Cuckoo (aka Claire, Darling)

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Twelve

I had a good friend once. Her name was Georgia and we were eight. She was an equally shy little girl and after a handful of summer lunchtimes spent hiding in the crafting room, our hour soundtracked by the screaming laughter and taunts of everybody else playing Tag outside, she spoke to me.

‘You don’t want to play Tag with the others?’ she asked in a soft, whispery voice with a gentle lisp.

I looked through the window to the stretched smiles, the frantic chases and panting chests. I shook my head in response. ‘No.’

‘I’d like to play,’ she admitted. The first secret a schoolmate had shared with me.

‘Why don’t you?’ I asked, curiosity overriding my usual shyness.

In response, she stuck her left leg out from beneath the table and lifted up her purple cotton trousers. My eyes widened. ‘Robot,’ I breathed.

She burst into delighted giggles and I recoiled immediately. She was laughing at me, making fun of me. I threw my hands over my face to hide my embarrassment, to hide myself. To my utter fascination, she leant forward and her grubby paint-covered hands gently peeled mine off my face. ‘Don’t be afraid. I’m not a robot, it’s just a metal plate, see?’ She tapped it with the end of her paintbrush. ‘I was born with a bad leg, but they’re fixing it. For now, I can’t run. I probably can’t play Tag for a while yet,’ she told me.

‘Oh,’ I replied lamely, unsure what else to say or how this entire interaction was making me feel.

At the end of that lunch break, she gave me her painting. It was a cat, labelled TaBbY xxxxxxx, who she informed me was her cat, though he had run away. ‘If you see a cat that looks like that,’ she told me seriously, pointing at it with a jab of her finger, ‘pick him up and keep him, because he should come home. I miss him.’

I had hurriedly crushed the picture into my bag, feeling oddly sheepish at having been gifted something so precious. Not just the painting, but her trust in my ability to help find and return the much-loved pet.

When I got home I flattened Georgia’s painting out on my bed, smoothing it carefully with my hands before hiding it at the bottom of one of my drawers. I still have that painting, in a shoebox under my bed. I don’t think of her often, but I do think of that sunny afternoon.

My memories of her after that are painful ones. We were friends for a while, in the broadest sense of the word. Quiet lunches spent exchanging pictures while I listened to her stories, her secrets. Then one day: ‘Mummy said this morning that you can come over for tea after school, if you like,’ she said to me, casually, as though it was a frequent occurrence to be invited to someone else’s home. ‘She said she can make pizza and chips,’ Georgia added with gusto.

‘Pizza and chips?’ I repeated warily.

‘Pizza and chips,’ she confirmed solemnly with a nod of her head. ‘You just need to ask the teacher if you can use the phone to get permission from your mummy. And get her to collect you from my house at seven?’

‘I’ll ask,’ I told her.

Of course, I had no intention of asking, of tainting my first outing with a friend with Mother’s hysteria. Any outing I took had to be arranged at least two weeks in advance. She wouldn’t have let me go any sooner, would have punished me for daring to ask, saying it wasn’t part of our weekly routine… it was too last-minute… she would need time to scope out Georgia’s family. But I didn’t want to wait. I wanted to go and have pizza and chips immediately.

The way I saw it, I had three options: don’t go, and lose the only friend I had; go, and be punished later; ask Mother, don’t go, and still be punished. To my eight-year-old brain, the choice was easy. And so I lied and told Georgia that Mother said it was fine, that I had borrowed the school phone to ask her. Georgia beamed and twined her arm through mine and chatted the whole way back to class about the games we could play together, the toys she was going to show me. I was so excited.

As hometime crept closer, I started to feel extremely anxious. What if Mother arrived before Georgia’s mummy? (She wouldn’t, Mother was always late.) But then I started having other thoughts. What if Georgia’s mummy adopted me? What if Georgia asked me to be her Best-Best Friend? I stood by the reception area holding clammy hands with Georgia, who proudly told the teacher on Going Home Duty: ‘Claire is coming over for tea tonight.’

The teacher beamed at me as though I had won an Olympic medal. ‘That’s lovely news! So nice to see you getting along with a friend,’ she said, turning to me. I blushed.

When Georgia’s mummy arrived, she was not what I had expected. I had envisioned an angel, a sort of glowing saviour who was going to whisk me away from my tragic life. In fact, she was the epitome of normal– a tired-looking lady with her hair in a messy bun atop her head, a puffy jacket trimmed with fur on the hood, and trainers that my own mother would have called tatty. But she smiled warmly at me and told me, ‘You can call me Kate, love,’ and that little word of endearment was all I needed to warm to her.

‘Sorry for such a last-minute invite. Georgia’s cousin was coming over but she’s feeling poorly and I didn’t want the food to go to waste. I hope your mum didn’t mind?’ she asked me.

‘No,’ I lied.

She held on to Georgia’s hand, who held on to mine, and the three of us walked the short distance to their house in this novel chain formation. Georgia chatted about our day at school and I marvelled as Kate asked questions, engaging with her daughter and entertaining her in a way Mother never did with me. ‘And what about you, Claire? What was your favourite part of the day?’ Kate asked me.

I chewed my lip, afraid of getting the answer wrong.

‘Her favourite is English,’ Georgia supplied for me. ‘She has the best handwriting in the class and likes to read stories!’

‘Well! That’s lovely,’ said Kate. ‘Maybe you can teach Georgia to enjoy reading some stories rather than sitting in front of the telly all day!’ But then she winked at her daughter, who giggled bashfully.

My cheeks turned pink and I looked to the ground quickly. Kate and Georgia were already off on another topic of conversation.

Georgia’s house was a terraced home, the top floor with two bedrooms. We didn’t go into Kate’s room (‘It’s Mummy’s private space,’ Georgia informed me seriously), but I had been so enraptured by Georgia’s nest that I’d forgotten there was more of the house to see. Her room was painted purple, unicorn decal stickers plastered on the walls with reckless abandon so it looked as though they danced around us. She had a CD player, which seemed very grown-up, and a big desk for colouring in and homework. Her bed was laden with cuddly toys, and we ended up stringing some blankets into a makeshift fort. In the midst of a complicated and dramatic soap opera in which a stuffed teddy had cheated on a dolly with a toy giraffe, we were called down to tea.

Kate was bustling around, tidying bits away and sipping a cup of tea while Georgia and I discussed how the dolly would get revenge, when the doorbell rang. It wasn’t a normal ring though: it was a frantic mash of the button, a continuous drilling sound accompanied by loud banging on the door. ‘Well! Someone’s eager to see us,’ Kate joked, though her eyebrows were raised in annoyance. ‘Cor blimey, better find out who that is,’ she said, turning off the tap and wiping her hands on her jeans as she went through to the hallway.

I had fallen still, pizza half-raised to my mouth.

‘What’s wrong?’ Georgia whispered.

Mother’s shrill voice reached me moments later. ‘You’ve kidnapped my daughter!’ she shrieked.

‘Now, now, wait a minute,’ I heard Kate say, her voice laced with authority.

‘Let me in, before I call the police and have you arrested for kidnapping!’

I glanced at Georgia. Both of us were wide-eyed with fear.

‘Calm down, calm down. Look, there’s clearly been a misunderstanding. I told Georgia to invite Claire round for tea and thought you’d said yes—’

‘I don’t even know who the hell you are!’ There was the sound of a small scuffle as Mother barged her way in, and I could hear her shoes clipping towards the kitchen. Georgia had dropped her cutlery and was standing by the table now while I sat there, still frozen.

‘Claire! Claire, darling? CLAIRE!’ Mother was sticking her head into every room and Kate had gone silent. When Mother appeared, she stopped short at the kitchen doorway, eyes quickly scanning the scene and taking it all in.

‘Claire,’ she said quietly, eyes narrowing, ‘get your coat. We are going home. Right now.’

I went to stand, pushing my chair out. I opened my mouth to apologise to Georgia, to Kate, but no sound came out.

‘But we haven’t finished our tea yet,’ Georgia argued, looking up at Mother.

I braced myself. Mother turned in slow motion, gaze ranging over Georgia slowly: her stained school shirt untucked from a creased skirt, her bare feet with chipped pink-painted toenails.

‘ Excuse me?’ Mother’s voice was quiet. She looked so tall beside Georgia, towering in her heels.

Kate moved to stand in front of her daughter. ‘The girls haven’t finished their tea yet. Look, this is a misunderstanding. Let’s just have a cuppa and a chat while they finish up and then Claire can go home. Gives you a night off making her supper,’ Kate tried again, desperation in her voice.

Mother turned to her with a sneer. ‘You call carbohydrates and frozen pizza supper ?’

Kate blinked at her, fists clenched, and even as a child I could tell she was biting her tongue because Georgia and I were present.

‘Claire, darling, get your things right now! We’re leaving. I don’t want you spending another moment in such squalor with this random woman and her poorly mannered cripple child,’ she added, throwing a significant glance at Georgia, who blenched.

‘How dare you?’ Kate exploded, a mother lioness rearing up to protect her cub. But Kate’s claws were no match for Mother’s, and I hurried up to Georgia’s room and grabbed my coat and book bag while they exchanged heated words, Kate’s furious and protective, Mother’s cutting and cruel.

She marched me out of that house, with one hand gripping the back of my neck like a pincer, telling me how she had arrived at the school to find I wasn’t there, how she had been terrified she had lost me, how they had told her I was at somebody else’s house, and how I was a little liar– a dirty, filthy liar– just like my long-gone father, and that house and that woman were disgusting, and I would never, ever be allowed to play at a friend’s house again… On and on and on she went, the whole way home, tainting what should have been one of my best days ever.

When I got back I realised she had raided my room, ripped up the pictures and notes Georgia had given me. All except for the one of the tabby cat, safely nestled away in my drawer. ‘You don’t need any other friends, Claire. Nobody will ever understand you like I do. Nobody will ever love you unconditionally like I do. These so-called friends you meet at school will only tear you down in the end, whereas I will always be there for you. You will always have me, Claire, darling,’ she said in a falsely apologetic tone as she shoved my ripped-up treasures in the bin.

The next day at lunchtime I sat down at my usual table and Georgia glared at me, swiftly moving to sit elsewhere. She never spoke to me again after that.

But I did have a friend, once.