Cuckoo

by Wendy Perriam

  Frances swung left at sea-level and turned along the promenade, following the signs for the Western Docks and Marine Station. The windscreen wipers panted from side to side, masking the human silence in the car. They stopped outside a dingy mausoleum, flanked by weed-infested railway tracks and muddy rutted puddles. The rain tapped a mournful requiem on the bonnet of the car. There was nowhere to park.

  ‘Think we ought to risk a yellow line?’ asked Frances. She never had, not once in fifteen years of driving.

  ‘Yeah, why not?’ Magda hadn’t seen the sea. She was staring at the photo in her passport, with its docked head, slouched shoulders. Frances had to coax her from the car.

  They struggled up the grey stone steps of the station, weighed down by massive leather suitcases. Charles had insisted on leather. It was twice as heavy, but also twice as elegant. He had bought up half of Harrods for her, in relief, or reparation; sent her off with a whole new wardrobe, a full-scale library, a battery of gifts – things he would have chosen for himself: his favourite authors, favourite records, favourite (bitter) chocolates. Magda had arrived with one scruffy bag; she was leaving with a matching set of calf-hide cases, initialled in gold italic – M.R.K. When she’d seen them, all she’d muttered was, ‘They’re not my initials, anyway.’ Most of her shabby treasures had been left behind: the football boots, the faded photo of Viv on her wedding day, the Brent Edge cords, The Secret Garden.

  They paused, for a moment, at the end of the corridor, arms aching, fingers rubbed red from the stiff leather handles. The only thing Charles had overlooked was someone to carry his cornucopia. He hadn’t been able to face the farewell himself, was too terrified of ‘scenes’. Emotion might surface, or guilt, or something equally unthinkable. The formal excuse was a business trip to Douglas, one he assured her it was impossible to postpone. Strange, he had chosen the Isle of Man, turned his face in the opposite direction and run away from them, winged north and west when Magda was going south and east.

  ‘Look at the sea!’ said Frances. She had to say something – the silence was as heavy as the luggage. It was imperative to change this last crucial day from mute overcast to sunny bright.

  Magda looked. The sea had reappeared through a gap in the wall, still grey, and almost solid like old glue. It seemed too tired for waves and tides. The girl shrugged and turned away. Too much sea. She blinkered herself along the corridor again, humping and dragging the cases down the iron stairway to the platform.

  The station was almost deserted, looked abandoned like a branch line closed for lack of passengers. The boat trains had not yet arrived from Victoria, and without them, this quayside terminal had no real life or function. Rusty rails trailed away to ramshackle sheds. A cleaner swept rubbish from a waiting-room, leaning morosely on his brush.

  ‘It’s not exactly Piccadilly Circus.’ Frances tried to keep talking. She was furious with the place, wanted to send Magda off in an atmosphere of hope and radiance, not this sullen no-man’s land. She had planned a special farewell, with the sun smiling and the clouds lifting, as she poured out all the things she had never dared; wrapped the girl in affection, as her final gift and recompense.

  So far, all she had managed was small talk. Magda had been silent the whole way down to Dover, despite every effort to distract her. They had struggled through traffic-sick miles of suburban sprawl, and out into a dismal countryside of grey farms and sodden fields, with Frances trying every subject in the book. She had moved from puppies to pop stars, from Kawasakis to karate, fallen back on fatuous topics like the weather and school food, even tackled the Top Twenty and the First Division; but the hunched figure beside her only bit its nails and fiddled with its passport. There was still time. They were far too early, anyway. The boat didn’t leave for over an hour, and they were banned from the quay until noon, marooned on a dingy platform, side by side, with nobody else and no distractions.

  She almost jumped when Magda broke the silence. ‘It’s like a cage,’ she muttered.

  Frances glanced around. Stark iron pillars frowned up to the ceiling, handcuffed into the horizontal girders of the roof, to form a prison of steel bars. The glass beyond let in almost no light. The day was overcast, in any case, and the panes themselves were stained and yellowing. There was a yellow tinge over everything – the jaundiced brick, the rusting iron, the bleary blemished glass.

  Magda, too, looked sallow. Her skin was pale and waxen, like a sickly plant dumped in a dark cellar. Frances had tried to tidy up her hair, but there was little she could do until it grew again. She had trimmed it more or less even, then bought her a pretty headscarf to conceal it. The girl had left the scarf behind.

  She was wearing new, stiff cords and a sensible raincoat. The clothes looked wrong on her, as if they had been bought for someone else, or hired out for the day. The prim brown gaberdine engulfed her, like a child swamped in its first school uniform. It had flattened her breasts and censored her curves, so that she was only a crop-haired kid again, too young to cross Europe on her own. Frances longed to put her in charge of the steward, or ask a kindly lady to keep an eye on her. But Magda didn’t believe in kindly ladies, and had categorically refused to let anyone look after her.

  She was unaware of all the dangers – rape, murder, interference with a minor. Frances shivered.

  ‘Chilly, isn’t it? Shall we have a coffee, to warm us up?’

  ‘Don’t mind.’

  The buffet was damp and fuggy at the same time. Rust-red lino clashed with pond-weed walls. They drank two cappuccinos each, spinning out hot froth in place of conversation. Magda put a coin in the juke-box. The barrier between them rose a notch or two higher, as the silence was assaulted by wild, whip-crack music. Frances was still struggling to remember her lines. She had to say something final and momentous, but all the words were trampled down by slamming drumbeats and snorting guitars, drowned in the orgiastic transports of the Clash.

  She strode over to the book-stand and scanned the rack of paperbacks. She had to give Magda some treasure to take away with her, some wisdom to remember. But there were only cheap romances, trashy thrillers, comic-strips. She piled the counter high with them, added chocolate, popcorn, bubble-gum, a pocket torch, a key-ring with an M on it. Still only cardboard rubbish. She glanced at the stale fruit pies, the leaden sausage rolls. Even the girl behind the counter looked plastic and disposable.

  ‘Haven’t you got anything more …?’ She stopped. You couldn’t buy affection and farewells in station waiting-rooms. She tossed down a handful of bank notes, mooched back to their table. Magda was fiddling with a matchbox, didn’t even bother to look up. Frances handed her the bag.

  ‘Thanks,’ she muttered tersely, and dumped it on the floor with the rest of her luggage.

  The juke-box was silent now, the four empty cups like an electric fence between them. Frances had done nothing to dismantle it. All she had managed was to burden the kid still further.

  ‘Shall we see if it’s time to go yet?’ Maybe it would be easier to talk outside.

  Magda stood up and tripped over the bag, a fragile paper bag which broke and spilled its contents on to the floor. A plastic Snoopy rolled into a puddle of cold tea. Magda left it there. She simply couldn’t carry any more. She struggled through the door with her half of the luggage, inching along the platform after Frances. The barricade was still closed. They stood outside the war memorial, drooping like the pigeons which shivered on the cold grey stone behind them. Magda had turned her back on Europe and was facing the other way, gazing along the station towards Richmond Green and Charles.

  Suddenly, Frances saw Charles standing there, not in person, but in Magda. The resemblance between them struck her like a blow. She had never really noticed it before, or perhaps she had never dared to. She and Magda rarely met each other’s eyes, always looked down, or looked away. Maybe it was the shorn head, revealing Charles’ stubborn profile underneath, his uncompromising bone structure. She had always had his mouth, that sensuous, unli
kely mouth, but now all the other similarities were almost shouting out. Even allowing for the difference in their colouring, this was still Charles’ child; his imprint and his lineage stamped across her face like initials on a set of luggage. She had never really doubted it, and now there was no doubt. Magda was Charles’ daughter, indisputably.

  Frances stood motionless, like the stiff and sculpted figures on the war memorial behind her, weeping women mourning the departed. Here was Charles’ offspring, torn from her school, her friends, her father; travelling on her own, without even the expiation she had so carefully prepared. There was still time. The station clock had turned to marble, its hands too cold to move.

  ‘Look, Magda, I don’t know how to say this, but I wanted to try to …’ There was a sudden roar behind her, and the station racketed into life. Porters poured from nowhere, crowds surged from slamming doors, announcements blared and crackled over bellowing loudspeakers. The first boat-train had arrived. Frances and Magda were almost trampled down, shoved aside by burly men and boorish women, battered by cases and rucksacks. There was no chance of a porter – they had all been immediately snapped up. They were swept along like rubbish towards the barricade. It had now been lifted and the passengers were butting through it, like a herd of animals. Most of them were foreigners, returning from a summer in Britain; French, German, Japanese, all prattling in their alien tongues. This is farewell, thought Frances, the parting of the ways. Four or five policemen were controlling the gate, allowing only those with tickets and passports to proceed through customs and out on to the quay.

  They couldn’t part like this. It was far too drab, too sudden. She hadn’t even said goodbye, and here was Magda being herded through a cattle pen, kenneled in the dungeons of a ship, without a glimpse of sky or sea. She had imagined wide horizons, leaping waves, not these prison bars, these sweaty, jostling aliens.

  Frances almost threw herself on a uniformed official. ‘Look, please let me through the barrier. I want to see my … daughter off. She’s travelling on her own, and I promised to be there when the boat leaves. I know it’s not allowed, but …’

  ‘Sorry, lady, the quayside’s strictly out of bounds. But if you walk back along the station and out on to the jetty, you can see the boat depart from there. It’s quite a tidy distance, though.’

  Frances hesitated. She was holding up the crowds. A Frenchman swore at them in German. Magda wasn’t German – she was British, the same nationality as her blue-eyed, light-haired father. Viv was right – she belonged here, and with him. Yet, she’d dealt so cavalierly with all Viv’s fears, kidded herself that Magda was simply going home. It wasn’t home. Magda would be a foreigner in Budapest, with a thick accent and strange English ways; teased and isolated as an alien in both her homelands. She’d allowed one rushed and suspect phone call, which Charles had made in private, to lull all her objections. Magda would undoubtedly be harmed. The school-leaving age in Hungary was as low as fourteen. Charles had talked about further studies at the State Gymnasium, followed by Budapest University, but supposing her mother pushed her into a dead-end job instead? Her whole future could be ruined, her life cut off before it had begun.

  And what about that telegram? She’d almost glamorized it, in the end, assumed quite arbitrarily it meant an automatic reunion between mother and daughter, with Miklos safely out of sight, and everything cosy. But what proof did she have? As Viv had pointed out, if Piroska was cruel enough to abandon her child in the first place, was it really likely she’d be begging to have her back again? Magda might arrive to a frosty, grudging welcome, to illness, poverty, or worse.

  Frances was standing like a dummy in the queue, people swearing as they bumped into her or tried to push past. She remembered suddenly the C to D encyclopaedia. ‘The newly-fledged cuckoo leaves its foster mother and flies unaided to its winter quarters. It may cross two thousand miles of land and open sea, risking storm and starvation, completely unguided, and with no assistance from its natural parents.’ She glanced at the drab brown plumage of Magda’s raincoat, the speckled jersey underneath. The child had found a porter and was watching him load her cases on a trolley. She was already half-turned towards the barricade, head down, hands plunged deep into her pockets.

  ‘’Bye, then,’ she muttered, scuttling sidewards like a scared bird, following the porter, edging out of reach, towards the sea and Hungary and oblivion.

  ‘No!’ Frances shouted. ‘Wait a minute.’

  Magda stopped, defenceless now, no luggage to lurk behind, no cases to hide her. She looked smaller, almost shrunken, as if she had crawled back into herself, only another blob among the crowds. The porter was whistling impatiently, tapping his foot, annoyed by the delay. Frances moved her lips like someone dumb and screaming in a dream. She could feel the words straining to get out, struggling to form themselves into a credible farewell, but they were blocked and panicked aliens, gibbering in a foreign tongue, who didn’t know the English for ‘goodbye’.

  She snatched the cases from the porter’s trolley, heaved and banged them back on to the pavement.

  ‘Don’t go!’ she cried to Magda. ‘Please don’t go – you mustn’t. Come back to Richmond with us. You belong with us. We want you.’

  Magda slowly unfurled. All her height and strength had been telescoped before. Now she was towering over Frances, a dark shadow blotting out the light.

  ‘Piss off!’ she screamed, tearing off the stiff brown coat and flinging it on the ground. ‘This is the last time I’ll ever bloody see you and you’re still giving me a pack of lies. Can’t you ever say what you mean? You don’t want me. You never did. And Charles doesn’t, either. He didn’t even want me to be born, so why give me all that crap about coming back with you? I’d rather die than go back to that dump! I don’t belong there. It’s not my home. It’s not anybody’s home. I can’t even breathe there.’

  Frances could hardly find her voice, a voice of ashes, dust. ‘Magda, I … I didn’t mean …’

  ‘No, of course you didn’t! You never mean anything you say. You’re a liar and a cheat and a …’

  ‘Magda, be quiet, please. We’re in a public place.’

  ‘That’s all you fucking care about – what other people think. Well, I don’t give a shit about it!’

  ‘How … dare you speak to me like that! I was only trying to help. I thought …’

  ‘I don’t want your rotten help – or anything to do with you. I never want to see you in my life again.’

  A little knot of people was gathering to watch, whispering and pointing. Suddenly, Frances didn’t care, began to shout at Magda, screaming across their dumb and gawping faces.

  ‘And I don’t want to see you, either! You’re right. I never did. I wouldn’t have you now, if you went down on your knees to me.’

  ‘Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? That’s what you’ve wanted all along – some poncy, slavering little creep, telling you how wonderful you are, to take her in off the streets and share your crappy home, giving you a medal for it.’

  ‘Anyone who lived with you would deserve a medal! You’re the most, rude, ungrateful, boorish child I’ve ever had the …’

  ‘I’m not a child.’ She was stamping on the raincoat now, trampling it deliberately.

  ‘You’re right, you’re not! You’re a great overgrown monster of a …’

  ‘And what do you think you are? A lazy slob who sits on your arse all day and never stops moaning about how busy you are, boring everyone with your stupid wingeing headaches and your little specks of dust. You don’t do a bloody thing, except complain – can’t even keep yourself. Charles pays for everything.’

  ‘You leave Charles out of this, you impertinent little …’

  ‘Why should I? He’s my father, isn’t he?’

  ‘No, he’s not.’

  Magda stared at her a moment, then swung round and kicked the largest of the cases with the full force and fury of her tough-soled boot. It didn’t even dent. She went on kicking,
again, again, again. There was a gasp from the crowd, but the case remained unscathed; shiny and impervious. Magda pummelled at the leather with her fists, tore at the straps, battered the locks. All she achieved was bruised and smarting fingers.

  She aimed one last savage kick at the case, then reeled back with a grimace. ‘Fuck off, Frances!’ she yelled, louder even than the blare of the loudspeakers.

  The crowd drew in its breath.

  ‘Fuck off yourself, you destructive little bitch!’

  Silence. Dover had rotted and dissolved into the sea, leaving only a pile of rubble, a foul and lingering smell. This was the solemn sacred leave-taking, yet all they had bestowed on each other was four-letter words and fury. She would carry that fury to the grave with her, and Magda would lug her share to Budapest and taint half Europe with it. If only she had settled for a brief, anodyne farewell – a shuffle, a mutter, a quick embarrassed wave. Anything was better than those shameful words, that terrifying outburst, those stupid sniggering onlookers. She could feel her heart still pounding against her ribs, her whole shocked body fraying and unravelling. How, in God’s name, could she have answered back like that, joined in a brawl like a fishwife, lied to an orphan kid about her father? It was too late now to make amends. There were only a few stragglers trickling from the boat-train, shuffling towards the customs hall. Once they were through, the barrier would be closed, she on one side of it, Magda on the other, forced apart by far more than a gate. A second porter was already reloading the luggage. She hardly dared look up. ‘Magda, I …’

  ‘You said fuck.’

  ‘I know, I’m sorry. I’m so terribly sorry.’

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘I don’t know what came over me. I’m so bitterly ashamed, I’ve never …’

  ‘It’s great!’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Your saying fuck. I like it.’

  ‘Magda, you’re …’