Cuckoo Song

by Frances Hardinge

  ‘Girls, I want you to wait here.’ Their mother half walked, half ran to the stairs and returned a few moments later with their father, who gave them both a brief, distracted smile that did not reach his eyes. He walked into the study, and then Triss could hear him talking loudly to the operator, asking what other calls there had been in the last day.

  When he returned, he knelt down before Triss, sighed and looked her straight in the eye.

  ‘Think carefully, Triss. When was it you thought you saw Pen using the telephone?’

  ‘Just now,’ whispered Triss. His words had already told her all she needed to know, however. Not ‘When was it you saw Pen using the telephone’, but ‘When was it you thought you saw Pen using the telephone’.

  The operator must have told him that there had been no call made from their house. What could that mean? Had Pen been play-acting with the phone after all? Could she even have put on a performance, to trick Triss into looking crazy? Or . . . was it possible that Pen never had been in the study, and that Triss really had imagined it?

  Triss’s mother put her arms around her.

  ‘You’re not in trouble,’ she said very, very gently. Triss’s blood ran cold.

  Chapter 5

  SWALLOWED MARBLES

  Triss’s parents were kind. Too kind. They talked everything over with her in the front room, after her father had phoned the doctor to make an appointment for the next day. There was nothing to worry about, they told her. She hadn’t done anything wrong. It was just a silly leftover bit of illness, but they would take her to the doctor and he would take care of it.

  The doctor would see through her, she was sure of it. He would be able to tell at a glance how ill she really was. Seeing-things ill. Doll-killing ill. Windfall-guzzling ill. But none of Triss’s tried and tested strategies worked. I don’t want to go to the doctor, I don’t feel like it, it would make my head hurt, his surgery smells funny, it scares me . . .

  In the end, what made her stop trying to squirm off the hook was the expression on her father’s face. It was pained and drawn in a way she had not seen before, and made him look older. She could not bear making her father look older.

  ‘Triss, there’s no need to be scared.’ He pulled her over to sit in his lap and hugged her. His jacket was full of serious father-smells, such as pipe tobacco, hair cream, and a warm leathery scent that seemed to be his very own. It made her feel a bit safer. ‘You’ll be fine at the doctor’s. You will be my brave girl, and I will be very proud of you, as I always am. I know you’re frightened and confused, but nothing bad is going to happen. You trust me, don’t you?’

  Triss nodded mutely, her cheek against his lapel. Even as she did so, though, the memory of the strange conversations she had overheard stung her, like a forgotten splinter in her skin nudged by a careless gesture. Her nod was a lie. She did not, could not, completely trust him.

  ‘And if you’re very good and very brave, then after we see the doctor, I’ll take you down Marley Street and we can buy you a new nightdress. And a nice new party dress at the same time. Would you like that?’

  Triss hesitated, and then nodded again, slowly. A new party dress meant he still loved her and that she was still Triss in his eyes. Party dresses meant parties, which meant not being locked up in a mental hospital.

  Triss felt her mother’s hand stroking her head, and with a rush of relief she felt a sense of her own power return to her. They were worried about her, but they were still on her side. They would still do anything they could to stop her lip trembling. The feeling of safety was fleeting, however. Pen would not be satisfied with her most recent assault. Pen would be planning something new, and Triss felt her own rage and resources rallying in preparation for battle.

  Triss suffered a largely sleepless night, kept awake by her thoughts and the pattering of the rain. Even when she dipped into sleep it was puddle-thin and streaked with dreams. She dreamed that she was in a dressmaker’s shop to be measured, but that when she took off her own frock to try on the new one she found she had another dress on underneath. She took off that one as well, only to find yet another dress beneath that one. Dress after dress she removed, becoming thinner and thinner all the while, until it came to her that in the end there would be nothing left of her, except a pile of discarded clothes and a disembodied wail.

  But the dressmaker kept making her take off dress after dress, and snickered all the while, with a laugh like the rustling of leaves.

  ‘Five,’ it rasped as it shivered with mirth. ‘Only five left to go.’

  Triss woke with a lurch. Her heart banged a terrified tattoo until she worked out where she was and satisfied herself that her limbs were not made of dress fabric.

  ‘Triss! Pen! Breakfast!’ Hearing her mother calling from downstairs, Triss roused her wits, scrambled out of bed and dressed quickly. As she was dragging a brush through her hair, however, little brown fragments of something tumbled from one of the tangles. With sudden foreboding, Triss peered into the mirror of her little dressing table. Her shaking fingers teased a crinkled brown shape from her hair. It was a dead leaf.

  ‘But . . . But I didn’t go out last night!’ she exclaimed helplessly. ‘Not this time! I didn’t! I didn’t! That’s . . . that’s . . . not fair!’ Her gaze misted and her eyes stung, but tears would not come. Blinking was difficult and painful.

  I can’t have gone out last night without remembering . . . Can I?

  There were no grass stains on her discarded nightshirt, but when Triss examined the floor she found wisps of straw and little crumbs of what looked like dried mud. Perhaps it meant nothing. Perhaps she had brought them in on her shoes the day before. When she dragged open her sash window it was reassuringly stiff and yielded only with a grating of paint, suggesting that it had not been opened in a long time.

  In the square below, she watched the leaves of the park trees bouncing under the onslaught of the rain. Down on the slick, dark pavement she could see tiny, pale flickers as each unseen raindrop struck home.

  It was raining all night. I could hear the pattering whenever I couldn’t sleep. So if I had gone out, my hair and nightshirt would be wet. And that would be wet mud on the floor, not dry. I can’t have gone out.

  Her mind had been fighting off the image of herself leaping out of the window like a mad thing and rampaging through garden after garden, guzzling marrows and going through dustbins like a starved cat. Now another image sprang to mind, that of Pen sneaking into her room with fistfuls of grit and dead leaves, in order to sprinkle them on the floor and in Triss’s hair.

  Would she really do that?

  Pen hates me. She’d love it if I ran down the stairs right now in tears, sobbing about dead leaves in my hair. She wants me to look mad, so I’ll get sent away and locked up. Then she’d have all the attention she ever wanted. She’d do anything to make that happen.

  But I’m not going to let her get rid of me. I’m not going to let her win. I’ll go to this doctor, and I’ll do what he says, and then I’ll show them all that he’s made me better. And I won’t let her see that I’m scared.

  Triss brushed her hair with great care, cleaned the grit off the floor, and walked down the stairs with all the calm she could feign. She had a battle to fight.

  In the late afternoon Triss’s father drove her into town, the rain thudding against the canvas roof of the car. Every time they stopped at a junction, awaiting the wave of the white-gloved policeman ordering the traffic, a small gaggle of boys and girls in hand-me-down clothes would gather by the road to gawp at the Sunbeam.

  Each time Triss stayed quite still as if she had not seen them, gazing into the distance while rain pearled the windscreen. It was something she remembered enjoying, the sense that other children were wondering who could be riding in such a grand car. The steamed glass between them was a magic window on another world, like a cinema screen. For all they knew, she might be a princess or a movie star.

  But today she could not feel glamorous and d
id not want to be special or mysterious. She felt small and miserable, and this morning the world outside seemed large, alarming and dreamlike. The road was chaos. Bikes rattled and weaved through the surge of larger traffic, their tyres drawing brief lines along the wet road. Carts lurched, and horse flanks gleamed like varnish. Trams clanged and shuddered along their shining tracks, the faces clustered inside them as unsmiling as soapsuds.

  Ellchester was a city of bridges, and had been even before the Three Maidens were built. Her crooked hills demanded it, so that the biggest roads did not need to dip, climb or buck, but could sail serenely from summit to summit. The nethermost streets weaved through old arched bridges in ancient walls that bulged like dough, while above them stretched bold Victorian bridges with the city’s crest carved in the sides. One always found oneself looking up or down at other roads, as they criss-crossed over and under one another. Today every arch had a silver curtain of falling drips.

  Doctor Mellows’s surgery was on a steep street to the north of town, full of tall houses of murky brown brick with long, gawping windows. Triss’s father parked carefully, turning the large wheels so that they lodged against the kerb, and hauling hard on the brake so the car would not roll downhill.

  The hall and reception were pill-pink and pill-green, and smelt of clean. The receptionist with the bobbing curls over one eye remembered Triss, and gave her a big scarlet-painted smile.

  ‘Yes, Dr Mellows is expecting you. Do you want to go through now?’

  ‘I’d like to talk to Dr Mellows first, if you don’t mind,’ Triss’s father said quickly.

  Triss was left in the waiting room, where she sat feeling sick.

  Five minutes later her father came out, gave her his special smile and stroked back her hair.

  ‘Dr Mellows is ready for you now. I’ll be right here.’

  Triss was shown into the doctor’s surgery and found Dr Mellows sitting at his desk. He was a tall, grizzled man in his early fifties, with a comforting rumble of a voice that seemed to come from somewhere deep under his ribcage. She had seen him so often over the years that he was almost like an extra uncle who was brought out for special occasions.

  ‘So. How’s my little hero? How’s my smallest soldier?’ It was his usual greeting. His eyes were alive with the usual mixture of twinkle and appraisal. The only thing that was different was that there were three large books on his desk, one of which was open. ‘Oh, now, don’t look so frightened! No pills or needles today – nothing to scare you. We’re just going to have a little talk. Sit down.’

  Triss sat in a comfortable chair on the other side of the desk, her gaze dropping briefly to the books in front of the doctor. The title along the spine of one of the closed books read Studies in Hysteria. The open book had the words ‘The Ego and the Id’ across the top of each page.

  ‘Now, I hear that you’ve had a nasty fever. How are you feeling now?’

  ‘Oh, much better.’ Triss made her voice bubble-bright.

  ‘But . . . not all better? Some things still don’t feel quite right, do they?’ Dr Mellows watched her with that same steady, unblinking twinkle, the pad of his thumb teasing at a corner of a page. ‘Why don’t you tell me about it?’

  So Triss told him. She told him that she was feeling fine, but a bit hungrier than usual. She told him that she thought she might have walked in her sleep back at the holiday cottage, and it scared her a bit. When he asked her if there was anything else that worried her, she spent a few moments with her head on one side, as if racking her brains, then blithely shook her head.

  When Dr Mellows asked her about her claim to have heard Pen talking on the telephone the day before, Triss crumpled her brow, looking rueful and reluctant to speak.

  ‘You . . . You won’t make everybody angry with Pen, will you? Only . . . I think it might have been a sort of a . . . a joke. I think maybe she pretended she was talking on the phone, so I’d tell people and then look stupid. She . . . does things like that sometimes. But you won’t say anything, will you? You won’t get her into trouble?’

  She bit her lip and looked across at the doctor, and could see from his face how he saw her. Brave but beleaguered, the long-suffering victim of a more spiteful sibling.

  ‘And you’re afraid that if she gets in trouble she’ll take it out on you, I’ll warrant.’ He sighed. ‘Yes, I see. Don’t worry, you leave that with me.’

  Triss let out her breath slowly, trying not to show how her pulse was racing. Two can play at your game, Pen.

  ‘Well, good, good.’ Dr Mellows smiled at Triss, and despite his words she wondered if there was the tiniest hint of disappointment in his gaze.

  ‘Can you stop me sleepwalking?’ she asked carefully. ‘Only, everybody seems really worried about it, and I don’t want to make anybody upset.’

  ‘Of course you don’t.’ He smiled at her kindly. ‘Well, let’s see what we can do. Young Theresa – your father tells me that before you were ill you fell into some kind of a millpond, and that you don’t remember doing so – that you don’t remember any of that day, in fact. Is that true?’

  Triss nodded.

  ‘Now, how shall I explain this?’ The doctor smiled warmly and gently. ‘Suppose one day you swallowed a big marble. Not that I’m saying a big girl like you would do anything so silly. Well, after you’d done so, that marble would cause you all sorts of trouble until it was out in the open again. You wouldn’t be able to see it, you might not even work out what was causing the problem, but you’d have a deuce of a tummy ache.

  ‘The funny thing is, sometimes memories can be like that. If something happens that scares us, or that we don’t want to remember, we swallow it down, just like that marble.’ He was talking slowly and carefully now. ‘We can’t see the memory any more, but there it is deep inside us, creating problems. I think that’s what causes your sleepwalking. A . . . sort of tummy ache of the mind.’

  It sounded so harmless when the doctor put it that way, in fact rather ordinary and homely. However, she recognized something in his tone of voice. Adults only talk that way when they know you’d be really upset or worried if you understood what they meant.

  ‘So . . . I just need to spit out the marble?’

  ‘Yes.’ The doctor nodded enthusiastically. ‘Exactly. The trick is to remember. Bring the marble back into the light of day. Then it won’t bother you any more.’

  ‘But having this marble doesn’t mean I’m mad, does it?’ The question ran away from her before she could stop it.

  The doctor looked up at her in surprise, then gave a short gust of laughter. ‘No, no, no! Lots of people sleepwalk, particularly youngsters like you. Don’t you worry about that. It’s not like you’re seeing pixies in your porridge, is it?’

  Seeing things! Seeing things! He knows! He knew all the time!

  There was no challenge or scrutiny in the doctor’s eyes, however, as he smiled and shut his book.

  No. No, he doesn’t know at all. That was supposed to make me feel better.

  ‘Now, just hop up on the scales over there, and after that I’ll set you free.’

  Triss obeyed, and barely noticed the way the doctor’s eyebrows rose as the needle wobbled across the painted numerals.

  As she followed her father out of the doctor’s surgery, Triss felt a warm wash of relief, followed by a cold current of deep anxiety and self-loathing.

  Well done, Triss, murmured a small voice in the depths of her gut. You tricked him. You tricked the person who was trying to help you. So now he can’t.

  Chapter 6

  SCISSORS

  Marley Street was one of the highest thoroughfares in Ellchester, and was now lit by electricity instead of gas. Steel brackets had been clamped to the tops of the poles that held up the running wires for the trams, and from these seared a light of almost unearthly brightness and whiteness, like distilled moonlight. It transformed the street and made everything larger, louder, more vivid and exciting, as if all the shopping throngs were onstage a
nd knew it. In comparison, the mellow light from the post-top gas lanterns down the side streets left everything there looking melancholy and a bit dingy.

  ‘Lambent’s as usual?’ her father asked. It was Triss’s favourite dress shop, she recalled after a moment’s confusion. All her best-loved dresses had been bought there, after fits of illness. Her whooping-cough blue chiffon. Her three-day-fever cotton with the primrose print.

  They halted before Lambent’s, the golden letters reading ‘Lambent & Daughters’ gleaming above the window in the light from the street lamps. As her father turned away to close his umbrella, Triss pressed herself close to the great, brightly lit window, avoiding the trickle of water from the narrow awning above. Beyond the glass posed five sleek plaster mannequins with pale silver skin. They were languorous and inhumanly slender, in the very latest style, and had utterly featureless faces.

  Triss was just admiring their pastel-coloured tasselled dresses when all five of the figures stirred. Very slowly they turned their eyeless heads to stare at her, and then hunched their shoulders slightly and leaned forward, with an attitude of intense interest.

  ‘No!’ Triss leaped backwards into the rain. Her father turned to her in surprise. She swallowed hard and forced her gaze away from the shop window. If her father saw her staring, he might look over his shoulder to investigate. What if he saw them move? Or what if he saw nothing strange at all? ‘Can’t we go somewhere else this time? I heard there was a better shop, down . . . that way.’ She pointed blindly along the street, hoping that she could find some dressmaker in that direction to lend her story credence.

  ‘Really? Yes, if you like.’ Her father opened his umbrella again. ‘What was this other dressmaker called?’

  ‘I . . . I can’t quite remember,’ said Triss, just relieved to find herself walking away from the ominous, watching mannequins. She strode on without looking back, her heart bouncing in her chest. ‘The name was something like . . . like . . . it was this one!’ To her delight and relief she realized that they were passing a shop with a big metal pair of scissors suspended above the door by a slender chain, a sure sign of a tailor or dressmaker. Most of the clothes on the wire-frame dummies in the window seemed to be for men, but there were some female clothes too. Triss’s eyes flitted quickly to the twirly sky-blue letters over the door. ‘Grace & Scarp – yes, that was it!’