Cuckoo Song

Chapter 2. ROTTEN APPLES

Hearing motion in the parlour, Triss carefully closed the door and scampered back to her bed, mind whirling like a propeller.

They think somebody attacked me. Is that what happened? Again she tried to force her memory back to the Grimmer, and again there was nothing, just an inner shuddering and flinching.

Who was this ‘he’ her parents had mentioned, the one that Father was ‘finished with’? If ‘he’ was so terrible, why would Father have had ‘ties’ with him anyway?

It all sounded like something from one of the crime films Pen loved so much, the sort where good honest men became entangled with hoodlums and gangsters. But surely Father could not be involved in anything like that! Triss felt her chest grow tight at the very thought. More than anything else, she was proud of her father. She loved the impressed way everybody’s eyebrows rose when they were introduced to him.

Mr Piers Crescent? The civil engineer who designed the Three Maidens and Station Mount? It’s an honour to meet you, sir – you’ve done wonderful things for our city.

Having a great civil engineer as a father meant seeing maps of planned roads at the breakfast table. It meant watching her father open letters from the mayor’s office about bridge construction and locations for new public buildings. Her father’s designs were changing the face of Ellchester.

Triss jumped slightly when the door opened, and her mother entered the room. There was a touch more powder on her cheeks, a sure sign that she had stepped aside to calm herself and set her appearance straight.

‘I’ve just been talking to your father,’ her mother declared with calm nonchalance, ‘and we think we should cut the holiday short and go home first thing tomorrow. Familiar surroundings – that’s what you need to sort you out.’

‘Mummy…’ Triss hesitated, unwilling to admit to eavesdropping, then went for a compromise. ‘You left the door open, and it was draughty so I went to shut it, and when I was there I… overheard Daddy telling you that there was somebody else down at the Grimmer yesterday evening.’ Triss caught at her mother’s sleeve. ‘Who was it?’

Her mother’s hands halted for a second, then continued calming the creases out of the pillow.

‘Oh, nobody, darling! Just some gypsies. Nothing for you to worry about.’

Gypsies? In a bowler hat and a Daimler?

Perhaps some of her distress showed in Triss’s face, for her mother sat down on the edge of her bed, took her by both hands and met her eye at last.

‘Nobody could want to harm you, froglet,’ she said very seriously, ‘and even if somebody did, your father and I would never, never let anything bad happen to you.’

And this would have been reassuring if the crystal-blue eyes were not a little too bright. Every time she saw that fragile intensity in her mother’s face, Triss knew she was thinking of Sebastian.

He had been called up in February of 1918, not long after Triss’s sixth birthday. When the War ended later that year, Triss remembered all the celebrations with the flags and big hats, and not really knowing how it would change everything, except that it meant Sebastian would be coming back home. Then the news had come that Sebastian would not be coming back, and she had thought for a while, in a foggy, confused way, that the first news had been wrong, that the War was not over.

In a way she had been right. The War had ended, but it was not gone. Somehow it was still everywhere. Sebastian was the same. He had ended but he was not gone. His death had left invisible wreckage. His absence was a great hole tugging at everything. Even Pen, who barely remembered him, walked carefully round the edge of that hole.

Triss had started getting ill not long after the War ended, and in a hazy way she understood that this was something to do with Sebastian. It was her job to be ill. It was her job to be protected. And right now it was her job to nod.

She nodded.

‘There’s my girl,’ said her mother, stroking Triss’s cheek.

Triss tried to smile. The conversation she had overheard still had its hooks in her mind.

‘Mummy? I… I’ve read all my comics and books, hundreds of times. Can I… Can I read Daddy’s paper?’

Mother went to ask Father’s permission, and then returned with a copy of the Ellchester Watchman. She lit the lamps, each glass globe giving a small, comforting ‘whump’ as it started to glow, then left Triss to herself.

Triss carefully unfolded the paper, feeling treacherous for her small deception. What was it she had overheard her father say?

I said that I was finished with him, and he’ll know that by now if he’s read this week’s paper.

In the paper, therefore, there was something from which the mysterious ‘he’ might learn that her father no longer wanted dealings with him. If so, perhaps she could find it too.

The paper had already been read and handled enough to smudge the ink here and there, and her fever-wearied mind felt a bit smudged too. Her mind slid over headline after headline, taking in so little that sometimes she had to read things several times to make sense of them. Most of them were just dull. Articles on the new omnibuses to be introduced in Ellchester after the London model. A photograph of a long line of unemployed men, flat caps pulled down over their grainy, sullen faces. A whist drive and dance to collect money for the local hospital. And on the fifth page, a mention of Piers Crescent, Triss’s father.

It was not very interesting. It described Meadowsweet, the new suburb her father was working upon, just outside Ellchester but reachable by the new tramline. There were even diagrams showing how it would look, with all the houses in rows down the hill, facing out across the Ell estuary. Triss’s father was helping to design the roads, the new boating lake and the ‘terracing’ of the hillside. The article said that this was ‘a departure’ for an engineer ‘best known for his large and innovative constructions’. However, it certainly didn’t mention Piers Crescent throwing off gangster contacts, and Triss could not help but think that if it had, the story would probably have been nearer the front page.

Perhaps I misheard him. Perhaps I imagined the whole thing. Perhaps… Perhaps I’m not well yet.

That night Triss lay awake, watching the dim flickering of the lowered lights and the chocolate-brown spiders edging across the ceiling. Every time she closed her eyes she could sense dreams waiting at the mousehole of her mind’s edge, ready to catch her up in their soft cat-mouth and carry her off somewhere she did not want to go.

Suddenly the world was full of secrets, and she could feel them in her stomach like knots. She was frightened. She was confused. And she was hungry, too hungry to sleep. Too hungry, after a while, to think or worry about anything else. Several times she reached tentatively for the bell, but then recalled her mother’s worried face watching as Triss wolfed down her supper, wild with hunger as she had been at lunch. No more now, froglet. Nothing more until breakfast, understand?

But she was starving! How could she sleep like this? She thought of sneaking to the kitchen to raid the larder. The food would be missed, but for an unworthy, desperate moment she wondered if she could blame the theft on Pen. No, Triss had begged so hard for more food, her parents would surely suspect her.

Then what could she do? She sat up, gnawing at her nails, then jumped a little as the wind-swung foliage outside clattered against the window. In her mind’s eye she saw the bough of the tree beyond, lush with leaves and heavy with apples…

The window had not been opened in years, but Triss gave the sash a frantic yank and it juddered upwards, spitting a fine spray of dust and paint flakes. Cold air rushed in, rippling the newspaper by her bedside, but she had no thought for anything but the young apples bobbing among the leaves, glossy with the dim gaslight behind her. She snatched at them, tearing them from their stems and cramming them into her mouth one by one, feeling her teeth cleave into them with a shuddering relief. They were unripe and so sharp that her tongue went numb, but she did not care. Soon she was staring at nothing but stripped stems, and her hunger was still thundering its demands, a raw gaping chasm at her core.

The bedroom was on the ground floor, and there was nothing more natural, more necessary, than clambering her way out to sit on the sill and dropping the short distance to the ground. The grass was downy-pale with dew. The cold of it stung the skin of her feet, but it did not seem important.

Only a few boughs were low enough for her to snatch the fruit from them, but when these were bare she dropped to all fours and scrabbled at the early windfalls. Some were recent, merely speckled with rot, others caramel-coloured and slack, riddled with insect holes. Their pulp squeezed between her fingers as she caught them up and crammed them into her mouth. They were sweet and bitter and mushy in the wrong ways and she did not care.

Only when at long last there were no more rotten apples to be found nestling in the grass did the frenzy start to fade, so that Triss became aware of her own shivering, her scraped knees, the taste in her mouth. She sat back on her haunches, gasping in deep ragged breaths, not knowing whether to retch or sob as her shaky hands wiped the sour stickiness from her cheeks, chin and tongue. She dared not look at the half-guzzled windfalls, in case she saw white shapes writhing in the pulp.

What’s wrong with me? Even now, after this wild glut, she knew that another surge of hunger was hanging somewhere like a wave, just waiting for its chance to break over her.

Her unsteady steps took her to the garden wall. It was crumbling and old, and all too easy for her to climb and sit upon, knees knocking under her thin nightdress. Before her was the grainy, gravelly road which passed the cottage, and following it with her eye she could see it curve and dwindle down the rough, tussocky hillside until it reached the distant village, now not much more than a cluster of lights. Before them, though, she could see the triangle of the village green, dull pencil grey in the moonlight. Beyond it quivered a faint floss of pale willows, and behind them… a narrow streak of deeper blackness, like an open seam.

The Grimmer.

She felt as if she was falling apart. All the little patches and pieces of how-to-be-Triss that she had been carefully fitting together all day were coming unpinned again, all at once.

Something happened to me at the Grimmer. I have to see it. I have to remember.

She took the shortcut down the hill over the hummocky grass, rather than following the wide swing of the road. Harsh stems and thistles spiked at her foot-soles and ankles as she stumbled down the uneven slope, but she had no thought for anything but the Grimmer.

With every step the Grimmer grew closer and clearer, black as perdition and narrow as a half-closed eye. Her knees weakened, but now the downward slope seemed to be carrying her forward of its own accord. The Grimmer grew and grew, and by the time she reached the green it was no longer a mere slit in the land but a lean lake, long enough to swallow four buses whole. Over its waters the willows drooped their long hair, bucking in the gusts as if with sobs. Against the dark surface she could make out the white water-lily buds, like small hands reaching up from beneath the surface.

There were occasional stealthy rustles and clicks in the undergrowth. Birds. Surely birds. Surely not would-be attackers who had been waiting in the bushes for her, knowing somehow she would have no choice but to return…

Shaky steps took her across the green to the water’s edge, where she halted and felt the cold properly for the first time. This was where they had dunked witches, hundreds of years ago. This is was where suicides had used to drown themselves.

At one place on the bank the mud was ravaged, tussocks of the grass pulled away, the earth finger-gouged. That’s where I dragged myself out. It must be. But why did I fall in?

She had hoped that if she found memories here, they would provide solid ground at last under her feet. But when memory came it brought no comfort. Here was only fear and falling.

Triss recalled an icy darkness, cold water choking her nose, mouth and throat. It seemed that she remembered looking up through a shifting brown murk, while her limbs slowly flailed, and seeing two dark shapes above her, their outlines wavering and wobbling with the motion of the water. Two figures standing on the bank above, one taller than the other. But there was another memory trying to surface, something that had happened just before that…

Something bad happened here, something that should never have taken place.

I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to remember.

But it was too late, she was there and the Grimmer was watching her with its vast, lightless slit of an eye, as if it might open it wide and stare into her gaze at any moment. Then, as the panic rose, her mind flapped shut like a book and instinct took over. She turned and ran, fleeing from the water, sprinting across the green and tearing back up the hill to the cottage with all the speed and panic of a coursed hare.