‘Take me. Please take me,’ I said. George was puzzled. ‘Where?’ he said.
To Africa.’
‘I’ll send you a postcard.’ He picked me up and for a moment I was close to his thundery sad eyes and his shaven chin.
‘Why can’t you work here?’
‘The climate’s no good for crocodiles. It needs to be moist and hot,’ and he smiled a stupid mad grin as if he had made a joke.
‘But what about me and Frank?’
‘I’ll bring you a present,’ he muttered quickly, and then dropped me back onto the platform, as the train came in screaming with rage. So I ran about in decreasing circles, yelling. Frank timed everything with a stopwatch. George was so agitated that he forgot to say goodbye and at the last minute he hung out of the window and blew kisses at us. The only lips he could reach were Jean’s, and I stared at them as they embraced. I had never seen them kiss like that before. On the lips.
As the train pulled away Jean took a small lace handkerchief from her handbag and wiped her lips, but the kiss hung there in the air for ages like smoke from a firework.
Trouble With The Rubbish
It was all hospitals where I lived. Ill health and bad blood. In the daytime the area was crowded with doctors and people in tears, and sometimes women in dressing gowns who were trying to escape from the gynaecological wards. There was a low drone in the air as if all the poorly people were breathing together in miserable breaths, like one great unwell beast. It smelt of cut flowers and force-grown fruit. I think it affected me, living where I did, among healing scabs or decaying bones. Dustbins were filled with computer printouts from heart monitors, and broken chunks of Armitage Shanks plumbing. There were rusty wheelchairs and bedside tables down the back lane waiting for the rag and bone men. I could feel the electric currents emanating from the psychiatric unit. It was an area with the ambience of a busy morgue.
On Friday morning I parted my reluctant curtains and looked across the yard to the back of a hospital building which was opposite my flat. I saw two sour-faced women wearing large yellow rubber gloves stepping out of the dark interior. They wore overalls the colour of bleach bottles, and their manner was underhand, even shifty.
They were carrying two black plastic rubbish bags which they placed discreetly with my rubbish. This was not where they were supposed to put their waste. Hospital rubbish generally went in yellow skips with the word DANGER painted in black on them. I knocked on the window but they slithered back into their own territory, leaving their suspicious garbage on my patch,
I was unsettled. I dressed quickly and ran downstairs. I felt vulnerable. I lived on my own. I had very little debris. What one decides to discard is a very personal matter. I purposefully crossed the back lane and knocked on the handleless door. I could smell contaminated blood. No-one appeared and I returned to check that the bags were still there. I went to the front of the building which was craggy brick with a pompous main door. I pushed myself dizzily through a revolving door. Ahead of me was a maze of carpeted corridors. I wandered along them nervously, calling into cubicles until eventually a sleepy caretaker in a brown sacking overall stepped out from behind a marble bust of Freud.
‘It’s all closed up until Monday,’ he said.
‘I thought this was a hospital. People get ill at the weekend you know,’ I snapped.
‘It’s a wing,’ he muttered defensively. ‘What kind of wing?’
‘Keep your hair on! It’s the loony wing,’ he said with a grin.
Well, I have a complaint to make.’ I looked at him fiercely. He seemed to have artificial ears, and they weren’t a pair either.
‘You have to have an appointment,’ he droned on.
‘This isn’t a medical matter,’ I said. ‘It’s domestic.’
‘Medical or domestic, it will have to wait.’
‘It’s the cleaning staff I’m after!’
‘They’ve all gone home now.’
‘Who are you then?’
‘Harry.’
We paused then, looking at each other. I felt a need to introduce myself by name, but repressed it.
‘I mean what’s your job here?’
‘I don’t work here. I’m from the other building. I’m security.’
‘What happens here?’
‘Therapy... counselling... drugs... the lot.’
I felt a sense of hopelessness. ‘I’ll come back on Monday then.’
‘Suit yourself.’
I left him standing in an amiable stupor, and went back to the rubbish.
What, I wondered, was in those bags? Then I looked down at myself and realized my nightdress was hanging out and over the back of my jeans.
Later, after a strange afternoon at work with a magnifying glass, and a couple of flutters with Eva when I asked for warm milk in my coffee and she said, ‘How warm?’ and I became weak with the possibilities that such a question offered, I went to buy a bottle of Bull’s Blood from Jimmy’s corner shop. When I got there Harry the guard was there talking to Jimmy who had the teeth of a rat and the prices of Harrods. Harry’s strange ears were covered by a balaclava helmet that an aunt must have welded for him out of a sock. With lavish sweeps of his fingerless gloves Harry was telling Jimmy of the area he guarded; from casualty to the dental block.
‘Who is guarding it now?’ I asked him casually, wondering if I should go and help myself to a large parcel of morphine.
‘I am,’ said Harry. ‘I look after everything round here.’
Then he winked at me, and I winked back. Or I blinked because I have never been able to wink. It’s not a skill you learnt in the south of England.
Letters From Africa
George wrote to me from Africa. ‘Dear Gert, I hope you are well...’ But I wasn’t well. No-one heard me when I tried to speak to them. Everyone was involved in their own private problems. Frank was lost in space, or squatting in the centre of a train set, his young head revolving as the toy train chuntered around the track. Jean had pasted herself into the pages of Vogue magazine. Carmen only came one day a week, and then she was generally too occupied to notice me as I slunk around the alcoves. I got on everyone’s nerves. My mouth opened and closed. I said the same things over and over again.
‘Don’t make me go upstairs.’ The words seemed to disappear, whenever I said them. They were sucked back up into the vortex of the attic.
A postcard from Africa arrived. It was a picture of a laughing black man with glistening teeth, holding a dead crocodile on a hook. He stood in front of a group of obese, sunny women wearing dazzling gold head-dresses. They pointed at the crocodile and laughed, or maybe at the man who held the crocodile. It was hard to tell.
The postcard joined the line of identical blue letters that lined the mantelpiece. The stamps were hot and lurid. The paper smelt of curry. The letters were very short. They talked about wild animals and intimate ailments. Sometimes photographs arrived, showing George on wide white verandas wearing a heavy straw hat. The black people always seemed to be holding trays and smiling as if their lives depended on it. George was taller than anyone else, and sometimes the top of his head was omitted from the picture, so that only his long nose and difficult mouth could be seen.
Jean had taken off her pink dress and put on a pair of slacks. She was growing a new layer of flesh that was pink and soft. Sometimes she let me watch The Man from UNCLE. Every night when she tried to send me to bed I sat on the hard attic stairs and wailed. It was like howling at the moon. Jean was following the Spock method. I heard her talking on the telephone to Mabel.
‘Gert’s driving me crazy,’ she moaned. ‘She’s so nervy. She says she wants to move back in with Frank, but he’s too sensitive. She drives him up the wall.’
Then she paused, listening to Mabel’s frenzied chatter and eventually said, ‘Oh Mabel! Would you?’
The next day Mabel turned up with her thin mouth and childless hips. She took her shoes off and opened a bottle of sweet Martini. Jean cuddled up to h
er and giggled. Suddenly the house was full of handbags and perfumed scarves. The two women wouldn’t stop guffawing. They talked about the men at the typing pool where they used to work, and every time they said a man’s name they snorted, as if the man was stuck up their noses and they had to blow him out.
When I walked into the room they blinked blearily and said, ‘Cheer up Gert!’ and I scowled at them, my eyes glued to Jean, waiting for her attention. She wiped my nose with a sweep of her silk handkerchief and told me to go and get the biscuit tin. I walked out of the room backwards and banged my head. When I returned they were standing in front of the mirror with their bras pulled up comparing nipples. Mabel’s nipples were huge brown upturned saucers. Jean’s were flat and reluctant. They were both saying, ‘Wish I had yours.’
When they saw me they sniggered and hooked their bras back on penitently. A lipstick rolled across the floor. The television, which had been switched on ever since Mabel arrived, burst into raucous studio laughter. The two women were a fence that I couldn’t climb over, so I went to Jean’s bedroom and sat in the cupboard, letting the silky tongues of dresses fall on my face and holding the red shoes in my hands, making them dance with each other.
Mabel stayed for weeks. She treated us like dogs, that needed food and exercise, or squinted at us as if we were flowers that were difficult to grow in this climate. Perhaps she thought we weren’t worth the pruning, the cutting and the watering. Sometimes, in the afternoons, we left Jean sleeping with the drowsy radio, and went for unrelenting walks that seemed to be all uphill. Mabel wore impractical shoes that twisted in the grass, and stockings that snagged on the thistles. If we lagged behind she whistled for us. Sometimes we stopped and she dispensed white bread sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper, and we wagged our tails. I couldn’t stop thinking about her nipples, even when she was wearing a raincoat.
In the evening the two women laughed so loudly that the china dinner sets rattled in the cupboards. Mabel was unmooring Jean. She was quite oblivious to the fact that she was a mother.
Frank looked at the two women as if they were shooting stars.
Sometimes Jean stopped laughing and her eyes rested on Frank as if she had just found a shell on a beach.
She looked at me as if I was a letter she had forgotten to post.
Other Communications
Frank and I once experimented with telepathic messages sent from one room to another. We were both shocked to discover it worked We were simultaneously mentally naked, and confused. Which thoughts belonged to which twin? Were my desires for girls in gymslips in fact the lecherous adolescent fantasies of my twin brother? For some years we became silent and mentally blank, but gradually, out of devilment at first, I began to call him on our exclusive telephone.
‘How’s things, Frank?’ I could hear sheets shift. I must have woken him up.
‘Where are you?’ His voice was deep, hoarse and shaky.
‘I’m finding myself.’
‘Why?’
I picture Eva.
‘I see,’ said the voice gloomily. ‘So you haven’t changed.’
‘This is different.’ There was a long silence, I could hear Frank stretching his arms and yawning. ‘How are things?’
‘Stony, slow. Very quiet until now.’
‘You never call me.’
‘I’m not supposed to speak to anyone.’
‘Not even me?’
‘Not even you, Gert. Look, I’m kind of busy right now. I’ll get in touch later.’
‘Oh yeah, sure.’ Frank had never even sent me a Christmas card.
Then he drew a curtain across the conversation. Sometimes I tried to imagine what it would be like if Frank was living with me. I pictured him sitting at my kitchen table with his hands cupped over his ears, or the two of us cooking a meal together, arguing over the meaning of words like ‘curdle’ and ‘finely chop’. He was so bloody obsessive. To be honest I don’t know where I would put him if I had him. He was like an animal which was nearly extinct, with all its natural habitat gone.
Five Shillings
Soon there were so many letters from Africa that they kept falling off the mantelpiece. I worried about George, picturing him wading through swamps where crocodiles writhed treacherously in green mud.
And each night, when I went to bed, up the winding stairs to the ominous attic, I wondered if the strange figure I had seen would come back. I placed my blonde doll at the foot of my bed. I left all the lights on.
Sometimes I thought I smelt something, or heard skirts rustling by my head. When this happened I would scuttle downstairs to the Furthest Nursery and try to slide into Frank’s bed without being seen or heard. I was like a stealthy reptile, nosing and twisting under the covers. Frank would wake up and push me out onto the floor, so that I often slept on the hard linoleum.
I heard Jean talking about me again to Mabel. She said she found me quite impossible. Mabel said I needed a good slap. Every night I wet myself.
Before Mabel returned home she pulled me into a thorny corner of the garden. I shied away from her, expecting the slap, but instead she gave me five shillings and told me to try harder. She hugged me and told me to smile. I forced the corners of my mouth upwards, and she squeezed my cheek as if to test the ripeness of a melon, and fastened the top buttons of her coat.
‘You tell Mabel next time you have a problem,’ she said. ‘Don’t take it out on Jean.’ She tied a tight knot in her headscarf. ‘She’s more delicate than you think,’ she said.
I nodded uncertainly, knowing that Frank would embezzle my five shillings for his telescope fund, and that I would end up giving it to him anyway.
The Farmer Wants A Wife
Frank and I were to be sent to nursery school.
Downstairs Jean was ironing two blue sailors outfits; a dress for me and shorts for Frank. The dress had small puff sleeves with virulent elastic, and was very long and unmanageable to wear. The shorts were more basic, although Frank complained that the sailor’s tie was throttling him.
Jean drove us to the hall, which was surrounded by conspiring yew trees. She parked in the middle of the street and left the car door wide open. That’s what she was like. She never locked anything, and never kept to the rules.
I was beginning to panic. I suddenly felt that I might as well be a suitcase being abandoned at left luggage.
Jean pushed us both in front of her and we found ourselves in a hall full of creaking toys and wide-eyed children. I turned around to cling to Jean’s skirt, but, following the Spock method, she had nipped off, leaving us to fend for ourselves.
The boys were generally square and chubby, although later I noticed some thin stringy ones lurking behind radiators and under window-sills. Most of them pelted around the room in imaginary Rovers, bumping into the girls, who were frothy, with rubbery mouths and shining hair haloed with velvet hair bands. They leant over large pieces of sugar paper holding unwieldy crayons.
Frank started counting maniacally. I told him to stop, but he wouldn’t. He was holding a bullet of plasticine in his hand as if it was a weapon that he might use. I ran to a vacant metal horse and started to rock to and fro in a disturbed manner.
A ferocious-looking woman with dog teeth blew a whistle, and everything stopped.
The woman told us that her name was Miss Lute, and that we must all sit in a circle. When all our legs were in identical positions Miss Lute told us that it was NEWS TIME.
A boy with shocking blond hair and a red neck stuck his hand up immediately.
‘Yes, Terence,’ said Miss Lute politely. ‘What is your news?’
‘My grandpa was sick down the stairs,’ Terence shouted, then curled up into a snigger.
‘Did he go to hospital?’ asked Miss Lute.
‘No, he died.’ Terence burst into tears. We all made odd shapes with our lower lips.
‘Oh dear,’ said Miss Lute sweetly. ‘Never mind Terence. Let’s ask one of the new children for their news. Lucy?’
&
nbsp; We’ve got a new baby. It’s yellow, and I sat on it,’ chirped Lucy.
‘That’s nice. Has anyone got any unusual news. Any surprises?’
‘There’s something nasty in my room!’ I blurted. All the other children stared at me sullenly.
‘I’m sorry. Say that again Gert.’
‘There’s something in my room. It smells.’
‘You smell,’ mumbled a sour-faced girl in a knitted frock.
‘Please, please, can I go home?’ I looked at them all desperately.
‘But Gert, you’re having a lovely time,’ said Miss Lute. ‘Do you need the toilet Gert?’ Miss Lute was saying.
A dark arc of liquid slowly spread over the floor around me. I looked bravely at my captor. ‘I want my mother,’ I said. ‘I’m wet.’
It didn’t work.
For the rest of the morning I was ostracized. Miss Lute forced me to wear a pair of nylon slacks and an unravelling sweater she found in a cupboard. She made a big thing about it. Everyone smirked. Frank was mortified.
I sat in humiliation by the fuzzy felt. Frank, still counting, drew a picture of an abattoir, upsetting some of the other children. Miss Lute told him to play with the bricks, but he scared her by looking up at her with a face disguised as a barbed wire fence. He had reached two thousand and eighty-three when Miss Lute rang a heavy brass bell, and we were instructed to eat rusks, which tasted of recently ironed tablecloths. We were told to chew them thoroughly. Then we had weak juice, that must have been drugged, because afterwards we all lay down on straw mats and fell asleep, while Miss Lute sang ‘The Farmer Wants a Wife’ in a low monotone.
Crocodile Soup Page 4