Crocodile Soup

by Julia Darling

  ‘How are you?’ I asked. The row of untrimmed men were feeling threatened. They started pulling up their socks and tightening their ties.

  ‘Still looking,’ Henry smiled at me.

  ‘Do you know the facts of life?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ I answered. Then I handed her a five-pound note. She was perplexed, and turned it over and over.

  ‘You’ve got lovely bone structure sir,’ chirped the boy cheerily.

  ‘From my mother,’ sighed Henry, leaning back and closing her startling eyes. ‘My daughter has the same bones. You would like her.’

  ‘Goodbye then.’ I patted her earthy shoulder. She opened one eye.

  ‘Goodbye laddy,’ she said politely.

  I left her then. The boy made a swift movement with his head that meant that he knew she was a woman, but would keep quiet for the sake of peace in the already perturbed barber’s shop.

  I thanked him and left, and walked home ignoring the rude chants of schoolboys, and the fat tuts of young women in skirts, feeling trustworthy at last.

  Frank

  ‘Gert?’

  The voice is internal. Frank.

  ‘Oh it’s you.’

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Drunk.’

  ‘She’s right, your friend, I think you should leave.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Get away from that place.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Just go. Write to Jean.’

  ‘I haven’t finished thinking.’

  ‘Don’t leave it too long.’

  ‘Frank?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wish you were here.’

  ‘Sorry Gert.’

  ‘Will I ever see you?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘I see.’

  Frank Comes Down From The Attic

  Heather from the art college came round to see me, one evening when Aunt Margaret was being visited by a grown-up child she once saved. I opened the door. The tourists smiled encouragingly as I let her in.

  ‘Come in.’ I was pleased. She had red rusty hair and carried a portfolio.

  The sitting room was a little embarrassing. It was half empty, and I couldn’t work out where we should sit, as there was only one chair. I turned on the gas heater and sat on the floor while Heather towered above me in the armchair.

  Heather was wearing striped tights and a cardigan with no buttons.

  She was a Lesbian Separatist.

  I asked her what one was and she explained, and I decided, on the spot, that I too would be one, which involved rejecting the penis and going to a women’s group with Heather. I would have gone to a nunnery with her if she had asked me.

  When I asked what would happen at the group, Heather described a kind of discussion, which I was not so keen on. I would have preferred an orgy.

  When she went she kissed me twice in a foreign way.

  I was slightly perplexed. Would being a Lesbian Separatist make me even more separate than I already was? I was scared that I might fall off the edge altogether. I repressed these fears and pinned a badge to my T-shirt with S.C.U.M embossed upon it, and clumped downstairs to wash Aunt Margaret’s dentures out.

  Something was happening to Jean. She had discarded her mollusc shell and emerged in a velvet blue gown that hung loosely from her thin body. She had also finished Aunt Margaret’s shawl. It was so large that my Aunt could wind it round her shoulders three times. When she wore it she was so warm that she also had to have a fan, in case she boiled. Aunt Margaret told me that the shawl was made of Jean’s discarded grievances. Around Margaret’s shoulders these became trivial and fell away in the form of sweat.

  Despite the fact that I was now a Lesbian Separatist I still continued to rely on Mr Berry for my education. We never alluded to the incident with the whiskey, and pretended it had never happened. I was squeezing Mr Berry dry of knowledge. It was incredibly trying. I would put books before him, pointing to the place from which we should begin. Often there was a long and bleak silence while he looked blankly at the text before him, then up at me hopelessly. Then, as if he was an unreliable car that had just been jump-started he began to splutter, and I wrote down every word he said, thirstily. I told him what to set me for homework, and I even got hold of the last year’s exam papers and forced him to go through the questions one by one.

  When he ran out of information he would stagger to the kitchen to make a cup of instant coffee. He had long forgotten wholefood and herbal tea. Even then I followed him with my notepad and made him debate wearily with me while he spooned stale Marvel milk into the cups.

  Sometimes he forgot his inner torment and let go, and then he would wave his arms about and become enthusiastic, but a word like LOVE could send him plummeting back into misery, and unfortunately English literature is studded with references to the word.

  His only work was teaching me, and he couldn’t even do that properly. I was his sole employer, and everything he earnt came from my hard work. The rest was social security cheques. I didn’t think Mr Berry understood how hard it was to stand naked all afternoon, or to assemble fragments of dishwashers without losing heart.

  I had become a martyr, but no-one seemed to notice.

  I was so busy working, understanding Hamlet and cajoling Aunt Margaret that I had forgotten Frank.

  When he eventually came downstairs it was with a vengeance.

  I couldn’t help thinking that Heather was right about men. They caused a lot of trouble and needed constant bailing out or their emotions would fester and become dangerous.

  And I couldn’t stop thinking about George, and his endless knots, which we accepted as part of his personality. If only I could have taught him the cha-cha-cha, then perhaps we would have been closer. Heather wouldn’t refer to her father. She said he was a perpetrator of patriarchy, but secretly I thought of my own father as less of a monster, and more of a tangle.

  Frank didn’t even have a knotting system to keep himself in place.

  He had been in the attic for years now, praying to a photograph of a man in a dress.

  When he appeared I was watching a programme about juvenile delinquents on television and wishing I had more time to be a juvenile delinquent again.

  Although I didn’t look at Frank his face was reflected on the screen, and I noticed that his eyes were wide as quarries. I turned round. His robe was tattered, and smeared with something brown. He was carrying a newspaper and a pebble. He put the pebble on the television and looked at me meaningfully. Then he showed me the newspaper. It was a tabloid, and it was creased and dirty, as if it had been in a dustbin.

  ‘Read it!’ he squawked.

  I turned off the television.

  The headline in front of me read PLANE CRASH KILLS HUNDREDS.

  ‘Oh dear,’ I murmured.

  ‘I did that,’ announced Frank. ‘By mistake.’

  Then he dissolved into tears. I waited until he stopped sniffing.

  ‘Of course you didn’t,’ I answered rationally.

  ‘Do you see?’ asked Frank.

  ‘See what?’

  ‘What I see?’

  ‘Obviously not,’ I answered firmly.

  Frank put a pebble on my shoe, then whispered, ‘It’s all right now, it won’t happen again.’

  ‘What are you talking about Frank?’

  He sank down cross-legged on the floor. The brown marks were burns.

  ‘What’s happened to your robe?’

  ‘The leaves around the window keep burning me. Will you come and see?’

  Unwillingly I trooped up the narrow stairs. I hadn’t made the journey for over a year; not since, as a last resort, we’d searched the house looking for George. Aunt Margaret was shouting orders from her rug. I was unaccountably and overwhelmingly depressed. Frank was breathing heavily. I wondered if he ever slept. I could see the bones in his face through his skin.

  The attic was not the Zen temple I expected, but more
like a room under siege. Most of the furniture had been pushed against the door, and we had to climb over chairs to reach the centre of the room. There were pieces of guru’s face torn up all over the floor, and two candles were flickering in insubstantial candlesticks. The bed was a cat’s cradle of ripped sheets and there were boxes of matches everywhere, and pebbles placed in enigmatic patterns all over the floor. Frank pointed to the window and I saw that the clematis leaves were blackened and scorched. He was frightened. He whimpered, then pressed another pebble into my hand. ‘Hold this, it helps,’ he whined.

  ‘What happened Frank?’ I asked dutifully, holding the stone to my breast.

  ‘She came in and distracted me, that’s why the plane crashed.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A woman. She wants something. She set fire to the leaves. She’s here now.’

  I could smell that tang of ink and bad breath. I shuddered.

  ‘Can you sort it out Gert? I just don’t think I can manage any more.’

  ‘Yes, of course Frank,’ I said quite gently, leading him downstairs. I blew out the candles and propelled him in front of me. The journey took hours. Frank was continually stopping and chanting and putting pebbles on bookshelves and under carpets.

  In the kitchen I gave him a cup of tea, but his mouth was clamped tight with terror. I noticed how thin he was and how his skin was quite yellow.

  I phoned Jean, who was staying with Mabel. Down the line I could hear music and laughter.

  ‘You’ll have to come home,’ I sobbed, ‘Frank’s dying.’

  I wrapped him in a blanket then, and we stayed together being twins waiting for Jean. Aunt Margaret was nearly hysterical with demands, but I didn’t go to her. There was rum in her voice, and she was instructing the spirits of a thousand illiterate children to come and find us.

  We were all deluded. All crazy. It was a menagerie.

  After a few hours Jean ran in with an expression of guilt and rage.

  She saw us both sitting there like refugees and became motherly for the first time in years. She took our temperatures, even though I told her I wasn’t ill, just prematurely aged.

  Last Days

  It was just me and Jean now, and Aunt Margaret, who was not so much a person as an unruly spirit. Frank was in an institution. We went to see him every afternoon, and tried to distract him with insignificant chatter. He had joined a chess club and never got dressed. His body had a fleshy, heavy look, as if it was filled with toffee. He said the drugs they gave him were nice, but his eyes said the opposite. We took him chocolates and trashy novels. He didn’t hear stars galloping any more, and a pebble was just something you found on a garden path. The other patients looked after him. They called him the Professor, which made him seem older than he really was, but he did look old. He telephoned us a lot. We listened.

  Jean and I listened a lot. We ate tinned soup and crackers. We played Scrabble. It was oddly pleasant. We were abandoned by men. The house had begun to menstruate.

  Upstairs I could still hear footsteps, so I didn’t go there. We were in a state of limbo. The doctors didn’t know if Frank would get better or not.

  It was during this period of waiting that something happened which shocked me deeply. I was walking wearily from one job to another, worrying about Lesbian Separatism, and if it was really my bag, and Frank, and Mr Berry, and everything. Heather had given me piles of pamphlets full of spelling mistakes printed on Gestetners. She was a bit pushy, Heather, and secretly I thought all the political stuff was ruining her art. All she painted now was naked women scrunched into uncomfortable boxes with torn magazines pasted over their mouths. I just wished she’d cheer up and paint something jolly.

  I was thinking about all this when I walked past the open door of a bar called the Broken Doll. A putrid waft of fumes gathered in a cloud on the pavement, and there, in the centre of it, falling from the bar door was the pale woman who I had once met with the artist after I tied Eileen to a tree. She crouched on the pavement. Her face was bleak with terror. The artist appeared like a tree struck by lightning above her and started kicking her round the head. She was screaming and wailing like a siren, and his mouth was clenched into a misshapen nail, twisted with ugly glee.

  People from the bar were gathering round, screeching like men at a cockfight. She was a prawn, turned in on herself in a curl on the ground. The other drunks pulled the artist backwards in a lurch. Some of them were laughing. It was a dance I had never seen before, but one which was familiar, even ritualistic. Her tears were repetitive. She was like the girl with red shoes that couldn’t stop dancing. I watched a woman in a grey T-shirt scrape her up and hobble away with her. This, I thought, must never happen to me.

  Cameron

  We were visiting Frank, sitting in a Victorian glass house in regulation deck-chairs and sipping thick tea from thin cups. Frank was struggling with his identity, and taking his spectacles on and off. Other relatives sat in shocked clumps, having conversations that were designed to impart sanity. They were talking about the price of socks and the sweet natures of most dogs. In the corner, alone, there was a gnarled black man, smoking a long pipe and humming to himself. He looked up and waggled his grey head at Frank who saluted him, then blushed and put another cube of sugar into his teacup.

  A male nurse with dreadlocks appeared with a trolley full of pills, and the patients stirred and widened their eyes. One by one they went up to the trolley and accepted a small plastic phial containing the day’s tranquillizers. The black man didn’t move. He held out his long fingers and waited for the boy to come to him.

  Jean fanned herself with a napkin and remarked upon the healthiness of the rhododendrons.

  Outside on the lawn a Chinese woman was dancing. We watched her hold an invisible ball above her head. A doctor, standing in the shade of a malevolent shrub stared at her, then took a Polaroid photograph. I was suddenly aware of being watched. Above me a video camera whirred and coyly turned its head to one side.

  Frank suddenly left the table, distracted, and walked out of the conservatory with his hands in their old praying position. I followed him nervously. We walked past a juicy rose bush that was heavy with bees. Frank stopped and stared at it. I stopped too, and together we watched a bee descend into the labia of a rose and suck. Frank whispered, ‘You’d like it here.’

  Above us, through an open window, a girl’s voice screamed, ‘I’m coming undone.’

  Frank didn’t appear to hear her. ‘Gert,’ he said, his grave face wincing.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered politely.

  ‘You wanted to ask me something?’

  I remembered the holiday when I followed Frank everywhere.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said dutifully. ‘I’m sorry about twisting your arm.’

  I examined his face. It was like mine, but inside out.

  ‘Don’t worry about that.’

  ‘I am attached to a piece of floss,’ Frank went on airily. ‘It only stretches this far.’

  ‘Have you tried walking further?’ I enquired, sensibly.

  ‘Yes.’ Frank shook his head and turned back.

  ‘What happened?’ I murmured.

  ‘I got stung. By a bee!’ Frank burst into peals of laughter. The asylum raised its eyebrows, and I realized Frank was in here for a long time.

  When we got back to the conservatory Jean had fallen in love. She was with the black man, who was holding her hands and singing ‘Blue Moon’ into her stormy eyes. She giggled.

  ‘This is Cameron. I am trying to persuade him to join us for tea tomorrow,’ she told us carelessly. ‘He plays the trumpet. He says he might, if he’s not busy.’

  Cameron made a trumpet sound with his lips.

  ‘Why are you here?’ I blurted, worried.

  ‘I just forgot to sleep,’ he intoned in a high-pitched voice. ‘Just forgot. Lost my trumpet in a cloud of smoke. Fell out of a moving ship. Too many songs going round in my head. Trumpets. Waves. Women.’

  Jean laughed
indulgently.

  Frank shuddered and said he needed to get back to a dream.

  Jean shook hands with Cameron.

  We walked together to the airy foyer with its milky statues of naked horses.

  ‘What do you want with him?’

  Jean pouted.

  ‘Haven’t we got enough to worry about,’ I protested. ‘He’s under surveillance. He could be a murderer.’

  Frank whispered, ‘He plays flat notes in his sleep.’

  Jean shrugged.

  ‘Maybe not tomorrow,’ she trilled. ‘But someday!’

  It sounded like the chorus of a sentimental song.

  Ascension

  With trepidation I was lured to a meeting of the Lesbian Separatists, with wine and cheese. They met in a living room of a house that had morbid velvet curtains and three vivid sofas. They were all wearing round spectacles, and most of them were at universities studying anthropology. When I smiled they didn’t smile back. They were discussing something very important which made them angry and hot. They pushed their hair back from their foreheads and shouted. Most of it was about foreign countries and political parties. One woman, called Heidi, ran from the room in tears when they turned on her like dogs, snarling. At the head of the meeting a big woman called Ariadne held the notes. Heather squirmed at her feet like an ornamental dog.

  They asked me if I had Come Out. I answered, ‘Well, I’m here aren’t I?’ and they sighed together in a long sulky breath, exchanging furtive sneers.

  After a while the words were clarinets and I couldn’t hold on to the meaning of what they were saying. It was oppressive. I wanted to admire someone, but found it hard to find a recipient. Heather wouldn’t even look at me; she only had eyes for Ariadne. I grabbed a wine bottle and drank the whole bottle silently. Suddenly the group was looking at me, waiting for me to say something. I realized with a horrible lurch that we were each supposed to say how we felt.

  Heather probed, ‘How do you feel Gert?’