Cuckoo Song Read Online Free PDF Page A

into dark water with no
bottom. If she ran to her parents with a sick brain, they would not react with kindness and comics and new pills and ‘don’t overstrain yourself till you’re stronger’. They
would be solemn and worried and let doctors tell them what to do.
I don’t want to be taken away and hypnotized or have holes drilled in my head . . .
    So Triss stood in silence by the car, hunched in the golden light of the morning, and felt like a monster. Every time her parents went into the house to retrieve one last thing, she tensed.
Please don’t look in the log basket. Please let’s go, let’s just go . . .
    She jumped out of her skin when a loud screaming became audible inside the house.
    ‘I’ve found her!’ It was her father’s voice, sounding strained and at his temper’s edge. Triss’s heart lurched. But it was not Angelina that her father
carried out into the daylight. It was Pen, sobbing, roaring and doing her best to stamp her heels into his kneecaps. ‘She tried to hide in the attic.’
    ‘I’m not coming!’ It was hard to make out Pen’s words. Her tantrums were seldom a matter of pouting and foot-stamping. Instead she screamed herself hoarse, a few
half-comprehensible words lost in the tornado of her rage. ‘. . . see she’s lying . . . can’t make me sit with her . . . hate you all!’
    Triss slipped into the back seat through one door, and Pen was bundled in next to her through the opposite door. Once there, Pen curled herself into a tight, hostile ball, flinched up against
the door so as to be as far from Triss as possible.
    She thinks I’m pretending to be ill
, thought Triss limply.
Pretending, so I can get everybody’s attention. The attention that
she
wants. I wish she was
right.
Triss’s father climbed into the driver’s seat, and pressed the starter motor button. There was a whine, then the main engine chuckled and purred. At last, at long last, they
were on their way.
    The family car was a mint-green Sunbeam with a wet-leaf glossiness, a purr of an engine and headlights that looked like round, expectant eyes. The day was bright, so the hood was pulled down,
leaving the whole family exposed to sun and sky. With a relief almost painful, Triss saw the cottage recede behind them, and then they were buzzing down lane after lane at a giddy thirty miles an
hour. Triss’s hair whipped around her face, and as the scene of her crime receded behind her the knots in her stomach started to loosen. Perhaps illnesses could be left behind, just like
small, badly concealed china corpses.
    Hills reared under them like bad-tempered beach donkeys, and the road twisted as if trying to throw them. Drystone walls wriggled, rose and fell on either side. Then a white-painted sign tore
past. Oxford that way, 85 miles, Ellchester this way, 20 miles.
    Triss leaned her cheek against the cool wooden panelling inside the car door, clinging to the sense of familiarity.
    I’m safe. I’m going home to Ellchester.
    The first thing anybody noticed on the approach to Ellchester was the Three Maidens.
    The most impressive of the trio of bridges spanned the width of the Ell estuary in one long elegant stride, its smooth arc and sandy-gold paint visible for miles against the glittering blue of
the water. The second bridge cut a lofty line across and over the city itself, supported by three of Ellchester’s eight hills, one of which was now capped with a pyramid-shaped building in
dull pink stone, the city’s soon-to-be-completed railway station. The last stretched out to join the rising slope of the valley on the other side. Between them, they held aloft the recently
constructed railway line.
    Everyone agreed that before the Three Maidens were built, Ellchester had been ‘in a decline’, which seemed to mean a slow, sorry sort of collapse like a sandcastle in the rain.
    Then Piers Crescent had come forward with his plans for the Three Maidens, and shown that, in spite of the intervening estuary