Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

‘Of course it was. Isn’t it always?’ Violet sighed, and drew Pen aside. Not-Triss followed at a small distance, still loath to draw attention to herself. ‘Pen – have you run away again ? And how did you get here from Ellchester? You haven’t been throwing rocks at cars again, have you?’

Pen opened her mouth wide, made a small not-quite-squeak and shut it again.

‘And what’s happened to your face?’ continued Violet. ‘Where did you get those bramble scratches on your cheek?’

Pen’s eyes crept across to Not-Triss. Violet followed her gaze and stiffened, her long jaw dropping.

‘Oh – you have to be joking.’ She stared, then shook her head in disbelief. ‘This evening is just… you brought your sister out here ? Pen! What—’

‘It was the only place I could think of to go! You said I should! You said I should always come to you—’

‘I said that if you ran away, then you should come and stay with me until you were ready to go home, instead of sleeping in hedges or getting into strange cars. And I could get into trouble for saying that .’ Violet gave Not-Triss another glance, as if assessing the likelihood that she might run to the police straight away. ‘This is different. If both of you are missing, your parents will be calling everybody short of the prime minister. I need to take the pair of you home right now.’

‘No!’ shouted both girls, with enough volume that several people looked round in curiosity.

‘Please don’t!’ blurted out Not-Triss. ‘I’m sorry we interrupted your party, but please, please don’t take us home. Our parents…’ She trailed off, desperately trying to think of a good story.

‘They tried to burn Triss alive!’ Pen leaped into the gap.

Violet raised her eyebrows and just looked at Pen. Not-Triss’s spirits sank. Violet didn’t like Mr and Mrs Crescent, but adults believed adults. Adults believed in adults. Violet evidently liked Pen, but Pen told lies and Violet clearly knew that.

Pen took hold of Violet’s arm.

‘Please!’ she said through her teeth, her eyes bright with the effort of willing Violet to listen to her. ‘Really. Truly. Cross my heart and hope to die.’

‘It’s true ,’ Not-Triss whispered, uncertain how much her word was worth. ‘I know how it sounds… but we can’t go home. We’re in danger.’

There was nothing warm about Violet’s long-jawed face as she scowled at them. She was an adult looking at two silly girls who had come to her with a silly lie. Then she gave an annoyed sigh, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again she looked angry but tired.

‘One night,’ she said simply, and it took Not-Triss a moment to understand what she meant. ‘I really shouldn’t do this… but you can stay at my lodgings tonight. I’ll take you there now and drop you off. But first thing tomorrow, you are going to tell me what is going on. Is that clear?’

Not-Triss nodded, hardly daring to believe in the reprieve.

‘Where are your coats? Don’t you even have coats? Wait here and I’ll get you blankets, or you’ll catch your death in the sidecar.’ It was becoming chilly, Not-Triss couldn’t help but notice. A number of the women in the hall were pouting a little, rubbing at their bare shoulders and looking for their shawls.

After Violet had departed in search of blankets and her coat, Not-Triss stole a glance at Pen.

‘Violet’s your friend then? Are you… Are you sure we can trust her? You’re sure she won’t pretend to help us, then drive us back home?’

Pen nodded confidently.

‘You don’t know her. If she was going to take us back, she’d tell us. Really loudly.’

Nobody wanted to see Violet leave, but nobody seemed surprised. Her record was passed back to her and she tucked it under her coat.

‘Don’t go, Violet!’ A drunk young man kept trying to haul her back to the dance floor. His drawl made her name sound like ‘varlet’. ‘Stay for once! Why do you never stay anywhere?’

‘Because I’m avoiding you , Ben,’ Violet declared calmly, pushing him aside. ‘It’s all personal.’ There was a burst of laughter.

‘Give up, Ben,’ somebody shouted. ‘Don’t tangle with old Frosty over there.’

Violet gave a short laugh, and for a moment her face held an odd mixture of pride and something less happy. She led Not-Triss and Pen out of the dance hall into the darkness, where the rain was slicingly cold against the skin.

Violet’s motorbike was standing amid the parked cars like a grimy fox in a field of cows.

‘The sidecar’s only meant for one person,’ she muttered, ‘but we’ll have to squeeze you both in.’ It was shaped like a fat little canoe with a big wheel on the side, a tapering enclosed nose to contain one’s legs and a seat under the opening. It proved possible for both girls to fit inside, with Pen sitting on Not-Triss’s lap.

Violet donned her goggles, tethered her cap and straddled her motorbike. Then, with visible effort and using most of her weight, she drove her foot down on the kick-starter, wrenching a startlingly loud rattle-roar from the engine. The smell of oil made Not-Triss feel sick. When the bike lurched forward and swerved out on to the road, Not-Triss reflexively gripped at the sides of the sidecar, teeth clenched with apprehension.

The road felt very close. On one side roared the bike, so loud that it made her right ear ache. On the other she could see the mudguard over the sidecar’s great wheel vibrating with the ruggedness of the road, so that she was afraid to let her hands near it. The icy rain was now rushing horizontally, straight into her face, and the wind was merciless. Worst of all, Pen wouldn’t stay still, but wanted to wriggle, twist, lean and stare around her, in ways that always seemed to involve elbowing or squashing Not-Triss.

A gentle and exhausted numbness settled upon Not-Triss’s mind as she watched occasional cars rattle past, their headlights carving shafts of light out of the darkness, streaked with bright rain. The recent past was a fading ache. Only this was real, this long moment of being shaken around like a shoe in a box, and even this was not very real.

At last the motorbike stopped in front of an old terraced house in a narrow unlit street, and Violet cut the engine.

‘Try to be quiet,’ she whispered as she clambered off the bike and set about extricating the two girls. ‘My landlady’s an old wasp, and I’m not supposed to have guests.’

Not-Triss and Pen followed Violet up the steps and watched as she slowly turned her key in the lock, with the concentration of a safe-cracker, and led them into a shadowy hall. The two girls were a step behind as she tiptoed up the stairs, unlocked another door and stepped through into a darkened room.

As Violet put coins in the gas meter and lit the lamps, Not-Triss looked around her at the primrose-patterned wallpaper dimpled with damp, the scuffed elderly furniture and the curtains that stopped two inches short of the sill. Celeste Crescent had talked about Violet living ‘the high life’, but the only valuable-looking objects in the room were a small wireless set, a wind-up gramophone and a few records.

Every drawer in the room was open, as if somebody had been interrupted in the act of searching the place, but Violet did not seem surprised by this. A half-open door in the opposite wall looked on to a dishevelled bed. A row of stockings dangled from the mantelpiece, their toes held in place by various ornaments. Not-Triss wondered if they were ‘artificial silk’, the new stocking stuff that Celeste Crescent sniffed at as ‘shop-girl silk’.