Crocodile Soup

by Julia Darling

I heard Frank whispering a violent fairy story to a boy who believed he was a train. The boy interrupted Frank to let off steam. Miss Lute stopped her song and bravely slapped Frank with a heavy wad of silence, although of course that made no difference to him.

  Then she growled, WE ALL PAT THE DOG.

  After that we lined up to go to the toilet. I was last and the toilet seat was hot from other children’s bottoms and the toilet paper had run out.

  Then Miss Lute opened the door, ushering in the parents as if they were bad children that had been shut outside. She beamed uniformly at each of us as we passed.

  Jean was outside, banging over her car door reading a magazine. She looked like a film star.

  I looked back at Miss Lute from the back seat of the car, catching her expression just before the door closed. Her face was suddenly hanging down in morose folds, gone from round to oblong. And I realized, in the way that I was often to know, by some childish intuition that I have now completely lost, that she wanted a farmer, a child and a dog all for herself.

  Reprieve

  But after my first day at nursery school I was suddenly granted unexpected parole from the attic. This was because unprecedented winds had dislodged slates on the roof and subsequently workmen were brought in to fix the damp. Happily, they discovered dry rot, which everyone assumed was the cause of the smell, and the work went on for some weeks. I was briefly allowed to sleep with Jean, back in the inner sanctum of her white cotton bedroom, with jars of yogurty creams and watercolours of churches. I noticed how she muttered in her sleep and how her feet danced to some silent music. She would say things like, ‘The ropes, I can’t hold on!’ or ‘There’s nothing to eat, we’ll have to kill it’. She slept with a hairnet over her straw blond hair. Sometimes she smiled at me when she woke up. Great yellow smiles with butter spread all over them.

  The workmen got more and more disenchanted. Some days they didn’t turn up. I heard the foreman discussing the atmosphere; he said it was putrid and that one of the younger men kept hearing scratchy noises. The others called the man a nancy and made fun of him.

  The house was full of dust and untidy planks. This forced us out, usually to parks, but sometimes on more ambitious outings.

  We decided to go on an outing to the zoo. When we arrived there was a humid rainstorm and soon we were all soaking wet. We each held a small, sodden paper bag full of peanuts. The spiky railings of the zoo were painted green, and as we walked through the entrance multicoloured birds beseeched us from high wrought-iron cages. The air smelt of hamsters. We seemed to be the only people there. Jean walked ahead swinging a white leather shoulder bag. Frank was looking through a pair of plastic binoculars. I sat down to get a bit of gravel out of my plimsoll. The earth trembled with the plod of elephants’ feet.

  We followed the signs that said REPTILES, and found ourselves in a dry and airless room filled with glass boxes. The snakes were cramped and lethargic. Not one could stretch out to its full length. I found myself immersed in a fat python that wound itself around an insubstantial twig. The snake breathed in and out. Its eyes were long and reproachful. I whispered its name, which was painted in gold letters above its box. Lenny. When I managed to turn away there was no sign of Jean and Frank. I began to run through the dark chambers. Lizards with leathery collars shrugged as I ran past. A chameleon changed colour. A boiled mamba moved in a sudden crack across its glass box. I bumped into a thin woman carrying a baby. She snapped at me with her fingers and the baby silently opened its gummy mouth. I ran on, through an archaic and tricky turnstile and found myself standing by a fetid toilet with a shabby door. I wandered inside, warily. A woman with skin like crackling was applying powder to her cheeks. She barked at me and I ran out again, panicking.

  Thanks to Miss Lute’s efforts, I managed to read a sign that said SEE THE MONKEYS and I followed it, running through a maze of mean cages containing mammoth shining beetles and tortoises with mould on their shells. I tripped over and my peanuts spilt all over the ground. Some sparrows soared down from a tree and began to gobble them up. Then I saw Jean, miles away, running in circles. She was the other side of several large fences. I shouted out to her, but I couldn’t hear anything and she couldn’t hear me. It was unbearable.

  Then I did something that the zoo keeper later said was impossible, which proves how much I wanted my mother in those days. I scrambled over a difficult eight-foot fence, scraping my knee on some barbed wire, and vaulted over a moat that was littered with coke cans and crisp packets. I was suddenly in an oasis of tropical trees with a quiet pond in the centre. Jean had disappeared, but Frank was standing on the other side of the moat staring at me through his binoculars. He was trying to say something, waving his arms in delirious semaphore. I started to walk towards him. A crowd of Cornflake-packet people with sloping shoulders were gathering next to the fence. They were holding hands. I could hear Jean calling my name. Her voice was broken, as if I was truly lost. Frank was motioning me to sit down. Feeling puzzled, I planted myself under a shrub and waited.

  Then I saw the crocodile.

  It lay a few yards from me with a terrifying stillness. How ridiculous, I thought. What a coincidence. Then I thought irrationally, maybe it’s George, dressed up.

  It opened one eye.

  Jean was there now. She stretched out her gloved hand, through the mesh of wire. All the attention was on me. I gloried in it for some seconds, and then the crowd gasped, as the crocodile opened its mouth and yawned.

  Jean moaned softly, and I had the feeling that only I could hear it.

  I wondered which part of me it would eat first.

  Perhaps my hands, so I would never be able to carry a handbag.

  A small monkey-faced man was creeping towards me holding a hoop and a fresh, bloody bone. He beckoned to me. The crocodile opened its other eye.

  It scuttled a couple of inches. Everyone stifled a scream.

  Jean fainted.

  The man ran to the side of the cage and unlocked a door.

  The crocodile charged. I ran.

  The crowd hung onto the sides of the cage.

  I felt its reptilian breath on me as the cage door closed behind me.

  Jean had gone blue, and was slumped on a bench rolling her eyes. Frank poked me in the ribs. Some small boys wept because they were not allowed to have a go in the crocodile’s cage. The crocodile was happily splintering the large bone into bite-sized pieces, as if it was a child’s leg.

  I was taken by the man with a hoop to see the zoo keeper, who had cagey eyes and boxy teeth, in a pillbox office. He shouted at me for half an hour, and I am sure that if he could have done, he would have whipped me. Jean revitalized herself and threatened to sue him. She was on my side.

  On the bus home Frank treated me with a new respect. He even let me try on his spectacles, which shrunk Jean’s face down to the size of a pixie’s, with a large pale nose. It occurred to me that I would have repeated the whole episode if asked. I imagined that I was coated with crocodiles’ breath, like a sugared almond.

  Jean said she would never go near a zoo again, and that she planned to complain to the highest authorities.

  I saw the King of the Jungle bending his head wisely towards her, and the Queen of England nodding her vague and jewel laden brow.

  It’s a rather happy memory. That’s why I’m telling you it. Part of the dry-rot time when I slept in the white peace of Jean’s bed.

  The Second Letter

  Dear Gert,

  Did you get my last letter? I have been very depressed. The room I live in is damp, and without Cameron it’s really quite unbearable. I know you never liked Cameron, but if you had known him better I’m sure you would have got used to him. We were very happy. I am supposed to leave soon, but the landlord says I can stay a bit longer, until I find another place. He is a horrible man with one of those army faces. He wears a combat jacket. I know we haven’t seen each other since you left, but you are my only daughter. I’m an old woman now, Gert. I’
ve got so much I want to talk to you about. We should never have left things for so long.

  I look forward to hearing from you soon. Perhaps you have been away.

  From your mother

  A Conspiracy Of Idleness

  This inner narrative was wrecking my present. I felt as if I was watching myself disintegrate and flake away, like the dead irises I saw in the bins at the back of the canteen.

  I couldn’t concentrate on my work. I was supposed to be looking at ways to introduce primitive voodoo objects to the under-fives. I told the Head Curator that I must think about it carefully, hoping to deflect him. I was under a lot of stress, I told him; family problems. I tore up Jean’s letter and flushed it down the toilet, although scraps of words, like ‘daughter’, kept floating back to the surface.

  My inappropriate obsession for Eva had made me nostalgic and uncommunicative. At the institute bad behaviour was treated with benevolence. I never realized this was possible before. They were being horribly kind to me. However, this was obviously sincere. There was, for example, the matter of redundancies which put everyone into a semi-coma. The stuffed condor in the foyer hung its beak with doom, and several labels had dropped off the artefacts in the Egyptian section. Theobald complained of nightmares concerning birds’ nests, and only Eva was consistent with her Nescafé and kettles.

  Before then I had never really lied on purpose, at least not as an adult, but now I saw the infinite possibilities of pretence. My excuses grew like malignant tumours. Some days I phoned in with a voice that I didn’t recognize myself. It cracked mirrors. Carol in the office developed a soothing tone and always agreed with me that it would be wise to ‘take things easy’.

  I discovered a conspiracy of idleness involving others who had practised the art all their working lives. I would drift to the toilet and mess around with the hand dryer. I examined my underarms in the mirror. Upstairs there was a mummified princess. She was the colour of what remains after weeks at the bottom of dirty coffee cups. She stooped with an awful anorexic hunch. Her womb had been removed, leaving a torn envelope of parchment skin. She was entombed behind glass in an endless room at the back of the museum. I wanted to ask the curator if I could take her out and clean her up a bit. I had an urge to cover her up.

  Each day I met porters and delivery boys, cleaners and caretakers, schoolchildren playing truant, even a lady mayoress, all dawdling and dallying, eager to discuss the colour of the sky, bus routes, or the price of shoes. Like smokers, we supported each other in a mutual mission. One day I met one of the museum cleaners by a fish tank. She was talking to a piranha who listened carefully. I asked her if she knew where I could buy cheap bananas, and she told me the history of every kind of fruit you can buy on a market stall. Then she sighed and said, ‘Better get back to work,’ but didn’t.

  Instead she warmed her bottom on the radiator and complained about the mess that the public made. She said that once some workmen had come to do refurbishments, bringing dust sheets, and how the museum was closed for a week and it was lovely because there was no mess, thanks to the sheets. We both agreed that our lives would be so much easier if we too were covered in sheets. We wouldn’t even need to wash. We arranged to meet again by the eel tank so she could show me her photographs of tulips in flower, although of course she never came. The idle never stick to their arrangements.

  I didn’t read the e-mails that appeared on the screen in front of me describing urgent meetings, wage cuts and developments. I would wander home after tea break and buy wine that tasted of ammonia, and lie on my bed smoking rolled cigarettes. I wrote letters to Eva which I made into kites and threw across the room, and I rewrote my messy life in chronological sequences, then scrumpled it up, so that my flat became a fire hazard.

  Learning To Dance

  You see, I really wanted to make Jean happy. It was my life’s work, and the main reason why I said I wanted to learn to dance. Not for myself, but for her with her weak ankles (my responsibility) and dreams of be-bop and jive. I said I wanted to be a dancer when I grew up, and that really made her perk up. I was worried about her. She sat around a lot. She drank a lot of gin. She didn’t have many friends.

  The second reason I wanted to dance was to spite Frank, who had large feet and thin arms and no sense of timing. This, I thought, was one way of demoting him from his smug position as most favoured twin, and at first it seemed that my plan was actually going to work.

  When I told her about wanting to dance Jean went straight out and bought me pink satin ballet shoes, a leotard and a stiff tutu. She touched these things as if they were precious. As soon as we got home she made me put them on and point my toes, then she clapped with a kind of disappointed pleasure, flexing her own delicate feet with empathy as I skipped around the room.

  I was to pas-de-bas with a dozen small girls in front of an ageing woman called Miss Palms in a heavyweight tweed suit, who was lame in one leg and who tapped time with a thorny stick.

  I had become a dour-looking child. I had a heavy fringe and protruding eyes. My jowls were heavy, and I had developed a sophisticated sneer. I used it lavishly in those first sessions at the dancing school. The piano player’s fingers creaked and we hardly ever saw her face; only her hunched brown cardigan. The room was wooden, like a ship, and once in it we were trapped and couldn’t escape. I danced with a girl who had no fingers. Her hand kept slipping out of my grasp. We were told to be trees, or animals, but I felt more like a bird trapped in a closed room. Sometimes I ran blindly into the walls and saw stars. After a few weeks I was experiencing my usual bouts of contempt and disappointment.

  I knew this got on Jean’s nerves. She wanted me to be wholehearted. She wanted me to enjoy the things she’d laboured for; social ease, accomplishment, sharp toes. Throughout each lesson Jean sat gazing crazily at my legs, nodding encouragement, biting her increasingly shredded lip.

  (What was the matter with her? Did she miss George? Did she have regrets? Why didn’t she do something with her life?)

  One day Miss Palms lost her temper with the piano player because she wouldn’t play the polka fast enough. She grabbed her by the back of her neck, and threatened her with her stick. We stood and sniggered, as if it was a joke. The piano player was not amused, and slammed her fists down on the black keys, making an ugly jarring chord. There was a pause that was the colour of thunder. Then Miss Palms growled, ‘You’re being a naughty girl, Jemima,’ and we all stopped giggling and froze into the shapes of gravestones.

  What were the mothers doing? They have disintegrated in the picture; women with no opinions. Perhaps they were laughing? None of us was. Our childish sense of survival forbade it. Maybe they were scared too?

  Miss Palms dragged Jemima from her stool by her ear and displayed her limp and cardiganned shape to the class, Jemima was pleading with her.

  ‘Don’t Florence, please!’

  She shook her as if she was a mongrel, and her spectacles fell off and lay on the floor like broken bones. Miss Palms stared at them and then at us, then blinked. We all waited.

  When she finally dropped her, with a look of utter disgust, Jemima sagged down to the size of a child. Miss Palms sent her sidling back to the piano, her figure turned from brown to pale grey. She played then, as if her life depended upon it, slamming her poor old fingers down on the keys. The polka was transformed into a discordant, modern jangle. We danced as if we were possessed; stamping the splintering floorboards beneath our feet.

  Miss Palms wanted everything to belong to her. I only wanted Jean and the balmy scent of her bed at night. The shape of her blond head asleep on the white pillow. I was dancing my heart out just to stay there.

  After the violent incident at the dancing class I always associated the polka with fear and suppressed violence, even though, as time went on, I realized that things were not quite as they seemed.

  I even began to understand the nature of dancing.

  One day, Jean and I were halfway down the lane when Jean realized th
at I had left a ballet shoe behind and made me run back to collect it.

  The room smelt of coffee and cigarettes. I peeped around the door. Miss Palms and Jemima were dancing a waltz, and the piano was closed. Jemima had taken her cardigan off, and was wearing a short sleeved flowery blouse with a lace collar. The only sound was their feet and the drip of taps from the toilet. They both had their eyes shut tight. Two cigarettes lay closely in an ashtray, with entwining threads of blue smoke ringing up to the ceiling.

  I stood there, entranced. Jemima opened one eye and her expression told me to leave before I was seen. I ran out of the building, somehow exhilarated and relieved.

  I did learn to dance. I have certificates to prove it. But the thing I learnt from Miss Palms was far more mysterious. It was as if I had seen something I wanted, but it was so far away that I couldn’t quite make it out.

  We were coming up to the exams, and Miss Palms was teaching us the cha-cha-cha, as well as encouraging competence in free expression. Free expression, like all dancing, was not what I thought it was. We were told to maintain a certain attitude or Miss Palms’ thick stick would make marks in the parquet floor and thud out a reproval. We weren’t allowed to flap our arms, but had to move them as if they were underwater.

  The mothers sat nervously at the back of the hall while we enacted this complex ritual, comparing our skills. Jean often looked disappointed.

  When it was time for the cha-cha-cha exam we waited in a queue outside the door, while the hall shook with raunchy music and small girls’ feet. I was last, and I saw Miss Palms yawning as I walked through the door. A tall woman in a pink acrylic suit smiled at me. She was the examiner. I was meant to dance with her. I could hardly reach her waist. I was supposed to curtsey but when the music started I dropped dramatically to my knees in a gesture of grand adoration. The woman in pink giggled. We had to start the whole thing again.