Cuckoo Song (12 page)

A familiar figure was hurrying between the cucumber frames and nasturtium beds, padded out like a very short Eskimo in her pale cream fleece-trimmed coat. It was Pen. As the younger girl
unfastened the gate at the back of the garden, she flashed a fierce and furtive grin towards the upper storeys of the house. Then the gate closed, concealing her from sight.

Clearly Triss was not the only person who had decided to take advantage of their mother’s nap. Triss slipped out through the back door, taking care to close it more carefully than Pen had
done.

What is she doing? Where is she going?

Pen’s eyes had been watchful, but alive with anger and a hint of triumph. It reminded Triss of her sister’s face when she had forced Triss to show her grass-stained nightdress.

Whatever she’s planning, it’s something to do with me.

Triss scampered across the garden to the gate, opened it a crack and peered through into the alley beyond, just in time to see Pen’s familiar form disappearing around a corner. Triss made
haste to the same turning, thankful her steps were drowned by the bluster of the wind. And there was Pen, strutting down Lime Street with her hands in her pockets, as if she had every right to do
so.

At a distance, keeping Pen just within sight all the way, Triss followed.

How strange it was, to be outside alone, without permission! Triss was sure that at any moment she would bump into some friend of the family. Thankfully the wind gave her an excuse to keep her
collar turned up, her hat pulled down and her scarf wrapped around her face. Again her father’s words haunted her.

My Triss is a sweet, quiet, well-behaved girl.

But, she promised herself, she would be
his
Triss again soon, once she found out what was wrong with her and made it better.

Wherever Pen was going, the route was clearly not new to her. She knew which railings were loose and could be pulled out so that you could sneak into the park and take a short cut. She slipped
down little behind-house alleys, where you could fight your way through the hanging washing and come out in main streets. She was familiar with the little zigzag lanes that crept up the sides of
the hills and spat you out on to footbridges with a view across the city, then swallowed you up in alleys again.

Eventually Pen came to a junction that Triss recognized. To the right lay the broad street that ran up the hill towards the better shopping districts, including Marley Street and the dressmaker
where Mr Grace worked. The left-hand road ran downhill towards the Puttens, the area of Ellchester which the younger people of the city had claimed for their own. There the lines of shops were
interspersed with dance halls, bars and cinemas.

Pen turned left.

Triss felt a knot of conflict in her stomach. Mr Grace’s shop was so close now, a mere handful of turnings away, but if she lost sight of Pen she would never know what the younger girl was
up to. Again, Triss remembered the look of guilty terror on her sister’s face when she had been overheard using the phone. Had Pen just been pretending, to trap her? Or . . . did Pen have a
part in the strangeness that had consumed everything?

I hate you, Pen
, Triss murmured silently, as she turned left, down the hill, keeping the smaller girl’s figure in sight.
I hate you.

At last Pen halted before a curious building which had been built on a hairpin bend and was therefore wedge-shaped. High above, under a row of light bulbs, was a sign painted
with the words ‘The Slice of Life’. The walls were cream-coloured, increasing the resemblance to a piece of cake. They were covered with posters, on which Theda Bara offered a sultry
glare, John Barrymore showed off his famous nose, and Rudolph Valentino fiercely clutched a young woman who did not seem to mind too much.

It was a cinema, a strange little cinema that Triss could not remember ever having seen or heard mentioned. As she was wondering at this, Pen walked up the front steps and in through the glass
swing-door.

Triss halted in the street, irresolute. Could this be the answer? Had Pen really fled the house on an illicit film-going trip? Now that she thought about it, Saturday afternoon was the time that
most cinemas held their ‘tuppenny rush’ showing, with cheap tickets for children.

Her eye slid to a board near the door. Sure enough, it advertised a Children’s Matinee. The main picture was
Murder at the Midnight Casino
, and the serial was something called
The Unseen Blade
. Both sounded exactly to Pen’s taste. Pen was addicted to gangster films, and any other picture that involved people shooting each other or falling off cliffs.

With severe misgivings, Triss walked up the steps and into the cinema.

The Crescent family’s cinema trips had always been to the Rhapsody, on the edge of town. It was large and grand like an Egyptian palace, full of reds and golds, with a piano that rose up
on a special platform just before the film began. Mother had always insisted that the other cinemas were ‘bug huts’, where one ‘was jostled by all sorts and came home with
fleas’.

The entrance was close to the ‘point’ of the cinema’s wedge, so Triss was unsurprised to find that the foyer was very small.

It was a strange mixture of old and new, grand and dingy. The carpet was bright red and had the raspy, exciting feeling of nylon, but the dark paint of the walls was peeling. Behind a battered
desk sat a pretty young woman with a mouth painted like a cherry and white-gold hair that looked like whipped cream.

There was no sign of Pen. Behind the women was a doorway with a velvet rope across it, from beyond which Triss could hear a cacophony of voices.

Triss’s mouth dried as the woman gave her a special warm ‘for children’ smile.

‘Don’t look so worried!’ she said in a confidential tone. ‘It’s just beginning. If you sneak in now, you’ll catch the start of the serial.’ She said the
word ‘sneak’ with a small, charming wrinkle of her nose. ‘That’s three ha’pennies for the stalls, thruppence for the gallery.’ She paused and seemed to take
stock of Triss’s clothes. ‘You’ll be for the gallery, won’t you?’

Triss floundered for an instant, before remembering that she had a purse with a little of her pocket money in her coat pocket. She hesitated, then fished out three pennies, received a metal
token in return and headed through the door behind the desk. From the gallery she would have a much better view of the auditorium, and a good chance of spotting Pen.

She passed through a door labelled ‘To the Gallery’, pausing to hand her token to a silent, sallow-faced attendant, then climbed a set of stairs, the sound of ruckus ahead growing
ever louder.

She emerged on to the gallery, which appeared to be empty. The auditorium below, however, was seething. The hard wooden benches were crammed with children of every age, from heartily screaming
infants to teenage girls who sat gossiping and peeling potatoes at the back. Children threw nutshells, or stood on benches to yell across to each other. Others stamped their feet and whistled,
calling for the film to start. Peering down, Triss tried to make out Pen’s diminutive shape among them, but in vain.

As Triss watched, a woman with her hair in a stern bun walked down the aisles, spraying something into the air above the children’s heads. All of them seemed to accept this as a matter of
course. A chemical scent of lavender drifted up to Triss and she wondered if the woman was spraying for fleas.

When a solitary man sat down at the piano and began to thump out a tune, the audience erupted with excitement. The room darkened, and the silvery screen began to move in its magical way, showing
the latest news events. Mr Baldwin, the prime minister, was talking silently in a big coat, the silver sunlight making him blink.

Then the serial episode began, showing a young woman trapped in a cellar rapidly filling with water. Most of the audience had clearly been following this story avidly and were soon shouting
warnings to her by name, or calling out the titles on the screen for friends hard of reading. As the heroine made her unlikely and ingenious escape, there were cheers, gasps, laughter and
catcalls.

On another day, Triss would have been drawn in as well, the shimmer of the great screen filling her with an almost unbearable excitement. Today, however, she was too busy scanning the figures
below bathed in the screen’s flickering light, searching in vain for Pen.

Could Pen have paid thruppence for a seat upstairs? There was a large central pillar blocking Triss’s view of the other half of the gallery. She sidled along the row of seats, and gingerly
peered round the pillar.

In a seat at the far end of the gallery sat Pen.

The smaller girl was fidgeting and seemed to be paying no attention to the screen at all. Over and over again she glanced to her left, towards the wall directly opposite Triss. There was nothing
there though, only a darkened wall painted a rich, deep red.

And then, quite suddenly, there was.

A small, open door had appeared in the wall, offering a rectangle of faint illumination. As Triss watched, Pen saw it and stiffened, then rose stealthily, made her way down the row of seats and
vanished through it.

There was something about that dimly lit doorway that sent Triss’s instincts twitching. She could smell something. No, taste something. No, neither of those, but there was something in the
air that furred her tongue and made her teeth tingle. It was strange. It was familiar. It made her think of the Grimmer. She did not want to follow Pen into that mysterious half-light.

But she knew she would.

The serial had yielded to a cartoon. Boggle-eyed, Felix the Cat crept past a sleeping dog, his shoulders hunched, each step an exaggerated lurch. As his adventures bathed the auditorium in a
storm-flicker light, Triss crept on silent feet towards the waiting door.

Chapter 11

As Triss approached the mysterious doorway, the sounds of joyful uproar in the auditorium seemed to dull. The roar of voices became foggy, the piano music muted to a tinny
chiming like distant cowbells. Beyond the doorway lay a narrow corridor running from left to right, carpeted in a drab earthy grey, and with patterned wallpaper of the same colour on the walls.

Triss gingerly leaned in to peer. To the left, the corridor led to a set of stairs leading downward. To the right it ended at a distant white-painted door, before which stood Pen. As Triss
watched, Pen knocked. A moment or two later, the door was opened, and the younger girl vanished within.

The carpet crunched strangely under Triss’s feet as she advanced down the corridor, soft but prickly, delicate but fibrous. The wallpaper looked a lot like velvet with some of its pile
shaved to create patterns. When she put out her hand to touch it, however, she found her fingertips stroking feathers. As she brushed the wall, a tiny tremor seemed to flutter through the pattern,
as though the wall was a living thing and had stirred its plumage.

Pen had left the white door slightly open, so Triss settled herself by the jamb so that she could peer in through the crack. She found herself looking into a small, dim room partially obscured
by the figure of Pen, who was still hovering just beyond the threshold. The lighting in the room was bleached and palpitating, like that in the auditorium she had just left.

‘Miss Penelope Crescent.’ Somebody was striding forward to shake Pen by the hand, somebody male and very tall. His voice was educated, confident and designed to carry. At the same
time there was an edginess in his tone, as if he was being distracted by thoughts of something very exciting. He stepped backwards again, fully into Triss’s line of sight, and she saw him
clearly.

Her first reaction was shock. The stranger was not just handsome, he was
movie star
handsome. His short, carefully combed hair gleamed like honey, and he had a small, fair, Douglas
Fairbanks moustache that curled up at the ends. He did not wear a proper daytime suit with jacket and vest of the sort her father always donned on weekdays. Instead he was dressed in the latest
fanatically casual fashion among those her parents called ‘the sporty set’. He wore a V-necked sweater over his crisp white shirt, the comfortable, loose trousers known as ‘Oxford
bags’, and two-toned, tan-and-white ‘spectator’ shoes. Over these hung a sleekly tailored grey-brown overcoat, and Triss could only assume that he had just arrived from some much
more glamorous engagement.

‘Always a pleasure. Please.’ He took another step back and spread his arm in a broad, welcoming gesture. As he did so, Triss thought she caught a gleam under his shirt cuff, a hint
of metal on his wrist. Pen accepted the tacit invitation, passing him to move further into the room.

Triss swallowed, then pushed both her luck and the door an inch or two more, so that the crack widened and she gained a better view.

It was easy to make out the source of the fitful lighting. To the right, the whole of one wide wall was a seething, quivering mass of silver-and-grey action. It was a movie, there was no doubt
about that, but there was no projector in sight, no blanched beam of light from across the room slanting down to strike the wall. Triss watched the great moving picture in bewilderment as some mute
heroine, bristling with ringlety virtue, shook her head rapidly and shunned the gifts of a Lothario with seal-sleek hair. Only when a title card flashed up on the screen with the words
back-to-front did Triss realize that she must be looking at the back of the auditorium’s screen.

Triss had heard that some cheap fleapits whose screens were nothing but hung sheets sometimes put a few audience seats behind the sheet, charging half price to those who saw the film back to
front. But the surface on which this film flickered looked like a wall, not a sheet. And if it were thin enough for the light to pierce, why could she no longer hear the piano music or the murmur
of the audience?

The rest of the room was extraordinary for its ordinariness. Aside from its walls, which were lined with the same feathery paper as the corridor, it seemed to be a perfectly normal parlour,
complete with floral-pattered chairs, a grandmother clock, a cloth-covered table sporting a tea set and a wireless. Triss could not imagine why such a room would be lurking behind a cinema screen,
however, and the light made everything look restless. Shadows jumped and beat like wings.