Cuckoo Song (41 page)

‘Keep running!’ she shouted, elbowing her opponent in the head.

Trista grabbed Pen’s hand and kept sprinting, taking turns at random. She did not know where she was or where she was going. All that mattered was that they kept moving. The riverside kept
appearing solicitously on the right, like an over-attentive nanny.

Her feet were silent, but Pen’s steps echoed with painful clarity. How obvious they were!
Tell me, have you seen two girls running?
They needed to hide.

‘There!’ she hissed, and pulled Pen over to one of the jetties, beside which a rowing boat bobbed. She clambered down into the boat and helped Pen in after her. Then, pulling at the
underside of the jetty with all her might, she managed to drag the boat under it, so that they were hidden from casual view. There was a sodden blanket in the belly of the boat, which she pulled
over them for good measure.

As they lay there gasping, trembling, listening, a familiar sound reached Trista’s ears. It was a guttural, rebellious rumble, the sound of a not-too-distant motorcycle engine throbbing to
life.

‘It’s Violet!’ squeaked Pen in stifled excitement. ‘She got away! She got away!’

The motorcycle’s tune rose into a crescendo, accompanied by the percussion of running steps and shouted demands. A roaring ribbon of sound . . . and then a long screech of distressed
rubber, and a sustained, painful rattle of impacts. There was a ting, tinkle, clatter of settling fragments, followed by a gouging silence.

The hush held its own for seconds, then gave way to a growing murmur of voices, a bubbling swell of concern and curiosity, punctuated by urgent shouts.

Chapter 38

Trista lay in the bottom of the boat with her arms tightly around Pen, feeling as if all her bones had been turned to jelly. She could hear Pen making little hiccupy noises
that sounded like sobs.

‘Violet . . .’ whispered Pen. ‘She crashed – she
died
.’

‘No, she didn’t,’ Trista said very quickly. She clenched her eyes tight, but that did nothing to shut out the deluge of imagined images. A body flopped over the bonnet of a
car, or perhaps a broken windscreen with reddened shards . . . Just for an instant she hated Pen for saying aloud everything she was trying not to think.

But Pen was too little and miserable for her to hate. Instead Trista tried to take her few rags of hope and wrap them around the smaller girl.

‘Violet isn’t dead,’ she told Pen and herself. ‘She had a plan, and her plan wouldn’t involve being dead.’

Silence. Snuffle, snuffle.

‘What was her plan?’ asked Pen, her tone of misery tempered by a touch of reluctant hope.

Trista stared into the darkness of the blanket, desperately trying to make sense of Violet’s last words.

Good luck with the snow.

‘She
decided
to let them catch her.’ Trista blinked at the revelation, and clung to it. ‘She
let
it happen, so we could get away, and so they would put her in
a police cell. That way she stays still . . . and the snow comes. Now hush, Pen, please hush! Or they’ll find us!’

For what felt like an age, there were sounds of running steps in the street and conversations in urgent tones. Occasional words and phrases were audible.

‘. . . ambulance . . .’

‘. . . two girls come by this way?’

At one point she actually heard several sets of feet walk out on to the jetty directly above them. Trista tensed, and even Pen’s snuffles became more muted.

‘Please take a moment to think, madam.’ It was the voice of the younger policeman, the one who had asked Violet to surrender. ‘The two little girls – where did they go
after that?’

He sounded harassed and concerned. In an odd, distant way Trista felt sorry for him. She wondered if he had a nice face, and a wife who would be sympathetic when he got home after a hard day. At
the same time she wondered what would happen if he found her, and whether she would have to bite him in order to get away.

There was a pause, and then the response came in a voice that sounded like the combined sobs of children in a distant cavern.

‘I remember quite clearly. They carried on running down the street – that way. Then they got into a car. A yellow car.’ It was unmistakably the drowned-looking Besider woman
from the tea room.

‘I saw them too,’ insisted an unfamiliar voice which rasped like crab shells chafing against each other. ‘Definitely a yellow car. It drove away.’

‘Yes,’ agreed a hiss like sand seeping through an hourglass. ‘The girls are gone. Take your snooping elsewhere.’

Trista could hear the faint scratching of pencil on paper. She wondered how many of the Besiders’ actual words the policeman could hear with his conscious mind, or whether he was jotting
down ordinary-sounding statements.

The Besiders were lying, to send the police off on the wrong trail. Why? They believed Trista was one of them, so perhaps they were protecting their own. Or maybe they did not want police paying
attention to the Old Docks while it was full of Besiders.

To Trista’s enormous relief, the young policeman seemed to heed the eerily similar statements given by the witnesses, and his footsteps creaked off the jetty again. For a while she made
out his voice asking the same questions of passers-by, then she heard him no more.

There were still many sounds of hubbub and inquisitive exchanges in the road above, however. Perhaps the Besiders would not turn them in, but there were plenty of ordinary people in the street,
who would doubtless soon connect the policeman’s questions about two young girls with the missing Crescent daughters in the newspaper.

‘We have to stay here for now.’ Trista racked her brain, trying to form a plan. ‘We’ll wait for the snow. It’ll be easier to walk around without people spotting us
when there’s snow.’

‘What if it
doesn’t
snow?’ demanded Pen, sounding only slightly mollified.

‘It will.’

It has to snow. If it doesn’t, then it means that Violet isn’t sitting still in a cell, or even a hospital. It means that she’s on the move still . . . or that she’s
dead.

The next few hours were the longest that Trista could remember. They were also painful in a very real sense, because Pen fidgeted hopelessly, sighing every minute or so and
shifting position in ways that always involved elbowing Trista.

There were whispered complaints too. Pen was bored. She was hungry. It was damp, and the blanket smelt funny. Trista was taking up all the room.

Trista told Pen to sing
One Hundred Green Bottles
in her head. Pen settled for whispering it huskily to herself, and soon Trista regretted making the suggestion. There was something
terrible about the countdown. The last hours of her life were falling away from her and smashing silently like so many imaginary bottles, and she was stuck in a musty boat watching it happen. She
tried not to think about the fact that her not-sister was full of unspent years, like pips in a robust little apple.

After a long while, however, she noticed a change in the atmosphere. The bobbing of the boat altered its rhythm a little, betraying a shift in the direction of the wind. The blanket flipped and
flapped. Pen was now complaining of being
cold.
At last Trista dared to tug aside the blanket and peer out.

The September sky had curdled and was now an intimidating yellow-grey, its tobacco-stain hues reflected in the shivering surface of the river. Stray gusts of wind tore in from the estuary with a
shark-bite fierceness and a chill that made her eyes stream. The riverside road was now all but empty of pedestrians.

‘Pen,’ she breathed, ‘it’s cold. It’s
cold
. Violet did it! She did it, Pen!’

Violet’s alive!
She could not voice the words, though, without admitting to Pen that she had been in doubt.

‘Look!’ Trista drew back the blanket a little, and Pen blinked mulishly in the meagre daylight. ‘There’s nobody in the street. We can probably sit up a bit now.’
She expected Pen to be as pleased as she was, and was a little surprised when she directed a surly glare at the lowering sky. ‘The snow’s coming. It’ll be here soon, Pen, I
promise. We just need to wait.’

Pen sniffed hard, and half sat up, disarranging the blanket.

‘No!’ she hissed. ‘I don’t want to! I don’t like these docks! I don’t want us to stay here any more!’

‘Pen, you’re being . . .’ Trista let out a breath and started again. ‘You know I
have
to be here at midnight, so I can follow the Architect.’

‘No, you don’t!’ Stars of reflected light gleamed in Pen’s eyes, her shadowed face creased with earnestness. ‘We could sail away, in this boat! We could go to
France!’

‘What?’ Trista could barely keep her voice to a whisper. ‘Pen, of
course
we can’t. And what would happen to Triss?’

‘I don’t care!’ And Pen, who had faced down moving cars and yelled at the Architect, was shaking, face crumpled, tears spilling out of her eyes. ‘I don’t want you
to go! And . . . And I don’t want
her
to come back!’

‘Pen!’ Trista exclaimed, appalled. ‘You don’t mean that!’

There was a growled, snuffled response that might have been, ‘Yes, I do.’

To be loved, to be
preferred
. . . The very thought gave Trista a painful little stab of joy. A moment later, however, she thought of the jagged rips that criss-crossed the Crescent
family and felt only sadness.

‘But she’s your sister, Pen! I’m not. I’m just a bundle of sticks that looks like her.’

Pen did not answer straight away, but wriggled herself closer, so that her damp face was buried in Trista’s shoulder.

‘Do you remember what happened after . . . after I dug up the frog and found out it had moved?’ Pen’s voice was hesitant and defiant, but with a touch of slyness.

It took a second or two for Trista to adjust to the change of subject and comb through Triss’s memories.

‘Yes . . . Yes, I do.’ Trista stroked Pen’s head. ‘You were so upset you couldn’t cry, you just went around
staring
at everything. You couldn’t sleep
even. And so . . . one night I remember sitting on your bed and telling you that the frog was in frog heaven, where there were no cats, and where all the lily pads were lovely and soft. And I said
that the frog wanted you to know that it was happy, and that it didn’t blame you for anything because you were only trying to help.’

‘And you hugged me when I cried,’ mumbled Pen. ‘And after that I went to sleep. Didn’t I?’

‘Yes, Pen.’ Trista sighed, and let go of the stolen moment. ‘But
that wasn’t me.
That was Triss.’

‘But . . .’ Pen pulled away and looked into Trista’s face, and her expression was a startling combination of determination, desperation and pleading. ‘But what if it
was
you? Maybe that’s why you remember it so well? Because perhaps –’ she gabbled on with increasing speed, as if afraid of interruption – ‘perhaps we were
wrong all the time, and you weren’t just made out of sticks a week ago, perhaps there were
always
two Trisses, a good one and a bad one, and you’ve always been the good one,
and I only sent away the bad one . . .’

Oh, Pen.

With a surge of pity and exasperation, Trista started to understand the fantasy Pen had cobbled together in her head. So this was why Pen had slipped into calling Trista ‘Triss’ over
and over again. This was why Pen had scowled whenever anybody talked about rescuing her real sister, and why she had tried to bargain with the Architect for the life of Trista instead. All this
while Pen had been building a make-believe version of reality where she hadn’t
really
betrayed her sister to a terrible fate, just sent away a
bad
version of her . . .

‘
Pen
,’ groaned Triss, tenderness battling against frustration, ‘that doesn’t make
any sense.
’ She gave Pen another squeeze. ‘Life
isn’t that simple.
People
aren’t that simple. You can’t cut them into slices like a cake, then throw away the bits you don’t like. The Triss who was kind about the
frog and the Triss who spoilt your birthday – they’re
the same person
.’

‘But she
hates
me!’ roared Pen. ‘And if she comes back, she’ll tell Mummy and Daddy what I did, and . . . they’ll send me away to prison or an orphanage or
school . . .’

And that was it, of course. If Triss returned, reality would come knocking. Pen would no longer be able to pretend to herself or to her parents that she had not been responsible for her
sister’s kidnap. She would have to face up to what she had done.

‘Triss doesn’t hate you.’ Trista could almost feel the strands of Pen’s affection, and knew that they had been flung out to her in desperation, like a swift grab made by
a falling climber. Now, with a sense of sadness, she realized that she needed to detach them and reattach them to Pen’s real sister, where they belonged. ‘When I talked to her on the
telephone, she was shouting at me – asking what
I
had done to
you
. She wasn’t angry with you. She was
worried
about you.’

Pen had no answer. Instead she gave in to a torrent of ragged, tormented sobs.

‘I don’t want to go to prison!’ she wailed at last. ‘I want my mummy!’

‘I know,’ said Trista, who had no mummy. ‘I know.’

She was still rocking Pen in her arms a few minutes later when the first tiny flakes of snow began to float down from the sky.

The boat-bound fugitives sneaked occasional peeks out from under their blanket as the sky grew dimmer. At first the snowflakes were tiny like ash flecks, dying as soon as they
touched the ground and leaving freckles of damp. A few people opened their windows for a while to laugh and wonder at the unseasonal sprinkling. The temperature kept dropping, however, and soon the
windows were closing again.

The wind stilled and the flakes fattened. Before long the air was a ballet of chill tufts, each the size of a farthing. The first settled on the earth and melted, falling in on themselves. Their
successors left a skin of fine, grey slush. But there were more and more, falling faster than they could melt, and soon the whole scene had a downy pallor. Both girls in the boat were shivering
now, and Trista was glad of the blanket.