Cuckoo (41 page)
‘Look at me,’ Polly giggled to herself.
Rose went over to the door, where the boys had dropped their bags. She picked them up and, leaving Polly, she went to put them on the kitchen coat hooks, fishing out their lunchboxes on the way. Then she returned to the table to resume her shopping list.
She chewed the pencil until her mouth was full of slivers of wood, sharp shards of paint, and charcoal-crunchy pieces of graphite. She was at the point of beginning to write when Gareth came downstairs with Flossie.
‘I’ve let the boys stay up there with Anna for a bit,’ he said. ‘But she’s pretty sleepy. They gave her some wild painkillers.’
‘Good,’ Rose said, without looking up.
‘You’ve got to take it easy, Rose,’ he said, sitting Flossie on her play mat.
‘She can’t sit up any more, Gareth. You have to prop her up with cushions,’ Rose said. ‘Or she’ll topple over.’
Gareth went through to the living room to fetch some cushions. He had been gone a few minutes when, as Rose had predicted, Flossie listed to the left then rolled onto her side, cracking her head on the stone floor.
‘Gareth!’ Rose shouted, rushing over to scoop up Flossie, who was silent, drawing her breath in with shock, the stunned calm before the storm of the wail she was summoning from somewhere deep inside.
Gareth came back into the kitchen, a couple of cushions in his hands.
‘I said she’d fall over.’ Rose looked at him. He tossed the cushions over to the mat.
‘I’ve got to get back to work,’ he said. ‘Have you seen my coffee tin? I can’t find it anywhere.’
With a small thrill, Rose remembered doctoring the coffee. With the bawling Flossie tucked under one arm, she reached up behind the basket of eggs and gave it to Gareth.
‘What’s it doing up there?’ he asked.
‘Just keeping things tidy,’ she said, bouncing Flossie up and down to try to calm her.
‘OK, then. Bye,’ he said, clearly keen to get out of the house, away from the screaming child and the accusing wife.
‘Supper at seven,’ she said. Putting Flossie on her knee, Rose returned to her list. Gareth hurried out of the back door, clutching his coffee tin. If there was one thing Rose could say about her husband, it was that he was a creature of habit.
A little while later, Polly came through with the laptop.
‘I think I’ll go up to the Annexe, do a little writing,’ she said, stretching herself like a cat in the sun.
‘Careful with Gareth’s laptop,’ Rose said.
‘I’ll drop it back in the studio,’ Polly said. ‘I can’t use these things for writing. A pen and paper’s the technology for me.’ She slipped towards the back door.
‘Polly,’ Rose said after taking a deep breath.
Polly stopped and turned to face her, one hand on the doorknob.
‘Have you got any plans yet?’ Rose said. ‘About what you’re going to do and all that?’
‘I’m working on it.’ Polly’s smile vanished. ‘Watch this space.’ Then she moved quickly out of the door and down the path towards Gareth’s studio.
Whatever, Rose thought. She couldn’t say she hadn’t tried to start the conversation.
She sat and looked around at the kitchen, as if scanning a room full of strangers. She had the odd feeling that it had nothing to do with her. For the first time she could look at the scrubbed wooden worktop without thinking she needed to give it another coat of oil. The wear and tear on it was merely evidence. The copper-bottomed saucepans suspended from the ceiling rack looked like dead things, the shining ladles, spoons and tongs that peopled the wall beside the Aga the instruments of their downfall.
She supposed, then, Polly and Gareth having disappeared to their work, that she was in charge of all the children again. But it didn’t feel like it had before, when she had enjoyed her role as the mother of the house. Things had fallen apart. It was as if she had been brought in because of the
absence
of a mother. She had the feeling that there was a vacuum where the woman she had thought she was once stood, and that she was now beside it, looking on.
absence
of a mother. She had the feeling that there was a vacuum where the woman she had thought she was once stood, and that she was now beside it, looking on.
In that case, she thought, who fills the space I occupy now? And this was a question she really couldn’t bring herself to answer.
Thirty-Eight
Unable to leave Anna alone, Rose called the boys to send them up to the village shop with a list and two twenty-pound notes. She also gave Nico her wicker shopping basket. It made her smile to watch him bridling at the feminine nature of the thing. At first, he tried to sling it over his shoulder like an unyielding, awkwardly-shaped duffel bag. In the end, he had to carry it in the only way possible: tucked into the crook of his arm.
‘Like Little Red Riding Hood,’ Rose said, rubbing it in as he scowled back at her. Yannis giggled behind his hand.
‘Shut up, runt,’ Nico snarled. But Rose had to give him his due. He strode as manfully as he could up the steps to the lane. From the set of his shoulders, she saw that he was prepared to face any peer ridicule, with fisticuffs if necessary.
The sight melted her heart. What on earth was she doing, taking it out on these two bereft boys? And, to make her actions even more despicable, she couldn’t – or rather wouldn’t – put her finger on what exactly the ‘it’ was that she was taking out.
The kitchen had filled with the meaty stink of a full nappy, so Rose tucked Flossie under her arm and took her up to her bedroom, where Anna was dozing. Rose had partly forgotten about the eye, and the sight of her daughter all patched up took her breath away for a second.
At the sound of her, Anna stirred and opened her good eye, looking up at her.
‘It hurts, Mum.’
Rose lay the stinking Flossie on the bed and picked up the packet of pills that Gareth had dangerously left on the side. She read that one to two were to be taken every two to three hours depending on the level of pain. She double-checked that these pills had Anna’s name on – that they hadn’t somehow been replaced by Polly’s medication – and then she checked the time. It had been at least two hours since she had gone downstairs to take control, so it was safe to give Anna the pills. But where on earth had the two hours gone? And had she succeeded? Was she back on top?
She swept her hands across the front of her apron, brushing away some invisible crumbs, then sat down and passed the pills to Anna, along with some water that had sat in a glass beside her bed for days. It had developed little bubbles of oxygen that clung to the side of the glass, trying to escape the staleness within.
‘Poo, Mum,’ Anna said, wrinkling her nose.
Rose had forgotten about the nappy. She got up and lay Flossie on the changing mat on the floor, peeling off her leggings then the sodden, bulging nappy. It was a hell of a weight. Rose had always insisted on using real nappies, but when she was ill she supposed that Gareth and Polly had decided to switch to low-maintenance Pampers.
Gareth and Polly.
‘Throw me the wipes,’ she said to Anna, pointing to the plastic pack sitting on the floor down by Rose’s side of the bed. It was beginning to look like a self-service sick room in her bedroom. There was an aura of unwashedness about it that even the vileness of Flossie’s nappy couldn’t overwhelm.
Rose carefully cleaned the light brown goo from around Flossie’s bottom, breathing through her mouth. The smell of shit – even that of her own daughters – made her gag. She held up her baby’s fat little legs, lifting her pelvis off the mat and reaching right round to where the nappy mess had crept up her back. Flossie lay there like a big doll, allowing herself to be moved back and forth. Where was her fight? Rose was sure she could remember epic battles to change Flossie before the hospital stay. She glanced over at Anna, who was lying back like a wraith against the pillows, like Munch’s
Sick Child
.
Sick Child
.
Rose let her head fall to her chest and felt the throb of her shin. The malnourished fatigue of the recently recovered sank through her bones.
How damaged we all are, she thought.
‘I think I’m feeling a little better,’ Anna piped from her pillow. ‘Can I get up now?’
‘Let’s leave it a bit,’ Rose murmured. ‘Come down for supper if you feel up to it.’
‘I want to watch telly, though,’ Anna said. ‘With Nico and Yannis. I’m bored up here.’
Rose got up with the stinky nappy in one hand, a freshly powdered and changed Flossie grasped under her arm with the other, as if she were carrying a rolled-up blanket or a bunch of firewood.
‘Well, if you can’t amuse yourself up here, I suppose you’d better come down then,’ she said, a little peevishly. ‘But I can’t help keep you occupied. I’ve got supper to make.’
‘Thanks, Mum,’ Anna said, a little taken aback by what, for Rose, amounted to an outburst. She cautiously got out of bed, tucking her feet into her slippers and shrugging her shoulders into her dressing gown. She did all of this with a level of self-consciousness, as if she were trying to convey to her mother what a good girl she was.
Relenting a little, Rose added, ‘You can help me out by keeping your sister amused.’
‘Of course,’ Anna said, relieved to be allowed back into her mother’s favour.
Anna had to take it carefully on the stairs. She found that, with one eye bandaged, she had difficulty judging distances. So Rose helped her down, holding her hand all the way.
When they got down to the kitchen, Rose saw the two little boys returning from the shop, marching down the steps to the front door, swinging the basket between them. They were bickering, but the looks on their faces suggested that, for once, there was a goodnaturedness to it.
They burst into the kitchen, spilling their boyish energy through the door. Nico put the basket on the table, and fished the crumpled list from his jeans pocket.
‘One kilo of organic lamb mince, check. Onions, garlic, rhubarb, spaghetti, tinned tomatoes – Napolina only – FRESH parmesan, semi-skimmed organic milk, pot of double cream, rolled oats and a dozen free-range organic eggs, check. But they didn’t have Maldon Sea Salt,’ he said, ‘so I just got table. I hope that’s OK.’
‘Thank you, Nico. That’s fine,’ Rose said. Of course, table salt wasn’t the same thing, but it was a practical decision on Nico’s part, and she was grateful to him for having shown such initiative. She was sure that, put in the same position, Gareth, for example, would not have bought salt at all.
‘Here’s the change, Rose,’ Yannis said, piling the coins on the table. ‘Seven pounds and thirty-one pee.’
Rose looked at these boys and, where she had seen damage in herself and her own daughters, in them she saw only potential for goodness and growth. If there was something she needed to cling on to, it was here, in these two wiry bodies.
‘Now, go and amuse yourselves, you lot, while I get supper on.’
As Rose set about making meatballs and tomato sauce, the kitchen began to look a little more familiar to her, as if it were that of the house she had grown up in and to which she had now returned. Of course, it was no longer possible to return to the house she had actually grown up in; it had long since been sold, when her parents turfed her out and left her to fend for herself. And look how well she had done out of that. She wished they were still alive, just so that she could show them all of this – the house, the garden, the life. Just so she could rub their noses in it.
She had reached the simulacrum of a truce with her mother and father in their last few years. It was the birth of Anna that had brought them round. A child that everyone actually wanted on this earth was finally acceptable to them. The sheer hypocrisy of it made her seethe, though. Even now, at such a remove, she felt a clenched fist draw back inside her as if on a spring, like a pinball striker. At any moment the handle might be let go, and all hell break loose.
She wondered if perhaps Brighton was such a bad idea that she would have to refuse to go. But what appeared outwardly to be a threat also contained strengths and opportunities. Yes, it could be a release, in that awful Pollyesque psycho-babble,
to face up to her demons
. But the practical side of her also saw that the trip would give her the ideal circumstances in which to talk to Polly, to begin to move her on and out of their lives. It could provide the starting-point for her own family – and even, if she played her cards right, the boys as well – to resume filling their beautiful house with the perfection that they had originally ordered for it.
to face up to her demons
. But the practical side of her also saw that the trip would give her the ideal circumstances in which to talk to Polly, to begin to move her on and out of their lives. It could provide the starting-point for her own family – and even, if she played her cards right, the boys as well – to resume filling their beautiful house with the perfection that they had originally ordered for it.
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