Authors: Julia Crouch

Tags: #Fiction

Cuckoo (44 page)

BOOK: Cuckoo

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‘He’s really sick,’ Anna said.

‘I don’t care,’ Rose said. ‘I need to talk to him. Now. You lot stay here.’

Ignoring the fact that the children were in the room, she pulled off her nightdress and put on a tracksuit. She pinned up her hair to make herself feel more in command, then she went out of the room and downstairs to Anna’s bedroom, leaving a bed full of concerned children.

She pushed open the door to Anna’s room and saw that the curtains were drawn against the morning light. Gareth lay in a huddle in the bed, a bucket at his side. A strong smell of stale fart filled the room. Rose smiled.

‘Hello,’ she said. He stirred, groaned and rolled over onto his back.

‘I don’t know what happened,’ he said, throwing his arm over his eyes. ‘One minute I was standing there, the next I had to run for the bathroom. I feel like I’ve shat my bowels out.’

You weakling! Rose thought. You pipsqueak! She wondered if Andy would be so sensitive to an overdose of laxatives and emetics, or whether he would just put it all behind him, so to speak, and get up and on with what he had been doing. She suspected the latter, very strongly.

‘Then, I don’t know, Polly got taken the same way, at almost the same time. I think it’s some sort of virus or something, Rose.’

‘Or something you ate, the two of you?’

‘It’s far worse than that,’ he groaned. ‘I feel like I’m dying.’

‘Food poisoning can be fatal,’ she said. ‘Botulism, for example.’

‘Rose?’ He took his hand away from his eyes and looked at her. She hadn’t moved fully into the room. Instead, she stood there, looking down at him, enjoying the fact that she was so much higher up than him, and that he was so helpless. ‘What is it? Is it about the gun ?’

‘
Is
it about the gun?’ she asked.

‘I have always wanted a gun, ever since we moved out here. It’s what a man does in the countryside.’

Rose snorted.

‘I was saving the kitten, Rose. God knows, that damn fox had already killed Manky.’

‘That’s what you think?’

‘Why are you being like this, Rose?’

Once again, Rose felt that lump rise up from her belly and lodge itself in her throat. Perhaps it was that clenched fist, trying to find a new way out. Whatever it was, it made it impossible for her to talk. Instead, she just lifted her hands and dragged them backwards through her hair, pulling her face back like a drumskin, so that for an instant she looked like a girl in a horror movie.

‘That’s the problem with you, Rose,’ Gareth said, making a leap in his mind that she could find no path for, ‘You’ve never seen me as a man. You just see me as a pathway, a means to an end.’

‘That’s not true,’ she said in a low voice.

‘It is. And when I finally turn round and say to you that I am a man, you can’t take it. You can’t take it so much that you just literally black it out, you collapse and fall.’

‘So to be a man you have to have a gun, do you?’ she asked, the lump working its way up to the air, like a baby forcing its head out between its mother’s thighs.

‘That’s not what I mean, and you know it,’ Gareth groaned.

‘You have to show your daughter you can kill an innocent animal, do you?’

‘It wasn’t innocent. It was a murderer.’

‘
You’re
the murderer,’ she thundered. ‘You are murdering everything around here.’

‘Gah!’ Gareth clenched his fists and groaned in frustration. The sinews in his neck stood out like threads. He pulled Anna’s princess duvet up over his head and threw his body over to face the wall, sending a flatulent gust of duvet air over towards Rose.

Disgusted, she turned on her heel and stormed downstairs to her kitchen. Automatically, she put her apron on and poured herself a large glass of wine. All this, and before lunch, too. She saw that her hands were shaking.

She needed a cigarette. She went to Gareth’s jacket, which was flung over the back of one of the wooden chairs, knowing she would find a packet of Drum and some Rizlas there. As she delved in his pockets, her fingers landed on the large, cool shape of the studio key. She fished it out and looked at it. It was a beautiful thing. She and Gareth had gone to inordinate lengths to source original door fixtures for the house, and although he had made her believe that locks were some sort of bourgeois hang-up on her part, he had been most concerned that the keys were both functional and original. This one was black and curved, as big as the palm of Rose’s hand. She imagined that, a couple of centuries before, some hulk of a village blacksmith had hewn this on his anvil, all sparks and smoke and metallic clangs. And here it was now, in her eyes some sort of fetish, the final piece in the jigsaw that would uncover the truth for her.

Pocketing the key in the front of her apron, she took the tobacco out to the side terrace, along with her glass of wine. She took three Rizlas and stuck them together as if she were making a spliff, then rolled herself an enormous cigarette, twisting one end and putting a Rizla packet roach in the other. Using the Zippo that Gareth always rather scummily kept tucked in the tobacco packet, she lit up and leaned back on the stone bench. The sun hadn’t yet struck the side of the building, and she felt the cold sting into her back and buttocks.

What with passing out earlier, the previous couple of days spent in bed and her wine breakfast, the tobacco sent her soaring with the kind of rush only occasional smokers know about. For a moment she seemed to leave her body and hover above herself, looking down at the nearly middle-aged housewife that she was presenting to the world, with her hastily pinned-up hair – how long was it, she thought, since she had visited the hairdresser? – lack of make-up and wobbling mounds of cellulite that were scarcely covered by her drab, functional clothes.

She closed her eyes against this vision and tried to think straight. Now she had her proof, she had decided that she was going to perform a guerrilla raid on the studio. But how? She had a window of about twenty-four hours, she reckoned, before Gareth and Polly were back up on their feet. But, with school shut, she couldn’t do it while the children were around, so she would probably have to wait until nighttime, which was cutting it a bit fine for the Brighton trip – which, she realised, with a sickening, excited thud, was tomorrow. And then what? What would she find in there? How would she react? That sort of thinking was getting too much like forward planning for her. No, she would wait and see. There was no hurry, beyond the twenty-four-hour stricture. She reckoned she had all the time in the world.

‘Mum?’

Rose opened her eyes. Anna had crept right up beside her.

‘Why are you smoking, Mum?’ Anna had never seen Rose smoke. She had, in fact, extracted a solemn promise from her that she never would. In the light of Gareth’s fairly heavy habit, Anna had said she wanted one parent to live until she was grown up, at least.

‘Sorry, darling. I’m just not feeling very well. This is sort of like medicine.’

‘A cigarette?’

‘Yes. Like . . .’ and here Rose’s brain was racing ‘. . . like, if you drank a whole bottle of Calpol, you’d have to be made sick.’

‘Like Effie did last year?’

‘Yes. But if you only have a little bit, if you’re ill, then Calpol can be very good for you. It can make you better.’

‘And a cigarette is like Calpol?’

‘In a way, yes.’

Anna thought this over. ‘I hope I never get the illness that needs cigarettes to make it better,’ she said finally.

‘I hope you don’t, either,’ Rose said. ‘I really hope you don’t.’

Rose drained her glass and stood up, grinding the big cigarette under her bare foot onto the stone floor. The mixture of hot and cold was really quite pleasing. Nico and Yannis hung about the back door, looking at what was going on. Nico, bless him, had Flossie balanced on his hip.

‘How are they?’ Yannis asked.

‘How are who?’ Rose asked, pushing her hair behind her ear.

‘Mum and Gareth. Are they going to be all right?’ His eyes were round with concern, as he came forward, step by step, afraid of what her answer might be.

‘I imagine so,’ Rose said.

‘They’re – they’re not going to die, are they?’

‘Don’t be gay,’ Nico snapped.

‘Nico!’ Rose said. ‘Don’t say that. I won’t have you using the word gay as an insult.’

Nico turned patiently to his brother. ‘Don’t be a spastic, then. Course they won’t die. Will they, Rose?’ He looked back to her.

Rose couldn’t allow this to go on. She couldn’t bear to see those two little faces, part of her gang, looking up at her with so much concern.

‘Of
course
not. Of course they’re not going to die. It’s just a bug – like I had. And look at me – I’m not dead, am I? They’ll be fine in a day or two.’ ‘We can still go to Brighton, can’t we?’ Nico asked.

‘Of course. I’m sure your mum will be fine by tomorrow.’

‘Promise?’

Rose knew that the laxative would have worked its way through her body by then. Whether the constitutionally weak and fragile Polly would be able to come with them, she didn’t know. But Rose had decided that she’d take the children away come what may. She needed to put some distance between herself and Gareth and the house for a while, to get her head straight.

The children were all standing looking up at her now. Their innocence and worry, the way they looked to her, was too much for her to bear.

‘Let’s go to the park,’ she declared, swaying slightly, breaking the spell.

‘Yesss!’ Yannis cried. ‘Can I bring the football?’

‘Bring what you like,’ Rose said. ‘We’ll stay out the whole day if we want to!’

Forty-One

‘Hello, stranger.’ Simon looked up and smiled as Rose walked over towards the park bench.

She smiled back and sat down next to him.

‘Not meaning to be insulting or anything,’ he said, ‘but you look like death warmed up.’

‘No offence taken,’ Rose said. ‘That’s exactly how I feel.’

‘I hear you’ve not been so well. I tried to call by a couple of times, but I kept on seeing
her
in the kitchen and, well, I just couldn’t bring myself to go in.’ He thrust his hands deep in his jacket pocket and stretched his legs out. ‘But I just want you to know the thought was there. I heard about your shenanigans at the weir, too.’

‘Bloody village gossip,’ Rose said. ‘It was all connected, I think, the nearly drowning and the illness. An unhappy collision.’

‘There seem to be quite a lot of them around with you lot at the moment,’ Simon said.

‘I’d like to say that was too cryptic for me to understand but, sadly, I can’t.’ Rose turned and gave him a wan smile. Simon took his hand out of his pocket and grasped hers.

‘Rose, I don’t think I can stand by much longer and watch this happen to you.’

‘It’s none of your business, Simon. Please.’

‘I know. But – I hate seeing you like this.’

‘Yannis. Get down off there!’ Rose yelled at the little boy, who had somehow shimmied himself right to the top of the A frame that supported the swings, and was now turning somersaults around the bar at the top.

Simon joined his two hands together, enclosing hers in his own. He tried to search her eyes out, but she refused to allow him access. Instead she scanned the playground, checking not only on the children in her charge but the other ten or so who were buzzing around the apparatus like wasps round an abandoned wine glass.

‘I’m fine, really, Simon. Just a bit of post-viral something or other. Gareth’s down with it now. So’s Polly.’

‘My heart bleeds.’

Rose smiled and, finally, looked right at him. ‘You’re a good mate, Simon. Thank you.’

BOOK: Cuckoo

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