Cuckoo

by Wendy Perriam

  Charles gripped the table. Whore, fuck, screw the living daylights … Words Frances didn’t even know, words squeezing between the music and wrenching it out of key. Something appalling and unbelievable had happened to his wife. She’d been turned from gold into base metal.

  ‘So you did go to that hotel at Windsor?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t bloody Windsor. Though I suppose you’d have preferred it – a royal town with a castle and a safe Conservative majority, and all the shops ‘‘by gracious appointment to her Majesty’’, and a four-star hotel with a top AA rating and a Michelin star. If you really want to know, Charles, it was a crumbling house in a squalid part of Acton, the sort of place they write ‘‘Pakis go home’’ on the lavatory walls …’

  She was crying into the fruit dish, her tears shining on the glossy yellow skins of the Golden Delicious. ‘I didn’t want to, Charles. I wanted you. But you weren’t there. You’re never there. You drove me to it. I only went because …’

  He put his hands over his ears, couldn’t bear to hear. He tried to blot out everything, the coarse, disgusting details, the gloating jubilation of the flutes.

  ‘It wasn’t even much good. Well, not the first time. After that it …’

  The first time. The phrase dropped like a stone into the echoing black hole the room had become. How many bloody times could that filthy lecher do it in a week? A hundred, a thousand? Even the radio was stunned. The German voice had disappeared, swallowed up in a frenzied surge of applause, five hundred hands clapping, a roar of adulation from the disembodied Munich audience. He picked up the knife from the table and ran his fingers along the blade. Fury was spilling out of everything, running down the walls. He watched Frances’ mouth making stupid, senseless sounds.

  ‘I must tell you, Charles, I must. You’ve got to listen, you’ve got to know what’s happening.’

  He turned his back, tried to stuff his fury in a drawer, tidy away jealousy and shock. But Frances was standing next to him, pulling at his sleeve, making him turn round.

  ‘Look at me, Charles. Listen. I did go to bed with him, but not only that …’

  Applause was still thundering through the room. Charles sat down slowly, stiffly, as if he were an invalid. ‘Yes?’ he said, seeing nothing save the pendant flashing on her neck. He shut his eyes, but it was still there, swaggering in front of him, like her preening, shameless voice.

  ‘I’m pregnant by him, Charles, I’m going to have his baby.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  The convent smelt of brown paper, a stale, boring smell, as if nobody had unwrapped it for a hundred years. The nuns had no hair and no bodies, only cut-out faces and flat, black robes which glided on castors. They never rushed. Nor ate, drank, slept, unbent or smiled. In the chapel, they chanted foreign languages and worshipped some naked oddball trussed on a cross. Their breath smelt of fusty flower-water which had never been changed.

  Mother Cornelia had cold pebble eyes set in a crazy paving face. She was sitting in the ante-chapel, her black back ramrod-straight. ‘Well, my child,’ she said, ‘you are called after a great sinner who became a great saint.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ Magda kicked a lisle-stockinged foot against the prie-dieu.

  ‘Your religious education has been most unfortunately neglected. No, it’s not your fault, we won’t apportion blame. All we’re going to do is put it right. That’s why your father brought you here, before term started. To give us a chance to catch up with your catechism, before the other girls return. We don’t want your classmates calling you a heathen, do we?’

  ‘Don’t we?’ Magda was jabbing at a loose splinter of wood sticking up on the prie-dieu.

  ‘Please try to concentrate, child, otherwise we’re not going to get through the Proofs Of The Existence Of God. God doesn’t expect you to take Him on trust. We can prove He exists, just as the sun exists, or you exist, or …’

  Magda had broken the splinter off and was poking it under her thumbnail. ‘But supposing I don’t exist?’

  The mouth pursed itself into a smaller, harder pebble. ‘Magda, don’t be insolent.’

  ‘I’m not. I’ve often thought about it. I mean, perhaps nobody exists. Perhaps we’re all a sort of joke, or a shadow, or …’

  ‘That’s blasphemous, Magda, to deny God’s creation. God made you in His own image.’

  ‘But what’s an image? Something that’s nothing in a mirror and all the wrong way round. Anyway, Charles doesn’t believe in God.’

  ‘Who’s Charles?’

  ‘My father, of course. You met him, didn’t you? He brought me down here.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ The stone face set a few degrees harder. ‘Well, we’ll have to pray for him, won’t we?’

  ‘Charles doesn’t need praying for. He’s got everything – cars and videos and stuff. He’s even bought a computer chess game with more than a million moves, stored in a sort of brain.’

  ‘Magda, we’re talking about God.’

  Magda sucked at her thumb, which was bleeding from the splinter. ‘I’m not.’

  There was a faint dab at the door. Nuns never knocked, did everything low-key; fluttered like moths, closed doors with velvet hands. A second, younger nun had entered and the two black shapes were whispering together, joined at the top like a double-bodied monster.

  Mother Cornelia stood up. ‘Well, Magda, isn’t that a strange coincidence? Your father’s come to see you. We were just praying for him, weren’t we? I’m afraid you’ll have to tell him that we don’t allow such frequent visits. He only brought you here three days ago. We have special weekends for visiting – just two a term. I’ll let you see him this time, but not in future.’

  Magda rammed the splinter further down her bleeding thumb. ‘I don’t want to see him.’

  ‘Of course you do. All our girls love to see their parents.’

  She watched as a drop of blood seeped slowly into the dark wood of the prie-dieu. ‘He’s not my parents. I haven’t got any parents.’

  ‘Magda!’ The toad-coloured eyes darted in her direction. ‘That’s quite enough. Right, we’ll receive your father in the parlour.’

  Swish-swish went the black robe in front of her. You always had to walk behind nuns. They were the brides of Christ or something stupid. Well, no one else would marry them, the way most of them looked. Mother Cornelia had a wart on her chin, raised up on a sort of stalk, and Mother Gregory had traces of a beard.

  They had reached the parlour now. Parents were always dumped in there – a cold, unfriendly room which swallowed everybody up. All the furniture stood stiffly to attention, as if Reverend Mother herself was forbidding it to slouch. There were grotty wax grapes in the fruit bowl, and pictures of Popes smirking round the walls. The Popes all looked the same, in purple dresses and fancy hats, with small piggy eyes and fingers raised in a sort of fuck-off gesture. They weren’t exactly women, but they weren’t men, either.

  Charles was the only man there. She could see his shiny black shoes and three inches of frowning grey pin-stripe. Her gaze stopped at his ankles. The nuns had taught her to keep her eyes cast down. (‘Only hussies look men in the face, Magda.’) It was safer with Charles, anyway. If you started with his feet, it gave you time to prepare yourself, before you met the ice-floes of his eyes. She wasn’t simply frightened of him, but proud of him as well. He was taller and richer and loads more important than most people’s fathers. He’d flown on Concorde fifty-three times and had lunch with the Oma of Begin, and had written a book which had been translated into Japanese so that the pages read backwards. She liked being seen with him, longed to shout, ‘Look at him, he’s my father!’ when he marched into shops in his posh camel coat and barked, ‘Haven’t you anything better?’ to the quivering salesgirls, or ordered her French wine in restaurants and made the waiters pour hers first.

  On the other hand, you couldn’t touch him. His suits were made of steel, and inside his body he didn’t have lungs and intestines and squashy, messy things like other pe
ople, but rows and rows of little drawers with labels on them – a sort of filing cabinet where his stomach should have been. He never hugged her and said ‘Wotcha Lollipop!’ or bought her sherbet suckers like Bunty’s Uncle Bob did.

  Her eyes had reached his fat gold watch-chain, paused at the middle button of his jacket.

  ‘Say hello to your father, Magda.’

  ‘Hi.’ It was not the sort of thing you said to fat gold watch-chains, but whatever you said, it was bound to be wrong. Charles was always on about split infinitives or erroneous prepositions and all that crap. Except this time, he wasn’t even listening. He had turned his asbestos smile on to Mother Cornelia.

  ‘I wondered, Sister, if I could be alone with Magda for a while?’

  You were meant to call them Mother, not Sister. Charles got it wrong on purpose. She was glad. She’d had enough of mothers – three in three months, and two of those had pissed off. First her own ma – oh yeah, she still wrote postcards – big deal, but the writing got larger on every one, and now it was only two lines and they were lies. ‘Miss you, kedvesem. Wish you were here with us.’ Well, if she bloody wished that, why not invite her over and be done with it? It was only that rotten Miklos who kept her out. She didn’t want to go, thanks, with him around.

  Then, precious Frances had flitted off as well, the very day Viv had returned her to the Parry Jones ponce-house. Charles had come back from Nassau, and looked all brown and cross and sort of simmering.

  ‘Frances isn’t well,’ he’d said. ‘She’s gone to convalesce.’

  Bilge! Frances couldn’t bear the sight of her, that’s why she’d walked out. Who cared, anyway? She’d won, hadn’t she, driven Frances from her own house? Now she could queen it in Frances’ chair at breakfast, and mess about with Charles’ video recorder, once he’d gone to work. And, in the evenings, she had him completely to herself. It was nice, the first few days. He took her to a restaurant where the steaks were as big as doormats and gave her a fiver without even asking. But a lot of the time, he was out, and even when he wasn’t, he locked himself in his study and hogged the phone. Most of the phone calls were to poor darling Frances. She’d listened outside the door and heard him saying, ‘All right, Frances, if that’s how you feel, there’s nothing more to be said’ … but he went on saying things. Once he’d said ‘goodbye’ seven times – she’d counted – and still not put the phone down. When he came out, his face was all locked up, and he went straight to the stereo and played some horrible wailing organ music. And they’d sat there all evening, choking in it, like church.

  Then he’d packed her case and driven her to this other dump of a church, and rat-face Cornelia had pressed a pale, damp hand into hers and said, ‘No, I’m not Miss, I’m Mother,’ which was crap, because she was far too old and ugly to be anybody’s ma, and Mother was a stupid name, anyway. Charles had stood with her at one end of the starched white dormitory, which was empty except for twenty staring beds and a picture of a bloke with golden ringlets and his heart on the outside. And he’d asked her a whole load of detailed questions about her mother and ‘What was it like when you were little, Magda?’ Well, he should know, shouldn’t he, and how the hell could you remember stuff like that, when you’d just been marched off to some Jesus-freak prison, and were wearing a blue serge frock that rubbed the skin off your neck?

  Christ! He was going to start it all again – the muscle in his face was twitching. The nun had disappeared, and he was leaning forward in that phoney, trust-me-darling way.

  ‘Look, Magda, now you’re living with us …’

  ‘I’m not living with you.’

  ‘Of course you are. This is just school. You’ll be back in the holidays.’

  ‘It is the holidays. Nobody else is here yet. It’s like a bloody morgue.’

  Charles shifted his chair, so that a new pig-eyed Pope glared at her over his shoulder. ‘It would be worse at home, darling. Frances is still away, and I’m working very late most evenings, so you’d be all alone.’

  She hated his darlings. They plopped out of his mouth half dead, like wet, struggling fishes. Of course she wouldn’t be alone in Richmond. She had Viv and Bunty, didn’t she, and all the animals, just a bike-ride away? They wanted to get rid of her, that was pretty clear. ‘What have you come for?’ she asked her father warily.

  He was probably going to move her somewhere else. She hadn’t budged from Streatham in all her fifteen years, but now it was all-change. First Richmond, then Westborough, and bloody borstal next.

  ‘I’ve just come to see you, darling, to make sure you’ve settled in.’ Another darling, another fucking lie. He’d never just come to see her, must be after something. Grown-ups always were.

  He was sitting on the edge of his chair, his legs stretched out in front of him, dead legs, made of granite. ‘Look, Magda, all I want is to get to know you better. I missed out on your childhood. That was sad. There were reasons, of course, but that doesn’t mean we can’t catch up now. I’d like you to trust me, tell me about yourself when you were small, fill me in on things.’

  Trust him. He must be joking. You couldn’t trust people who lied. ‘What sort of things?’ she asked.

  ‘Anything. Your friends, your mother, people who visited the house. You and Piroska lived alone, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Funny the way he called her ma Piroska. It sounded sort of weird.

  ‘What can you remember when you were really tiny?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Christ, who the hell did he think she was – bloody Einstein or something, to remember things in her cradle?

  ‘Your mother was working, wasn’t she? Did she ever bring friends home?’ He made his eyes all soulful like a basset hound. ‘Try, Magda.’

  Why should she bloody try? He’d been there himself, hadn’t he? Not when she’d been old enough to have a memory, but years before, he’d visited. A tall man who didn’t have a lap. She’d drawn him, sometimes, in her colouring book and never had to use her coloured crayons – he was always grey. Except the once she’d seen him lying on top of her mother in the narrow wooden bed. He’d been pale then, pale all over, except for his eyes. They’d gone almost black, when they saw her standing there. He’d never come again.

  Perhaps she’d been mistaken and it wasn’t him at all. Could such a stiff grey man be so soft and pink and pillowy underneath, or even take his clothes off? People looked so stupid when undressed, and Charles was never stupid.

  ‘Did you and your mother have any – er – special friends?’

  She remembered the way his legs had stuck out beyond the bed, almost level with her face, when she’d crept in through the door, and caught sight of him, feet first, crushing her mother. Miklos probably lay on her mother like that, but without the legs. He was so squat and dumpy, he hardly had legs.

  ‘Yeah, there was one.’

  ‘What, when you were a baby?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Miklos had only shown his ugly mug last January, but Charles wouldn’t know that.

  ‘He slept on my mother, right on top of her, smothered her.’

  ‘Magda!’

  ‘Well, he did. He put his hands all over her, and then he …’ Disgusting. She’d never do it. Some of the girls at Streatham did, and then bragged about it in the lavatories, and giggled and went pink. But she’d refuse to take her clothes off in front of anyone. ‘He was horrible. A Jew. A foreigner. He hadn’t any legs.’

  ‘No legs? Magda, please.’

  She looked down at Charles’ feet again. Black, smug, shiny feet. Could they ever have been naked, only inches from her face? Charles had moved his chair towards her. She suddenly wanted to hug him, like her mother had, crush into him and under him, strip off all the hard grey skin and find him pink and soft and loving underneath.

  ‘This – er – foreign chap. Did your mother ever say how long she’d known him?’

  ‘Oh, years and years.’ If she couldn’t hug him, at least she’d lie for him. These were the things he wanted her to s
ay, she was quite aware of that. He was moving nearer to her now, and for the first time in her life, she had his total concentration.

  ‘Before she knew me?’

  ‘Oh, long before.’ Perhaps he’d touch her now. She was answering correctly, she could tell. He was so close, she could smell the sharp spicy fragrance on his chin. She wanted that smell on top of her, overwhelming her. He took her hand, held it very tight.

  ‘Look, Magda, I want to …’

  ‘Time to go, Mr Parry Jones.’ Mother Gregory billowed through the door, and Charles leapt up as if he had been doing something wrong.

  ‘No!’ Magda threw herself in front of him. ‘There’s something I’ve got to ask you.’ The name had reminded her. ‘I want to use your name – Parry Jones, I mean. Kornyai is such a stupid name. They teased me at the other school, and they’ll fall about at this one.’

  Charles had stopped, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was staring at a picture of the Blessed Mother Foundress blessing a leper. Magda tried to squeeze between them.

  ‘If you don’t want me to have all of it, I’ll just take half. The Parry bit, or even just the Jones. It’s safer being Jones.’

  Charles had turned to steel again. ‘Look, Magda, names aren’t important. They’re just a legal fiction.’

  She was speaking to his back. ‘Well, if they’re not important, why do you mind?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’ He was lying to please her, as she had done for him.

  ‘So I can, then?’