The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  ‘That sounds the kind of thing,’ said McCarthy hopefully.

  Cornish frowned. ‘But the problem there is that you’d be ripping yourself off. I mean, if you offer people a sixty-quid deal for comprehensive insurance of their car then your initial cash intake will be massive. But once the claims come in you’ll go bankrupt because the amount of money available to pay for repairing damaged cars is less than the amount it costs to actually repair them. What’s the point?’

  ‘So you think . . .’

  ‘On the other hand it’s a pretty bad analogy. Cars aren’t oil rigs or earthquakes. You can pretty accurately estimate the number of car crashes in a year, because there’s so much data it becomes really predictable . . . but how many oil rig explosions are there? I mean, you could gamble long-term on an earthquake, say, because it might never happen in your lifetime, or an oil rig might blow up tomorrow or not for twenty years. Look at Grand Prix motor racing – no fatalities in ten years then two die in one weekend.’

  ‘So you think it’s plausible,’ said an eager McCarthy. Cornish drew in another deep breath.

  ‘Possible. I don’t know about plausible. ‘Give me a few minutes, would you?’ he said, taking out a pen and a notebook.

  At this, Winnicott stood up. ‘I wonder if you’d excuse me,’ he said and left the room. McCarthy watched him go, worried.

  Winnicott hurried past Lucy who was in a furious mood. Not only was her computer telling that all the work she had typed in the day before did not exist but a lawyer was over by the water cooler flirting noisily with one of the accountants. She barely registered Winnicott’s presence. He walked carefully into the wash-room, went into the toilet and locked the door with difficulty. He sat down and within ten seconds he was unconscious.

  In Winnicott’s office Cornish silently scribbled in his notebook, paused then scribbled again. McCarthy stood up and went over to the window. He gazed out over the City and down to the light blinking on top of the pyramid of Canary Wharf.

  Michael McCarthy

  The year 2000 is merely a date: the modern world began somewhere between 1962 and 1966. One day, perhaps, some prodigy will point to the precise moment, possibly to within a few minutes, when what came after was utterly different from what went before. It is, of course, almost certain that this moment has been lost; not even those who were there will have realised the significance of what it was they were a witness to. The last age, after all, began with the crucifixion of an obscure criminal in some Middle Eastern shithole. Why should its end be any more conspicuous?

  Louis Bris, The Wisdom of Crocodiles

  As a child I did not have to get used to the sight of men falling out of the sky because they had always done so from the moment I was born. So unremarkable was it that I don’t have any earliest memory of when I first realised that men were falling from amazing heights, any more than you would have an earliest memory of eating or of your mother and father. For years, until now, I took these things for granted, proud that there was something unusual about my life compared to other lives; but in itself it seemed normal, what went on.

  One thing I do remember as having a definite beginning was the first time I saw one of these parachutists killed. He was a novice, with thirty jumps or so, making a descent from two thousand feet. It isn’t clear what happened and some of the things I recall probably did not take place. I was four years old and playing outside in a crowd of people waiting for the plane. Suddenly there was a lot of confusion, legs dispersing everywhere. Someone, I don’t know whether it was my mother or my father, told me to go into the clubhouse and wait. I did as I was told. I sat on the table swinging my legs and humming to myself, but I could be wrong, it could have been another time. After a while, I’ve no idea how long but to me it felt like a very long time without anyone to talk to, I went out by the back door and without any particular sense of curiosity walked round to the front. People were looking towards the runway at an approaching car. No one noticed me. As I remember, it was a 1950s job in black with someone standing on a runner along the side. I stood on a coal-bunker to get a better view. I have a sense of enormous drama, of great movement, of people in shock, disturbed, craning to see, and of three men in the back with the one in the middle not like any man I’ve ever seen before or since. What struck me then, and now, was the floppiness of his neck, bent back and away from me and to one side so that I couldn’t see his face. He lacked resilience and seemed to be attempting to flow into the man on whose shoulder he was resting. This man had shape but the dead man’s shape was gone, even though there was no mark on him as far as I could see. After that I don’t remember anything. Somewhere through the years, I don’t know how, I got the idea that he’d been showing off to his girlfriend, intending to leave the opening to the last moment.

  A few months ago, while my mother was preparing dinner for us all, I told her what I remembered of his death. She was surprised at what I’d seen but couldn’t remember much herself as it was over thirty years ago. In passing, I commented on the reason he had pulled too low. She looked at me oddly and then told me the real story of what killed him.

  His name was Parry Hughes and he was married. He was an obsessive type, closed up and secretive, and had developed a fascination for calculating heights of opening, the time it took for a chute to deploy and how the one could be calculated against the other in order to give the exact lowest point at which you could pull the ripcord and land safely. His wife, also a parachutist but with only fifteen jumps, discovered what he was up to and had tried to stop him. As a result of her fearful pleas and threats he apparently relented and gave his word he would stay at home. When Saturday came, he locked her in their bedroom while she was dressing and came to the dropping zone to carry out his plan. No one knew for sure exactly what went wrong but the coroner accepted my father’s likely version of events. The chances were, he thought, that Parry had simply fumbled his first attempt at pulling the ripcord and because there was no margin for error he had hit the ground while the parachute was still unfolding from his back. Later his wife found a diary filled with calculations and illegible scribbling that detailed the depth of his desire to get it right but gave nothing away about why.

  I was struck by this new side to a story I had lived with all my life, touched by the locked door and fearful wife and the depth of her grief after a long and silent wait until large men in flying suits broke down the door to tell her that her husband had been killed; and Parry, overlooking the need to take himself into account, scribbling in his secret book and failing in his calculations to give a number to his clumsy hands.

  My parents were both Irish, my father having come to England to join the Royal Air Force shortly after the war. My mother had the ‘drop dead’ attitude that Irish women often have, particularly the pretty ones, and she resolutely refused to be impressed by my father, even though impressing people, usually by attempting some dangerous and often stupid stunt, was what he enjoyed most. If you had seen her then, but hadn’t heard her speak, you would have thought her a delicate English beauty, thin to the point of being consumptive. ‘That one’ll be dead before she’s twenty,’ the crones in Dublin used to prophesy, when she walked down the street. Despite this apparent fragility, she was remarkably tough even though she was often in terrible pain because of a spinal injury she’d got when roller-skating as a child. When she was bad, she’d have to lie in bed for weeks on end, and when she got up we’d ask to see how bent she was. Standing in her nightdress she would turn her back to us to demonstrate the collapsing tower of her spine and we would gawp at the way her back curved to one side by six or seven degrees. Sometimes it looked as if she’d topple over just by standing still. Her back was slowly disintegrating because of the lack of decent medical treatment. Her doctor had forbidden her, on pain of an unspecified anathema, from consulting a chiropractor, a breed regarded by the medical profession in those days as one step up from the kind of practitioners who filed their teeth to a point. In the Fifties, doctors
regarded women as, in their very essence, a problem. They were inherently unhealthy in a way it seemed rarely possible to treat. Like collapsing towers, they could be propped, shored up with metal stays, their foundations reinforced but nothing fundamental could be done to treat their essential weaknesses. The pain, however, became so bad she secretly went to see a chiropractor in Bath, and I can still remember waiting for her in the Volkswagen outside the clinic feeling as if we were part of a blasphemous conspiracy, all voodoo and witchcraft.

  But the sense remained with me that women were utterly different from men in some way that I had yet to grasp. Men were muscular like my father, built for strength like posts, clear in their lines of muscle and sinew. But women were hidden, curved and blurred in their intent, bodies mysterious, soft and collapsible. Their underwear reflected this systemic instability. When I first saw my mother strapping herself into a corset in that curious shade of pink, I used to think it was unique to her because of her bad back; but one of the fascinating things about women, or at least about my mother’s friends, was their carelessness in matters of dress around little boys. The result of this was that much of my childhood seemed to have been spent watching women in their late twenties wandering around in various stages of undress. Not that there was much of the essential fleshy woman on display even so. They were always encased in lacy shells, crossed by straps and buckles, bones and silver suspenders. The sense was always of something interior needing to be held in place, supported, buttressed, underwired to prevent an imminent collapse. Still, being admitted to a world from which older boys and men were excluded was freedom that I prized. There was nothing innocent about my voyeurism as I wandered through their bedrooms or sat on the floor playing with my soldiers waiting for the crossing and uncrossing of their legs; but with hindsight there also seemed to be no shame.

  Things began to change when I was eight. I remember one visitor, a widow in her thirties, I suppose, whose officer husband had been killed in a flying accident in Bahrain. She had a beautiful face and would correct me if I did not put my knife and fork together on my plate when I had finished eating. At some point during her visit, as I was wandering around upstairs, I walked in through her open bedroom door looking for a toy. She was sitting cross-legged in front of the mirror. She was naked. She was so white, so round, so unconfined. I can still see the ridges of her spine descending to the curves of her buttocks, and the hanging sideways look of her breasts. And the brown nipples, burning me with their colour. I stood quite still. She turned. Then, unconcerned she said, ‘Hello, Michael, are you all right, darling?’ She seemed not to notice my astonished face, wide eyes and shock. Then she stood up and faced me. I had never seen hair on the body of a woman before. I would have been a deal less struck if she’d had wings. Who would have thought it? It was so unpredictable, so black, the rest of her so white. It was too much. I turned around and ran away.

  This will never happen to my son; he’s used to that kind of thing. There are none of these astonishments in store for him. The loss is his, I’d say, even though he’ll never have that endless nag I still feel to return to the bedroom and the woman turning her thoughtless head to welcome me.

  The lock-out finally came one day when Bridget Gallagher was visiting us. My parents were both bewildered and impressed by her because she would say the first thing that came into her head, however outrageous it might be. Although the women talked of sex quite frequently, it was usually referential enough to keep me slightly in the dark. I picked up lots of useful things about sex this way, even if the satisfyingly precise was hard to come by. Bridget didn’t care for the oblique and during her visits it was especially important to be always in earshot. On this occasion Bridget and my mother were sitting opposite each other while I was on the floor between them, using the sofa as a battleground and not paying much attention because the conversation had drifted towards a detailed description of a lengthy shop. Still, mindful of Bridget’s tendency to sudden and dramatic changes of topic, part of me was monitoring what was going on. She’d been to a big department store in London and was telling my mother about her visit to the lingerie department. Ears alert, I increased the volume of my explosions to cover my newly directed interest. As usual with children, I over-acted and my mother told me off:

  ‘Mike! Either shut up or go upstairs.’

  I ignored her as I was expected to but turned the volume down. Bridget was discussing an article she’d read about a new machine that could make tights cheaply enough to replace stockings.

  ‘I bought a pair, though they weren’t that cheap. Bloody liars.’ With this she stood and in one quick movement pulled her skirt around her waist.

  ‘What do you think?’ she said to my mother. ‘God, they’re so comfortable.’

  My mouth dropped open and my eyes widened as she whirled about, her slim buttocks encased by the unfamiliar nylon and, for the times, a tiny pair of knickers.

  ‘What do you think of the panties? Cheeky, eh?’

  I was so taken aback by this that my show of indifference vanished – enough for my mother to see how transfixed I was by Bridget’s exhibition of long legs and nylon-covered bum. She gestured at Bridget that I was looking, but Bridget only laughed as she pulled down her skirt.

  My mother never said anything to me but after this she always shooed me out of the bedrooms of her friends and immediately distracted me if I was playing on the floor when they were visiting. And so the new freedom for women ushered in by tights, and all that they implied, signalled my ejection from the harem with its easy chat and careless immodesty. Whenever I was around, my presence was taken into account and there was no way back. In effect I had become a man. I had been expelled, and before I’d found the secret. Maybe it’s much the same for every boy. We get thrown out just as we’re about to put our finger on the thing itself. Possibly that’s the secret of the male gaze, why we’re always looking at women. With all that gawping, all those stares, someone will be the Archimedes of the secret world of women. ‘Eureka!’ he will shout, the earth will move, and paradise, perhaps, will be regained.

  Until this exile, my father had been a distant figure. This was not because of any manly stand-offishness with children but simply because he wasn’t often there. Parachuting took him away most weekends and often he was abroad competing for weeks at a time. That year he became British champion for the first time and, one evening in September, we went off to the cinema, not to see the feature, but to watch the Pathé News which preceded it. There in black-and-white up on the screen was my father, dropping from the sky then smilingly receiving his prize from a minor aristocrat who was vaguely connected with the British Parachuting Association. How proud I was to hear that Pathé voice, fruitily congratulating him on what he’d done along with that peculiar music, which even then seemed to belong to an older, vanishing world.

  Like most sports parachutists he was quite short, but he had been a wrestler before he had come to England, and on first joining the RAF had been a physical-training instructor. He was immensely muscular, his shoulders and arms particularly, and he was always striking those body-builder poses with his arms over his head to emphasise his triceps or akimbo to draw attention to his extraordinary latissimus dorsi which, when flexed, gave the impression that he had a pair of wings folded behind his back. He used to laugh at himself when he did this, while still full of admiration for his own strength and power. He enjoyed exasperating my mother with these displays. She responded by mocking him and approving of him at the same time. ‘You’re a bloody show-off, Kevin,’ she would say disdainfully. ‘Bigheads, the McCarthys. Every one of them.’

  Week after week I watched him fall, through high summer and into a warm autumn, waiting in front of the crowds, sometimes large, sometimes small, sharing in what it meant to be observed, drawing from the hunger for excitement – I’m not entirely sure that I can put my finger on what they got from watching men fooling about in the air with their noisy, expensive planes and their brightly coloured p
arachutes. But I think they were like people at a zoo: behind the bars were creatures who did not know what dread or worry was. Fear they knew, but not anxiety. My father was like an animal to them. They no more felt reproached by him than by the strength and courage of a horse. His willingness to die was admirably irrelevant. But not to me. It seems obvious now, absurd not to have noticed it before, week in, week out, loving the atmosphere, proud of the gaze of thousands watching as I walked with my father, carrying his helmet with our name printed on the front, his arms full of brightly coloured cloth, soaking it up, worshipping the admiration of the crowd the way he did, that every time I heard the engines cut and that speck begin to gather speed I was afraid that I was going to watch him die.

  My father’s real job with the RAF was to train and despatch paratroopers. The army had tried to do this for itself but failed. The instructors needed a combination of gentleness and discipline to handle the young troops’ fear of their first jump. Fighting came naturally to these men, but not falling from a great height. To get many of them to jump required a careful understanding of the particular nature of the terror. Bullying a man into jumping, said my father, was a sure way to get him killed and yourself court-martialled.

  In the early spring of the next year, two Hercules transporters left RAF Abingdon for a NATO training exercise in Italy. My Mum and I went with him because we knew an Italian parachutist from the European championships whose wife had invited us to stay in their house just outside the city. The two Hercules were based near Pisa. Each one could hold sixty paras and six instructors, but the weather was poor at first and my father took the chance early on in the first week to take me to see the city from the top of the Leaning Tower where Galileo first demonstrated the nature of fundamental forces. There my father conducted his own experiment into the nature of gravity. Someone fooling about had started him off by encouraging him to do one of his gymnastic party tricks on the edge of the tower. To their horror, and that of the paras and tourists watching, he grabbed the low wall with both hands and swung up into a handstand. The intake of breath that resulted wasn’t enough and he shifted his weight on to his right shoulder and lifted his left hand clear so that he was balancing on one hand. The amazed laughter that followed egged him on and, still supported by one arm only, he lowered his chest till it almost touched his hand then pushed up until his arm was almost fully extended. He put his left hand back and, swinging his body between his arms, landed lightly back on the tower. He looked at me and I was filled with pride. Later he told me that it wasn’t as dangerous as it looked, that he had balanced himself so that the only direction in which he could fall was back towards the safety of the tower.