Cuckoo Song (7 page)

Doctor Mellows’s surgery was on a steep street to the north of town, full of tall houses of murky brown brick with long, gawping windows. Triss’s father parked carefully, turning the
large wheels so that they lodged against the kerb, and hauling hard on the brake so the car would not roll downhill.

The hall and reception were pill-pink and pill-green, and smelt of clean. The receptionist with the bobbing curls over one eye remembered Triss, and gave her a big scarlet-painted smile.

‘Yes, Dr Mellows is expecting you. Do you want to go through now?’

‘I’d like to talk to Dr Mellows first, if you don’t mind,’ Triss’s father said quickly.

Triss was left in the waiting room, where she sat feeling sick.

Five minutes later her father came out, gave her his special smile and stroked back her hair.

‘Dr Mellows is ready for you now. I’ll be right here.’

Triss was shown into the doctor’s surgery and found Dr Mellows sitting at his desk. He was a tall, grizzled man in his early fifties, with a comforting rumble of a voice that seemed to
come from somewhere deep under his ribcage. She had seen him so often over the years that he was almost like an extra uncle who was brought out for special occasions.

‘So. How’s my little hero? How’s my smallest soldier?’ It was his usual greeting. His eyes were alive with the usual mixture of twinkle and appraisal. The only thing that
was different was that there were three large books on his desk, one of which was open. ‘Oh, now, don’t look so frightened! No pills or needles today – nothing to scare you.
We’re just going to have a little talk. Sit down.’

Triss sat in a comfortable chair on the other side of the desk, her gaze dropping briefly to the books in front of the doctor. The title along the spine of one of the closed books read
Studies in Hysteria
. The open book had the words ‘The Ego and the Id’ across the top of each page.

‘Now, I hear that you’ve had a nasty fever. How are you feeling now?’

‘Oh, much better.’ Triss made her voice bubble-bright.

‘But . . . not all better? Some things still don’t feel quite right, do they?’ Dr Mellows watched her with that same steady, unblinking twinkle, the pad of his thumb teasing at
a corner of a page. ‘Why don’t you tell me about it?’

So Triss told him. She told him that she was feeling fine, but a bit hungrier than usual. She told him that she thought she might have walked in her sleep back at the holiday cottage, and it
scared her a bit. When he asked her if there was anything else that worried her, she spent a few moments with her head on one side, as if racking her brains, then blithely shook her head.

When Dr Mellows asked her about her claim to have heard Pen talking on the telephone the day before, Triss crumpled her brow, looking rueful and reluctant to speak.

‘You . . . You won’t make everybody angry with Pen, will you? Only . . . I think it might have been a sort of a . . . a joke. I think maybe she pretended she was talking on the
phone, so I’d tell people and then look stupid. She . . . does things like that sometimes. But you won’t say anything, will you? You won’t get her into trouble?’

She bit her lip and looked across at the doctor, and could see from his face how he saw her. Brave but beleaguered, the long-suffering victim of a more spiteful sibling.

‘And you’re afraid that if she gets in trouble she’ll take it out on you, I’ll warrant.’ He sighed. ‘Yes, I see. Don’t worry, you leave that with
me.’

Triss let out her breath slowly, trying not to show how her pulse was racing.
Two can play at your game, Pen.

‘Well, good, good.’ Dr Mellows smiled at Triss, and despite his words she wondered if there was the tiniest hint of disappointment in his gaze.

‘Can you stop me sleepwalking?’ she asked carefully. ‘Only, everybody seems really worried about it, and I don’t want to make anybody upset.’

‘Of course you don’t.’ He smiled at her kindly. ‘Well, let’s see what we can do. Young Theresa – your father tells me that before you were ill you fell into
some kind of a millpond, and that you don’t remember doing so – that you don’t remember any of that day, in fact. Is that true?’

Triss nodded.

‘Now, how shall I explain this?’ The doctor smiled warmly and gently. ‘Suppose one day you swallowed a big marble. Not that I’m saying a big girl like you would do
anything so silly. Well, after you’d done so, that marble would cause you all sorts of trouble until it was out in the open again. You wouldn’t be able to see it, you might not even
work out what was causing the problem, but you’d have a deuce of a tummy ache.

‘The funny thing is, sometimes memories can be like that. If something happens that scares us, or that we don’t want to remember, we swallow it down, just like that marble.’ He
was talking slowly and carefully now. ‘We can’t see the memory any more, but there it is deep inside us, creating problems. I think that’s what causes your sleepwalking. A . . .
sort of tummy ache of the mind.’

It sounded so harmless when the doctor put it that way, in fact rather ordinary and homely. However, she recognized something in his tone of voice
. Adults only talk that way when they know
you’d be really upset or worried if you understood what they meant.

‘So . . . I just need to spit out the marble?’

‘Yes.’ The doctor nodded enthusiastically. ‘Exactly. The trick is to
remember
. Bring the marble back into the light of day. Then it won’t bother you any
more.’

‘But having this marble doesn’t mean I’m mad, does it?’ The question ran away from her before she could stop it.

The doctor looked up at her in surprise, then gave a short gust of laughter. ‘No, no, no! Lots of people sleepwalk, particularly youngsters like you. Don’t you worry about that.
It’s not like you’re seeing pixies in your porridge, is it?’

Seeing things! Seeing things! He knows! He knew all the time!

There was no challenge or scrutiny in the doctor’s eyes, however, as he smiled and shut his book.

No. No, he doesn’t know at all. That was supposed to make me feel better.

‘Now, just hop up on the scales over there, and after that I’ll set you free.’

Triss obeyed, and barely noticed the way the doctor’s eyebrows rose as the needle wobbled across the painted numerals.

As she followed her father out of the doctor’s surgery, Triss felt a warm wash of relief, followed by a cold current of deep anxiety and self-loathing.

Well done, Triss
, murmured a small voice in the depths of her gut.
You tricked him. You tricked the person who was trying to help you. So now he can’t.

Chapter 6

Marley Street was one of the highest thoroughfares in Ellchester, and was now lit by electricity instead of gas. Steel brackets had been clamped to the tops of the poles that
held up the running wires for the trams, and from these seared a light of almost unearthly brightness and whiteness, like distilled moonlight. It transformed the street and made everything larger,
louder, more vivid and exciting, as if all the shopping throngs were onstage and knew it. In comparison, the mellow light from the post-top gas lanterns down the side streets left everything there
looking melancholy and a bit dingy.

‘Lambent’s as usual?’ her father asked. It was Triss’s favourite dress shop, she recalled after a moment’s confusion. All her best-loved dresses had been bought
there, after fits of illness. Her whooping-cough blue chiffon. Her three-day-fever cotton with the primrose print.

They halted before Lambent’s, the golden letters reading ‘Lambent & Daughters’ gleaming above the window in the light from the street lamps. As her father turned away to
close his umbrella, Triss pressed herself close to the great, brightly lit window, avoiding the trickle of water from the narrow awning above. Beyond the glass posed five sleek plaster mannequins
with pale silver skin. They were languorous and inhumanly slender, in the very latest style, and had utterly featureless faces.

Triss was just admiring their pastel-coloured tasselled dresses when all five of the figures stirred. Very slowly they turned their eyeless heads to stare at her, and then hunched their
shoulders slightly and leaned forward, with an attitude of intense interest.

‘No!’ Triss leaped backwards into the rain. Her father turned to her in surprise. She swallowed hard and forced her gaze away from the shop window. If her father saw her staring, he
might look over his shoulder to investigate. What if he saw them move? Or what if he saw nothing strange at all? ‘Can’t we go somewhere else this time? I heard there was a better shop,
down . . .
that
way.’ She pointed blindly along the street, hoping that she could find some dressmaker in that direction to lend her story credence.

‘Really? Yes, if you like.’ Her father opened his umbrella again. ‘What was this other dressmaker called?’

‘I . . . I can’t quite remember,’ said Triss, just relieved to find herself walking away from the ominous, watching mannequins. She strode on without looking back, her heart
bouncing in her chest. ‘The name was something like . . . like . . . it was this one!’ To her delight and relief she realized that they were passing a shop with a big metal pair of
scissors suspended above the door by a slender chain, a sure sign of a tailor or dressmaker. Most of the clothes on the wire-frame dummies in the window seemed to be for men, but there were some
female clothes too. Triss’s eyes flitted quickly to the twirly sky-blue letters over the door. ‘Grace & Scarp – yes, that was it!’

‘All right.’ Her father smoothed back her damp hair. ‘Let’s see what they have, shall we?’

Only as she was mounting the steps to the shop door did Triss felt a tickle of disquiet. It was not exactly fear, just a tug of unease as if she had forgotten something important. A thought
flashed into her mind, but it was not a terrible one, just odd. It was the memory of wrestling with her mother’s scissors the morning after her fever, the tool sullenly uncooperative in her
hands.

As Triss pushed the shop door open there was a loud and sudden bang. Something clattered to the ground at her feet. She found herself staring down at the enormous pair of iron scissors that had
been hanging over the door.

Her father had been holding his umbrella over her, and only this had prevented the blades falling on to her head. The world around Triss seemed to bleach, and for a few moments she lost the
ability to understand it. The great scissors at her feet were the only real thing. There was a lot of fuss all around her, and it sounded as if her father was making most of it. Everybody else
seemed to be doing a lot of apologizing.

‘No idea how the chain snapped . . . it was brand new just a year ago . . .’

Triss and her father were hurried into the gleaming shop, and somebody made a great business of dabbing the raindrops off Triss’s shoulders with a handkerchief, as if that would undo the
scissor-attack.

‘My daughter,’ her father was declaring in tones of incandescent rage, ‘is in a state of delicate health. Her nerves cannot stand this sort of shock!’

One portly man managed to raise his voice above the chorus of apology. ‘Sir, we are most heartily and profoundly sorry. No excuse can be made for such an accident, but perhaps you will let
us make some small amends. Perhaps a dress for your daughter with our compliments . . . and maybe a suit for yourself at a discount?’

Triss’s father hesitated, the lid tottering on the boiling pot of his temper. Then he knelt down beside her.

‘Triss – how are you? What do you want to do? Do you want to stay here and see what their dresses are like, or shall we go somewhere else?’

‘It’s all right,’ piped up Triss. ‘I don’t mind if we stay here.’ It was true, she realized. She was shaken, but did not feel bodily affected by the shock the
way her father seemed to expect. Triss even felt slightly guilty about it, as if after his speech she had a duty to be more stricken.

‘If you are sure.’ Her father briefly glanced across at the stout man who had offered the dress and discounted suit. ‘Triss, I need to talk to the manager about a few things.
If I leave you to be measured, will you be all right?’

‘But we know my measurements,’ Triss exclaimed, surprised.

‘I think you should be measured again, love,’ her father said quietly but firmly, and again Triss saw the ghost of anxiety stalk past behind his smile. ‘Dr Mellow says . . .
that you may have lost a little weight.’

Lost weight?
Lost
weight? With incredulity Triss recalled all the food she had devoured over the last three days. How could she have
lost
weight? Now she thought about it,
though, the doctor had looked rather taken aback when she climbed on the scales.

Still turning this revelation over in her head, Triss was led through a door marked ‘Reserved for Special Guests of Grace & Scarp’. The room on the other side was small, but much
grander than the main shop floor and startlingly empty of people. The walls were patterned in serious-looking dark blue and silver-grey, and the furniture was mostly chrome and glossy leather. From
racks along one wall hung folded bolts of black, brown and navy-blue cloth. It was all very sensible and gentlemanly, and made Triss feel silly and out of place, like a dollop of jam on a
newspaper.

‘Please, do take a seat.’ The man who had shown her into this grand room pulled forward a large leather chair for her. ‘This is our VIP room – reserved for royalty, the
extravagant and those we attack with scissors.’

At first glance Triss had thought that the man was quite young. His hair was oiled to a fashionable treacly gleam. His smile was youthful as well, quick and humorous. Now that she took the time
to look at him, however, she noticed horizontal lines creasing his forehead and a touch of greyness in his cheeks. His motions had a slight stiffness as well, and she realized that he must be older
than her father. His manner was playful, but it was the careful playfulness of an old dog who no longer chases every ball. When he crossed the room, he walked with a shadow of a limp, though it was
almost hidden by the neatness of his step.