Cuckoo Song

Chapter 21. CANNED CHEESE AND BANANAS

Violet’s motorbike was standing amid the parked cars like a grimy fox in a field of cows.

‘The sidecar’s only meant for one person,’ she muttered, ‘but we’ll have to squeeze you both in.’ It was shaped like a fat little canoe with a big wheel on the side, a tapering enclosed nose to contain one’s legs and a seat under the opening. It proved possible for both girls to fit inside, with Pen sitting on Not-Triss’s lap.

Violet donned her goggles, tethered her cap and straddled her motorbike. Then, with visible effort and using most of her weight, she drove her foot down on the kick-starter, wrenching a startlingly loud rattle-roar from the engine. The smell of oil made Not-Triss feel sick. When the bike lurched forward and swerved out on to the road, Not-Triss reflexively gripped at the sides of the sidecar, teeth clenched with apprehension.

The road felt very close. On one side roared the bike, so loud that it made her right ear ache. On the other she could see the mudguard over the sidecar’s great wheel vibrating with the ruggedness of the road, so that she was afraid to let her hands near it. The icy rain was now rushing horizontally, straight into her face, and the wind was merciless. Worst of all, Pen wouldn’t stay still, but wanted to wriggle, twist, lean and stare around her, in ways that always seemed to involve elbowing or squashing Not-Triss.

A gentle and exhausted numbness settled upon Not-Triss’s mind as she watched occasional cars rattle past, their headlights carving shafts of light out of the darkness, streaked with bright rain. The recent past was a fading ache. Only this was real, this long moment of being shaken around like a shoe in a box, and even this was not very real.

At last the motorbike stopped in front of an old terraced house in a narrow unlit street, and Violet cut the engine.

‘Try to be quiet,’ she whispered as she clambered off the bike and set about extricating the two girls. ‘My landlady’s an old wasp, and I’m not supposed to have guests.’

Not-Triss and Pen followed Violet up the steps and watched as she slowly turned her key in the lock, with the concentration of a safe-cracker, and led them into a shadowy hall. The two girls were a step behind as she tiptoed up the stairs, unlocked another door and stepped through into a darkened room.

As Violet put coins in the gas meter and lit the lamps, Not-Triss looked around her at the primrose-patterned wallpaper dimpled with damp, the scuffed elderly furniture and the curtains that stopped two inches short of the sill. Celeste Crescent had talked about Violet living ‘the high life’, but the only valuable-looking objects in the room were a small wireless set, a wind-up gramophone and a few records.

Every drawer in the room was open, as if somebody had been interrupted in the act of searching the place, but Violet did not seem surprised by this. A half-open door in the opposite wall looked on to a dishevelled bed. A row of stockings dangled from the mantelpiece, their toes held in place by various ornaments. Not-Triss wondered if they were ‘artificial silk’, the new stocking stuff that Celeste Crescent sniffed at as ‘shop-girl silk’.

When Violet knelt by the small tiled hearth and started to load it with coal, Not-Triss watched her with a blank, hypnotized fascination. At the first lick of flame, however, she could not help flinching back a step and drawing in a panicky breath. Her skin seemed to tingle with terrible warmth once more, as it had when she had been forced close to the cottage fireplace. Violet cast a surprised glance over her shoulder at Not-Triss, taking stock of her mute, trembling paralysis, and frowned a little. She turned back to the hearth, but shifted her position across so that she blocked Not-Triss’s view of the flames. When Violet put the fireguard in place, Not-Triss felt her pulse slow a little.

Meanwhile, Pen busied herself collecting blankets and cushions from here and there, dropping them in front of the fire to make a sort of nest, with the confidence of practice.

‘Violet!’ Pen whispered loudly, when their reluctant hostess was sitting back, wiping soot from her hands. ‘We need food. We haven’t eaten anything for hours!’

‘So next time perhaps you should wait until after dinner before running away,’ Violet muttered, without obvious sympathy.

‘But I’m starving!’ exclaimed Pen. ‘I haven’t eaten anything all day!’

‘Well, you needn’t sound as if that’s my fault,’ Violet growled, heading over to a wooden box near the wall. ‘I’m not your mother.’

‘Good,’ Pen answered without hesitation. ‘I wouldn’t want you to be my mother. I’d run away from you too.’

Not-Triss listened agape to this exchange, tensing for the inevitable thunderclap. It did not come.

‘Canned cheese and bananas,’ murmured Violet, returning to the hearth and dropping to her haunches. ‘It’s all there is.’

Pen shrugged. ‘I like canned cheese.’

Not-Triss watched as Violet dug her opener into the cheese can and started cutting a jagged hole in the top. Her long face was still jewelled with rain, her nose blue from the cold, and the straps of her motoring cap hung down below her ears. For the first time Not-Triss started to understand why Pen might come here when she ran away. In the Crescent family home you had to be careful all the time, because if you did or said the wrong thing it never went away. It just hung there forever, an invisible black mark that everybody knew was there. Pen had found a place where you could say things that were rude and grumpy, and where the other person would just be rude and grumpy back, and afterwards you could sit eating bananas without an ounce of ill feeling.

The three of them ate the cheese off tea-set saucers. It had a slight metallic taste but nobody seemed to care. The bananas were brown-skinned, but the flesh inside was still mostly pale and firm.

At last Violet stood, fastening the chinstrap of her cap again.

‘I’ll be back in a few hours, and I’ll try not to wake you. Don’t burn down the house while I’m gone unless absolutely necessary. And when I’m back, don’t wake me until at least ten.’

‘Where are you going?’ In spite of everything, a hundred suspicions and fears crowded back into Not-Triss’s head. ‘Why are you going out again? You’re not going to our parents or the police, are you?’

‘Oh, for pity’s sake! No. No, I won’t.’ At the door she paused, her eyes lingering on Not-Triss again, her narrow, painted mouth drooping into its habitual frown. ‘Triss, do you need any… any medicine or anything before you go to bed?’

‘No.’ Not-Triss shook her head, feeling abashed at her outburst, but still only half-reassured. ‘No, thank you. I… I don’t think they really help.’

The door closed behind Violet, and Not-Triss sank down to sit on the cushions near the now-caged fire.

‘It’s all right,’ Pen said, pulling blankets over her own knees. ‘I’ve stayed here before. She always does that. Last time she stayed out until seven in the morning. I know because she woke me up coming in. She sleeps till ten, then gets up and goes to work.’

Work. Again not entirely the ‘high life’ Celeste Crescent had described. Apparently Violet Parish did not spend her whole time sitting around and drinking cocktails at the Crescent family’s expense. Not-Triss had a dozen new thoughts about Violet Parish, and yet these were not the most important things on her mind.

She glanced across at Pen, who was nestling herself in the blankets like a dormouse and refusing to meet her eye.

‘Pen,’ she said gently, ‘I think we need to talk. About everything. About the Architect.’

Pen chewed hard on her upper lip, and for a few seconds Not-Triss thought the younger girl might ignore her, or give vent to one of her fits of temper. Instead she wound the blanket tassels around one finger and shrugged.

‘You have to promise not to get angry,’ she mumbled belligerently, ‘or scratch me with your claws or bite me with your thorn-teeth.’

‘I promise,’ said Not-Triss. ‘And I’m really sorry I hurt your face.’

‘Good,’ answered Pen sullenly.

‘So,’ Not-Triss prompted, as patiently as she could, ‘the Architect. Where did you meet him?’

Pen gave her a sly sideways glance. Perhaps she was weighing up a lie, like a snowball in her hand, seeing if it would hold together. Or perhaps she was trying to judge whether Not-Triss might become a screaming thorn-monster at a moment’s notice if she said the wrong thing.

‘He just turned up one day. Three weeks ago. The day after my birthday. And Mother and Father promised we would all go to Bowgate’s Picture House, because they were showing Peril on Park Avenue. But then when we were about to go, you said – I mean, real Triss said that she had a headache and a fever. She did it on purpose, so we couldn’t go, I know it, I saw her looking at me, I know it. So I called her a liar and a rat, and then everybody shouted at me and I wasn’t allowed to go to the cinema at all.’

Not-Triss said nothing. She could vaguely remember the incident, could recall a sense of outrage at being yelled at while she was ill. Had there been a certain hint of spiteful satisfaction as well at seeing Pen robbed of her birthday treat? Perhaps there had.

‘I ran away again,’ Pen whispered. ‘I hated you all. I went and sat on the seesaw on Gramhill Park, and it was raining, and I hated you all so much I wished I had a gun. Or a gang, so I could go home and you’d all be scared. But then I thought I didn’t want to make Mother and Father scared, just you, because it was all your fault, and you made them like that. And when I was thinking that, a big black car stopped by the park, and a man got out and came right up to me. He called me “Miss Penelope Crescent” and held his umbrella over me, and said no gentleman should let a lady sit in the rain.’

‘And that was the Architect?’ asked Not-Triss, trying to untangle her thoughts. She had wondered how Pen had managed to contact the Architect in the first place.

Pen nodded. ‘I was a bit scared of him at first, particularly when he said he’d been watching us for some time. But then he said he didn’t like the way everybody else treated me, that it wasn’t fair, and he wanted to help me. He said sometimes families are like fruit bowls, and if one of the pieces of fruit is rotten it makes everything rotten. So you have to take that fruit out of the bowl, and that makes everything better. And I said that you – I mean, the real Triss – was rotten and made everybody unhappy. And he agreed.’

Not-Triss could feel some of her previous anger and hurt stirring in her, but the misery was so vivid in Pen’s face that she forced herself to rein it in.

‘He wanted to know if our family would be going to the countryside any time soon, and I told him about the holiday. Then he said he wanted to make a bargain with me. I had to give him lots of things belonging to Triss – he said the diary pages were the most important bit – and then, when we were on holiday, I had to get Triss to come with me to the Grimmer. He said that if I did that, then he…’ Pen paused, biting her lip. It was hard to tell in the firelight, but Not-Triss thought she might be flushing somewhat. ‘He said he’d take Triss away so she’d never come back and everything would be better,’ she said, adding in a mumble, ‘and neither of us would ever talk about it to anybody.’

‘So you lured the real Triss down to the Grimmer—’

‘Don’t say it like that!’ hissed Pen. ‘And don’t look at me like it’s all my fault! I just wanted everything to stop being horrible, and that’s your fault. Well, real Triss’s fault, but you’re just like her!’

‘Well, if you hate me so much, why did you bother saving me?’ snapped Not-Triss. Her paper-thin self-control was stretched to tearing point, and there was a sea of grief behind it.

Pen glared at Not-Triss. Her eyes were shiny with angry tears.

‘I didn’t mean to,’ she muttered fiercely. ‘This morning, when everybody was driving away without me, I thought you might do something horrible to Mother and Father if I wasn’t there. So I hid in the back – down on the floor under the blanket. Then when the car was stopped outside the cottage for ages I got bored and cold, so I sneaked out and hid in the kitchen. Then everybody found out you were a monster and caught you, and at first I was really glad, because it meant you wouldn’t come home and scratch my face and try to break into my room.’ Her tone held a mixture of malice and fear. ‘But… then they wanted to burn you. And you started crying. And it wasn’t real tears, but it was real crying. You were really scared, even though they kept saying you weren’t.’

‘Then why couldn’t Father see that?’ Not-Triss felt despair and hurt welling up inside her again, and it was all she could do to stop her teeth sharpening. ‘Why couldn’t Mother see it?’

‘Because they’re stupid,’ growled Pen, rubbing at her nose with her sleeve. ‘They can’t tell when real Triss is fake-crying, so of course they can’t tell when Fake Triss is real-crying.’

‘Don’t call me that!’ It was hard to say why the words stung so much.

‘If you don’t like it, that’s too bad,’ retorted Pen with a sudden gleam in her eye, ‘because that’s what you are. Fake Triss. In fact, that’s your name now. You don’t have a name, and I saved your life, so I get to choose what your name is. And it’s Fake Triss.’

‘I’m not—’

‘Shut up, Fake Triss. You’re lucky I’m letting you have a name at all.’

Not-Triss closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She thought of Pen dragging her by the hand from the cottage kitchen. She thought of Pen sprinting by her side through the moonlight.

‘Tell me more about the Architect.’ Not-Triss thought it safest to change the subject. ‘He gave you a way of calling him on the phone, didn’t he?’

Pen gave a short nod.

‘I had to say, “Waste, wither, want,” before I picked up the mouthpiece, and then when I pressed the button for the switchboard, the voice on the line wasn’t a normal operator. There was this whispery woman instead, and I just had to ask her for the Architect, and she put me through.’

At last Not-Triss understood why there had been no record of Pen’s mysterious phone call from the Crescent household. It had not gone through the usual switchboard at all. No wonder the operators knew nothing of it.

‘Did he ever tell you where he lived, or anything else about him?’ continued Not-Triss.

‘Not really, just that he was an architect.’ Pen scowled in concentration. ‘Wait – he said that’s why he was watching us. Because he knew Father. Through their work. But he said he’d decided he liked me better than Father, because I seemed more “honourable”.’

A blizzard of fragments were flurrying through Not-Triss’s mind and trying to form a picture. She remembered the overheard conversation between Piers and Celeste Crescent, regarding the mysterious he that Piers wanted nothing more to do with. She remembered the article in the newspaper concerning Piers’s new building project. Last of all, there was the mystery of the envelopes in the desk drawer, their existence so carefully concealed. Her mind was too tired to make further sense of the fragments, however.

‘We have to find out more about the Architect, Pen.’ Not-Triss saw her not-sister flinch, and after a moment’s hesitation aimed a comforting pat at the smaller girl’s foot. ‘I know you don’t want to, and I don’t really want to either. But we have to. He doesn’t just have Triss. He has Sebastian.’