Crocodile Soup

by Julia Darling

‘Oh no,’ she declared. ‘Not me.’

  The café owner threw us out at midnight and we parted politely under a curvaceous lamp post. I wandered towards my subway, thinking of Henry, and stepped on a boy with only one eye who was crouching in a puddle playing a guitar with no strings. He strummed it with his fingers and hummed. I sat down with him, and for a while we watched the feet of passers-by splashing past, afraid to look down at us in case we asked for our bus fare home. Then a policeman strolled up amiably and the boy grinned at him as if he knew him.

  I expected to be invisible, but the man in blue stared at me and stopped smiling. Authoritatively he told me to stand, and then grabbed me with both hands as if he had caught a rare newt.

  Gallantly he escorted me to the police station, which was granite and imposing. He squeezed my arm very tightly, steering me past a glass partition through which I could see Big Betty and Robbie arguing over my juvenile face that looked up innocently from the pages of a national newspaper.

  They saw me and tutted. I stuck my tongue out.

  Unceremoniously I was deposited in a cell and informed that my father was flying to Glasgow in an aeroplane. I scratched GERT WAS HERE on the wall with a button, and hoped it would give the building a stomach ache. After some hours I was led into a brightly lit room and made to sit opposite a policewoman with a white collar and a defiant chin. She asked me patiently if I had experienced penetrative sex.

  ‘Definitely not,’ I said with conviction.

  ‘You wouldn’t know a lady called Henry would you?’ I asked.

  ‘Can you describe her? Did she corrupt you in any way?’

  ‘Not at all.’ I squinted, trying to see Henry’s features, but ah’ I could visualize was the blurred outline in the photograph.

  ‘She gave me five pounds, that’s all.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about that dearie,’ grunted the policewoman, as she escorted me back to my cell.

  But that’s all I could think about. The dirty five-pound note that didn’t belong to me.

  Coming Home

  George and I stepped off the night train. Our journey had been damp and silent, and I slept, or pretended to sleep, for the greater part of it. George read the same newspaper for six hours. He never asked me what I had been doing. I felt like a runaway animal. We walked down the hill from the station. He breathed heavily as if the air was difficult to catch. The town was full of bright windows and talkative televisions. I looked in at knick-knacks on mantelpieces, the dangerous swirling carpets of Southern sitting rooms.

  I had a sudden memory of being three years old and holding his huge hand as if it was a raft. Now it might as well be a jellyfish. He was oddly reflective. He sailed ahead of me down the steep hill to our house, then stood outside, looking in. As I loped closer I could hear music. All the lights were on. The windows were open and the curtains were undrawn. We stood there listening to clinking and chattering. The silver cat peeped out at us and arched its back, hissing. When George opened the door, warm beery air flooded over us. The front room was full of candles. The table was heavy with large momentous cakes and the curling tongues of smoked salmon. Mabel staggered towards us with a sparkler in her hand, her eyes flashing with static.

  ‘So you’re back!’ she squeaked.

  Everyone looked at us then. The room was full of drunk women. They were clicking their fingers and licking their lips. It occurred to me suddenly that maybe they had eaten their husbands for first course, which was maybe why George was so apprehensive. They were dancing to raunchy hot chilli music. There were no handbags, only discarded shawls and lost shoes. I stared at them hungrily. George changed himself into a piece of rope and coiled up in a chair. The women sniggered.

  Jean sashayed out from behind a cupboard door. God seemed to have gone on holiday. She had dyed her hair from grey blond to platinum and was wearing a glossy dress imprinted with trumpets, and a pair of sleek red shoes. I looked down at my feet which were like something from the ocean bed.

  She eyed me with hostility. I stared back. My eyes felt like marbles in my skull. She rolled over to me and said, ‘I’m having an old girls’ reunion.’

  ‘Where’s God?’ I asked nastily.

  ‘Gone, gone, gone!’ she chanted devilishly. ‘Happy now?’

  I tried to sneer, but ended up looking at the floor.

  ‘These are my old friends.’ She enveloped them with one sweep of her long pale arms.

  ‘I think I’ll have a bath,’ I said casually.

  ‘Go ahead!’ Jean snapped, cynically. ‘But you’ll be paying from now on!’

  Someone turned the music up. They all started dancing. I staggered up the stairs feeling as if the whole of Glasgow was embedded in my head.

  I could feel Jean, hot eyes in my back. This, I decided, was much worse than tears.

  She never spoke to me after that. We moved in different spheres. George kept a file in his parlour titled GERT: DISAPPEARANCE, which contained newspaper cuttings, police statements and a cassette of Captain Beefhart’s greatest hits.

  It was the end of my formal education, as Miss Oar put her misshapen foot down and barred me from her gruelling establishment. I went back to Mr Berry, who calmly continued my tuition, as if nothing untoward had occurred.

  And Jean pretended that she had no children and smoked at breakfast time and George began to talk to himself in public.

  Escape

  After a week in the ward I couldn’t take it any more. The woman in the next bed wouldn’t stop telling me about her ovarian problems, and eggs started to roll into my dreams at night like giant pods. The doctors were all junior and dropped their stethoscopes. They explained everything with naive smiles. Apparently, I was under observation, but no-one seemed to be looking, apart from Gwenny, who visited every day. I found her visits touching. I mean, she hardly knew me really. She would bring me an orange, or a kiwi fruit, and peel it carefully, then feed it to me very slowly. If I had been able to speak I would have asked her to get me out of there, but all I could do was smile gratefully and chew. After she had gone the air smelt of citrus and sparklers.

  The nurses dressed me shabbily in darned paper nightdresses and occasionally asked me impossible questions about my medical history, which I answered with a nod or a shake of my head. They gazed down my throat with plumbing implements. They X-rayed my lungs, and twiddled with my larynx. They took my temperature and wrote coded messages on the file at the end of my bed. They turned off the lights at ten o’clock, leaving me rummaging about under pink blankets, wishing for pain killers and sleeping pills.

  We were a ward of disturbed, faintly injured women. Opposite me lay a secretary who had gone blind for no apparent reason, and a teenager who had mysteriously turned a deep oyster yellow colour. On my right was the spinster with swelling eggs, cackling and complaining, and ringing the night bell so often that no-one heard it any more. Behind a pink curtain there was a bus conductress with a perpetual nose bleed. The nurses came out holding scarlet flannels.

  At least I didn’t ask for anything. Often the tea trolley wheeled past me as if I was invisible. The meals arrived on blue plastic plates with aluminium lids. Under the lids were indescribable meals, made from ingredients I had never seen before, piled indiscriminately on top of one another.

  Frank whispered to me sometimes, but I didn’t answer. I heard his soft feet on the cold stone, and his breath as he meditated cross-legged, silent and isolated. I wanted to speak to him, but I couldn’t. I suppose it was always like that with Frank. My flowers had all wilted and all the visitors, apart from Gwenny, had dried up. It was like lying in a decaying greenhouse.

  I waited until night fell and the matron was watching Brookside. The nurses flew about so fast they never noticed me anyway. I clambered down from the high iron bed, and put on the egg woman’s slippers. Inside I was a grey mulch. My heart was beating in several different places.

  I crept down the corridors in the guise of an escaping germ, aware that my nightgown was tor
n in several places, revealing glimpses of pubic hair and nipple.

  I passed a group of Americans shouting at a doctor, who was red in the face with black sticky hair.

  ‘Whadda ya mean, she got stuck?’ yelled a woman with a chromium jaw. They were quite oblivious as I sidled past. A porter with a vast unmanageable hoover that pulled him wilfully along the perspiring linoleum floor didn’t even look up. I wondered if I actually still existed until I was nodded at solemnly by a tiny Asian woman in a beaded sari gliding past me pushing a drip full of blue liquid. Her eyes were glittering and she was full of purpose.

  Eventually I located a door, revolving all by itself. The reception desk was quite empty, and I scribbled a note on a scrap ripped from my paper hem. I propped it against an arrangement of dried flowers. It read GONE HOME. LOVE GERT HARDCASTLE. As I pushed out into the cold clean air I left the aromas of luncheon meat, tinned mandarin segments and margarine and smelt the incinerator instead. I decided I was quite content to remain mute. The journey home took five minutes. I had to break in having mislaid all the implements of daily life. As I climbed awkwardly with naked legs through the window I heard a yell. Across the road Harry was trying to communicate in semaphore.

  ‘Do you want a leg up?’ he mouthed.

  I shook my head and clambered on. Harry shrugged and wandered off with his torch.

  Once inside I put my clothes on and then got into bed, where I sat propped on pillows drinking whiskey and wondering what would happen next.

  George Builds A Boat

  George was building a boat. No-one saw him making it, but each weekend he plodded off with cans of varnish and sandpaper and bags filled with shackles and pulleys. He came back smelling of burnt plastic, and gradually, over months, his back developed a curve from bending so long over his work, and his hair, instead of thinning with age, grew thick and tarry. The boat was blue, and he called it Oona, in memory of our lost au pair. It was meticulous and neat and had a little kitchen with a gas cooker and one tin cup, one plate, and one saucepan.

  While George built his boat I sensibly taught myself the art of cake decoration. I was trying to impress Jean; to coax a word or a look from her stony face. My cakes were audacious and often multi-coloured. I made spongy structures, animals, buildings and abstract designs. I had a set of stainless steel kitchen utensils that George had given me for my birthday (I got nothing at all from Jean) which no-one else was allowed to touch. I notched and frilled, tweaked and fluted, glazed and crystallized. I was left quite alone.

  Frank was now converted entirely to monkishness. He had shaved his head. I was used to this now and had learnt to bow slightly when he entered rooms. He lived in the attic all the time, and had stopped going to school in his gown. He was supposed to be going to university, but he was still too young. He had passed so many exams there were none left to take.

  One day George invited us to witness the launching of Oona. It was the only occasion I can remember us all being together. We unwillingly tore ourselves from our introverted lives and made the journey to a jetty poking out precariously in a place called Orb. I went on the bus with Frank, who wore an orange robe. Jean drove separately in a car. She refused to even sit in the same room as me, let alone side by side in a vehicle.

  The boat jutted out of a ramshackle shed. We lined up in a row watching George prepare for the birthing of his creation. I had made a cake in the shape of a wave, with a seagull flying above it made of marzipan, held in the air by a thin silver wire. Jean had brought a bottle of fizzy wine to break against Oona’s bottom. Frank hovered sadly, praying on the slipway, as if his hands had flown down from his ears. His robe clashed with the shingle. George was boyish in a wet towelling shirt and sailcloth trousers held up with string. He was a one-man band. Jean tried to smother her irritation as a rising gale blew her poncho tassels across her face.

  Eventually the little boat creaked slowly down the planks and plummeted into the tarry water. We cheered, and I cut the cake; handing George a slice from the jetty as he fussed with the tiller. Jean took a photograph, but George was not looking at the camera. His eyes were set on the horizon. He was so tall that when the boom swung it nearly knocked him over.

  Jean announced, too early, ‘I’m going home,’ and Frank and I shuffled after her.

  George said he would tidy up and join us later. He hadn’t eaten his cake and neither had Frank. He was planning a maiden voyage. We all looked forward to it. He made us feel guilty.

  Finding My Voice

  The next day Gwenny turned up at my flat, having gone to the hospital only to find a girl with an inflamed ear in my bed. The matron had told her that I was digging my own grave. She was carrying a bunch of energetic chrysanthemums.

  I was very frail. In fact I could hardly stand. I opened the door fearfully. I had just opened a brown envelope and found out that the car I had crashed into on the coast road was a blue Reliant Robin, owned by an elderly woman who had just had her hips replaced. I was to be charged with reckless driving. I was losing my grasp on reality. Maybe Gwenny wasn’t there at all.

  Gwenny looked at me as if I was a small child. I pulled her into my flat. She said, ‘You should be in hospital, you daft idiot,’ and laughed.

  Not being able to speak, I just shrugged. All the curtains were closed. We stood in the dirty kitchen like two shadows meeting in the twilight.

  ‘You gave me a shock, when you weren’t there,’ said Gwenny.

  She started moving around, picking up scraps of paper, and putting the kettle on. Almost to herself she muttered, ‘I thought you’d died!’

  I shook my head feebly.

  ‘Why don’t you get into bed?’ she said kindly. Obediently I wandered into my grey, untidy bedroom. I could hear Gwenny singing downstairs.

  Then she was creeping up the stairs. I pretended to be asleep. I could feel the intensity of her gaze as she looked down at me.

  ‘Gert?’ Gwenny touched my hand.

  ‘Would you like a biscuit?’

  I kept my eyes closed, refusing to acknowledge her. She sat there patiently, holding a plate of custard creams. I opened my eyes. It dawned on me then, as I looked up at Gwenny. Gwenny was beautiful. I saw her completely in focus, just for a few seconds. I saw into her thoughts. I smelt her childhood. I wanted her more than I had ever wanted anyone.

  I grabbed her hand as if it was a life belt. My voice suddenly boomed out of my throat at top volume, gurgling up from the soles of my feet in great gushing words.

  ‘I don’t like custard creams!’

  ‘What do you like?’

  ‘Figgy rolls. Caramel shortcake. Club biscuits...’ I pulled her towards me, reciting a litany of biscuits, forgetting Eva, forgetting everything but the taste of crumbs on Gwenny’s tongue.

  Closer

  ‘Gert?’

  ‘Frank, is that you? You sound louder than usual.’

  ‘That’s because I’m thinking about you a lot.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘I’m worried about you. You’ve been weird. You might have died.’

  ‘Oh, thanks.’

  ‘And I was thinking about all that time when Jean didn’t speak.’

  ‘I didn’t think you noticed.’

  ‘Before I was ill. When the house was mapped out so that no-one ever met on the stairs.’

  ‘Perhaps we were all ill.’

  ‘And you just cooked food and carried on, and you didn’t have anyone to talk to.’

  ‘I had Mr Berry.’

  ‘But no-one really close. It was awful. It was like ice.’

  What’s brought this on Frank?’

  ‘I just thought you might have died and I could have done something.’

  ‘But I’m not dead.’

  ‘No. OK.’

  ‘Don’t give up Gert. Please.’

  My First Date

  I was sixteen years old. My existence was entirely solitary. My mother hadn’t spoken to me for over three years, my twin brother was too monkish to sp
eak to ordinary mortals, and my father spent all his time bobbing about in Oona. If it wasn’t for Mr Berry I think I might have killed myself, but I feared that if I did I would live in the limbo of the house along with Harriet who was, I believed, enjoying the general misery, so I continued with my education.

  To my own amazement I got myself a job. I saw it advertised in a magazine. Cook wanted. Cooking made me feel useful. I loved to watch cakes rising in ovens with glass windows. The job was part time, and the restaurant was the Cowboy Saloon on the edge of a bypass, a few fields away from the small town where I lived.

  The building was in the style of a cowboy’s head, with a huge orange plastic hat for a roof. I was ordered to cook within full view of the customers in an imitation water hole. I sweated into the steaks while famished people drummed their fingers on their napkin rings. The orders lined up in hundreds on the counter, and plates were constantly returning with half-eaten shanks of meat on them, and complaints of ‘too rare’ or ‘overdone’. The waitresses, dressed as Calamity Jane, despised me. They compared me to the day cook who was a man with a Clint Eastwood nose, and who cooked faster than I could read. Each night I cooked several cows. I heard their relatives mooing across the fields as I walked home.

  At home I practised cooking for George, who chomped his way through sides of beef without making any comment. I made him Duchess Potatoes, Salmon in Aspic, Quails’ Eggs in Lavender Sauce, Candied Lambs’ Hearts and Anchovy Surprise. I watched him eating, and waited for a response, but he had no sense of taste. At one of these meals, he informed me in a low voice that the crocodiles were no longer paying. People didn’t want crocodile handbags any more. His company, he confided, had unravelled and fallen into the hands of cheap alligator skin salesmen. I served him up a bowl of damsons and he gobbled them up two at a time. He put the pips carefully on one side of his plate. There were four.

  I didn’t tell him that I had an admirer. His name was Ed Cutler, which I never shortened to Ed. He was a temporary waiter at the Cowboy Saloon, and lived in a caravan behind a silo, which was why he smelt of manure. He had black greasy hair and tinsel eyes. He walked home with me across the fields, and proclaimed his love for me from the centre of nettle patches, or halfway over hedges.