Cuckoo
Cuckoo
JULIA CROUCH
headline
Copyright © 2011 Julia Crouch
The right of Julia Crouch to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication
may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by
any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or,
in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms
of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2010
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
eISBN : 978 0 7553 7806 7
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Table of Contents
To Tim, Nel, Owen and Joe.
Thanks to:
Jacqui Lofthouse who helped me decide what to do and to stick to it; Hannah Vincent who spurred me on until I had finally killed the fox; Tara Gould at Short Fuse Brighton for letting me read my stories to real people, out loud; Carmela Marner for being the first to read and feed back; Boo Hewerdine for advice on matters musical; Janee Sa for social work expertise; Chloe Ronaldson for her midwifery advice; Hannah Norden for her ambulance/paramedic insights; Laura Marshall-Andrews for her medical help; John O’Donoghue for saying he thought I had done some writing before; Chris Baty and Nanowrimo; Queens Park Lowbrow Bookgroup for listening to me going on and on; Jane and Roy Collins and Pam and Colin Crouch; Rosemary Pryse for the writing space and a hundred-thousand stories; Simon Trewin, Ariella Feiner, Jessica Craig, Zoe Ross, Giles Smart and everyone at United Agents; my wonderful editor Leah Woodburn, and Imogen Taylor at Headline; Joan Deitch; Amanda Smith and Gary Parker; and my family for putting up with it all.
Aftermath
It could be the scene of a crime, but the real crime happened somewhere else. Nothing is what it had been: everything is cut, or torn, or ripped. Great globs of flesh-coloured paint blight the surfaces; shards of paper curl over edges.
Propped up against the walls are painted repetitions of the same, naked, skeletal form. She is arched, ecstatic, beautiful. And her eyes have been gouged out, stabbed with scissors, sliced with a blade.
It is, in short, a total mess.
One
When Rose heard that Christos had been killed, she didn’t think twice: Polly and the boys must come and stay. She and Gareth had the space now, and Polly had been her best friend since primary school. There was no doubt about it: they must come, stay, and let Rose look after them.
The phone call came on the last day of February. Anna and baby Flossie were asleep, and Rose and Gareth had just lit a candle and opened a bottle of wine at the kitchen table. The image of such a nightly routine had been held in their minds throughout the two and a half years they had spent renovating this house in the Wiltshire hills. Now, just one month after they had finally moved in, the vision had been established as firm fact.
The phone echoed across the flagstone floor, breaking into the rural silence they still found a little unnerving. Gareth had wanted a proper, resounding phone bell just like the one he had grown up with in rural upstate New York. One you could hear wherever you were. He said it signified, for him, a conscious intent, a state of being here by design, rather than by accident. Rose couldn’t see how he took it to that conclusion, but a loud bell was practical because they couldn’t get any sort of mobile phone reception out where they were, out in the sticks.
Taking her glass of wine with her, Rose went to answer the phone.
‘Christos is dead,’ was the first thing Polly said.
Rose had to sit down at the window seat, the cold stone freezing into her legs.
‘What?’ She didn’t believe it, of course.
‘He’s been killed. In a car crash. He was drunk.’
‘What’s the matter?’ Gareth drew his chair over and sat by Rose, holding her hand as she took it all in and fought for air.
Rose thought of Christos, the big bear. Christos was, of everyone she knew – except Gareth and the girls – the last person she could ever imagine not living. He was all about life. Once, knowing she craved scallops when she was pregnant with Anna, he had cooked her a full twelve. ‘You must follow your body, because it knows you better than you do,’ he had said with his infallible Greek logic. She and Gareth had his paintings all over their house. Bursts of colour, life, sex and food, they lit up the cool interior they had made, clashing beautifully with the restraint and symmetry of Gareth’s own, more cerebral, work. They even had one of the most erotic paintings Christos had ever made – of Polly, as it happened – hanging in their dressing room.
‘When?’ Rose asked. She needed facts to help her take it in.
‘Two weeks ago.’
Rose thought she could hear the sound of the sea at the end of the line, crashing onto the stone of the shore. She imagined Polly sitting on the terrace of the house in Karpathos, the one that led straight onto the beach. She would probably have a large glass of Metaxa in her hand. But then it was February, so she probably wasn’t outside. Was it cold in Greece in February? Rose didn’t know – she had only visited in the summer, and the last time she had done that had been two and a half years ago. She and Polly hadn’t spoken at all for six months, she realised.
But, however long they spent apart, they always seemed to be able to pick up where they left off. Rose and Polly were entwined. They had grown up together; they lived together in their late teens and twenties. They had both married artists, and had surprised each other by both rather unfashionably moulding themselves around their men and their children.
‘He always drives too fast on the roads round here,’ Polly was going on. ‘Thinks he knows them because he was born here. But he doesn’t. It’s all bollocks.’
‘Poor you.’ Rose didn’t know what else to say.
There was silence. Just the sound of the sea: crash, pull; crash, pull.
Rose put her hand over the mouthpiece and told Gareth the news. Gareth gasped, closed his eyes and collapsed his face into his palms, pressing his fingertips into his brow. He and Christos had been friends once, before Polly. In fact, it was through Christos that Rose and Gareth had met.
Rose went back to Polly. ‘How are you?’ She tried to hold her own shock and upset back for the sake of her friend. She wasn’t as entitled to grieve for Christos as much as Polly.
‘We’ve buried him and I’ve been wished an abundant life a thousand times by all the aunts and cousins and his bloody mother. We’re waiting for the memorial service, then I’m out of here.’
‘And the boys? How are they?’ Rose had difficulty finding a voice for this. Nico and Yannis were Polly and Christos’s two sons. Rose and Anna had spent a fortnight snorkelling and sunbathing with them, that summer they’d visited, just before the house project had kicked off. Rose remembered Nico, aged seven, surfacing in front of her with a perfect sea urchin shell, his smile as wide as the sandy sweep of bay behind him. Christos’s whooping for his son’s find reached them across the sparkling sea. Rose thought with a shudder that she should have visited more often. Now there would be no chance of return.
‘All I want to do is to touch him,’ Polly said. ‘And that shocks me. I didn’t want to so much before, when I could – but now it’s all I can think of. It’s like a fire has burned everything.’
‘And the boys?’ Rose asked again.
‘They’re too young really to know what it means. They’ll realise soon enough, but for now they have no idea of the permanence of it. Fuck.’ There was the sound of a glass crashing onto stone.
‘I’ll come out tomorrow,’ Rose offered, catching the warning look Gareth darted at her through tear-rimmed eyes. She knew the minute she said it that the whole idea of dropping everything and taking the baby out to the eastern lip of Europe was ridiculous. Gareth was supposed to be getting back to his work; she was needed to run everything else.
‘No,’ Gareth mouthed. Despite the painting in the dressing room – which he put up with partly for Rose’s sake, and partly because it was an example of Christos’s best work – he had never liked Polly. He once said that she gave him the creeps, which was pretty strong for Gareth.
‘No. You stay put. Me and the boys are coming back. We’re out of here,’ Polly said.
‘Well then, you must come and stay here,’ Rose said, looking directly at Gareth. ‘Stay as long as you like.’
Gareth went over to pour himself another glass of wine, his back to Rose.
But what can he say? Rose thought. He’ll just have to like it.
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