Cuckoo (4 page)
‘Look at that,’ Rose pointed out for Anna, her voice catching slightly. A young blonde woman had pushed a trolley full of red suitcases through the gates and was now standing still, searching. On top of the suitcases, against all safety regulations, she had perched a small, ginger-haired boy. The child’s face lit up as a tall, lanky man flew towards him, scooping him up. From the colour of his hair, the man had to be the boy’s father. Perhaps they had only been apart for a couple of days, but Rose thought it must have been longer. Were the woman and child coming home? Or were they arriving to join the father away from where they lived? Why did the father only embrace the child and not the woman? They exited stage left, the woman still pushing the trolley and the man holding the child. Their story would live on, and Rose would never know about it.
It contrasted so sadly with the last time she had flown, when she and Anna had got back from visiting Polly in Karpathos. Rose had been excited about claiming their own little scene for themselves, a reunion after being away from Gareth, who had rather too readily volunteered to spend the fortnight in England, making the Annexe habitable for their return.
But he had been late to meet them, and they had stood at the arrivals rendezvous point not quite knowing what to do. As usual, Gareth wasn’t answering his mobile; even in range, he had a selective deafness no matter how loud he made the ringtone. Rose could feel the holiday and her suntan draining away with every moment they had to stand there. By the time he eventually turned up, nearly an hour late, she was crabby and resentful. All she wanted to do was get back home. She barely noticed the big bunch of daisies he had brought her from their new garden.
Rose and Anna finished their drinks and went back to the barrier. Anna turned somersaults on the shiny metal rail until a miserable security guard came along and told her off. Rose, not seeing his point, nearly started an argument. But Anna’s embarrassed pleading – ‘please don’t, Mum’ – stopped her. Finally, the plane they were waiting for was announced as having arrived.
And then, there was Polly.
Dragging a large dusty pink suitcase, a guitar strapped to her back, she looked even thinner than she had two years ago. Bones ridged the deep vee of her black T-shirt. Her stiff, long skirt stood out from her like a gothic lampshade. She looked more like an orphan than a widow. Her two little boys, who were now five and nine years old, wavered, blinking behind her. The three of them, pulling their suitcases behind them, could have been survivors of some kind of apocalypse, facing sunlight for the first time.
Polly was, as usual, commanding attention. People’s eyes were on her.
Tucking Flossie closely into her front, Rose ducked under the barrier and ran towards Polly. Anna followed behind them. Taking care to move the baby to one side, Rose took her best friend into her arms and pressed her against her chest, breathing in her unchanging scent, a mingling of Amber and sweat, with a dark Jasmine wound underneath it. Polly just let Rose take her. She stayed very still, held and tense. She felt like a frightened bird in Rose’s arms: stilled, only just humming with life. Rose was scared that she might break her, but she knew Polly was tougher than that.
The big suitcase toppled over. Nico, the elder of the two boys, tried to set it to rights, but it was almost as big as him, and probably weighed more. Yannis, his brother, tried to help him, but only managed to get in the way, setting off a skirmish between the two boys.
Other travellers had to skirt around this splayed-out scene – the two women held still, with a baby sandwiched between them; the two skinny boys wrestling with a battered pink suitcase and Anna, the neat little girl, standing to one side, like a lemon. Rose was aware that they were making a scene, a picture for an audience, but she sort of liked it.
It was dark and raining hard as they swung up onto the M4, heading west. Rose turned the heating up full blast in the Galaxy. The green light of the dashboard, the noise of the fan and the swooping of the windscreen wipers seemed to cast a spell over the children. After a couple of minutes of silently looking out of the windows at the rain, the boys were asleep, their brown faces tilted back, their mouths slightly open. Flossie and Anna soon followed.
It didn’t seem necessary, even appropriate, for Rose and Polly to talk. Polly sat tapping her knee, sipping at the strong black coffee Rose had bought for her, drumming her bitten fingertips as if she were waiting for something. It was more like sitting next to an electric field than a person. Rose indicated and swung out to overtake a large lorry that was funnelling dirty water straight back at them.
‘Was it hideous?’ she asked after a while.
‘Worse,’ Polly said, looking at the muzzled lights of Reading in the rain. ‘God, this country’s grim. You forget after a few years just what it’s like.’ She shivered.
‘You warm enough?’ Rose asked.
‘Someone just stepped over my grave,’ Polly said, and wrapped her denim jacket tightly around her. ‘Look, Rose, I know we’ve only started, but any chance of a fag break? Is there anywhere in this country you’re allowed to smoke?’
It seemed like a good idea. Rose pulled over at Reading West Services and parked up in the rest stop car park. The children didn’t stir. Polly got out and climbed a steep grass bank in front of them to sit on a picnic bench. She was trembling in the rain. Rose got an umbrella from the boot, locked the doors and joined her. She had a good view of the car in case the children woke up.
‘Want one?’ Polly offered Rose her bag of tobacco. She had black smudges under her eyes that could have been mascara, but were more likely down to nights of sleeplessness.
Rose looked back at the car with the sleeping children in it. She knew she shouldn’t take a cigarette, but this was a special occasion, and smoking had been one of the things that Rose and Polly had done really well back in their twenties. She could resist in front of Gareth, but Polly was a different matter. For old times’ sake she took a Rizla and started rolling. The two of them sat huddled under the umbrella, smoking.
‘That’s nice,’ said Rose, exhaling. ‘Haven’t had a fag in ages.’
‘They all smoke in Greece,’ Polly said. ‘It hasn’t quite got there yet, the Northern European sanctimoniousness.’
‘Perhaps the Mediterranean diet benefits outweigh the smoking drawbacks.’
‘Possibly,’ Polly said. ‘It’s an old shithole, anyway, Karpathos.’
‘Oh come on, it’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen,’ said Rose.
‘You don’t know anything,’ Polly said. ‘It’s a shithole full of arseholes. Or an arsehole full of shit. In any case, I wish they were all dead.’
‘But—’
‘Oh Rose. Don’t listen to me. I’ve got issues.’ Polly snorted a sort of laugh and stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I need a pee.’ She buttoned up her denim jacket and darted down the slope and across the car park to the services.
Rose sat there watching the slight figure flit across the shiny black tarmac. She knew Polly had her problems with Christos’s family, who would have preferred a Greek girl for their golden boy, or at the very least someone who wasn’t an ex-junkie ex-rock star. And his death had clearly not brought any sort of reconciliation. Rose reckoned that was why Polly had come back to England. She had a history of being quick to take offence, flaring up and off at the slightest touch. And after that, she could hold onto a grudge for days, weeks – even permanently.
There was one woman, for instance, who Polly referred to as ‘the dead one’, who had had some sort of thing with an ex of hers. Polly swore that if she saw this woman while driving, ‘even though she’s only a walking ghost,’ she would mount the pavement and knock her right down, reversing back over her head to hear it pop. She had even turned it into a song, ‘Piss Redress’, which became the title track of her second album.
For the most part, Rose found these florid revenge strategies amusing. Polly outlined them well and was entertaining with the detail. But there was always the suggestion that what she was saying might actually be true, and it was just a matter of luck that the situation hadn’t yet arisen where she might act out her plans.
Once or twice, Rose had been at the receiving end of Polly’s anger, and she hated it. In fact, Rose couldn’t cope with anyone being angry at her and often went to great pains to avoid it. When she was younger, she would compare herself to Polly, finding herself a little wet around the edges, a little unformed, a little too eager to pour herself into the mould that her best friend carved out for her. But since marrying Gareth and having her children, she had found more focus and definition. It had probably helped, too, that Polly had moved over two thousand miles away. In the sum of things, though, Rose believed that her own approach, her desire to please, had led to a life less troubled than Polly’s.
But the mess Polly was in right now was nothing to do with her anger; it was not of her own making – Rose had to remember that. Polly had just lost her husband: the man who had helped her out of big, big trouble, the man who had given her a whole foundation on which to rebuild her life.
Polly appeared in the brightly-lit service station doorway, incongruous against the McDonald’s backdrop. She came out and was blown across the car park by the filthy weather. She, and her clothes, were far too flimsy for this English March. She looked as if she might take off, be swooped up across the dark night sky. For a moment, she seemed to have lost her bearings. She stopped to push her mop of black hair out of her eyes, scanning the cars, looking for Rose. A man in a good raincoat, hurrying across the car park, stopped for a second to take her in. You could almost hear him thinking that what he saw was interesting, familiar even; Polly had been a well-known figure fifteen years ago. You could see his calculation, then the decision that, weighing things up, he would just quietly return to his solid Audi and its sleek leather seats.
Then Polly looked up and smiled the first real smile that Rose had seen from her. She flitted past the car and up the bank to sit down again.
‘We’d better get going,’ Rose said.
‘Just one more cig,’ Polly said, and she rolled up and lit another. She narrowed her eyes and exhaled a stream of smoke into the night. Then she turned to Rose. ‘I want to thank you,’ she said. ‘You and Gareth are being so generous.’
‘It’s nothing,’ Rose said. ‘Besides, we’ve got loads of space.’
‘I know. But I also know that Gareth and I have never really seen eye to eye,’ Polly said. ‘He hated me because I took Christos away from him.’
‘Do you think that was it?’ Rose said. It had always troubled her that Gareth could never put his finger on what it was that he found so off-putting about Polly. Her own theory was that it had more to do with his jealousy about their friendship – that he somehow felt threatened by it. In any case, the two couples made up of two sets of best friends didn’t hang out together as much as an outsider might have expected. Rose practically moved into Gareth’s flat a week after first sleeping with him. It was, she knew now, an avoidance strategy: simply put, Rose found it difficult to be near Christos while she was with Gareth. She was happy to play second fiddle to Polly’s lead – indeed, she carried on seeing her almost every day until they moved to Karpathos – but she couldn’t bear the idea that she would ever consider Gareth to be second best, when in so many ways he was so perfect for her.
Shortly after they got together he had taken her to the private view for his and Christos’s MA Group degree show at Goldsmiths. Gareth’s piece, entitled
BloodLine
, was just that: a white box of a room with a thick red horizontal line around it which he had drawn at the level of his heart, using his own blood. At his eye-level, he had gaffa-taped letters and documents connected with his search for his birth mother. At the middle of one of the walls, near the door that swung shut as you entered the room, closing you in, was an original photograph of his mother – the only one in his possession, Gareth said – with holes where the eyes were.
BloodLine
, was just that: a white box of a room with a thick red horizontal line around it which he had drawn at the level of his heart, using his own blood. At his eye-level, he had gaffa-taped letters and documents connected with his search for his birth mother. At the middle of one of the walls, near the door that swung shut as you entered the room, closing you in, was an original photograph of his mother – the only one in his possession, Gareth said – with holes where the eyes were.
Rose had stood in the middle of the room in a flowered chiffon mini-dress, clutching her wine and weeping, as Gareth told her how Pam and John, the people he had grown up believing to be his parents, had kept the fact of his adoption from him until he was eighteen. When they told him, he raged for a month. He wanted to kill them. He wanted to kill his birth mother, the woman who had abandoned him.
‘But weren’t you grateful for the life you had? It was a good life, wasn’t it?’ Rose searched his eyes, desperate for some sort of release from the tension she felt in that enclosed, blinding space.
‘No,’ Gareth said, resting his finger on the red line. ‘My anger obliterated all those years. Why hadn’t they told me? Why had she abandoned me? No one could give me answers that satisfied me. And then, by the time I found out who my real mother was, she was dead. Killed herself in Buffalo, New York. And I thought:
Good
.’
Good
.’
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