Crocodile Soup

by Julia Darling

‘Like a box of chocolates,’ I answered, and nobody laughed.

  ‘You have to Come Out,’ commanded Ariadne adamantly. We must all Come Out.’

  ‘Where?’ I slurred.

  ‘To our parents, for a start,’ quipped Heather.

  Then I got it. We must confess.

  I tried to tell them that I hadn’t slept with a woman yet, so it seemed a little premature, but their beady eyes were fixed on me and I was, I realized, the anthropological specimen of the night.

  ‘My father’s gone,’ I confessed pathetically.

  ‘Your mother then!’ Ariadne shouted.

  ‘OK then!’ I agreed, wanting to end the discussion.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ rallied Heather, ‘to give you support.’

  ‘That’s all right. It’s not necessary. My brother’s in a mental hospital, you see.’ I picked up the bottle and let the last drips fall into my mouth.

  ‘You were supposed to share that wine,’ bleated someone accusingly.

  ‘It is necessary,’ Heather went on, picking up on Ariadne’s tone. ‘You can’t wriggle out of it. I’ve done it.’

  ‘Well done,’ I groaned.

  ‘What happened?’ enquired Heidi, who still had red ditches down her cheeks.

  ‘They hate me, of course,’ snapped Heather. ‘And my Art.’

  Ariadne patted her on the head and Heather wagged her tail.

  The problem was I couldn’t work out what they wanted. It was just too difficult.

  Ariadne boomed, ‘Tomorrow then!’

  I got up, and stumbled drunkenly. They were all looking at me as if I was somehow traitorous. I didn’t understand what I had done to make them so hostile.

  ‘What’s wrong with now?’ I roared, rising to the bait, and deciding to hoist them with their own petard.

  ‘I’m not sure you’re in the right state; you’re drunk,’ demurred Heather.

  ‘I’m as right as I’ll ever be,’ I screeched, frightening some of the thinner members.

  ‘I’m game!’ yelled Ariadne.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ shouted a medley of degree students, rising to their feet like a choir.

  For the first time I was part of a movement and filled with a sense of righteousness and euphoria. Everyone was smiling at me now. Even the windows had more respect than at first, and the sofas had become quite insignificant. I was reminded of Miss Reedcake, my old sports mistress, and running, and girls’ schools, and daisy petals.

  ‘Come on!’ I ranted at the top of my teenage voice.

  Behind me a stampede of desert boots jumped up and I sped out of the door followed by five or six women with faces like torches. As we cantered out of the house our eyes shone like headlights before us, so fixed were we on our mission. It was only as we jogged around the last corner, and headed towards my front door that I began to have doubts.

  But this entourage was a runaway train that wouldn’t stop until it reached my door.

  Jean was sitting with Aunt Margaret, who temporarily believed she was a river and swirled beautifully between great white cotton sheets. She looked up with a Victorian smile at the line of anthropologists before her.

  ‘How nice,’ she whispered. ‘Gert’s brought some girlfriends round. Jean, why don’t you get some chairs.’

  The hot women were suddenly silenced at the sight of Aunt Margaret, who towered above them spiritually and mentally in the guise of a waterfall.

  ‘I like girls!’ she rumbled. ‘Girls are good swimmers on the whole!’

  Jean returned with the chairs, and we gathered around the bed dutifully.

  ‘She’s weak,’ muttered Jean. ‘She’s ebbing. And Frank’s rung eight times.’

  The group was quiet now, and all that could be heard was their pants after the exhausting run. Margaret started speaking, believing she was standing at a pulpit, and told the story of her life. I was completely done for, and rested my head on the candlewick bed cover and instantly fell asleep.

  When I came round Aunt Margaret was tinkling away happily to herself. It occurred to me that all her grief was running away down the mountainside, and when it was all gone she would die singing. The women had gone. Jean was fast asleep on the other side of the bed. It was as if we were resting on imaginary banks.

  Margaret opened one eye blearily.

  ‘Your friends stayed for some hours. I told them everything. I think they enjoyed themselves. They said you wanted to tell me something.’

  ‘Oh that.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ Margaret babbled, then burped.

  ‘I’m a Lesbian Separatist.’ It sounded like something in a jar.

  ‘At least you’re healthy,’ Margaret muttered.

  For a moment then she opened her eyes and was frighteningly lucid.

  ‘Speaking of which,’ she said authoritatively.

  ‘What?’ I asked, frightened, expecting a lordly telling off.

  ‘There’s a dead poet in this house. I’ve seen her several times and managed to converse with her about many things; poetry of course, and corsets. Very interesting the way they used to make them. Very uncomfortable. Anyway, as I said, she’s been hanging around, doing nothing, something which always causes trouble. It’s all to do with this business.’

  ‘Business?’ I echoed weakly.

  ‘What you just said. What was it, lesbian soup?’

  ‘What?’ I was genuinely confused.

  ‘Seems she never got a chance to be herself. Fell in the soup and never got out of it. Died before it was declared and so on. Says she knows you. She said to say she’s sorry about the trouble she’s caused. She festered, that’s all. I’m taking her with me.’

  ‘Where?’ I asked dimly.

  ‘Paradise!’ hooted Margaret. ‘Where else?’

  ‘I thought your friends were lovely girls,’ Margaret said sweetly. ‘That poet said she liked the look of the spidery one. Ariadne. Said she might visit.’

  And then she hummed for a while.

  ‘It’s called Coming Out,’ I said softly.

  ‘Ah. Like cherry blossom,’ tinkled Aunt Margaret. Then she took off her old silver ring and gave it to me, curling my fingers around it with her old hand, as if it was a secret.

  I must be the only person in the world who came out before I even came in.

  ‘If I were you,’ Aunt Margaret advised, ‘I wouldn’t tell Jean.’

  At that moment Aunt Margaret dried up and began to sing.

  A Death In The House

  Jean was quiet as a nun. Aunt Margaret was buried in a temple in Highgate Cemetery. She ascended to heaven at the age of one hundred and two. Her body was soft as a butterfly and she was covered with fine silver hairs. Her obituaries were numerous, and her funeral was crowded with old and passionate women and dusty ministers who wiped their tears with grey handkerchiefs and sang like seagulls. We still had visitors coming to see the room where she spent her last days. I hoped it put Harriet’s nose out of joint. The visitors touched the bed and crossed themselves, and I was beginning to wonder if we were in the presence of a saint.

  I ran round to Mr Berry’s house waving a piece of paper. I had passed all my exams. He was building a house of cards that toppled over when I blew through the door. He laughed and his whole face creaked with the effort. We put on a waltz and danced around the floor together, and I understood that the exams were for him as much as me. I was Mr Berry’s achievement. Together we had seen to my education.

  I also realized that I loved Mr Berry. I loved him because he was so weak.

  After we were through with dancing we looked through lists of universities and planned my future. I wanted to do Oriental Studies. I wanted to get away from everything Southern, and move on to other worlds where roofs were domes and there were no boys in gowns. I asked Mr Berry if he would like to walk around some campuses with me, saying the word ‘campuses’ several times; it was part of my new dictionary.

  Then he said to me quietly, ‘I’m going home.’

  ‘Where?’ I asked. />
  ‘To Ireland,’ he said. ‘You were my life’s work! There’s nothing for me here.’

  And I could see that there wasn’t.

  That was the last time I saw Mr Berry. He was standing at the door, and I realized that he was still in his dressing gown, and his waving hand was shaking.

  At the corner I turned. He was still there. A line from Paradise Lost burst into my mouth and I whispered it, not knowing why, ‘Dovelike sats’t brooding on the vast abyss .

  I can forget that endless piece now. Thank God, I thought.

  Jean

  Every week Jean visited the trumpet player at the leafy asylum. They drank tea, hummed tunes, and clicked their fingers. They looked into each other’s eyes, swaying and egging the other on. The trumpet player wore dapper jackets, and Jean put on her red shoes. Their fingers danced together on the wooden table in the conservatory.

  Jean asked him the nature of his madness, and he told her how he got played out on cruise liners. Night and day he played the trumpet, until it was glued to his lips, and his fingers couldn’t stop moving. He told Jean this, and then he burst into tears for three weeks, until his face went soft, like treacle toffee.

  Then Jean bought him a new trumpet and he took it out of the box as if he had given birth to a new child. The doctors hovered behind them nervously, as if the music might whirl him away. He played one long blue note, and smiled. At the end of the visit Jean put the trumpet back in its case and carried it home. She spent the evenings polishing it with a lavender rag.

  He was writing a trumpet solo for my mother, and one day, Jean said, he would come and live with her, but there was no hurry. Take each day as it comes, she said. I’m free, she told him. I’ve got nobody left but you.

  Gwenny’s Question

  Gwenny and I were going to Paris. Gwenny was leaning over a desk looking into the nervous eyes of a boy with a career in tourism ahead of him. She was questioning him wildly about timetables, boats, trains and planes. He was so confused by her that the computer had seized up. She was tapping her nails impatiently on a glossy picture in a brochure of the Eiffel Tower.

  ‘Which airport?’ he asked politely,

  ‘I don’t know!’ muttered Gwenny.

  ‘When would you like to fly?’

  ‘Actually, I think I’d rather get the train,’ I murmured feebly.

  I started idly leafing through brochures. I looked at the pictures of swimming pools and cocktails of obligatory sunsets. I liked listening to Gwenny. She was so unpredictable. She was leaning across the desk now, prodding the computer keys. It clicked, and suddenly whirred into action.

  I left her to it, and gazed out of the window.

  That’s when I saw Eva. She was standing in the middle of the pedestrian precinct, with people rushing past her, holding a clipboard. Her face was set in an expression of surrender. Her beauty seemed to have fallen away from her like leaves from a tree. It was awful. I nudged Gwenny, but she was too absorbed in the business of tickets, and when I turned back Eva was gone.

  ‘Come on, get a move on!’ Gwenny was haranguing the boy again, who feverishly passed her two train tickets, and sat back exhausted.

  Later, Gwenny and I went and sat in a misty café, clasping mugs of hot chocolate, trying to remember our school French. Just as I was lost in the middle of a disintegrating sentence describing who I was, Gwenny interrupted me, and grabbed one of my hands which I had been waving about in a Parisian manner.

  ‘I’ve been wanting to ask you something,’ said Gwenny. Gwenny was rarely so serious.

  ‘What?’ I asked anxiously.

  ‘Just tell me. Why don’t you speak to your mother?’

  The Last Train

  The day before I left home in autumn, when the river was a mush of brown leaves, Frank was allowed home for the weekend. He sat staring at the television as if it was a wild animal. Jean was clearing out cupboards; an activity she had applied herself to with venom ever since Margaret’s death. I was tiptoeing around Frank, worrying about what would happen after I left.

  He didn’t seem depressed. In fact he was calm and wide eyed, like a tired child. He had started to smoke, and beside him an ashtray was filled with half-finished tab ends. When he didn’t smoke he chewed gum. It seemed like his mouth was never still.

  At about ten o’clock we escorted him to bed, turning back the covers and tucking him firmly between the sheets. He closed his eyes straight away. The front door was locked. I don’t know how he managed to open it.

  He must have lain in bed for some hours, listening to the rain outside, and the trains rushing by. I imagine him struggling out of bed, and trembling as he fumbled his way to the door, still dressed in his institutional pyjamas, his mouth moving in a neverending prayer.

  The street would have been a long winding corridor, longer than our first journey to the Furthest Nursery. Maybe he was aware of my dreams as I slept. It must have taken him a long time to reach the railway line, past the closed eyes of shops and the birds sleeping in rows on the ledges, as it was nearly dawn when he got there and the sun was a weak pink ball rising on the horizon. He stood on the bridge, looking down, waiting for the first train to scream up the line, hell-bent for London, hearing its scream in the distance, clenching his fists.

  What was I dreaming of that night? Why didn’t I wake up?

  Frank waited until the express train thundered over the viaduct and into the tunnel, and just as the sparks flew from the rails, and the noise was so thunderous that he forgot everything, he hurled himself forward and was broken instantly into a thousand tiny pieces that flew into the air and broke the speed of the great engine, nearly causing the train to de-rail.

  Harry

  And now I was leaving again.

  As I was packing I could see Harry waving at me from outside. He was trying to say something with his irregular mouth. I opened the door and he beckoned me out.

  ‘Look,’ he crowed, pointing victoriously at the dustbins.

  The rubbish had gone. The alley was scrubbed and clean.

  ‘Are you responsible?’ I asked him.

  ‘You could say that,’ answered Harry. ‘I pulled strings.’

  Then he leant very close to me, so that I could feel the electric bristle of his chin against my ear.

  ‘Guess who’s staying at my house?’ he whispered.

  He was grinning like a child who had just found fifty pence in a gutter. I shook my head.

  ‘I’ve got Her,’ he announced proudly.

  ‘Who?’ I gasped, although I knew immediately who he was talking about.

  ‘She’s at home on the sofa. I’m going to look after her. I got a book out of the library. On preservation.’

  ‘Well done Harry,’ I said, and kissed him.

  The Letter

  Jean sometimes felt she was trying to drink an ocean with a bent teaspoon. Living in a bedsit on her own was not as bad as she had envisaged, and she had experienced some good times with Cameron. He had taught her to be loose again, for one thing, and he had shown her how to own nothing. She had no idea what to do next, now that he had gone. Lately she thought about me most of the time. She wrote many letters, but I never wrote back. The space between us was full of grief. Then on the last day of her tenancy she came downstairs to discover a letter, the paper calloused, the ink faded, smelling of old men’s furniture. It had obviously travelled, being thumbmarked and heavy with the breath of foreign postmen. She picked it up. There was no-one in the house. Their two rooms on the fourth floor were open wounds. A bag of miscellaneous string was the only item left in the bedroom. She took the letter to the communal kitchen, holding it in front of her, as if it was a promise. There was a kind of buzzing in her left ear, as if a blade of grass vibrated somewhere beyond her eardrum. As she tore it open my front door key fell into her hand.

  The letter was from me. When I wrote it I was on a train with Gwenny on my way to Paris. Gwenny was asleep, snuggled into the corner of the carriage with a contented expre
ssion on her face. Outside there was nothing but rocks and dust. A man with stormy edges was telling me the story of his life. He was only six when I interrupted him.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘I must write a letter. Do you have any paper?’

  And he turned out to be a paper merchant with suitcases filled with paper, papyrus, root paper, paper made from crushed beetles, moist paper, blotting, thin parchment, petal notelets, envelopes made from industrial waste, fried and boiled paper. He displayed his wares on the train seat and I picked a strange mottled shade of handmade parchment which was the most expensive of the range.

  And then I wrote to Jean.

  Dear Mum,

  I’m really sorry that I haven’t been in touch before. I had some trouble at work, and to cut a long story short, I lost my job. I’m going away for a short while with my friend Gwenny, who I’m sure you will like. Please stay in my flat while I’m gone. I paid the rent for the next couple of months. When I get back I would like to talk to you about Frank. I hope you enjoy living in my flat. I cleaned it up before I left, and there’s no rubbish there now. My friend Harry may call on you to check that you are all right.

  With love

  Your daughter Gert

  ‘Gert?’

  ‘Is that you Frank?’

  ‘Yes, it’s me. I’m glad you wrote to her. It wasn’t her fault.’

  ‘No. I just couldn’t find the words, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m not going to call you any more. I’m going to sleep.’

  ‘I thought you might say that.’

  ‘It’s just you kept on waking me up.’

  ‘You never did like to be disturbed.’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad you called.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘You did it Gert.’

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘You grew up.’

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