Cuckoo Song

Chapter 38. GREEN BOTTLES

Trista lay in the bottom of the boat with her arms tightly around Pen, feeling as if all her bones had been turned to jelly. She could hear Pen making little hiccupy noises that sounded like sobs.

‘Violet…’ whispered Pen. ‘She crashed – she died.’

‘No, she didn’t,’ Trista said very quickly. She clenched her eyes tight, but that did nothing to shut out the deluge of imagined images. A body flopped over the bonnet of a car, or perhaps a broken windscreen with reddened shards… Just for an instant she hated Pen for saying aloud everything she was trying not to think.

But Pen was too little and miserable for her to hate. Instead Trista tried to take her few rags of hope and wrap them around the smaller girl.

‘Violet isn’t dead,’ she told Pen and herself. ‘She had a plan, and her plan wouldn’t involve being dead.’

Silence. Snuffle, snuffle.

‘What was her plan?’ asked Pen, her tone of misery tempered by a touch of reluctant hope.

Trista stared into the darkness of the blanket, desperately trying to make sense of Violet’s last words.

Good luck with the snow.

‘She decided to let them catch her.’ Trista blinked at the revelation, and clung to it. ‘She let it happen, so we could get away, and so they would put her in a police cell. That way she stays still… and the snow comes. Now hush, Pen, please hush! Or they’ll find us!’

For what felt like an age, there were sounds of running steps in the street and conversations in urgent tones. Occasional words and phrases were audible.

‘… ambulance…’

‘… two girls come by this way?’

At one point she actually heard several sets of feet walk out on to the jetty directly above them. Trista tensed, and even Pen’s snuffles became more muted.

‘Please take a moment to think, madam.’ It was the voice of the younger policeman, the one who had asked Violet to surrender. ‘The two little girls – where did they go after that?’

He sounded harassed and concerned. In an odd, distant way Trista felt sorry for him. She wondered if he had a nice face, and a wife who would be sympathetic when he got home after a hard day. At the same time she wondered what would happen if he found her, and whether she would have to bite him in order to get away.

There was a pause, and then the response came in a voice that sounded like the combined sobs of children in a distant cavern.

‘I remember quite clearly. They carried on running down the street – that way. Then they got into a car. A yellow car.’ It was unmistakably the drowned-looking Besider woman from the tea room.

‘I saw them too,’ insisted an unfamiliar voice which rasped like crab shells chafing against each other. ‘Definitely a yellow car. It drove away.’

‘Yes,’ agreed a hiss like sand seeping through an hourglass. ‘The girls are gone. Take your snooping elsewhere.’

Trista could hear the faint scratching of pencil on paper. She wondered how many of the Besiders’ actual words the policeman could hear with his conscious mind, or whether he was jotting down ordinary-sounding statements.

The Besiders were lying, to send the police off on the wrong trail. Why? They believed Trista was one of them, so perhaps they were protecting their own. Or maybe they did not want police paying attention to the Old Docks while it was full of Besiders.

To Trista’s enormous relief, the young policeman seemed to heed the eerily similar statements given by the witnesses, and his footsteps creaked off the jetty again. For a while she made out his voice asking the same questions of passers-by, then she heard him no more.

There were still many sounds of hubbub and inquisitive exchanges in the road above, however. Perhaps the Besiders would not turn them in, but there were plenty of ordinary people in the street, who would doubtless soon connect the policeman’s questions about two young girls with the missing Crescent daughters in the newspaper.

‘We have to stay here for now.’ Trista racked her brain, trying to form a plan. ‘We’ll wait for the snow. It’ll be easier to walk around without people spotting us when there’s snow.’

‘What if it doesn’t snow?’ demanded Pen, sounding only slightly mollified.

‘It will.’

It has to snow. If it doesn’t, then it means that Violet isn’t sitting still in a cell, or even a hospital. It means that she’s on the move still… or that she’s dead.

The next few hours were the longest that Trista could remember. They were also painful in a very real sense, because Pen fidgeted hopelessly, sighing every minute or so and shifting position in ways that always involved elbowing Trista.

There were whispered complaints too. Pen was bored. She was hungry. It was damp, and the blanket smelt funny. Trista was taking up all the room.

Trista told Pen to sing One Hundred Green Bottles in her head. Pen settled for whispering it huskily to herself, and soon Trista regretted making the suggestion. There was something terrible about the countdown. The last hours of her life were falling away from her and smashing silently like so many imaginary bottles, and she was stuck in a musty boat watching it happen. She tried not to think about the fact that her not-sister was full of unspent years, like pips in a robust little apple.

After a long while, however, she noticed a change in the atmosphere. The bobbing of the boat altered its rhythm a little, betraying a shift in the direction of the wind. The blanket flipped and flapped. Pen was now complaining of being cold. At last Trista dared to tug aside the blanket and peer out.

The September sky had curdled and was now an intimidating yellow-grey, its tobacco-stain hues reflected in the shivering surface of the river. Stray gusts of wind tore in from the estuary with a shark-bite fierceness and a chill that made her eyes stream. The riverside road was now all but empty of pedestrians.

‘Pen,’ she breathed, ‘it’s cold. It’s cold. Violet did it! She did it, Pen!’

Violet’s alive! She could not voice the words, though, without admitting to Pen that she had been in doubt.

‘Look!’ Trista drew back the blanket a little, and Pen blinked mulishly in the meagre daylight. ‘There’s nobody in the street. We can probably sit up a bit now.’ She expected Pen to be as pleased as she was, and was a little surprised when she directed a surly glare at the lowering sky. ‘The snow’s coming. It’ll be here soon, Pen, I promise. We just need to wait.’

Pen sniffed hard, and half sat up, disarranging the blanket.

‘No!’ she hissed. ‘I don’t want to! I don’t like these docks! I don’t want us to stay here any more!’

‘Pen, you’re being…’ Trista let out a breath and started again. ‘You know I have to be here at midnight, so I can follow the Architect.’

‘No, you don’t!’ Stars of reflected light gleamed in Pen’s eyes, her shadowed face creased with earnestness. ‘We could sail away, in this boat! We could go to France!’

‘What?’ Trista could barely keep her voice to a whisper. ‘Pen, of course we can’t. And what would happen to Triss?’

‘I don’t care!’ And Pen, who had faced down moving cars and yelled at the Architect, was shaking, face crumpled, tears spilling out of her eyes. ‘I don’t want you to go! And… And I don’t want her to come back!’

‘Pen!’ Trista exclaimed, appalled. ‘You don’t mean that!’

There was a growled, snuffled response that might have been, ‘Yes, I do.’

To be loved, to be preferred… The very thought gave Trista a painful little stab of joy. A moment later, however, she thought of the jagged rips that criss-crossed the Crescent family and felt only sadness.

‘But she’s your sister, Pen! I’m not. I’m just a bundle of sticks that looks like her.’

Pen did not answer straight away, but wriggled herself closer, so that her damp face was buried in Trista’s shoulder.

‘Do you remember what happened after… after I dug up the frog and found out it had moved?’ Pen’s voice was hesitant and defiant, but with a touch of slyness.

It took a second or two for Trista to adjust to the change of subject and comb through Triss’s memories.

‘Yes… Yes, I do.’ Trista stroked Pen’s head. ‘You were so upset you couldn’t cry, you just went around staring at everything. You couldn’t sleep even. And so… one night I remember sitting on your bed and telling you that the frog was in frog heaven, where there were no cats, and where all the lily pads were lovely and soft. And I said that the frog wanted you to know that it was happy, and that it didn’t blame you for anything because you were only trying to help.’

‘And you hugged me when I cried,’ mumbled Pen. ‘And after that I went to sleep. Didn’t I?’

‘Yes, Pen.’ Trista sighed, and let go of the stolen moment. ‘But that wasn’t me. That was Triss.’

‘But…’ Pen pulled away and looked into Trista’s face, and her expression was a startling combination of determination, desperation and pleading. ‘But what if it was you? Maybe that’s why you remember it so well? Because perhaps –’ she gabbled on with increasing speed, as if afraid of interruption – ‘perhaps we were wrong all the time, and you weren’t just made out of sticks a week ago, perhaps there were always two Trisses, a good one and a bad one, and you’ve always been the good one, and I only sent away the bad one…’

Oh, Pen.

With a surge of pity and exasperation, Trista started to understand the fantasy Pen had cobbled together in her head. So this was why Pen had slipped into calling Trista ‘Triss’ over and over again. This was why Pen had scowled whenever anybody talked about rescuing her real sister, and why she had tried to bargain with the Architect for the life of Trista instead. All this while Pen had been building a make-believe version of reality where she hadn’t really betrayed her sister to a terrible fate, just sent away a bad version of her…

‘Pen,’ groaned Triss, tenderness battling against frustration, ‘that doesn’t make any sense.’ She gave Pen another squeeze. ‘Life isn’t that simple. People aren’t that simple. You can’t cut them into slices like a cake, then throw away the bits you don’t like. The Triss who was kind about the frog and the Triss who spoilt your birthday – they’re the same person.’

‘But she hates me!’ roared Pen. ‘And if she comes back, she’ll tell Mummy and Daddy what I did, and… they’ll send me away to prison or an orphanage or school…’

And that was it, of course. If Triss returned, reality would come knocking. Pen would no longer be able to pretend to herself or to her parents that she had not been responsible for her sister’s kidnap. She would have to face up to what she had done.

‘Triss doesn’t hate you.’ Trista could almost feel the strands of Pen’s affection, and knew that they had been flung out to her in desperation, like a swift grab made by a falling climber. Now, with a sense of sadness, she realized that she needed to detach them and reattach them to Pen’s real sister, where they belonged. ‘When I talked to her on the telephone, she was shouting at me – asking what I had done to you. She wasn’t angry with you. She was worried about you.’

Pen had no answer. Instead she gave in to a torrent of ragged, tormented sobs.

‘I don’t want to go to prison!’ she wailed at last. ‘I want my mummy!’

‘I know,’ said Trista, who had no mummy. ‘I know.’

She was still rocking Pen in her arms a few minutes later when the first tiny flakes of snow began to float down from the sky.

The boat-bound fugitives sneaked occasional peeks out from under their blanket as the sky grew dimmer. At first the snowflakes were tiny like ash flecks, dying as soon as they touched the ground and leaving freckles of damp. A few people opened their windows for a while to laugh and wonder at the unseasonal sprinkling. The temperature kept dropping, however, and soon the windows were closing again.

The wind stilled and the flakes fattened. Before long the air was a ballet of chill tufts, each the size of a farthing. The first settled on the earth and melted, falling in on themselves. Their successors left a skin of fine, grey slush. But there were more and more, falling faster than they could melt, and soon the whole scene had a downy pallor. Both girls in the boat were shivering now, and Trista was glad of the blanket.

‘I haven’t had my tea,’ Pen muttered mournfully as supper smells seeped from dozens of houses.

‘We don’t have any money,’ Trista reminded her.

‘There’s snow! We could go carol singing, and people might give us food if we look sad.’ Without further ado, Pen began pulling at the underside of the jetty, so that the boat began to swing out from beneath it.

‘Wait!’

‘You said we could get out of the boat when it snowed!’ protested Pen.

‘All right, but be careful getting out, and stay close to me!’ Trista helped Pen climb up on to the jetty, the smaller girl tottering slightly with stiffness. Triss wrapped the blanket around the pair of them, so that it shrouded their heads and figures like a cloak. ‘Let’s keep this over us, so people don’t recognize us.’

At the back of the tea room, a kindly under-cook passed some leftover currant scones to the girls through the kitchen door, telling them that she shouldn’t really, but it was a shame for them to go to waste. The girls stood in an alley and munched the scones, watching the whirl of white around them. The few scant gas lamps on the streets were now surging into solemn, flickering life, each illuminating a halo of flurrying flakes.

‘I’m cold.’ Pen hiccuped down the last mouthful of her scone, then peered into the darkness. ‘I bet they would let us sit by their fire.’

Following the direction of Pen’s pointing finger, Trista made out a reddish gleam in the shadow of an abandoned auction house. Against the wall she could just see a stumpy black crate that had been pressed into service as a brazier. Around it stood three figures, hunched against the cold.

‘All right,’ she whispered back. ‘But let’s creep over, in case they’re Besiders.’

‘Besiders like you, don’t they?’ Pen frowned.

‘They won’t when they hear I’m against the Architect,’ Trista muttered. ‘And they’ll find that out as soon as they talk to the Architect’s people. They might know already.’

Trista and Pen padded down the powdered road, keeping to the darkest parts of the street and avoiding the pools of gaslight. Finally they found a shadowed doorway from which they could watch the firelit group with more ease.

The murmur of voices from beside the brazier was subdued, but sounded human. There was no eerie overlaying, no sinister under-voice. The figures seemed to be dressed in ordinary jackets and coats, furthermore, not the strange feather-garments the Besiders in the tea room had worn.

‘They seem—’ Trista began.

‘Shh!’ hissed Pen furiously.

Trista shushed, and a voice from the group at the brazier floated over to her.

‘They were definitely here. That much is certain.’

The speaker had his collar turned up and a scarf wrapped protectively around his chin, hiding most of his face. Nonetheless, there was no mistaking the voice of Mr Grace.