Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

‘Can you stop me sleepwalking?’ she asked carefully. ‘Only, everybody seems really worried about it, and I don’t want to make anybody upset.’

‘Of course you don’t.’ He smiled at her kindly. ‘Well, let’s see what we can do. Young Theresa – your father tells me that before you were ill you fell into some kind of a millpond, and that you don’t remember doing so – that you don’t remember any of that day, in fact. Is that true?’

Triss nodded.

‘Now, how shall I explain this?’ The doctor smiled warmly and gently. ‘Suppose one day you swallowed a big marble. Not that I’m saying a big girl like you would do anything so silly. Well, after you’d done so, that marble would cause you all sorts of trouble until it was out in the open again. You wouldn’t be able to see it, you might not even work out what was causing the problem, but you’d have a deuce of a tummy ache.

‘The funny thing is, sometimes memories can be like that. If something happens that scares us, or that we don’t want to remember, we swallow it down, just like that marble.’ He was talking slowly and carefully now. ‘We can’t see the memory any more, but there it is deep inside us, creating problems. I think that’s what causes your sleepwalking. A… sort of tummy ache of the mind.’

It sounded so harmless when the doctor put it that way, in fact rather ordinary and homely. However, she recognized something in his tone of voice . Adults only talk that way when they know you’d be really upset or worried if you understood what they meant.

‘So… I just need to spit out the marble?’

‘Yes.’ The doctor nodded enthusiastically. ‘Exactly. The trick is to remember . Bring the marble back into the light of day. Then it won’t bother you any more.’

‘But having this marble doesn’t mean I’m mad, does it?’ The question ran away from her before she could stop it.

The doctor looked up at her in surprise, then gave a short gust of laughter. ‘No, no, no! Lots of people sleepwalk, particularly youngsters like you. Don’t you worry about that. It’s not like you’re seeing pixies in your porridge, is it?’

Seeing things! Seeing things! He knows! He knew all the time!

There was no challenge or scrutiny in the doctor’s eyes, however, as he smiled and shut his book.

No. No, he doesn’t know at all. That was supposed to make me feel better.

‘Now, just hop up on the scales over there, and after that I’ll set you free.’

Triss obeyed, and barely noticed the way the doctor’s eyebrows rose as the needle wobbled across the painted numerals.

As she followed her father out of the doctor’s surgery, Triss felt a warm wash of relief, followed by a cold current of deep anxiety and self-loathing.

Well done, Triss , murmured a small voice in the depths of her gut. You tricked him. You tricked the person who was trying to help you. So now he can’t.

Marley Street was one of the highest thoroughfares in Ellchester, and was now lit by electricity instead of gas. Steel brackets had been clamped to the tops of the poles that held up the running wires for the trams, and from these seared a light of almost unearthly brightness and whiteness, like distilled moonlight. It transformed the street and made everything larger, louder, more vivid and exciting, as if all the shopping throngs were onstage and knew it. In comparison, the mellow light from the post-top gas lanterns down the side streets left everything there looking melancholy and a bit dingy.

‘Lambent’s as usual?’ her father asked. It was Triss’s favourite dress shop, she recalled after a moment’s confusion. All her best-loved dresses had been bought there, after fits of illness. Her whooping-cough blue chiffon. Her three-day-fever cotton with the primrose print.

They halted before Lambent’s, the golden letters reading ‘Lambent & Daughters’ gleaming above the window in the light from the street lamps. As her father turned away to close his umbrella, Triss pressed herself close to the great, brightly lit window, avoiding the trickle of water from the narrow awning above. Beyond the glass posed five sleek plaster mannequins with pale silver skin. They were languorous and inhumanly slender, in the very latest style, and had utterly featureless faces.

Triss was just admiring their pastel-coloured tasselled dresses when all five of the figures stirred. Very slowly they turned their eyeless heads to stare at her, and then hunched their shoulders slightly and leaned forward, with an attitude of intense interest.

‘No!’ Triss leaped backwards into the rain. Her father turned to her in surprise. She swallowed hard and forced her gaze away from the shop window. If her father saw her staring, he might look over his shoulder to investigate. What if he saw them move? Or what if he saw nothing strange at all? ‘Can’t we go somewhere else this time? I heard there was a better shop, down… that way.’ She pointed blindly along the street, hoping that she could find some dressmaker in that direction to lend her story credence.

‘Really? Yes, if you like.’ Her father opened his umbrella again. ‘What was this other dressmaker called?’

‘I… I can’t quite remember,’ said Triss, just relieved to find herself walking away from the ominous, watching mannequins. She strode on without looking back, her heart bouncing in her chest. ‘The name was something like… like… it was this one!’ To her delight and relief she realized that they were passing a shop with a big metal pair of scissors suspended above the door by a slender chain, a sure sign of a tailor or dressmaker. Most of the clothes on the wire-frame dummies in the window seemed to be for men, but there were some female clothes too. Triss’s eyes flitted quickly to the twirly sky-blue letters over the door. ‘Grace & Scarp – yes, that was it!’

‘All right.’ Her father smoothed back her damp hair. ‘Let’s see what they have, shall we?’

Only as she was mounting the steps to the shop door did Triss felt a tickle of disquiet. It was not exactly fear, just a tug of unease as if she had forgotten something important. A thought flashed into her mind, but it was not a terrible one, just odd. It was the memory of wrestling with her mother’s scissors the morning after her fever, the tool sullenly uncooperative in her hands.

As Triss pushed the shop door open there was a loud and sudden bang. Something clattered to the ground at her feet. She found herself staring down at the enormous pair of iron scissors that had been hanging over the door.

Her father had been holding his umbrella over her, and only this had prevented the blades falling on to her head. The world around Triss seemed to bleach, and for a few moments she lost the ability to understand it. The great scissors at her feet were the only real thing. There was a lot of fuss all around her, and it sounded as if her father was making most of it. Everybody else seemed to be doing a lot of apologizing.

‘No idea how the chain snapped… it was brand new just a year ago…’

Triss and her father were hurried into the gleaming shop, and somebody made a great business of dabbing the raindrops off Triss’s shoulders with a handkerchief, as if that would undo the scissor-attack.

‘My daughter,’ her father was declaring in tones of incandescent rage, ‘is in a state of delicate health. Her nerves cannot stand this sort of shock!’

One portly man managed to raise his voice above the chorus of apology. ‘Sir, we are most heartily and profoundly sorry. No excuse can be made for such an accident, but perhaps you will let us make some small amends. Perhaps a dress for your daughter with our compliments… and maybe a suit for yourself at a discount?’