering .
. .
Can I?

There were no grass stains on her discarded nightshirt, but when Triss examined the floor she found wisps of straw and little crumbs of what looked like dried mud. Perhaps it meant nothing.
Perhaps she had brought them in on her shoes the day before. When she dragged open her sash window it was reassuringly stiff and yielded only with a grating of paint, suggesting that it had not
been opened in a long time.

In the square below, she watched the leaves of the park trees bouncing under the onslaught of the rain. Down on the slick, dark pavement she could see tiny, pale flickers as each unseen raindrop
struck home.

It was raining all night. I could hear the pattering whenever I couldn’t sleep. So if I had gone out, my hair and nightshirt would be wet. And that would be wet mud on the floor, not
dry. I
can’t
have gone out.

Her mind had been fighting off the image of herself leaping out of the window like a mad thing and rampaging through garden after garden, guzzling marrows and going through dustbins like a
starved cat. Now another image sprang to mind, that of Pen sneaking into her room with fistfuls of grit and dead leaves, in order to sprinkle them on the floor and in Triss’s hair.

Would she really do that?

Pen
hates
me. She’d love it if I ran down the stairs right now in tears, sobbing about dead leaves in my hair. She wants me to look mad, so I’ll get sent away and locked
up. Then she’d have all the attention she ever wanted. She’d do anything to make that happen.

But I’m not going to let her get rid of me. I’m not going to let her win. I’ll go to this doctor, and I’ll do what he says, and then I’ll show them all that
he’s made me better. And I won’t let her see that I’m scared.

Triss brushed her hair with great care, cleaned the grit off the floor, and walked down the stairs with all the calm she could feign. She had a battle to fight.

In the late afternoon Triss’s father drove her into town, the rain thudding against the canvas roof of the car. Every time they stopped at a junction, awaiting the wave
of the white-gloved policeman ordering the traffic, a small gaggle of boys and girls in hand-me-down clothes would gather by the road to gawp at the Sunbeam.

Each time Triss stayed quite still as if she had not seen them, gazing into the distance while rain pearled the windscreen. It was something she remembered enjoying, the sense that other
children were wondering who could be riding in such a grand car. The steamed glass between them was a magic window on another world, like a cinema screen. For all they knew, she might be a princess
or a movie star.

But today she could not feel glamorous and did not want to be special or mysterious. She felt small and miserable, and this morning the world outside seemed large, alarming and dreamlike. The
road was chaos. Bikes rattled and weaved through the surge of larger traffic, their tyres drawing brief lines along the wet road. Carts lurched, and horse flanks gleamed like varnish. Trams clanged
and shuddered along their shining tracks, the faces clustered inside them as unsmiling as soapsuds.

Ellchester was a city of bridges, and had been even before the Three Maidens were built. Her crooked hills demanded it, so that the biggest roads did not need to dip, climb or buck, but could
sail serenely from summit to summit. The nethermost streets weaved through old arched bridges in ancient walls that bulged like dough, while above them stretched bold Victorian bridges with the
city’s crest carved in the sides. One always found oneself looking up or down at other roads, as they criss-crossed over and under one another. Today every arch had a silver curtain of
falling drips.