Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

I only remember the Triss she was, not the Triss she is now. And people can change a lot – sometimes in as little as a week.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Triss said quickly. ‘I really wanted to ask you something. When you’re in London, can we write to each other?’

Trista was taken aback, startled by the idea of receiving letters in her own handwriting.

‘Yes,’ she said, as soon as she had recovered her wits. ‘I… can’t promise I won’t eat some of your letters. I lost a lot of my stuffing, and I don’t know what will happen if more falls out. I would like to write to you though.’ She paused before continuing. ‘I already promised Pen I would send her letters.’

‘Pen misses you.’ Triss looked down. ‘Every time she looks at me, I know who she would like me to be.’ Her expression was one of thinly veiled hurt.

‘Pen just needs an older sister,’ Trista said quietly.

‘But… but I’m her older sister!’ exclaimed Triss, her eyes shiny with tears of frustration and sadness.

‘Then steal her back from me.’ Trista smiled her thorny smile. ‘ Be her big sister.’ They walked on, and Trista gave Triss another curious glance. ‘Do you think your parents will mind the two of you writing to me?’

‘I don’t know.’ Triss shook her head. ‘They won’t say they mind, but… I think they want to forget everything that happened and go back to the way things were.’ She gnawed her lip. ‘We can’t, can we? Everything’s different… not the way I thought… broken.’

In her heart of hearts, Trista knew that it would have been far easier for Piers and Celeste if Trista herself had died. It would have made things simpler and neater. They did not wish that on her, of course, but hers would have been a poignant tale with an ending. They could have closed the book, detached her in their minds from their beloved Triss and tried to return to the comfort of their rut.

But she had not died, and nothing was simple. She was still drawing in breath after troublesome breath, and nobody would have the luxury of forgetting about her. There was a strange new piece in the jigsaw of the Crescent family, pulling it into a different shape, and they would have to deal with that now and always.

It might have been easier for the Crescents if Trista had died. But easier, she reminded herself, was not the same as better.

‘I don’t think they know what to do,’ Triss went on. ‘ I don’t know what to do.’

‘You should ask your parents to send you back to school,’ Trista answered impulsively. ‘Ask them now, while they can’t say no to you.’

‘What?’ Triss paled. ‘But I haven’t been to school for years! I don’t know how… I mean… I can’t!’

‘Listen to me,’ said Trista, turning to face her other self. ‘Triss – I’m asking you to jump.’

Violet’s bruises healed, and she stalked about angrily with a walking stick until her doctors relented and released her. Piers paid for the repair of her motorcycle, and when she left the clinic with Trista at her side, there it was waiting for her, gleaming, ugly and glorious.

Trista climbed into the sidecar. It felt strangely cavernous without Pen sitting painfully in her lap. But I’ll grow to fill it , she told herself. Or will I? Perhaps I’ll just stay this age forever, like Peter Pan but with sharper teeth.

‘Typical,’ Violet snarled, then glanced at Trista and laughed. ‘Tucked away in a hospital for a month. We’re the awkward ones – the ones who spoil things and don’t fit. So they hide us away and call us ill.’

Trista’s mind drifted to other misfits. The displaced Besiders, under the grinning, pragmatic leadership of the Shrike, who now had an uneasy truce with Piers. And Jack, who had taken the news of Violet’s imminent departure from Ellchester with solemn calm, telling her it was ‘about time she let go’.

What happens to the outsiders? Are we like windfalls, rotting when we fall off the main tree?

‘We’re like ghosts,’ she said aloud, feeling sad. ‘The real world goes on – jobs and families and newspaper stories – and we’re outside it.’

‘No, we’re not,’ said Violet, with surly defiance. ‘ They’re the ghosts. Piers and Celeste and the others like them. Trying to cling to the past, to the way things were, pretending nothing has changed. Everything changes and breaks and stops fitting – and we know that, even with our stopped clock. The world is breaking, and changing, and dancing. Always on the move. That’s how it is. That’s how it has to be.’

And Violet kicked down on her motorcycle’s starter, like a bull stamping a challenge. She crouched forward as the engine gave its ugly, cackling roar, and then the pair of them were on the move and speeding, hedges fleeing past them as if outraged.

The sky was a tearless blue, stung with the white motes of birds. The sun blazed pitilessly on the smashed golden fields, where workers tried to make the best of the snow-crushed harvest. Cars swung around the corners without warning, their horns lowing, their windscreens dust-spattered. Signposts gleamed white, and promised London.

Trista’s eyes stung with dust, and joy, and the cobweb tears that she was beginning to accept. Her lungs and mind were full of life – life as it was, not as anyone said it should be.

This second is mine, and this, and this, and this…

There was an invisible necklace of nows, stretching out in front of her along the crazy, twisting road, each bead a golden second. She had no idea how many there were. Perhaps a hundred million of them, perhaps fewer than ten.

And she laughed, knowing that with every risk, every corner they took at speed, the necklace could be broken, its beads spilt and lost in the gutter. All was perhaps . Nothing was certain.

And that, that was wonderful.

I would like to thank my editors, Ruth Alltimes and Rachel Petty; my agent, Nancy; my writers’ group for feedback and support; the London Transport Museum (and in particular Emily Cartwright for patiently answering my somewhat surreal questions about trams); Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories by Diane Purkiss (Penguin Books Ltd 2001); We Danced All Night: A Social History of Britain Between the Wars by Martin Pugh (Vintage 2009); Women in the 1920s by Pamela Horn (Sutton Publishing Ltd 1995); Below Stairs: The Bestselling Memoirs of a 1920s Kitchen Maid by Margaret Powell (Pan Books 2011); 1920s Britain by Janet Shepherd & John Shepherd (Shire 2010); Changelings: An Essay by D. L. Ashliman 1997, and for his fascinating collections of folk texts; my beloved Martin; the Geffrye Museum of the Home; Chris Fox, and last of all my grandmother, whom I never met, but who threw her home village into confusion as a young woman by unexpectedly returning from London on a motorbike.