The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  The next day they ate dinner on the roof of the flats using a collapsible table. She was unusually quiet during the meal but in a pleasant, easy way. During a pause in the conversation he found himself looking out over the town towards the Sunglass wedge of the NatWest Tower, and behind it, in the distant mist, the strikingly impressive vacuity of Canary Wharf with its warning signal wink. The hazy cloud and the dying red sun gave the place an unaccustomed glamour, like the opening scene of a film with high production values. Turning back to her he found her eyes assessing him beneath the sharp, straight cut of her black fringe. He could sense himself being summed up with a quiet generosity.

  ‘What’s in there?’ he said, nodding towards a cardboard box with Fairy Liquid 24-Bottles written on the side.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, smiling with wide eyes. ‘It’s for work.’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’

  She looked at him in a way that was hard to place – admiration perhaps, as if he had won a well-deserved prize. She went over to the box and brought it to the table, pushing the dishes to one side. She lifted the cardboard flaps, reached inside carefully and brought out the bonsai tree her grandfather had brought back from Japan. He was astonished as she placed it in front of him. He looked at the tree and then, uncertainly, at her.

  ‘I don’t know what to say. Thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ she replied. She kissed him, softly at first, but then deeply and more passionately.

  Oh God, this is it, he thought and his stomach plunged as if he were in an over-fast lift. He led her down to the flat and she allowed herself to be guided to the bedroom, her eyes focused on his. Standing by the bed, he slowly removed his clothes, stopping her from doing the same by a simple touch on her wrist as her hand went to the buttons on her blouse. When he was naked, he slowly began to undo her skirt, blouse, bra, and when she was in just tights and knickers knelt down and slowly pulled them to her ankles. She lifted one foot from her shoe then the other and then she was naked too. Still kneeling, he kissed her softly just above her pubic bone, feeling the texture of her hair and skin upon his lips. Then he stood up and gently pushed her backwards onto the bed, taking her weight by placing his hand in the small of her back. As he did so he heard the sound of plastic rustling underneath the sheet, but she seemed not to notice. He leant over her, his knees brushing the sides of her hips. He braced himself as his hands went to intertwine with hers, pulling them up until they lay pinned back next to her head. He kissed her as his body pushed her hard into the bed and she was dimly aware of an unaccustomed noise, familiar but belonging somewhere else. While he was kissing her he began a rhythmical movement against her but, strangely, he was not erect and she could feel his penis brushing softly against her thighs. He removed his mouth from hers and sat upright. She looked down between his legs and saw his penis lying downwards, softly touching her pubic hair. She looked up at him, confused. He held her stare as he pushed her hands hard into the bed and gripped her body painfully between his legs. He looked at her, unblinking, his eyes empty, void, and forced her hands over her head holding both in one of his. His free hand came slowly down her forehead over her eyes and to her mouth. He looked at her again and breathed out slowly as if he would never stop, his breath intensely hot and sweet. Then he tensed again and bit her. She screamed in horror and pain, the sound coming from the pit of her stomach and muffled by his hand. Terrified, she thrashed under him. His hand slipped for a moment and she let out the animal squeal of a creature about to be slaughtered. He covered her mouth again as she bucked and heaved under him.

  And then he stopped.

  His grip relaxed and slowly let go her hands and mouth.

  She waited, too terrified and shocked to make a sound, then began to pull herself from between his legs, scrabbling backwards frantically until she reached the headboard. She sat up so that her back was resting against it and then brought her knees to her chest. He was looking up at the ceiling but his eyes were unfocused as if he had taken a blow to the side of the head. Then he closed them, trying to control his breathing. After a short while he opened them again and without looking at her got off the bed, walked unsteadily to the table and rested one hand against a chair. He brought the other hand to his stomach, bending as he did so. He was obviously in terrible pain.

  She grabbed a pair of scissors lying on the bedside table. Rage swept away her fear. She leapt from the bed, her hand raised, and in two strides was behind him, the scissors coming down towards his back with all her force. He twisted at the last moment and blocked the blow with his left hand. The momentum of the strike unbalanced her and his right hand clasped the edge of the scissors and twisted them free of her hand. Her face was now very close to his. On his forearm there was a deep gash about four inches long.

  ‘That hurt,’ he said. Gently he put the scissors on the table behind him. She tried to break free but he held both her hands behind her back and pulled her to him. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll need much encouragement,’ he said. ‘. . . Leave . . . don’t come back.’

  He let her hands loose and she backed away from him. Teeth clenched, afraid, outraged, grief-stricken, she stared at him. ‘Why?’

  He said nothing but examined his cut arm as if he were not quite able to believe the blood pouring out of the wound and down the channels between his fingers. Realising he was not going to say more she put on her blouse and skirt and shoes, stuffing her knickers and tights into her handbag. She walked towards the front door, opened it and turned. ‘I want an answer.’

  ‘Go away,’ he said, looking at his bloody arm. She did not move and so he walked towards her. Afraid, she stepped back onto the landing. There was a burst of laughter from further down the hall as three men came out of one of the flats. The men looked at her, dishevelled and beautiful, as they walked past her to the lift. She stood and stared at the door of his flat, hearing the deadlock turning, the door being bolted at the top and bottom and the chain clattering against the door-frame. She started to walk down the stairs then stopped. Moving backwards onto the landing she felt the terrible ache in her throat and she began to cry, spasmodic, painful and nothing at all to do with emotional release.

  It was from Ruth Compton, Head of English, that Martin Beck finally learnt what it was all about. She’d been listening vaguely to a casual enough conversation between the heads of the third and fourth years – titles were handed out at Mabey’s in lieu of pay rises: heads of this and that were as plentiful as battalion leaders in the IRA. The similarities with senior terrorists did not end there, although discipline was maintained in the community in less obvious ways. Instead of baseball bats there were pursed lips, instead of knee-cappings there were disdainful remarks within the staff room. Ruth was the exception. Fiercely protective of her department, she began listening to what they were saying more carefully when she heard them discussing Beck. He was a fourth-year form master, answerable to the head of the year, and it was she who let slip what had led to the arrival of the Cellophane bag and its soft white contents, stained with red ink and covered in dead leaves. Apparently, a week before its arrival, Alice Winnicott had summoned the fourth-year head to her office and lectured her about the year’s insufficiently discreet approach to the business of menstruation. They were to be given instructions in the proper means of disposal. They were not to flush the towels down the toilets, and the boxes in which the towels came should under no circumstances be thrown into the wire rubbish bins that dotted the school, where they could be clearly seen among the Mars Bar wrappers and discarded copies of Bliss and Sugar. It was also to be made clear that while the school was not unsympathetic, those who did suffer a certain amount of discomfort should realise that this was a fact of life they would have to get used to. Alice Winnicott had been insistent that it was important not to dwell on the matter of pain because it was necessary to discourage the girls in their natural tendency to dramatise. The fourth-form head had duly summoned Martin’s female colleagues in charge of the other three f
orms, briefed them, and the next day ninety fourteen-year-olds were initiated into the proper relationship between waste disposal and the female reproductive cycle. The thirty girls in Martin’s form were ignored.

  Furious, Martin cornered the head of the fourth year and demanded that she explain why he and his form had been excluded. She mumbled and dodged, looked satisfyingly embarrassed and lost for an explanation. But it gradually dawned on him as she talked that what embarrassed her was not that they had decided to exclude him and then declined to inform him of the decision, but that they had not discussed him at all. The presence of his absence was not even on the agenda. In matters of blood Martin Beck was an unperson and the thirty girls for whom he was responsible became invisible by association. Like some Chinese mandarin fallen from grace, his concubines were to be buried with him. One at least had refused her consent.

  ‘I’d like a word with you, Mrs Winnicott.’ She looked surprised at his tone but she did not risk a confrontation in the staff room, and coldly invited him to go to her office.

  She sat down. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘I think you know.’

  ‘I can assure you that I don’t.’ She had regained her habitual composure; like Gau she was happiest on home territory.

  ‘You’re not seriously telling me that you didn’t know exactly what those sanitary towels I brought you were about as soon as you saw them.’ He was angry, not least because she had manipulated him in a manner that was now clear to both of them.

  ‘I had a pretty shrewd idea, yes.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I didn’t feel there was any need to. And, anyway, I couldn’t be sure.’

  ‘You must think I’m an idiot.’

  ‘No, I don’t think that.’ She said it flatly as if it were a question she had given lengthy consideration.

  ‘Why wasn’t I told?’

  ‘I should have thought that was obvious.’

  ‘Not to me.’

  She sighed, with a calculated note of irritation. ‘This is a delicate matter. No one suggested you be excluded. It was just obvious to us all that your involvement wasn’t really appropriate. To be perfectly frank, it’s nothing to do with you.’

  That was careless of her. ‘Clearly someone thought otherwise.’

  She realised her mistake but was off-hand. ‘One girl.’

  ‘Is that all? Actually it was more like thirty, no one having bothered to tell my entire form. If it was important enough for the other fourth forms to know and important enough for you to carry on like a Venetian doge to keep it from me, then it was important enough for them to be told as well. I’d have to say that you haven’t behaved very . . . professionally.’

  Each occupation, each place of work has its special insult, a single expression of disdain around which a chorus of less easily fixed disapprovals can find simple expression. To accuse someone of being unprofessional at Mabey’s was the equivalent of papal anathema. She was furious.

  ‘How . . .’

  For a moment Martin thought she was going to say, ‘How dare you?’ but she had the sense to bite her tongue. She continued, but with a hold on her temper. ‘It was perfectly clear that your form would hear from the other girls what had been said. The message obviously got through and it got through without embarrassing them which is what they would have been if you had talked to them about this matter. They can be very sensitive – a fact you don’t seem to have entirely grasped, if I may say so.’

  ‘Yes, they’re sensitive all right,’ he replied. They’ll have picked up the shame of it without any problem. They’ll have learnt how to be subservient to their dirty little secret.’

  The muscles in her thin face tightened. ‘I don’t think you can afford to be quite so self-righteous. Are you really expecting me to believe that if we had included you, you would have quite happily trotted off to a class of giggling, squirming schoolgirls to lecture them about not flushing their sanitary towels down the school toilets?’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘Where is it?’ he asked.

  ‘I burnt it, if you must know,’ she said defensively.

  ‘Good,’ he replied.

  She looked surprised. He had meant to storm out and slam the door behind him but in the end he just walked out, closing the door quietly.

  The bell had gone to signal a change of lesson and a corridor nearby was filled with girls rushing from one class to another. He almost knocked over two who had decided to take a short cut past Alice Winnicott’s office and down past some building works on one of the stairways.

  ‘You can’t go down there – it’s dangerous.’

  Looking guilty, neither girl said anything.

  ‘Where have you come from?’

  ‘Biology.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Economics.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Smiling, they went back to join the girls still flowing along the corridor.

  He walked back to the staff room but as he was about to open the door, the bell began to ring again, stopped for a few seconds, then rang again, on and off continuously. He remembered there had been yet another warning at the morning staff meeting earlier in the week about a practice bomb drill, which involved the evacuation of the school and its reassembly on the hockey pitch. Being next to both the registers and the doorway, he was one of the first teachers out of the school buildings, but already disciplined lines of teenage girls were making their way to various parts of the sports field in a complete silence broken only by the high-pitched instructions of the PE staff, who were already waiting for them. His form register in hand, he watched as they formed an elaborate, divided square, a blue legion in A-line skirts. Then he began the calling of names, from Adams to Yates. ‘Yes,’ ‘Yes,’ the girls affirmed. Eight hundred and fifty times they asserted their presence while all around them the dying leaves blazed in the cooling air and the cold sun.

  Anne was a lost soul. It was certain that she felt betrayed, outraged, incredulous at what he had done and that she felt all this painfully at the deepest level. But his actions were incomprehensible. Caught with another woman, discovering he’d been siphoning her bank account, that he was working for a rival firm, all these would have left her feeling deceived, angry and astonished. But each of these insults had a place to go, inbuilt responses that were pretty much the same for everyone. You knew not just what but how to feel when the husband or the lover took you for a ride by kissing elsewhere or by thieving from your purse. Under the incomprehension, the kiss, the filch, they made a common sense by virtue of the fact that here was a story that had been, was being, and would be told again. But she had no inheritance of common lies to see her through this one. What was the story here?

  In gripping yarns the fear is that the revelation won’t be right – the last page missing or a lack of skill in writing an ending that astounds. She had the final missing page and nothing else: the guilty man had been unmasked but the beginning and the middle of his shame was lost? And, without a motive, so was she. Steven had consigned her to a kind of hell. Her story, too, had been mislaid. And robbed of her outline she had become a ghost.

  All week she had found it hard to breathe, hard to swallow, as if a solid object was sticking in her throat, a hard lump of misery. But it was impossible not to think, not to consider, not to find herself slipping and imagining fantastic and absurd reasons for the events of that night, impossible not to imagine convincing explanations or even forgivably bad ones: a childhood trauma, a bad mother, or one dead or drunk or worse. Idiotic fantasies blew up like tropical storms only to die away to unmediated pique or fear or misery. Anything to make the story fit.

  What was also extraordinary was the way life went on as she grappled with the unravelling smash and terror of what had happened. Decisions had to be reached, people seen and conversations had. It was not just that she was living two lives simultaneously but that the normal life would take over and it would b
e as if the horror was suspended, as if part of her had been disconnected, the wires cut so that she could function with what was left. Just before the rush of pain came back when she was on her own or not busy, she felt that this was how a zombie must feel. Not like a zombie in the films who was really just undead, but a zombie that had most of its feelings and intelligence and even a sense of humour still working. In fact, you couldn’t really tell from outside that this person was not really a living thing because a lot of this creature remained alive. It was a half-life, or a quarter or three-quarters, but whatever was missing was what stopped her being a real person. When your soul was frozen, what astonished her was how nearly everything that was your normal life, no matter how complicated, could still go on.

  Steven looked in the mirror. He felt dopey from the Kapake painkillers he had been taking and fuzzily depressed. His skin had the colour, and some of the texture, of new putty. His arm throbbed gently, as if it were preparing to rev up for something more dramatic. When he came to stitch the wound in his arm, the Kapake did a good job of dulling the pain – he had fainted only twice. He shut his eyes and imagined the emotional insurgency Anne would now be going through. Horror: certainly. Fear: of a kind. Hurt: deep. Loss: deeper. Confusion: deeper still. But underlying all of this was something more powerful.

  The phone rang. It was her. ‘I want to talk to you.’

  Although it was what he hungered for, he was shocked. He had never heard such coldness in a human voice before..

  A depressed David Hendrix was in his consulting rooms drinking brandy while dictating his notes on George Winnicott into NEMO. He was depressed because of the identity parade. It had shaken him because he felt that he must have come close to being identified as involved with Maria Vaughan’s disappearance. It wasn’t just the realisation that suddenly, for no rational cause, your life could disintegrate around you and you could be found guilty of a terrible crime you hadn’t committed. It happened, after all. It was not exactly unknown for the English legal system to put people in prison for things they hadn’t done. But it was more plausible that he might be arrested. If that happened it wouldn’t have mattered much to his professional colleagues whether he was subsequently released. His reputation would be ruined, his livelihood destroyed. It had never quite come home to him before that to lose his work would be to lose himself. He had gradually fallen into the trap of thinking of himself as consisting centrally of his personal relationships with others and with himself. But he now realised that his work was central to his sense of being human. He knew this intellectually, of course, he could have told you this, just as he could have told you that he was going to die at some time. But now he felt this in the way you feel only when you lose it or come close to losing it. If he could not do his job any more he would cease to be a person. He would be a kind of ghost. In the middle of these morose thoughts his attention was distracted by a small icon he had never seen before blinking off and on in the top right-hand corner of the computer screen.