Page 34 of Cuckoo

‘Well, it’s just a quick call,’ she began, sounding sharp and snappy in comparison to her usual dramatics. ‘I want to let you know I have cancer. Stage 4, incurable, in my lungs. No point even trying chemo and, to be honest, it’s not worth the hassle. If I’m going to die, I’m doing it with a full head of hair, thank you very much. So anyway, now you know,’ she said, breezily. ‘Goodbye, Claire, darling.’ And with that, she hung up.

I stared at the phone in my hands for a long time, unsure what to do. Was this another game? A trick? Mother loved tricks; she loved to do anything that would capture my attention and send me running back to her. I quickly weighed up the pros and cons of calling her back, and decided I had to. A huge part of me believed this was just another lie, anotherruse to get me rushing to her bedside with flowers and an apology. But I knew I couldn’t live with myself if that turned out to be wrong.

So I called back, and she let me run through to voicemail. So I left one. And a text message. And I emailed. They were all roughly the same in content: I asked how long she had left, whether I could come and visit, how she was feeling. I told her how sorry I was, as I knew was expected of me. After a week I’d had no reply to any of them, so I sent a huge bouquet of her favourite flowers to the house, still too afraid to visit unannounced. Too wary of what I would find there. I was afraid of seeing her weak and frail, sickly and dying, proof that I had left her alone, sick and helpless. I was equally afraid to find her strong and healthy, playing out another lie so she could mess with my emotions as though I was a puppet with no feelings of my own. I was afraid of being pushed away in my own mother’s dying moments. I was afraid of every other possible scenario when it came to her.

When I received no response to my gestures, I became angry. She was punishing me. This evil, lying woman did not have cancer. I was convinced of it. This was exactly the type of thing Mother would do to command attention, to force me to come back. She had once told the school she had sprained her ankle and kept me home for a week, running around her like a servant, bringing her food and wine in bed and plumping pillows behind her back. I had caught her in the middle of the night going to the bathroom, striding confidently along without so much as a twinge in her ankle, buthad pretended not to see anything and continued doting on her for three more days after that.

She was doing the same thing again, but this time a more extreme scenario, because my defying her and leaving home was an extreme measure, so she had to punish me for it in equal measure. Yes, this was all a ruse, I told myself.

Except it wasn’t.

Chapter Thirty-Three

11 September 2025

Dear Diary,

The anniversary of Mother’s death has hit me harder than I thought it would. I feel like there’s no right way to mourn. I feel like I should be crying hysterically, but nothing comes. And then I feel guilt-ridden and awful. How terrible a person must I be, not to miss Mother at all? She wasn’t perfect, but she tried her best, didn’t she?

I didn’t even tell Noah about the anniversary, I still didn’t want to address it, didn’t want her to taint this new life that I have with memories of her. But I guess somehow he found out about it– I have no clue how. And so in the morning, he had a bouquet of flowers ready and he told me he was taking me to the church where she is buried to lay them down.

Honestly, I got a bit upset. I felt it was invasive. He doesn’t understand my relationship with her or the conflicted feelings I still have about her, and I didn’t want to spend the whole day thinking about her when for so much of my childhood I was forced to put her first. I wanted to put Claire first today, to putMotheron the back burner of my mind. Just spend a normal, boring day with my fiancé.

Noah told me he thought this attitude was unhealthy, that I needed to process her death properly. And even if I didn’t feel genuinely mournful, we could lay the flowers together and then leave and get lunch somewhere. I kicked up a fuss, said I didn’t want to go and that he had no business pressuring me into it. He conceded this was true and apologised. I sat on the bed sulking for about ten minutes before I told him he was probably right, I should go and make my peace and that I appreciated his thoughtfulness.

He drove me to the church where I’d told him she was buried, a ramshackle field of gravestones outside a crumbling church isolated amidst endless residential south-east London streets. I hadn’t visited the grave since her funeral, and as we walked past all the others with flowers and messages laid on them, I felt a fresh stab of guilt.

When we got to the gravestone, we stood in silence and I stared down at it, reading the words again and again and again.

Trina Arundale

1971–2024

Loving mother, friend and angel

I didn’t choose those words. The guys at the funeral parlour did. I’d decided I couldn’t care less what the tombstone said. But as I read it over and over and thought about how her remains were somewhere underneath, rotting away and feeding the earth, I began to sob.

I hunched over, wailing, the flowers beside me and Noah silently rubbing my back.

He waited in silence until I was finished, then took my hand and held it all the way back to the car.

When we got in, he’d told me he was proud of me.

I’m still not sure if I was crying from rage or sadness.

Claire

Chapter Thirty-Four

The time for being afraid is over. I can’t continue living in this limbo of guesses and half-truths. At the very least, it will give me the push I need to get over Noah and move on. Even though that thought makes my mouth tremble. I draw a deep breath and knock, hard, three times on the butter-coloured door.

I hear light footsteps approaching and Lilah opens it. As soon as she sees me, her eyes widen and she tries to close the door in my face, but I step forward and jam my foot inside the frame.

‘Lilah—’

‘You need to go,’ she tells me shakily. ‘I’ll call the police!’

So she knows who I am.

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