Cuckoo

by Wendy Perriam

  She released the ankles and pulled him down towards her on the cushions. ‘You don’t believe me, do you? I ran away to have a baby. It was your fault, really. Except I’m not having it. We’re celebrating that, as well. The death of a foetus. Did you ever have a baby – Your wife, I mean?’

  ‘Er, no. We …’

  ‘It’s safer, isn’t it? Babies are such messy things. Disgusting. They ruin everything. Heinrich … may I call you Heinrich?’ She squeezed closer to him, fingered his Victorian cravat-pin. ‘Would you be an angel and fill me up? Charles is such a spoil-sport, he says I’ve had enough. But it’s my party, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, of course. What are you drinking?’

  ‘Anything.’

  Frances was suddenly alone again. She could hear the party roaring all around her, out of key. She stuck out her tongue at a smug bronze figurine posturing on a low table. ‘Hap-py ann-i-vers-ary,’ she whimpered to it. ‘Hap-py, hap-py, hap-py, hap-py, hap-py …’

  She wasn’t sure how happy she was. The room was thick and coated, and there seemed to be two of everything, and her glass wouldn’t stay where she put it, and her head had turned into a stereo and was playing dreadful roaring music, and underneath the roar there were little niggly voices imploring her to pull herself together.

  ‘You’re behaving outrageously,’ they whined.

  ‘Yes, outrageously!’ she agreed. And giggled.

  ‘Making a fool of Charles.’ Charles? He was the tall one, with the terrifying grey smile. They must have got it wrong – you couldn’t make a fool of Charles.

  The voices were still nagging. ‘Messing up your clothes, swaying on your feet …’

  She grinned. Not on her feet – she couldn’t be – she was swaying on the floor. Just one more tiny drink, and then she’d stop. She’d only downed a glass or two, to drown the pain of her period. It was the heaviest one she’d ever had, with cramps.

  Heinrich had returned with two glasses. She struggled up to grab one.

  ‘Oops – sorry!’ Why on earth did the floor have to shift like that, when it was her turn to move?

  ‘It’s quite all right.’ How could it be all right, when that greedy red stain was gobbling up his pale oyster suit?

  ‘But I’ve soaked your trousers.’

  ‘Please don’t mention it.’ No, mustn’t mention anything – Charles had told her that. Not trousers, nor babies, nor Neds, or beds, or wombs, or periods, or Charles, or …

  She stroked a sweaty finger down his arm. ‘What do you think of Charles?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Heinrich was mopping his knees with a white silk handkerchief. She wished to God he’d stay still, instead of bobbing around like that. It hurt her head.

  ‘Charles. Charlie boy. My other half. Do you like him?’

  ‘Your husband is a very brilliant man.’

  ‘But do you like him, Heinrich?’

  ‘Well, yes, of course, I …’

  ‘You don’t like him, do you? I don’t blame you, actually. I don’t like him much myself.’

  ‘Mrs Parry Jones, I simply …’

  ‘Call me Fran. I’m drunk, aren’t I? I’m a rotter. Don’t like my own husband. I use him. I use people all the time. Charles says so. Charles says I use you. Do you think I use you, Heinrich?’

  ‘No, of course not, Mrs Par …’

  ‘Oh, listen! They’re playing our tune. Someone’s put on the Anniversary Waltz. Shall we dance?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Parry – Fran … I’m afraid I don’t dance.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t dance. The richest man in the world and he doesn’t dance. What a shame!’

  Oppenheimer had taken two steps backwards. That was stupid. You were meant to move towards people when you danced with them. Frances crawled after him on her hands and knees. ‘I don’t believe you, Heinrich. You just don’t want to dance. But I want to dance with you. Charles says we’ve got to dance. I’ve got to entertain you. That’s why I’m here. You’re his most important client and … Oh, please don’t go away.’

  She pulled herself up, using his leg as a lever, and then laid her head against his shoulder. Except his shoulder wasn’t there. Only a sort of awkward gap between them, which made it impossible to waltz, let alone stand up. And suddenly, the rhythm had changed and she had swapped partners. They must be doing a Paul Jones, because Heinrich had disappeared and the tall, terrifying one had grabbed her, with the smile. The smile was cutting her to pieces and the sharp, splintered voice had crashed into the music and was spinning at the wrong speed on the dizzy turntable inside her head. ‘Go away, Charles, I’m teaching Heinrich to dance.’

  And now there was Viv, vast and rustling in puke-green taffeta, wanting to waltz with her as well. They were tugging her in two – the stiff, steely one, yanking at her right side, and the soft, flabby one lungeing at her left. It felt strange, as if one leg were shorter than the other.

  ‘No, Viv, I don’t want to dance with you, I want to dance with Heinrich. Let me go, Viv, I don’t want to go upstairs …’

  When Charles came down again, Laura was draped across the banisters. ‘Frances unwell, darling? A touch of morning sickness, I suppose. Or is it that bug you said I had?’

  He stared past her sequins at the wreckage of his house. The Sex Pistols had kidnapped his outraged stereo; retching ashtrays were sicking up their contents on the pale wild-silk upholstery; a fourteen-stone bruiser was standing on the sideboard, looping multi-coloured streamers from the antique chandelier.

  ‘Off the sofa, everyone – we need more room. Shove that table back. Wow, mind the wine!’

  Charles groaned and turned away. He could see Oppenheimer, like some silent portrait of a cursed and hunted ancestor, cowering in the shelter of a tallboy, pale and wary, glancing at his watch.

  How, in God’s name, could he turf out forty-three barbarians, some of whom he didn’t even know; how ensure his most respected client a decent night’s sleep, before a crucial flight to Bogota? It wasn’t even midnight. The party might rollick on for hours, yet. Drinking on empty stomachs had made everybody reckless; last trains or morning church or baby-sitters, all conveniently forgotten. There were not even any clocks. Frances had removed them from the whole of the downstairs area. It was another of her crazy, new-wave whims, some Rousseau-esque rubbish she had picked up at Acton, along with her cave-man hairstyle and tomboy clothes. Clocks killed spontaneity and natural body rhythms – or so guru Frances claimed. Those she couldn’t hide, she had castrated, by insisting he remove their pendulums. Even his long-case clock was neutered now. God Almighty! A month or two ago, he would never have allowed her to dictate to him like this, mess around with expensive fragile mechanisms, in the name of some mumbo-jumbo mysticism. It was proof that he was weakening. Yet now she wasn’t pregnant, he felt he had to humour her, indulge her, even in absurdities. He couldn’t bear to lose her, not a second time.

  Besides, it unnerved him, somehow, to know that she had never liked his clocks. Why hadn’t she told him so before? In all the sixteen years they’d been chiming and pealing in what he saw as gloriously conformist harmony, she had been gritting her teeth, clenching her fists, longing for silence, or discord, or some millennial myth of sun-dial randomness. And he hadn’t even known.

  So, tonight, he had conspired with her in silencing his clocks, as if a single evening could compensate for all those jangling, booming years. Frightening, really, to see how easily their hands and pendulums surrendered, as if he himself had been muzzled or unstrung.

  It hadn’t paid. He’d given way to irrationality, and now his rule and territory were overrun, his drawing-room under siege. It was time to take a stand. His clocks must be his allies in the return to order. If he replaced or re-hung them all, their so-called guests might take a hint and go. It was nineteen minutes to midnight. Fifteen clocks, striking twelve times each, could hardly be ignored. Once he’d boomed and chimed them off the premises, he’d be left only with the Oppenheimers, and they were more
amenable. He’d bundle Mrs off to bed with a mug of charm and Ovaltine, and woo Heinrich with his strongest five-star cognac, and a man-to-man apology (wife unwell, women’s troubles, hormones playing up). Then, with any luck, bed and oblivion until the morning plane.

  He fetched a screwdriver from the kitchen drawer, concealed it in his pocket. Mrs Eady was scraping squashed piccalilli from the hall rug.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Parry Jones, but if you call this a quiet little dinner for three, then I’m the Duke of Kent.’

  He’d start with the cuckoo clock, since it was nearest him, in the hall. Frances had been unable to remove it, so she had gagged and stifled it, instead. It was one of his favourites, a collector’s piece with its carved acanthus leaves and early fusee movement. The cuckoo itself was hand-painted, with two-tone grey wings and a speckled breast, every detail perfect. He hated it to be out of action, time stopped arbitrarily at six o’ clock. He turned it round and removed the backplate. Mercifully, he was almost alone. The hall was too dark and chilly for most of the guests.

  The little spring door burst open and the cuckoo bowed its head and flapped its wings, as if in jubilation at its reprieve.

  ‘Cuckoo-oo!’ it whooped, prematurely.

  ‘Not yet,’ mouthed Charles, inserting the screwdriver into a delicate brass pawl. It was only eleven forty-six, for Christ’s sake, and he didn’t want anyone alerted until his grand finale at midnight.

  ‘Cuckoo-oo, cuckoo-oo, cuckoo-oo,’ cheered the unabashed yellow beak, dipping up and down, up and down, wooden wings flapping. Charles slammed his hand over its mouth, as he had done with Frances in the bedroom, when she kept struggling up and asking him to dance. The wretched bird was equally perverse. Its beak jabbed up and down against his palm, the cuckoo-oos spilling through it and tumbling out across the hall, rallying all the guests. ‘Cuckoo-oo, cuckoo-oo, cuckoo-oo, cuckoo-oo …’

  ‘Oh, how lovely!’ cried Amanda Crawford. ‘A cuckoo clock!’

  ‘A drunken cuckoo clock,’ corrected Laura. ‘Don’t they say pets take after their owners?’ she added, sotto voce.

  Charles was using his hanky as a gag, while he tried desperately to release the jammed mechanism. But he couldn’t halt the cuckoo-oos, only made them hoarser.

  ‘For God’s sake, stop,’ he muttered.

  The cuckoo ignored him. So did all the guests, who were thronging into the hall, as if to attend a cabaret, egging the cuckoo on with cheers and catcalls.

  ‘Pretty Polly, pretty Polly!’

  ‘It’s gone cuckoo – ha ha!’

  ‘At the third stroke, it will be …’

  The cuckoo was merciless. It had even woken Frances, who had staggered to the top of the stairs and was gazing down at the heaving, seething circus in the hall below. Laura had started cuckooing herself, and now all the mob was joining in, shouting out in unison, ‘Cuckoo-oo, cuckoo-oo, cuckoo-oo …’

  Yellow beak and speckled chest flashed up and down, up and down, as if conducting a massed chorus. How could such a tiny thing resound like that? Forty-three human throats were now outshouting it, but Charles could hear the bird above them all. However hard he struggled, he couldn’t silence it – his screwdriver was impotent. He was suffocating in hot, sweaty bodies; elbows jammed into his side, flailing hands grabbing at the clock. The whole panting, braying herd had hemmed him in. He could smell their cheap scent, their whisky breaths, their reeking underarms. Their throats were open scarlet traps, devouring him and jeering; ‘cuckoo, cuckoo’ mocking in his ears, Laura as their ring-leader.

  He grabbed the bird by the neck and wrenched it out. There was a sudden snapping sound as the metal rod broke off, and the bird came away in his hand, mute and mangled, wings rigid now, beak silent. The broken mechanism whirred on for a moment, and then ran down into a final, gasping wheeze. As if in sympathy, the whole house held its breath. Every guest stood motionless. Even Frances had stopped whimpering on the landing. The silence was oppressive, ten foot thick. Suddenly, she lurched forward and fell halfway down the stairs. Charles made a move towards her; the tiny wooden corpse still clutched tight in his hand.

  ‘Murderer,’ she shouted. ‘Bloody murderer!’

  Chapter Twenty

  Frances tried to open her eyes. Someone had glued them together, taken her legs away and left only a pair of bobbing yo-yos. She reached out for her watch, which wasn’t there. She didn’t need to look at it, knew already it was late. Winter had come that morning, and old age. She eased painfully out of bed, stumbled to the curtains and opened them a crack. There would be only bare brown earth and fallen leaves. She blinked against the glare. The sun was sizzling on to shrieking purple dahlias, the lawn blazed with emeralds, and whooping red carpets had been flung across the hot geraniums. How could the sun be so insensitive, tossing tinsel and bunting across half the world and roistering on with the party, when …? Party. She shuddered at the word, hardly dared remember it. Horror and remorse were clogging up her works like a broken clock.

  Her period was still taking its revenge. Dried blood was streaked across the sheets, and someone was dragging barbed wire right through her stomach. There was an angry bruise on her knee and another on her forehead. The entire contents of the compost heap had been emptied into her mouth. She felt sick and hollow and ravenous at once.

  She limped and crawled downstairs. The hall smelt stale and smoky. There was blood on the floor, or was it only wine? Broken glass sparkled in spears of sunlight, squashed lumps of cheese patterned the dark sofa, bloated shipwrecked olives floated in puddles of whisky. The cuckoo clock still had its back off, all its private parts exposed. The spring door was turned to the wall, so she couldn’t see the broken rod, the empty, gaping house.

  ‘Charles,’ she faltered. ‘Charles …’

  Viv appeared from the kitchen, with an overall atop her taffeta. ‘Oh hello, love. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Where’s Charles?’

  ‘He left with the Oppenheimers about two hours ago. They had to catch their plane. I stayed to lend a hand. Here, let me make you some tea. You look really rough.’

  Frances walked slowly across the drawing-room and stopped in front of the bronze figurine. That was the exact spot she had sprawled last night, drunk and out of control. She was almost surprised the cushions looked so normal. Shouldn’t they be stained – everything she’d touched in that disgusting swinish state be shrivelled and polluted? Some shrill, insistent voice was screaming in her head, accusing her, accusing.

  ‘Come and sit down, love. I’ve made some nice strong tea.’

  ‘Viv, last night … I hardly dare remember.’

  ‘Don’t! You’d had a horrid shock and were just reacting to it. Charles told me all about it. I hope you don’t mind, but he was in such a dreadful state. I stayed behind to help him and it all sort of came out.’

  ‘What did?’

  ‘Oh, you know, your … pregnancy. Look, why didn’t you tell me, darling? I could have been some help.’

  ‘I wasn’t pregnant, Viv.’ Frances spat out each word slowly, as if words were too much trouble for her mouth.

  ‘Yes, I know that. Charles explained. But, all the same, perhaps I could have … Look, I’m sorry, Frances, I really am.’

  ‘Why be sorry?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Well, I’m not. I’m glad I’m not pregnant. I’m over the moon about it.’

  ‘Frances, don’t be silly, darling. You don’t have to pretend with me.’

  ‘I’m not pretending. It happens to be true. D’you know what I did when I realized my period had started?’

  ‘What?’ Viv sugared her tea for the second time.

  ‘I laughed! I simply rocked with laughter. I couldn’t stop.’

  ‘That was just shock, another form of crying.’

  ‘No, Viv, it wasn’t. It was real, good, old-fashioned laughter. You don’t understand. I was absolutely delirious with relief.’

  ‘Relief?’ Viv looked shocked herself.
‘But I thought you said you wanted …’

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘But I didn’t. That’s the whole point – I was wrong. I’ve been wrong all my life. Everybody tells you, if you’re female, you’ve got to want a baby. So you do. It wasn’t until I saw that blood between my legs, I realized how much I didn’t want one.’ She stopped. Why did talking hurt so much? Every syllable banged against her head and made it judder. And yet she had to talk. Words were piling up inside her, fighting with each other, trying to escape and explain themselves to all the world, herself included. ‘I know it sounds crazy, Viv, after all those months of poring over charts and baby books; all the times I’ve wept because my period has come. But, this time, when it came, it was almost a deliverance. If anyone had told me that, I’d have laughed them out of court. I was absolutely convinced I wanted to be pregnant. And I did, Viv, it was true. But that’s all I wanted. Just the achievement of pregnancy – the status, the specialness. But pregnancy without a final term, without a baby at the end of it.’

  Viv kept trying to interrupt. This was her special subject which she’d studied five times over. ‘Expectant mothers often feel like that, Frances, especially with the first one. It’s difficult to visualize the baby, that’s all. If you’d really been pregnant, and gone ahead and had it, you’d have been overwhelmed with joy when it was born. All your doubts and fears would have simply vanished.’

  Frances slung a cushion from sofa to floor. ‘I’m sorry, Viv, I simply don’t believe it. That may be true for you, but not for me. Oh, maybe there’s something wrong with me – I’m the first to admit it. But my period was actually like a victory sign, a great reprieve, a peal of bells. I felt as if I’d been brought back from the dead.’

  Viv swallowed her tea too fast and spluttered through it. ‘But that was only because of the circumstances. Don’t you see? Of course you’d be relieved, when the baby wasn’t …’ She broke off in embarrassment. ‘But supposing it was Charles’ baby …’

  ‘I don’t want anybody’s baby. I was just obsessed with my own mysterious womb.’ Frances pushed her cup away. One small cup of tea was useless against the gritty thirst raging through the room. The entire Niagara Falls couldn’t wash that rank taste from her mouth. All her words seemed coated with it. ‘Do you realize, Viv, I totally believed that I was pregnant, didn’t have the slightest doubt. Yet there was no real proof at all. It was far too early, anyway. But I managed to talk myself into all the signs and symptoms. I’d almost had my labour pains by day thirty-five! I can hardly believe how ridiculous I must have sounded.’