Crocodile Soup
Julia Darling was a novelist, poet and playwright. Born in Winchester in 1956 in the house that Jane Austen died which partially inspired her first novel Crocodile Soup (1988); it was long listed for the Orange Prize for fiction. Her second novel The Taxi Driver's Daughter (Penguin 2003) was set in Newcastle upon Tyne where she moved to in 1980; it was long listed for the Man Booker Prize and short listed for the Encore Award. She wrote many plays for stage and radio, including Manifesto for the New City for Northern Stage and Appointments and Personal Belongings for Live Theatre. An anthology of her plays Eating the Elephant and other Plays was published by New Writing North in 2005. The title play was about breast cancer which Julia was diagnosed with in 1994.
Through her poetry collections Sudden Collapses in Public Places (2003), and Apology for Absence (2004), she sought to open up the language around illness and healthcare, particularly breast cancer. Julia’s on-line weblog was adapted by Jackie Kay into The Waiting Room and was dramatised on Radio 4 in 2007. Julia was Fellow in Literature and Health at Newcastle University and edited The Poetry Cure (Bloodaxe, 2004) with Cynthia Fuller. In 2003 Julia was awarded the Northern Rock Writers Award and in 2014 was honoured by the Newcastle Gateshead Initiative with a Local Heroes bronze plaque in the city. She had made Newcastle her home since 1980 until she died in 2005. To find out more about her work visit www.juliadarling.co.uk
This edition published by Mayfly Press, 2015
Mayfly Press
Chase House
4 Mandarin Road
Rainton Bridge
Houghton le Spring
DH4 5Ra
First published in Great Britain by Anchor, a division of Transworld Publishers Ltd, 1998
Paperback ISBN 9781909486157
Ebok ISBN 9781909486164
Printed by Martins, cover design by courage.
Copyright © 1998 by Julia Darling
The right of Julia Darling to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following people for their support during the writing of this book: Bob White and Jane Whitely for hosting the writing of the first draft in Fremantle, Australia; Bernard and Mary Loughlin at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Co Monaghan, Ireland where two subsequent drafts were written; John Murray of Panurge Books for believing in me; Jenny Attala and Chrissie Glazebrook from the literature department at Northern Arts for their continual help and support. Tom Shakespeare, Nicy Rushton, Wendy Robertson, Graeme Rigby, Josephine Darling, Karin Young and Charlie Hardwick for their constructive comments. Debbie Taylor, Andrea Badenoch, Jane Harris, Penny Smith and Kitty Fitzgerald for sharing the agony; Gillian Allnut and Margaret Wilkinson for their inspirational sessions ‘Writing From Inside Out’; Sean O’Brien for being there; Bridget O’Connor for her inspiration; Wendy McEvoy and Dave Eadington at Siren Films for their encouragement.
Jane Bradish-Ellames at Curtis Brown for her sound advice. Also, my mother, Vicky Darling, for her love of words, and my friend Jan Johannes for listening. I also gratefully acknowledge the support from the Arts Council of England, who gave me the financial space to finish the novel.
For Bev, Scarlet, and Florrie.
The First Letter
Dear Gert,
I know I haven’t been in touch for some time, but then neither have you. Cameron died last week, of a brain haemorrhage. He collapsed in the middle of playing my favourite tune, ‘Making the Waves Sleep’, at the local club. We used to go there every Saturday night. I’m not sure what to do now. We’ve been living in a small flat near Waterloo Station, but the landlord wants me out and I’ve got nowhere to go.
I was wondering if I could stay with you. Please get in touch soon, as I’m already in arrears.
With love
Your mother, Jean
A Vision In The Stuffed Bird Room
The day that I got my mother’s letter it was autumn and the air was thick with the fumes of sparklers and the breath of nervous dogs. I stuffed the letter behind the radiator, along with various questionnaires and memos. Upstairs, the museum was closed. I was looking into the caverns of an Egyptian pot, lost in a hieroglyphic daydream, when I heard a tapping sound coming from the stuffed bird collection which was right above my room. For a moment I thought the frozen birds had stepped down from their perches and were pecking the long oak floor with their beaks. I put down the fragment and wiped my spectacles. I frowned. The sound had a rhythm.
I walked nervously up the wide stone steps; past the fossilized turtle and the depressed newts, and into the bird room. I peered through a glass panel containing a golden eagle. I blinked. There in the half darkness was a figure. She was dancing a tango on the empty floor to an audience of perplexed birds. She tapped and circled, concentrating with the most extraordinary poise. She was holding an invisible partner, I watched her, mesmerized. Then, just as she pivoted and turned, she raised her head and saw me. She stopped dancing. I recognized her. She was the new girl who worked in the canteen. We stared at each other in shock. Then she disappeared.
The next day, my colleague Theobald, who worked with insects, told me the girl serving coffee was called Eva. When he said her name a light went on somewhere inside me. Suddenly everything was illuminated. I noticed the dust everywhere; and the fact that at night fine specks drifted from old exhibits onto my papers, so that when I drew my hands across them in the morning, they left a path. I realized that as I sat there, dust was gathering on the crown of my head.
I was in the middle of labelling a vast collection of ancient artefacts. It had taken me years to reach this position. I had burrowed my way down; from lofty university campuses, to archaeological digs, to the reading rooms of basement archives, and finally to a comfortable underworld, an archaeological institute in the centre of a Northern city, beneath a municipal museum. Not far from where I sat there were bridges and council estates, shops selling mops for seventy-five pence, shopping malls teeming with Northern people carrying plastic bags full of consumer goods that would be eaten or played with, and then discarded, and buried beneath the ground. This was the kind of thing I thought about, and which sometimes could make me have panic attacks the size of Egypt.
But other days I wondered if anyone actually read my well-researched labels. It could take six months to trace the exact origin of a cup, or a brooch. I rarely saw the public, although I heard them sometimes, rattling through the tannoy system, dropping coins and munching mints.
I liked my work. It was intricate and elaborate. It absorbed me into long trances when I forgot everything. It was a passion.
Eva looked ordinary in the canteen. She was in her twenties; she wore an overall. She had strong eyes, short modern hair and a high forehead. She reminded me of a figurehead of a ship. She ignored me. I sat, drinking her coffee, which was strong and frothy, watching her.
I felt as if I had discovered a totally intact early Egyptian scroll and that I should handle the find with care.
But I was also not myself; romantically or professionally. I was not used to emotion. The institute was not generally an emotive place. It was good for shelving and filing, and storing, and that’s why I liked it.
But after the day when I first saw Eva it occurred to me that I may as well be an exhibit myself, and that maybe lunch was more interesting than history.
When I was six, our kitchen was very cool and quiet, with a red waxy floor. There was always a bee struggling against the window pane. I could do anything I wanted. Our cake tins were full of Victoria sponges. We had butter on everything.
I opened the back door and stepped into a side street. Outside it was a sleepy afternoon, and wood pigeons were cooing. My twin brother Frank was playing his violin, and it made this carping sound that spoilt the peace of everything, but Frank was like that. My father, George, had gone to post a letter. My mother was having her afternoon rest. I had some bread in my pocket and a threepenny bit from the toby jug in my father’s parlour. I believed that I could go anywhere that I wanted. So I walked along a bit, until I came to an area I didn’t really know. There was a lily pond with mammoth goldfish that were too cramped to swim and bumped into each other. I stood on some grey steps and threw my bread at them. Some of the crumbs landed on the water lilies so that a few birds flew down and ate them. I hung about, watching, for some time.
The stranger was long and green, like a bottle. His neck was a stalk and his eyes closed upwards. He appeared to have grown from behind a bush. He came up very close, smelling of dead birds trapped in a shed. He looked down at me with his great cowlike eyes and I knew he was afraid of me. Then he opened his mouldy coat and showed me his penis, as if it was all he had to offer. I stared at it without blinking. It was like a version of Frank’s new telescope. It had rings round it that were similar to the tube that ran from the back of our washing machine. I nodded, and he gratefully folded it away into the rusty linen of his old trousers. There was nothing more to say so I slipped from the tow of his shadow and ran, looking back for a second to see him shrug and gulp as if he was out of breath.
When I got home everyone had woken up. The kitchen was full of appliances whirring and bubbling and my mother, Jean, was smoking a Dunhill cigarette. The packet was blue and white and smoke filled the room. I hadn’t realized she smoked. I was quite surprised.
She asked me where I’d been and I said, ‘To look at a pond.’
She said, ‘That’s too far, you might have been accosted by strangers or something.’
Then she stubbed out the cigarette in a matchbox and stuffed it into the bin, while I scampered to the toby jug to replace the threepenny bit.
Origins
Jean had two babies altogether, who found themselves transplanted from her relatively safe cave into an uncertain environment. We dived from water to air, one after another, landing in an embroidered basket that stayed for months by our mother’s bed. I was the first and then there was Frank.
Apparently I was beautiful, with diamond eyes and waving victorious arms, while my twin Frank was limp and runtish, with a streak of pimples and a flattened nose. He was grey and I was pink. He lay stomach down, examining the whiteness of his pillow, while I gazed angrily at the ceiling, kicking my legs, as if I was trying to climb back up an impossible staircase. They called me Gertrude, apparently in memory of my dead grandmother, but I think they did it to counteract my looks. I was obviously not a Gertrude, and the name quickly got shortened to Gert, which was even worse. I grew into my name unwillingly, and I often wonder what would have happened if they had called me Emily or Lucretia, or some other name with an aura of dignity. Because of my name my legs are now short and my hair is heavy and flat. I also have my grandmother’s thick ankles and slow jaw.
Jean was only twenty-two. A year before she had been learning how to dance. I was one of the things she wanted then.
You see, I was born in the wrong place. I should have emerged on the west coast of Scotland, or in some wild borderland, or near a crashing ocean, but instead I was dragged by my head into a room in a market town in a southern English valley, surrounded by sharp flint walls. It sounds safe but it wasn’t. Rocks circled hungrily above its spires, and a river named the Cut, filled with fine green hairy weeds, razored through it. Odd gargoyles peered down from the edges of church roofs with swelling eyes and leering tongues. Old ladies carried rat poison in their shopping bags. Disintegrating drunks urinated in the public fountain, rolling their plastered eyes at church men and choirboys.
I found myself in a lopsided Georgian house with beady windows and faulty guttering. The house was elegant but nervous. It sat tremulously at the bottom of a winding hill, wrapped in a shawl of ivy, fearing subsidence from above.
My mother never spoke of her childhood, and if her parents phoned up she would hide in the downstairs toilet.
I imagine she materialized at a ball. At least there was little evidence of her before then. She had been encased in a strict and starched childhood and made to eat cabbage disguised as tomato.
She wore a hushed cream dress with gloves to her elbows. She had made the dress sitting under a forty-watt light bulb in a back room wallpapered with thorny pink roses. Downstairs her own mother straightened the antimacassars and hummed, marvelling at her daughter’s eyes which had recently mutated from childish grey to blue. She had also developed thigh muscles. Jean was a filly on the make; looking for a home with non-stick saucepans and an account at a department store. She had studied the manuals, and this was how you got one; by smiling, by dancing, by being a girl with broad hips and plucked eyebrows.
Lines of men and women faced each other on the grilling dance floor. The women wanted to be picked and were afraid of being left behind like abandoned gas masks. They craned towards the men like flowers to an unreliable sun, offering their looks and naked shoulders; their domestic muscle and wartime childhoods. Everyone was out to forget.
Yet Jean was distressed. She had an inappropriate imagination. Her personality wriggled uncomfortably under her girdle. Her friend Mabel had floated off with a man who had brackish teeth. She wanted to take off her red patent shoes and throw them at the next man who proffered his fat hand. She was tired of terse, trivial conversation. She concentrated on a vision of an array of modern domestic appliances, from automatic dishwashers to car hoovers. When George clumsily pushed her onto the dance floor she thought of Kenwood mixers.
There was not a trace of bright colour on the dance floor, apart from Jean’s shining shoes. It was predominantly black and white; a flurry of swirling opposites, magnetically pulling forwards and away.
When the band broke the women gathered in the toilet to swear and stuff their brassieres with pads, and to pluck unruly eyebrows into flirtatious arcs. They dabbed away their sweat with powder puffs and revitalized their smiles for the next hunt. They rubbed their armpits vigorously with sweet scents to hide the smell of their unfeminine opinions. They rummaged in dirty handbags for the ends of lipsticks, and topped up the thick foundation that covered the ironic lines around their mouths.
Once alone they stopped trying to be women and became loose and funny, as if their bodies were clothes released from their hangers. They lounged lewdly over the edges of the washbasins. They calculated the bank accounts and backgrounds of potential partners. They wanted servants and patios, leisure and rose gardens, and bedrooms to rest in. They didn’t know then, these clever women, how those floral, middle-class rooms would become prisons and how they would end up bewildered, standing at dawn in the garden in a pair of old trousers trying to work out what went wrong.
And the war girls who conspired with Jean in the toilet, lending her sanitary protection and heaving the pedals and handles of the ghastly incinerator, were the same women who pioneered premenstrual tension in post-war suburbs. They made it into souffles; they polished floors with it, and they pushed prams on its onerous power.
Jean did the best she could on this occasion with the blood that seeped out from under her creamy gown. She plugged herself up with bandage and pad, which made her too heavy below and increased her sense of mastlessness. She returned to the punishing dance floor and engaged herself in the Dashing White Sergeant. She knew that George would propose. He had a glazed, dysfunctional look and his big hands were caught on the ho
oks of her bodice. Their steps collided as they always would, and with horror she realized that blood was running down her new stockings, dripping into the net of her underskirt, and finally cascading in clots onto the parquet flooring. She tried to pull away, her heel skidding in a glutinous red drop, but it was their turn to skip under the arches. No one noticed, apart from a black trumpet player, called Cameron Drinkwater, whose eyes rolled in his head and who fixed on Jean for one long sympathetic note. He was the man she should have married. When she could she ran to the toilet. Three friends galloped after her, seeing the whites of her eyes as she fled. They gathered around her in a life belt and escorted her back to the coven of toilet bowls and basins, to swab her down and lend her corsetry and courage.
I sometimes think of the men who danced briefly alone after those women had gone, standing puzzled on the dance floor, holding invisible partners for a second, before turning and walking back to their table.
I feel sorry for them. Those men.
Incidental Thought
Perhaps it will be all right, I thought. Perhaps, when I go to work, there will be peace, and Theobald will stop jumping from foot to foot, and Eva will no longer be beautiful. Perhaps they will realize that the lottery grant was a big mistake. The Head Curator will go on a sabbatical, and things will stay as they were. We will all slide back into our lamplit rooms and watch history from a safe distance. We will be able to keep it behind glass, where it can fascinate but not hurt us.
Family Life
Can I tell you how much I loved my mother? I loved her like a dog loves an old bone. Then, when I was just a comma in the kink of her arm, I gazed at her perfect blond face, her reticent eyebrows, her heavy eyelashes, her scarlet Bombay lips. She smelt of crisp meringue and she said words like, ‘Miraculous’. She was very pale. I heard people commenting on her tubercular, romantic complexion.
Crocodile Soup Page 1