Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

‘What if it doesn’t snow?’ demanded Pen, sounding only slightly mollified.

‘It will.’

It has to snow. If it doesn’t, then it means that Violet isn’t sitting still in a cell, or even a hospital. It means that she’s on the move still… or that she’s dead.

The next few hours were the longest that Trista could remember. They were also painful in a very real sense, because Pen fidgeted hopelessly, sighing every minute or so and shifting position in ways that always involved elbowing Trista.

There were whispered complaints too. Pen was bored. She was hungry. It was damp, and the blanket smelt funny. Trista was taking up all the room.

Trista told Pen to sing One Hundred Green Bottles in her head. Pen settled for whispering it huskily to herself, and soon Trista regretted making the suggestion. There was something terrible about the countdown. The last hours of her life were falling away from her and smashing silently like so many imaginary bottles, and she was stuck in a musty boat watching it happen. She tried not to think about the fact that her not-sister was full of unspent years, like pips in a robust little apple.

After a long while, however, she noticed a change in the atmosphere. The bobbing of the boat altered its rhythm a little, betraying a shift in the direction of the wind. The blanket flipped and flapped. Pen was now complaining of being cold. At last Trista dared to tug aside the blanket and peer out.

The September sky had curdled and was now an intimidating yellow-grey, its tobacco-stain hues reflected in the shivering surface of the river. Stray gusts of wind tore in from the estuary with a shark-bite fierceness and a chill that made her eyes stream. The riverside road was now all but empty of pedestrians.

‘Pen,’ she breathed, ‘it’s cold. It’s cold . Violet did it! She did it, Pen!’

Violet’s alive! She could not voice the words, though, without admitting to Pen that she had been in doubt.

‘Look!’ Trista drew back the blanket a little, and Pen blinked mulishly in the meagre daylight. ‘There’s nobody in the street. We can probably sit up a bit now.’ She expected Pen to be as pleased as she was, and was a little surprised when she directed a surly glare at the lowering sky. ‘The snow’s coming. It’ll be here soon, Pen, I promise. We just need to wait.’

Pen sniffed hard, and half sat up, disarranging the blanket.

‘No!’ she hissed. ‘I don’t want to! I don’t like these docks! I don’t want us to stay here any more!’

‘Pen, you’re being…’ Trista let out a breath and started again. ‘You know I have to be here at midnight, so I can follow the Architect.’

‘No, you don’t!’ Stars of reflected light gleamed in Pen’s eyes, her shadowed face creased with earnestness. ‘We could sail away, in this boat! We could go to France!’

‘What?’ Trista could barely keep her voice to a whisper. ‘Pen, of course we can’t. And what would happen to Triss?’

‘I don’t care!’ And Pen, who had faced down moving cars and yelled at the Architect, was shaking, face crumpled, tears spilling out of her eyes. ‘I don’t want you to go! And… And I don’t want her to come back!’

‘Pen!’ Trista exclaimed, appalled. ‘You don’t mean that!’

There was a growled, snuffled response that might have been, ‘Yes, I do.’

To be loved, to be preferred … The very thought gave Trista a painful little stab of joy. A moment later, however, she thought of the jagged rips that criss-crossed the Crescent family and felt only sadness.

‘But she’s your sister, Pen! I’m not. I’m just a bundle of sticks that looks like her.’

Pen did not answer straight away, but wriggled herself closer, so that her damp face was buried in Trista’s shoulder.

‘Do you remember what happened after… after I dug up the frog and found out it had moved?’ Pen’s voice was hesitant and defiant, but with a touch of slyness.

It took a second or two for Trista to adjust to the change of subject and comb through Triss’s memories.

‘Yes… Yes, I do.’ Trista stroked Pen’s head. ‘You were so upset you couldn’t cry, you just went around staring at everything. You couldn’t sleep even. And so… one night I remember sitting on your bed and telling you that the frog was in frog heaven, where there were no cats, and where all the lily pads were lovely and soft. And I said that the frog wanted you to know that it was happy, and that it didn’t blame you for anything because you were only trying to help.’

‘And you hugged me when I cried,’ mumbled Pen. ‘And after that I went to sleep. Didn’t I?’

‘Yes, Pen.’ Trista sighed, and let go of the stolen moment. ‘But that wasn’t me. That was Triss.’

‘But…’ Pen pulled away and looked into Trista’s face, and her expression was a startling combination of determination, desperation and pleading. ‘But what if it was you? Maybe that’s why you remember it so well? Because perhaps –’ she gabbled on with increasing speed, as if afraid of interruption – ‘perhaps we were wrong all the time, and you weren’t just made out of sticks a week ago, perhaps there were always two Trisses, a good one and a bad one, and you’ve always been the good one, and I only sent away the bad one…’

Oh, Pen.

With a surge of pity and exasperation, Trista started to understand the fantasy Pen had cobbled together in her head. So this was why Pen had slipped into calling Trista ‘Triss’ over and over again. This was why Pen had scowled whenever anybody talked about rescuing her real sister, and why she had tried to bargain with the Architect for the life of Trista instead. All this while Pen had been building a make-believe version of reality where she hadn’t really betrayed her sister to a terrible fate, just sent away a bad version of her…

‘ Pen ,’ groaned Triss, tenderness battling against frustration, ‘that doesn’t make any sense. ’ She gave Pen another squeeze. ‘Life isn’t that simple. People aren’t that simple. You can’t cut them into slices like a cake, then throw away the bits you don’t like. The Triss who was kind about the frog and the Triss who spoilt your birthday – they’re the same person .’

‘But she hates me!’ roared Pen. ‘And if she comes back, she’ll tell Mummy and Daddy what I did, and… they’ll send me away to prison or an orphanage or school…’

And that was it, of course. If Triss returned, reality would come knocking. Pen would no longer be able to pretend to herself or to her parents that she had not been responsible for her sister’s kidnap. She would have to face up to what she had done.

‘Triss doesn’t hate you.’ Trista could almost feel the strands of Pen’s affection, and knew that they had been flung out to her in desperation, like a swift grab made by a falling climber. Now, with a sense of sadness, she realized that she needed to detach them and reattach them to Pen’s real sister, where they belonged. ‘When I talked to her on the telephone, she was shouting at me – asking what I had done to you . She wasn’t angry with you. She was worried about you.’

Pen had no answer. Instead she gave in to a torrent of ragged, tormented sobs.

‘I don’t want to go to prison!’ she wailed at last. ‘I want my mummy!’

‘I know,’ said Trista, who had no mummy. ‘I know.’

She was still rocking Pen in her arms a few minutes later when the first tiny flakes of snow began to float down from the sky.

The boat-bound fugitives sneaked occasional peeks out from under their blanket as the sky grew dimmer. At first the snowflakes were tiny like ash flecks, dying as soon as they touched the ground and leaving freckles of damp. A few people opened their windows for a while to laugh and wonder at the unseasonal sprinkling. The temperature kept dropping, however, and soon the windows were closing again.