Cuckoo (11 page)
She hung her Barbour on the peg by the door and went into the kitchen. It looked like the Hackney flat after the second burglary, minus the shit. But instead of the mess of marauders, it was the leavings of small boys and their messy fights that confronted her. To buy time before she cleared it all up, she made a pot of tea and sat down at the table in a streak of sunlight to feed Flossie, who had just woken up.
They were just settling down when Gareth came in, all afire from a productive morning in his studio. Energy seemed to spill out of his fingertips when he was like that.
‘Christ, what’s been going on here?’ He came over and kissed Rose and stroked Flossie’s cheek, then set about the ritual of making his habitual pot of dark, strong coffee, grinding the beans in an ancient chrome and mahogany hand-grinder that he had bought in a roadside antiques stall in Maine. It was the only way, according to him, to prepare coffee.
‘The boys had a fight.’
‘No blood spilled, I hope?’
‘No,’ Rose said. ‘Just porridge.’
‘They’ve grown up pretty wild,’ Gareth said. He hadn’t seen Nico since he was two, when Christos and Polly moved to Greece. Last night had been the first time he had met Yannis.
‘You should know about that!’ Rose said. Gareth and Andy had been home-schooled, which Pam and John had interpreted as letting them roam the woods around their land, generally doing what they wanted. They had spent days away in camps they had built themselves. They hardly ever opened a formal textbook. Yet they both came out of it having read more books, and with a better understanding of the world around them, than most regular highschool students.
‘No, I didn’t mean my sort of wild. That was a gift of freedom. They may have got a lot wrong, but Pam and John knew exactly what they were doing with that. These little guys, they seem to have been, I don’t know, neglected. Perhaps not that. Perhaps I mean disregarded.’
‘I don’t want this to descend into a Polly bashing,’ Rose said.
‘I ain’t sayin’ nothin’,’ Gareth said, holding up his hands and smiling lopsidedly.
‘You’ve got a point, though. Yannis and Nico don’t seem to have had much in the way of guidance,’ Rose said, changing Flossie over to feed on the other side. ‘Certainly not recently.’
Gareth switched on the coffee-maker and went over to stand behind Rose, looking down at his baby daughter’s fist as she beat her mother’s breast to get more milk. He reached down and let Flossie close her hand around his finger. Milk dribbled out of the side of her mouth.
‘I love that,’ he said. Rose felt his erection press into her back. He had always been aroused by the sight of her feeding. Rose felt strangely grateful for this. It was extraordinary: connected and intimate, a slightly shameful, shared secret between the two of them.
‘Mmm. Do I smell coffee?’
Rose jumped and turned round to see Polly standing in the middle of the kitchen. Gareth slid back and Flossie fell off the nipple and started to cry. Polly was barefoot and wearing nothing but a thin, antique cotton nightdress. She might as well have been naked, the way her goosebumped nipples and dark pubic hair were visible. At least Gareth’s used to it from Christos’s painting, Rose thought. He’s seen it all before.
‘Come on in,’ she said, latching Flossie back on.
‘I’ll fix you a coffee. Strong, black, no sugar, isn’t it?’ Gareth moved over to the stove.
‘Well remembered,’ Polly smiled. She sat at the table. It was then that Rose realised that she was shaking.
‘You OK?’
‘I’m a bit cold,’ Polly said. ‘I forgot it wasn’t Greece.’
‘Gareth, could you fetch my kimono for Polly?’
‘Sure,’ Gareth said, placing down a coffee for Polly. Then he turned and bounded up the stairs.
Polly fumbled in the embroidered bag she had slung over her shoulder and brought out a couple of brown pill bottles. They rattled in her shaking hands. ‘These bring on the shivers, too,’ she said.
‘What are they?’
‘Greek doctors prescribe willy nilly, thank God,’ she said, washing down one pill from each bottle with a mouthful of coffee. ‘I’m needing a few pharmaceuticals to help me get over the worst.’ She caught Rose’s look and smiled. ‘No cause for alarm, Mother.’
‘I didn’t mean—’ But Rose knew that Polly and substances were a potent combination. She wondered how much that Greek doctor had known about Polly’s past. Even before things got out of hand back in London, she had been a heavy necker of pills. Despite her frail exterior, Polly could party with the best of them, and always managed to last the night through to sunrise, long after Rose had passed out in a corner. Rose hated anything trippy that made her lose her sense of self, but Polly loved all that. She had once said that she didn’t think she could have written any songs without her little helpers.
‘These are sort of antidepressants. They get me going in the morning, after these’ – Polly took another bottle from her bag and waved it in the air – ‘have helped me sleep through the night. It’s all very balanced, Yin and Yang. Really. It’s a great help. I’ll be back on me feet in no time.’
Gareth came in and handed her the kimono.
‘Thanks,’ she said, shrugging it around her bony shoulders. Although it was much too large for her, Rose thought that Polly gave the kimono a glamour, a back story. On Rose, it was just a beautiful kimono. On Polly, Billie Holiday loitered in its folds.
A silence fell on them, as Rose finished feeding Flossie and Gareth sat staring into his mug, thinking. Polly shook and twitched, looking out of the window, then sharply down to the floor.
‘I have to get back to work,’ Gareth said eventually, getting up.
‘I wish Christos had your discipline,’ Polly said, looking up at him with heavy-lidded eyes.
‘But he did loads of work,’ Rose said. ‘He was incredibly prolific.’
‘He was a lazy Greek,’ Polly said, picking at her fingernails with the tine of a fork that someone had left on the table.
Gareth exhaled and looked at Rose, one eyebrow raised. Then he stroked her cheek with the knuckle of his index finger and left, shutting the back door a little too firmly.
Rose got up and laid Flossie back down on her lambskin. She fetched the fruit bowl and put it in front of Polly.
Polly took an orange from the bowl and turned it in her hands like a cricket ball.
‘So, the boys are at school,’ Rose said.
‘I thought they might be,’ Polly said, clawing at the orange to get the skin off. ‘That’s good. Thanks.’
‘The Head would like to see you at some point today. There’s some paperwork that needs to be taken care of.’
‘Jesus. That’s all I seem to have done since Christos died.’
‘Sorry,’ Rose said, ‘but you do need to do it. Janet’s been incredibly flexible letting them stay today. I’ll take you up there at about twelve so we can catch her at lunchtime.’
‘If you want.’ Polly was picking the pith off the orange now, removing every tiny bit.
‘Come on, Polly, you’ve got to think of Nico and Yannis.’
‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ Polly whacked the orange down onto the table. ‘Do you think I’m not trying? It’s all right for you, Rose, with all this – your nice house, your nice husband, your nice fucking children . . .’
‘Polly . . .’
‘It all turned out all right for you, didn’t it?’
‘That’s not fair.’
‘Too right it’s not fair.’
Rose couldn’t say anything to this.
‘It’s all so perfect here. Perfect Rose and her perfect house,’ Polly went on. ‘Look, Alessi kettle, herbs dangling from the ceiling, cream fucking Aga.’
‘Stop this,’ Rose said quietly. Polly had got up and was pacing around the kitchen. Remembering the earlier incident with the boys, Rose moved across the room to stand in front of Flossie.
‘It was shit with Christos.
Shit
. You know?’ Polly said. ‘Nothing ever worked. I never had anything like this, and now – now I’ve got nothing.’ She came to a halt in the middle of the kitchen and looked up at the vaulted ceiling. ‘After everything . . .’ She screwed her eyes shut tight and hunched her arms around herself, as if she were trying to force the world back into focus.
Shit
. You know?’ Polly said. ‘Nothing ever worked. I never had anything like this, and now – now I’ve got nothing.’ She came to a halt in the middle of the kitchen and looked up at the vaulted ceiling. ‘After everything . . .’ She screwed her eyes shut tight and hunched her arms around herself, as if she were trying to force the world back into focus.
‘He didn’t love me, you know. Not really. Not like – like that.’ She almost spat as she pointed to the door through which Gareth had disappeared. ‘He only wanted my magic. And when he’d had that, when he’d drunk it all up, he’d had enough.’
She turned to Rose and looked her straight in the eye.
‘You’re lucky, Rose. You never had any magic to be stolen. You’ll never know what it’s like. It was shit with Christos in Karpathos. Shit. And then he died.’
I’m not going to take this personally, Rose thought, fighting to stay on the side of compassion.
Then Polly jolted, as if reality had bitten her sharply in the skull.
‘He died, Rose. He actually died.’ She drew a breath and twitched again. ‘I don’t think I can go on like this.’
Then her face crumbled, and her eyes filled with tears.
That was what Rose needed. She went to Polly and wrapped her arms around her. She held her tight and felt her crumple beneath her, great walls of sobbing shuddering through her tiny body.
‘Let me in, Poll,’ she said. She felt a small tingle of satisfaction that she hadn’t risen to Polly’s criticisms. She had, after all, to make great allowances for grief.
‘It’s going to be all right,’ she said. ‘You’re going to be fine. You’re a survivor, Polly, remember? You get through everything.’
She pulled Polly to her again, smelling the travel in her hair, the perfume and the unwashed scent of her. She rubbed her back, feeling the ribs and the outline of her pelvis at the base of her spine. She was brittle, almost crackling under Rose’s touch.
‘Remember?’ Rose urged.
‘I’m a survivor.’
‘You’re a survivor. You helped me through all that when we were younger. Now I’m going to help you, Poll. I’m here for you.’
They stood there for a while, until the air around Polly had settled, until she was still.
‘Are you, Rose?’
As she looked up, Rose thought she saw the green flecks in Polly’s irises flicker with gold. She pressed her scarred index finger to Polly’s, finding the ridged line that matched her own.
‘You helped me, and now I’m going to help you. However I can.’
‘However you can?’
As the scars touched, Rose felt the familiar lurch in her belly, something between fear, pleasure and excitement, the feeling that only Polly could arouse in her.
‘However. And I’m sorry if you felt I was putting you under pressure,’ she said, stroking Polly’s hair and holding her face in her hands. ‘I’ll tell Janet you can’t make it today.’
‘No,’ Polly said. ‘You were right. I’ll go. I’ve got to hold it together for the boys.’ She looked up at Rose. ‘You know that was just me going on, back then? I loved Christos – you know that, don’t you? I loved him so much.’
‘I know. You were made for each other. Anyone could see that.’
‘And I miss him. And I’m angry at him for driving so stupidly and getting himself killed.’
‘I know.’
‘And leaving us all alone.’
‘Yes.’
They moved apart a little. Rose took a tissue from under her sleeve and dabbed at Polly’s eyes. ‘You go and have a bath, Poll,’ she said. ‘Use my bathroom, and put a slug of bath oil in. Wash it all away. Take your time. Then we’ll go to the school. OK?’
‘All right. Thanks, Rose,’ Polly said. ‘Thank you. I don’t know what I’d do without you.’ She moved back towards Rose and reached up, taking her face between her cool, dry hands. She pulled her down towards her and kissed her on the lips.
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