She was exactly where she wanted to be. This room was fire-lit and as warm as a burrow. There were scones on a cute little table in the middle and a bowl of thick cream and jam with big pieces of fruit in it. She had a blanket over her knees and her chair was big enough for her to curl up.
‘See? I said it would be amazing.’ Rosie leant over. Her hair covered one eye, but she was smiling and scraping cream from her knife.
It was amazing. She didn’t have to do anything or be anywhere, and it was so cosy here, like living in a children’s programme. There were pictures on the walls in delicate gold-rimmed frames: holiday shots of a bird in a shawl wearing glasses perched on her beak, sometimes standing with other similarly dressed birds in front of the pyramids, or the Eiffel Tower.
‘Where is she?’ Thea asked.
Rosie crammed a scone into her mouth leaving a purple smear on her lips. She swallowed a few times before answering. ‘The cuckoo? She jumped,’ she said casually, eyeing up another scone.
‘But who’s going to call the time?’ Panic rose in Thea’s chest.
‘Oh, we can’t do that. Don’t worry. They’ll kill us if we go outside.’
The fire crackled and a log split with a hiss. Thea was suddenly angry with the cuckoo for jumping. She had a job to do; this was her responsibility. You couldn’t trust anyone these days. An empty wing-backed chair stood by the fire with a single feather on the seat.
‘One of us has to call the time,’ she said.
Rosie broke open another scone and tapped the knife on her teeth; there was the sound of metal scraping on enamel. ‘No, we don’t,’ Rosie said.
It was too warm in the room. She pushed the woolly blanket from her and let it slide to the floor. She didn’t want to go out there. Rosie should go. It wasn’t her problem. Rosie should volunteer because the time had to be called and it wasn’t her job to do it.
‘You should do it,’ she said to Rosie.
‘Do it yourself,’ Rosie snapped back, impatiently flicking her hair back from the eye it had covered. Except there was no eye, just a red, gaping wound where her eye should have been, as if someone had taken an ice-cream scoop to her face. On her temple there was a heart drawn around the metal disc. ‘I don’t know why you have to spoil it. There’s nothing else to do. Just have a scone, relax.’ Rosie dug into the jam again and smiled as she spread it onto the scone, but the smile wasn’t like before, perhaps it was the eye that gave it menace.
There was a diving board contraption in front of the double doors, on which the cuckoo stood before it shoved her out of the clock to call the time.
Thea didn’t want to.
She got up. She didn’t stand on it but edged around it, leaning over to push one of the doors open a little, just to see what was going on.
Down below her there was fire. The golf ball building was crumpling in on itself and the fire ate it up, swishing its tongue around and around, lapping up every last bit. Then her body jolted and suddenly she was too far out. She couldn’t scrabble for purchase. Someone had hold of her neck and they were pushing her over the edge, even though she was trying to hold on, her body fizzing with adrenaline. Tensing, she tried to grab something, anything to stop her from dipping, from moving, from lurching off the edge. She was going to fall. Every muscle in her body tensed for impact as she …
… woke up.
Standing on the edge of the bed, someone’s hand on her hip.
‘Thea?’
She looked down at Harriet’s worried face as she wobbled on the springy mattress.
‘What was I—?’ Thea stuttered.
Not a hallucination, not a hallucination, not a hallucination. She was not turning into Richard and Ted and Moses. She was not. Thea thought back to the lectures she’d had, which seemed years ago now – micro sleep, that was it. The body snatching some rest. That was all.
‘Just a bad dream, I’m sure.’ Harriet helped her to sit down and then squeezed her arm, her eyes sad. ‘Delores is ready to see you now.’