Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

‘Pen?’ she called quietly, knocking on what she believed and hoped was Pen’s door. ‘Your lunch is out here!’ There was no response. Triss wondered if Pen was sitting sullenly within, ignoring her, or whether the younger girl had climbed out of her window and run off in yet another fit of truancy. She laid the tray on the ground. ‘Pen, I’m leaving it by your door.’

Please come to the door and take the food, Pen. Please – I don’t think I can resist it if you don’t.

No Pen appeared. The scented steam from the plate was in Triss’s nose, and even when she closed her eyes she could still see the golden-crusted pie with its glossy gravy, and the pepper freckles on the potatoes’ creamy flesh…

It was too much for her. With a small, helpless sob, Triss dropped to her knees and snatched up the fork. Pen’s food tasted better than hers had, better than anything. She tried to make every mouthful last, but could not. She tried to stop, but could not.

And as she was shakily licking the plate, she heard the faint sound of a voice in her father’s study, the study that should have been empty.

Triss set down the empty plate on the tray, then gingerly drew closer to the study. When she put her ear to the door she heard what sounded a good deal like Pen, talking in a low, steady, furtive tone. Peering in through the keyhole, Triss could indeed see Pen. The younger girl was facing away, but Triss could still see exactly what she was doing. She was making free with that most august and sacrosanct of objects, the family phone. Triss felt her eyebrows rise. She could not have been much more surprised if she had caught Pen borrowing the family car.

It was a tall black candlestick telephone and was fixed to the wall for ease of use, so that you only needed one hand to use it instead of two. It was placed at a height convenient for Triss’s father, but Pen was standing on tiptoe on a chair to bring her face level with the mouthpiece. Her right hand held the little conical earpiece to her ear.

Triss could not make out her sister’s murmured words. Pen looked absurd perched there, like a tiny child playing at being the parent in a game of make-believe. Only Pen’s hushed tones made the matter seem more serious.

As Triss watched, Pen hung the little earpiece back on its hook and stepped down. Triss straightened up, and a few seconds later Pen opened the study door. Finding herself face to face with Triss, Pen froze, her face a mask of guilty terror.

‘Who were you talking to, Pen?’ asked Triss.

Pen took a deep breath, but found no words. Her face reddened and twitched, and Triss could almost see her sister hastily auditioning a range of lies and denials to see whether any of them would do. Then Pen’s eye fell on the empty plate by her door, and when her gaze returned to Triss’s face the terror had been replaced by outrage and disbelief.

‘You ate my lunch!’ Her voice was so shrill it was almost a squeak. ‘You did, didn’t you? You ate it! You stole my lunch!’

‘You didn’t come down for it!’ Triss protested, feeling her hackles rise defensively. ‘I knocked – I tried to give it to you—’

‘I… I’m going to tell Mother and Father…’ Pen was gasping in angry breaths as if she might explode at any moment.

‘They won’t believe you.’ Triss had not meant to say it. She had been thinking it, but she had never intended the words to leave her head. It was true though, and Triss could see the same knowledge reflected in the frustration and rage on Pen’s face.

‘You think you can do anything you like, don’t you?’ snapped Pen, in a tight, bitter little voice. ‘You think you’ve won already. But you haven’t.’

‘Pen –’ Triss struggled to undo the damage – ‘I’m sorry I ate your lunch. I’ll…’ She steeled herself to promise Pen part of her own dinner, but knew this was a promise she could not keep. ‘I’ll make it up to you. Please, can’t we just stop this? Why do you hate me so much?’ All at once Triss felt that she could not bear Pen’s relentless animosity on top of everything else.

‘Who do you think you’re kidding?’ Pen’s face was a map of disbelief. She leaned forward to peer into Triss’s eyes, her own gaze pit-bull fierce. ‘ I know about you. I know what you are. I saw you when you climbed out of the Grimmer. I was there .’

‘You were there?’ Triss took a step forward, only to see her sister flinch back. ‘Pen, you have to tell me everything you saw! Did you see me fall in? What happened?’

‘Oh, stop it!’ snapped Pen. ‘You think you’re really clever, don’t you?’ She swallowed hard, and clenched her jaw as if there was nothing she wanted more than to bite somebody. ‘You know what? You’re not as clever as you think. You’re getting everything just a bit wrong. Everything. All the time. And sooner or later they’ll notice. They’ll see.’

In Pen’s face Triss could see nothing but a declaration of war. The younger girl’s incomprehensible words boiled and seethed in Triss’s mind like a shoal of piranhas, and Triss’s desperation was swiftly replaced by a flood of frustration and resentment. She had wanted to be sorry about eating Pen’s lunch, had wanted to talk it out with her, but all of these feelings were now swallowed up by bitterness and a stinging sense of unfairness. It was always this way, she remembered that now. She would try to reach out, only to be knocked back by Pen’s ingenious and relentless hatred.

‘You’re lying, aren’t you?’ Triss hissed. ‘You didn’t see anything at all. You’re just trying to scare me. Liar!’

She was filled with a seething desire to strike back, and with a honey-sweet throb of power realized that, if she wanted, she could get Pen into trouble without even trying. I can tell them she screamed at me and made my head hurt. As the thought passed through her mind, it started to seem to her that her head did hurt, that Pen had made her feel ill. And I can tell them she saw something the day I fell in the Grimmer; they’ll make her tell.

‘Girls?’ Their mother appeared at the head of the stairs. ‘Girls – are you having a row up here?’

Both girls froze, and involuntarily glanced across at each other, more like conspirators than opponents. If there was no row, neither of them would be in trouble. On the other hand, if either of them wanted to plead a grievance, the other would have to do the same, louder and harder. Who had more to lose from a cascade of blame?

Triss had been on the verge of calling down the stairs to her parents, to tell them what Pen had said and report the illicit phone use. Now, however, her nerve failed her. Despite her rage, there was a creeping fear that perhaps Pen really did know something terrible about her, something that Triss would not want her parents to know.

‘No,’ answered Pen sullenly. ‘We’re not rowing. I was just… telling Triss something I thought she ought to do. Loudly.’

‘Really?’ Triss’s mother raised both eyebrows.

‘Yes. You see –’ Pen’s gaze crept sideways to Triss’s face – ‘Triss brought me up my lunch, and I told her I wasn’t hungry. And… she was. So I told her to eat it. And so she did.’

Triss’s mother looked to Triss, a question in her eyes. Triss’s mouth was dry. She had been braced for Pen to accuse her of lunch-theft. Now, for no obvious reason, Pen seemed to be letting her off the hook. Feeling a little as if somebody had poked her in the eye with an olive branch, Triss slowly nodded, confirming Pen’s story.

‘Oh, Triss!’ Her mother sounded half-scandalized, half-concerned.

‘You see, she’s really hungry all the time,’ continued Pen, frowning deeply at her scuffed shoes. ‘ Really hungry. And just now I was saying that she ought to tell you, in case it meant she was still ill, only she didn’t want to because it might worry you.’