Cuckoo Song

by Frances Hardinge

  Violet peered at Trista through narrowed eyes.

  ‘I . . . saw him that night,’ she said carefully. ‘The night of the snows.’

  Trista did not ask who ‘he’ was, nor did she exclaim or prompt. She came over and sat by Violet’s bed, giving her friend a silence to fill.

  ‘It was bitterly cold in the hospital, and the sisters had run out of blankets to pile on us. And then the windows all burst open, and the rooms filled with the blizzard. Not just gusts of flakes, but a real snowstorm so thick it was as if we were all outside. I felt as if the world had melted away, and all that was left was Winter, with me and my bed in the middle of it.

  ‘Then I saw a figure walking towards me, through the snow. And it was . . .’ Violet trailed off, and laughed under her breath.

  There was a long pause, and Trista realized that no more tale would be told. There was only a snow-blank page for her to fill in herself.

  ‘And . . . he seemed . . . happy?’ was all she could think of to ask.

  Violet gave the slightest nod, and a very small smile that made her look younger and slightly shy.

  ‘He says he likes my hair short,’ she said, under her breath.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about the watch.’ Trista bit her lip, then made herself unbite it. The mannerism gave her a funny feeling now that she had seen Triss do the same thing. ‘It was mainly linked to . . . to him through his hair. But it was linked to you because it was yours, and because he wanted you to have it. That means it still is linked. I’ve stopped time running out for me, but it’s possible I did the same for you. I . . . don’t know what that means.’

  Violet pondered this, brow creased, hands behind her head, then finally gave a shrug.

  ‘Well, it isn’t stopping me healing. It sounds as if we’ll have time to think about that anyway.’ She grinned. ‘And potential immortality isn’t the worst problem we’ve had to face recently, is it?’

  There was a knock at the door.

  ‘Miss Parish?’ A nurse put her head around the door. ‘Those visitors you’re expecting – they’re here.’

  Despite herself, Trista found herself straightening and readying her mental armour as the Crescent family entered the room. The armour was almost immediately dented as Pen pelted across the room and flung her arms around her.

  ‘Trista!’

  Trista picked her up and swung her to and fro so that her legs waggled in the air, then remembered that she was displaying strength unusual for a slight eleven-year-old girl. The other three members of the Crescent family waited by the door, looking pale-faced and uncertain as if they thought there might be lava under the floor.

  It was Piers, of course, who braved the lava first, finding a chair for his wife to sit down, then walking over to shake Violet’s hand and ask if she was being well looked after.

  It was Piers also who went on to talk and talk, filling the gaping silence that was waiting to happen. His voice sounded confident, but Trista knew him too well to believe that. He was treading carefully, knowing he was walking along a riverbank full of sleeping crocodiles. All the while, Violet listened with a crocodile smile, and helped him with a wry remark now and then.

  Trista was not really listening. She was looking at the Crescents, watching for hints and signs. Their little family jigsaw had been torn apart, and the pieces had suffered strange adventures, growing into new and unexpected shapes. Yet there they were, sitting in the same pose as the newspaper photo, the classic family. Mother demurely seated, children on either side, father standing behind with one confident hand placed on the mother’s chair. Had the pieces been slammed back into place, forced to take up the same shapes as before and form the old picture? Would they pretend that nothing had happened?

  No. She did not think so. A few tiny changes caught her eye.

  Pen was bold and impulsive as ever, of course, but she was not silenced at every step. Her parents occasionally muttered a restraining or reproving word, but it no longer had the same reflexive force, the same weary exasperation. The reins seemed to have slackened, and Pen’s boisterousness was enthusiastic instead of angry.

  Celeste looked older. There was something slightly off-kilter about her, as if she had lost her balance and was not sure how to regain it. She tried to give Trista a smile, but it fractured and went wrong, and Celeste dropped her eyes. Looking at her face, Trista could only think of Celeste walking out of the farmhouse kitchen, and shutting the door behind her so that horrors could happen.

  I don’t know why I find that harder to forgive than Piers, who was ready to throw me in the fire. Well, at least he was willing to face up to what he was doing. But I do feel sorry for her. She will always be the person who walked out of that door . . . and she knows she can never come back through it.

  There was a hollowness in Piers’s confidence now. He halted himself now and then, glancing at others to gauge their feelings, their approval or disapproval.

  And then there was the fourth member of the family, in her powder-blue dress and hat, sidled up against her mother’s arm, the tip of her nose red and a thick scarf wound under her chin.

  How did anybody ever mistake us for each other? I’m taller than her! No, perhaps I just stand up straighter than she does.

  It was still eerie, looking into a face that was so like her own, and yet animated by another mind. Triss clearly found the experience unnerving too. Her eyes glassed over as she looked at Trista, then she dropped her gaze and gave a little involuntary shudder.

  Trista felt a pang of hurt, but rallied. She saw me walk out of the Grimmer, she reminded herself. I frightened her family, and tore apart her room, and ate her dolls, and made her sister like me, and pushed her into a river. No wonder she’s scared of me.

  Then Triss lifted her eyes again, met Trista’s gaze and hesitantly managed a small smile. It was a bit nervous and tight-lipped, but still a real smile, not a parentally enforced smile-to-show-you’re-friends-now.

  Trista smiled back, guessing that her own smile looked much the same.

  ‘Obviously, there are problems,’ Piers was saying. ‘If you and young . . . Trista stay in Ellchester, both of you are likely to be hounded by the papers. Idle people, foolish questions – you know how unpleasant such things can be.’

  ‘I can see it might be embarrassing to have to explain how you grew a spare daughter overnight,’ remarked Violet, with a paper-thin air of sympathy. ‘Perhaps you could claim that one was a draft version?’

  ‘Miss Parish, you understand the way people’s minds work, the sort of scandal—’

  ‘Oh, I think I understand what you’re worried about, Mr Crescent,’ said Violet with a slightly unpleasant smile.

  ‘Our family owes you both a great deal,’ Piers went on. ‘And we want to make sure young Trista has the best possible prospects. There are excellent schools—’

  ‘Boarding schools?’ asked Trista. Her reward sounded a lot like being locked away and tucked out of sight.

  Without even thinking about it, she reached out for Violet’s hand, knowing it would be there. It was, and curled warmly around hers.

  ‘No boarding schools,’ said Violet. ‘She needs a home – people that understand who and what she is.’

  The Crescent parents exchanged appalled glances. They began the terrible, apologetic disclaimers, trying to explain without explaining. Of course we would love to have Trista, but . . . but . . . but . . .

  ‘Why?’ demanded Pen. ‘Why can’t she come home with us?’

  ‘Because she’s coming with me,’ answered Violet.

  There was more talk after that of course. Piers would help. Lawyers, adoptions, a story – perhaps that Trista was an orphaned daughter of one of Sebastian’s comrades? If Violet was looking for work in London, Piers could provide references, contacts, possibly even a place somewhere. Trista could only think about the strong, long, nicotine-stained hand holding hers.

  ‘And . . . if we can help with money . . .’ Piers suggested.

&nbs
p; Trista’s ‘no’ coincided with Violet’s ‘yes’. Trista glanced at Violet and changed her own ‘no’ to a ‘yes’.

  ‘Well, we should let you both get some more rest.’ Celeste rose from her chair. Her ever-busy fingers made their usual adjustments to Triss’s clothes, pulling her scarf warmly around her, drawing her protectively close . . .

  . . . and without unkindness, Triss pulled away from her mother slightly. She did not even appear to notice she was doing so.

  ‘Mother,’ she said shyly. ‘Can I . . . talk to Trista alone? In the garden?’

  They walked side by side, darting only occasional glances at each other. On an unvoiced impulse they had linked hands as they left the building, and were now uncomfortably connected. Sometimes Trista felt Triss try to pull away, and reflexively tightened her hold. At other times the strangeness of it made Trista want to let go, only to find Triss hanging on stubbornly.

  ‘Thank you for rescuing me,’ said Triss at last.

  ‘That’s all right.’ Trista gave her a sideways glance. ‘Sorry about pushing you in the river.’

  ‘You could have asked me to jump,’ Triss replied in a small voice. ‘I would have done.’

  ‘Would you?’

  The Triss that Trista could remember being would not have jumped. She would have wailed, clung to somebody and demanded to be taken home. But that was Triss before she was kidnapped by the Architect, not the girl who stood before her now.

  I only remember the Triss she was, not the Triss she is now. And people can change a lot – sometimes in as little as a week.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Triss said quickly. ‘I really wanted to ask you something. When you’re in London, can we write to each other?’

  Trista was taken aback, startled by the idea of receiving letters in her own handwriting.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, as soon as she had recovered her wits. ‘I . . . can’t promise I won’t eat some of your letters. I lost a lot of my stuffing, and I don’t know what will happen if more falls out. I would like to write to you though.’ She paused before continuing. ‘I already promised Pen I would send her letters.’

  ‘Pen misses you.’ Triss looked down. ‘Every time she looks at me, I know who she would like me to be.’ Her expression was one of thinly veiled hurt.

  ‘Pen just needs an older sister,’ Trista said quietly.

  ‘But . . . but I’m her older sister!’ exclaimed Triss, her eyes shiny with tears of frustration and sadness.

  ‘Then steal her back from me.’ Trista smiled her thorny smile. ‘Be her big sister.’ They walked on, and Trista gave Triss another curious glance. ‘Do you think your parents will mind the two of you writing to me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Triss shook her head. ‘They won’t say they mind, but . . . I think they want to forget everything that happened and go back to the way things were.’ She gnawed her lip. ‘We can’t, can we? Everything’s different . . . not the way I thought . . . broken.’

  In her heart of hearts, Trista knew that it would have been far easier for Piers and Celeste if Trista herself had died. It would have made things simpler and neater. They did not wish that on her, of course, but hers would have been a poignant tale with an ending. They could have closed the book, detached her in their minds from their beloved Triss and tried to return to the comfort of their rut.

  But she had not died, and nothing was simple. She was still drawing in breath after troublesome breath, and nobody would have the luxury of forgetting about her. There was a strange new piece in the jigsaw of the Crescent family, pulling it into a different shape, and they would have to deal with that now and always.

  It might have been easier for the Crescents if Trista had died. But easier, she reminded herself, was not the same as better.

  ‘I don’t think they know what to do,’ Triss went on. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘You should ask your parents to send you back to school,’ Trista answered impulsively. ‘Ask them now, while they can’t say no to you.’

  ‘What?’ Triss paled. ‘But I haven’t been to school for years! I don’t know how . . . I mean . . . I can’t!’

  ‘Listen to me,’ said Trista, turning to face her other self. ‘Triss – I’m asking you to jump.’

  Violet’s bruises healed, and she stalked about angrily with a walking stick until her doctors relented and released her. Piers paid for the repair of her motorcycle, and when she left the clinic with Trista at her side, there it was waiting for her, gleaming, ugly and glorious.

  Trista climbed into the sidecar. It felt strangely cavernous without Pen sitting painfully in her lap. But I’ll grow to fill it, she told herself. Or will I? Perhaps I’ll just stay this age forever, like Peter Pan but with sharper teeth.

  ‘Typical,’ Violet snarled, then glanced at Trista and laughed. ‘Tucked away in a hospital for a month. We’re the awkward ones – the ones who spoil things and don’t fit. So they hide us away and call us ill.’

  Trista’s mind drifted to other misfits. The displaced Besiders, under the grinning, pragmatic leadership of the Shrike, who now had an uneasy truce with Piers. And Jack, who had taken the news of Violet’s imminent departure from Ellchester with solemn calm, telling her it was ‘about time she let go’.

  What happens to the outsiders? Are we like windfalls, rotting when we fall off the main tree?

  ‘We’re like ghosts,’ she said aloud, feeling sad. ‘The real world goes on – jobs and families and newspaper stories – and we’re outside it.’

  ‘No, we’re not,’ said Violet, with surly defiance. ‘They’re the ghosts. Piers and Celeste and the others like them. Trying to cling to the past, to the way things were, pretending nothing has changed. Everything changes and breaks and stops fitting – and we know that, even with our stopped clock. The world is breaking, and changing, and dancing. Always on the move. That’s how it is. That’s how it has to be.’

  And Violet kicked down on her motorcycle’s starter, like a bull stamping a challenge. She crouched forward as the engine gave its ugly, cackling roar, and then the pair of them were on the move and speeding, hedges fleeing past them as if outraged.

  The sky was a tearless blue, stung with the white motes of birds. The sun blazed pitilessly on the smashed golden fields, where workers tried to make the best of the snow-crushed harvest. Cars swung around the corners without warning, their horns lowing, their windscreens dust-spattered. Signposts gleamed white, and promised London.

  Trista’s eyes stung with dust, and joy, and the cobweb tears that she was beginning to accept. Her lungs and mind were full of life – life as it was, not as anyone said it should be.

  This second is mine, and this, and this, and this . . .

  There was an invisible necklace of nows, stretching out in front of her along the crazy, twisting road, each bead a golden second. She had no idea how many there were. Perhaps a hundred million of them, perhaps fewer than ten.

  And she laughed, knowing that with every risk, every corner they took at speed, the necklace could be broken, its beads spilt and lost in the gutter. All was perhaps. Nothing was certain.

  And that, that was wonderful.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank my editors, Ruth Alltimes and Rachel Petty; my agent, Nancy; my writers’ group for feedback and support; the London Transport Museum (and in particular Emily Cartwright for patiently answering my somewhat surreal questions about trams); Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories by Diane Purkiss (Penguin Books Ltd 2001); We Danced All Night: A Social History of Britain Between the Wars by Martin Pugh (Vintage 2009); Women in the 1920s by Pamela Horn (Sutton Publishing Ltd 1995); Below Stairs: The Bestselling Memoirs of a 1920s Kitchen Maid by Margaret Powell (Pan Books 2011); 1920s Britain by Janet Shepherd & John Shepherd (Shire 2010); Changelings: An Essay by D. L. Ashliman 1997, and for his fascinating collections of folk texts; my beloved Martin; the Geffrye Museum of the Home; Chris Fox, and last of all my grandmother, whom I never
met, but who threw her home village into confusion as a young woman by unexpectedly returning from London on a motorbike.

  ‘One of our finest children’s writers’

  Nicolette Jones

  Frances Hardinge’s first book, Fly By Night, won the Branford Boase Award for outstanding debut novel. Fly By Night was also, along with many of her following books, shortlisted for several other awards, including the Guardian Fiction Prize. All her books are now published in many languages around the world.

  Frances spent her childhood in a huge, isolated old house on a hilltop in Kent that ‘wuthered’ when the wind blew and inspired her to write strange, magical stories from an early age. Now she lives in Oxford and London with her boyfriend.

  Also by Frances Hardinge

  Fly By Night

  ‘Remarkable and captivating, masterfully written and with a wealth of unexpected ideas . . . Full of marvels’

  Sunday Times

  Verdigris Deep

  ‘Hardinge writes with energy and verve’

  The Times

  Gullstruck Island

  ‘Hardinge is a hugely talented writer of tireless invention and prose’

  Guardian

  Twilight Robbery

  ‘Twilight Robbery has everything: fabulous characters . . . richly evocative world-building and writing so viscerally good you want to wrap yourself up in it’

  Sunday Telegraph

  A Face Like Glass

  ‘Sophisticated, multi-layered and elegantly written’

  Booktrust

  First published 2014 by Macmillan Children’s Books