Cuckoo

by Julia Crouch

  The field was packed, it couldn’t be denied. Little family groups covered it almost entirely, stretching their pale English legs out in the sun on brightly coloured Mexican blankets, tucking into their picnics. The sound of middle-class chatter filled the air, men talking about how it was like Tuscany today, mothers calling to their children.

  ‘Leo!’

  ‘Anastasia! Come here, darling!’

  ‘Let’s go over there.’ The children groaned as Polly led them all to a place far away from the crowd, at the top of the sloping field, at least fifty metres from the river. Rose would never have chosen that spot. It was impractical, a choice made by someone who obviously didn’t care if her children swam or drowned.

  Rose was feeling the heat; her body was damp with it. She was sure her dress was showing her sweat. Her belly was hurting, too, that unmistakable, hot pain of a period about to start. She had once heard it described as a worm slowly eating its way out of you. That’s exactly how it felt to her.

  Polly put the blanket down, and the children started tugging on their swimming costumes. Yannis threw off his clothes completely to get changed, but Nico and Anna were a little more circumspect, hiding their bodies by twisting and turning with towels and, in Anna’s case, shrouding her secrets with a long towelling robe that belonged to Rose.

  ‘Can we go now, Mum?’ Anna asked, hauling a rubber ring onto her shoulder.

  ‘Yes, but don’t go over the weir,’ Rose said. ‘And that applies to you two as well,’ she said to Nico and Yannis.

  ‘Do you think so?’ Polly turned to her. ‘They’re strong swimmers.’

  ‘There’s a current,’ Rose said, looking over at the strong flow of the river, which was still a little swollen by the recent rain. She didn’t really care what the boys did, but she didn’t want Anna to follow them.

  ‘Ohhh . . .’ Nico wailed, trying to attract Polly’s attention. But she was too busy now, changing into her own little bathing suit, to pay him any notice.

  ‘How about you play in the pool section until after lunch, then when Flossie’s asleep, I’ll take you over the other side,’ Rose offered.

  Nico, realising that he didn’t have any alternative, shrugged his assent then turned and led the other two down the slope to the river.

  ‘Aren’t you going to get changed?’ Polly said, sitting down in her perfect fifties bikini. Rose was quite shocked at how her body looked unclothed. She was covered with a light down of dark hair, and her bones and sinews were quite clearly visible, as if she were some sort of three-dimensional anatomical diagram. Apart from the tattoos, another history was etched on her skin: a network of thin scars that criss-crossed her thighs and arms. Rose noticed that while some were older and keloid, others, which must have been made more recently, were still scabbed. And there were what looked like small bruises, too. On her inner thigh, and above her breast. Finger dots.

  What a mess, Rose thought. And a small part of the hard thing that seemed to have set into her over the past couple of days melted, when she thought of all that Polly had put herself through. And of course, she needed to show kindness, and so did Gareth. And that, surely, was all he was up to: trying to show Polly some kindness.

  ‘I’m going to leave it a bit. I’ve got to feed Floss now,’ Rose said, unbuckling her from the little car seat.

  Polly rubbed sun cream into her papery legs, then stood up and stretched. Despite the skin and the bones and the scars, people looked over at her. Or perhaps it was because of them. But Rose knew that it was also her glamour that drew people’s eyes. They wondered if she was some kind of star. And of course, she was – or had been – so they stared even more.

  ‘I’ll get the picnic out,’ Polly said, rather uncharacteristically. She knelt at the basket in her little bikini and started to unwrap the food that Rose had prepared earlier that morning. Sitting there with her baby at her breast, Rose tried to think back and remember what she had made, but she couldn’t. It was as if the morning had been another country. The only thing she could recollect was that this was the first time in years that she had prepared food without filling it with her love.

  So there were egg sandwiches. Without cress. And a shop-bought pizza cut into slices. Cheese sandwiches and peanut butter sandwiches. Little sausages without sticks or rolls, bags of crisps and Mars Bars that Rose and Anna had bought from the local shop. And some little purple plastic bottles of something ersatz. Only the big bag of cherries had anything to do with what Rose was coming to see as her former self, and even these were unseasonal, something from which she usually recoiled.

  ‘This looks great,’ Polly said, as she popped the cork from one of the champagne bottles. ‘Bottoms up!’ She poured a large plastic cupful and handed it to Rose.

  Balancing Flossie with one arm, Rose drank her champagne. She watched the children splash in the water. They were so far away, she could only make them out because of the pink rubber rings. It looked like they were playing a game that involved using whatever means you had to try to take possession of one of the two rings. The other children in the water seemed to be giving them a wide berth. Rose hoped this was just down to the wild splashing, and nothing to do with anything they were saying. Polly leaned over and refilled her cup.

  Rose finished feeding Flossie and laid her down on the blanket, where she stayed still, looking up. Rose tried to tell herself that she was fixated on the trees above, horse chestnuts in full candle. She lay down next to Flossie, and tried to join her in her reverie.

  ‘Look, Flossie, flowers in the air. How weird is that?’

  Polly sang under her breath, one of her own tunes.

  There was no response from Floss. Rose looked up at the leaves and blossom as they swayed in the slight breeze, listening to the gentle rustle that mingled with Polly’s humming and the chatter of the people in the field. She should take it easy. She hadn’t eaten anything all day. She shouldn’t drink any more alcohol until after the picnic.

  ‘Here you go!’ Once more, uninvited, Polly topped up Rose’s cup. Despite the resolution she had made just a couple of minutes before, Rose knocked it back. She had gone beyond the point of worrying how they were all going to get home if she were drunk.

  Polly stood up and, putting her fingers to her mouth, whistled loudly. The chatter stopped as every single head in the field turned to see who had produced the piercing sound.

  ‘Fucking hell, Mum!’ Nico shouted through the silence, right across the field, and Rose heard the quick intake of breath of offended parents, as they turned to glare at the little dark-skinned delinquent in the swimming trunks.

  The three children stomped up the hill towards their picnic. Rose saw Anna forcing herself not to stare at Polly’s strange body.

  ‘I don’t like any of these sandwiches,’ Yannis said, looking at the forlorn little platefuls.

  ‘You’ve got to eat something,’ Rose said.

  Polly thrust a bag of crisps and a Mars Bar at him. The others dutifully tucked in.

  Rose didn’t feel very hungry, but she forced down a sandwich to allow herself to drink another couple of cups of champagne, working her way well into the second bottle. Polly, as usual, ate nothing.

  ‘Can we go back in now?’ Anna said, her mouth reddened with cherry juices.

  ‘You’ve got to let it digest first,’ said Rose. She was having to be careful with her words. She could feel a bit of slurring coming on. ‘Come and lie next to me.’

  Relenting, Anna snuggled next to her. Flossie nuzzled into her other side, and, lying back, Rose allowed herself to drift off, the dappled sunlight warming her face.

  She woke sticky with sweat. Anna and Flossie were both fast against her like little press studs. She was so, so hot. Prising them away, she half sat up – bleary, she thought, from the champagne and the heat. Polly and the boys were all fast asleep, lying apart, on their backs, palms up, so that if you looked at them from the air they might appear to be the victims of some catastrophic event. The boys, their f
aces red-stained with cherry juice, and the blood-red blooms on Polly’s dress added a tang of verisimilitude to the scene.

  The field was quieter now. There was a muffled quality to the sounds coming from the few children playing in the water, but most of the families were sitting with their lunches, their well-behaved offspring quietly munching on chicken drumsticks and home-made quiche, bare limbs splayed on the grass. A few groups had brought barbecues. Small drifts of smoke rose from their encampments, bringing with them the smell of charred flesh. If you half-closed your eyes, as Rose did, it could have been a battleground after the event.

  She was crazy with the heat. Taking care not to wake anyone, she got up, stretched and clenched and unclenched her hands, which had gone to sleep again underneath her girls. Woozy from the champagne, she rummaged in the beach bag and pulled our her swimming costume. Simple and black, with a tummy control panel, it had a plunging neckline that made the most of her cleavage. It was, she thought, just the right side of sensible. She leaned against a tree to pull it on, looping the straps up and under her sundress.

  Liberated from her clothing, she pulled on her beach shoes. She hated going into wild water without them. Who knew what she might step on? Holding her arms folded across her middle, she rather self-consciously picked her way across the field towards the river. Then, gasping with the cold of it, she launched herself into the bathing pool and ducked her head under, wetting her hair. She stood up quickly, her heart beating, panting with the shock. Then, again she lowered herself in. The water was shallow here, no more than thigh deep, but despite the sun’s best efforts, it still had a chill on it. Later in the summer, after a season’s warming, this pool could hold the temperature of a bath. But it was the fast-flowing water beyond that was calling to Rose. She pulled herself onto the weir, then, lying on her stomach, she slid down the algae-green fronded slope into the brown swirl beneath.

  If the pool had been cold, this deep water was ice. The shock of it made her head ache and she forgot where her toes and fingertips were. She tried to reach back to the weir, to grab on to one of the jellied strings of weed that clung to it, but it came away in her hand. Gasping, but not yet panicking, she tried to put her feet on the ground, but the river, fed by the recent rain, was too high for that. It carried her away from the bathing-place.

  She first tried to swim against the current, in an attempt to get herself back to where she came from, then, when that proved to be impossible, she tried to fight her way towards the far bank, where at least she would have a chance of holding on to something. But the cold, and possibly the champagne, made her movements sluggish. Normally a strong swimmer, she just didn’t seem able to make her strokes count for anything. Then she realised she was losing the battle. Her heart started pounding, the adrenaline sent a shock around her body and she seized up as if electrocuted. She breathed in, hugely, involuntarily. With the air, she took in a lungful of brown, dank riverwater. Coughing and waving her useless arms around, she felt herself going under, as if pulled by water babies down to their lair. A thick, bristling thing brushed her leg and she had a second to worry about pike and razor-sharp teeth before she was under and the light faded to a swirling greeny brown that crept into her limbs and over her forehead.

  For a second she gave up and felt an enormous sense of relief that she could stop the struggle, but then two strong hands gripped her, one under her arm, the other under her chin, and hauled her backwards, up and out of the water, where, like a baby being born with its passages full of mucus, her reflexes stirred into an attempt at breath. Unable to reach air, she was dimly aware of more hands taking her, dragging her over mud and stone onto grass, where fists pumped her chest and pushed into her shoulder, fingers reached into her mouth and hooked themselves around her paralysed tongue. She retched, coughed and vomited water and cherries, spluttering waste into the earth at her cheek.

  ‘Rose, Rose . . .’

  She looked up and into the eyes of her doctor friend, Kate, who was leaning over her in a Speedo suit and swimming cap.

  ‘Where’s Flossie?’ Rose tried to say, but no sound came out.

  ‘She’s back,’ she heard Kate say. ‘Rose, is Gareth here?’

  The last thing Rose remembered before she passed out was Kate punching a number into a mobile phone that someone had thrust into her hand.

  Thirty-Three

  A low orange light bled into the room from the crack in the curtains. Rose creaked one eye open. She was in her nightdress, in her own bedroom. She tried to run over what had happened, but she couldn’t get beyond the point where she fell asleep after the picnic. Her throat felt as if someone had got inside and rasped every surface with sandpaper.

  ‘Floss?’ she croaked.

  ‘Ah, you’re with us.’ Kate bustled across from the armchair, carrying a copy of the Guardian.

  What is Kate doing in my bedroom? was all Rose could think.

  Kate laid a cool hand on Rose’s forehead. She held her wrist between her other fingers, taking her pulse.

  ‘Where’s Flossie?’ Rose said.

  ‘Don’t worry, she’s downstairs with Gareth. You need to rest. You’ve had a bit of a time.’

  Rose tried to sit up, but the person in her throat seemed to have also left a few hammers lying around in her skull cavity.

  ‘What’s going on with me?’ she said, trying to hold her head still.

  ‘Apart from anything else,’ Kate said, ‘you’ve got a nasty dose of the flu. Which, in itself, would have been enough to knock you out. There’s a lot of it about, you know. I’ve organised jabs for everyone else. But you also nearly drowned through going swimming when reeling drunk.’

  ‘Gosh,’ Rose said.

  ‘How much did you actually drink, Rose?’ Kate asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rose said, shame washing over her.

  ‘If Tim and I hadn’t decided to go for a swim . . .’ Tim was Kate’s husband, a six-foot six-inch triathlon athlete orthopaedic surgeon. ‘I wouldn’t have been able to drag you out on my own.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Rose said.

  ‘I’m just glad you’re all right. I don’t know what got into you, going swimming in that state.’

  ‘It was only a couple of glasses of champagne.’

  ‘It looked like a lot more than that.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t really remember. It could have been. Polly’s a classic glass topper-upper.’

  ‘It was as if . . .’ Kate frowned slightly, then she shook her head.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, it was as if you’d taken something else as well.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Rose said.

  ‘I’ve made sure it’s too late for a urine sample, anyway. We don’t want the drugs squad around again, do we?’

  ‘I didn’t take anything. I don’t do that.’

  ‘It could have just been the fact you were ill, I suppose,’ Kate said. ‘With the booze on top.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Six.’

  ‘Jesus. Where did the day go?’

  ‘Rose, no. It’s six the following evening. So to speak.’

  Rose gasped. ‘Flossie!’

  ‘She’s fine. She’s eating enough solids now, and Gareth has been giving her bottles of follow-on milk.’

  ‘No.’ Rose turned her head away.

  ‘You’ve been awake from time to time, but you’ve not been exactly coherent. You’ve had one hell of a fever. I’ve been keeping an eye on you, though. I thought you’d appreciate not being carted off to hospital.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘None of that, now.’ Kate moved over and sat on the bed. Her hair was tied back, and her freckled face and clear green eyes made her look so clean that Rose felt like weeping, in her intoxicated, despoiled state.

  ‘Rose, are you all right at the moment?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s just – I’ve been watching out for you a little bit since Flossie . . . well, since the ho
spital stay.’

  ‘I’ve hardly seen you.’

  ‘Ah, but remember, I’m the village GP. Not much escapes me.’ Kate took Rose’s hand and squeezed it, with so much care that Rose felt a swell in her throat, as if something was about to erupt. And then she couldn’t help it: the tears came and she found herself wracked with heavy, cathartic sobbing. She buried her face into Kate’s shoulder.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Kate kept saying, holding her and rubbing her back, absorbing her tears into her clean, lavender-scented T-shirt.

  ‘I’m sorry, Kate,’ Rose said over and over. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  In the end, she fell back onto the pillows, her eyes swollen, her face streaked with snot and tears. Kate handed her a tissue, and she cleaned herself up.