Crocodile Soup

by Julia Darling

  ‘I’ve got to get away from here,’ she said as she looked up towards the flats where she lived. ‘I’m going to die here if I’m not careful.’

  I didn’t have time to offer her an escape route. She was walking away, turning to wave at me as I sat staring at her with the taxi driver who was still talking about how to toilet train dogs. I would ask her tomorrow if she would come away with me. I knew she would say yes.

  Daily Petals

  We passed the eleven-plus. The exam was held in a vast vacant swimming pool that smelt of verrucas. The exam paper was aquatic blue and the questions swam in front of my eyes in a shoal.

  When Mr Whitebait told us the results we were all hot and dehydrated from hurdling around the school field. The ones that failed loitered at the back of the small crowd of panting eleven-year-olds, their tails between their legs. Their faces turned from policeman blue to secondary grey and even I, Gert, felt sorry for them and embarrassed. Mr Whitebait smiled at Frank and said he had written himself off the paper and into the universe. He patted my head and called us the bright twins. Frank beamed at him with undisguised hatred. Mr Whitebait had shrunk and his skin was papery and yellow. I had an image of scrumpling him up and burning him slowly, like Jean had with Winston Churchill.

  That night George announced that Frank would be sent to an expensive school beyond the city walls. I would go to the grammar school for girls. Neither of us protested. Neither of us wanted to go to school.

  Soon Frank disappeared. There was a photograph of him wearing a multi-folded gown, on the mantelpiece in George’s parlour. He held a book in his hand that he pretended to read.

  Before he went we sat in the Furthest Nursery listening to a reel-to-reel tape recorder. His face was longer now, and had no childish neatness left. A moustache shadowed his upper lip. It was rare to see his face full on. No-one knew how to talk to Frank. At meals he crouched with his fingers over his ears as if he was listening to the palms of his hands. Sometimes I felt as if Frank and I were drowning in watery silence, and I tried putting my hands to my ears to see if I could hear the same things that he did. I think I heard figures adding themselves together, and then splitting apart. We listened to Captain Beefhart. Frank made maps of his songs.

  Frank was sent to a school where beating was on the syllabus. In 1900 there had been an orgy of flagellation in the great library. It was as if he was going to a castle with no drawbridge and a wide moat. Everyone had forgotten we were twins.

  Although the school was in a nearby town, Frank would be a boarder and would sleep in a dormitory and have cold baths. He would not be allowed to take his gown off except to play rugby and to sleep. I was sure that Captain Beefhart would not agree with this type of education.

  After Frank went I listened for him, in the hollows of my ears. I could hear a game of cricket from behind a high wall. I hoped Frank was running, and that he wouldn’t get bowled out.

  Now I was just a girl in a sea of hefty girls. I had an echoing stutter and my chin was oily. My hair had grown into a long matted plait which I sucked obsessively. I had a hard boater to place on my head, a purse belt that I tightened nervously all day, great calves that had grown while I was asleep, and a blazer with steel sleeves. The school had a wide green lawn in front of its classical doors, and a palatial exterior, but round the back it was all Portacabins and hardboard, chipped toilet seats and leaking pipes. There were thousands of girls. The sixth-formers were angels. They flew about in groups. We were mice, scurrying from prefabricated hut to cloakroom, dragging our elasticated shoe bags behind us, squeaking.

  We coloured in a lot there. They were very keen on maps and shades of tundra. I gazed at the teachers’ faces, trying to understand what it was they wanted to impart to us. Some of them had mountainous noses, or wore dresses like Ordnance Survey maps. I followed the creases. When they talked of matrices and algebraic symbols I imagined them as people. When they told us of kings and queens, I saw them as algebraic symbols and mountain ranges. My first report said I was vague and academically confused.

  I turned to sport.

  Miss Reedcake, our form mistress and the PE mistress, led expeditions to a flat green field where we jumped over hurdles with pony keenness. We threw ourselves over the insubstantial pole of the high jump, and lurched and plummeted the length of the sandy long jump. We relayed in red-faced teams, and ran as if chased by poison arrows. Our knickers and vests were stained with pubescent juices.

  ‘Come on yellows, blues, greens and reds!’ commanded Miss Reedcake from a primary position under a twisted beech tree.

  I was discovering competitiveness and enthusiasm. It gushed through my young limbs in mercurial waves. It could make me over-emotional. The other girls had more restraint.

  Watching Francesca made me weak. Her legs and torso were hairy and unappealing when she stood still, but when she broke into a sprint she transformed into a female Apollo. Her chest pushed forward, and her chin flattened to meet the wind. On the grassy flat she soared ahead of the others. I screamed with delight, and Miss Reedcake slapped me and told me to contain myself. When I fainted as Francesca cut over the finishing line, she left me lying face down on the grass so that when I came round my features were imprinted with daisy petals.

  One day I bounced homewards from school, my hair sticking to my boater, ignoring the jeers from the jaded secondary school bus that passed each day, and walked through the churchyard with high grass and stopped, as I often did, to sit on a gravestone and cool off.

  At first I didn’t notice the man only a few yards from me. He was mottled and camouflaged by a lichen T-shirt. He scribbled in a small black book. He had dirty hair and the face of a crow. His knee bones jutted out under his trousers and he smirked as if he knew something I didn’t. He smoked a fat unwieldy cigarette.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked as I edged off. Lily ponds.

  ‘An artist.’ His eyes were tie-dyed.

  Mr Manners strolled past, wheezing heavily, carrying a spade and a length of rope.

  The artist dropped his fag end into the Pilgrim’s Well.

  It’s very hard to leave someone who stares. I ran off down the public footpath, but I was interested all the same.

  A Weekend Break

  ‘Eva, why don’t we go away?’

  We were standing with the Egyptian mummy eating a bag of boiled sweets. Eva had noble weepy eyes. The institute had become almost unbearable. Theobald had a mobile telephone that he held upside down. Eva had been summoned to the Head Curator’s office. The door had been tightly closed for ages. When she emerged she told me that she was on a month’s notice. Meanwhile I had been told to re-apply for my job.

  The Head Curator stormed about with a metaphorical dustpan and brush. He had swept out several antique filing systems and cleaning staff in the last week, and had a team of New Age archaeological and graphics graduates that flocked behind him with pocket-sized computers. The public had disappeared altogether and the quiet halls were filled with the sound of hammers. Eva was to be replaced by a dinosaur-shaped coffee machine, that dispensed lime green milkshakes. The shop was being stocked with miniature sarcophagi that were also pencil sharpeners, made in China.

  The mummy had a stoical expression. I came to tell her, fearfully, that she was to be hauled down from her serene corner and bunged in the foyer, where a waxwork of a surprised pyramid plunderer would bend over her poor corpse as if stumbling over it for the first time. I said to Theobald that the curse of the mummy might descend on us. He replied that it already had and mooched off to supervise his desecrated gnats.

  ‘Where?’ asked Eva tearfully.

  ‘Anywhere. For a few days... a weekend. I’ll pay. It will be my Christmas present to you. Please.’ A double room overlooking a lake, or the sea. I will profess everything, I thought. We will drink champagne in the en-suite bathroom. We will plan our future.

  ‘I’d have to ask Gwenny.’

  ‘I meant just me and you.’

  ‘Yes. I’
d have to ask Gwenny if she’d look after mother.’

  Then, ‘I’ll go with you Gert,’ purred Eva, and the mummy winked at me lewdly. Then Eva hugged me. For a second I plunged my head into her neck and grasped her taut waist. She hung on so tight I was beetroot red by the time she untied her arms.

  After work I met Eva in the travel agent’s. We pored over holiday catalogues for hours in a sweet fantasy of bounty adverts and striped umbrellas, but in the end we settled for Scarborough, for a long weekend break in a small hotel called the Navigator’s Compass that promised log fires and a choice of kippers at breakfast. It wasn’t quite what I’d intended but it was a cheap offer, and I heard the rusty merry-go-rounds creaking, the seagulls serenading, the chips dripping and hoped we shared a mutual view of charm. I paid the deposit.

  The next day I rashly bought a car. It was a low green colour with rusty wounds around its shanks. I bought it from a man in an alley who had an Alsatian in a wire cage mocking me throughout the whole cash transaction. I was in a kind of euphoric daze. I drove up and down the wide coast road that skirted the North Sea and where all I could see was road and sky. It was the road that connected Eva and I, like a thin grey thread of spittle from one mouth to another. It had four lanes and was famous for tearaways. There was a radio in my vehicle, which spluttered Radio One out in spasms. I found myself weeping over the more sentimental episodes of Our Tune. It was a truly optimistic time; that brief period of contentment before the Navigator’s Compass, in top gear, driving into the sharp sunset.

  The Fourth Letter

  Dear Gert,

  If you won’t write to me, then could you send me some money?

  I believe you have a good job. A few hundred pounds would be helpful.

  Don’t send cash, as the post often gets stolen. Send a cheque.

  I am your mother.

  Jean

  The Ornamental Shrub

  Sometimes I saw Rosa Van Durk, usually in the distance. She wobbled along on an inconceivable bicycle, sporting a Panama hat and singing German folk songs.

  I noticed how children stopped to stare at her, some shrinking behind their mother’s legs, others greeting her with shining eyes. The latter, I assumed, were her patients. To us she was a goddess.

  One day I saw her fall from her chariot of a bicycle. I ran up to her offering my arm. She had cut her knee and blood stained her tasteless trousers. She laughed at herself and tottered back onto her iron-clad feet. This incident worried me. Rosa Van Durk was mortal, and the guardian of my nightmares.

  Another morning I awoke from a dream in which I was wearing a white dress and dancing, but the dress and my skin were made of glass, and everyone pointed at my inner organs; my beating heart, my rubbery intestines, my pulsing liver. A violin player struck up a tune and played the highest note in the history of musical endeavour and the glass broke. I sat up clasping my stomach in terror. Looking down I saw a brown sticky stain on the bottom sheet. Although I had read about menstruation I assumed the blood would be bright red. I was worried that my insides were faulty, like the plumbing of our old house that choked and spluttered.

  It was dawn. The house was filled with cold, blue light. I climbed out of bed and searched for Jean, finding her at the bottom of the garden, planting an ornamental shrub. She was wearing a pair of baggy trousers, which were smudged with earth.

  ‘What do you think?’ she said, standing back.

  She wore rubber boots and gardening gloves, and her hair was tightly pinned down, as if it might rise up and rebel.

  The shrub was velvet green with scarlet flowers.

  ‘There’s blood on my sheets,’ I confessed mirthlessly.

  ‘Oh.’ Jean stared at me with interest.

  I followed her into the house. She was like an actress who had forgotten her lines. She put some bread in the toaster, then scraped Marmite on the toast and ate it slowly. I hung around vacantly waiting for advice, blood dripping down my inner legs.

  When her mouth was still full of breakfast she informed me, rather casually, that my insides were soft and organic, like the roots of shrubs.

  I gazed at her, chewing. George appeared with a bloodless face. She winked at me as if we had a mutual secret.

  Later she handed me a crumpled parcel full of large knickers made of hard material, and wads of white pads that looked like they were designed to bandage war wounds. The parcel looked old, as if it was something her mother had given her and that she had never used.

  Then, when she was sure that no-one was listening, she told me, in a loud, frantic whisper, that I should not dance, or pay any attention to the earthy stirrings of my body, and shook a finger at me as if I had already been disobedient, and shuddered.

  Bad News

  By the time I was thirteen, thanks to Rosa Van Durk, I had experienced some non-calamitous years. Exactly what happened in that time I’m not sure. I ate ice creams. I went to the cinema. I slept. And I assembled an enormous jigsaw depicting an ocean liner in a vast sea with a grey cloudless sky.

  One morning George was reading the daily newspaper. He smirked to himself. I was digging into a resistant grapefruit, praying that it might make me thinner. A butterfly caught in the room was flapping around George’s head. Several flies were nosing their way into the marmalade.

  It must have been summertime, although everywhere in our house was always dark.

  George said ‘Oh,’ and stood up, stunning the butterfly, and hitting his head on a dangling lamp which swayed from side to side, casting a theatrical spotlight on the table. He held the paper at arms’ length as if it was suddenly distasteful.

  Jean swept in wearing a vehement pink blouse. She scowled at the breakfast things, and poured herself a pungent cup of coffee.

  ‘What?’ she growled, pecking at a square of Ryvita.

  ‘Bad news,’ said George, tossing the paper in her direction, so that it landed awkwardly in the butter. He rubbed his head. His fingers were twitching and he left: the room suddenly. I knew that soon he would be bent over an impossible knot.

  Jean folded the paper into a neat square and read as if she was wearing spectacles.

  ‘Oh,’ she murmured.

  ‘What?’ I asked innocently, spearing a stringy bit of pith from my teeth.

  ‘Nothing.’ A curtain crossed Jean’s face.

  I had the sudden sensation of being lowered into icy water.

  Jean rolled the newspaper into a tight bundle, and put it in her pocket, and ran out of the room, leaving her coffee steaming.

  But I already knew what had happened. A chilly breeze was blowing into the house. The chimneys rattled.

  I bolted out of the door and made for Rosa Van Durk’s house.

  As I pelted through the irregular streets I saw other children, wide-eyed and nervous, looking out from their bedroom windows.

  I jumped on a green country bus that slurred through winding lanes in a drunken stupor. Rosa’s house was at the top of a tidy village called Broom. The front lawns were primped and trimmed with nail scissors, the roses were starched, the honeysuckle was forced, against its will, to curl around old ladies’ heads. As the bus cranked to a halt I noticed that all the nets were hooked up, in craggy fingers, and that the tidy pensioners appeared to have been dragged through hedges backwards. A grandmother in a pink jumpsuit was frozen in a flower bed denting a row of pansies with her Zimmer frame.

  Rosa’s house was always a target for complaints, with its unruly raspberry canes, its bohemian garden ornaments, and its Germanic curtains. Now the whole village gazed sorrowfully at it, and even the cats howled.

  There was a police car, with flashing lights, parked badly outside Rosa’s cottage. Several windows were broken, and the front door gaped open. Rosa’s belongings were scattered all over the place. Books hung from the trees, thin letters on blue paper blew down the hill. Rosa’s walking stick was lying in a patch of nettles. A broken teapot crunched under my feet.

  ‘What happened?’ I wailed, to no-one in part
icular. A heavy policeman stomped up to me and with difficulty bent down to peer into my pubescent face.

  ‘Did you know the deceased?’ he asked slowly.

  I nodded my head.

  ‘When did she die?’ I whispered, not really wanting to know.

  ‘Last night. She was burgled,’ said the policeman. Then he added gently, ‘She had a heart attack in hospital. Was she a relative?’

  ‘No,’ I mumbled. ‘She was my friend.’

  A group of children with old faces, had gathered behind us. A cluster of elderly women, with honest, parchment eyes wobbled up the street, and a young, go-ahead vicar skated to a halt on a racing bike. The air was moist with tears. The villagers were sorry that Rosa had gone, despite her untidy garden.

  We all felt as if we were witnessing something terrible and sacrilegious. A murder in a cathedral. The burning of a temple.

  After Rosa Van Durk’s death I became sullen and unhappy. I hunched up in the corners of rooms. I stole money from Jean’s purse. I drank her sherry. I smoked her Dunhills and refused to sleep, and even though I was ordered to bed some nights, I simply crept back down the stairs and curled up in the linen cupboard, or wrapped myself around the water heater, or even stole out to the cold shed. I carried garlic in my pocket. My eyes changed from brown to dirty yellow. Fear followed me around, and I was pale and exhausted. At school I failed everything. I was cruel to the weaker children. I tied them up and left them in holes. I stuck drawing pins into their young skin, I pulled out their hair. They cringed when I walked past them.

  I waited for something to appear. Sometimes I shouted into the caverns of the attic, telling the spirit to come and get me, but it didn’t come, although I sensed a shadow behind me in corridors, and once I think I saw a figure looking down at me from the attic window. One day I burnt the poet’s entire collection of leather-bound works in a pyre in the garden, but still nothing appeared. The fire stank of burning skin, and the words wound into the sky in italic grey smoke. George shook me and Jean followed me from room to room, shouting. I enraged them even more by silence.