Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

‘Triss! Darling!’ Her mother dropped down on to her knees and gave Triss a tight, brief hug. ‘Oh, you should have said! You should always tell me things that are worrying you, poor froglet!’

‘Mummy,’ Pen asked in the smallest of voices, ‘is Triss going to be all right?’ Her brow puckered and her mouth drooped a little, as if she was a much younger child, frightened by the dark. ‘Is she still sick? Only… I got really scared last night. When I saw her in the garden. She was acting all funny.’

Triss’s blood turned cold. That little snake. She saw me under the apple tree last night. She must have seen me from her window.

Their mother looked at Triss again, no suspicion or accusation in her gaze, only the beginnings of a bewildered smile. ‘In the garden ?’

‘I have no idea what she’s talking about.’ Triss was amazed that she managed to keep her voice so level, so convincingly bemused.

‘Yes – that’s the scariest bit,’ mumbled Pen. She reached out and wound one finger round a fold of their mother’s skirt, as if for comfort. ‘I really don’t think Triss remembers. But I saw her, and she was crawling around in the mud and stinky apples for ages. She looked all starey, and her nightdress was mucky…’

‘Triss, darling.’ Her mother’s voice was very soft, and with a sinking of the heart Triss knew what she was going to ask. ‘Can you fetch your nightdress? There’s a love.’

Inside her room, Triss tried to scratch off some of the mud and grass stains with her fingernails, but to little avail. There was no spare nightdress she could substitute. Her neck and face felt hot as she carried the grimy, crumpled mess out to her mother, who unfolded it and surveyed it in silence.

For the briefest moment, Triss caught Pen flashing her a hard, appraising glance. The whole conversation had been a trap. Triss could only see that now that the pit was gaping in front of her.

‘Pen was using father’s telephone.’ The words fell from Triss’s mouth like stones, hard, cold and bitter-tasting.

‘I didn’t!’ Pen’s face took on a look of simple blank incomprehension, so realistic that for a moment Triss half-believed in it. ‘Mummy – why is Triss saying that?’

‘She’s lying!’ protested Triss. ‘She’s always lying!’ For the first time, however, she saw her mother’s see-saw teeter and threaten to settle in a new direction.

‘I didn’t!’ Pen sounded as if she was close to tears. ‘Triss did say something about hearing voices coming from the study when she came up, and said it sounded like somebody on the telephone, but there wasn’t anyone there! There weren’t any voices! Mummy – she’s scaring me!’

‘Girls, I want you to wait here.’ Their mother half walked, half ran to the stairs and returned a few moments later with their father, who gave them both a brief, distracted smile that did not reach his eyes. He walked into the study, and then Triss could hear him talking loudly to the operator, asking what other calls there had been in the last day.

When he returned, he knelt down before Triss, sighed and looked her straight in the eye.

‘Think carefully, Triss. When was it you thought you saw Pen using the telephone?’

‘Just now,’ whispered Triss. His words had already told her all she needed to know, however. Not ‘When was it you saw Pen using the telephone’, but ‘When was it you thought you saw Pen using the telephone’.

The operator must have told him that there had been no call made from their house. What could that mean? Had Pen been play-acting with the phone after all? Could she even have put on a performance, to trick Triss into looking crazy? Or… was it possible that Pen never had been in the study, and that Triss really had imagined it?

Triss’s mother put her arms around her.

‘You’re not in trouble,’ she said very, very gently. Triss’s blood ran cold.

Triss’s parents were kind. Too kind. They talked everything over with her in the front room, after her father had phoned the doctor to make an appointment for the next day. There was nothing to worry about, they told her. She hadn’t done anything wrong. It was just a silly leftover bit of illness, but they would take her to the doctor and he would take care of it.

The doctor would see through her, she was sure of it. He would be able to tell at a glance how ill she really was. Seeing-things ill. Doll-killing ill. Windfall-guzzling ill. But none of Triss’s tried and tested strategies worked. I don’t want to go to the doctor, I don’t feel like it, it would make my head hurt, his surgery smells funny, it scares me…

In the end, what made her stop trying to squirm off the hook was the expression on her father’s face. It was pained and drawn in a way she had not seen before, and made him look older. She could not bear making her father look older.

‘Triss, there’s no need to be scared.’ He pulled her over to sit in his lap and hugged her. His jacket was full of serious father-smells, such as pipe tobacco, hair cream, and a warm leathery scent that seemed to be his very own. It made her feel a bit safer. ‘You’ll be fine at the doctor’s. You will be my brave girl, and I will be very proud of you, as I always am. I know you’re frightened and confused, but nothing bad is going to happen. You trust me, don’t you?’

Triss nodded mutely, her cheek against his lapel. Even as she did so, though, the memory of the strange conversations she had overheard stung her, like a forgotten splinter in her skin nudged by a careless gesture. Her nod was a lie. She did not, could not, completely trust him.

‘And if you’re very good and very brave, then after we see the doctor, I’ll take you down Marley Street and we can buy you a new nightdress. And a nice new party dress at the same time. Would you like that?’

Triss hesitated, and then nodded again, slowly. A new party dress meant he still loved her and that she was still Triss in his eyes. Party dresses meant parties, which meant not being locked up in a mental hospital.

Triss felt her mother’s hand stroking her head, and with a rush of relief she felt a sense of her own power return to her. They were worried about her, but they were still on her side. They would still do anything they could to stop her lip trembling. The feeling of safety was fleeting, however. Pen would not be satisfied with her most recent assault. Pen would be planning something new, and Triss felt her own rage and resources rallying in preparation for battle.

Triss suffered a largely sleepless night, kept awake by her thoughts and the pattering of the rain. Even when she dipped into sleep it was puddle-thin and streaked with dreams. She dreamed that she was in a dressmaker’s shop to be measured, but that when she took off her own frock to try on the new one she found she had another dress on underneath. She took off that one as well, only to find yet another dress beneath that one. Dress after dress she removed, becoming thinner and thinner all the while, until it came to her that in the end there would be nothing left of her, except a pile of discarded clothes and a disembodied wail.

But the dressmaker kept making her take off dress after dress, and snickered all the while, with a laugh like the rustling of leaves.

‘Five,’ it rasped as it shivered with mirth. ‘Only five left to go.’

Triss woke with a lurch. Her heart banged a terrified tattoo until she worked out where she was and satisfied herself that her limbs were not made of dress fabric.

‘Triss! Pen! Breakfast!’ Hearing her mother calling from downstairs, Triss roused her wits, scrambled out of bed and dressed quickly. As she was dragging a brush through her hair, however, little brown fragments of something tumbled from one of the tangles. With sudden foreboding, Triss peered into the mirror of her little dressing table. Her shaking fingers teased a crinkled brown shape from her hair. It was a dead leaf.