Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

Not-Triss was not ready for this day. She hated it. She wanted to send it back. Something inside her was squirming so hard she felt she might burst. Everything was wrong. Everything was going to go wrong.

Breakfast was left on a tray outside Not-Triss’s room, and she did not know whether to feel relieved or hurt. The eggs were soft-boiled the way she liked them, but with a sense of disorientation she noticed that the fruit juice was not in her favourite, pink-tinted glass.

She stared at it, as though making sense of the change would help her understand her parents, and allow her to save herself. The pink glass was Triss’s glass. Had they really decided to deprive her of her favourite glass as part of her punishment, or had they instinctively felt that Triss’s glass was no longer rightly hers? Did disobedient Triss no longer count as Triss? Was crazy Triss no longer Triss? Or… could they possibly suspect the truth?

Not-Triss braced herself, and used the fruit juice to wash down a hair slide and two screwed up pages from Triss’s favourite comics, but her stomach continued to growl.

It was Sunday, so Not-Triss changed carefully into her smart church clothes.

By the time she went downstairs, she had an explanation rehearsed in her head. It was a good lie, with a fair dollop of the truth in it to stop it curdling. As she meekly sat down beside her father on the sedan, however, she saw his face and her story cooled in her mind. He had clearly slept less than she had. Not-Triss plunged in anyway, but her explanation sounded stilted, her words cold and mechanical as beads on an abacus bar. She was not sure he was even listening.

Her father said nothing when she had finished, but gently laid a hand on her head. He was looking at her face, she knew it, and still she dared not meet his eye. If she did so, the spine of her story would break and the beads clatter to the floor.

‘All right, Triss.’ She could not tell from his tone whether he had accepted her story, or merely accepted that it would be the only story forthcoming.

Not-Triss became aware of her mother having a hushed conversation in the hall with Miss Soames, a young woman who sometimes came to babysit when the Crescent parents went out to parties.

‘Thank you for coming at such short notice. We should be back tomorrow, so we only need you to stay over the one night. It’s just a matter of looking after Penelope this time. She will need to be taken to church, and you will need to consult Mrs Basset about meals.’

We should be back tomorrow.

It’s just a matter of looking after Penelope.

‘Are we going away somewhere?’ Not-Triss asked. She kept her eyes fixed on her father’s shoes, so that they would not stray to his face. His feet moved slightly, perhaps uncomfortably.

‘It’s going to be rather a long day, I’m afraid.’ His hand settled over one of hers. It was warm, but did not squeeze. Perhaps he was afraid of breaking her. ‘We’re going to drive out on a trip to Wenwick – you, me and your mother. We’re going to talk to one or two people, to see if they know… ways to help you get over these… night troubles. Most of them are friends of friends. Kind people. You’ll like them.’

Not-Triss gnawed at her lip, her small, scattered fears becoming large, specific fears, like raindrops merging on a window pane.

No pink glass for crazy Triss.

‘I don’t want to!’ she blurted out, still fixing the innocent shoes with a stare that might have kindled wood. ‘I don’t want to talk to them! I don’t want to go away! Not… Not now!’

I can’t go away now, I can’t! I need to find the Shrike! I need to talk to Pen!

‘And you’re busy right now!’ she went on, scrabbling for arguments. ‘You have lots of work – getting ready for the Capping Ceremony in three days’ time – you said so! So we can’t! Why don’t we talk to them next week?’

‘Triss.’ He put his arms around her, as carefully as if he was hugging a child of smoke. ‘I love you very much, you know that?’

Not-Triss nodded, sick with panic. ‘Don’t make me go! Please, please let me stay here!’ She clenched her eyes shut, willing him to feel her desperation even if he could not understand it.

‘I love you,’ he continued, tenderly relentless, ‘and that’s why we have to go.’

As Not-Triss stepped out through the front door and heard it click shut behind her, she felt a sudden superstitious pang. Into her head came an unreasonable fear that she would never see it open again. She felt as if it had closed like scissor-blades, snipping away her past and everything she knew.

The little travel case in her hand she had crammed to bursting, for she knew she would be away for at least one night. It was filled with treasured trinkets, comics and hair ribbons. Not-Triss could only hope these provisions would be enough to stop her becoming feral.

Before her, the world wore a grey veil of rain. The air was clammy and unseasonably cold. There were grains of something in Not-Triss’s socks, and she guessed that they must be earth-crumbs that had broken away from her soles. The gutters tutted, and the Sunbeam was slick as new paint.

Her mother had a yellow scarf around her head and hesitated on the step under her umbrella while Triss’s father readied the car.

Not-Triss could hear the cool, solemn chiming of church bells over the growl and gossip of the traffic, and could see other people stepping stiffly out into the drizzle in their best clothes. The raindrops glistened on straw hats and buttoned gloves. But Not-Triss was not going to church, and it made her feel all the more out of step with the world.

Not-Triss stared up at the windows of the house, but the one face she expected to see did not stare down at her. Somehow she had been certain that she would be confronted with Pen’s coal-hard gaze. With triumph in her eyes, perhaps? Or fear, or resentment? But perhaps Pen was still given to flashes of silver, and would not be coming out of hiding for a while.

To her surprise, Not-Triss found that she was disappointed. In spite of the way the younger girl hated her, she realized that she had counted on that exchanged look to strengthen her nerve. They shared secrets, if nothing else, and a mutual interest in keeping them. That made Pen the nearest thing she had to a co-conspirator.

Not-Triss approached the car feeling betrayed. The rear seat was covered in luggage, and she was offered a place in the front, between her parents. Usually this would have been a treat, and even the crush would have made her feel warm and protected. Today she wondered whether they wanted to keep an eye on her.

The Sunbeam’s engine stuttered its objections to the rain, then found its voice. Not-Triss smudged herself a spyhole in the clouded windscreen and watched mutely as Ellchester slid damply by and then was left behind.

Wenwick was fifty miles’ drive away, an old-fashioned resort with long, arcing streets of wide-windowed, staring houses. Even though the Wenwick baths were no longer considered to cure everything from gout to toothache, the place still bristled with doctors, like a crust of barnacles marking a high water point after the tide had gone out.

Each doctor the Crescents visited spent half an hour talking to Triss’s parents, and then ten minutes or so talking to Not-Triss herself in private, ‘so they could get to know each other’.

The first one was a very kindly, elderly man who talked to her about the ‘rest cure’, in a conservatory that looked out on to a garden. Sometimes people had too many worries and needed rest . Even wonderful things like families and friends could be too tiring sometimes. So you needed a rest from them, so that your mind had a chance to calm down. A few weeks of lovely bed rest, perhaps. And sometimes it was best to avoid other excitements, just for a while. Reading, writing, talking…