Cuckoo Song

Chapter 4. WAR

There was something terrible and uncomfortable about hearing her mother sob.

It was a relief when at last Triss’s mother sniffed and rallied, carefully wiping away tears with the very tips of two fingers, so as not to smudge her make-up. She locked the drawer again and pocketed the key, then stood and left the room, closing the door carefully as if an invalid slept in the empty bed.

Triss remained where she was, listening as her mother’s tread moved away across the landing.

A distant door closed, and from behind it came the dull murmur of voices. At last Triss dared to crawl out from under the bed. The locked drawer taunted her, and she gave its handle a small, futile tug, but the drawer would not yield.

Taking a deep breath, she softly opened the door and slipped out, closing it behind her. The landing was empty, and Triss uttered a quiet prayer as she slipped across to the door opposite.

Please let it be the right one this time… To her relief, it opened on to a little room that she recognized instantly. Patchwork quilt on the bed, new Flower Fairies book on the bedside table, primrose wallpaper… yes, it was her room. It smelt faintly of cod-liver oil and the potpourri in the drawers. An old tongue-shaped cocoa stain that had never entirely cleaned out of the carpet was a familiar roughness under her foot.

A wave of relief broke over her, then lost its bubbling momentum and drained away, leaving her cold and uncertain. Even this, her own little lair, gave her no sense of comfort or security.

Mother said the letters were from that man, the one they’re worried about. They think he attacked me, so they whisked me home where I’d be safe. But if he left letters in Sebastian’s desk, then he must have been in the room somehow.

Home isn’t safe. Whoever he is, he can get in.

Her wardrobe loomed at her from the corner of the room. Triss’s imagination instantly crowded it with creeping assassins. When she threw open the door, however, nothing but innocuous dresses stared back at her.

On impulse, she ran her fingers over lace collars and cotton frocks, trying to tease out her own memories. Her hand paused on a small, cream-coloured blazer, with a straw boater hung over the same hanger. These did stir a memory, but also a painful briar-tangle of feelings.

Two years ago, Triss had worn this uniform during her brief time at St Bridget’s Preparatory School. She had loved going to the school, but it had made her ill.

Triss had not noticed it making her ill. In fact, she had thought she was getting better, brighter and happier. After spending so much of her life in one house, leaving it each morning filled her with an almost painful excitement. Her parents had changed, however, seeming discontented and short of temper. Everything had turned wrong and sour, and she sensed deep in her gut that it was her doing. Often they had felt her brow at breakfast, then decided she was too excited and kept her home. Every day they interrogated her about the school, and declared that the teachers had been negligent in some way that she had missed.

One day Triss was caught gossiping in class and was kept back after school. It was only for ten minutes, but her parents were in uproar. After bitter recriminations the Crescents had taken both their daughters away from the school. Triss had begged her father to let her stay, which made him more agitated than she had ever seen him before or since. He was doing all of this for her. He was defending her. Why was she trying to turn her back on her home? She had wept and wept for hours afterwards, until her stomach turned sick and her head ached. Then, of course, she had realized that she must be ill, and that her parents must have been right all along.

Knowing that the uniform no longer fitted filled Triss with a saddened yearning, and a twist of guilt at the feeling. She closed the wardrobe door to block it from sight. Even as she did so, she thought she glimpsed a tiny hint of movement in her peripheral vision. She tensed and stared around the room, senses tingling.

Everything around her was still, but her gaze was returned. From the dresser and side table stared the rag dolls her mother had sewn her, the cherry-mouthed French bébé doll and a china ballerina her father had given her after her first serious fever, almost like a reward. On any other day their presence should have been comforting, but now as Triss looked at them, all she could think of was Angelina’s shattered face.

They were motionless, nothing but dumb, soft, bundles of cloth and china. Or perhaps they were rigid, watching her, waiting for her to look away so that they could move again…

Stop looking at me.

She could not bear the thought that all of them might slowly turn their heads to stare at her, chime out china words or start to scream. Scrambling off the bed, Triss snatched up a pillowcase. She hastily swept all the dolls into it and knotted the top. Looking for somewhere to hide the bundle, she dragged open a drawer, then froze, staring down into it.

Within it she could see the diaries she had kept for years, each with its different leather or fabric cover. Every one lay open, a ravaged paper frill showing where all their pages had been torn out. They had been ripped in just the same way as the diary she had taken on holiday.

This changed everything. One destroyed diary smacked of an act of impulsive spite, the sort of thing that Pen might well do if she had the chance. The destruction of seven diaries in two different places suggested method and planning. Was Pen really that organized?

Perhaps Pen had not done it at all. Perhaps her father’s mysterious enemy had been in Triss’s room and gone through her things.

‘Mummy!’ It was meant to be a call, but it turned into a croak instead as the force left her voice. The next moment Triss felt frightened and embarrassed by the tortured books and shut the drawer quickly, glad that nobody had heard her.

She hurled the pillowcase of dolls into her wardrobe instead, and dived back into her bed. For a long while she stayed perfectly still, listening for any sound from within. There was nothing but silence.

Even in Triss’s quilt-fortress the scents of cooking found her out. Evidently Mrs Basset the cook had been tracked down after all. However hard Triss tried to focus on understanding everything that had happened, her mind was soon a slave of her stomach, and her attention fixed on the yawning emptiness inside her.

When lunch was called, it took all her willpower to walk down the stairs instead of running. Her parents were fortunately distracted and did not appear to notice her meal vanishing almost as soon as it was set in front of her, nor did they catch her stealthily ladling more on to her plate.

Triss could not understand how they could sit so mildly and calmly at the table and talk about boring, ordinary things as if they mattered. Her mother was complaining that Cook had asked for the whole of Tuesday off, in lieu of the break she had been promised.

Once again, Pen did not come down to lunch, and Triss was tortured by the sight of her sister’s food gradually cooling and congealing on the table. Only by clasping her hands tightly together in her lap did she prevent herself snatching at it.

‘She’ll get weak at this rate,’ sighed their mother. ‘Triss – could you be a love and take it up to her room? If she won’t answer, leave it by her door.’

‘Yes!’ Triss struggled to suppress her eagerness while her mother fetched a tray.

Carrying Pen’s lunch up the stairs, Triss managed to wait until she was unobserved before furtively picking at it. Just a potato – she won’t miss one. And… that piece of bacon. And a carrot. It took a lot of self-control to leave it at that, and Triss proceeded to Pen’s room with haste so that she could put the rest of the meal out of temptation’s way.

‘Pen?’ she called quietly, knocking on what she believed and hoped was Pen’s door. ‘Your lunch is out here!’ There was no response. Triss wondered if Pen was sitting sullenly within, ignoring her, or whether the younger girl had climbed out of her window and run off in yet another fit of truancy. She laid the tray on the ground. ‘Pen, I’m leaving it by your door.’

Please come to the door and take the food, Pen. Please – I don’t think I can resist it if you don’t.

No Pen appeared. The scented steam from the plate was in Triss’s nose, and even when she closed her eyes she could still see the golden-crusted pie with its glossy gravy, and the pepper freckles on the potatoes’ creamy flesh…

It was too much for her. With a small, helpless sob, Triss dropped to her knees and snatched up the fork. Pen’s food tasted better than hers had, better than anything. She tried to make every mouthful last, but could not. She tried to stop, but could not.

And as she was shakily licking the plate, she heard the faint sound of a voice in her father’s study, the study that should have been empty.

Triss set down the empty plate on the tray, then gingerly drew closer to the study. When she put her ear to the door she heard what sounded a good deal like Pen, talking in a low, steady, furtive tone. Peering in through the keyhole, Triss could indeed see Pen. The younger girl was facing away, but Triss could still see exactly what she was doing. She was making free with that most august and sacrosanct of objects, the family phone. Triss felt her eyebrows rise. She could not have been much more surprised if she had caught Pen borrowing the family car.

It was a tall black candlestick telephone and was fixed to the wall for ease of use, so that you only needed one hand to use it instead of two. It was placed at a height convenient for Triss’s father, but Pen was standing on tiptoe on a chair to bring her face level with the mouthpiece. Her right hand held the little conical earpiece to her ear.

Triss could not make out her sister’s murmured words. Pen looked absurd perched there, like a tiny child playing at being the parent in a game of make-believe. Only Pen’s hushed tones made the matter seem more serious.

As Triss watched, Pen hung the little earpiece back on its hook and stepped down. Triss straightened up, and a few seconds later Pen opened the study door. Finding herself face to face with Triss, Pen froze, her face a mask of guilty terror.

‘Who were you talking to, Pen?’ asked Triss.

Pen took a deep breath, but found no words. Her face reddened and twitched, and Triss could almost see her sister hastily auditioning a range of lies and denials to see whether any of them would do. Then Pen’s eye fell on the empty plate by her door, and when her gaze returned to Triss’s face the terror had been replaced by outrage and disbelief.

‘You ate my lunch!’ Her voice was so shrill it was almost a squeak. ‘You did, didn’t you? You ate it! You stole my lunch!’

‘You didn’t come down for it!’ Triss protested, feeling her hackles rise defensively. ‘I knocked – I tried to give it to you—’

‘I… I’m going to tell Mother and Father…’ Pen was gasping in angry breaths as if she might explode at any moment.

‘They won’t believe you.’ Triss had not meant to say it. She had been thinking it, but she had never intended the words to leave her head. It was true though, and Triss could see the same knowledge reflected in the frustration and rage on Pen’s face.

‘You think you can do anything you like, don’t you?’ snapped Pen, in a tight, bitter little voice. ‘You think you’ve won already. But you haven’t.’

‘Pen –’ Triss struggled to undo the damage – ‘I’m sorry I ate your lunch. I’ll…’ She steeled herself to promise Pen part of her own dinner, but knew this was a promise she could not keep. ‘I’ll make it up to you. Please, can’t we just stop this? Why do you hate me so much?’ All at once Triss felt that she could not bear Pen’s relentless animosity on top of everything else.

‘Who do you think you’re kidding?’ Pen’s face was a map of disbelief. She leaned forward to peer into Triss’s eyes, her own gaze pit-bull fierce. ‘I know about you. I know what you are. I saw you when you climbed out of the Grimmer. I was there.’

‘You were there?’ Triss took a step forward, only to see her sister flinch back. ‘Pen, you have to tell me everything you saw! Did you see me fall in? What happened?’

‘Oh, stop it!’ snapped Pen. ‘You think you’re really clever, don’t you?’ She swallowed hard, and clenched her jaw as if there was nothing she wanted more than to bite somebody. ‘You know what? You’re not as clever as you think. You’re getting everything just a bit wrong. Everything. All the time. And sooner or later they’ll notice. They’ll see.’

In Pen’s face Triss could see nothing but a declaration of war. The younger girl’s incomprehensible words boiled and seethed in Triss’s mind like a shoal of piranhas, and Triss’s desperation was swiftly replaced by a flood of frustration and resentment. She had wanted to be sorry about eating Pen’s lunch, had wanted to talk it out with her, but all of these feelings were now swallowed up by bitterness and a stinging sense of unfairness. It was always this way, she remembered that now. She would try to reach out, only to be knocked back by Pen’s ingenious and relentless hatred.

‘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.