Crocodile Soup

by Julia Darling

  I shut my eyes. Eva was leaving. A nurse loomed on the other side of the bed and stuck a thermometer in my mouth. I was very hot and confused. I felt as if I was in the back of a great limousine with Eva and Clive sitting confidently in the front. They had clothes on and I was naked.

  Leaving

  The next day, after school, instead of meeting Jean, I slid off in the direction of the train station. I removed my grey school uniform in the Ladies’ Powder Room, and stuffed it behind the pipes of a British Rail toilet and put on a maxi dress made from nylon cobwebs. I bought a platform ticket from a machine, and when the old London train came belching in I got on it and huddled in the luggage compartment. I pretended to be a suitcase lodged behind a brown parcel. After a while we sloped into a nondescript and deserted station and I jumped off. I flew past a cardboard ticket collector disguised as a crow. Outside in the street I walked until I found a sign pointing North. I knew that was the right direction. I was aware that my blood was not of Southern origin. Each step forward was larger than the last. I hitchhiked, imitating with my thumb a movement I had only seen on television. Cars full of open-mouthed babies and frowning grandmothers sailed past, staring with disapproval. In this green landscape I stood out like Stonehenge. Then a purple and green saloon car swerved to a stop in a layby. I could see it vibrating with wailing Pink Floyd before I opened the door. The driver was loose and lanky and reclining on a leopard skin seat.

  ‘I’m going to Glasgow,’ he drawled. He was wearing a ring with a skull on it.

  ‘So am I,’ I announced and leapt in beside him. He looked like Coleridge and that was good enough for me.

  The car was soaked with Arabic oil and several times I got green and car sick. The driver, Robbie, wore dark glasses and watched me vomit on the hard shoulder of motorways, while ferocious trucks with a thousand lights ripped past. As we drove into the motorway night, under the arms of thin bridges, shadowed by dark hills I couldn’t see, I entertained him with an uneven and random selection of lies which he accepted with casual nods of his skeletal head. I described my fictional friends in Glasgow. I even told him their names, their family histories, and their hobbies.

  He was meeting a man called Welshy who owed him money. Up on those hard roads I was miles from my pink spare bedroom. Ahead of us was a necklace of light flung into the sky. I told him my name was Frankie. Short for Francesca, the runner.

  We stopped at a motorway service station where it became apparent that I had no pockets, and no cash. Robbie bought me a cup of cloudy coffee and told me that he was training to be a social worker. When he got out of his car his legs didn’t seem to fit the top half of his body. They were short and fat. On the next table a leathery rock ’n’ roll band were gabbling moronically and lurching over a greasy dinner. They were so dirty that no-one would sit near them. Their conversation was a battle of curses, that seemed to make no sense at all. The manager, who had forty-watt eyes and was dressed in a Teflon suit, came and hovered over them shaking his long managerial finger. They sniggered like small boys, and squirted tomato ketchup on the table. A family of four in plastic raincoats, eating salad sandwiches, were shaking their heads.

  One of the band picked up a chip and threw it at the family. The manager raised his hands and marched over to them. It looked as if there might be a fight. The waitresses lurked around the cash desk pouting and urging the manager on. The family hid behind a pepper pot.

  I looked on with wide eyes, wondering if I could manage to leave Robbie and join them instead. They seemed to be well-marinaded in vice.

  The biggest and dirtiest man, who was wrapped in leather bandages and who had a scar on his bulging forehead, lurched to his feet and leered at the manager who was a tiny man in comparison.

  Then there was a clap of thunder and all the lights went out, and everyone groaned together. Robbie muttered, ‘Come on, let’s get outta here,’ and I unwillingly followed him out to the car. As we left the building I could hear the waitresses giggling hysterically in the kitchen. Robbie turned off Pink Floyd and started listening to Radio Four.

  On my journey north I learnt to roll cigarettes. At first they were loose and flaky, then tight and airless, and finally as we passed through the border from one country to another, they were perfect. I rolled hundreds of cigarettes for Robbie, who thanked me wearily.

  I slept then, dreamlessly, curled on the back seat with Robbie’s heavy sheepskin coat piled above me. I could hear the miles disappearing under the car.

  When I woke up we were in Glasgow. Everything was square and high; men, buildings, lamp posts. I could see a black beery river and the city seemed to be cloaked in medieval smog through which I could hardly see anything. It was like being in a cave. Robbie stopped in front of a chip shop in an archway. Grease hung in stalactites from the ceiling. I was hungry. I looked at Robbie, who removed his dark glasses revealing naked, uncertain eyes. He handed me a Scottish pound note.

  ‘This is where we part Frankie,’ he said, sternly. I must have looked perplexed because he got out of the car and opened the passenger door, motioning me to step onto the flagstones. He grasped me by the shoulders and looked firmly into my eyes.

  ‘Why don’t you use the change to make a phone call?’

  ‘OK. Thanks.’

  ‘Scoot.’ He turned and left me, jumping in the car and revving urgently and disappearing into a tangle of foggy streets with Macintosh names.

  No-one had ever told me to scoot before. I murmured the word to myself as I stepped into the hollow cavern of the chip shop, where a woman in the shape of a blown up white paper bag was holding an unhappy fish by the fins.

  There was a clock hanging precariously above the bubbling oil that showed the time to be midnight. I ordered the chips and my voice sounded like a ridiculous flute in an orchestra of double basses.

  Back out in the street all I could hear was cursing. Garrulous words seemed to come from all directions. There were men everywhere. I stood by a bus stop and put comforting chips in my mouth. A car pulled up and a voice said, ‘You don’t know where you’re going do you?’

  ‘No,’ I answered cheerfully, ‘I’m an existentialist.’

  ‘You’re a wee idiot,’ sighed Robbie, who was obviously not nearly as full of vice as I might have wished. In fact he had a fatherly, sensible side which emanated from him in clouds.

  ‘I was brought up by Evangelists,’ he confided when I got back in the car. ‘I couldn’t leave you in the middle of Glasgow.’

  He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as if he had the weight of Glasgow on his shoulders.

  ‘Betty,’ he announced decisively.

  Betty

  The woman before me was vast and wide. She had me sitting with a mug of weak hot chocolate in a room pillared with reams of paper. Robbie had deposited me at the Sanctuary for Alcoholic and Homeless Women.

  Betty regarded me with unsentimental concern. She was here to help, she muttered. Around her waist was a belt from which dangled many keys; every five minutes the door opened and a fallen face peered around it apologetically to request one of these to ‘get the milk’ or ‘open the laundry’. I sat there miserably. Yet again vice had evaded me. I was completely safe, protected and in the arms of mercy. Where were the opium dens of my fantasies, the brothels, the ravaged bohemians, the fearful underworld which exists in Gothic detective stories?

  Betty asked me a question. Her thick arms folded over her enormous breasts. ‘What age are you?’

  ‘Eighteen,’ I lied.

  ‘Do your family know where you are?’

  ‘They’re dead,’ I said plaintively.

  ‘Your guardians then?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘For Christ’s sake lassie, will you look me in the eye. Every day I see girls like you; give me a phone number and let’s get this straightened out. I want to go to bed!’

  I gazed up at her. She was breathing heavily. She appeared cross and a little pink.

  ‘I don’t wa
nt to go home.’

  ‘So where are you heading then?’

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘This house is filled with women who have nowhere to go. Any one of them would give her eye teeth to have a place. You’re from the South? You’ve got a voice like Princess Anne. What happened? Was there trouble in your house?’

  Everything in the room was overused. The telephone was smudged with fingerprints. The chairs had been sat on so much they sagged like old ladies. Betty was too direct. I was in the presence of an overweight angel. She didn’t like me at all. I could sense that in her weariness. Everything was distorted.

  I didn’t want to be rescued by Betty.

  ‘Can I stay the night?’ I enquired politely.

  ‘You’ll have to sleep on the floor. The place is full to bursting.’

  ‘I’ll make a phone call in the morning.’

  ‘That’s the idea. Glasgow isn’t the place for you.’

  ‘Can I have a bath?’

  ‘No,’ she barked abruptly. ‘I’ll give you until the morning, and then I’ll phone the police.’

  She jangled her keys ferociously. From upstairs there was a loud burst of classical music. Betty raised her eyes to heaven.

  ‘That will be Mari, I’ll have to stop her.’ She ran from the room, leaving me sitting in her claustrophobic office with the window open. I glanced outside. It was nearly dawn. There was a drop of about eight feet. I tucked my dirty dress into my school regulation knickers and climbed out, scraping my knees on the brick before dropping to the pavement. Outside it was murky as a coal mine. I started to run. It was glorious; running in a strange city, through streets with no cars, out of bounds, oarless, unattached, without morals, without advice, in a pair of grammar school gym shoes that were once bright white.

  More Visitors

  One night in the hospital I had an attack of breathlessness. I was listening to the sounds beyond the ward; the cool vaporous hush of the morgue, the tea urns bubbling in the canteen. My body had something the matter with it, but my brain was unusually clear. The hospital was similar to the institute. Around me patients were suspended in their dusty white beds in an exhibition of illness and malfunction. Nurses kept drawing the screens around my bed and investigating my orifices with sharp lights. I was a pothole.

  I had several visitors, but the best one was Gwenny.

  After Eva had gone Gwenny strutted in swinging a handbag with clips in the shape of parrots. Her earrings were bird cages. She was the least stressful of my visitors, bringing a Nintendo Game Boy and a bottle of Jameson’s. I stared at the monotonous squares descending from nowhere and my pulse rate settled to a calm beat. I voicelessly watched Gwenny flirting with the nurses. They even gave her a cup of tea. She perched on the side of the bed and held my hand.

  ‘Are you all right Gert?’ she asked as if she meant it.

  I shook my head, and we sat like that for ages, with her sipping tea and squeezing my fingers.

  After a while she said, ‘Bloody Eva. I blame her mother.’

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘She was a strapping woman,’ said Gwenny. ‘Beefy, like they get up there on the coast. She was one of the fastest fish gutters I ever saw.’

  I looked at Gwenny. In the fierce neon of the hospital, I could see what a pirate she was. She glinted.

  ‘She used to disappear every so often... for months at a time. No-one knew where she went. When she came back she would stink; even worse than the smell of rotting fish. Eva’s got commitment problems.’

  I nodded, dumbly, and had a swig of Jameson’s. My head felt pleasantly furry.

  ‘It will be all right,’ she whispered, as she got up to leave, tucking the bottle of whiskey inside my pyjamas and folding me into the bedclothes.

  ‘There are other fish to fry,’ whispered Gwenny. I was so relaxed that I slept for hours.

  When I opened my eyes Theobald and the Head Curator were gazing down at me, as if I had just been discovered. The Head Curator held a huge bunch of multi-coloured tulips, while Theobald clasped a brown crumpled paper bag of overripe plums.

  Still unable to utter a syllable I lay beneath them while they conversed across the bed about the progress of the Mammal Room.

  Then the Head Curator looked down at me sadly.

  ‘I am very fond of you Gert. I want you to understand that. Very fond.’

  ‘So am I,’ squeaked Theobald, blushing.

  ‘We want you to get better,’ the Head Curator boomed, upsetting the iller residents who started to sniff.

  ‘We miss you,’ whittered Theobald.

  Such are the palliatives served up to the unwell, cooked up in the corridors en route to bedsides. Off they marched, with a last managerial salute to the whole ward at the exit.

  By now my bed was surrounded by flowers. My view of my fellow inmates was obscured by stems and petals. A face peeked through the foliage.

  ‘I heard you were here off the nurses,’ said a balaclava. Harry sat down furtively.

  ‘I’m supposed to be guarding obstetrics,’ he muttered.

  I pointed helplessly at my mouth.

  ‘They told me you’d lost the gift of the gab, so to speak.’

  He leant towards me.

  ‘The black bags are piling up, I’m afraid to say. I had a word with the Samaritans. They said you should complain in writing.’

  I found I was able to raise one eyebrow and did it twice.

  ‘That’s the spirit!’ Harry tittered.

  Then he looked about, furtively.

  ‘There’s an awful lot of people stay in here for years. They get syndromes.’

  I found his pessimism refreshing, even endearing.

  ‘I expect you’ve got concussion; or shock. You’re evidently not yourself. Oh well, I JUST POPPED IN...’ Harry raised his voice, assuming I was deaf as well as dumb, or perhaps with the intention of impressing a passing matron. ‘I’LL GO AND CHECK GERIATRICS!’

  I raised my thumb in support.

  ‘Oh, I brought you a book. I found it in a skip. It’s about heaven and that.’

  He pushed an earthy copy of Paradise Lost under the sheet, where it collided with the Jameson’s, sending it shooting down my leg.

  ‘KEEP YOUR PECKER UP!’ he shouted, and disappeared.

  I suddenly found myself thinking about Jean. Wishing she was there.

  That’s when I had this sensation of suffocating. I gasped and my face swelled up and thumped with pressure. Then I was underwater and crushed under massive waves. Bells started ringing and nurses scattered in birdy circles around the bed, pulling back the sheets to discover the whiskey, and scurrying off with it. A mask was pressed down over my nose and mouth and I stopped jerking about and began to swim. I was suddenly a great whale that could hold its breath for a hundred years. I descended down, fathoms deep, then; gracefully and fearlessly.

  Henry And The Five-Pound Note

  After a few days my grey dress was crusty with Glaswegian smog and torn at the hem. Glasgow was a large gentlemen’s public convenience; tiled and stinking of urine and dog shit. I slept for two nights in the manky entrance of a subway. Already I had made the acquaintance of a dozen ghouls whose faces were camouflaged with exhaust fumes and river mud. Days were usefully spent looking for boxes and newspapers, and begging fifty pences off students who looked guilty.

  We ambled down the precincts appearing bemused and deranged. Each time someone asked me my name I reinvented my identity – Dorothy, Emily, Jane, even Fred.

  An old woman called Henry invited me for a cup of tea. She counted out the rough coins in halfpennies onto the formica counter. The proprietor considered refusing her custom, then relented, remembering Mother Theresa, perhaps, or Saint Francis and the lepers.

  As we rattled to a table with our sweet china mugs she boomed loudly, ‘You wouldn’t be a virgin by any chance?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I answered regretfully.

  She sat me down and told me the facts of life.

  I didn�
�t really understand before, beyond the merest biological details. She was so graphic in her descriptions of bodily parts and their functions, from testicle to cervix, from masturbation to bestiality, from sodomy to blow jobs, that I retched into my mug.

  ‘It’s always best to be informed,’ she told me dryly. ‘You never know.’

  ‘It’s never happened to me. I’ve only ever seen two willies.’ I wiped my mouth with a paper napkin. ‘And that wasn’t intentional.’

  ‘It will,’ she muttered grimly.

  Henry was walking to Muck, where she thought she once had a mother, she said.

  ‘Come too. I’ll look after you!’

  I peered into her eyes, which were oddly charming and extravagant, and accepted the offer. I agreed to meet her the next day in the same café.

  ‘Where’s your purse?’ she asked.

  I showed her that I was in fact without pockets.

  She rooted about in her layers of clothing and produced a five-pound note.

  ‘Buy some bottles of stout, for the journey, and a coat for yourself from the Sally Army,’ she whispered maternally.

  I nodded, tucking the note into my threadbare vest.

  It was thundering outside. Henry reached over and looked into my palm.

  ‘You’ve got a long way to go,’ she announced finally. ‘But you’re trustworthy.’

  I was touched by this compliment. No-one had ever trusted me before. I glowed with responsibility.

  Although our discussion was at an end, neither of us had any particular appointment, so we relaxed in the steamy clutter of Mackie’s Tea Rooms drinking from empty mugs for some hours. Henry showed me a black and white photograph in a silver frame of a sad girl sitting in a rowing boat.

  ‘That’s my daughter,’ she told me.

  The child was about eight. I examined the grainy picture and thought I could see Henry in the background, wearing a fisherman’s smock and waving at the camera.

  ‘Is this you?’