Cuckoo Song (22 page)

‘Somebody get me a drink and a cigarette!’ Violet said as she dragged off her coat, to reveal a long dark-green dress with split skirts. It was not a sultry request, more like a
mechanic asking to be passed a spanner. Nobody seemed offended, and soon she had a glass in one hand and was drawing on a cigarette as somebody lit it for her. Her face was still shiny from rain,
but she did not seem to care.

The musicians looked a bit aggrieved at first as a wind-up gramophone was produced, but took the opportunity to seek out drinks and mop their brows.

‘Thank God they’ve stopped,’ Violet said quite audibly. ‘Music as hot as a dead frog.’

As the needle dipped to the record there was a white-noise hiss, and even after the first rude blare of brass there were still spit-spots of static. This was a record that had been places and
come back scratched, and somehow the roughness made it seem all the more itself.
This
jazz had not wiped its feet; it crunched right into the room with gravel on its shoes.

Pen tried to call out to Violet, but was hushed. Everyone in the boathouse had drawn closer, listening until the mischievous, lawless song ended with a half-mocking salute and a last long
note.

‘That,’ said Violet, stubbing out her cigarette, ‘is how you do it.’ The remark was partially directed at the musicians, who seemed to take it as a challenge. When they
started up with their instruments again, the rhythm was fiercer and more defiant than before.

‘Violet!’ called Pen again, but Violet did not hear. She went out with the tide of dancers to the floor, and Not-Triss was unsure whether she drew the tide, or whether the tide drew
her.

Half the windows looked out over the river, and it made Not-Triss feel as if she was on a boat. As the dancing began again and the floorboards started to thunder, it was easy to believe that
there was no ground under them. Nobody was steering the boat, everybody was dancing, and nobody danced more wildly than Violet. There was something desperate about it, as if dancing would stop the
boat sinking. There was something fierce about it, as if she wanted to drive her foot through the hull and sink the boat faster.

So this was Violet’s world. The
fast
world. The ‘high life’, as Celeste Crescent would put it. In spite of everything, it made Not-Triss nervous, as if wickedness was
something she could breathe in like smoke, and which might leave a scent on her clothes.

Even though she was out of the rain, Not-Triss realized that she was starting to shiver. The more people looked at her, the worse the trembling became. She did not want anybody to stare too
hard, in case they saw something monstrous in her face and reeled away in search of flames to destroy her. All these people could turn in a moment, she knew it.

‘Violet!’ At last Pen’s perseverance paid off, and as the musicians finished their piece she managed to force her way through the crowd. ‘Violet, it’s me!’
Violet’s eye fell upon Pen, and she paused in the middle of drawing from her cigarette, then closed her eyes and let out the smoke in a long exasperated breath.

‘Oh Lord,’ she muttered. ‘Pen, for . . . Pete’s sake, what are you doing here?’ Once again, her mock-London drawl grated on Not-Triss’s nerves.

‘I
had
to come!’ exclaimed Pen. ‘It was life and death!’

‘Of course it was. Isn’t it always?’ Violet sighed, and drew Pen aside. Not-Triss followed at a small distance, still loath to draw attention to herself. ‘Pen –
have you run away
again
? And how did you get here from Ellchester? You haven’t been throwing rocks at cars again, have you?’

Pen opened her mouth wide, made a small not-quite-squeak and shut it again.

‘And what’s happened to your face?’ continued Violet. ‘Where did you get those bramble scratches on your cheek?’

Pen’s eyes crept across to Not-Triss. Violet followed her gaze and stiffened, her long jaw dropping.

‘Oh – you have to be joking.’ She stared, then shook her head in disbelief. ‘This evening is just . . . you brought your
sister
out
here
? Pen!
What—’

‘It was the only place I could think of to go! You said I should! You said I should always come to you—’

‘I said that
if
you ran away, then you should come and stay with me until you were ready to go home, instead of sleeping in hedges or getting into strange cars. And I could get
into trouble for saying
that
.’ Violet gave Not-Triss another glance, as if assessing the likelihood that she might run to the police straight away. ‘This is different. If
both
of you are missing, your parents will be calling everybody short of the prime minister. I need to take the pair of you home right now.’

‘No!’ shouted both girls, with enough volume that several people looked round in curiosity.

‘Please don’t!’ blurted out Not-Triss. ‘I’m sorry we interrupted your party, but please, please don’t take us home. Our parents . . .’ She trailed off,
desperately trying to think of a good story.

‘They tried to burn Triss alive!’ Pen leaped into the gap.

Violet raised her eyebrows and just looked at Pen. Not-Triss’s spirits sank. Violet didn’t like Mr and Mrs Crescent, but adults believed adults. Adults believed
in
adults.
Violet evidently liked Pen, but Pen told lies and Violet clearly knew that.

Pen took hold of Violet’s arm.

‘Please!’ she said through her teeth, her eyes bright with the effort of willing Violet to listen to her. ‘Really. Truly. Cross my heart and hope to die.’

‘It’s
true
,’ Not-Triss whispered, uncertain how much her word was worth. ‘I know how it sounds . . . but we can’t go home. We’re in
danger.’

There was nothing warm about Violet’s long-jawed face as she scowled at them. She was an adult looking at two silly girls who had come to her with a silly lie. Then she gave an annoyed
sigh, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again she looked angry but tired.

‘One night,’ she said simply, and it took Not-Triss a moment to understand what she meant. ‘I really shouldn’t do this . . . but you can stay at my lodgings tonight.
I’ll take you there now and drop you off. But first thing tomorrow, you are going to tell me what is going on. Is that clear?’

Not-Triss nodded, hardly daring to believe in the reprieve.

‘Where are your coats? Don’t you even have coats? Wait here and I’ll get you blankets, or you’ll catch your death in the sidecar.’ It was becoming chilly, Not-Triss
couldn’t help but notice. A number of the women in the hall were pouting a little, rubbing at their bare shoulders and looking for their shawls.

After Violet had departed in search of blankets and her coat, Not-Triss stole a glance at Pen.

‘Violet’s your friend then? Are you . . . Are you sure we can trust her? You’re sure she won’t pretend to help us, then drive us back home?’

Pen nodded confidently.

‘You don’t know her. If she was going to take us back, she’d tell us. Really loudly.’

Nobody wanted to see Violet leave, but nobody seemed surprised. Her record was passed back to her and she tucked it under her coat.

‘Don’t go, Violet!’ A drunk young man kept trying to haul her back to the dance floor. His drawl made her name sound like ‘varlet’. ‘Stay for once! Why do you
never stay anywhere?’

‘Because I’m avoiding
you
, Ben,’ Violet declared calmly, pushing him aside. ‘It’s all personal.’ There was a burst of laughter.

‘Give up, Ben,’ somebody shouted. ‘Don’t tangle with old Frosty over there.’

Violet gave a short laugh, and for a moment her face held an odd mixture of pride and something less happy. She led Not-Triss and Pen out of the dance hall into the darkness, where the rain was
slicingly cold against the skin.

Chapter 21

Violet’s motorbike was standing amid the parked cars like a grimy fox in a field of cows.

‘The sidecar’s only meant for one person,’ she muttered, ‘but we’ll have to squeeze you both in.’ It was shaped like a fat little canoe with a big wheel on
the side, a tapering enclosed nose to contain one’s legs and a seat under the opening. It proved possible for both girls to fit inside, with Pen sitting on Not-Triss’s lap.

Violet donned her goggles, tethered her cap and straddled her motorbike. Then, with visible effort and using most of her weight, she drove her foot down on the kick-starter, wrenching a
startlingly loud rattle-roar from the engine. The smell of oil made Not-Triss feel sick. When the bike lurched forward and swerved out on to the road, Not-Triss reflexively gripped at the sides of
the sidecar, teeth clenched with apprehension.

The road felt very close. On one side roared the bike, so loud that it made her right ear ache. On the other she could see the mudguard over the sidecar’s great wheel vibrating with the
ruggedness of the road, so that she was afraid to let her hands near it. The icy rain was now rushing horizontally, straight into her face, and the wind was merciless. Worst of all, Pen
wouldn’t stay still, but wanted to wriggle, twist, lean and stare around her, in ways that always seemed to involve elbowing or squashing Not-Triss.

A gentle and exhausted numbness settled upon Not-Triss’s mind as she watched occasional cars rattle past, their headlights carving shafts of light out of the darkness, streaked with bright
rain. The recent past was a fading ache. Only this was real, this long moment of being shaken around like a shoe in a box, and even this was not
very
real.

At last the motorbike stopped in front of an old terraced house in a narrow unlit street, and Violet cut the engine.

‘Try to be quiet,’ she whispered as she clambered off the bike and set about extricating the two girls. ‘My landlady’s an old wasp, and I’m not supposed to have
guests.’

Not-Triss and Pen followed Violet up the steps and watched as she slowly turned her key in the lock, with the concentration of a safe-cracker, and led them into a shadowy hall. The two girls
were a step behind as she tiptoed up the stairs, unlocked another door and stepped through into a darkened room.

As Violet put coins in the gas meter and lit the lamps, Not-Triss looked around her at the primrose-patterned wallpaper dimpled with damp, the scuffed elderly furniture and the curtains that
stopped two inches short of the sill. Celeste Crescent had talked about Violet living ‘the high life’, but the only valuable-looking objects in the room were a small wireless set, a
wind-up gramophone and a few records.

Every drawer in the room was open, as if somebody had been interrupted in the act of searching the place, but Violet did not seem surprised by this. A half-open door in the opposite wall looked
on to a dishevelled bed. A row of stockings dangled from the mantelpiece, their toes held in place by various ornaments. Not-Triss wondered if they were ‘artificial silk’, the new
stocking stuff that Celeste Crescent sniffed at as ‘shop-girl silk’.

When Violet knelt by the small tiled hearth and started to load it with coal, Not-Triss watched her with a blank, hypnotized fascination. At the first lick of flame, however, she could not help
flinching back a step and drawing in a panicky breath. Her skin seemed to tingle with terrible warmth once more, as it had when she had been forced close to the cottage fireplace. Violet cast a
surprised glance over her shoulder at Not-Triss, taking stock of her mute, trembling paralysis, and frowned a little. She turned back to the hearth, but shifted her position across so that she
blocked Not-Triss’s view of the flames. When Violet put the fireguard in place, Not-Triss felt her pulse slow a little.

Meanwhile, Pen busied herself collecting blankets and cushions from here and there, dropping them in front of the fire to make a sort of nest, with the confidence of practice.

‘Violet!’ Pen whispered loudly, when their reluctant hostess was sitting back, wiping soot from her hands. ‘We need food. We haven’t eaten anything for hours!’

‘So next time perhaps you should wait until after dinner before running away,’ Violet muttered, without obvious sympathy.

‘But I’m
starving
!’ exclaimed Pen. ‘I haven’t eaten anything
all day
!’

‘Well, you needn’t sound as if that’s my fault,’ Violet growled, heading over to a wooden box near the wall. ‘I’m not your mother.’

‘Good,’ Pen answered without hesitation. ‘I wouldn’t
want
you to be my mother. I’d run away from you too.’

Not-Triss listened agape to this exchange, tensing for the inevitable thunderclap. It did not come.

‘Canned cheese and bananas,’ murmured Violet, returning to the hearth and dropping to her haunches. ‘It’s all there is.’

Pen shrugged. ‘I like canned cheese.’

Not-Triss watched as Violet dug her opener into the cheese can and started cutting a jagged hole in the top. Her long face was still jewelled with rain, her nose blue from the cold, and the
straps of her motoring cap hung down below her ears. For the first time Not-Triss started to understand why Pen might come here when she ran away. In the Crescent family home you had to be careful
all the time, because if you did or said the wrong thing it never went away. It just hung there forever, an invisible black mark that everybody knew was there. Pen had found a place where you could
say things that were rude and grumpy, and where the other person would just be rude and grumpy back, and afterwards you could sit eating bananas without an ounce of ill feeling.

The three of them ate the cheese off tea-set saucers. It had a slight metallic taste but nobody seemed to care. The bananas were brown-skinned, but the flesh inside was still mostly pale and
firm.

At last Violet stood, fastening the chinstrap of her cap again.

‘I’ll be back in a few hours, and I’ll try not to wake you. Don’t burn down the house while I’m gone unless absolutely necessary. And when I’m back,
don’t wake me until at least ten.’

‘Where are you going?’ In spite of everything, a hundred suspicions and fears crowded back into Not-Triss’s head. ‘Why are you going out again? You’re not going to
our parents or the police, are you?’