Crocodile Soup

by Julia Darling

  I could have replied that I too had been out of my mind, but I was too busy trying to remove my shoes which stuck to my feet and dripped on the floor.

  Jean wrenched herself from the stage and disappeared through the French windows to sob. George loped after her. I could hear them blaming each other among the shrubs.

  I was superfluous, as if I had interrupted a melodrama in which I had no part. They were so involved in the tragedy of my disappearance that it took some minutes for them to adapt to my presence. Miss Lute packed her bags righteously; as she left she grabbed my hand and trilled ‘I suppose you think you’re clever?’ I shook my head at her dimly. Her eyes were too big for her head. They sparkled with righteousness.

  I was left alone with the policeman. He was too large for the room. His legs seemed unbendable. He leant down and peered into my pupils.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’ I asked politely.

  ‘No, thank you. I think we had better have a little talk.’

  ‘Fire away,’ I said glumly.

  ‘At what point did the man in question accost you?’ he asked, pen poised.

  ‘What man?’ I answered dumbly.

  ‘Miss Lute told us that you were in the church with a man.’

  ‘That’s right. I waved at her. She was arranging flowers.’

  ‘Yes. Well?’

  ‘He’s just a friend. I’ve known him for ages.’

  What’s his name?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s an artist.’

  ‘But you say he’s a friend, and you don’t even know his name?’

  ‘He’s just someone who hangs about; that I meet sometimes.’

  ‘You arranged to meet him?’

  ‘No, I just bumped into him.’

  ‘I see. Where have you been exactly?’

  ‘For a walk.’

  ‘And did this man make any, er, suggestions to you?’

  ‘No. He hardly ever speaks.’

  Jean was wailing; waking up the street with her bellows. The policeman wouldn’t stop sticking his pocked nose uncomfortably close to my ear.

  ‘Gert,’ he lectured. ‘Life is a box of chocolates. If you eat them all at once you will be sick.’

  ‘I see.’

  He kept his eyes fixed on me.

  ‘It is illegal to have sexual intercourse at your age. Do you understand?’

  The cast was back from the garden. They stood solemnly in a curtain call. George had gone red as a Dutch tulip.

  ‘You’ll sleep in the spare room from now on!’ he roared.

  Too late, I wanted to say. If only they had moved me there when I was six. My lower lip started to sag. I was suddenly sorry for myself.

  ‘That’s right,’ muttered the policeman. ‘Remember Gert. Chocolates.’

  Their faces burned with a supernatural fervour. I shut my mouth and forced myself to look downwards, afraid that I might say something goading and start the whole dialogue off again. I drifted off to bed. The policeman talked to my parents for a long time. I could hear his heavy vowels booming like a double bass through the floorboards.

  The next day the attic was defumigated of Captain Beefhart and the reel-to-reel tape recorder. Even the dolls’ hospice was finally removed. Everything was put in boxes marked ‘Gert’s adolescence’ in the shed. I would have to live in a pink room with twin beds and a glass-topped dressing table. When I was not at school I was to be tutored by an unemployed scholar called Mr Berry. Jean got hold of my arm and squeezed it.

  ‘Are you sorry?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered deceitfully.

  ‘What is the matter with you Gert?’ she asked intellectually.

  ‘Nothing,’ I answered, thinking of Rosa Van Durk’s sweet face. I wished painfully that she was still alive. Talking to Jean was like trying to converse with a weather vane. She swung in all directions according to the climate. And George was a steeple.

  Cramming

  Mr Berry brewed me a cup of camomile tea and stared at me bleakly. He unfastened his collar, which was crumpled, and focused his vague green eyes on my private education. We were in a room with nothing in it, apart from a picture called ‘The Second Stage Of Cruelty’ which depicted a man with a contorted mouth beating a dying horse, and a child being squashed by a wheel. Far away, at the back of the picture, was a body being tossed in the air by an angry bull. I looked into this picture, which hung sideways on the wall, for inspiration when Mr Berry asked me a question I couldn’t answer. It rarely helped. We sat opposite one another at a skimpy table, piled high with books.

  George paid him five pounds a week.

  I went to see Mr Berry on Thursdays and Saturdays. The term used for this kind of tuition was ‘cramming’.

  Mr Berry seemed crammed himself, living in a rented two-up-two-down house sandwiched in between grander houses with lion door knockers. Mr Berry didn’t even have a doorbell, and I had to knock on the low black door with my bare hands. He was writing a book about Paradise. He said that he had been writing it all his life. He drank his tea from a cup with no handle, poured from a tin teapot that looked as if it had been kicked. His hands around the cup were long and feverish, and his fingers constantly twitched.

  He didn’t look up. He examined a fat text book on the table before him while I had a lined pad before me. At first it was like playing chess, then as months passed, he relaxed, and sat back in his chair, and I began to learn.

  I don’t understand why it was that I so wanted to please Mr Berry. I strove to hear his quiet approving compliments. I shrunk my wide and flamboyant handwriting and tried to absorb any fragment of knowledge. His face was made of medieval stone, with grey stubble on his long chin. If he smiled it was as if dust fell from his face. He was the only Irish man I had ever met and his voice was a medley of low vowels. He was mysteriously nocturnal. Mr Berry was teaching me about opium. We studied Thomas De Quincey and his condition. I had a delightful sensation of being off the syllabus and following whatever flight of fancy Mr Berry deemed appropriate. I could imagine Mr Berry in an opium den; his pale pock-marked face looking quite attractive in clouds of Eastern smoke.

  My education at Miss Oar’s establishment was diminishing. It was like studying two different universes. I had developed a superiority which made me even more unpopular with the neat girls with pony tails. Yet, something in me demanded that I made a friend, and I loped about with an unnoticeable individual called Eileen, who lent me ten pences for the hot chocolate dispenser and was from the North, which made her words heavy as clogs.

  There was something different about Mr Berry, I told Eileen one lunch hour in the bracken beyond the sports hut. He had a lodger come from Dublin called Timothy who dressed in tank tops and rode a racing bike. Timothy had fair hair that was nearly long. Mr Berry looked at him with a big, dusky smile on his face as if he had just remembered something hilarious.

  Eileen smirked and pulled up a handful of grass with her teeth.

  ‘What are you doing Eileen?’ I asked.

  ‘Being a horse,’ she snorted and jumped to her feet.

  I was supposed to follow her in a gallop over the field, but I bridled and said, ‘Eileen, aren’t we too old for this sort of thing?’ I didn’t tell her I had already been a horse, and would never be one again.

  She squatted down again, disappointed. Eileen wrote a diary and smelt of sour dough. She was dyslexic, but I comforted her by saying it was cookery that afternoon and you didn’t need grammar to make a passable meringue. At the same time I was thinking that meringue was very flimsy stuff and could sink into a depression. We waited in gloomy apprehension until the bell rang, then scampered to the classroom singing, as if relieved to have ended our compulsory leisure.

  Those days I was completely alienated from my own body. I looked down on it with disgust. Workmen and schoolboys leered at it. No bra would hold down my postcard tits. Mr Berry didn’t seem to notice them. He annunciated poetry as if it was an enchantment. Poetry seemed to stop my buttons from b
ursting.

  It was relief to be there in his tranquil burrow of a room. Outside it I was confused by vice. I was always looking for its root, but only found the lost leaves from the previous season. My school reports were so short it was almost as if I was becoming invisible. Jean was summoned to see Miss Oar, who described me as rude and apathetic, with some facial difficulty. Jean bought me some Hide and Heal, and begged me to try harder.

  ‘Gert,’ she said, ‘you need qualifications.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked, foolishly.

  ‘Because without them you could end up—’ and she paused, trying to summon the worst image she could.

  ‘In Woolworths,’ I mimicked smugly.

  To me, Woolworths was a bright, homely store, with piles of broken biscuits and cheap perfumes. There were no ghosts in Woolworths, and the girls who worked there seemed glum but content.

  ‘Lost,’ whispered Jean, biting her lip. The house shook. Something laughed from an alcove. The bees clustered around the clematis window.

  Mr Berry wasn’t particularly interested in me, but then neither did he disapprove of me. He was genuinely pleased when I wrote an original sentence. His shoulders would spread out and he would straighten his back.

  ‘Good,’ he would drawl. ‘I think you’ve got the hang of something there Gert!’

  Sometimes I think he found me tiring and childish, and then he would yawn and curl over his books and his voice would get softer and softer. He marked my work illegibly with a blunt pencil.

  One afternoon, with cups of black tea in our hands, I lingered a few minutes after the lesson. I was stuck for conversation, but Mr Berry beckoned to me and we went through the messy hallway to a back kitchen, which was cluttered and dirty, with tacky plates with take-away curries smeared on them in unstacked piles by the sink.

  ‘This is Milton,’ said Mr Berry.

  He pointed at a grey parrot in a high wired cage.

  ‘Don’t go close. He has a way of frightening strangers. Say hello.’

  ‘Hello Milton,’ I squeaked.

  ‘Good morning to you,’ scraped the parrot.

  ‘What else does he say?’ I enquired of Mr Berry.

  ‘Anything he hears and remembers, don’t you Milton?’

  ‘Fuck,’ screamed Milton. ‘I fancy that.’

  Eva’s Confession

  We woke in the fug of fried breakfast. No-one would speak to us in the dining room. We fixed our eyes on our plates streaked with fat and gristle, and Eva played with the salt and pepper set which was in the shape of a galleon.

  Next to our table an elderly man sang while chewing a fried egg. I had an overwhelming sense of being marooned at sea. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Eventually Eva broke the silence. Well?’

  I pushed a spoonful of porridge to the side of my bowl.

  ‘What was the matter with you?’ she asked. ‘Did you see a ghost?’

  Between sips of cheap coffee I told her then, about where I grew up, and the attic, and even Jean. It all sounded incredibly puerile, but I stammered on, until the dining room was quite empty and we were sitting in a sea of stained white tablecloths.

  ‘Does this kind of thing happen often?’ Eva asked crossly.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘I thought you were normal,’ she said.

  ‘I am. Really I am,’ I protested unconvincingly.

  ‘Why don’t you write to your mother?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘It’s your duty.’

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  ‘I mean, she gave birth to you didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, she did.’ I was shrinking in my seat.

  ‘It’s not very nice when someone looks at you and screams.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered.

  ‘Forget it,’ said Eva, slamming the salt and pepper set down in the centre of the table.

  ‘Eva,’ I talked to her hands. ‘I want to tell you something.’

  She looked up, forcing me to look at her. Her wide eyes were only a few inches from my own. I leant into her as if falling into a wave.

  ‘I told you I’m a lesbian.’

  ‘I heard you last night. Anyway I’m not daft, Gert.’ Eva was suddenly bored again.

  ‘I’ve never been in love until...’ I continued. It was like surfing.

  ‘Love!’ snorted Eva.

  ‘You know how that feels?’

  ‘Yes I do,’ stated Eva, twiddling her earring. ‘Can I talk to you? I know I can trust you. It’s a secret.’

  Something was not quite as it should be. The compass swung creakily in the wrong direction.

  ‘I’m in love with Clive,’ said Eva, ‘...and I don’t know what to do about it.’

  ‘Clive? Who’s Clive?’

  ‘You know, Clive, the Head Curator. We’ve been having an affair for months. Didn’t you notice?’

  A jukebox was playing in another room.

  You are the sunshine of my life...

  ‘It started when you gave me the irises. I thought they were from him.’

  ‘I never realized.’ My voice had grown solid and motherly. ‘Is he married?’

  ‘Yes. He’s got two children.’

  ‘And you love him? The Head Curator?’

  ‘Clive,’ said Eva. ‘Yes, I do.’

  Imagine his clumsy hand on her cheek. Her hand on the back of his after-shaved neck. Her undoing his awful trousers. Did they kiss in front of the Egyptian princess? Did they talk about me? Did Clive say ‘Poor Gert,’ and did Eva nod her head sympathetically. Did she say, ‘She’s quite nice really, when you get to know her’? Did she say ‘I’ve said that I’ll go away with her for the weekend. I’m dreading it a bit, but I’ve said that I’ll go, so I’d better’? Did Clive promise to leave his wife? Had he seen Eva dance all alone in a room full of glass cases?

  Do they swear undying love? Do they drive down country lanes in his velvety Rover and swivel across the gear stick towards each other? Does Gwenny know? Does her mother know? If he loves her, why is he letting her go? Perhaps he said, ‘Eva, it’s my job, we don’t need a staff canteen, a drinks machine will do, and anyway, my love, it’s better this way. Soon someone will find out at the institute.’ And she might have said, ‘But what about Gert?’ and he would put his finger to his moustached lips and tell her not to worry her beautiful head about me, and for a moment she would push him away, and then she would fall, into his adulterous arms, and I would be brushed away.

  God Comes To Stay

  Jean was visited by God. He came to her once while she was washing up, out of a sinkful of scummy water. God said, shop around, and so she spent each Sunday visiting a different church, tasting the flavour of the holy water, feeling the sun’s rays through stained-glass windows, running her hands along the pews, enjoying their smoothness.

  God did not visit George; maybe because he never washed up. The house was littered with hardbacked bibles and spineless religious pamphlets. Jean had begun to entertain vicars and nuns, and to eat dry religious biscuits and drink weak tea, and look curiously at the sky. She learnt a collection of hymns with high, slippery treble parts. She sung them at night. It sounded like she was gargling.

  The Church of England was not enough for her. She told us that the congregation only cared about roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. She believed they were more concerned about their hats than their prayers, and the local vicar had sinus problems.

  Mother’s prayers were long and fervent. I heard her incanting and pleading with angels in her bedroom. My name came up often. Meanwhile George stooped in the hallway and loitered behind curtains in the guise of a devil. He played blasphemous lewd music on a gramophone in his high parlour, and sported an evil aphrodisiac cravat around his neck, and rubbed exotic hedonist oils into his wiry black hair.

  Jean painted her bedroom white and hung a crucifix above the bed. There was an invisible electric fence down the middle, guarded by Jesus’s unhappy eyes, that prevented George from ever tou
ching her sacred skin. He took to sleeping in the Furthest Nursery, surrounded by sorrowful Meccano cranes left behind by Frank.

  God also suggested that Jean did less housework, and that she did more for the poor and needy. I often saw her rattling collection boxes in the High Street and smiling graciously at squalid sights.

  She packed up a box of decadent underwear and gave it to Age Concern. I imagined elderly widows in her peachy bras.

  Meanwhile the plates piled up and the floor was covered with crumbs, and God was our new lodger, and we were constantly told to consider him. ‘Do not speak with your mouth full as God cannot hear you. Too much television offends him.’

  One morning, at dawn, I was awoken suddenly by a swallow that flew through the open window and hovered momentarily above my head, before flying out again, with a shriek of despair.

  When I described this event to Jean she smiled at me beatifically and informed me that I had seen the Holy Spirit. I pretended to nod wisely. There was no point arguing about it. I didn’t tell her about the mess that landed on my pillow, smelling of worm and drain. Jean wanted everything to be white cotton and lilies.

  These days Jean picked me up at the school gates. She wore dark glasses and parked some distance from the school. This was at my request. On these journeys I looked hopefully out of the window for some trace of the artist, but there was none. One day Eileen accompanied me to the car, and Jean smiled at her encouragingly.

  ‘Who was that nice girl?’ asked Jean.

  ‘Eileen,’ I answered gloomily.

  ‘I wish you’d have more friends. God would like that,’ twittered Jean, who had swung south, and was in a fine weather phase.

  ‘Girls’, she continued, ‘of your own age.’

  I didn’t answer. I was watching a group of sixth-formers passing around a cigarette furtively. They were changing into high-heeled shoes, stuffing their flat school brogues into plastic bags. One of them smeared purple lipstick across her lips.

  ‘Men’, Jean was saying, ‘have no scruples, Gert.’

  ‘What do you do all day?’ The question popped out of my mouth with no malice intended.