Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

The voices were gone. The clutching hands had gone. Not-Triss was lying in Meddlar’s Lane, and beside her lay Pen, who was struggling to sit up. The cockerel had taken advantage of Not-Triss’s flailing fall to recover his liberty and was strutting in ruffled confusion a few yards away, head twitching. Its flopping comb and tiny perplexed eye made her want to laugh and laugh when she remembered how it had terrified everybody in the Underbelly. Looking up, she could see only the dark, graceful arc of the bridge’s underside. When she tried to move her eye along its length towards the secret upside-down village, however, something in the lines of the architecture twisted, straining and tiring her eyes so that she could not help closing them. She had heard of tricks of the light. Here the light seemed to have been thoroughly hoodwinked.

The girls tried to capture the cockerel again, but it slipped between a pair of iron railings into a trim garden a little further down the road. Not-Triss was wary of following it, now that the sun was easing into the sky.

It did not seem wise to dally where people might see them. Looking at Pen, Not-Triss could see that the younger girl’s collar was torn, and her clothing covered in dusty handprints. Her dark hair was a mass of tangles, and there were a few new scratches and pinch-marks on her neck and cheeks. Not-Triss’s clothing had been mended with the Shrike’s neat, tiny stitches, but she could feel grit in her hair and was all too aware of her bare, grimy toes.

Unfortunately there were now more people out and about, many heading to work. The two girls won a glance of curiosity from a couple of factory hands and a milkman steering his three-wheeled handcart through the streets.

Not-Triss drew Pen into a park where she knew there was a fountain, to repair the worst of the damage. She expected resistance, but to her surprise Pen submitted, closing her eyes tight and turning her face upward so that Not-Triss could wipe at it with a drenched handkerchief. She ran her fingers through Pen’s hair, to loosen the worst of the tangles, and the smaller girl winced but did not complain. It occurred to Not-Triss that they were playing the parts of little and big sister, and she felt a crushing sense of loss, as if somebody had shown her something immensely precious then taken it away forever.

She’s nine years old. And what happened to Triss wasn’t because of her. She was just a pawn. It was all about Sebastian.

Sebastian, trapped in an eternal winter. ‘Stopped’ between life and death. As Not-Triss thought of this, she again remembered the single snowflake floating down to land between Violet’s feet, and the ice on the inside of the windows. Snow and ice. Did Violet fit into this strange picture somehow, and if so, where?

‘That’s good enough.’ Not-Triss finished wiping Pen’s face. ‘We should go back and talk to Violet.’

As they were leaving the park, Not-Triss looked back to find that Pen was stooped, scrabbling at the grass.

‘Pen, what is it? What have you got there?’

Pen ran to catch up, face set with concentration. She held up her hands towards Not-Triss and opened them. They were full of dead leaves, twigs, bits of string, a damp and trodden cigarette card and a ragged piece of a paper bag.

‘They were on the ground,’ declared Pen earnestly. ‘On the road behind you, when we were walking – and on the grass in the park. I think… I think they’re probably bits of you, so I picked them up. So that we can put them back.’

Not-Triss looked at the litter in Pen’s small, grubby hands, and felt cobweb sting at her eyes.

‘Yes,’ she said gently. ‘I think you’re right. I’ll… I’ll take them, and put them back in later. Thank you, Pen.’

Just as the two girls reached Violet’s street, Not-Triss found that Pen had fallen back once more. When the younger girl caught up again, she was carrying two pairs of shoes, one in each hand.

‘Pen! Where did you get those?’

‘It’s just borrowing!’ protested Pen. ‘Like the cockerel!’

Not-Triss sighed, feeling that she was perhaps not setting the best example as fake big sister.

‘Besides,’ Pen went on, ‘you need shoes. And I brought an extra pair so that you can eat them if you’re hungry.’

Nothing would persuade Pen to return them. As Not-Triss put on a pair of the stolen shoes, she tried to console herself with the thought that Pen was probably right. In order to avoid looking like a half-wild thing, she did need shoes.

They approached the door of Violet’s boarding house, and as they did so Not-Triss became aware that they had left it too late to sneak back in. The brass knobs of the door were being polished by a middle-aged woman in a floral-print dress and long strings of beads. Her body was pear-shaped, as if she was made of wax and had melted a little in the sun. There was nothing soft or warm about her expression of concentration or brisk gestures though.

Not-Triss and Pen came to a halt on the street and stared, uncertain what to do next.

The woman gave them a brief, hard glance.

‘We don’t have trouble with flies, thank you,’ she declared curtly.

When the girls showed no sign of leaving and every sign of confusion, she gave them another pointed look. ‘Well, I assume you’re here to catch flies, standing there with your mouths open. Now close them up and take yourselves off. I don’t run a peepshow.’

‘We’re here to see Violet Parish,’ said Not-Triss, hoping that the name might gain them entrance. Presumably this was Violet’s landlady, the one that she had described as ‘an old crab’.

‘We’re her cousins,’ Pen added promptly.

The landlady narrowed her eyes and looked down her slab-like cheeks at Pen.

‘I thought her family…’

‘Yes, they threw her out!’ Pen resumed enthusiastically. ‘But… our father sent us because he wants to bury the hatchet. Which comes from Indians, you know.’

The landlady examined them both, and Not-Triss saw suspicion replaced by a beaky look of curiosity.

‘Well, if I know Miss Parish, she won’t be out of bed yet… but why don’t you come in and wait for her? My ladies are just having their breakfast at the moment. How about a little bread and butter?’

What can we do? We can’t stay out in the streets.

‘That would be very kind,’ Not-Triss answered meekly, and they were shown into the boarding house again, but this time not as intruders.

Walking into the parlour was a bit like entering a large plum-coloured, cloth-lined trifle. There was an elderly upright piano, perfectly polished but with no stool. Along the top of it clustered photographs of royalty in tortoiseshell frames.

The ‘ladies’ turned out to be Mrs Waites, who had lost her husband in the War, and Mrs Perth, who had lost her husband ‘in Africa’. Mrs Waites’s forward-sticking teeth made her tea slurp and her smile look hungry. Mrs Perth was a watery-eyed old woman who sat up perfectly straight, ate her breakfast with care and dignity and said almost nothing.

The two girls were given stools, so low that the table edge came almost up to their shoulders.

As the landlady placed a plate of bread and butter in front of her, Not-Triss felt an all-too-familiar surge of ravenousness. Her right hand started to lunge for the bread of its own free will, but Pen pounced, seizing her wrist with both hands and holding it fast.

‘Triss!’ Pen hissed urgently. ‘Don’t!’

‘Are you called Triss, dear?’ asked Mrs Waites. ‘What a curious name!’

These words shocked Not-Triss out of her haze of hunger with a snap. They had only been in the house a minute and already they had dropped one of their real names.