Authors: Julia Crouch

Tags: #Fiction

Cuckoo (24 page)

BOOK: Cuckoo

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‘Sit there, I’ll get us a cup of tea,’ Rose said.

When she came back from the parents’ kitchen, a mug in each hand, she found that Polly had drifted away from Flossie and was standing chatting to the mother who had rejected the pasty. Rose parked the mugs on the top of Flossie’s locker and Polly came back across the room to join her, as bright as a shot of sunshine.

‘What were you talking about?’ Rose said, handing her the tea.

‘Oh, just this and that,’ Polly said. ‘She had been trying to work out all of our relationships.’

‘Oh,’ Rose said. ‘I thought she hadn’t even noticed me.’

‘It’s quite funny,’ Polly smiled. ‘She thought I was Gareth’s wife!’

‘Who did she think I was, then?’ Rose asked.

‘Do you really want to know?’ Polly said.

‘Go on.’ Rose forced a smile.

‘His ex!’ Polly sniggered, delivering it as a punchline.

‘And how did she explain Flossie, then?’ Rose said. ‘And how Gareth has come in twice a day to see us, and brought us food and drink?’

‘Steady on, Rose,’ Polly said. ‘It’s just what she – mistakenly – thought she saw. It’s funny.’

‘Stupid cow,’ Rose muttered, sitting down in her seat and taking a slug of her tea. She stretched her legs out and rubbed her eyes. ‘Shit, I need to get out of this place.’

They sat drinking their tea and talking about the children.

‘It’s so brilliant the way they get on, Rose. It is like they’re all in the same family. Anna loves my boys.’

‘And how about you, Poll? How are things with you?’

‘I’m doing OK, you know?’ she said. ‘My widow songs are nearly complete. Gareth’s talking about having a word with the landlord at the Lamb about me doing a little preview.’

‘Wow,’ Rose said. The Lamb was the village pub, and it had a reputation for putting on surprisingly good music nights. The better Bristol and Bath bands lined up to play there, as well as more famous national acts. Once, the story went, Jarvis Cocker had done an unadvertised acoustic set, a couple of years before his renaissance. It would be a perfect venue for Polly to try out her songs.

By the time Gareth returned, Rose had told Polly all about the problems she was having with the other parents.

‘Rose needs to get out of here, Gareth,’ Polly said. ‘It’s driving her cuckoo.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ he said. ‘How about you go home tomorrow morning? I’ll come in and sit with Floss, and you can drive back, take a bath, spend a bit of time in the garden or whatever you want to do, then come back in after you’ve picked the guys up from school?’

It was a good idea, and Rose had stockpiled enough breast milk to make it work. They toasted Flossie with a drop of whisky, then Polly and Gareth left. As they crossed the ward, Rose saw how that woman might have got the impression that they were husband and wife. There was a rangy similarity to them both, an alikeness of hair and gait, that made you think they belonged together.

Rose shook herself. I really am going crazy in this place, she thought.

Later that evening, the Ward Sister came round to check on Flossie. Rose told her the plan for the next day, asking her what she thought. The Sister looked at Rose as if she were some kind of imbecile.

‘You don’t have to ask our permission, you know,’ she said. ‘Twenty years ago, the parents wouldn’t have been here except for visiting hours and, in my opinion, it allowed us to do our job far more efficiently.’

Rose laughed, as if the woman were joking, but the look on her face made her realise she was serious, so she stopped.

That evening, Rose sat and watched Flossie, who looked right back at her.

Was she imagining things, or was there something different about her baby? Something missing? Before the pills, every day had seen Flossie grow more into focus, a baby on her way to becoming a toddler. But now it seemed as if the process had been reversed. There was a sort of blur about her now.

Now Flossie was awake, the doctors could be more definite about her prognosis. It was clear, for example, that they could rule out severe cognitive or physical impairment. But when it came to the more subtle effects, they couldn’t be so sure. The damage, if any, they said, would probably be slight – an occasional stutter, perhaps, or a tiny setback in her reading age. Or there might be no discernible difference. In any case it would be hard to tell what was a result of the poisoning and what would have happened anyway.

It was all most unsatisfactory. Rose wanted the empirical results she loved so much. Not knowing was like a footing was missing from her foundations. From a world that had promised everything, now nothing seemed certain at all.

Twenty-One

The next day, as planned, Rose drove home, leaving Gareth with Flossie. When she arrived, she took one look at the house and wished she had stayed in the hospital. Anna and the boys were all at school, and Polly was probably still in bed. The place was deserted.

The kitchen was in chaos. A cake with one slice cut out of it stood, uncovered, in the middle of the table. Around it was a jumble of packets of flour, dirty mixing bowls, eggshells and used cups. It looked as if the cake had made itself. The floor was covered in a drift of peelings and flour. Jam jars of daffodils, pussy willow and catkins stood on every surface, their water rank and stagnant: the kind of water you knew would smell of death. The clothes basket stood in the middle of the floor, full of screwed-up, damp washing that was beginning to smell musty. Rose took the whole lot through to the pantry and set it going through another wash cycle.

Then she went upstairs. Every bed was unmade, including hers and Gareth’s. Defeated, she threw herself onto the rumpled sheets. None of this should matter, but it did. She had been away less than a week and everything looked, smelled, felt different. Surely that couldn’t just have happened so quickly of its own accord – without some sort of effort on someone’s part?

She batted these thoughts away. She was tired and this was all strange. She closed her eyes and drifted off. Twice she jolted awake, thinking that the beeping of Flossie’s machines had stopped. Each time it took her a while to think through where she was, and why she was staring at a white wall instead of a beige curtain.

When she woke for good, her face was jammed up against the pillow, resting in a patch of her own drool. She lay very still, her eyes focusing slowly on the white pillowcase. They came to rest on a foreign object: a single, long, dark hair, right against her cheek. Her brain caught up with her vision and registered just what she was looking at. She sat up and examined the hair, holding it up against her own, which was shorter, mousier. There was no doubt about who this stray belonged to.

Polly’s head had been on this pillow.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Rose,’ she heard herself say out loud into the silence of the room. Polly must have been up in the bed reading to the children. Anna had probably dragged her up here for a bedtime story. Rose had to work very hard to conjure up an image of Polly, with the children gathered around her, sharing a book. And even if she could bring herself to believe it, stomaching it was completely beyond her. It would be as if Polly were being Rose, and Rose found that almost revolting. It put a scent in her nostrils of the time the burglars shat on the Hackney floor.

Rose pulled the duvet right back and closely inspected the rest of the bed. There was one pubic hair on Gareth’s side – his, she decided with relief after a close inspection. There was nothing else, except the old black mark from a time when, a little drunk, she had fallen asleep in bed over a shopping list, letting her pen bleed into the sheets. She had never been able to get that mark out.

Then Rose got down onto her knees on the bed and pressed her face to the sheets, running up and down them, sniffing like a curious dog might at the rear end of a bitch. She was certain that there was a tinge of Polly to them. But then she had the physical evidence of the hair, and if she had actually been in the bed – which she had – then of course it would smell of her.

Rose sat on the bed, twisting the hair around her scarred index finger, winding it tight until the tip grew white. Then she glanced across the room at the big mirror to her side of the bed and caught sight of herself, hair awry, eyes open a little too wide.

She smiled at her reflection. ‘You’re being absurd,’ she said out loud to herself.

She pulled the Polly-hair until it snapped. Cooped up in that ward, she had quite clearly lost the art of perspective.

She got up, shook the duvet and plumped the pillows. Then she went to the bathroom, cleaned the bath and ran herself a deep, hot tub. She washed her hair and every part of her body. Then she lay back in the water, counting the puffs of cloud through the skylight above the bath. She was on her way to feeling reborn. The world began to settle. She tingled with the feeling of work to do. Soon she would have order restored, and then they could all move on ahead.

She got out and cleansed, toned and moisturised her face. She rubbed body cream on her body, foot cream on her feet, hand cream on her hands and elbow cream on her elbows. After a moment’s hesitation, she decided also to put the elbow cream on her knees.

It was time to get on. She went, naked, to the bedroom to get her kimono from the hook on the back of the door, but it wasn’t there. Possibly Gareth had put it away somewhere. She searched through her drawers, but it wasn’t there, either. The kimono was special to her, and quite valuable. Perhaps Anna had needed it for comfort? She told herself not to worry. Gareth was sure to know what had happened to it.

Instead, she pulled on some tracksuit bottoms and a long-sleeved tee. She went down to the kitchen, put the radio on, then cleared everything up, scrubbing down the cleared floor, table and work surfaces. She put fresh water in the vases, gagging as she tipped away their old contents – her suspicions about the smell had been well placed. A closer look at the cake showed it to be heart-shaped, studded all over with little sugar flowers, with
Rose
written on it in a wobbly, child’s icing hand. Anna’s work, Rose thought, smiling. She cut herself a slice and sat down with a cup of tea, looking at the light dappling on her herb garden. The chives were beginning to sprout their purple tufts already. Should she remove them and keep the herb for cooking, or let them grow on as flowers?

Then, guiltily, she remembered Flossie. There were more important things to worry about than flowers on herbs.

A flash of pink drew Rose’s eye up to the Annexe door. It was Polly, wandering down the steps towards the house, singing to herself. She looked rumpled, as if she had just risen from sleep. But what Rose particularly noticed was that she was wearing her kimono, drawing it around her, stretching it tight across her hips, belting it up as if it belonged on her.

She came into the kitchen and, without noticing Rose, went straight to the coffee-machine.

‘I was looking for that,’ Rose said.

Polly jumped. ‘Oh, I didn’t see you there! Hi, Rose,’ and she went over and put her arms round her and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Want a coffee?’

‘I don’t do coffee,’ Rose said.

‘Oh yes, sorry, of course, I forgot. I’m still half-asleep!’ Polly chirped. She turned to the machine and performed the coffee preparation ritual as perfected by Gareth. Grind, scoop, fill, level off, switch, froth, steam.

‘I was looking for my kimono,’ Rose said.

‘What? Oh God, I’m sorry. I meant to put it back, but you beat me to it,’ Polly said. ‘I had a bath down here and didn’t want to put my dirty clothes back on, but I didn’t want to go up the garden in a towel and frighten the neighbours, so I just grabbed this off your bedroom door. You don’t really mind, do you?’

Rose did mind, but she didn’t say anything. ‘That level of modesty doesn’t sound like you.’ She forced a smile.

‘Well, you know, it’s the countryside. When in Rome,’ Polly said, using Gareth’s wooden spatula to scoop froth from the milk jug onto her coffee.

And what neighbours? thought Rose. No one overlooked their house and garden. That had, after all, been the point of moving out here.

‘Do you like the cake?’ Polly said. ‘Anna spent hours on it.’

BOOK: Cuckoo

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