The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  ‘NEMO, there’s something flashing on the screen.’

  Yes, Mr Hendrix. It is a box containing a small circle.

  ‘What does it mean?’

  It means that a query or problem you have asked me is now capable of being answered.

  ‘What query?’

  I have found the solution to the crossword clue E13.

  ‘Really?’

  I don’t understand your question, Mr Hendrix. Do you want to review the solution now?

  For a moment Hendrix considered refusing. But his. depression made this all seem even more stupid and childish than usual. In any case it would be nice gesture to send the answer to Winnicott.

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a short pause as NEMO accessed the relevant file.

  The solution to the crossword clue E13 is: Senselessness.

  The Macintyre building on Windle Street is unlike any of the giants that surround it in the City of London. It was built in 1981 but gives the curious impression of having been there for a long time, and although it is also clearly, and controversially, modern its classical origins are obvious even to the untrained eye. Even its admirers, however, are unenthusiastic about the strident blue of its brickwork.

  Anne Levels, pale and nervous, hesitated in front of the small entrance, which seemed more suited to a house. Several times that afternoon she had approached and walked away. A group of businessmen passed by her and seemed to pull her through behind them. She was expected at reception and was led through so quickly that she did not have time to run away. The receptionist knocked on the door.

  ‘Come in,’ said a distant voice, producing a frantic beat to Anne’s heart. The door was opened, she was introduced, and then the receptionist was gone.

  He was standing on a slightly raised section of the room next to a large device that looked like the delivery system for a weapon. There were similar constructions everywhere in various stages of assembly, some larger, others much smaller. Unlike familiar technology – the domestic fridge, the badged, installed device that powered a dentist’s drill – they looked unfinished, chromeless, the product of a human hand careless of erratic welds or a neat fit in the inessential parts. They disturbed not because they were unknown devices for creative damage to soft tissue, but because the intelligence behind these complicated things was recognisably like your own: sharper, more knowledgeable but capable, certainly, of a bad day, a headache or a fitful capacity for incompetence.

  He looked at her with restrained anxiety. Around his right arm he wore a white sling. He opened his mouth to speak but stopped himself as if he had, on reflection, nothing to say.

  She walked further into the room establishing by instinct a territorial right. ‘Well?’ she said. She watched his face. It had, she thought, the grey tinge of old white paint and something of the same plastic sheen. The dark circles under his eyes shone through like a complicated painterly effect of white over black. The eyes, she saw, were pin sharp, but touched with pain, fatigue and a satisfying fear of her. She felt implacable. She watched the hopeful calculation on his face begin to drain away. He started to speak.

  ‘I’m very sorry . . .’

  He stopped and blinked, realising the ridiculousness of his position, the banality of his violence against her, of how absurd his brutality had been and how weak he looked now. She despised him.

  Then he smiled, mocking himself but also, she thought, mocking her as if they were equals in a ridiculous lovers’ misunderstanding.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ she said quietly. He stopped smiling and he looked at her as if he were controlling some annoyance. He started to speak but again stopped, as if to calm himself down. She was made more angry by his daring to control himself. What right had he to do so? What right to have any feelings of irritation strong enough to need controlling? Indignant at this affront she watched him reach for a small cash box and take out a felt bag the size of a small purse. He undid the string, tempting her to be curious. Once you had seen through someone, she thought, how obvious their moves became and how foolish one felt for ever having believed them. He unfolded a square of jeweller’s felt on the table in front of him and carefully shook the bag like a gardener sowing seeds from a packet. He finished but said nothing as he looked at her. Now the fight in him seemed to have gone again.

  He looked towards the jeweller’s felt on which lay seven tiny crystals, like grimy industrial diamonds. Quietly he began. ‘When people talk about their emotions it always seems airy fairy, don’t you think?’ He prodded one of the brownish crystals like a ten-year-old fidgeting with a bowl of sugar. ‘But this is what emotions look like – bits of muddy glass.’ He glanced at her but could not hold her gaze. He looked down again at the crystals. ‘Strain is what causes these to grow inside the people they were taken from.’ He pointed at them each in turn. ‘Anger. Resentment. Malice. Fear.’ He coughed and swallowed with difficulty. He looked at her directly then cast his eyes down. ‘You can forget the heart – bladders and kidneys hold the secrets of the human soul.’ He tried another remorseful look, but she was cold. Only a fool would be mollified by anything he had to say and she did not wish to be a fool but utterly implacable. To be unforgiving in the face of abject sorrow was her intention, the only way of maintaining any sense of self-respect for loving someone deeply who was just a vicious creep. In spite of this she was aware of his pain, his misery and exhaustion, as well as his calculation – for she could well see that he wanted to do more than just explain himself. And this both infuriated her and made her hope for something he could say which would make everything all right. He looked around the room at the messy collection of half-assembled and experimental devices that covered every available space.

  ‘These machines, what they measure is fear. It turns up on these screens as ulcers, tumours, failing hearts. Your blood carries the trace of every emotion it is possible to feel, and they can make you sick or they can make you well.’ He was unaware that he was breathing noisily with the effort of speaking for so long. ‘I need your love . . .’

  ‘I did love you. Why did you try to hurt me?’

  The interruption unbalanced him but he kept on going, as if to stall would be to surrender a last chance.

  ‘I need your love because without it I will die.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘You look pale. You’ve lost weight,’ he said.

  There was nothing to be said in reply to this because it was true. She knew exactly what he meant.

  He began to explain himself. It was the oddest sensation for him as he spoke. Something seemed to take him along quite naturally and there was no effort, no strategy, no watching the way he was received. It just happened. It’s so easy, he thought, so easy that it seemed to do the work for you; it fell out of you like a weight falling under the effect of gravity. He enjoyed it; it was so very pleasurable, the truth. It was convincing. It was so true. When he had finished he was sorry that there wasn’t any more to say, and he felt, absurdly, as if he’d like to go back to the beginning and start again.

  She did not speak for fully thirty seconds. ‘You’ve killed people?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How many?’

  He did not answer.

  ‘How many?’

  Again he did not reply. She looked at him, her eyes cold. ‘I’m going to the police. You’re a sick, miserable, lying fucking murderer.’

  He was not cowed by this but seemed to be almost irritated by her failure to understand what he had been saying to her.

  ‘Lying, absolutely. Miserable, certainly. Sick, definitely.’ He hesitated. ‘But none of it was done from malice. If retribution is what you want, nothing the police can do to me will come even close.’ He paused, as if trying to see all this from her point of view. ‘Come here,’ he said at last, very gently.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I’ll come to you.’

  He moved towards Anne. Outside in the corridor the clatter and banging of ordin
ary life seemed to reach out to her as more substantial than the dream unfolding in front of her. As he came close, he opened his mouth. She held her head away but did not change her position. The hostile look in her eyes was not softened by fear or pity.

  He blew softly into her face. The smell, although distinctive, was not unpleasant.

  ‘Pear drops,’ she said. ‘You’ve been eating pear drops. So?’

  ‘No. It’s me.’ He looked at her, searching. ‘After a long starvation your body begins to eat itself. Acetone is a by-product. It smells like pear drops.’ He held up the back of his hand. Across each nail was a white line as if they had all been removed, folded crisply by precise hands, then replaced.

  He started to sway slightly. ‘I’ll let you out.’

  He began to move towards the door, but with the second step his knees buckled. He staggered, then collapsed. She watched him, her mouth open. He was sitting on the floor holding onto a table with one hand. There was a puzzled expression on his face as if he couldn’t understand what he was doing on the floor and why he couldn’t move. She had seen the same look on the face of a dog she had once run over, her car breaking its spine. Below the break the animal was paralysed but its two front legs kept scrabbling on the road as it tried to get back on its feet. Steven began to pull himself up by the table but halfway his grip gave out and he began to fall. His other hand flailed wildly at her – a simple reflex and she responded automatically. But she was too late. He fell back, missing her outstretched hand, and the back of his head hit the floor with a terrible crack. In a moment, astonished, she was holding him up. His eyes blinked, uncomprehending, dazed and filled with pain. She held his head for some time. She was aware of everything around her: the strange room, the blood on the floor, the conversation of a few minutes earlier and that she was holding the head of a man who had tried to kill her. She was conscious of thinking but not of thinking about anything, as if the mechanism of a projector had been left running after the film had spooled itself to the end: the bright light was on, the machine whirred and clicked as before but it projected only white light – intense and featureless.

  This sensation continued throughout the taxi journey to his flat and until the moment when she helped him to his bed and eased him onto his back. She was breathing heavily and so was he, but she was panting from the effort of holding him up. Steven was breathing in and out at a shallow but fast rate, like a mechanism no longer in control and imminently about to burn itself out. He closed his eyes and his breathing slowed.

  ‘That hymn you’re always singing. What’s it called?’

  ‘What?’ They were the first words they had spoken since he had collapsed. ‘Oh, Simple Gifts.’

  She wished she had told him to shut up, but she was taken by surprise and so deeply rooted was the giving of answers to specific questions that it was out before she could stop herself. A deep resentment warmed its way through her.

  ‘I’d like you to do me a favour if you would,’ he said.

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ she said, astonished that she could speak at all, let alone in tones of such motherly irritation.

  ‘I have to remember to breathe,’ he said, watching the effect he was having. ‘If I fall too deeply asleep I just stop. Look at me. I need a good night’s rest. I need someone to wake me up if my breathing stops.’ He was panting like a large animal on a hot day but still kept his eyes on her face. He was not trying to hide from her that he was carefully sounding out her response. ‘I need someone to watch over me.’ He had intended to smile at this point, to concede the irony of what he was asking her to do, but he was now too tired and in too much pain, and she was past being charmed. Old habits, he thought.

  ‘A favour is what you do for a friend,’ she said.

  He was almost proud of her hostility, of her unwillingness to relent even a little.

  ‘Are you my friend, Steven?’ His eyes were closing with exhaustion and he did not reply. ‘Then give me some good advice. Tell me what I should do about you.’

  His eyes closed and when he spoke he was barely audible.

  ‘Leave,’ he said, and fell asleep.

  Ten minutes later she was still there, standing with her back to the wall, fury and hate and spite filling her up as his breathing slowed. Deeper and deeper went each breath and slower and slower – and all the time her hatred for him grew. She could feel it turning in her chest, a living thing pushing and shoving and catching against the inside of her ribs. And all the time she listened to his breathing. Deep it was now, and slow, ten seconds between each breath. Then he breathed out and did not breathe in again.

  She watched. He did not move. She waited; the movement in her chest had also stopped. Very slowly his white face began to change colour, slightly at first, a reddish cast turning gently to something darker, blue, purple. Deeper and deeper it went until his face was as livid as a bruise. Still she did not move. She watched him and her chest heaved again with anger and a new disgust. Parker went his face, red and purple mixing, the only movement on the otherwise dead-still body. There was a sudden heavy thud. His mouth opened and wind rushed into his chest like air into a sealed room. His eyes opened in shock and pain. There was a second blow. Again the sound of air but now with an explosive rasp. Again she struck him on the chest, and again. He fell off the bed, more in response to the pain of bursting lungs than to escape the blows.

  The punches stopped. When his breathing had almost returned to normal, after ten minutes with his head bent to his knees, she started to speak. ‘When I was a child, there was nothing much you could do for people with asthma. My mother use to lie with me all through the night when I was really bad. Hour after hour she’d stroke my hair. She used to sing it to me, Simple Gifts, to calm me down.’

  He did not say anything in reply and after a while she noticed that his arm had started to bleed again, the bandage dripping like a tap. She walked over to him, trapped by his slim waist and the powerful muscles of his shoulders and back, stretched taut by his bent attitude. As she reached out to touch his wounded arm, he turned round and caught her wrist with his good hand. It was a movement of fluidity, grace and extraordinary speed.

  ‘Better not,’ he said. He lay back on the bed and fell asleep again.

  Anne stood in the shower. It was solid on three sides and with a thick opaque glass door that sealed off every sound but that of the power-driven water thrashing her body. Eyes closed, she turned up her face into the stream and let the sensation annihilate every thought, every sense but that of the water on her skin. After ten minutes of this she was driven out by the cold of the water. Drying herself quickly, she welcomed the taste of air after the oxygen depletion of the hermetic shower. She cried out as she looked at her wrist. She had been wearing her watch. The inside surface of the glass was wet and the hands had stopped. She walked distractedly into the front room, examining it carefully.

  He wondered if he should express concern or wait for her to explain. He had begun the overtures by brushing against her arm accidentally when she was close to him, when they passed each other in the corridor or went through the same door, but not even the careful choice of extremities or the avoidance of presuming to touch her skin had softened her. The only sign that she had in any way accepted him was that she had stayed.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘My watch. I wore it in the shower.’ The tone was devoid of desire to engage with him.

  ‘It might just need a careful drying. Let me see what I can do.’

  He held out his hand but did not try to take it from her. She passed it over in a gesture full of disdain.

  An hour later Steven, jeweller’s glass in one eye, was almost finished. Next to his hand was a small canvas roll that held numerous tiny instruments, surgical implements for a delicate manikin. With tiny silver tweezers in his hand he eased a spring, thin as a hair, into its place. Drawn in by his skill and anxious for the heirloom handed down from her grandmother, she did not notice that his fac
e had gone white and that he was having trouble keeping his hand from shaking. He wanted to avoid the danger implicit in her starting to feel sorry for him and, almost finished, he handed her the tweezers. They were so small it was quite a performance, indeed a ridiculous one, to place them between her thumb and forefinger without touching her. She went to pick up the one remaining cog, no bigger than the head of a pin, and with enormous care placed it in the tiny slot above the now compressed spring. He replaced the back-plate, fixing it with a satisfying click, then handed it to her. She looked at it, then began to wind. The second hand swept across the face within a fraction of the first turn.