Cuckoo Read online

  Cuckoo

  JULIA CROUCH

  headline

  www.headline.co.uk

  Copyright © 2011 Julia Crouch

  The right of Julia Crouch to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication

  may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by

  any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or,

  in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms

  of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2010

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN : 978 0 7553 7806 7

  This eBook produced by Jouve Digitalisation des Informations

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

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  www.hachette.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Aftermath

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Two years later

  To Tim, Nel, Owen and Joe.

  Thanks to:

  Jacqui Lofthouse who helped me decide what to do and to stick to it; Hannah Vincent who spurred me on until I had finally killed the fox; Tara Gould at Short Fuse Brighton for letting me read my stories to real people, out loud; Carmela Marner for being the first to read and feed back; Boo Hewerdine for advice on matters musical; Janee Sa for social work expertise; Chloe Ronaldson for her midwifery advice; Hannah Norden for her ambulance/paramedic insights; Laura Marshall-Andrews for her medical help; John O’Donoghue for saying he thought I had done some writing before; Chris Baty and Nanowrimo; Queens Park Lowbrow Bookgroup for listening to me going on and on; Jane and Roy Collins and Pam and Colin Crouch; Rosemary Pryse for the writing space and a hundred-thousand stories; Simon Trewin, Ariella Feiner, Jessica Craig, Zoe Ross, Giles Smart and everyone at United Agents; my wonderful editor Leah Woodburn, and Imogen Taylor at Headline; Joan Deitch; Amanda Smith and Gary Parker; and my family for putting up with it all.

  Aftermath

  It could be the scene of a crime, but the real crime happened somewhere else. Nothing is what it had been: everything is cut, or torn, or ripped. Great globs of flesh-coloured paint blight the surfaces; shards of paper curl over edges.

  Propped up against the walls are painted repetitions of the same, naked, skeletal form. She is arched, ecstatic, beautiful. And her eyes have been gouged out, stabbed with scissors, sliced with a blade.

  It is, in short, a total mess.

  One

  When Rose heard that Christos had been killed, she didn’t think twice: Polly and the boys must come and stay. She and Gareth had the space now, and Polly had been her best friend since primary school. There was no doubt about it: they must come, stay, and let Rose look after them.

  The phone call came on the last day of February. Anna and baby Flossie were asleep, and Rose and Gareth had just lit a candle and opened a bottle of wine at the kitchen table. The image of such a nightly routine had been held in their minds throughout the two and a half years they had spent renovating this house in the Wiltshire hills. Now, just one month after they had finally moved in, the vision had been established as firm fact.

  The phone echoed across the flagstone floor, breaking into the rural silence they still found a little unnerving. Gareth had wanted a proper, resounding phone bell just like the one he had grown up with in rural upstate New York. One you could hear wherever you were. He said it signified, for him, a conscious intent, a state of being here by design, rather than by accident. Rose couldn’t see how he took it to that conclusion, but a loud bell was practical because they couldn’t get any sort of mobile phone reception out where they were, out in the sticks.

  Taking her glass of wine with her, Rose went to answer the phone.

  ‘Christos is dead,’ was the first thing Polly said.

  Rose had to sit down at the window seat, the cold stone freezing into her legs.

  ‘What?’ She didn’t believe it, of course.

  ‘He’s been killed. In a car crash. He was drunk.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Gareth drew his chair over and sat by Rose, holding her hand as she took it all in and fought for air.

  Rose thought of Christos, the big bear. Christos was, of everyone she knew – except Gareth and the girls – the last person she could ever imagine not living. He was all about life. Once, knowing she craved scallops when she was pregnant with Anna, he had cooked her a full twelve. ‘You must follow your body, because it knows you better than you do,’ he had said with his infallible Greek logic. She and Gareth had his paintings all over their house. Bursts of colour, life, sex and food, they lit up the cool interior they had made, clashing beautifully with the restraint and symmetry of Gareth’s own, more cerebral, work. They even had one of the most erotic paintings Christos had ever made – of Polly, as it happened – hanging in their dressing room.

  ‘When?’ Rose asked. She needed facts to help her take it in.

  ‘Two weeks ago.’

  Rose thought she could hear the sound of the sea at the end of the line, crashing onto the stone of the shore. She imagined Polly sitting on the terrace of the house in Karpathos, the one that led straight onto the beach. She would probably have a large glass of Metaxa in her hand. But then it was February, so she probably wasn’t outside. Was it cold in Greece in February? Rose didn’t know – she had only visited in the summer, and the last time she had done that had been two and a half years ago. She and Polly hadn’t spoken at all for six months, she realised.

  But, however long they spent apart, they always seemed to be able to pick up where they left off. Rose and Polly were entwined. They had grown up together; they lived together in their late teens and twenties. They had both married artists, and had surprised each other by both rather unfashionably moulding themselves around their men and their children.

  ‘He always drives too fast on the roads round here,’ Polly was going on. ‘Thinks he knows them because he was born here. But he doesn’t. It’s all bollocks.’

  ‘Poor you.’ Rose didn’t know what else to say.

  There was silence. Just the so
und of the sea: crash, pull; crash, pull.

  Rose put her hand over the mouthpiece and told Gareth the news. Gareth gasped, closed his eyes and collapsed his face into his palms, pressing his fingertips into his brow. He and Christos had been friends once, before Polly. In fact, it was through Christos that Rose and Gareth had met.

  Rose went back to Polly. ‘How are you?’ She tried to hold her own shock and upset back for the sake of her friend. She wasn’t as entitled to grieve for Christos as much as Polly.

  ‘We’ve buried him and I’ve been wished an abundant life a thousand times by all the aunts and cousins and his bloody mother. We’re waiting for the memorial service, then I’m out of here.’

  ‘And the boys? How are they?’ Rose had difficulty finding a voice for this. Nico and Yannis were Polly and Christos’s two sons. Rose and Anna had spent a fortnight snorkelling and sunbathing with them, that summer they’d visited, just before the house project had kicked off. Rose remembered Nico, aged seven, surfacing in front of her with a perfect sea urchin shell, his smile as wide as the sandy sweep of bay behind him. Christos’s whooping for his son’s find reached them across the sparkling sea. Rose thought with a shudder that she should have visited more often. Now there would be no chance of return.

  ‘All I want to do is to touch him,’ Polly said. ‘And that shocks me. I didn’t want to so much before, when I could – but now it’s all I can think of. It’s like a fire has burned everything.’

  ‘And the boys?’ Rose asked again.

  ‘They’re too young really to know what it means. They’ll realise soon enough, but for now they have no idea of the permanence of it. Fuck.’ There was the sound of a glass crashing onto stone.

  ‘I’ll come out tomorrow,’ Rose offered, catching the warning look Gareth darted at her through tear-rimmed eyes. She knew the minute she said it that the whole idea of dropping everything and taking the baby out to the eastern lip of Europe was ridiculous. Gareth was supposed to be getting back to his work; she was needed to run everything else.

  ‘No,’ Gareth mouthed. Despite the painting in the dressing room – which he put up with partly for Rose’s sake, and partly because it was an example of Christos’s best work – he had never liked Polly. He once said that she gave him the creeps, which was pretty strong for Gareth.

  ‘No. You stay put. Me and the boys are coming back. We’re out of here,’ Polly said.

  ‘Well then, you must come and stay here,’ Rose said, looking directly at Gareth. ‘Stay as long as you like.’

  Gareth went over to pour himself another glass of wine, his back to Rose.

  But what can he say? Rose thought. He’ll just have to like it.

  Two

  It was a long phone call. After she put the receiver down, Rose realised that Gareth wasn’t in the kitchen any more. She searched the house, but she couldn’t find him. Pulling on her Barbour, and slipping her feet into boots, she took a torch and the baby alarm and, still reeling from the news about Christos, still unable to absorb it, she headed off into the moonlight to where she knew he would be.

  A slow, deep river ran at the bottom of the field, and beside it stood a big old willow with a flat, smooth stone at its base. Rose had first discovered the spot fifteen months ago, after she had told Gareth she was pregnant.

  It had been an accident, the pregnancy – the result of a rather messy topping-out night, when they had farmed Anna out to a friend’s house and invited the neighbours round to help them consume a lot of awful local cider. They had hauled a Christmas tree up onto the rooftop, there was a lot of whooping and dancing, and then everyone staggered home. Andy – Gareth’s brother, who had come over from France and was helping out and camping in the Annexe with them – collapsed in a drunken heap on the floor of the main house. Rose and Gareth covered him with blankets and tiptoed on their own up to the Annexe, where, after a nearly chaste eighteen months of sharing their bedroom with their small daughter, they let all caution fly to the wind.

  So it was that, a few weeks later, when Rose did the test and it came out positive, it came as something of a blow. The plan had been that when the house was finished, Rose would find teaching work for the hours Anna was at school. This would take the financial pressure off Gareth, allowing him to pursue the more creative possibilities of his work. While he had enjoyed the practical satisfactions of putting doors up and knocking walls through, he had begun to feel stunted. In order to reboot his work, he needed uninterrupted, unpressured days in his studio – once he had built it.

  Rose had known that this new baby would put paid to all that. She also knew that, for many reasons, Gareth had only wanted one child. So, with a chill in her heart, she had gone out to tell him. He was out in the rain, repointing an old stone wall that had been consumed by ivy. When she gave him the news, he jolted as if she had hit him with a stun gun. Then he dropped his trowel, stood up and just walked off.

  She had spent ages trying to find him that time. She ran through the fields for a whole wet afternoon, calling out like a madwoman, growing increasingly desperate at how easily their happiness could be punctured. Eventually she found him sheltering under the willow, smoking and staring at the brown swirl of the water.

  ‘I suppose an abortion’s out of the question, then?’ he had asked, looking up at her.

  It was, absolutely. Rose wanted that baby, and despite Gareth taking to his bed for three days, her pregnancy began to take shape.

  ‘We can make this work,’ she coaxed, offering him tea on the first day of his retreat, as the perpetual rain battered through the windowless ground floor of their unfinished home. ‘We’ve still got a bit of money, and I’ll give you all the practical support you need.’

  Rose knew, from the almost weekly contact that Gareth was getting from the gallery, that there was a demand for his work that his absence had only made stronger.

  ‘And if you have the right conditions you can really work prolifically,’ she said on the second day, after she and Andy had worked side by side weatherproofing the house by battening blue plastic sheeting from lintel to sill on every gaping window hole.

  By ‘right conditions’ Rose meant the light, airy studio that they were making from one of the outhouses. By ‘work prolifically’ she meant churn out more of the same old same old. Gareth didn’t have a leg to stand on with the financial argument. But he had planned a return to his more conceptual roots, and there he was being forced back to the commercial concerns he had tried to escape.

  ‘It could be perfect, Gareth. Just think, a baby,’ was her offer on the third day, when the first hard frost of what had been up till then a mild, wet winter finally set in.

  Gareth eventually managed to get up and back to work on the house, but he wasn’t himself. His reaction had heralded a long and difficult period for them, from which they had now only recently emerged.

  Rose had a nagging worry that this news about Christos – and, more specifically, the bit about Polly coming to stay – might kick everything off again. She knew that quick action was needed, so, drawing her Barbour around her, she hurried across the silvery-blue field towards the river. The picture of a laughing, sun-shot Christos hung in her mind so vividly that she reached out for him in the night air. And that’s when it jolted into her that she would never again hear his voice, never touch his skin again. She stopped and held her breath, as the awful fact of his death struck her fully for the first time. For a moment she felt lost, marooned in the middle of the field. If she didn’t hold on to herself, she thought she might disappear altogether.

  Then she looked up and saw Gareth’s willow. Outlined by the moonlight, it looked like a drooping troll in the night. Rose could smell Drum tobacco, and she knew her husband was there. Her bearings recovered, she moved on towards the tree and crept into the tented circle made by what remained of the leaves.

  She sat down next to him, joining him in silence.

  ‘Christos. I can’t believe it,’ he said, his eyes shut.

&
nbsp; ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s too horrible.’

  ‘He was so . . .’ Gareth looked up at the river with red eyes, searching for words.

  ‘He was your friend.’

  ‘She’s had the funeral, I take it?’

  ‘Yes. I’m afraid she has.’

  ‘I would have liked to have been there to bury him.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘That woman stole him and kept him to herself.’

  ‘I know, but—’

  ‘She should have told us sooner.’

  ‘Yes.’ She put her arm around him. The river flowed on at their feet, filling their silence with the sound of its journey from hill to ocean.

  ‘It’s the wrong time for this to happen,’ he said finally, digging his boot into some mud at the water’s edge.

  ‘I know,’ she said, taking his hand.