Crocodile Soup

by Julia Darling

  What do you think? Good heavens! I try my best!’ she protested pressing her foot down on the accelerator.

  But she was a mystery; her scent, her days, her thoughts. I liked being alone with her at times like that, in a car, sat side by side. When Jean drove she looked as if she knew where she was going.

  ‘Why don’t you ask Eileen round?’

  ‘I’m not sure that I like Eileen.’

  ‘You have to get to know her better.’

  ‘I don’t get on with girls.’

  ‘Of course you do. Who do you get on with?’

  Captain Beefhart, Thomas De Quincey, Milton the parrot, an artist who never speaks, Rosa Van Durk, Mr Berry.

  She ushered me into the house. I had been under house arrest since the night I disappeared. I couldn’t even open my bedroom door without being observed. George informed me that he had alarmed the stairs, and that any movement at night would set off a cacophony of angry bells. Although the attic wasn’t being used they wouldn’t let me up there. It was full of George’s weather charts, and the walls were still covered with Frank’s leafy drawings of the Kingdom of Leaves.

  I just wanted to lay my hands on some opium.

  Jean’s Last Letter

  Dear Gert,

  Here is a photograph of me and Cameron at Battersea funfair. I thought you might like to have it. I have given up expecting a letter from you. I have been seeing a doctor about my fits, but I don’t suppose you want to know about that. Obviously you can’t bring yourself to communicate with me.

  I just want to say I forgive you.

  From Jean

  Eileen Visits And Frank Turns Orange

  Frank had started coming home at weekends and announced that he needed space, and Jean said, ‘Have the attic’, even though she must have known in the back of her mind that nothing good would come of it. I sometimes wonder if many of our problems would have been solved by lopping off the top storey of the house. I got hold of Frank and attempted to warn him against spending too much time in the attic, but he just arched his eyebrows and announced that he had joined a sect, so nothing could ever harm him.

  ‘What sect?’ I probed, as he walked away tinkling a small bell.

  Meanwhile, I had troubles of my own.

  Eileen had come to stay the night. Her broad smiles filled the sticky air. She was going to sleep in my room, in the other twin bed. Jean was pleased. When Eileen met my mother she was rubbing a marble Virgin Mary with a duster. Eileen stood with her mouth open. Jean turned on her and became elegant. She lured her into the garden with a large golden teapot. I followed with ham sandwiches. I could already hear Jean interrogating Eileen about her Northern history. They ignored me as I set down the plate. Eileen’s accent thickened as she described cotton mills and bobbins, and her flaxen family.

  I abandoned them for a while, wandering neurotically up the spiral staircase to find Frank. He was transforming the attic into a temple, with a photograph of a grinning guru in a frame hanging above the fireplace. He seemed bemused. Everything else was Zen, apart from joss-stick holders and a neat altar made from a shoe box with an apple on it.

  I wondered how the God downstairs felt about it.

  Frank sat cross-legged on the rug humming. I sat down with him, but bis eyes were closed and he wouldn’t open them. He was wearing a cotton nightshirt. His mouth was fixed in a permanent private smile.

  ‘How long have you been like this?’ I ventured, but he ignored me. I attempted to close my eyes but the humming reminded me of bees, or perhaps fog horns, and I started to think of Oona. I could still hear the distracting conversation in the garden too, and Eileen plodding through each mouthful.

  ‘It’s not safe in here Frank,’ I said, prodding him with a joss-stick.

  Frank gave me a cosmic sneer. I muttered a threat to the room.

  Then I left Frank and tiptoed down the familiar creaks of the attic stairs. When I got back to the garden Eileen’s face was swinging to and fro with laughter. I had really gone off Eileen. They were on about church now and I was spiritually out of my depth. The two of them glanced at me benevolently.

  Later as Eileen and I lay side by side in the twin-bedded room, each reading paperback crime novels, we could hear the ripples of guru song reverberating through the old house.

  Downstairs Jean played ‘Abide With Me’ on the piano, while in the distance ‘Je t’Aime’ slithered in between the floorboards.

  ‘You’re a very lucky person, Gert,’ purred Eileen, before switching out the bedside lamp without asking.

  I pretended to sleeptalk. I rambled on and on like an encyclopedia. I could hear Eileen rolling about in her fine cotton sheets. I wished they would strangle her.

  The next day Eileen and Jean went to a spiritualist church, dressed in tartan skirts and white lace blouses, and Frank chanted his way through several complex ceremonies, and I drank a bottle of dry cider in the shed while George tied a dozen knots in his high parlour. Then we assembled for a vegetarian lunch of murdered nuts and damaged sprouts with a glutinous Japanese gravy. Eileen had made a pudding with a damask top out of bread ends. It tasted of the New Testament.

  For the first time I premeditated a crime. When the last saucer had been washed and dried and the house was calm and businesslike I suggested a walk. Eileen fetched her parka and Jean departed to her linen counterpane, while George mooched through yachting magazines and women’s underwear catalogues, and did not notice a missing length of white nylon yachting rope. Frank had disappeared into Nirvana.

  Eileen and I walked down to the river, with its banks of watercress and vicious swans. I led her into the deep undergrowth of small streams, muddy paths and insubstantial planks. Eileen’s trousers snagged on sharp thorns and her stout shoes were flecked with chalky clay. She said, ‘Shall we turn back now Gert?’

  And I answered, ‘No, the main path is just around the corner,’ feeling like Gretel’s errant father.

  Through a hole in the jungle around us I could see a cricket field and sitting cross-legged in the centre of it was the artist, with his idiosyncratic hairstyle and bony shoulders. He swigged from a bottle. It was time to get rid of Eileen,

  ‘Let’s play horses,’ I suggested casually.

  ‘All right,’ agreed Eileen, ‘I’ll be the horse.’

  ‘And I’m the cowboy.’

  That’s when I tied Eileen to a tree. She treated it like a joke and so did I. I wrapped my father’s rope around her plump body while she squeaked and whooped.

  ‘Whoah, Silver!’ I exclaimed. I tied a thousand knots until the tree was a cotton reel and only her mousy head emerged. I despised her even more for being gullible and good tempered. When I was satisfied that she couldn’t possibly escape, I walked off. By the time I reached the artist her cries were indistinguishable from those of the wild ducks that flew overhead.

  I had learnt not to speak to the artist. I just sat down on the grass looking preoccupied. He reached over and pulled my hair playfully. I thought he was going to kiss me, but he growled instead and gazed beyond me to an approaching female figure who swept towards us in a pre-Raphaelite nightdress. It was a pale girl with long straight corny hair. Her whole body swayed. She was the painting. She was the one he was waiting for.

  When their eyes met I was suddenly outcast. My body did not have her feminine qualities. I jumped up and said hotly, ‘Goodbye.’

  She looked at me for a second, then gave me an uncalled-for look of utter contempt.

  The artist sniggered.

  I ran off. I kept on running for ages. I pulled myself up a hill which was so steep that I had to grasp handfuls of sharp grass, that came away and crumbled in my hands. Once at the top I collapsed in the centre of a ring of trees and looked down on the churchy fastidious town with its rivers and bones, its walls and its moats.

  I saw the map of my childhood. The southern sun beat down on me. I craved thunder, and danger.

  That’s when I decided to run away.

  This wa
s not my town, and these were not my people.

  The Coast Road

  Neither are these, I thought, looking at the landscape of high-rises and a field of black and white football players dancing around a green field.

  I was driving along the slow lane of a dual carriageway; driving badly because all the time I was dealing with the medley of stories that came at me with more force than traffic signs or speed limits.

  Last time I saw Eva was when I dropped her off after our disastrous weekend. For the second time I left her under the huge clock near her house. She kissed me lightly and walked slowly from the car. I sat there, watching her, like some kind of stalker. She suddenly stopped and turned back to look at me. Her face was quiet and solemn. Then she disappeared into a shadow, her shoes clipping on the grey tarmac. Two perfect tears ran down my cheeks. Every time I thought of that moment I started to cry.

  Since then I had more or less stopped going to work altogether. Eva was leaving anyway, to take up a new career in double glazing. She phoned me up sometimes, and her voice was full of guilt. Her mother had tried to swim to Norway after we got back. They rescued her when she was shin deep. I tried to be sympathetic. She said her mother should go into a home, but when she went to see one she thought that the inmates looked like dried fish, and the place smelt of burning photograph albums. When I think about it, Eva spoke as if she came from another planet altogether. Because of her mother she had to miss two dancing championships, and Adrian was threatening to dance with the woman in a snakey dress.

  Meanwhile, Clive the adulterer was lording it in his new kingdom. The Egyptian mummy had been moved and was frozen in terror in a coffin in the foyer. I saw a schoolchild throw his sweet wrapper into her sarcophagus. Theobald was completely brainwashed, and could only say words like network and download. He acted as if I might hit him every time I saw him. I was someone to be avoided. An object of antiquity. Perhaps they would put me in a skip, I thought. I knew my days in the basement were numbered. I had to be re-interviewed the following week. Clive had forced me to submit a curriculum vitae. He said it was a mere formality, but I knew he was lying. Even my own desk was unfamiliar.

  So I drove my old knocker of a car, up and down the high straight coast road; a miserable joy rider.

  I didn’t notice the traffic jam ahead, or see a line of helpful traffic cops waving us to a standstill. I drove merrily onwards and into the back of a white Volvo. There was the most incredible racket; a crash of metal on metal that echoed and splintered like a thunderclap. My whole body was thrown forwards in a magnificent crunch. I briefly thought, as my radiator exploded into an atomic cloud, that maybe I would like to live. Then the door opened and I dropped out, onto the hard road surface, and somebody dragged me clear of the explosive body of my hysterical vehicle. I was laid on a grass verge. I was momentarily conscious as somebody fiddled with my eyelids and had a moment of clear vision. Leaning over me was Jean. Among the screech of sirens and running feet I managed to grab her arm.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I spat.

  ‘Saving your life,’ she said, cupping my bloody head in her capable palm.

  Her eyes were as fragmented as my windscreen. I started to giggle wildly. Somehow, out of the entire population of a region, I had managed to collide with my own mother. Blood was pouring out of my nose. Before I drifted off I had one more thought, like a drop of water.

  Jean cared about me.

  When I came round I was in the hospital. I had finally qualified to enter its architecturally grandiose walls. Perhaps I could send a message to the psychiatric unit about the rubbish?

  More Trouble

  Eileen was still tied to the tree.

  I shimmied down the hill, thinking of escape. It was Sunday. The bells were clashing in an awful charivari of flat notes. The afternoon was now half evening and I had blanked out Eileen entirely. I was too absorbed in my own adolescent condition to have a conscience.

  I was wearing a long black dress with beaded tassels. It covered my ample body like a tent. I strode purposefully down the centre of the path. The river had divided and flowed either side of me.

  When I got to the street there was a noticeable whiff of Harvey’s Bristol Cream in the air. A dog wearing a black and white jacket, like a dinner suit, barked at me from the house next door and a woman with an orange cocktail cigarette in her thin lips frowned from an upstairs window. I stuck my finger up at her. I felt that wherever I went I was watched and monitored.

  It was only when I saw the glow from my father’s parlour that I recalled knots, and then Eileen. A silhouetted group of people stood indignantly in the middle of the street. I could smell morality coming at me in blasts. When she saw me Jean grabbed me by the throat, her lipstick smudged and her teeth in an ungodly snarl. Behind her were two people who I assumed were Eileen’s parents in chunky coats, and my friend the chocolate policeman. They had a conspiratorial air. ‘Where is Eileen?’ gnashed Jean, shaking me so hard that dust flew out of my clothes.

  I had the sensation of being the possessor of such a secret that I counted to ten before I answered calmly, ‘Isn’t she back?’

  Jean shook me and managed to kick me on the shin before the policeman stepped between us.

  Then God whispered into Jean’s ear and she smiled apologetically at Eileen’s parents who were standing officiously under their hats, looking like standard lamps.

  ‘Where’s our Eileen?’ grunted Eileen’s father. I remembered that he was a butcher by trade, and began to feel worried.

  ‘What have you done with her you bad lass!’ cursed the mother.

  I mumbled something about a game and they stared at me as if I was a dead turkey.

  Then I led them on the arduous walk through bushes and brooks until we heard the stoical chants of a hymn. The group marched away from me in the direction of the holy tree where Eileen looked angelically at the sky. I hovered, knee deep in a marsh hearing their happy reunion and waiting for the policeman to undo my numerous knots.

  ‘I prayed to God,’ announced Eileen happily.

  I knew she would. I was dragged back by Jean, who had given up trying to forgive me, and clearly wanted to cast me out. She pushed me across the threshold with a curse. Eileen was coddled with toddy and cake, then carefully parcelled in a cashmere rug and sent home with her huffy parents.

  No-one asked for an explanation, although the policeman threatened imprisonment, and I suppose there wasn’t one. I was the Mary Bell of the town. If they had asked me why I had tied an innocent girl to a tree I would have answered that, in the greater scheme of things, being tied up for a few hours is relatively unimportant. In fact, going on Eileen’s experience it was positively beneficial. Later in life Eileen was ordained, and became a famous church figure. I like to think that I was responsible for her spirit, nurtured in lonely hours under the stars. She never even got a cold.

  That night Jean put on a fretful frock and roamed the house with the agitation of a hungry panther. George cowered downstairs in his parlour, whistling through his teeth.

  Upstairs Frank was humming loudly, as if he might burst.

  I shut down my face and read a dictionary.

  ‘Is it me?’ she shouted eventually, standing at the bottom of the stairs.

  The house clenched its corridors.

  ‘Well?’ she bellowed.

  She raged up and down the stairs. I heard a door closing. George had slipped away.

  Jean towered over me like Moses. She put her pale face close to mine and whispered nastily, ‘What then?’

  The house shuddered.

  Inappropriately, I remembered a visit to see my grandparents in a furtive suburb of London. There were unintelligent chickens in the garden. On the wall hung a picture of a Spanish lady in a twirling red dress. I thought it was delightful. My mother’s face was hard as glass. Her parents were sitting under tartan rugs eating small sandwiches and drinking Horlicks. The house smelt of dentures.

  Jean was staring at me as
if I was a chicken in her parents’ garden.

  ‘I’m in the wrong place,’ I blurted incoherently.

  ‘What on earth do you mean, the wrong place?’

  ‘I don’t know who I am.’

  ‘You’re Gert, that’s who you are.’

  ‘I want to be somebody else. I don’t like it here.’

  ‘And I don’t like you,’ she screamed, and our eyes met.

  I shrugged dolefully.

  Jean’s face disintegrated into a depression.

  She left me, bewildered, and went to bed.

  Visitors

  Eva appeared beside my bed holding a bunch of pink roses. I was glad that I was lying down. She looked embarrassed and eager to please.

  I opened my mouth to say hello, but nothing emerged. My voice was an engine with no spark. Eva noticed my confusion and laid her cool hand on my mouth.

  ‘You might have internal injuries,’ she muttered and sat down, holding her flowers tightly. ‘I’ve started the double glazing job. I have to stand outside supermarkets and attack poor shoppers with my questionnaire. It’s embarrassing.’

  I nodded unsympathetically.

  ‘I’ve brought you a card from Gwenny. Here.’ She opened a blue envelope. Inside was a card with a black and white picture of Marlene Dietrich in a suit, winking. Get well soon was scrawled among kisses inside.

  ‘Do you want me to phone anyone? In the family I mean?’

  I shook my head vehemently.

  ‘Sorry about Scarborough.’

  I managed a sad smile.

  ‘Perhaps we should go away again?’

  I frowned. No more trips.

  ‘Look, I’ll come and see you tomorrow. Perhaps you’ll have a voice then.’

  She bent over me and kissed my cheek. I stiffened, and shrank back awkwardly.

  ‘When you get out of here’, she looked around and shivered, ‘we’re going to look after you.’

  Who is we?

  ‘I mean me and Clive,’ she whispered as if she heard my thoughts. ‘We’re your friends.’