Authors: Julia Crouch

Tags: #Fiction

Cuckoo (5 page)

BOOK: Cuckoo

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Rose gasped and looked away.

‘So I came over to England, away from the lot of them. And now my bloodline starts and ends here,’ he said, his voice cracking. ‘In this room.’

‘And how are you with them now, Pam and John?’ she asked gently.

‘They’re deceased. They were too old. It’s too late.’

Rose took him by the hand and led him through the swinging white door, back into the bar area, where Christos and Polly were holding court with a group of earnest-looking undergraduates. She knew that, in Gareth, she had found her man. She was going to take his bloodline forward, out of that clinical, angry space, and out into the world. And in doing so, she was going to make her own reparation as well as taking on the son of that poor, eyeless woman in the photograph.

Christos ran out of red dots for his own exhibition that night, but
BloodLine
didn’t sell, and no one expressed any interest in Gareth, beyond a general muttering about health and safety and imitations of Marc Quinn. But for Gareth, and, to some extent for Rose too, the work represented a catharsis that allowed both of them to move on together, united on the surface, at least.

‘Don’t look so worried.’ Polly reached across in the rain and took Rose’s hand, waking her up out of her dream. ‘I want you to know that I am going to be so good, that you are only going to be thankful that I am there. I promise that.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ Rose smiled.

Polly sat back and smoked for a while, her eyes darting around the car park as if she were searching for something.

‘What do you remember of Christos?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know if—’

‘No, go on, I want to know.’

‘OK, well, let me see. He was always going on. He was always talking, drawing, smoking, drinking, eating. Touching you; making food; clearing up. I never, ever saw him sitting still. Not even when he slept. You always felt you could do, say, eat and drink whatever you wanted when you were with him. He was – I don’t know – he was like a dark-haired lion, great in the doorway of your white house, grapevines over his head, Raki in his hand. He was a sort of Dionysus.’

‘Godlike.’

‘Yes, if you like. Godlike.’

And the two women sat there in the rain, under the umbrella, remembering that all this was dead, gone, no longer.

‘I’ve missed you, Poll,’ Rose said.

‘Me too you.’ Polly leaned forward and stubbed her cigarette out on the picnic table.

‘You really must stay as long as you like,’ Rose said. ‘Stay for ever!’

‘Well, until we get on our feet again . . .’

‘Of course.’

‘Oh, by the way,’ Polly said. ‘The baby was crying when I went past the car.’

‘Why didn’t you say?’ Rose said, scrambling to her feet and running down the slope to get Flossie.

‘I did. Just now,’ Polly said to Rose’s back as she slowly got up and made her way down behind her.

Five

It took Rose a while to settle Flossie back into the car seat; she had managed to wake up all the others with her wailing. Anna had been trying to calm her sister, which somehow made Rose feel worse, as if she had committed a double dereliction of duty. Polly just got in the car and sat and waited for Rose to finish, barely acknowledging Yannis and Nico, who were wriggling with discomfort in the back.

Rose eventually climbed into the driver’s seat. It was nearly seven o’clock and she wanted to get home to the stew she had cooking in the Aga, to feed the travellers then settle them into their new digs. She was a little angry at Polly for not having told her earlier about Flossie, but she made allowances for tiredness and for grief. By the time they were back on the motorway, she was able to speak again.

‘What are your plans then, so far?’ she asked Polly, but there was no answer. She glanced over and saw that Polly had curled around her seatbelt and fallen asleep. She looked so calm and so innocent like that – at least ten years younger than she actually was. Rose turned her attention back to the road and quickly had to brake. The car in front was stationary and it looked like there was a long queue up ahead.

As she sat in the traffic jam, Rose felt a growing sense of responsibility for her visitors. Her own and Polly’s histories were so bound up together, it was hard to know where one of them began and the other ended. It was Rose who had introduced Christos to Polly, back in the Notting Hill flat days, and it was because of Polly and Christos that Rose had got together with Gareth.

Polly had been very successful in the early nineties. She had ridden high in the indie charts with her raw yet poetic music, and had been the pin-up for a certain type of kohl-eyed boy. When she came up to London to do her teacher training, Rose had rented a room in Polly’s velvet-lined Notting Hill flat. Those had been heady days. Polly was Rose’s ticket to the glamorous and exciting London that she, a maths graduate and trainee primary school teacher, shouldn’t really by rights have had access to. She remembered only too well the feeling of facing a raucous class of seven year olds with the dregs of cocaine in her system – and, on one very memorable occasion, her nostrils – from the night before. She was well known as Polly’s sidekick, and her photo often appeared in magazines, in the background or in the back of some taxi, behind the main story that was Polly.

And then it all went wrong. Polly’s fourth album, a pared-back piano-based series of the darkest songs she had ever written, was universally loathed. ‘Music to cut your wrists to,’ was one critical opinion, ‘and not in a good way’. Polly, who lacked the thick skin to deal with such blows, sank low, and the recreational use of cocaine and heroin that they had both enjoyed soon became, for her, a daily necessity. Sepulchral at the best of times, Polly started to look like a corpse. Her skin greyed, her legs looked like she had rickets, her hair began to fall out. But even like this, she exuded a childlike sexuality that seemed to draw men to her.

Rose, bored by the people that Polly had begun to hang out with – junkies breed junkies – had, for the first time in her life, started going out on her own and making her own friends. She and a couple of her PGCE contemporaries had edged their way into a group of older boy MA Fine Art students at Goldsmiths, where they were all studying. She enjoyed hanging out with them, spending half-term afternoons in lock-ins in smoky New Cross pubs, arguing about minimalism, structuralism and postmodernism over pints of Red Stripe. She was drawn to the conceptual, left-brain stuff they went on about, but was at a loss to understand how they then translated that into creative work. It was something that still both perplexed her and provoked her admiration.

The MA boys were romantic figures, all work-worn fingers, splattered DMs and intense cigarette rolling. Christos had caught her eye from early on, and it wasn’t very long before he asked her to go with him to ‘this little Greek place my Uncle Stavros runs’.

It was the middle of a heatwave and everything about London was a little heightened. The night they went to the restaurant, darkness had brought no relief from the humidity of the day. It turned out to be one of the most extraordinary nights of Rose’s life.

After a dinner of char-grilled souvlaki, thick garlicky tsatsiki and tooth-achingly sweet baklava, Rose and Stavros stayed drinking Raki and Greek coffee until the restaurant closed. Opening bottles of cold beer and chilled Retsina and handing them out to all the restaurant staff after hours, Uncle Stavros turned the music up loud, cleared the floor and turned the place into a party venue. This was quite normal, Christos had explained, for a weekend evening.

The night was long and sweaty. Rose found herself dancing next to a dripping, squat Mexican dish-wash boy and a waitress she had decided early on was a great beauty. Then Christos stepped in, put his arm around her waist and in a gesture that was grand and romantic, like something from an old-fashioned movie, he swept her away so that he had her all to himself.

They danced for hours, glued together at the groin – skin on skin with her arms under his T-shirt, twined around his back. He smelled, she remembered, of Eau Sauvage, garlic and fresh sweat. She could recall it so clearly even now, over a decade later, with him in his grave, and it still made her make a small involuntary sound at the back of her throat when she thought about it.

Then at four-thirty, just before sunrise, his uncle called a load of cabs. Everyone poured out of the restaurant into the clammy night and piled in.

‘Now for the best part of the evening!’ Christos grinned as he handed her into the taxi.

They went up to Hampstead Heath, where, like a pack of giggling children, they climbed over fences to break into one of the bathing ponds. This was how they always ended a hot Saturday night, Christos said. It was a hangover from the days when his uncle had run a restaurant in the Plaka in Athens, and they had all gone down to Rafina to see the dawn in from the Aegean, before a trip to the fish market to buy the next day’s menu.

‘Hampstead Heath Pond isn’t quite the same, and the
fisk
is delivered in a dirty white van, but what can you do?’ Uncle Stavros shrugged, and, tugging off his clothes to reveal a darkly-haired body that had seen perhaps too many souvlaki and kleftiko, he bellyflopped into the cold, dark water.

The others followed him. They were all so hot, the water practically sizzled when they jumped in.

Christos swam across the pond, leading Rose off to a dark corner, away from the others. As the shouts and laughter died down, and everyone began to drift off, Rose and Christos made love, naked on the grass, in the early-morning light. He came at her like a hungry animal, licking and eating. She was quick to respond.

Looking back on that night, she reckoned that Christos had lit something up in her that she had never known about before, and she was grateful to him for it.

As they walked back across the Heath in the warm morning sun, Rose thought that she had very high hopes for this one. They kept stopping for deep, devouring kisses, adding more ache to their already tired mouths and faces.

‘Would you like to come in for coffee?’ she asked with a smile when they arrived on the doorstep of the flat she shared with Polly.

‘I’d like to come in and fuck you some more,’ he whispered. ‘Then I’d like to sleep with you.’

So he did. As usual, Polly had been partying all night and had gone to bed leaving the place looking as if a bomb had hit it, but for once, Rose couldn’t care less.

They woke in the late afternoon and lay in bed, listening to the Sunday silence. Rose got up to make a cup of tea for them both, and was annoyed to see that Polly still hadn’t cleared up from the night before. She also noticed that there, amongst all the beer cans and vodka bottles, was a dirty set of works and spillages of white powder on the coffee-table. Not for the first time, Rose thought that if Polly didn’t sort herself out soon, she was going to have to start thinking about taking the almost unbearable step of leaving this flat and living a life apart from her friend. As she crossed the floor towards Polly’s room, she indulged in a little fantasy, where she moved into a cottage on a cliff by the sea with Christos and was finally able to stand on her own two feet.

She was working out how many children they would have when she knocked on Polly’s door.

‘Poll? You awake? Want a cup of tea?’

There was no reply. Rose knocked again. Surely she couldn’t have gone out and left all that crap out there?

Carefully, she opened the door and there was Polly, completely naked, sprawled on her back across her bed, strings of drying vomit in her black hair and blood smeared around her face and pillow. She was the same colour that Rose and Gareth would later choose to paint their living-room walls: duck egg blue.

Rose ran to her and took her pulse. She thought she could feel something, but it was hard to tell because her own heart was pounding so strongly. She grabbed a mirror from Polly’s bedside table and held it to her face, sprinkling tiny grains of white powder over her as she did so. It steamed up, so she was breathing, slightly.

Rose began shaking her, trying to wake her, but Polly just flopped back like a bluebell a day after picking.

Then Christos was by her side. He was completely naked.

‘Is that—?’ he asked.

BOOK: Cuckoo

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