Crocodile Soup

by Julia Darling

  Perhaps you can’t forgive me for not getting in touch sooner. After you left home I was not myself. I fell in love with Cameron. Surely you must know how that feels? I forgot everything. I wanted to put it all behind me. I had to get out of the house.

  I shan’t bore you with sordid details, but put it this way, I am in a desperate situation. The landlord says I can do cleaning work for him, temporarily, but I can hardly bear even the smell of the streets around here. It stinks of trains and chips. I never noticed when Cameron was alive.

  Perhaps you’re not a letter writer? I’m sorry I’m not on the phone. Please write soon.

  Jean

  Christmas

  What should I give Eva for Christmas? An ornament? A book? A pot of honey? Or shall I buy her a card, and if so, what shall I write inside it, and what should the card signify? Should it be flowery, serious, light-hearted, large, small or abstract? What do you give a love object?

  What do you give someone you don’t really know?

  I was sitting on an underground train, concentrating on this question. It was snowing and the passengers waiting on the platforms were solid and furry. The carriage was crammed with pensioners, defensively clutching concessionary passes, with mighty felt hats pinned to their heads and overlarge gloves. When they moved there was a sound of crackling polythene. They looked at the snow with disgust, and stamped their feet on the floor to shake the flakes off. Christmas approached like a tunnel.

  What should I give her? When I got off the train I was no clearer, and it was only when I began a tedious walk through a shopping mall that I decided to buy us both a holiday.

  George Comes Home

  Dear George,

  I have reached a decision. You should see the way that Gert bites her nails and mutters to herself. Frank is also going through a difficult time. He will only look at me through a telescope. You see, George, when we married I wanted a proper home, but what have I got? Children who never smile with psychiatric disorders and a sofa I can never sit on.

  It can’t go on. You must come home.

  When George came back the house was neurotic and tidy.

  When he stepped off the train we didn’t recognize him. He was red and scaly from the neck up, and his hair had grown thick and ragged. When he saw us he sighed before waving.

  At home he dispensed strange ornaments; skeletal wooden horses, wiry African heads, bead pictures, necklaces and bright blankets. He gave me a stick with a long mane of hair stuck to it that I swished about, catching the back of Frank’s knees. I asked him about the crocodiles, but his own face had closed down, as if all his wires had been snipped. I wondered if his brain had boiled in the hot sun. I was unsure if the man sitting at the end of the table was really my father. Jean served up boiled beetroot and roast beef and he looked at his plate as if it was an impossible problem.

  And Jean acted happy and lit a candle in the centre of the table which reflected in the pupils of her eyes, like love.

  The Lost Au Pair

  Next thing I knew we were on holiday. It was supposed to be Jean and George’s second honeymoon. We were staying in a pink cottage by the sea. Botanical plants grew on ledges in the cliffs above us. The sea was so blue it looked artificial. It was in a seaside resort with shells encrusted in the walls. A spindly pier stretched out into an impenetrable mist. There was a book shop that sold postcards of women with vast fleshy bottoms, and encyclopedias, shackles and sailors’ hats, and sweets shaped like pastel-coloured pebbles. Boats jiggled together and sung in the evenings. A toy train chugged along the promenade driven by a man with no legs in a kiss-me-quick hat. Sometimes a cannon went off and it felt like our insides had sunk to the bottom of the sea.

  Everywhere was steep. The waves crashed against the harbour wall and curled over themselves. Frank said there was too much noise. He was trying to write a novel. I looked over his shoulder and saw that his writing had almost disappeared. It was just spiders’ footprints now. When he wasn’t writing he played silent music on a bent piano in the front room. The sofa was high backed and deep and I sat there watching him. He hunched over the keys, concentrating, and from behind he looked as if he was sobbing.

  I followed him everywhere. I couldn’t help it. I wanted to talk to him about Jean and George. Frank knew something I didn’t. He said I smelt revolting, but I still hung about waiting. Frank had changed a lot. He was trying to be like other boys, but he wasn’t. He had bruises behind his eyes. George treated him like a girl. He called me Gertie and taught me nautical terms. He was quite different since he’d been away. He tried to introduce himself to us every day, but we turned up our noses and wouldn’t give him even a courtesy nod. The salt blew the crocodile scales off his brow. We looked up at him humourlessly and longingly. He was the one who tried to keep the conversation going over cottage pie. Jean just looked into saucepans and listened to angry music on the radio; her face as doom laden as a black sail. Something was up.

  When everyone was asleep I pulled on my shabby holiday clothes and walked out of the cottage. I went to the shingle beach and shouted. The waves egged me on. I could hear Frank dreaming; of places he had never been; of planets and universes. Then I saw a lonely woman on the two-bit jetty that lunged halfway into the harbour. She was crying and staggering like a sailor whose boat had steamed away without her. I called to her, but she didn’t turn round, so I couldn’t see her face, and I didn’t think I wanted to see it, because I wouldn’t know what to say. Whoever it was, they were dangerous, so I made myself forget what I saw, and the smell of the sea that particular night. Babies’ tears, that’s what it smelt like.

  Then a Swedish au pair girl turned up with a white leather suitcase and dark glasses and we all stared at her as she sat in the front room of the dank cottage, wondering why she was there. She didn’t match the furniture. George treated her like something he’d just pulled out of a bran tub. He said that now Jean could rest, as she’d been having trouble with her nerves, but as soon as Oona arrived Jean became twitchy and restless.

  One day we were all on the beach, in the steep seaside place; George with his porous nose, Jean, Frank and me. Next to our huddled group two small boys with thin arms and sharp wet legs were digging sand as if they were possessed.

  I was wearing a puckered bathing costume with a limp pink bow. Oona lay some distance from us; in the pose of a foreign postcard, wearing a white bikini that fitted her like a seal skin. George was reading an almanac and fingering a corned beef sandwich. He was stuck in a deck-chair. He wouldn’t take off his shoes. He said he must go somewhere soon. Jean had nested beyond a breakwater. She was reading the obituaries in The Times, and her hair was contained in a daunting black scarf, which made her a landmark, even though she tried to be unnoticeable. She scowled at the boys ferreting in the sand, throwing up grainy storms with tin spades. The sand was black and their puny limbs were smudged with it. Jean ordered them off and fingered a Dunhill cigarette in the bottom of her beach bag. It was common to smoke outside. Frank was constructing an oil rig from lollipop sticks. You would only know he was part of our family by the way he pretended not to know us.

  Oona knew how to sunbathe. It was in her genes. She lay on a lilo behind a frontier of suntan lotions and had a gadget, a pulpy plastic envelope, that rested heavily over her eyes. We wanted the lilo. It belonged to us, and Oona had plumped herself on it. Jean glanced at her with contempt. Oona, who George had got from an agency, didn’t even know how to clean a lavatory. She was already homesick, and only pretended to love children in letters. I ambled about, looking at Oona, looking at Jean. I sidled up to Frank, who turned his acned back to me. I sloped back to Oona and tapped her firm, greasy thigh. She took off her eye cover and scowled. I attempted to explain the word SWIMMING to her, using arm movements. I pointed at the lilo and then to the bow on my chest. Oona shook her head. Jean was asleep now, and the death columns were blowing in wheels along the beach.

  I started all over again with Oona, who wiped her arms with
white cream, then got up when I was in mid-stroke, picked up the lilo and catwalked down to the calmish sea. She launched herself into the shallows and floated face up with her arms drooping languidly over the sides.

  It was all very quiet. George’s deck-chair was empty, and a seagull carried the remains of his corned beef sandwich high up in the sky. Jean was in the fathoms of slumber. I buried my leg in the sand, until it felt numb and dislocated from the rest of my body. I imagined that I was a one-legged person and waited for a kind passer-by to feel sorry on my behalf. Hours passed.

  Then someone saw an orange cruise liner sliding along the top edge of the sea; like a ship in a novelty pen. The group of children all stopped digging, and got up to shout and wave, as if we were shipwrecked, desperate to be heard. I wrenched my dead limb from its cold grave and limped hopefully down to the sea. Soon there was an almighty wash and vast booming waves were crashing along the shoreline. We applauded, as if it was a passing parade, and ran about in the froth. Then, gradually, the wash slipped back to nothing. That’s when Frank piped up, ‘Where is Oona?’

  We craned our necks and fanned our eyes.

  Frank shrugged and picked up a pebble in the shape of a heart. I tugged at Jean’s black headscarf and she slapped my hand viciously and woke up.

  ‘Where’s our lilo?!’ I screamed piercingly.

  One side of Jean’s face was red and creased from where it had pressed against the breakwater. She was so angry that she pulled her cigarette out of the bag and lit it, trembling still from a nightmare about a stain on a Jaeger jacket.

  ‘What?’ she snarled. She did look common.

  ‘Oona’s floated off on our lilo,’ Frank and I bleated in squeaking unison.

  ‘For God’s sake!’

  The tide had seeped away by now. The family was a long way from anything. From the promenade we were a little clump of people alone in a daunting expanse.

  Jean stood up and shrieked. Even the youths in the penny arcade heard her and the seaside town turned its head. She ran, still shrieking, towards the pier. Frank tried to roll himself into an invisible ball as she passed. The small boys cried and hunched their shoulders. I ran through the dipping rock pools calling, ‘Ooonaaa, Oooonaaa!’

  I sounded like a sea-bird. I was nearly hoarse.

  ‘Ooooooonaaaaaa!’

  On the quayside there was a dull bang and a flare whooshed above us. We cheered. A posse of men in yellow plastic anoraks galloped out of nowhere, crushing Frank’s oil rig with big leathery Wellington boots. They carried an inflatable lifeboat, and disappeared into the sea after Oona.

  George came back. His breath smelt fruity and he had mislaid his almanac. He squinted at the horizon and coughed. Jean put on his large flecked sweater and walked up and down like a hungry wolf. She told George to take us home, but he shook his big head. When Jean was like this it was better to do nothing.

  When the men returned, some hours later, and the sun had quite gone, and the sea purred, and the family was a line of cold people wrapped in wet towels who waited, they brought back the deflated lilo. One of the men held it up, as if it was a skin.

  ‘He’s got the lilo!’ chirped one of the boys helpfully.

  Jean whispered the Lord’s Prayer, and sent George tiptoeing off to the police station.

  At the cottage we ate fish fingers.

  I asked Jean, as she scoured the frying pan, ‘Where is Sweden?’

  ‘Look in the atlas,’ she snapped and blew her nose on a dishcloth.

  I went upstairs to the cabinet where the encyclopedias were kept. Oona’s bedroom door was open; it smelt of wet bathing costumes in there, but I didn’t go in.

  I looked at the green map of Sweden; its head hung over the Baltic Sea. Like Oona, it was just a shape.

  Frank was mending the lilo with a bicycle repair kit.

  The next day Jean wrote a letter to Sweden. Her face was a church. George took us to a tearoom where there were cakes as big as bricks. We each drank a milkshake with a long straw and looked up mournfully at the waitress. It was meant to be a treat.

  But for a long time I kept finding bits of Oona; her mascara, her raincoat, her Lypsyl.

  Frank Disagrees

  ‘Gert. Stop it.’

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘Getting things out of proportion.’

  ‘Do you mean Oona?’

  ‘She was homesick. She didn’t stay very long.’

  ‘Are you saying that she never drowned?’

  ‘Of course she didn’t. She lost our lilo, that’s all. Forgot about it and it drifted out to sea. You always make tragedies out of things.’

  ‘So what happened to her?’

  ‘She packed her bags after about a week and went home. Jean didn’t like her.’

  ‘And George did?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m sure. I can’t bear it, the way you get everything wrong. I think you should write to Jean after all. She is your mother.’

  ‘Yours too.’

  ‘But I’ve got nothing. You’ve got a job and everything. Don’t you want to make friends with her?’

  ‘I just can’t.’

  ‘You have still got a job haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Go back to your breathing Frank.’

  ‘I am, don’t worry. One more thing. Stop remembering me as a kind of dysfunctional egg head.’

  ‘You were.’

  ‘I was just a little boy Gert, just like you were a little girl.’

  And a door slammed somewhere in space, forcing me back into the unpleasant reality of the day ahead.

  Learning To Communicate

  That morning the Head Curator made us all have a meeting. We sat around the long wooden table in the Victorian conference room and Eva brought in coffee on a tray. Everyone gazed expectantly at the Head Curator who was looking at his hands on the flat table. I noticed how hairy his fingers were. They were almost apelike. He told us that he had been on a course to learn how to communicate properly with others. Then he asked us all to hold hands. I was sitting with Theobald on one side and Marcus the botanist on the other. Neither of them had hands that I would normally consider holding. Tentatively, I asked ‘Why?’, and the Head Curator frowned at me as if I had burped or farted.

  After we had held hands, he ordered us to turn to the person on our left and tell them our worries.

  ‘How long have you got?’ I smirked, turning to Marcus who had gone a deep shade of red.

  ‘I’m worried I might lose my job,’ whispered Marcus. ‘I’ve got five children.’

  ‘Yes,’ I murmured, sympathetically.

  ‘What about you?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m worried about everything,’ I told him, feeling tearful.

  ‘Five minutes is up,’ boomed the Head Curator. ‘How does everyone feel?’

  ‘Great!’ announced Theobald, who had just confessed his worries about his knees to Carol from the office. She in turn had unloaded her anger about dog mess in the area where she lived.

  ‘So, on with the business!’ announced the Head Curator. ‘Redundancies!’

  At this point I drifted off, too aware of Marcus’s repressed sobbing to engage in the discussion. I suddenly remembered another incident, and another museum.

  History Lessons

  I was on a school trip, walking down a steep hill with all the other children, in a line, on our way to look at Mr Whitebait’s version of history. It was autumn again, and the trees were heavy with bulging conkers that we were not allowed to collect. They hung above our heads in inviting prickly balls. We were supposed to walk in a military fashion, with our chins abnormally high, and our feet stamping the slimy leaves on the pavement. The nature teacher clung to the rear of this parade, staggering slightly, and Mr Whitebait led us, chanting war songs and slashing the path with his ferocious cane.

  We walked along by the river which was overflowing, and stared at the angry swans down by the sluice. I stopped suddenly to
point at a magical trout that was perfectly still in the rushing water, causing a pile-up and a boy called Roger to fall over and hurt his knee. The fish darted away. I stared at where it had been dumbly, ignoring Roger’s roars of pain as he picked the grit out of his skinny knee. The nature teacher slurred ‘Oh, Gert!’ and comforted little Roger who had blood on his sock. I apologized several times, and a flock of swans glided up and listened to me, cynically. Then Mr Whitebait, who was miles ahead, roared at us, and we had to hobble on.

  I began to worry about the insides of the sandwiches that Jean had packed that morning. She tended to hurl expensive ingredients in between stale bread, with slices of hard butter. I didn’t want anyone else to see how inept my mother was at the basic domestic task of lunch-making.

  We traipsed over a narrow bridge made of twigs, through a geriatric gateway between two flint walls, and past the lily pond where I had met the stranger. The goldfish goggled at us. The water lilies trembled.

  ‘This’, announced Mr Whitebait, ‘is the site of the Battle of the Mercenaries.’

  We wrote this down on small notepads. I wished someone had told me earlier. I looked down into the water and saw that the gloomy bed was indeed matted with soldiers’ hair.

  Then we were walking down my street, and to my embarrassment ordered to stop in a line to look at my house, while Mr Whitebait and the nature teacher pointed to the plaque above the front door. I kept silent, hoping that Mr Whitebait wouldn’t embarrass me, but of course he did. Frank and I had to stand and answer questions. Luckily none was asked. The windows were reassuringly blank and uninformative. Then Mr Whitebait blew a whistle and the front door opened, and Jean and George were standing there, waving. Jean was wearing a lace apron, and had flour on her chin. George had his arm loosely around her shoulders, and he was laughing. Perhaps he had oiled his hair, because it lay on his head with the shine of a patent shoe.