Cuckoo

by Julia Crouch

  Just before they got to the car, Rose was surprised to spot Simon. He was standing outside a pub on the other side of the road, a pint in his hand, smoking. He was on his own, and he looked awful. She tried to catch his eye, but he wasn’t looking outwards. If she hadn’t had the children with her, she would have gone over to him. But as it was, they had to get back. She had never seen Simon like that before, though, and it made her wonder just what exactly was going on under her own nose, in her own home.

  Fifteen

  ‘I’m gonna get you!’ Gareth roared, waving his sword in the air as he charged down the grassy mound.

  The children screamed and fled in all directions.

  Polly and Rose, basking in the unseasonal sunshine, stretched out and smiled at each other.

  ‘So this is why we have men,’ Polly said, lying back on the tartan blanket and tickling Flossie while Rose began to put the picnic things away.

  ‘He certainly loves to play,’ Rose said, crinkling her eyes and looking at her husband as he galloped and whooped over the crumbling castle ruins. It had been Gareth’s idea to come up here. Now he had the boys to play with, he wanted to reconstruct a game he and Andy had invented in their childhood, called Invaders. The rules were labyrinthine, but the children seemed to grasp them immediately, and, armed with the wooden swords and shields Gareth had made the day before, they were well into the inaugural game.

  Gareth had found the castle just after they had moved to the village, on one of his early reconnaissance walks. He had once told Rose that, throughout his adult life, he would subconsciously size up various landscapes for their Invaders suitability. When he first clapped his eyes on this site, he knew it would be perfect, and he had just been biding his time, waiting for the right moment to put it to use. The castle was in fact the remains of a badly built Victorian mock-medieval folly, and it sat on private land. It therefore didn’t have the health and safety restrictions and censorious caretakers that were normally assigned to more historic, nationally adopted, remains.

  The landowner was an aging, absentee American movie star more famous for his involvement in Tantric practices than his acting work. He happened to own a couple of Gareth’s pieces and was only too pleased to think of their creator frolicking on his land with his family. So the Invaders had the place to themselves.

  Gareth had recruited Yannis to be on his side, and they were stalking Anna along a precipitous four-foot-high stone wall.

  ‘Be careful!’ Rose cried.

  ‘They’re fine,’ Polly said, looking on.

  ‘Christos was great with the boys, too, though,’ Rose said, after a while.

  ‘He was a good father,’ Polly said. ‘But he wasn’t rough and tumble like that. He didn’t have that sort of energy with children. He was more interested in adults, really. Children he enjoyed talking to, but he’d never have had them on his back like that.’ She waved her hand at Gareth, who now had Nico down on the ground, tickling him, while Anna was behind him, her hands on his shoulders, trying to pull him off. Yannis was running circles around them, whooping, and all three children were giggling like puppy hyenas.

  ‘That surprises me,’ Rose said.

  ‘That’s the thing with Christos. Nothing was expected.’ Polly lay back, shielding her eyes from the sun, lifting Flossie up to lie on her stomach.

  Rose packed everything into the picnic baskets, then she joined Polly on the blanket and lay back, looking up at the breezy sky. She and Gareth had agreed that it was far bluer here than in the city. Gareth said he was going to test it in paint one day. He was going to paint canvases of blue sky in different parts of the world – just the blue – then put them up on a gallery wall and compare them. Rose had argued that it wouldn’t be scientific, because the blue varied from day to day, and he couldn’t be all over the world in one day. He had laughed, but she had been serious.

  Polly stroked Flossie’s chubby arm, softly kneading the flesh. ‘When Christos died,’ she said, ‘all I wanted to do was touch someone. His body was the part of him I no longer had. I could still sort of talk to him, still feel his presence, but the actual physical part of him had been taken away from me.’

  ‘When we can’t have something, it’s what we want most,’ Rose agreed.

  ‘Well, you’d know that, more than anyone.’ Polly looked over at Rose.

  Rose stopped what she was doing and looked down at her hands, picking a little dirt out from beneath her fingernails. For a moment, she lost all sense of where she was. The laughter of Gareth and the children was lost to her ears.

  ‘Sorry,’ Polly said.

  ‘We don’t talk about that, Poll, remember? Not ever. Pain of death.’ Rose held her scarred index finger out in front of her as if it were a magic wand.

  ‘OK, then. Sorry.’ Polly looked away.

  Rose forced herself back into the now, and smiled a little too brightly, her eyes dazzled from the sky.

  ‘Do you know what, Polly? I can’t think of a thing I want that I haven’t got!’

  The minute she said it, she wished that she hadn’t. How horribly smug it must have sounded. Rose wanted to apologise to Polly, to tell her that she had only said it to convince herself, and that in no way was she trying to rub her unhappy friend’s nose in her own comfortable situation. But if she said that, she would show her own vulnerability, and she wasn’t going to start down that road.

  ‘Well, that’s marvellous. I’m really glad for you.’ Polly frowned and drew her arms closer around Flossie. Rose couldn’t help thinking that her baby couldn’t be too comfortable there on that rack of bones.

  ‘At the funeral,’ Polly said, after a while, ‘I wanted to rip off the coffin lid and jump in and screw him there, in front of everyone. I wanted him to be cremated. I wanted his body fully over and done with. I thought that would stop the feeling. But the idea of his body still there somewhere, mouldering away under the ground: it’s too horrible.’

  ‘So why didn’t you cremate him?’ Rose asked, shuddering too at the thought.

  ‘His mother. She said it was illegal in Greece. I didn’t know any better. I believed her. But she was lying. The state permits it but the Orthodox Church doesn’t. Despite the name old Yaya Maria had lumbered him with, Christos was not a believer.’

  ‘He was anything but Orthodox,’ Rose said.

  ‘And I should have gone with what he would have wanted. But there you go. I was weak.’

  ‘Don’t say that. His mother sounds like a force of nature.’

  ‘Tell me about it. Anyway, so I let us all down. And there I was, the days after the burial, going to the graveyard, touching the fresh earth that contained him, burying my face in it. And just itching, like an animal on heat. I surprised myself.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean I hadn’t really wanted him all that much when he was alive. Not for a couple of years, really.’

  She lifted Flossie off her front, sat up and rummaged in her bag for her pills. Rose, taking Flossie from her, noticed that Polly’s hands were shaking again. She watched her as she necked four pills from three different bottles, washing them down with her Cava.

  ‘That seems like a lot of pharmaceuticals, Poll,’ Rose said gently.

  ‘It’s just what the doctor prescribed.’ Polly rattled the bottles. ‘And who am I to disagree?’

  ‘So did you get over it?’ Rose asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The itching feeling?’

  ‘No. It got so bad I had to ask Taverna George for some help.’

  ‘No!’ Rose said.

  ‘He didn’t seem to mind,’ Polly laughed. ‘It did us both a lot of good. It wasn’t as if it was the first time, me and George, anyway.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Yes, Jesus.’ She put on the air and accent of a scandalised Greek grandmother and waved her arms in the air. ‘Chreeestos!’ She laughed and lay back down again. ‘Oh Rose, you can be such a prude. Remember, neither of us had been complete angels when he wa
s alive.’

  Rose knew this was true of Christos, at least. She had never been entirely honest with Polly about the extent of the feelings she had for him. This had partly been down to her own pride, partly because she knew that telling Polly wouldn’t help anyone deal with anything any better. But there was that time, on Karpathos during that visit two years ago, when they were supposed to all be going to see a one-off showing of La Dolce Vita at the open-air cinema in Pigadia, but Polly had been feeling ill. She stayed in and Rose and Christos had gone without her. The night had ended with a moonlit motorbike ride to a beach, where a reenactment of the Trevi Fountain scene had turned into a midnight skinny dip. Rose had tried to draw a halt to things before the sense of déjà vu became too precise, but she had only been partly successful.

  ‘It was an exorcism of sorts,’ Polly went on. ‘Besides,’ she shrugged, ‘George is, as you yourself noted, impossibly good-looking.’

  For a number of reasons, Rose was quite relieved when Anna bounded up towards them.

  ‘Come on, you two! Dad says you’ve got to join in. He says it’s not fair three kids against only one adult.’

  Rose got up. ‘I’ll come, but someone has to stay and look after Flossie. Poll, are you OK with that?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Polly said. ‘Does that mean I’ve got to just lie here in the sunshine while you run around up and down hills? I’ll do my best to cope.’

  Rose joined Anna and ran off, stopping to pick up one of the extra swords Gareth had made.

  There was much whooping, charging and over-dramatic rolling down banks. What was surprising was that it took over an hour for someone to hurt themselves. Nico tripped while running away from Anna, and got a nasty gash on his knee. It wasn’t serious, but there was enough blood to get him bawling. The other children squatted in front of him, grimacing, at once repelled and fascinated by the gore. Gareth ran back to the car for the first-aid kit.

  After she had cuddled the tears out of Nico, Rose walked him back to the picnic blankets to find a medicinal bar of chocolate she had stashed at the bottom of one of the baskets. She stopped short in her tracks as she saw Polly and Flossie. Flossie was wobbling, but, for the first time in her life, she was standing unaided. She had just let go of Polly with one hand. In her other, she was rattling a bottle of pills.

  ‘Look!’ Polly said. ‘No hands!’

  Flossie, who hadn’t even begun to crawl yet, stood for a moment, held up at the top of the arc of a wobble, then she tumbled to the ground, rolling down a tiny slope that was right behind her.

  ‘Oops a daisy!’ Polly sang.

  Rose rushed to scoop up Flossie, who screamed and stuck out her lower lip.

  ‘What’s this?’ she said, picking a pill off the ground.

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ Polly said, taking it from her. ‘The lid came off when she was rattling them. I thought we’d got them all.’

  ‘I hurt my knee, Mum, look,’ Nico said, tugging at her arm.

  ‘Ow,’ Polly said. ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘Course it does,’ he said.

  ‘Never mind, here comes Doctor Gareth,’ Polly told him, shielding her eyes from the sun and watching Gareth hurdling back across the stone walls, bearing the big blue plastic first-aid kit. ‘Big, strong and capable.’

  ‘Are you sure you got all the pills, Poll?’ Rose said. ‘Floss puts everything in her mouth at the moment.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Chill, Rose. Look, she’s smiling now.’

  Flossie, who had seen her daddy charging towards her, had lit up like a little candle and was leaning away from Rose, holding her hands up towards him.

  ‘Perhaps you can show your dad how you can stand up, Floss,’ Polly said, taking her by her waist and putting her on her feet.

  ‘I’m not sure it’s so good for her legs, Polly,’ Rose said.

  Flossie wobbled, tried to take a step, then fell down on her bottom, making everyone but Nico laugh and applaud.

  ‘Hey, what about my knee?’ he complained, looking up at them all, one by one.

  Sixteen

  They got back after dusk in the end, with the tingle of a day in the sun on their faces. Rose, who had probably sunk a little more Cava than she should have, laid out the remains of the picnic on the coffee-table and the children had the rare treat of a TV dinner while the adults retired to the kitchen to drink another bottle.

  They lit the candles and settled back in the golden glow.

  ‘I’m so glad I’m here,’ Polly said, hugging herself. ‘I can’t imagine being anywhere else than here with you, my best friends in the whole world.’

  Gareth gazed into his glass, twirling it around in his big hands and smiling. Then he looked up and raised a toast.

  ‘To having a blast!’

  They all clinked glasses.

  By about ten o’clock the children had all fallen asleep on the sofas, faces smeared with the Eton Mess Rose had made from the leftovers of the picnic meringue, cream and strawberries. Rose, Polly and Gareth lifted them up to their rooms.

  ‘They can clean their teeth in the morning, Rose,’ Gareth said.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ she said.

  Back downstairs, Polly hugged both Rose and Gareth at once.

  ‘Well, goodnight, guys. And, once again, thanks.’

  ‘Look, stop all that thanks now, OK?’ Rose said. ‘Let’s all be equal in this from now on.’

  ‘I agree,’ Gareth said.

  They saw Polly to the door, and stood on the threshold watching her weave her way up the steps towards the Annexe.

  ‘So long as she stays up there,’ Gareth whispered to Rose.

  She smiled and leaned into him.

  ‘I’ve just got to feed Flossie, then I’ll be up,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll be waiting,’ he said.

  But by the time she got to the bedroom, Gareth was lying on his back, his arms outstretched, snoring.

  Poor man, Rose thought. He’s not used to running around after boys all day.

  Rose woke at four in the morning. Flossie hadn’t cried for her two o’clock feed, which was something of a first. Initially, this didn’t worry Rose. Anna had kept her up all hours until she was two years old; perhaps Flossie was going to treat them all a little more kindly.

  The clear night had made the house very chilly. Rose could see her breath as she tiptoed across the landing to Flossie’s bedroom; the grass outside glowed with a peppering of frost.

  It was when Rose leaned over to look into Flossie’s cot that the cold jolted out from the air and plunged deep into her belly. Her baby was still, breathing in shallow rasps, with a sheen of sweat over her face. Rose grabbed her. Flossie’s skin was burning, and when Rose picked her up, her body flopped in her arms. She put her back down and pulled open her Babygro. A rash purpled over her chest.

  Clutching the baby to her, Rose charged back to her bedroom, yelling for Gareth.

  ‘What’s the number?’ Rose pressed, as Gareth searched their address book for the village GP’s out-of-hours contact.

  ‘I think we should call an ambulance,’ he said.

  ‘Kate will get here quicker. And she knows us.’

  Kate was the village GP, and the closest to a female friend Rose had managed to find since they had moved.

  Rose dialled and waited for an answer. Come on, come on, she thought.

  ‘Hello?’ Kate sounded sleepy.

  Rose told her what had happened.

  ‘You stay there. I’ll be with you in a tick,’ Kate said.

  True to her word, she was at their door in five minutes, a duffel coat thrown over her pyjamas, her feet in Birkenstocks. She took one look at Flossie and ordered Gareth to call for an ambulance.

  ‘We need to get her to hospital as soon as possible,’ she said to Rose, pulling up Flossie’s eyelids and shining a light into her pinprick pupils. ‘She has a high fever, poor muscle tone – and look,’ she said, pulling aside the Babygro pyjamas ‘ – she’s starting a rash. It could be meningitis.’


  Rose gasped. She knew it.

  ‘It’s OK, Rose,’ Kate said, putting a firm arm around her shoulders. ‘We’ve got it early. But I’m afraid I’m going to have to put a line in, so that they can get antibiotics into her as soon as possible. It’s not nice, but you’ve got to hold her arm down like this.’

  She showed Rose exactly how to extend Flossie’s arm as she inserted a large needle into a vein by her wrist. Flossie moaned and wriggled, but Rose held her firmly. Rose saw that Kate kept looking up to check that she was all right. She wasn’t. Watching all this happen to her baby, she felt like collapsing onto the floor.