Story Number Three: Cuckoo

I've basically given up on doing things week by week since starting this new job, as the hours and my energy level when I get home are wiiiildly unpredictable. Plus, I also have a life and can't be spending every non-working hour God sends tapping away in the semi-darkness for the good of my MA.

Anyway - on with the story. As usual, (misquoting Russell Brand on Big Brother's Big Mouth, for which apologies) phone us! text us! email us! comment on us! - we only write it so you can read it. And here it is.

Cuckoo



Night. Quiet. A haze of moonlight seeping through the thin curtains like blood through gauze. The breathless, foetid-fresh smell of a child’s bedroom.
Mummy stands, her hand still on the doorknob, touching it lightly, like a chess player lingering over an uncertain move. She can hear her own hushing breath as her eyes adapt to the soupy darkness. She can’t hear his, though, which means that he is awake and pretending to be asleep for her benefit. She wonders when he will learn deception, how to mimic the pale snores and gasping snuffles of true sleep. She learned early on, aged six or seven, and remembers thinking that she was a very clever little girl. She still pulls that trick sometimes, when Daddy comes home late and she doesn’t want to speak to him. She does a very good imitation of a peaceful sleeper, which is ironic, as her own slumber is often violent and disturbed. She still suffers from the nightmares of her childhood.
“Nicky?”
He doesn’t respond. She pictures his large blue eyes upturned to the invisible mobile dangling from the ceiling. Ships and balloons and trains and planes and cars. He loves machines, motors, anything that can get you from place to place; he’s not fussy. She moves further into his room, letting go of the doorknob but not closing the door behind her. The landing, too, is dark, but already she can see more, make more sense of the grainy, pullulating shadows. She tiptoes forward and kneels softly on the thick carpet, her head near his. Only the crack of tendons in her knees gives her away. She senses him flinch at the snap, or her nearness, she doesn’t know which. She lays her hand on his forehead and strokes back his soft, fine hair. Warm and clammy, but better than a few hours ago. Less feverish. He is still pretending to be asleep.
“Nicky,” she whispers, “are you feeling better now?”
He does not move, does not answer, a hot, angry little corpse.
“I’m sorry you couldn’t go to the fair, sweetie,” she says. “You had an awful temperature. We couldn’t let you, really.”
Silence. He’s sucking in stiff shallow breaths, lying motionless, rigid with righteousness. She thinks she can make out the rise and fall of his ribs, and is reminded of dogs panting, or mice; the smaller an animal, the faster it breathes. If you could listen to a mouse’s heartbeat it would blur into a constant high thrum.
“Mummy and Daddy couldn’t go either,” she says.
Instead they had enjoyed a rare, relaxed dinner at home over a bottle of wine, both keeping an ear out for the baby monitor. Nicky had wept and grizzled and yelled as far as his sore throat allowed, and even though they had said he could watch the big fireworks on the TV in his room as a special treat – and the big fireworks were bound to be better than the modest local bonfire night, Daddy had assured him – he had refused. It wasn’t the same. He wanted to be there.
Mummy remembers how much Nicky had loved November 5th last year: the smell of wood-smoke on leather jackets, the creamy, salty taste of fire-blackened chestnuts, the crowds coddled in scarves and warm coats, flush-faced beneath the sudden light of exploding stars. How everybody had looked younger, guiltless, in the glow of flames and fireworks. And the games, the fairground stalls; the hot, slapdash smell of carnival food, the lights in the darkness, people shouting to one another over the barkers and fluorescent music, breath billowing like dragonsmoke.
“Silly Nicky,” she says, “don’t sulk now. You can go next year.”
How can she have forgotten the yawning scale of childhood time and space, when a year might as well be a million, where the bottom of the garden is the end of the world? She hasn’t forgotten that Nicky hates being called silly.
“I’m not silly,” he says fiercely, forcedly, reluctant to break his silence but stung into defending himself. She smiles at his profile in the darkness.
“Of course not, sweetie. Sorry. Just ill and a bit tired.”
A grumpy pause.
“I wasn’t even that ill. I could have gone.”
Time to be strict, she knows. She hardens and deepens her voice. How much of parenthood is play-acting, storytelling.
“Yes, Nicky, you were. You were burning up.”
“Like a bonfire,” he says, sulkily.
“Exactly like a bonfire,” she says, brisk and businesslike. She modulates her tone again. “A cross little bonfire. But I’m glad you’re feeling better now.”
“A bit,” he admits, a grudge in his voice. She reaches out to where she knows the bedside table to be and places the beaker on it gently.
“There’s some water,” she says, “and if you want anything in the night we’re just across the landing. You go to sleep now.”
She leans over to kiss him on the forehead but he stops her.
“No,” he says.
A weird cold washes through her.
“No what, Nicky?”
“I can’t go to sleep without a bedtime story. I want a story.”
His tone is plaintive, and she realises that of course, because he had been dozing on and off with the temperature and the fever, they have not followed the usual night-time ritual. He hasn’t been put to bed properly; of course he can’t sleep. His night-light, a rubber bulb that glows a soft angry orange when pushed into a plug socket, has not even been switched on.
“I’ll have to turn the lamp on, then.”
He twists away from her as though from a fire.
“No, it hurts my eyes.”
“Well, darling, I can’t read you a story in the dark. Mummy needs light to see.”
“Can’t I have a new story?”
“What sort of story?” she asks, playing for time, wondering whether she isn’t too tired to make up a satisfying tale at this time of night. Calling Daddy won’t be much help; Nicky complains that his stories are boring.
“A story about Bonfire Night.”
“Guy Fawkes?”
He shakes his head; she sees the movement and hears his hair flap vigorously on the pillow.
“Boring. We did it at school.”
He’s only been going to nursery school for a year or so, but he is already world-weary, blasé about painting and reading and break.
“Oh. Well then.”
“A new story,” he insists. She sits back on her heels, then eases the cramp in her calves by manoeuvring into a cross-legged sitting position on the carpet by the bed. Her mouth is exactly on a level with Nicky’s ear.
“All right then,” she says, not at all sure of what she is going to say next. She feels a brief flash of the vertiginous terror actors must experience when they dry on stage.
“What’s it about?” he demands.
“Bonfire Night.”
He wriggles impatiently. “And?”
“A little boy.”
“A little boy like me?”
“A little boy very much like you. He had big blue eyes, and messy blond hair, and he had a Mummy who was very much like me.”
“Oh good,” Nicky says, approvingly. Her confidence is buoyed like a balloon on an updraught. Write what you know, isn’t that what they say?
“Once upon a time – on a night very much like tonight, in fact, a November 5th not very long ago at all, the Mummy of this little boy decided to take him to see the fireworks on the village green.”
“Was he ill?”
“No,” she says firmly. “He was a very healthy little boy and had absolutely no temperature at all, which was why she decided to take him.”
“Did his Daddy come too?”
“No, darling, the little boy’s Daddy was away at work that weekend, in France. But he wished he had been there, and so did his Mummy, especially after what happened that night.”
She hears him stir, tense, curl himself up into a tight little ball of delighted anticipation. Now she’s got him.
“What happened?”
“We’ll see. I’ll tell you about the bonfire night first.”
“All right.” A fire, almost as good as a mystery; not quite.
“There was a huge bonfire. Blazing.”
“How huge?”
“Very. Bigger than Daddy.”
“Bigger than a house?”
Mummy considers.
“No, not quite as big as a house. Maybe as big as the garden shed. But very big and very hot, with flaming sparks shooting out of it, and wood glowing red-hot so you couldn’t go too close to it without your hair crisping up and your face going bright red.”
“Really hot?”
“So hot you couldn’t toast marshmallows.”
“Why not?”
“Because they wouldn’t melt, they’d just explode in pink smoke.”
“Cool.”
And the fireworks were the best fireworks you’ve ever seen. They’d been brought all the way from China where people had made fireworks for thousands of years.”
“Thousands …” Nicky says softly, impressed.
“They were in the shapes of stars and moons and wheels and planets –”
“Were there rockets?”
“Yes, and when they exploded they filled up the sky with sparkling rain in gold and silver and blue and green and pink.”
“Rainbow rain,” says Nicky.
“Yes, rainbow rain. Like glitter. And the bang was so loud that the church wobbled.”
Nicky giggles.
“But before anyone could watch the firework display, first of all the little boy and his Mummy went to the fairground and had a go on all the games.”
“All of them?”
“Every single one.”
“What was there?”
She tries to remember from last year. All that springs to mind are the gentler, less exciting attractions, the stuff of Victorian nostalgia; the hook-a-duck stall, the hoopla and tombola, the lucky dip. She thinks of other fairgrounds, all the festivals and carnivals of her life.
“There was a … ghost train. And a rollercoaster, just for one night, that looped around the bell tower twice and finished on the cricket pitch. And there were stalls selling toffee apples and popcorn and candyfloss, blue and pink and yellow candyfloss, and hot dogs and hot chocolate and chestnuts and it all smelled delicious and amazing. And there was a shooting gallery, too, where you had to get three shots right in the middle of the target to win a goldfish, or a toy lion, or a cowboy hat, or – ”
“What else?”
Mummy is running out of inspiration.
“There was a hall of mirrors, and a darts game, and hoopla.”
“What’s hoopla?”
“It’s where you have to throw a wooden ring over a pole to win a prize.”
“What prize?”
“Well, there were all sorts of stuffed toys, great big ones, nearly as big as the little boy himself. Every animal you could imagine. Kangaroos and elephants and giraffes. Whales and dolphins and dinosaurs.”
“Bears too?”
“Of course.”
“Bears like Big Bear?”
Mummy involuntarily glances to where Big Bear sits, a fuzzy patch of blacker darkness in the shadowed corner. He is propped up in Nicky’s half-size blue rocking chair, unmoving and silent, his weighted forepaws resting on the arms of the chair like the clenched fingers of a hanging judge.
“Just like him,” she says. “All hanging from the ceiling where nobody but the stallholder could reach.”
“Did Mummy play the hoopla?”
“Oh yes,” she says vaguely, “eventually.”
“What did she win?”
“Ah,” says Mummy, cryptically. “That’s a very good question.”
Nicky scrunches himself up with excitement.
“Why?”
She takes a deep breath and wonders.
“Because when the little boy and his Mummy were going through the fair, the little boy saw the blue candyfloss and wanted some. He’d never seen blue candyfloss before.”
Nicky scoffs. He’d seen it last year, ages and ages ago. He’d eaten so much of it that he’d been sick in the car on the way home. The sick hadn’t been as blue as he’d hoped.
“So, anyway, the little boy was quite a bit littler than you and he was in a pushchair to that his legs didn’t get tired.”
Again Nicky, normally robust to a fault, looks smug in the near-dark.
“And while his Mummy was talking to the stallholder and waiting for the blue candyfloss to give to her little boy, guess what happened?”
Nicky cannot imagine.
“When she looked down at the pushchair again, her little boy was gone!”
Nicky gasps with excitement.
“Run away?”
“No, Mummy says firmly, “although she did think that for just a second, because he’d vanished like a puff of smoke. But what made her realise that the little boy hadn’t run away, that he’d actually been kidnapped, was what was in the seat of the pushchair instead of him. What do you think it was?”
Nicky shakes his head dumbly.
“Go on, have a guess.”
“A ghost?”
“No.”
“A little girl?”
“No.”
“A candyfloss?”
“Now you’re being silly. Shall I tell you?”
“Yes.”
“It was a large stuffed bear, almost exactly the same size as the little boy she had lost. He had soft brown fur like Big Bear, and shiny black eyes like Big Bear, and big heavy paws too. In fact –” she cocked her head at Big Bear, silent in the chair, still and dumb, “– he was very, very much like Big Bear in every way.”
“What did she do?”
“Well, first of all she screamed. She screamed very loud, so that everyone turned around and even the carousel stopped in surprise. And then she started pushing the chair with the bear in it all around the funfair, running over people’s toes and bumping into them, spilling their drinks and their hot dogs and crying and shouting that somebody had stolen her son.”
Nicky’s eyes are wide and luminous, glowing pale grey at her in the iron-coloured shimmer of the room.
“What did they do?”
“Do? They got out of her way. They thought she was mad, poor woman, running through a fairground screaming and weeping with a stuffed bear in a pushchair. But she wasn’t mad. Someone really had stolen her son and put a soft toy in his place.”
“Why?”
“It’s called a changeling.”
“What’s a changing?”
“Do you remember the story of the Ugly Duckling?”
Nicky looks uncertain.
“Yes …”
“Like that. Except that because all eggs look the same, the ducks didn’t know he was a swan until too late.”
Nicky absorbs this. He is beginning to relax a little again: the Ugly Duckling, after all, has a happy ending, like all good stories.
“What happened then?”
“Well, she started going up to all the stallholders, to ask if they had seen anything, if they’d seen somebody carrying her little boy. She described him in every detail but nobody had seen anything. And just when she had almost given up, she came to the last stall.”
“Which stall was it?”
“It was the hoopla. The throwing-rings game, remember?”
Nicky blinks and nods. His face, which this morning had been flushed with fever, is milky pale. He lays his head back gently on the pillow, not moving his eyes from hers for a second.
“And guess what she saw dangling from the ceiling of the stall, hung up on a hook like the straps of his dungarees, looking very confused but perfectly all right?”
Nicky smiled.
“Her little boy!”
Mummy strokes his warm soft cheek.
“Clever you. That’s right. So what do you think she had to do?”
“She had to win him back?”
“Exactly. She couldn’t get past the stallholder to rescue him, because the stallholder was big and strong – bigger than Daddy – and he wouldn’t let her. He said he had no children, and that he needed a son to help him on the stall, and that if she couldn’t win her little boy back fair and square, he would raise the child as his own and all she would have to take home was a stuffed bear.
So he gave her three hoops and told her she had to get all three over the pole to win her boy back. Normally you only have to get one ring over to win a prize.”
“All three?” Nicky’s eyes were wide with indignation.
“Yes, because the little boy was the top prize, the most precious thing, and so she had to be extra good to win him back.
So she narrowed her eyes, took a step forward and squinted at the pole, measuring the distance. She took the first ring in her hand – and even though her hands were shaking and her heart was shivering, she threw it straight and true and it rattled down over the pole easily. The same thing happened with the second ring. But just as she was throwing the third ring, she felt something soft touch her leg, and she jumped and screamed. She had forgotten all about the bear, and it had fallen out of the pushchair against her leg. Or at least that’s what she thought at the time. When she jumped she let go of the ring and it bounced and banged around the pole – it almost looked as if it might still just go over, but then it bounced one last time and fell down on the ground.
She had lost, and the stallholder laughed a terrible laugh and told her to keep the bear, that it could be her booby prize. She tried to climb over, to rescue her son, still dangling from the ceiling by his dungarees, but the stallholder pushed her away and none of the onlookers would help her. She stumbled away, sobbing, with nothing but the pushchair and the bear.”
“How did she get him back?” asked Nicky curiously. For she must have got him back. He was here, wasn’t he, with her now?
Mummy’s eyes are glazed a little with tiredness. In the twilight of Nicky’s bedroom she looks far away, like someone in a mirror.
“She didn’t, Nicky,” she says quietly, gently. “She had to take another little boy out of his pushchair while his Mummy was buying a toffee apple. She put Big Bear in the little boy’s place and hoped that the other Mummy wouldn’t notice. And she didn’t. Not until it was too late anyway.”
She glances across at Big Bear’s corner. “Big Bear came back, of course. Followed them home. He needed a Mummy too.”
Nicky blinks. Mummy glances at her watch, its face, like hers, unreadable in the darkness. Then she suddenly smiles wide. He can see her teeth and eyes gleam.
“Well, it’s time to go to sleep now, Nicky. Good night and God bless.” Mummy stands up, knees crackling like firewood, and leans over to kiss Nicky on his dry lips. As she moves towards the door, she flicks on the nightlight. Two sparks of orange flame ignite in the rocking-chair corner, where Big Bear’s shiny black eyes outstare the night. Mummy yawns and pauses as she opens the door of Nicky’s bedroom.
“Silly Mummy,” she whispers tenderly, “I forgot the most important part. They all lived happily ever after.”
And she closes the door behind her softly.