I wish this humidity would break. It’s sticky, despite yesterday’s rain. I feel hungover. Lack of sleep doesn’t help.
I wave goodbye to Elsa and Pippa as they go out. Elsa’s keen to be helpful. I’ll drop Pippa off, I’ll be going that way to the shops. Why don’t you go and get some fresh air on the lawn? You’ll feel better.
I can’t face sorting out the last of Dad’s clothes. The thought of the hideous green-gold wallpaper in there makes me want to heave. Instead, I take boxes of papers out to a blanket I’ve laid out on the lawn. It’s prevarication. I’m pretending that I’m doing something useful when I should be sorting out our future.
All the ridiculous talk of swapped babies and symbolic eggs seems stupid now that I’m out in the fresh air.
I imagined it would be cut and dried when Dad died. Sell the house. Find somewhere residential for Pippa or pay Elsa to take care of her. Now I hate myself. I have all along, and have taken it out on Pip. She’s the purest soul I know. There’s such sweetness in her. How can I leave her to the mercy of others?
How can I love her so much yet can’t bear to be near her sometimes? I fought everyone who tried to bully her at school. I became a terror, sniffing out weakness and reducing other children to tears. I started doing it just because I could. They hated me and in return and I felt nothing for them, not anger, not contempt. That’s how damaged I am.
I’m afraid that everything people think of me is true, but I’m not afraid enough to change. I am selfish. I like my own silence and space. I hated Dad for saying, “You will look after Pippa won’t you? The world’s a terrible place.”
Need. Nothing scares me more.
Then I look at Pippa, who is far more complete a human being than I am. She’s no trouble, not really. I could work from here and go to London for meetings. All I need to run my business is a phone. It would only need a bit of will to make it work.
I pull papers from the box. It’s an accumulation of crap. Receipts from electrical appliances, their warranties long outdated, bills, invitations and old business diaries.
It’s so quiet. I lie back. There’s not even the slightest breath of a breeze. I shield my eyes as I look up. The trees are full of Corvidae.
Birds don’t roost at eleven in the morning, yet the rookeries are full. Sunlight reveals them as oil on water creatures with amethyst green on their foreheads and purple garnets on their cheeks.
Rooks, weather diviners with voices full of grit who sat on Odin’s shoulders whispering of mind and memory in his ears.
How Elsa’s lessons come back to me.
She taught me long ago to distinguish rooks from crows by their diamond shaped tails and the bushy feathers on their legs. I find these the strangest of all Corvidae, with their clumsy waddles and the warty, great patch around the base of their beaks. It’s reptilian, Jurassic, even. A reminder that birds are flying dinosaurs, miniaturised and left to feed on insects and carrion.
I turn my head. Crows have gathered too, on the patio furniture, the bird baths, the roof and, of course, the crow palace. The washing line sags under their weight.
I daren’t move for fear of scaring them. Perhaps I’m scared.
Ash walks through their silence. They’re not unsettled by his presence. He’s still wearing the same suit. His stride is long and unhurried.
He doesn’t pay attention to social niceties. He falls to his knees. I lean up, but I’m not sure if it’s in protest or welcome. It’s as if he’s summed me up with a single glance when I’m not sure what I want myself. He presses his mouth against mine.
He pushes my hair out of the way so he can kiss the spot beneath my ear and then my throat. The directness of his desire is exhilarating, unlike Chris’ tentative, questioning gestures.
He pulls open my dress. I unbutton his shirt. He pulls down my knickers with an intensity that borders on reverence.
His body on mine feels lighter than I expect, as if he’s hollow boned.
When he’s about to enter me he says, “Yes?”
I nod.
“Say it. I need to hear you say it. You have to agree.”
“Yes, please, yes.”
I’ll die if he stops now. The friction of our flesh is delicious. It’s as necessary as breathing.
When Ash shudders to a climax, he opens his mouth and Caw, caw, caw comes out.
I wake, fully dressed, lying on a heaped-up blanket beneath the crow palace. There’s a dampness between my legs. I feel unsteady when I get up. The shadows have crept around to this side of the house. It must be late afternoon.
When I go in, Elsa’s in the kitchen. She’s cleaned up after yesterday.
“I’m sorry. I was going to do that . . .”
“It’s okay.” She doesn’t turn to greet me.
“Where’s Pippa?”
“Having a nap. We’re all quite done in, aren’t we?”
She turns to wipe down the worktops. She looks so at ease, here in Dad’s kitchen.
“What happened to my mother?”
I have to take the damp cloth from her hand to make her stop and look at me.
“It’s all on record.”
“I want to hear what’s not on record.”
“Then why didn’t you ask Michael while he was still alive?”
I’ve been expecting this but the anger and resentment in Elsa’s voice still surprises me. I take a deep breath. Retaliation won’t help my cause.
“Because he hated talking about her.”
“Then it’s not my place to tell you, is it?”
“Of course it’s your place. You’re the closest thing to a mother that either of us have ever had.” I should’ve said it long ago, without strings. The tendons at Elsa’s neck are taut. She’s trying not to cry. I didn’t just leave Dad and Pip. I left her too.
“You were born in this house. The midwife didn’t come in time. Your father smoked cigarettes in the garden. Men didn’t get involved in those days. I helped bring you both into the world. I love you both so much. Children fly away, it’s expected. I just didn’t realise it would take you so long to come back.”
“I know you loved Dad too. Did he love you back?”
“He never loved me like he loved your mother.” Poor Elsa. Always at hand when he needed her.
“You sacrificed a lot to be with him.” Marriage. A family of her own.
“You’ve no idea.” Her voice is thick with anger. “It’s utterly changed me.”
Then she bows her head. The right thing to do would be to comfort her. To hold her and let her weep on my shoulder. I don’t though. It’s a crucial moment when Elsa’s emotions are wide open.
“The papers said Mum had postnatal depression and psychosis.”
An illness that follows childbirth. A depression so deep that it produces bizarre beliefs.
“They were desperate for children. They would’ve done anything.”
“Anything?”
“Fertility treatments weren’t up to much back then.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, you happened. A surprise, they told everyone. I remember holding you in my arms. It was such a precious moment.”
“When did she get ill?”
“When it became clear that Pip wasn’t doing so well. You were a thriving, healthy baby but Pippa was in and out of hospital because she was struggling to feed. She slept all the time. She never cried. You were smiling, then rolling over, then walking and she was falling further and further behind.”
“And Mum couldn’t cope?”
“The doctors became worried as she had all these strange ideas. And you were a real handful.”
“Me?”
“I’m sorry, maybe I shouldn’t say this.”
“Tell me.”
“You were just a little girl, trying to get their attention. You’d bite Pippa, steal her food. When you were big enough, you’d try to tip her from her high chair.”
“And what exactly was it that Mum believed?”
“She insisted she’d been tricked by the birds. They’d helped her to conceive and then they went and swapped one of you for one of their own.”
I wake in the hours when the night turns from black to grey to something pale and cold. My mind’s full. It’s been working while I sleep.
Mum’s insistence that she’d been tricked by birds. That they’d helped her to conceive.
They laid one of their own in your mother’s nest . . .
Cuckoo tactics. Mimic the host’s eggs and push out one of their own. Equip your chick for warfare. Once hatched, the hooks on its legs will help it to heave its rivals from the nest.
Look under the crow palace.
I pull on jeans and a sweatshirt. Dad kept his tools in his shed. I pull the shovel from the rack, fork and a trowel for more delicate work.
It’s chilly. I leave footprints on the damp lawn. It takes a while because I go slowly. First I take up turf around the crow palace. Then I dig around the base. The post goes deep into the rich, dark soil. My arms ache.
I lean on the post, then pull it back and forth, trying to loosen it. It topples with a crash. I expect the neighbours to come running out but nobody does.
I have to be more careful with the next part of my excavation. I use the trowel, working slowly until I feel it scrape something. Then I use my hands.
I uncover a hard, white dome. Soil’s stuck in the zigzag sutures and packed into the fontanelle. The skull eyes me with black orbits full of dirt that crawl with worms.
I clean off the skeleton, bit by bit. Its arms are folded over the delicate ribcage. Such tiny hands and feet. It’s small. She’s smaller than a newborn, pushed out into the cold far too early.
Mum and Stephanie were right. Here is my real sister, not the creature called Pippa.
Oh my God, you poor baby girl. What did they do to you?
“Are you okay?” Elsa ushers me into the kitchen. It’s eight in the morning. She has her own key.
I can’t bring myself to ask whether Pippa, my crow sister, is awake. How was the exchange made? Was it monstrous Pippa who heaved my real sister from my mother’s womb? Was she strangled with her own umbilical cord? And who buried my blood sister? Was it Mum and Dad? No wonder they were undone.
“What happened to you?”
Elsa opens a cupboard and pulls out a bag of seed mix, rips it open and tips out a handful. When she eats, some of it spills down her front. She doesn’t bother to brush it off. When she offers me some I’m hit by a wave of nausea that sends me across the room on rubbery legs to vomit in the bin.
“You’ve got yourself in a right old state.” Elsa holds back my hair.
I take a deep breath and wipe my nose.
“Elsa, there’s a baby buried in the garden.”
She goes very still.
“You knew about it, didn’t you?” I sit down.
She pulls a chair alongside mine, its legs scraping on the tiles. She grasps my hands.
“I didn’t want you to know about it yet. I wish that cuckoo-brained Stephanie hadn’t come to the funeral. And Arthur and Megan hadn’t interfered with that damn key. You found the eggs, didn’t you?”
I think I’m going to faint so I put my head on the table until it passes. Elsa rubs my back and carries on talking. When I sit up, Elsa’s smiling, her head tilted at an odd angle. A gesture I don’t recognise. “I’m actually relieved. It’s easier that you know now you’re staying.”
“Elsa, I can’t stay here.”
“It’s best for everyone. You’ve others to consider now.”
I press my fists to my closed eyes. I can’t consider anything. My mind’s full of tiny bones.
“Mum knew that Pippa wasn’t hers, didn’t she?” I’m thinking of the human-bird-baby in its shell.
“Pippa?” Elsa’s eyes are yellow in this light. “No, she knew that it was you that wasn’t hers. She had to watch you like a hawk around Pip.”
I vomit again. Clumps of semi-digested food gets caught in my hair. Elsa dabs at my mouth with a tea towel. Her colours are the jay’s—brown, pink and blue. Was it her, stood at Mum’s back and pecking at her eye?
Pippa stands in the doorway looking from my face to Elsa’s and back again. I’ve never seen Pip’s gaze so direct.
Now I know why my heart’s loveless. Pip’s not the aberration; I am. I’m the daughter of crows, smuggled into the nest. Pippa is how she is because of my failed murder attempt. I affected her development when I tried to foist her from the womb.
It’s all my fault.
Pippa edges around the room, giving the woman who raised her a wide berth. She tucks herself under my arm and puts a hand low down on my abdomen. She peers into my face, concerned, and says, “Birdies.”