Cuckoo by Julia Crouch

leave and walked off down the clattery school corridor with its tang of school dinners and plimsolls.
     
    Outside in the playground, the home lunch children were just being brought back to school by their parents. Rose could feel the ripple Polly caused as they crossed the playground. Even before she was famous, she had managed to turn heads, with her ingrained glamour and angular swagger. Now, more than a decade after her most recent album, people would still do a double-take. Even with her hair so neatly combed, and her clothing tuned down, Polly still had a distinctive look that was hard to obscure.
     
    In an attempt to defuse the spell that she knew Polly could cast – and the trouble that generally resulted – Rose introduced her to a couple of people as ‘my old friend Polly, whose kids are starting at the school’. But it was pretty pointless. As Polly held out her hand for shaking, Rose couldn’t help feeling as if she was introducing the Queen.
     
    ‘I thought I was going to have to start signing autographs,’ Polly said as they walked back across the field.
     
    When they got back, Polly went up to the Annexe to lie down.
     
    ‘Can you get the boys, please, Rose? I’m wiped out,’ Polly said, as she set off.
     
    ‘Of course,’ Rose said. Nico was nine, and she reckoned that pretty soon, with their strength in numbers, Anna could have her dream and the children could make their own way home. There were no roads to cross, and most of the journey was across the fields.
     
    She hadn’t let Anna know during her stories of when she was a girl, but the reason Rose’s parents had forbidden her to take the short-cut under the pier on her way to school back in Brighton was that it was a notorious gathering-place for all sorts of undesirables. Rose had disobeyed her parents and, on one occasion, a man grabbed her. He had something purple and hard sticking out of his trousers, which he put her hand over, moving it up and down. She had squeezed it really hard, and dug her nails in, which had made him swear and loosen his grip, allowing her to beat him off with her satchel and run away. But she couldn’t get the stink off her hand, no matter how hard she washed it. For weeks afterwards, she suffered nightmares where he followed her home, climbing in through her window and sticking that stinking thing at her with his smelly hand over her face.
     
    After that, at least for a while, she tried her best to be a Good Girl, to obey her parents. But her efforts always seemed to backfire, and she invariably found herself thundering up the stairs of the guesthouse in an effort to lock herself inside the bathroom before her father caught her. In the end, she had just stopped trying – the outcome always seemed to be the same, whether she was good or bad.
     
    In any case, this was why she wouldn’t let Anna wander on her own. But now that Anna had two wild and unruly guardsmen, she supposed she would be safe. Another advantage, Rose thought, of Polly, Nico and Yannis staying for a while.
     
    Thinking about this, Rose went up to the school a little later to pick up the children. She brought them back, listening to Nico and Yannis’s excited chatter about their first day at Anna’s school.
     
    ‘It’s your school now,’ Anna said to them, swinging her schoolbag round and round over her shoulder.
     
    When they got back, Rose gave each of them a glass of milk and a slice of cake. Then she turfed them all out into the back garden, where they started to build a den in the overgrown patch at the very end. Rose smiled to herself, thinking how much this would please Gareth.
     
    At six-thirty, Rose sent Nico up to the Annexe to fetch Polly for supper. A while later, he came back, alone.
     
    ‘She’s in bed and sort of sleeping. She says go on without her.’
     
    ‘I’ll put a plate out for you to take up for her,’ Rose said.
     
    ‘Nah, don’t waste it,’ Nico said. ‘She said she’s not hungry.’
     
    As