Cuckoo (14 page)
When she brought the children home from school, she sent them to the Annexe to pick up the boys’ stuff.
‘Was your mum in there?’ she asked Nico as the three of them returned laden with the toys and books she had carried up there just days before.
‘Yeah, but she’s resting.’
‘Sleeping?’
‘Nah, just lying there. She said hello to us, though.’
‘Ah.’ Rose helped the boys set out their belongings. Very soon, the rather bare guest room had been transformed into a proper boys’ bedroom.
‘Wicked!’ Yannis said.
Rose fetched the new wellies and clothes she had bought from Tesco and gave them to the boys to try on. Everything fitted beautifully, although Nico said he didn’t like his new fleece, declaring it to be lame. He took himself off to the corner of the kitchen in a half-hearted attempt at a sulk.
‘Do you guys want to come and feed the chickens?’ Anna said. It was her job, and she did it every day. She loved the chickens, which she viewed as her own.
‘We can see if they’ve laid,’ she went on. ‘Though Peck probably won’t let us get near. She’s very broody right now.’
‘OK, then.’ Yannis jumped up. Nico tagged along behind them – again, too cool to show interest, but unable to keep away.
While the children got on with feeding the livestock, Rose took her trowel out to her herb garden at the front of the house, thinking that she could keep half an eye on the Annexe to see if Polly stirred.
This part of the garden had presented a lot of challenges for Rose. Before the renovations, it had been a steep slope. Then Rose, Gareth and Andy spent a weekend carving it into terraces that led down, with the help of stone steps, to the front door of the main house. When you arrived by car – which you invariably did, because most trips beyond the school involved a motor – you parked up by the Annexe and took the steps down towards The Lodge.
Gareth hadn’t been sure about this at first. Backed up by Andy, he had said that carrying the shopping down all those steps would be a pain. The two of them had spent an evening drinking beer and thrashing out a plan for moving tons of earth to bring a driveway down to the house. They filled up one of Gareth’s rough sketchbooks with diagrams and lists.
When the two of them worked together like that, Rose could see the two boys who had grown up in each other’s pockets, miles from anywhere. They were so alike, it was surprising. Raised for selfsufficiency, they had been equipped with a deeply practical response to anything life might throw at them. Andy had told her that once he and Gareth had built a party hut: a two-roomed log cabin on the edge of Pam and John’s land. They had cleared part of the forest and fashioned the structure from the trees they had cut down. It had taken the entire summer. How different Gareth and Andy’s teenage years had been from the boozy, lazy time Rose and Polly had spent in Brighton, taking drugs on the beach, hanging out with boys on sofas.
Despite admiring the way the two of them worked, Rose had argued passionately against their pragmatic drive idea. She said they needed to separate the car from the house. She wanted to stand at the sink and see a garden, not a driveway. The backdrop to the view was the Annexe, and the car could hide behind that. If they had a beautiful old Saab, or a Maserati or something, then that might be a different matter. But seeing their practical, ugly, big old Galaxy sitting there would just be depressing.
The men couldn’t really argue with that, so Rose was very careful that, the decision having been made in her favour, she would never, ever complain or ask for help when faced with hauling a week’s worth of shopping down the steps to the house.
And she loved the herb garden that stood where the drive might have been. The space and scope for growing all sorts of esoteric varieties of thyme and lavender excited her. She was happy, while the children fed the chickens, to take the opportunity to spend a little time out there, picking around the earth, getting rid of the baby weeds that were already pushing themselves up so early in the year. Flossie sat beside her in her car seat, gurgling in the sunshine.
Rose heard the children clatter round from the back garden to the side of the house, towards the stone table and benches that stood by the pizza oven. This was where Anna sat and counted the eggs each day.
‘Well, my papa’s dead,’ Nico was saying.
‘Yeah, yeah, I know that,’ Anna said. ‘Now you’ve made me lose count.’
‘But he might come back, though,’ Yannis piped up. Rose’s heart contracted.
‘No, he won’t,
malaka
,’ Nico said.
malaka
,’ Nico said.
‘He might, though.’
‘And my mama’s famous, though. And she’s pretty and thin,’ Nico went on.
‘Well, my mum’s pretty, too,’ said Anna, Rose’s loyal little girl.
‘And, well, my mama’s very brave. She sometimes has little cuts here and here, and sometimes they bleed,’ Yannis boasted.
‘Shut up, Yannis,’ Nico hissed.
‘And my yaya is a witch because she says Mama killed Papa,’ Yannis added.
‘She doesn’t,’ Nico said, his voice rising.
‘She does, though. I heard her, and Mama said back to Yaya that
she
was a witch.’
she
was a witch.’
‘Yaya doesn’t mean Mama actually killed Papa,’ Nico said.
‘She does. I heard her.’
‘You didn’t, though – you just shut up, Yannis,’ Nico yelled, and there was a crash and a gasp from Anna.
‘MUM!’ Anna shouted.
Rose arrived just in time to pull Nico off his brother. He was screaming, Yannis was crying and the eggs lay smashed all around the patio. Anna stood there wringing her hands.
‘That’s enough, you lot,’ Rose said, holding them apart, at arm’s length, wondering how she was going to sort this one out. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she spied the fox creeping into the space between the apple tree and the pear tree at the far end of the back garden.
‘Anna, are the chickens in?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Anna said, following Rose’s gaze. ‘Oh, Foxy!’
‘Look,’ whispered Rose, putting an arm round each boy. ‘See?’
‘Won’t he eat the chickens?’ Yannis asked.
‘Not if they’re in. They’ve got a fox-proof run. We love our fox,’ Rose said. ‘In fact we’ll leave these smashed eggs for him to clear up after we’ve gone.’
‘Most people in the country hate foxes, but we think he’s strong and proud,’ Anna added, using the exact words that Rose had used when they first saw him a couple of weeks after they had moved in.
The children gazed at the grizzled beast. Rose’s theory was that he had more or less taken over the garden when The Lodge had stood empty. In spite of the chickens, she was glad of his presence because he kept the rabbits away. Or, more likely, he kept the rabbits down. She didn’t like to think about it all that much.
‘The poor old fox is hunted and hated by humans,’ she said to the boys, ‘but he sees our garden as a safe place in a hostile world.’
‘And we love him,’ Anna beamed.
You’ve certainly earned your keep this afternoon, Mr Fox, Rose thought. The two boys, their fight forgotten, now stood transfixed as he dawdled across the lawn, completely unconcerned by the presence of the humans.
‘Let’s make supper,’ Rose said at last. ‘Will you go and bring Flossie in, please, Nico?’ she asked, offering the task like a gift, a proof of her trust in him after having to handle him so roughly to get him off his brother.
They went in and she set the children tasks to help prepare the meal, which she reconfigured from a roast leg of lamb to a pie, because it involved stirring stuff in pots, rolling out pastry and decorating with little leaves and initials. It was far more complicated and took longer to do than a roast, especially with an army of inexperienced sous chefs, but Rose was a great believer in the healing power of the kitchen.
Soon, Nico was cutting the lamb into cubes, and trimming it of fat, Anna was frying onions, and Yannis was rubbing flour into butter between newly washed fingers.
‘Phew – it’s hot in here,’ Rose said, and flung open the kitchen window. It was true, the early March sun had a strange intensity to it that afternoon.
When the pie was in the oven, she set the younger ones to cutting out biscuits from the leftover pastry, while she and Nico peeled some spuds.
‘So, Nico,’ she said. ‘How was your second day at school?’
‘S’OK,’ he said. ‘Except—’
‘Except what?’ Rose asked.
‘Well, a couple of the kids, they take the piss.’
‘Why?’
‘They say I speak weird.’
‘Who says you speak weird?’
‘Oh, just a couple of kids in my class. They’re morons, anyway.’
‘Names?’
‘Nah, it’s OK.’
Rose made a mental note to have a word with his teacher in the morning.
‘And how are you liking it, staying here with us?’ she went on.
‘It’s OK,’ he said.
‘Just OK?’
‘Yep,’ he said, nodding and frowning over the potato he was slowly scraping right away with the peeler.
‘You’ve finished that one, I think.’ Rose took it from his hand and put another, unpeeled one in its place.
‘And how do you think your mum is?’ she asked.
‘She’s all right.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes. Well . . . she’s sad. About Papa.’
‘Of course she is.’ Rose put her peeler down and bent down towards him, trying to catch his eyes. ‘It’s normal, you know, to be sad when someone you love dies.’
‘I know,’ he said, his eyes fixed on his work.
‘And – are you sad, Nico?’ she asked.
‘I . . .’ He looked up, over her shoulder, and a flicker of something Rose couldn’t define – was it fear? – passed over his face.
She turned to see Polly shivering outside at the open kitchen window, looking straight at her. Her black hair flared out around her, making her face appear small and ill-defined. She was wearing the long, semi-transparent white nightdress again. Rose noticed that in the sunlight it looked a little ripped, a little stained with what looked like dried blood. Her eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot.
Her voice was quiet when she spoke. ‘Of course he’s sad – aren’t you, Nico?’
The boy nodded dumbly.
‘We’re all sad, Rose. In case you hadn’t noticed, our entire world has fallen apart.’ Then, in a burst of energy released from somewhere deep inside her, she yelled, ‘God!’
The children stopped what they were doing and looked up, stunned. Across the other side of the kitchen, a knife fell from the magnetic block to the stone floor with a metallic clatter. Rose shuddered and blinked. Then, thinking quickly, she pulled herself together and clapped her hands.
‘OK, kids. Why don’t you go and watch
The Simpsons
? Nico and Anna, will you keep an eye on Flossie for a moment?’ She ushered them through into the TV room and thrust the remote control into Yannis’s hand, who took it as if it were a piece of treasure entrusted to his safekeeping.
The Simpsons
? Nico and Anna, will you keep an eye on Flossie for a moment?’ She ushered them through into the TV room and thrust the remote control into Yannis’s hand, who took it as if it were a piece of treasure entrusted to his safekeeping.
Rose hurried out of the house, round to where Polly was still standing, looking out now, up at the Annexe, her stained nightdress fluttering in the breeze.
‘Come on, Polly, let’s go up to your room, make a cup of tea, have a sit down.’
‘You always think putting things in stomachs will mend things, don’t you?’ Polly said.
‘I know,’ Rose said, putting her arm in Polly’s. ‘But, you know what? I really do need a cuppa. Come on.’
Steering her by her sinewed, downy arm, Rose led Polly up the stone steps towards the Annexe. Her skin felt rough to the touch, dry like paper. But she came readily enough, offering little resistance.
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