Crocodile Soup

by Julia Darling

  Dancing with the lady in pink was oddly pleasurable. My head sank into the pillow of her belly which gurgled with giggling, and she tasted of freshly sprung corsets. She was being the man, and all I had to do was follow. It occurred to me that all I ever wanted was this kind of leadership and my feet fell in with hers mesmerically. I didn’t want the dance to stop, but it did, with a resounding cha-cha-cha and I was sent away, leaving the women to confer on the subject of my swivels and turns.

  Later I got a certificate with a seal on the top. I had passed with honours. I stuck it to a wall in the attic, but it soon dropped down onto the floor and became mildewy.

  When my feet got too large for my ballet shoes I stopped dancing, although I still have dreams about free expression, in which I become a belly dancer with the pink lady and our inner thighs begin to sweat as we roll our bellies to the flutes of snake charmers.

  Harry

  I went to the corner shop to buy cigarettes. I was off work again. Harry was everywhere, lurking in the canopies of car parks, looking up at empty conker trees. He circled the dental hospital with its green windows and cabinets full of molars. He poked in the skips with his mottled nose. At night he guarded the back lanes and incinerators. He ambled to Jimmy’s shop and I heard him making lewd remarks about young nurses; filling the long uneventful nights. I never went back on Monday, like Harry told me to. I watched for the women, ready to pounce, to catch them red-handed.

  I spoke to Harry as I passed him in the back lane. His head must have been on the boil all the time, because the balaclava was so thick. No wonder he thought of sex in his woolly world. He stopped me and beckoned conspiratorially. I ambled up to him, curious. He pointed at the tarmac, and we both examined the remains of a stolen car; a small pile of blue, shattered glass, an emergency breakdown card, a keyring with a blurred photograph of a child encased in plastic, and the tracks of tyres swerving on full throttle. There was a moment’s silence; a homage to the excitement of the thieves and the euphoria of hitting the coast road at ninety miles an hour.

  Harry said, ‘Happened ten minutes ago. Brand new Nissan.’

  I liked Harry. I found this surprising, as he was a man with no morals. He seemed lonely as an isolated virus. When he slept, back on a green settee in Westerhope, he said he dreamt of his ancestors who were Roman soldiers guarding the wall in a dreary line, their thighs freezing under their tunics. It was in his blood to guard places and things, he told me. His father had been in charge of the city’s car parks. His grandfather had carried Victorian explorers’ handbags while they swayed into the desert on camels.

  Provoked by this intimacy I started to explain our first meeting, and my concerns over garbage that was not mine. About the glum women who never spoke, who came from nowhere. I even told him about the lottery grant, and the Head Curator, and the Egyptian mummy who nobody cared about. As I gabbled on a sea wind gathered and blew us closer together. I could see the tyre marks on Harry’s cheeks and his pink eyes peeping.

  ‘What do you think is in those rubbish bags?’ he asked mysteriously, as if he already knew the answer.

  Bad experiences. What else could come from a state psychiatric unit but terror and misery... mothers’ grimaces, fathers’ infidelities, a nightmare concerning a Persian carpet and a smothered kitten, a Catholic childhood, or raw silence?

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t like to think about it,’ I said eventually.

  ‘You should be careful rats don’t gnaw the corners,’ he murmured. There’s plenty of rats here. They play together at night. I see them larking about. Whatever is in the bags could leak out. Maybe it already has. You could catch it.’

  ‘Why don’t you speak to them?’

  ‘Rats don’t speak.’

  ‘Not the rats, the cleaners.’

  Them too. They won’t even give me a cup of coffee.’

  Harry lit up a Silk Cut; pulling his balaclava down and exposing a frail moustache.

  ‘I don’t go in there unless I have to,’ he whispered. There was a man went in, looking for a dentist. Got the wrong place. I knew him personally. He had an abscess in his molar and he was howling with the pain. It took him hours to get out, because they got out the forms, and no-one knew what he was talking about so they mistook him for a loony. He nearly ended up in Ward One Hundred.’ Harry paused for effect. ‘But he kept opening his mouth and showing them his teeth and in the end they let him go and he ran out and found his car had been stolen. It was a Nissan, like this one.’ Harry shook his head, relishing the moment, exhaling smoke like a car exhaust.

  Then he whispered in my ear, ‘That’s what they’re like in there. Unsympathetic.’

  He turned and whistled, as if he had a dog.

  Walking through the smells of amalgam and surgical spirit, skirting the black bags that slumped on the streets and listening fearfully for rats’ teeth, I went home, worried.

  Frank

  ‘Are you there Frank? I can hear your tin cup scraping across your stubble. Frank?’

  ‘Gert, why don’t you calm down?’

  ‘What do you think about Frank?’

  ‘Shades of light. Breath.’

  ‘Do you think about the old house?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s incidental. Unimportant.’

  ‘How are things?’

  ‘Same.’

  ‘Does anyone converse?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘What’s the point of it then?’

  ‘There is no point.’

  ‘Do you ever miss George?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I got a letter from Jean.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘What shall I do?’

  ‘Whatever you want.’

  ‘You’re no help are you?’

  ‘You could write back.’

  ‘But I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t face it.’

  ‘Don’t then.’

  ‘You are no help at all.’

  ‘Look, will you stop disturbing me. I’ll have to start the whole ritual again now.’

  ‘What ritual?’

  ‘Everything. Washing. Meditating. You know.’

  Eva And The Cream Bun

  I had noticed Eva was sighing a lot. Her straight back had a subtle sag and her coffee was slightly less hot.

  Then I saw her standing at the flower stall. She was wearing a tailored jacket that flared at the waist and a cobalt blue scarf that spread over her shoulders in a wave. She was buying some irises. I had meant to glide past her without being seen, but I sailed too close and she looked up and waved.

  I stopped and said, ‘Eva?’

  I was filled with guilt then, because I looked her straight in the face and knew I had somehow deceived her. I had thought about her so much I no longer knew her.

  ‘These are for my bloody mother. It’s her birthday,’ she said.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘She’s seventy-six.’

  ‘Your mother!’ I echoed.

  ‘That’s her name. Iris,’ said Eva.

  Then she looked at a man’s watch on her perfect wrist and up at me.

  ‘Do you fancy a coffee?’ she said.

  I was very hot. The back of my neck was vibrating like a cat on heat. I remembered a café near by with small tables and bone china cups. I mumbled, ‘Yes,’ and dumbly walked beside Eva who began to chatter. After that it was easy because all I had to do was nod while Eva talked. We ordered a pot of tea for two and two portions of gluey cake. Eva played with the cream that lay in a glut over hers and then pushed it over to me. She was preoccupied, upset, and enigmatic. It was like winning a date with a famous person. Maybe she thought I was boring.

  ‘You’re from the south aren’t you?’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘Well that doesn’t matter to me. I don’t mean to be rude, but people round here are
like that... about southerners... I never thought of you as a southerner. I’ve watched you at the museum. You look foreign. Did you know that?’

  ‘Ah.’ Was that a compliment, or was she merely referring to my Germanic ankles?

  ‘Did you think I was crazy, when you saw me dancing?’

  ‘No, not at all. I thought I was seeing things.’

  ‘I was practising, that’s all. For a competition.’

  I raised my eyebrows.

  ‘Amateur ballroom,’ said Eva brightly.

  There was a creamy pause, then she said, ‘Thank you for the flowers. No-one’s given me any flowers for years.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’

  ‘It wasn’t some gimmick, was it? The Head Curator didn’t tell you to buy them did he?’

  ‘No!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘It’s just, well, he’s got some weird ideas hasn’t he?’

  I nodded, and told her about the voodoo objects. Eva shook her head in disbelief. Then she wiped her mouth with a napkin and leant towards me.

  ‘I’ve never been anywhere. Other countries came to me. On boats. I’m right near the quay... in that big block of flats with the clock that you can see from the other side of the river. My daddy was a watchman, and my mam made pies. Fish pies. Do you like fish? You should come up to ours and have some fish pie.’

  ‘I’d love to.’

  ‘Except she’s a bit of a handful.’ Eva pointed at her head. ‘Barmy.’ Then, ‘Why did you give me the flowers?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘Why not!’ I shrugged.

  Eva frowned. She was trying to work me out, looking at me the way I once looked at an undated artifact.

  ‘Chrysanthemums are my favourite. Irises symbolize death. Chrysanths are all about life and change and that kind of stuff. I don’t like irises.’

  ‘So why are you giving irises to your mother?’

  ‘They’re her favourite flower, that’s why.’

  We paused. Eva looked embarrassed. ‘Do you get out much? I go out with Gwenny, my friend.’

  ‘Your friend? With ginger hair?’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I saw you meeting her.’

  Watching me were you?’

  I shook my head, unnerved. ‘No, I was just on my way home,’

  Eva grinned suddenly, sitting back in her chair.

  ‘We go to the clubs... Fat Betty, the Continental... and get pissed, you know. I hope you don’t mind me talking like this.’ She waited for a reaction but I was muted by a large walnut.

  ‘The truth is I’m putting off going home. She won’t go out, so that means we both stay in... and I’m in charge of the birthday celebrations. I made a cake last night. It’s nice. It’s a fruit cake. But all she’s got is the telly. I shouldn’t be going on like this. When she walks she says it’s like walking on knives. Like the little mermaid. Walking on knives! It’s Gert isn’t it? Not Miss Hardcastle. Can I call you Gert? It’s a nice name. The truth is, about the flowers, that I wish she was dead. She was a bloody awful mother and now I’m stuck with her.’

  I took a large gulp of tea, and opened my mouth to speak, but the tea had gone down the wrong way and was driving a ravine somewhere up the back of my nasal passages. I started to splutter. Tea seemed to be dripping out of my ears. Eva stood up and landed on my side of the table. She bent over me. Her lips were near my ear. Her hand was flat on the centre of my back. She tilted me forward and I started to breathe. A steady river of tea dripped from my nose and ran in a brown thread over the tablecloth. I could smell pastry and security on Eva’s scarf.

  ‘It’s all right, Gert,’ she said. ‘Breathe slowly. It’s only a hiccup.’

  Dusty Springfield

  For a brief period in this chronology I became a girl in a sticky-out dress with an indulgent mother. The cha-cha-cha certificate had helped. I was making an effort. Jean wanted to school me in all the arts that she had neglected. I was a debutante before I reached the age of six.

  The piano was a gift from George. It came in an African envelope in the form of a sales receipt. He had bought me a baby grand with a velvet stool. It was delivered the next day by tone-deaf men with stumpy legs. I made Jean check inside it for crocodiles, which she related to Mabel on the phone with much giggling.

  And then she telephoned Mrs Hesp.

  Mrs Hesp had blue fingers, the colour of varicose. She was my piano teacher. She put the metronome on the piano and set it off like a brisk disapproving tongue. We were stuck in the scale of C. Her house was a hole with a piano in it. I was at the bottom trying to play ‘The Cuckoo’, my fingers clumping over the wide white notes.

  These are the words I learnt from Mrs Hesp; manuscript, cleft, lento, bars, flats, sharps - the hard words of musical agony.

  At home I was playing a different scale altogether. Jean played music hall songs in wild scattering chords. She got lost in the tunes, fumbling and tripping, lolloping from chorus to verse. After she left the room the piano would hum with nostalgia. Then Frank would start, crashing his spidery hands on to the aching keys, playing Schoenberg, and disjointed modern jazz, fighting with the keys, bruising them and making them defiant.

  It was my piano after all, not theirs. When the room was empty I would creep in, in my Shetland jersey and forget-me-not skirt. I would play stories. I played the story of the brave girl who destroyed a city, starting with the tinkling of paraffin flames, or the love story of the brave girl who leapt an impossible chasm to reach her sweetheart. I played until the room was full of me. Someone would always come in (was it Carmen, or Jean?) and tell me to shut up, and by then it was usually night although the curtains weren’t drawn, but I had spun myself so high and taut that I couldn’t come down. I was mute with music. They would slam the piano lid down on my fingers to stop me.

  That was why I got sent to the piano hole to see Mrs Hesp and to play ‘The Cuckoo’ in the scale of C. It was an exercise in repression.

  I had reached school age. Try and imagine the sum of my parts, with my cha-cha-cha diploma, and my unsettling relationship with Jean who had weak ankles. My father was lost to crocodiles. We used his letters to light fires, as the paper was very dry and inflammable.

  The school had wire all round it. It was high up, above the town. Through a six-foot fence I could see a row of terraced houses with meek curtains and polished letter boxes. I whispered to passing strangers on the way to the shops to get me out. I tried to pass messages to them written on scraps of toilet paper, but they didn’t turn their heads.

  I wore a hat in the shape of a door wedge with thin elastic under my chin. Frank had a flat cap. Our clothes were weighty with name tapes. We stood in the playground trying to be invisible, drinking from dwarfed bottles of creamy milk with straws. Our ties were strangling us, but if you took your tie off then Mr Whitebait, the headmaster, led you to his parlour with the picture of Winston Churchill above the mantelpiece and attacked the palms of your hands with a baton. I couldn’t believe that he dared do this to Frank. Frank was Einstein. After the beating Frank’s face turned so white that it glowed at night.

  The school was very expensive. They knew nothing. The nature teacher was drunk and couldn’t say the word primrose. ‘Primrose,’ I said to myself, and wished for oblivion.

  I was so well behaved that adults loathed me. I was good in an artificial way. I crossed my arms as if I had a rifle stuck in the base of my spine. I listened so hard the words became foreign. I did my homework twice. That is why Mr Whitebait made a scapegoat of me. I had a victim mentality. I liked to suffer and I selflessly believed it took the spotlight off Frank.

  The other children were strangely vacuous, with uniforms that looked as if they were cut out of a catalogue. They had straight hair and teeth and carbolic cheeks. At playtime they ran in circles as if powered by an invisible motor. They were the progeny of policemen and traffic wardens, reared under the auspices of the Church of England. They had mothers shaped like caravans.

  At first, wh
en Mr Whitebait made me chew the chalk I thought he was joking. He was talking about a pop group called the Monkees. He said, ‘Who listens to the Monkees?’ and I stretched my arm high up in the air, because although I didn’t listen to the Monkees I thought it was a yes question.

  ‘I expect you watch “Ready Steady Go”?’ he went on, pleasantly.

  All the little policemen looked at me.

  ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’ I spluttered.

  ‘And who is your favourite singer Gert?’

  ‘Dusty.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Dusty Springfield.’

  Frank shook his head.

  Mr Whitebait turned his smile upside down and took a stick of chalk out of his pocket.

  ‘Chew on that Gert,’ he snarled. ‘And consider the eleven plus.’

  It tasted sweet, like candy dust. I swallowed most of it. The class roared with laughter. I laughed too. I swallowed it. Dusty Springfield.

  When Winston Churchill died his big blubbery face was in all the newspapers. Mr Whitebait told us to cut him out and stick him on our bedroom walls. I cut him out twice and for days he stared down at me in duplicate as if I was Hitler. I asked Jean to take him down, because I didn’t dare. She scrumpled him up callously and said, ‘That’s enough of you and your sleep walking!’

  I asked her what she meant

  ‘You,’ she said. ‘You’ve been walking up and down the stairs at night waking up poor Frank. Don’t you remember? I got up and took you back to bed and you said you were looking for a book, but it was nonsense.’

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘I said, “What book?” and you said, “The Complete Works of Dusty Springfield.”’

  Around this time Frank wrote to Jean to ask if he could see a psychiatrist. He was sitting in the top branches of a beech tree at the end of the garden, waiting for a reply.

  But she just ironed handkerchiefs and changed the furniture around.

  The Third Letter

  Gert,

  Why haven’t you written? Are you still angry with me? I know we didn’t always get on, but you were such an imaginative and difficult child. I was very young. Surely after all this time you want to see me at least. I’m not a monster. I’m nearly sixty. I’ve got palpitations. Let’s forget the past and start again.