Cuckoo (12 page)
Again, Rose felt that surge inside, and her eyes pricked with tears.
Polly clutched the kimono around her, and climbed the stairs slowly, as if each step hurt her.
Rose sighed, and looked over to her baby, who was lying on the floor, gazing at a shaft of sunlight as it hit the stone floor.
‘Blimey. What are we going to do with her, eh Floss?’
And, at last, she set to clearing up the mess of the kitchen, putting it all to rights. But before she did that, she ate the whole, perfect, pithless orange that Polly had left on the table, letting the juice run down her chin.
Ten
Polly pulled out all the stops for the meeting with Janet the headmistress. After her bath, she washed and brushed her hair, and managed to assemble an outfit that wasn’t ripped, dirty or transparent. Apart from her spectral thinness, she could have passed for a normal mother. Rose went up to the school with her partly to give moral support, but mostly to be on hand to ease out any wrinkles that might spring up.
As it turned out, the meeting went smoothly. Polly was on her best behaviour: articulate, charming, and only as sad as was appropriate to her position of new widow. She filled in the forms for the local authority and handed them over to Janet with a smile.
‘From first impressions, they’re going to fit in marvellously,’ Janet said. ‘The other children seem to be very taken with them.’
‘They’re quite a pair,’ Polly said, getting up and reaching her hand out to shake Janet’s.
‘Thanks, Janet,’ Rose said.
‘Don’t mention it. Baby’s looking gorgeous.’ Janet took Flossie’s hand, which she had flung out from the sling like a little drama queen. ‘I’m so glad you’re preparing another little Anna for me.’
They took their leave and walked off down the clattery school corridor with its tang of school dinners and plimsolls.
Outside in the playground, the home lunch children were just being brought back to school by their parents. Rose could feel the ripple Polly caused as they crossed the playground. Even before she was famous, she had managed to turn heads, with her ingrained glamour and angular swagger. Now, more than a decade after her most recent album, people would still do a double-take. Even with her hair so neatly combed, and her clothing tuned down, Polly still had a distinctive look that was hard to obscure.
In an attempt to defuse the spell that she knew Polly could cast – and the trouble that generally resulted – Rose introduced her to a couple of people as ‘my old friend Polly, whose kids are starting at the school’. But it was pretty pointless. As Polly held out her hand for shaking, Rose couldn’t help feeling as if she was introducing the Queen.
‘I thought I was going to have to start signing autographs,’ Polly said as they walked back across the field.
When they got back, Polly went up to the Annexe to lie down.
‘Can you get the boys, please, Rose? I’m wiped out,’ Polly said, as she set off.
‘Of course,’ Rose said. Nico was nine, and she reckoned that pretty soon, with their strength in numbers, Anna could have her dream and the children could make their own way home. There were no roads to cross, and most of the journey was across the fields.
She hadn’t let Anna know during her stories of when she was a girl, but the reason Rose’s parents had forbidden her to take the short-cut under the pier on her way to school back in Brighton was that it was a notorious gathering-place for all sorts of undesirables. Rose had disobeyed her parents and, on one occasion, a man grabbed her. He had something purple and hard sticking out of his trousers, which he put her hand over, moving it up and down. She had squeezed it really hard, and dug her nails in, which had made him swear and loosen his grip, allowing her to beat him off with her satchel and run away. But she couldn’t get the stink off her hand, no matter how hard she washed it. For weeks afterwards, she suffered nightmares where he followed her home, climbing in through her window and sticking that stinking thing at her with his smelly hand over her face.
After that, at least for a while, she tried her best to be a Good Girl, to obey her parents. But her efforts always seemed to backfire, and she invariably found herself thundering up the stairs of the guesthouse in an effort to lock herself inside the bathroom before her father caught her. In the end, she had just stopped trying – the outcome always seemed to be the same, whether she was good or bad.
In any case, this was why she wouldn’t let Anna wander on her own. But now that Anna had two wild and unruly guardsmen, she supposed she would be safe. Another advantage, Rose thought, of Polly, Nico and Yannis staying for a while.
Thinking about this, Rose went up to the school a little later to pick up the children. She brought them back, listening to Nico and Yannis’s excited chatter about their first day at Anna’s school.
‘It’s your school now,’ Anna said to them, swinging her schoolbag round and round over her shoulder.
When they got back, Rose gave each of them a glass of milk and a slice of cake. Then she turfed them all out into the back garden, where they started to build a den in the overgrown patch at the very end. Rose smiled to herself, thinking how much this would please Gareth.
At six-thirty, Rose sent Nico up to the Annexe to fetch Polly for supper. A while later, he came back, alone.
‘She’s in bed and sort of sleeping. She says go on without her.’
‘I’ll put a plate out for you to take up for her,’ Rose said.
‘Nah, don’t waste it,’ Nico said. ‘She said she’s not hungry.’
As far as Rose knew, Polly hadn’t eaten a thing all day. She was really going to have to keep an eye on her.
At seven, Gareth came in from the studio and they all sat down to supper without Polly. The boys tucked into their lasagne like hungry animals, taking second helpings and licking their plates clean.
They had spent their first day at school as rather glamorous exotica: their accented English and olive skins were a novelty at the village school.
‘Me and Yannis decided we wanted to run round the playground, so we did, and soon everyone in the school was charging round after us,’ Nico said.
‘The whole school!’ Anna hammered it home for Gareth.
‘Like a crocodile,’ Yannis said, and Anna and the boys beamed at one another. Anna had spent the day basking in the reflected glory of being associated with the boys, and Rose saw that she liked it. A lot.
‘Like a bunch of idiots,’ Nico added. Then the laughter died down and he yawned and shivered. ‘I’m cold,’ he said.
‘Ah, you’re not used to our nights yet. It can get pretty chilly,’ said Rose. ‘Now, finish up, and we’ll get you to bed. It’s really late.’
‘At home, we stay up as long as we like,’ Nico said.
‘Well, we do things differently here,’ said Gareth. ‘And while you’re with us, you’ll do them like we do.’
‘And you must be exhausted anyway, after your journey and going straight to school and all that,’ Rose said.
‘Come on Anna banana,’ Gareth said, taking her and Flossie up for their bath.
Rose found blankets and wrapped them round the boys. She walked them up the garden towards the Annexe. The sky was clear now, and the air still. A touch of frost was biting into the air and the stars were like tiny stabs in backlit silk.
‘Look,’ she said, pointing up. ‘The Plough, see?’
‘We’ve got that back home,’ Nico said. ‘We see it from our terrace every night. But it’s over there.’ And, with an astronomical rationale all of his own, he pointed further south.
She bundled them both up the Annexe stairs to the darkened room above, and they tiptoed past Polly, who lay huddled asleep on the big bed. Rose took them into the bathroom, and switched on the light. Polly had taken a shower, Rose noticed. The floor was covered in water, there were damp towels bundled in a corner, and talcum powder covered the surfaces.
‘Where are your toothbrushes?’ Rose asked the boys.
They both shrugged.
‘Well, your toilet bags then?’
‘Toilet bag?
Ewww
,’ Yannis giggled.
Ewww
,’ Yannis giggled.
‘Your washbags, I mean.’
Both boys looked blank. So Rose made them use their fingers with the toothpaste she had put out before they had arrived. Tomorrow she would buy them warmer clothes and toothbrushes. And pyjamas, because it turned out that they didn’t have any of them, either.
She tucked them into the bunk beds in the little bedroom – which, she noted, was very small indeed once there were two boys in it. There was also a faint whiff of damp, which she had never noticed before.
She went to turn the light out, looking back to smile at the two brown faces peering out from identical striped duvets.
‘Rose?’ Yannis said from his nest, in a small voice.
‘Yes, Yannis?’
‘Do you know any stories?’ he said. ‘Not scary ones, though.’
‘Let me see now,’ said Rose, curling up on the end of his bed. She could hear Nico sigh and turn noisily to face the wall. ‘It won’t be long, Nico, just to get Yannis settled.’
‘Whatever,’ Nico said.
‘Do you want to hear how me and your mum met?’
‘All right,’ Yannis said.
‘Well, it was a very rainy day by the seaside where we lived, and we were at school – our primary school, which was just near the beach.’
‘Ours is too, back home,’ Yannis said.
‘Yours opened right onto the beach, didn’t it? So at lunchtime you played out there. Well, ours was in the middle of a big town and there were a few roads between the school and the beach, so it was quite different, and the weather was very chilly and rainy that day, so everyone felt a little mean and cold. Not like in Karpathos, where the sun shines almost every day.
‘Anyway, we were all sitting down at our desks, when the teacher said there was a new girl, and in walked your mum. She was thin as a stick, and tiny, and her hair was like a frightened black cat sitting on her head.’
Nico let out a snort of laughter from the bed above.
‘She was soaking wet, and looked like a little ferret, staring out with her beady eyes. And she was wearing what looked like a purple tutu, stripy pink and black tights and big silver boots that made her feet look like a hooligan’s. Everyone in the class laughed.’
‘No one laughed at me today,’ Yannis said.
‘No. They’re nice at your new school. Back then, everyone laughed at your mum, except me. I stood up and said, “Can she come and sit by me, Miss?” And I looked after her. I took her hand and said, “We’re going to be best friends”. And we were.’
Nico had turned round now, and he hung his head down from the top bunk, listening.
‘That afternoon, I took her back to my house after school. We stopped off at her little flat on the way to let her mum know, but her mum was sleeping on the sofa, so we left her a note. Did you ever meet your granny?’
‘I did, when I was a baby,’ Nico said. ‘But I don’t remember her.’
‘Well, she was very beautiful. She was a model and her photo was in a lot of magazines when she was younger. But by the time she had your mum she wasn’t all that well, and she wasn’t able to look after her properly. So we went back to my house and we had tea, and Polly told me all about her life. She and her mum had just moved down to Brighton from London, and they had spent some time in Italy before that, and Morocco. But they stayed in Brighton when they got there, because her mum was too tired to move anywhere else. Which was lucky for me and Polly.
‘So if we weren’t at school together, we were round each other’s houses. My house was a sort of hotel, and we’d play in the empty bedrooms.’
‘Can we go there, to that house?’ Yannis asked.
‘Oh, it was sold a long time ago,’ Rose said. ‘Still, we’ve got
this
house now. And I hope you two and Anna will grow up to be as great friends as me and Polly.
this
house now. And I hope you two and Anna will grow up to be as great friends as me and Polly.
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