Cuckoo

by Julia Crouch

  Simon cleared a space on the table by swiping what looked like a week’s worth of papers down onto a stool. He made tea for everyone, without thinking to ask if that was what they wanted, and served it up in stained mugs. Nico and Yannis, strangers to this English ritual, sipped their drinks and made faces, as if they had been handed moonshine.

  They set about the cake with less hesitation. Almost fluid with chocolate, it was made by a woman who lived in the next village, who had baked for Konditor & Cook in her London days. All the children cleared their plates, then, with chocolate faces and fingers, they begged for more, which was forthcoming from Simon before Rose could intervene.

  ‘So Tiger got sent home again,’ Anna said.

  ‘Please don’t speak with your mouth full, Anna.’ Rose touched her on the wrist.

  ‘He punched Sammy in the face,’ Yannis said.

  ‘Not hard enough,’ Nico muttered.

  ‘It made his nose bleed, though,’ Anna reassured Simon, who winced.

  ‘What do you mean, not hard enough, Nico?’ Rose asked.

  ‘He was saying stuff about our mum,’ Yannis said.

  ‘Shut up, Yan,’ Nico said.

  ‘What sort of stuff?’ Rose gently put herself between the boys.

  ‘He said—’

  ‘Shut UP!’ Nico yelled at his little brother. ‘It doesn’t matter what he said. He shouldn’t have said anything.’

  ‘Well, whatever he said, he didn’t deserve to be hit,’ Rose said.

  ‘He fucking did. And Tiger didn’t deserve to be sent home. He was being a mate,’ Nico grumbled.

  ‘And Sammy is a shit, Rose,’ Yannis said earnestly.

  ‘Quite possibly so, I suppose.’ Rose looked down at her hands. She just didn’t have the energy to draw a conclusion from all this. Unusually, the ability to make it into a lesson for the children escaped her.

  The room fell into an awkward silence, with just the sound of Flossie breathing heavily as she tried to cram a squashed-up ball of chocolate cake into her mouth.

  ‘Well then – who wants to watch a DVD?’ Simon clapped his hands. ‘We’ve got a top quality pirate of Pirates of the Caribbean Four. You can even see the people getting up to leave the cinema to pee!’

  ‘Yess!’ Liam and Effie stood on their chairs and punched the air. Evidently this dodgy sort of DVD was a top treat in their household. The Tiger business was forgotten as the children bundled through to what Simon called the screening room – in reality just a second living room with a laptop projector trained on a large white wall.

  ‘Now then, me hearties,’ Simon said as the children made themselves comfortable on the velvet beanbags that were scattered around the carpet. ‘When you see signs of a getting up to pee-er, you’ve got to go Harr Harrrrr, OK? And there’ll be Seaworthy Simon’s special toffee popcorn for them as stay quiet except for that – all right, me hearties?’

  ‘Aye aye, Cap’n,’ the twins saluted. Even Nico couldn’t help a smile. The DVD started and soon the children settled down into a concentrated silence.

  Rose and Simon went back to the kitchen.

  ‘That’s bought us a bit of undisturbed time, thank God,’ he said. ‘Those boys are something of a handful.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Rose said. ‘Do you mind if I feed Floss?’

  ‘There’s no better sight.’ Simon got up to make more tea. Rose unbuttoned her shirt and latched Flossie on, then looked around at the drifts of clutter, the half-finished projects by the twins. There was a miniature garden in a shallow dish, with moss pressed down into earth to make grass. There was a papier-mâché and posterpaint fort, with plastic soldiers guarding toilet-roll ramparts. Rose remembered how the Annexe had been full of similar efforts, and she sighed as she tried to remember the last time she and Anna had sat down to get on with something with no one else around, no bickering boys, no clamouring baby.

  ‘Is everything all right, Rose?’ Simon sat down next to her and put a mug of tea by her side.

  ‘What do you mean?’ She jumped out of her daydream.

  ‘You just seem a little – disconnected today. It’s not because of me and her, is it?’

  ‘What? Oh, no. Like I said, that’s all forgotten.’

  ‘What’s on your mind, then?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. I’m probably just a bit tired out. Still not quite got into the swing again after the hospital stay. And the worry. You know, about Flossie.’

  ‘Of course.’ Simon drank his tea and looked closely at Rose. ‘Everything’s OK at home besides that, then? Between you and Gareth, I mean?’

  ‘Of course,’ Rose blurted out. ‘We’re rock solid.’

  ‘Of course.’ Simon looked down.

  ‘Always have been. Nothing wrong there,’ she said.

  ‘Good. And how’s things with Polly?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Any sign of her moving on?’

  ‘Possibly. After last night – but, it’s her shout, you know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I can’t make her do what she’s not ready for.’

  ‘Of course.’ Simon let his gaze wander out of the window. Then, as if making a decision, he turned back to Rose and, reaching across the table, he grabbed her hand.

  ‘Rose. You have got to get her out of your house. You are being set up for a disaster, Rose. She’s dangerous.’

  ‘You’re just saying that because you got hurt.’

  ‘Possibly, but I’ve got eyes in my head and I know what I see. I’ve had to listen to her talking about you two when you’re not around to hear. Get her out, Rose.’

  ‘I don’t want to listen to this, Simon.’

  He got up and went round to her side of the table. He sat next to her and held her by the shoulders. ‘Look, Rose, I’ll spare you the details, but I can’t say it strongly enough. Get her out of your life. If there’s an applecart, she’ll upset it. She’s already got mine toppled all over the place. I’m not just being selfish – although it’d do me no end of good if she weren’t just down the road. This is because of you, my dear friend, and I don’t want you upset as well. Regroup, get her out.’

  Liam bounced through to the kitchen. ‘Oy, Dad, where’s our popcorn?’

  Simon moved away slightly. ‘Coming, Lee. Just doing it.’

  ‘Get on with it, then, Dad,’ Liam said, disappearing back into the screening room. ‘We’ve got Greek boys waiting!’

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more,’ Rose said, straightening her back and stroking Flossie’s cheek.

  ‘Just ask yourself, Rose. How does a baby take all those pills, eh?’

  ‘It was an accident, Si.’ But even saying it, Rose flushed.

  ‘And Rose,’ said Simon, getting up to haul out his heavy-based pan for popcorn. ‘Where is Polly now?’

  ‘Gareth took her to Bath,’ Rose said. ‘To get guitar strings.’

  Simon looked at Rose for a moment, then turned to make his special toffee sauce for the popcorn for the children.

  Thirty

  Simon gave them all supper, a quick tuna pasta bake. Rose tried to call Gareth to tell him to come over and join them, and to bring Polly too, if she felt like it. But his mobile was off, and he wasn’t picking up the landline.

  It was gone eight when Rose and the children got back to The Lodge – later than she had planned, but it was a Friday, so there was no school the next day. The house was dark and the car wasn’t in the driveway. Polly and Gareth were still out.

  She went to the place around the side of the Annexe to switch the outside lights on so that they could see their way down to the house, cursing as she stepped in something that she thought might be a pile of animal mess.

  When she flipped the switch, she saw the full horror of what she had felt underfoot.

  ‘Look away, Anna!’ she gasped.

  But it was too late. Anna had seen Manky, or what remained of Manky, in the driveway just outside the Annexe, underneath where the Galaxy usually sat. Something had got hold
of him and torn him to bits, so that at first Rose had thought Polly might have dropped a red-lined fur stole on her way to or from the car.

  But no, the mangled mat of fur, blood and viscera was her faithful old cat. Whatever had killed him had left his head intact, so she could tell.

  Anna screamed, turned away and vomited tuna, pasta, chocolate cake and popcorn into Rose’s vegetable patch. Nico and Yannis squatted by the pitiful corpse, wrinkling their noses in disgust, but unable to look away.

  ‘It must be the fox,’ Rose said, helping Anna away towards the house, trying to find an explanation. ‘Or a badger, perhaps. I’ve heard they can be quite vicious with cats.’

  ‘Foxy wouldn’t hurt Manky, though,’ Anna sobbed.

  ‘Come on, boys,’ Rose said. She felt very cold, and very tired.

  ‘I want to sleep with you tonight, Mum,’ Anna said, as Rose towelled her dry after a troubled bath.

  ‘Of course. You, me and Floss will all sleep together,’ she said. She would be glad of it. She didn’t want to let anything else precious out of her sight tonight.

  She tucked Anna and Flossie into her bed, then went to switch off the boys’ light. Nico was reading and didn’t look up, but Yannis peered, pale and tiny, from the folds of his duvet.

  ‘Rose,’ Yannis said, his voice very small. ‘Is there a cat heaven for Manky to go to?’

  ‘I’m not sure, Yannis,’ she said. She wasn’t feeling very generous. ‘I’m not so sure about anything,’ she went on, and he put his fists to his eyes.

  ‘Goodnight,’ she said and turned the light out.

  She went down to the kitchen, turned on all the lights and opened a bottle of wine. It was the second of the evening – she and Simon had shared one earlier.

  Standing vigil in the middle of the room, she looked up at the Annexe, willing the car to return as she drained her glass and refilled it.

  By the time she had reached the end of the bottle, there was still no sign of the Galaxy. She realised her legs were aching from standing still. She was also drunk, cold and weary. She took herself upstairs to her girls and, tucking herself under the duvet, lay down between them.

  ‘Rose, Rose.’ Gareth was shaking her awake. ‘Hey, Rose.’

  She had been dreaming of falling down a sort of Alice in Wonderland hole, where scenes of her life were playing out in layers: here was her mother, being stern about something Rose had done wrong; there was Christos, smiling with the sun in his eyes as he lay beside her; there was Manky, running around after a toy Anna had made; there was the baby being taken away.

  She landed with a bump in the bed. ‘Where were you?’ she whispered.

  ‘I’m so sorry. We bumped into Dave Morgan, and he took me and Polly round to his studio.’

  ‘Who?’ Rose was bleary.

  ‘You know, Dave the sound guy – with the studio in Lansdown? He’d heard about the gig. Looks like he and Polly are going to work something out. I tried calling. Did you get my answerphone message?’

  Rose couldn’t work out why she hadn’t thought to check. But then she remembered. ‘Manky . . .’

  ‘Manky?’

  ‘You’ll have to clear him up, Gareth. I can’t do it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In the driveway. You probably didn’t see. You probably parked the car over him.’

  ‘God.’

  ‘He was attacked, he’s—’ And Rose started shaking, until she couldn’t hold back the tears any longer.

  Moving Flossie to the other side of her, Gareth sat and held her close, stroking her hair, until she was done.

  ‘He was part of me.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do, Gareth.’

  ‘I’ll deal with him, love. Don’t worry about a thing.’ He lifted Flossie and put her into Rose’s arms. ‘You take your girls and get some sleep now. Don’t worry about me. I’ll bed down in the studio. And don’t go out in the morning until I’ve sorted it all out, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ Rose said, allowing herself to be tucked in like a child. It took a while to stop shivering, to stop the pictures of her rippedapart cat playing themselves on her eyelids, but in the end, she fell again into a deep, black sleep. This time there were no dreams. Nothing at all.

  Thirty-One

  Flossie woke Rose at dawn, grizzling and patting her on the face with tiny open hands. They were mini-slaps, sweaty and sticky. Rose had a panic for a second, unable to find her arms; each had gone completely numb from being tucked around a daughter. She retrieved her limbs and clenched and unclenched her fists until there was enough feeling in them for them to work. Screwing her eyes up against the sore weariness of such a deathly sleep, she picked up Flossie and tiptoed downstairs with her, careful not to disturb Anna, who had turned onto her side and was curled around her pillow, snoring softly.

  The house was still and silent downstairs. It felt strangely empty. Then Rose remembered why that was. There was no cat accompanying her downstairs, no one rubbing against her legs wanting food, water and a morning scratch under the chin, or between the ears.

  She put Flossie into her high chair and gave her a rusk. Then she scooped up Manky’s water and food bowls. She tipped the unfinished portion of Iams into the bin, then thought again and threw both the bowls away as well, as a sort of gesture towards closure. Then she stood at the sink and looked up towards the Annexe, wondering if Gareth had cleared up the remains yet.

  ‘Won’t be a sec, Floss.’ She slipped on her overshoes and climbed up the steps away from the house, breathing clouds of body warmth into the morning air that still held a little chill. It had rained in the night, again: the leaves held more than dew drops, and there were little puddles in the indentations of the York stone treads. It was just that moment before the sun hits the earth, when the air still wears a thick cloak of the night.

  Death is as much a beginning as an end, Rose thought, but this gave her little comfort as she searched out the corpse of her cat. Getting down on her knees, wincing as the gravel stuck into her legs, she looked beneath the dusty undercarriage of the Galaxy. Manky was no longer there. The gravel had been scooped away, and all that remained of him was a small dollop of what looked like squashed raspberry. It had probably been too dark for Gareth to have seen that.

  She hoped he had saved something to bury, to give her and Anna the chance to give their grief a ritual upon which to hang itself. Two animal deaths in a fortnight. It wasn’t looking good for the lesser species at The Lodge. She hoped that Gareth had concealed any remains within some sort of box. Not a bag: the idea of Manky’s remains laid in the ground flopping around in a sack made her stomach heave.

  Rose sat back up on her haunches and leaned against the blue side of the car, fighting the urge to retch. The air filled suddenly with an alarming sound, like a school guillotine, chopping pile after pile of stacked-up sugar paper. She flinched and cowered, covering her ears. When she brought herself to look up, she saw the noise was coming from a pair of swans crossing the sky, slicing the air with their wings.

  Then they were gone, leaving a resounding vacuum in their wake. She stood and brushed the nips of gravel from the indentations in her knees. She looked through the car window. Inside was an empty pizza box and – she counted carefully – eight empty Mexican beer bottles. Someone had been feasting last night.

  She fixed her gaze up at the Annexe windows and listened very closely for any hint of life inside. But the silence, now the swans had passed, was impenetrable. All she could hear was a buzzing in her ears as if she had spent the night before with her head in some loudspeakers. It got louder as she climbed back down to the house, and she had to rub her ears with the flats of her hands to try to stop it. She looked in through the kitchen window at Flossie, who was very involved in smearing her half-masticated rusk around the tray of her high chair.

  Good, Rose thought.

  Taking a deep breath, she dec
ided not to go back inside. Instead, she skirted round the side of the house, past the pizza oven and out across the sodden grass to Gareth’s studio. We really must put some stepping stones down, with all this rain, she thought.

  She stopped in the middle of the lawn, hearing now her own blood pushing around her body like the swoosh of a foetal heart monitor. She breathed deeply, the freshness of the air catching her throat and burning her chest. What a smell the morning had. The sweet scent of a too-early honeysuckle just tinged the air. It could all have been so beautiful, if it weren’t for the noise in her ears, the sting in her eyes.