Cuckoo (17 page)
She picked them up from school in the Galaxy. It was the first time the boys had been in the car since that first journey from Heathrow, and it took a good deal of bargaining to organise who was sitting where. They both wanted to be next to Anna, but on the very back row, where there were only two seats. Then there was a long argument about why they should wear seatbelts. Finally they set off, bombing down the narrow, banked country lanes through the drizzling afternoon. In a month or so, the cow parsley would be dwarfing them, but right now they were able to see the fields and the hills beyond.
‘All this green – it hurts my eyes,’ Yannis said.
‘It gets worse, believe me,’ Rose smiled over to him. In losing the back-seat argument, he had won the not inconsiderable consolation prize of sitting in the front, next to Rose. Flossie, backwards facing in the middle row was being watched over by Anna who was whispering and giggling with Nico in the row behind.
‘I want to be in the back,’ Yannis moaned, looking over at the two of them.
‘On the way home you can,’ Rose said. Only partly satisfied by this, Yannis turned again to look out of his window.
‘Back home it’s all brown, blue and grey,’ Yannis said. ‘We get flowers in the spring, but then the sun comes and kills them all.’
‘We get flowers here all through to the end of the summer.’
‘Really?’ He considered this, twirling his long hair round his index finger.
‘And, hey, Yannis. You could start thinking about this all as your home now, too.’ Rose put her hand on his knee.
‘It’s too cold here.’ He scowled, looking out of the window at the fields as they streaked past.
Rose parked in the multi-storey and filed them all out into the street. There was a lovely shop called Jabberwocky which sold really good quality, rugged clothes for middle-class country children. It was a little more expensive than Tesco, but Rose thought the cut was better, and the clothes lasted longer.
On the way there, she realised how unaware Yannis and Nico were of the traffic. She had to intervene more than a couple of times to stop them stepping out without looking. In the end, she made them hold on to the buggy, one each side. It was, she thought, better to force passers-by off the pavement than risk these loose cannons careering off into the road. It wasn’t that they were just looking the wrong way when they crossed the road. It was more that they had no idea of danger. Nor, it seemed, did they possess the ability to follow her instructions.
They piled into the shop, and the children sat in the play area with Flossie, while Rose went around building a pile of possible outfits for the boys to try on. The shop was pretty child-friendly, but even so she had to mediate a couple of times: once to pull Yannis off Nico, the second to tell him to tone the language down. She wasn’t used to shopping trips being so wearing. Yannis, who was normally the easiest of the boys, was proving to be quite a handful today.
They crammed into the changing room. Yannis immediately stripped down to his underpants, slipped his way past Rose and ran back into the shop.
‘I’m a weirdo!’ he cried out, turning a couple of cartwheels across the shop floor.
‘I’m a weirdo!’ He bounced and lunged his face into that of a nice little girl with plaits and the straw-boatered uniform of a private girls’ day school. She shied away and buried her face in her mother’s heavy floral linen skirt.
Rose darted across the shop to catch Yannis and finally managed to corner him by the shoe department.
‘Come on, Yannis,’ she said, holding him by the arm. ‘You’ve got to act a bit more grown up. It’s like being with a toddler.’
‘But I’m a weirdo.’ He stood there, panting and glaring at her. ‘I’m a weirdo. They all said!’ Sniggers racked him until, like a tap running dry, it all stopped and his wiry little body, at first so tense and fizzing, seemed to fold before her eyes. She followed him to the ground, still holding him.
‘Who said, Yannis?’
‘The kids at school. I hate them.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ she said. ‘They can’t do that.’
At last, the tears came.
‘I hate that school. I want to go home, Rose. I want it all back how it was,’ he wailed.
The shop was, thankfully, fairly empty, and the few other customers and sales staff kept a discreet distance from Rose and the melting, wild little boy.
She folded him up in her arms, pressing his hot head into her breast. ‘There, there, Yannis. It’s OK, shhh, it’s OK.’
‘I want my papa,’ he sobbed.
‘I know,’ Rose whispered into his hair. ‘I know, Yann.’
It was horrible to think, but in a way she was glad that he was reaching out for her like this. The poor boy had to go through this grief. Even a child had to reach the bottom, before they could move on. She felt privileged that he had chosen her for his witness.
‘And Mama’s just rubbish.’
‘Shh,’ Rose said. ‘She just misses him too, and it’s making her sad, like you. But she’ll be better soon. And I’m here, and whatever happens, I promise, promise, promise that I will never, ever let you down.’
He looked up at her, his eyes red.
‘Look, Yannis, Gareth and I – well, we love you. As if you were our own sons. And Christos – your papa – he loves you too. He’s up there, looking down and giving you all his love.’
‘In heaven?’
‘Yes.’
‘But Mama says that’s just bollocks. I heard her tell Yaya that, when they were at the funeral.’
‘Do you think it’s bollocks?’
‘No.’
‘Well then, nor do I.’
‘I talk to him sometimes.’
‘Do you know what? So do I.’ She smiled at Yannis. She hadn’t noticed before, but he really had the eyes of his father. ‘I can see him right there, inside you, right now.’
‘How can he be up there and in me at the same time, though?’
‘Well, nothing’s impossible. Your dad is on an awfully big adventure. One we can’t even begin to imagine.’
‘And that’s a good thing?’
‘Yes. Yes, it is.’ She gave him another hug. ‘Here,’ she said, breaking away a little. ‘I know what’ll make you feel better. There’s this place round the corner that serves the most amazing hot chocolate. It’s so thick you can stand your spoon up in it.’
‘Really?’ he said, the cloud passing as quickly as it had descended.
‘Yes, but come on, first we’ve got to get you kitted out,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Buy you some clothes, I mean. Come on.’ And she led him back to the changing room.
Behind the curtain, a scene of calm and order confronted her. Nico was sitting playing with Flossie, who was awake in her buggy.
‘Those are the ones Nico wants,’ Anna said, pointing to a pile of clothes that were neatly folded on a chair. ‘And these,’ she said, putting the final pair of trousers back on a hanger, ‘don’t fit or they look rubbish.’
Nico smiled up at Rose. ‘They’re really cool clothes. Thanks, Rose.’
‘That’s nothing, Nico. I’m glad you’re happy. Now then, Yannis, let’s get you sorted.’
And she set to helping him into the lovely, German-made trousers and Swedish fleeces she had piled up, ready for him to try on.
She ended up spending over £300 in the shop, but she felt Jabberwocky had earned it, having had to bear witness to Yannis’s moment. The boys insisted on wearing their new clothes and she paraded her freshly smart crew into the special hot chocolate café. They emerged half an hour later, happy but somewhat less well-groomed, with chocolate moustaches and splatters on their new tops. The children, sugar riding high in their bodies, skipped and chattered all the way back to the car park. Yannis seemed to have entirely forgotten his earlier outburst.
Just before they got to the car, Rose was surprised to spot Simon. He was standing outside a pub on the other side of the road, a pint in his hand, smoking. He was on his own, and he looked awful. She tried to catch his eye, but he wasn’t looking outwards. If she hadn’t had the children with her, she would have gone over to him. But as it was, they had to get back. She had never seen Simon like that before, though, and it made her wonder just what exactly was going on under her own nose, in her own home.
Fifteen
‘I’m gonna get you!’ Gareth roared, waving his sword in the air as he charged down the grassy mound.
The children screamed and fled in all directions.
Polly and Rose, basking in the unseasonal sunshine, stretched out and smiled at each other.
‘So this is why we have men,’ Polly said, lying back on the tartan blanket and tickling Flossie while Rose began to put the picnic things away.
‘He certainly loves to play,’ Rose said, crinkling her eyes and looking at her husband as he galloped and whooped over the crumbling castle ruins. It had been Gareth’s idea to come up here. Now he had the boys to play with, he wanted to reconstruct a game he and Andy had invented in their childhood, called Invaders. The rules were labyrinthine, but the children seemed to grasp them immediately, and, armed with the wooden swords and shields Gareth had made the day before, they were well into the inaugural game.
Gareth had found the castle just after they had moved to the village, on one of his early reconnaissance walks. He had once told Rose that, throughout his adult life, he would subconsciously size up various landscapes for their Invaders suitability. When he first clapped his eyes on this site, he knew it would be perfect, and he had just been biding his time, waiting for the right moment to put it to use. The castle was in fact the remains of a badly built Victorian mock-medieval folly, and it sat on private land. It therefore didn’t have the health and safety restrictions and censorious caretakers that were normally assigned to more historic, nationally adopted, remains.
The landowner was an aging, absentee American movie star more famous for his involvement in Tantric practices than his acting work. He happened to own a couple of Gareth’s pieces and was only too pleased to think of their creator frolicking on his land with his family. So the Invaders had the place to themselves.
Gareth had recruited Yannis to be on his side, and they were stalking Anna along a precipitous four-foot-high stone wall.
‘Be careful!’ Rose cried.
‘They’re fine,’ Polly said, looking on.
‘Christos was great with the boys, too, though,’ Rose said, after a while.
‘He was a good father,’ Polly said. ‘But he wasn’t rough and tumble like that. He didn’t have that sort of energy with children. He was more interested in adults, really. Children he enjoyed talking to, but he’d never have had them on his back like that.’ She waved her hand at Gareth, who now had Nico down on the ground, tickling him, while Anna was behind him, her hands on his shoulders, trying to pull him off. Yannis was running circles around them, whooping, and all three children were giggling like puppy hyenas.
‘That surprises me,’ Rose said.
‘That’s the thing with Christos. Nothing was expected.’ Polly lay back, shielding her eyes from the sun, lifting Flossie up to lie on her stomach.
Rose packed everything into the picnic baskets, then she joined Polly on the blanket and lay back, looking up at the breezy sky. She and Gareth had agreed that it was far bluer here than in the city. Gareth said he was going to test it in paint one day. He was going to paint canvases of blue sky in different parts of the world – just the blue – then put them up on a gallery wall and compare them. Rose had argued that it wouldn’t be scientific, because the blue varied from day to day, and he couldn’t be all over the world in one day. He had laughed, but she had been serious.
Polly stroked Flossie’s chubby arm, softly kneading the flesh. ‘When Christos died,’ she said, ‘all I wanted to do was touch someone. His body was the part of him I no longer had. I could still sort of talk to him, still feel his presence, but the actual physical part of him had been taken away from me.’
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