Crocodiles & Good Intentions

by Liza Cody

  ‘Well, I won’t forget.’

  ‘Yeah, you will. As soon as you’ve taken a handful of those Snoozeezys you bought at the all-night chemist on your way over here, and stashed in your left shoe, you too will forget my Little Miss Perfect. And you’ll cease to care about Connor, my broken son. You’ll sleep snug in the private pod which is no bigger than Hazel’s coffin, and forget all about friends, enemies and smashed up children.’

  ‘I do hope so,’ I said.

  Several men were still wiping their eyes and noses. Ocean Freedom was helping the Staffie owner bathe the Staffie’s eyes with water. The Staffie still had the wooden spoon between his teeth and was refusing to give it up.

  ‘I bet pinch of Golden Virginia on him,’ said a shaven-headed guy, holding his mug out for more tea. ‘Now all bets are void, thanks to you.’

  I couldn’t tell if I was being congratulated or blamed. Nor could I tell who he was talking to – Lorelei or me. I stayed close to the kitchen counter. Sometimes the homeless world seems to be populated entirely by damaged men and I feel outnumbered and powerless. At those times, when I’m even less popular than normal, I’m grateful that people like Lorelei are armed with spatulas and unshakeable ethics.

  I wanted to hide away in my claustrophobic pod with Electra. I wanted to sleep safe and deep. But first I had to take Electra out into the snow. I put on Billy’s coat and swathed my head in an extra jumper twisted like a deranged turban against the chill. I covered Electra in her waterproof. One of the care-workers let us out. On our way up the stone outside steps we met two cops coming down. Heart in mouth I flattened myself against the handrail, lowering my head and eyes.

  They barely glanced at me. But I didn’t breathe again till I was out on the slushy pavement and hurrying away from the police car, parked illegally with two wheels up on the pavement. We were a long way from North by Northwest of the North Circular, and I knew the care workers had called them because they were afraid the dogfight would go rampageous, but I didn’t want to be seen, recognised, thought about or remembered by a cop. Especially not remembered. Cops have such inconveniently long memories.

  I rushed Electra round a corner, out of sight of the shelter, before letting her stop to pee. We stood, half protected, in an abandoned shop doorway, and I watched the snow blow horizontal from East to West along the deserted street. It was still melting on the warmer pavement, but more slowly now. If it kept going it would become a white blanket by morning. Pretty but deadly.

  I did not know how I was managing to stand. The grief and anger, the danger and confusion, tumbled like an avalanche over me. Manipulation, betrayal, sleeplessness and pain soaked me to the bone. The freezing weight of it was suddenly unbearable and I found myself weeping. The whole helpless, hopeless mess of cruelty and inhumanity found expression in gulping sobs of sorrow for, of all things, Hazel’s death. I’d heard her soggy cough for the last time only a few days ago. She had shared her cider and warned me about Antabuse – acts of generosity from someone who had nothing. Well, she didn’t have nothing – she’d had Gary, a forever companion, a love of sorts. Now she was dead and Gary had nothing but anger left in his heart. That’s worth a few tears, isn’t it? I didn’t know her story and now I never would. She, like a snowflake on a warm pavement, vanished in seconds. Isn’t that cause for sorrow?

  ‘Tears dripping on a wet pavement,’ hooted the Count of Contempt. ‘What a fitting tribute.’

  I would have answered, trying to transform sadness into a more bearable anger, but a figure hurrying by, swathed in a thick coat and protected by a red umbrella, caught sight of us and stopped. It was Lorelei.

  ‘What’re you doing out here?’

  ‘Waiting till I’m sure the police have gone.’

  ‘They’ve gone,’ she said abruptly. ‘Why are you crying?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why not, indeed?’ She made it sound like profound philosophy.

  How might my life have turned out if I’d had a mother like her? She didn’t say, ‘What have you got to cry about?’ or ‘Shut up – others have it far worse,’ or ‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself, you’re showing me up.’ No, she simply told me that sorrow was justified whatever the occasion and stood patiently by, almost as patient as Electra, waiting for the storm to pass. Then she took off one glove, reached into her pocket and handed me a fistful of tissues.

  She watched while I mopped my face. Then she took off the other glove and gave me the pair, saying only, ‘Get warm. You’re exhausted. It’s safe to sleep now.’

  And it was. Safe behind a locked door in my coffin-sized pod I snuggled into a duvet that smelled only a little stale. With Electra warming my feet I crashed headfirst into the black.

  31

  A Place Of Safety

  I stayed at Juliet House for three days because the temperature dropped below freezing three days in a row. The Cold Weather Protocol was in place, so no one was kicked out or turned away from the door either. The dayroom filled with emergency mattresses and sleeping bags. Tempers crackled. Food supplies and volunteers to take on the extra kitchen work were scarce.

  But were we grateful? You’d think we would be, wouldn’t you? But instead we acted as if we were the paying guests of a five star hotel being offered inadequate service. If lunch was ten minutes late, if there weren’t enough clean cups for instant tea or coffee, if someone had crapped in the shower and no one had cleaned it up, we complained. We made a fuss, we felt hard done by and we expressed ourselves loudly. We behaved as if we, the victims of fate, were owed compensation. Food and shelter were ours by right. So do it better you lazy volunteers. Why? I don’t know. Maybe for once we were safe from being moved on so we could stop pretending to be meek and grateful and behave like spoiled tourists instead.

  Electra and I slept a lot. I could swallow Snoozeezys whenever I wanted to. It was what made life without red wine bearable in my claustrophobic pod. It kept me out of reach of the damaged men. It gave my poor pummelled body a chance to heal.

  Outside, although the main roads had been ploughed and salted, it was quiet. The pavements were icy. Some conscientious citizens had swept a few yards outside their own property, but the majority hadn’t bothered. Electra and I slipped and slid carefully round the block a couple of times a day seeing scarcely anyone.

  Most action took place outside Juliet House where, in spite of the Cold Weather Protocol, there was no amnesty on tobacco or booze. Groups of bickering men huddled on the church steps trying to smoke with their gloves on. Sometimes a couple of guys, going stir crazy, would collect money from other guys desperate enough to trust them, drag themselves off to the nearest shop and come back with tobacco, cider or beer. All of this had to be consumed hurriedly, outside in the freezing cold.

  I went to the shop too, but discovered they only sold red wine in two litre bottles. Even I couldn’t manage to drink two litres at a single sitting – which I’d have to do because I couldn’t smuggle the rest inside. You can’t just walk in to Juliet House. You have to be buzzed in by the professionals in the front office. Even then there is a kind of airlock where you are assessed for drunkenness, aggression and instability. If they want to, the professionals can tell you to ‘walk it off’, and send you away till you’re calmer and more amenable to Juliet House rules. They can refuse to let you in at all. They can, and will, call the cops on you if you’re violent and won’t go away. Charity for the homeless begins, not at home, but in an airlock.

  But, after the threat of the dogfight had passed, as long as I kept myself to myself, I felt relatively safe and comfortable. I should, I thought, have come here as soon as I left prison instead of relying on Pierre and Li’l Missy to ease me into the kind of freedom I’d been yearning for. How was I to know that their hearts, minds and courage had been undermined by a daughter of Damian Dark?

  So I settled into the routine of regular meals being given to me, of cu
ps of tea I didn’t have to make myself, of soap and water, of early bedtimes in a warm, dry bed. I was resting, I told myself, building myself and Electra up – I’d be out of Juliet House by Christmas.

  In fact I probably could have stayed until the Snoozeezys ran out and my thirst became critical, or until the shelter professionals kicked me out – whichever came first. But then something happened that changed everything.

  I hadn’t seen Lorelei since that first night. But at lunchtime on the fourth day she turned up behind the kitchen counter, dishing out plates full of spaghetti Bolognese. The cooks had been listening to the noon news on the kitchen radio but forgot to turn it off when they raised the hatch grille, so portentous BBC voices competed with the unstoppable sports commentary from the dayroom TV. Scots Gary, numbed sullen by rage, was ahead of me in the queue. He snapped at Lorelei, ‘Turn that shite off. D’you think I want to know about how fucked up the Middle East is and – what now – sodding dead babies?’

  ‘I don’t suppose you do, Gary,’ she said. She handed him a plate and then turned away to switch off the radio. But not before I heard the BBC voice say, ‘… an arrest was made last night… ’ The serious tone of the voice thrust, unwelcome, to the front of my mind what for three peaceful nights, I’d shoved to the back.

  When it was my turn I said, ‘What dead babies? Who’s been arrested?’

  ‘I wasn’t really listening, Lady.’ She passed me the bowl of grated cheese and I helped myself to a heaped spoonful. I love cheese. ‘But there was one of those Social Service scandals about a little kid found concussed and… ’

  ‘Was it a boy? In Shoreditch?’

  ‘If it’s the same story – but I don’t know, honestly, I was concentrating on the sauce. Why?’ She gave me a curious, wise-eyed look.

  ‘Nothing.’ The man behind jostled me impatiently and I hurried away with my plate to a table at the far end of the room.

  I rolled back my sleeve to look at my forearm. Of course it was clean. I’d washed away Li’l Missy’s scribbled phone numbers.

  ‘What have I done?’ I whispered to Electra. But she didn’t answer. She was sitting close to me gazing wistfully at my plate. She loves cheese too. It isn’t very good for her, but I took a pinch and offered it to her on the palm of my hand. She accepted quickly.

  I stared out of the window. Snow was still clinging stubbornly to the corners of the glass. We were below ground level so I couldn’t see much more than passing shoes and ankles behind the iron railings. All was wet, grey and dark. There was no sky. Even when we went outside and looked up there was only a thick layer of loft insulation bearing down on us.

  ‘This is like chokey,’ I said to Electra.

  ‘Bollocks,’ said one of the guys opposite me and started to tell of food spat and pissed on by the twats on kitchen duty, of canteen dust-ups. Another guy joined in and they swapped memories of brutality and degradation. Does everything have to be a competition between men? Well, maybe not all men. I thought about Li’l Missy and Pierre as they’d been when I first knew them. They’d been kind to each other then. They’d supported each other in their subversion of what was expected of ‘normal’ men – until Winter Woman started to mould them into the shapes that would satisfy her bourgeois needs. What kind of woman does that? Isn’t it usually a man’s trick – to think only of his own wants and ignore your identity completely?

  ‘That’s sexism,’ jeered the Sneering Serpent. ‘I’ve told you before – I am an equal opportunities tempter. I can find and nurture talent in men and women alike. You should follow my example.’

  ‘Oh belt up,’ I said with my mouth full.

  ‘Piss off yourself,’ said the guy opposite. ‘If you don’t like the company just fuck off.’

  So I did. I took my plate away to my cocoon. Eating in your room isn’t allowed in Juliet House, but none of the care workers noticed me.

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’ I asked Electra. She didn’t answer. She hopped up on the narrow bed beside me. She leaned against my shoulder until she’d licked up another mouthful of cheese and I’d stroked her from nose to tail. Then she curled up and closed her eyes.

  I thought about Li’l Missy Smister being arrested and sent to prison, having his food peed on and enduring brutality in the canteen. I wasn’t so worried about Pierre – he was big and confident enough to command respect even in a feather boa.

  ‘In which case,’ interrupted the Disseminator of Doubt, ‘why did he fold and become my love child’s glove puppet?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something to do with sex? Maybe she did infiltrate his life like a parasite, by stealth, and weakened him.’

  ‘Brilliant at exploiting weakness – my daughter has so many fascinating abilities. You’d never know it to look at her, would you? How does it feel to have such easily manipulated friends?’

  ‘Unsafe,’ I said.

  ‘Well then, why risk the safety you’ve discovered here to look for them? What could you do for them if they have been arrested?’

  I began to be quite glad I’d washed their phone numbers off my arm. I lay down on the bunk and closed my eyes. There was time for a nap before tea. But I’d barely drifted off when I heard the clatter of cutlery on a melamine plate. Electra was obliterating every last trace of spaghetti Bolognese and cheese. The plate looked as if it had been in the dishwasher. But the sight of the pristine plastic made me roll up my other sleeve. And there on my left arm was the not quite readable trace of two telephone numbers. Li’l Missy must have written with a Magic Marker. Could I pretend I hadn’t seen it and do a much more thorough job next time I had a shower?

  ‘That would be my advice,’ insinuated Duke Dismal.

  ‘What should I do?’ I showed Electra the writing. She licked my arm. The faded numbers, unlike cheese, did not disappear.

  ‘Oh balls and bananas,’ I said. I picked up the shiny plate and left the safety of my pod.

  Lorelei was leaving just as I arrived at the kitchen door. She took my plate but said, ‘I’m not washing that up. I’ve done so much in the last hour my hands are melting.’ She looked down at her hands as if they were too big for her and belonged to someone else. She sighed and put my plate on the counter. Then she sighed again and let me into the kitchen while she rinsed my licked plate, knife and fork under the hot tap and put them in the steriliser. The kitchen was very clean. Usually it’s a tip – everyone leaves the washing up for someone else. But not Lorelei; I knew she’d help me.

  I said urgently, ‘Get out now, before someone else finds more work for you.’

  We left the kitchen and this time she shut the door with an air of finality. We walked up the corridor towards the front office together.

  I said, ‘Can you help me with something?’ I pushed my left sleeve up to my elbow and showed her the nearly legible writing. She fished in a bulging carpet bag for her reading glasses.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she muttered, squinting and peering. ‘Either you wash too well or not well enough.’ But she co-opted Rex and his magnifying glass from the front office. They decided there were five possibilities for the two numbers and wrote them down for me. Lorelei then demanded the key to the storeroom and found me a striped, thick-knitted beanie cap and a thick-soled pair of men’s shoes. The professionals in the front office looked disapproving but said nothing. They are always polite to their volunteers, but I had a feeling that they relied on Lorelei more than most. Which is why, after some wheedling, they allowed me to use one of the office phones.

  The first number earned me abuse: ‘Stop calling this number. I haven’t got any money. Get an honest job!’ At first I thought it was personal but Rex told me that was how he too responded to cold callers. The second didn’t connect at all. The third was answered by Li’l Missy.

  She started in immediately: ‘Momster, where have you been? We need witnesses. Why do you always run out when you’re needed? You’r
e such a douche! Honestly, your douchiness would try a saint, so it would.’

  I nearly hung up. But after an audible tussle Pierre said, ‘Don’t mind her, she’s panicking.’

  ‘What’s happened? Is it Connor?’

  There was a pause, and then Pierre said softly, ‘He died last night. He never woke up.’

  I slid down the wall, doubled over as if I’d been punched in the gut. Oh those bastards, oh shit, shit, shit – the crippling weight we force our poor little children to carry! But they can’t. They’re too small. They just can’t.

  Why was Connor dead? What had he done to deserve it?

  ‘Nada,’ said Pierre. ‘He was just a kid.’

  ‘But he was impossible. I sort of wanted to kill him too.’

  ‘Trouble?’ Lorelei asked five minutes later as we were walking along the icy pavement to her car. She was tired and picking her way between the treacherous mounds of compacted snow. With the cold pinching her cheeks she looked closer to eighty than seventy. She was older than my mother would have been if she was still alive.

  ‘What did I do?’ I wanted to ask her. ‘What did Connor do to deserve so much abuse? What did I do?’ But I didn’t ask. I was alive, and my mother never stubbed out her cigarettes on my body. How could I possibly compare my childhood to Connor’s?

  But might Lorelei have given the only sane answer? ‘What could you possibly have done? You were only a child. And besides, you’re conflating two quite different childhoods.’ Then I would’ve shouted, ‘So why do I feel so fucking guilty?’ But there are some muddles even wise old women can’t untangle.

  ‘But I can,’ the Great Guilt Tripper murmured in my ear. ‘Why do you suppose Mommy Dearest always blamed you for your father leaving? Where there’s blame there’s guilt.’

  32

  Memory

  We met in the café we’d gone to when I got out of pokey, where I’d shared a sticky bun with Electra and hadn’t realised how dangerously respectable Pierre and Li’l Missy had become. Because respectability is dangerous – it has nothing to do with kindness or good faith. All it does is impose its own rigid standards on other people and crush their wonderful anarchic shapes into little square boxes.