Cuckoo

by Julia Crouch

  The last thing she wanted to do, however, was to go to Brighton. Everything there was too close to the bone for her. But she felt trapped. Stuck between the beaming faces of Gareth and Polly, she couldn’t bring herself to refuse. The trip had been so firmly arranged that there was no chance of it not happening.

  It was a strange sort of kindness, though, Rose thought, with Polly knowing what she knew.

  ‘Now you lot have got to get out of the way.’ Anna had come back in, clutching the kitten. She climbed on the bed. ‘I want my mum back for the night.’

  Gareth smiled and stroked Rose’s hair. ‘Goodnight, love; night, Floss, Anna.’ He bent over and kissed the three of them. ‘Come on, Poll, let’s leave the girls to their sleep. And I’ll take that little Monkey, Miss Anna.’ He scooped up the kitten and moved towards the door, waiting for Polly.

  ‘Good night, Rose.’ Polly kissed her on the cheek then got up and followed Gareth out of the bedroom. As she closed the door, Rose heard her laughing at something he had said.

  Anna snuggled down next to her, lifting the duvet up over her shoulders.

  ‘Poo, Mum. Stinky old bed.’

  Thirty-Five

  Rose couldn’t sleep. She lay there in a bath of sweat, sandwiched between her hot little daughters, desperate for a pee. She lifted herself up and over Flossie, almost leapfrogging so as not to wake her up. It was only the third time she had stood up in two days, and she had to pause for a few seconds to allow the blood to return to her head. Her bare feet curled under the chill of the wooden floor, as she stood silently in the middle of the room, swaying, waiting for the black dots in front of her eyes to subside.

  The house was completely silent. She looked at the clock on Gareth’s side of the bed. It was three o’clock. So she must have slept, then. She took a pee, then got her kimono from its peg and, drawing it around herself, feeling a little lighter than she had a few days ago, she cracked open the bedroom door. The landing was pitch black. There was no moonlight to help her down the stairs. She didn’t want to switch on the hallway light, so she went back to the bedroom and got the torch from her bedside table. She often used it when Flossie woke up, to avoid disturbing Gareth. It had become something of an irrelevance though, since he hadn’t slept in the same bed as her for three nights now.

  Swooping the torch across the stairs like a cat burglar, Rose tiptoed down towards the kitchen. The light made this most familiar of places seem strange and new to her, as if it had been rearranged. She flicked the switch on the torch and stood, again in the dark, straining to see if she could discern any movement up at the Annexe. All was silent; all was dark.

  She moved across the stone floor that was even colder than the wood under her bare feet, and switched on the lights that ran underneath the wall cupboards. It was all the light she could bear just now. She turned and looked around her. The room had been changed. Under her tenure, it had been ordered, with clean surfaces and everything resting in its allotted space. Now it was like it had been when she had returned from the hospital the first time. The story of last night was present everywhere. There was a bowl of vegetable peelings on the counter that filled the air with the sweaty tang of stale onions. The sink was full of unwashed pots. The food processor stood in a queue for its turn to be cleaned, old soup crusted round its edges. The table hadn’t even been cleared from what looked like a dessert of oranges. Two empty wine bottles stood at one end, with two drained glasses by their side. The chairs were spread around the kitchen; you could read exactly how each person had pushed themselves away from the table, and in what mood.

  A sound like a distant newborn baby’s cry made her jump. She looked where it was coming from and saw the kitten, tiny and fluffy, swaddled in a blanket in a shallow cardboard box. Rose had crocheted that blanket. It had been for Anna when she was a baby. Trying not to handle the kitten with the violence she was feeling – she didn’t want another dead animal on her hands – Rose picked it up and shut it in the living room. If it shat everywhere, it wasn’t going to be her problem. She picked up the blanket, shook it out and, folding it neatly, put it carefully over a chair back.

  Rose’s stomach turned and she realised she was hungry. She moved to the fridge and opened it. It was empty except for a chunk of cheap cheddar, two cooked sausages and a bowl of noodles: leftovers from meals she didn’t know about. In the door stood a pot of natural yoghurt, half a tub of hummus, orange juice and milk and at the back a couple of old jars.

  She stood at the fridge and absent-mindedly crammed the sausages into her mouth. She scooped the noodles up with her fingers. Then she took a couple of bites from the cheddar, holding it as if it were a piece of cake. Taking the hummus over to the breadbin, she finished it off with an almost whole loaf of staling bread, dunking it into the pot and scraping it around until there was nothing left. Leaving the empty pot on the crumb-strewn worktop, she went back to the fridge and applied herself to the yoghurt. She worked quickly now, washing the food down with alternating gulps of the milk and orange juice. Kneeling on the floor, she opened a drawer in the freezer and pulled out a tub of Ben & Jerry’s Rocky Road ice cream. Squeezing it out of its frozen carapace, she bit into it as if it were a giant ice lolly, barely noticing that her teeth ached with the freeze.

  Remembering from long ago how all of this went with her, she pulled out a bag of petits pois and tipped them into her mouth, sucking briefly to thaw them before she swallowed.

  She shut the freezer door and stood up, her insides chilled. She needed something to warm herself up now, so she climbed up onto the stepping stool and reached for the biscuit tins. They were still as empty as they had been when she was packing for the picnic. Still on the stool, she found a jar of sultanas and crammed overflowing fistfuls of them into her mouth, then a packet of oatcakes, which she took over to the fridge and helped down with the last of the milk.

  Feeling as if she had finally filled the emptiness, she lay on the stone floor and looked up at the ceiling. Her hands strayed to her belly and stroked its now firm, convex shape. For a second she felt nothing but a solipsistic bliss.

  But then, as she knew it must, the other feeling crept in. A dull nausea, like the smell of new carpet, began to seep into her toes and move up her body. What on earth was she doing here, on the kitchen floor, with the remains of her disgusting frenzy all around her? It had been almost two decades since she had done this, but it had come back to her like a bad dream that you can never quite force out of your mind. She sat up and crawled to the pantry, where, finding the red plastic bowl she usually did the hand washing in she stuck her finger down her throat and made herself vomit up every last trace of her session.

  Spitting out the last dregs of bile, she felt redeemed, purged, and ready for action.

  She stood and reached down her Barbour, slipping her feet into her overshoes. Taking the torch, with sour breath and lumps of vomit still catching in the back of her throat, she tiptoed up the garden steps to the Annexe. She snapped the torch off and stood completely still, holding her breath, straining to hear any sign of Polly being awake. As seemed to be the way with this night, there was no sound. Good. Rose went to open the door at the bottom of the steps that led up to the living area. She didn’t know what she wanted to do, nor indeed, fully why she was doing it, but she felt something needed to be proved. Something needed to be made definite.

  A sting of shock jolted her. The door was locked. It had never, to Rose’s knowledge, been locked before. Even when she, Gareth, Anna and Andy had slept up there, and she had been so paranoid about the silence of the countryside, it had never been locked. What was it with all the door-locking that was going on right now?

  ‘Fuck,’ she said to herself. ‘Oh fuck.’

  She rattled the door a little, thinking perhaps that in doing so she might accidentally wake Polly. If she did, and if Polly came down, Rose would find an explanation for being there at four in the morning, and everything would be all right. The sound of the loose handle on the
other side of the door would surely bring her down. It seemed to ricochet around the walls of the darkness of the night. But there was nothing, no response. Except that somewhere, not too far away, a couple of hedgehogs screeched their frenzied, birdlike mating racket.

  Rose hurried back up the steps and turned to look into the Annexe window, scanning it for movement. But it just returned her stare blankly, calling Flossie’s gaze to her mind.

  Her nerves were on the edge of her skin. Was she going to do this all over again? Was she once again going to creep around to the back of her house and spy in on Gareth’s studio? Even as she asked herself these questions, she found herself tiptoeing over the black lawn to the hulking shape of the studio. Again, the door was locked, the blinds drawn. She pressed her ear right up against a windowpane. Nothing. It was as if everyone had left in the middle of the night. For a moment that thought had her by the throat – it might be true. Then she remembered seeing the car in the driveway up by the Annexe. They must still be here. Surely?

  A chill got her, like an invisible shapeless thing that was swooping at her, behind her head. She had always been afraid of the dark, afraid of the silence of the countryside. Until the Hackney mugging, she had been happy, with a little caution, to walk about city streets at any hour of the night or day. But she had always held a deep fear of the dark of the rural night. This moment, here, right now in front of the studio, was the first time she had remembered this in all the time of their escape to the countryside. Once, long ago, before Anna was born, she and Gareth had stolen away to a small cottage in North Wales. The cottage backed onto a lake that, by day, was glorious, blue and lightly whipped by the mountain breeze. But at night, it took on, for Rose, a malevolent presence. One warm, still night, Gareth had picked up a rug and suggested they walked down to the lake. Rose, keen not to let her weediness be revealed to him at such an early stage in their relationship, had gone along with him. On the way down to the water, he sang ‘Blanket on the Ground’ in his best Country and Western accent.

  But halfway there, even with him by her side, Rose had been seized by an overwhelming urge to run to the cover of a building. She had found her feet taking her away from him, and she was charging back up the path, slipping on the grass, stumbling on stubs of rocks, unable to stop until she was back inside the cottage with all the lights on.

  And she was feeling that urge now, outside the studio, in her own back garden. She turned and, not worrying about making a noise, she fled back up towards the house. On the way, she tripped up onto the York stone terrace, barking her shin badly on the hard edge. Undeterred in her flight, she picked herself straight up and hurried towards the kitchen door.

  She threw herself inside and slammed the door shut, leaning her back against it, panting, not knowing quite what had propelled her so quickly back up the garden. Looking around at the detritus that covered what had been her kitchen, she had no compulsion to tidy up. Instead she felt a sense of defeat that bordered on relief. Scanning the worktop, she saw Gareth’s studio coffee tin. She went over and opened it, smelling its warm interior. It was empty, waiting for a refill.

  Something hit her. It was a plan, of sorts, for proving something. Moving quickly now, Rose went to the fridge to get the sealed Tupperware box that Gareth kept his special blend of beans in. Americans are so particular about their coffee, she thought. She moved over to Gareth’s beautiful old coffee-grinder and tipped the beans into the funnel contraption at the top, positioning the tin underneath to catch the grindings.

  Then she slipped into the pantry and climbed on a stool to reach the secure, high cupboard where the home medications were kept. After Flossie had been born, Rose had suffered from piles so big that they had hit the bed before her backside when she sat down. Not wishing to disrupt her breastfeeding with drugs, Rose sought the help of a herbalist, who had provided her with some dark green tablets that had rocketed through her system so violently that she had only used one. She had left the others tucked away in the medicine cupboard.

  Finding the bottle, Rose climbed down and skipped across the kitchen to the grinder. The tablets, she remembered, had a dark chlorophyll taste, but she thought that a smoker like Gareth, who liked his coffee strong and bitter, wouldn’t be able to detect it. She tipped the whole bottle into the coffee-grinder funnel and turned the chrome handle, shaking the studio tin to mix the dark green powder of the pills with the brown coffee.

  She put the tin up on the dresser shelf, hiding it behind Anna’s egg basket. Some part of her needed to think about what she had done in the cold light of day before she unleashed it on her victims. She buried the empty pill bottle at the bottom of the recycling bin, and put the kettle on for a cup of tea. She felt good now. Good enough to have a go at the kitchen. She did her usual, methodical tidy, moving clockwise from the most northern part of the kitchen, clearing, wiping and sweeping; putting some things away and straightening others. She knelt down and wiped the kitchen floor with the dishcloth from the sink. Normally she wouldn’t do that in a million years, but the devil had got her. To her it was a subversive act: the best sort, in fact – one that only she would know about.

  It was only when she moved backwards to clean the bit she had knelt on that she noticed the blood. For a second she sat back on her haunches and looked at it, wondering where it came from. But then she felt the sting in her shin, and brought her leg forward to inspect it. It was covered in blood that was oozing from a split in the front about three inches long. She must have done that when she tripped on the terrace. She rinsed and wrung out the dishcloth and, deliciously, wiped away the blood from her leg. Squinting and contorting herself to get up close to her injury, she noticed with a sense of detachment that the split went right down to the bone. She must have really bashed herself.

  Going back to the medicine cupboard, she reached down her well-stocked first aid box. She poured TCP on a gauze wipe and marvelled at the sting as she cleaned the wound. She found the paper stitches she had bought when Gareth had cut his hand during the build, and pulled the edges of the wound together, binding them tightly to each other. Then she covered the whole thing with a big plaster. She would have to wear trousers from now on. This wound, too, would be her secret. She should probably have stitches, she thought, but she wasn’t going to the hospital. There was no way she was going to leave the house now, not when there was so much to watch out for.

  She went back to the kitchen and got the mop and bucket. She had made quite a mess, she noticed now. There was blood everywhere, as if someone had taken a newly slaughtered corpse and dragged it around the place, smearing sanguine evidence on every surface.

  It took a while to clear up. It was nearly dawn when Rose took herself up to her bed and climbed back in between her daughters. It was extraordinary to her that they had both slept while she had been so busy. She reached across Flossie to open her bedside drawer. Kate’s prescription was there, tucked under a tube of hand cream.

  She unfolded and studied it. Then she lay back, staring up at the ceiling with its exposed beams that Andy had said probably came from an ancient ship.

  Here begins the endgame, she thought. I’ll see the end of all of this.

  Thirty-Six

  For a second when Rose woke, she panicked as she realised she was alone in her bed. Her daughters were gone. She glanced over at her alarm clock and realised that it was gone ten. Of course they were up. Anna would be at school. She lay there in the grey light of the curtained room and tried to recall what had gone on in the night. Her throat was sore, and her shin throbbed. She turned onto her back and felt the creak of her spine and pelvis. It felt as if she had been beaten up.

  There was the distant sound of music from the kitchen. Someone was downstairs. It wasn’t Gareth, because he always had Radio 4 on when he was in the house. So who was with Flossie? A sudden panic propelled Rose out of bed, wafting her staleness around the room. She grabbed her dressing gown and fled for the stairs.

  What she saw from the landing ab
ove the kitchen was beyond horrible. Polly was in the armchair, curled up with Flossie, reading a picture book. They both looked utterly contented, as if they had been born to end up just there. Rose gasped and brought her hand to her chest. Hearing the sound, Polly looked up, the smile she had shared with Flossie freezing on her face.

  ‘You shouldn’t be up,’ she said to Rose.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Rose said.

  ‘You don’t look fine,’ Polly said, not getting up.

  Rose went down the stairs and crossed towards Polly, holding out her hands.

  ‘Give me Flossie,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think that’s necessary. She’s fine, look, aren’t you, Floss?’

  Flossie turned and looked up at Rose, a smile breaking her face open. She looked more present than she had for weeks.

  ‘Besides which, you should rest. You’re still ill. And Rose – please don’t come down and tidy up in the night. I’m on the case. I can cope, you know. People just do things differently from you sometimes, you know?’

  Rose stood there, her mouth opening and closing like that of a fish plucked from its bowl.