Crocodiles & Good Intentions

by Liza Cody

  The remnants of twice frozen snow stuck to the pavement outside. The steam on the window was thick as a net curtain, and there was a pathetic string of Christmas lights swagged across it, winking randomly.

  ‘When’s Christmas?’ I asked Electra.

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ she said, leading me eagerly towards the door. ‘I don’t think the baby Jesus came to redeem us dogs, do you?’

  ‘What kept you?’ Li’l Miss Smister asked. She was wearing aquamarine angora and looking more like her old self.

  What kept me was the now unusual task of scraping together enough dosh for half a bottle of red redemption. Did you think I could survive Connor’s death without help?

  ‘Oh per-lease,’ Electra sighed.

  ‘Not that old excuse again,’ yawned the Gravedigger, for once on the same side as my good furry fairy.

  Pierre bought me a mug of dark sweet tea and a toasted teacake. He persuaded the woman at the counter to bring a bowl of water and a cold pork sausage for Electra.

  ‘It’s serious,’ he told me. ‘We’re waiting for your Kaylee Yost too. We got that Cropper woman sayin’ we abused Connor and her daughter, and I dunno how many neighbours are backin’ her up.’

  ‘They’re saying I raped a minor,’ Li’l Missy gasped. ‘Me!’

  ‘The nuns,’ Pierre said. ‘Breathe. Deep breaths. Looks like everyone will believe anything about churchy people these days.’

  ‘But I wasn’t that sort of nun – I was Audrey Hepburn in A Nun’s Story. She wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Pierre agreed soothingly, ‘nor would Whoopi Goldberg or Julie Andrews, but y’know, ain’t no one understands illusion no more. And, know it, Cherry’s ratted us to the cops that we’re the nuns. Signed an affidavit, or what, to that effect.’

  ‘So we’re smoked, dried and kippered. You too, worst of all,’ Li’l Missy said to me. ‘Cos it was your idea, you being an ex-con, an’ all, and breaking your parole, and stealing and burglarizing et cetera.’

  ‘Well,’ Kaylee Yost said, dragging a blast of winter into the café and overhearing the last exchange. ‘The most serious allegations, the ones about the little boy, won’t stand up to any forensic interpretation of the autopsy, provided of course, that you’re telling the truth. But that won’t be for a while yet, and in the meantime things might become quite unpleasant for all of you.’

  ‘We’re tellin’ true,’ Pierre said. He was, in fact, the only one who could carry off sincerity with any hope of belief. And that was because he really was sincere. Li’l Missy and I could never manage it – possibly because the British don’t have a natural talent for self-belief.

  Kaylee Yost sat down and asked for coffee. She was dressed as usual in a manly dark business suit, but she still managed to look like a dithery schoolgirl in her sensible waterproof boots, with her lank hair tucked behind her ears. She said now, ‘I’ll need the name of the costumier you hired the nun costumes from, and I hope you kept the receipt too. That will strengthen your story.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Li’l Missy who never kept receipts. She often didn’t have them in the first place – she’s a bigger thief than I am.

  ‘The Cropper woman got her dates all wrong,’ Pierre said. ‘Like she’s claiming we had Connor for weeks instead a two days.’

  ‘That’s what the fancy dress receipts will help to establish.’ Kaylee burned her tongue on the hot coffee and her eyes watered.

  ‘There’s got to be social work reports or doctors’ records that go back yonks,’ Li’l Missy said. ‘You can’t have that many burns and bruises without someone notices.’

  ‘They’re setting up a Social Service Enquiry,’ Kaylee said. But even someone with her belief in The System didn’t manage to look optimistic about it. The rest of us just sighed. Even Electra.

  I said, ‘Well, everyone knows where I was until… um… last week. And at least I took him to the hospital.’

  All three of them stared at me in surprise. And I realised maybe fleshing out the stages of my relationship with Connor might not help my cause.

  ‘And who shaved his head?’ Kaylee asked. ‘Mrs Cropper’s making a huge deal about that. Someone shaved his beautiful curls off.’

  ‘His beautiful curls were filthy with dried shit and infested with nits and lice.’

  ‘So he was shaved at the hospital? We can verify that, can’t we, that none of you three did it?’

  ‘I swear none of us did it.’ As far as I was concerned, Kaylee was jumping to a very convenient conclusion.

  The other two were looking at me wondering why I didn’t tell our solicitor about Gamma Dora and Mama Misha: Gamma Dora who I’d bet a pound to a penny had been banged up; Misha with her overpowering motherliness and distrust of Social Services; the whole family who ‘didn’t do cops.’ They’d actually paid attention to Connor. They saw his injuries, starvation and lice, and unlike anyone else, they did something about it. They fed him, they washed him, they clothed him. Okay, maybe they were a little free with the cough syrup and alcohol, but for a short time at least, he stopped crying and went to sleep. That was a huge gift to give a little kid like Connor. They didn’t deserve to be sicked on by the Law with all its blundering and blame.

  ‘You’ll dob them in if you have to,’ said the Sultan of Self-Interest. ‘And you’ll justify it. After all, who’s to say he wasn’t still drugged and confused when he wandered out through that door your friends knocked down. Who’s to say it wasn’t their actions as much as yours that tipped him headfirst down those stone stairs?’

  ‘We were trying to save him.’

  ‘Ha-ha-ha. You know what the road to my domain is paved with, don’t you?’

  ‘Good intentions don’t butter any parsnips in a court of law,’ Kaylee said.

  ‘Why are we wasting time on who cut Connor’s hair?’ Pierre asked. Something about him had changed. He was wearing an African scarf around his shoulders. It was thick cotton woven in patterns of burnt orange, crimson and gold. Whenever he moved it released the scent of cardamoms, cinnamon and frankincense – the smell of… oh yes, now I recognised it – the smell of Alicia.

  ‘Mrs Cropper is very good at muddying the waters,’ Kaylee said. ‘Whatever her culpability for her grandson’s condition, it was you three who forced your way into her home, abducted Connor and drove away with him. Someone shaved his head without the permission of his legal guardian. She is throwing everything she can think of into the pot and stirring it.’

  ‘But we didn’t do it,’ Li’l Missy said.

  ‘With a better education she might have made an effective and annoying lawyer,’ Kaylee murmured reflectively. ‘She’s absolutely brilliant at misdirection – she’s picking a detail she can prove, however irrelevant it is, and tying up everyone’s time and energy on it. The police, the Social Services, solicitors, me – all up to our ears in the question of who shaved Connor’s head without permission. It’s abuse, et cetera, et cetera – but not hers. She’s innocent as the driven snow.’

  This was very bad news for me, Gamma Dora and Mama Misha. I thought maybe I should finish my teacake quickly and go back to Juliet House without leaving a forwarding address. Electra nudged my knee. She said, ‘No, you’re the only protection they have. If you leave now Pierre and Li’l Missy will tell Kaylee about them for sure. They went to Misha’s flat too. They know the address.’ Her breath smelled of cold pork sausage.

  I gave her a mouthful of buttered teacake. ‘Yes, but what do I say?’

  ‘You’ll think of something.’ She lay down, resting her head on my foot, and closed her eyes. I closed my eyes too, but I couldn’t think of anything.

  ‘Let’s do a timeline,’ Kaylee said, taking a legal pad out of her brief case, dropping a pen and scrabbling under the table for it.

  ‘Okay,’ I said helpfully. ‘Except I can’t remember dates – my head has bits missing
– but the day after I got out of chokey I went to Castle Cropper because Kerrilla Cropper asked me to look in on her little boy, Connor. There was no one there except Connor. He was all alone in his own filth, crying, bruised and skinny as a comb. I saw him through the letterbox. I talked to a neighbour who said she sometimes posted pizza slices through the letterbox for him. I can’t remember… I was going to go back but… ’ All I could remember was the thud of trainers into my ribs and the stinging slap on my cheek as my mother said, ‘Shut your mouth, you lying little cow.’

  ‘I called 999,’ I said, loudly enough to drown her voice.

  ‘When?’ Kaylee snapped at the end of her biro.

  ‘You don’t have a phone,’ Li’l Missy pointed out.

  ‘The underage, you know, girl, who was Connor’s auntie – I took her phone. She grabbed it back, but I told the lady who answered where to find Connor.’ It was a fact about that awful day I’d forgotten till now.

  The others stared at me in amazement.

  ‘Concussion,’ I explained.

  ‘The call must have been logged,’ Kaylee said, ‘even if it was incomplete.’ But she didn’t sound one hundred percent certain.

  ‘We don’t talk to strangers about that sort of thing in my family,’ my mother said through clenched teeth as she dragged me out from under the bed.

  Li’l Missy said, ‘She stayed out all that night, didn’t she, Pierre? It was the next day we dressed up as nuns and went to see what she told us about. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Sure is.’

  ‘Pierre took a picture,’ Li’l Missy told Kaylee eagerly. ‘That’s dated. That proves Connor was still in Shoreditch two days after Momster’s release.’

  ‘It also proves he still had his hair,’ Kaylee said, ‘and that you were there. And it strengthens Mrs Cropper’s assertion that you shaved him.’

  I said, ‘The phone can’t tell anyone who took the picture.’

  ‘But… ’ said Pierre and Li’l Missy together.

  ‘No, stop,’ Kaylee interrupted. ‘Lady B’s right – no one can say who did what unless you give them the information. All you have to say is that you’re performance artistes. You were dressed as nuns. You witnessed what you took to be a very serious crime – dreadful abuse against a child, and you removed him for his own safety. Don’t tell me any more than that.’

  ‘But Cherry’s statement… ’

  ‘My goodness, Pierre,’ Kaylee said, ‘Ms Price is a frightfully malicious person. What on earth were you, of all people, doing with a woman like her? And what did you do to make her so vengeful?’ She looked at him with warm, wet eyes, and I suddenly realised that she was in love with him, and probably had been since she first met him. Now her face blotched fiery pink and she went on in a rush: ‘Provided you don’t deny that you were the nuns who took Connor to her house, nothing she has said can implicate you any further. Her main interest is in exonerating herself from any blame whatsoever. The one who should be most worried is you, Lady B.’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ I said. ‘Really I can’t. I had concussion. I know I was kicked by kids, and knocked over by a bus, and someone hit me at the hospital. There were cops and a nurse. But I can’t remember the sequence or what happened next.’

  ‘There are witnesses,’ Pierre said. ‘We know she was hit by a bus because we turned up just afterwards and there was a guy who said she saved his life.’

  ‘And the same frigging guy brought Connor to Cherry’s house that same night,’ Li’l Missy said. ‘But who knows what happened in between?’ She looked at me meaningfully. I thought, she wants to distance herself from… what? Oh yes – when she and I walked away from the accident to Jade’s car, and left Connor all by himself with strangers, howling on the back seat. She wants me to forget about that. Me too, I thought. Oh yes, how many times did I fail to act like a decent, caring human being where Connor was concerned? No, don’t count the ways.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said helplessly. ‘I’ve forgotten.’ It was almost true.

  Kaylee touched my wrist. ‘Try,’ she urged, ‘try to organise your thoughts.’

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ Li’l Missy said. ‘Will you look at her – she couldn’t organise a prick-up in a brothel. She spent half the time concussed and the other half leathered.’

  ‘But you still managed to take Connor to the hospital?’ Pierre asked, hurriedly. ‘Can’t you remember what happened before that?’ He stared at me intently. Willing me to remember or to forget? And then I saw him driving away in the Ambo leaving a cloud of toxic exhaust, and only just avoiding crushing the poor little boy under the Ambo’s spinning tyres.

  The cops were coming. We both panicked. But, oh, I thought, how many people does it take to kill a child?

  ‘All I remember,’ I said, ‘is me carrying him on my back to a reception desk but some woman making me take Electra out. No dogs allowed.’

  ‘Which hospital?’ Kaylee’s pen was hovering over her notebook.

  I shrugged helplessly.

  ‘How did you know where to find it?’ she persisted. ‘Did you go to the main entrance or to A and E?’

  ‘She’d just been hit by a bus,’ Li’l Missy said.

  ‘And before you ask,’ I said ‘the number of the bus was the Number of The Beast.’

  ‘Oh lord,’ Kaylee said, resignedly ditching her pen.

  Pierre and Li’l Missy Smister both did a wonderful job of making their sighs of relief sound like sighs of exasperation.

  ‘We were just trying to help, honest,’ Li’l Missy said.

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ Kaylee said sadly.

  ‘It was already too late,’ Pierre said.

  The Lord of the Bones dug his elbow into my ribs, reciting ‘A day late, a dollar short – You’ll never do the things you ought – The things you do will come to nought.’

  Kaylee said, ‘Our interview with the police is tomorrow at three-thirty.’

  ‘Our interview?’ I said, sitting bolt upright.

  Kaylee turned her anxious schoolgirl face towards me. ‘I’m afraid so. The police, of course, want to talk to the three of you. These two… ’ she nodded towards Li’l Missy and Pierre, ‘… have already made preliminary statements, but you’d left before the officers could take yours.’ She sighed. ‘Why didn’t you call me?’ she asked Pierre. ‘I could’ve been there for you.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘We really shoulda. But, know it, I always thought we could deal – I just thought, “We’re rescuing a kid. That’s a good thing, right?” Maybe I thought, y’know, I can’t make stuff right with Cherry, but I can do something for the kid. Get him outa the shit-hole he was in. I shoulda known – Social Services, the law, they got their ways of dealing – but we were, like, goin’ with the moment.’

  ‘I wish you hadn’t gone with the moment dressed as nuns. That makes it look both frivolous and, well, almost perverted. It makes you an easy target for Mrs Cropper and the media.’

  ‘Good intentions,’ I said, and heard the Joker sniggering behind my back. ‘Shut up,’ I cried, ‘I don’t want to hear again, over and over, what the road to hell is paved with.’

  ‘Will you shut up about the Devil and hell?’ Li’l Missy said. ‘We’re in this fix cos of you. Just when we need you to help us out your brain goes day tripping.’

  ‘She’ll get worse if you put pressure on,’ Kaylee said, ‘I’ve seen it happen before.’

  ‘I’ll corroborate everything Li’l Missy and Pierre say,’ I told Kaylee. ‘They’re right and they haven’t had their brains kicked out, so their memories remain intact. But whatever Sally Spiteful says, I’ll contradict it, deny it and non-corroborate it. She’s a liar.’

  ‘Sally… ?’

  ‘She talking about Cherry Price.’ Pierre sighed. ‘She thinks Cherry’s the one gave Connor back to his gran’ma. She thinks Cherry already has o
ne kid buried under her shed.’

  ‘That’s Billy’s story,’ Li’l Missy said gleefully. ‘He’s a pervy old article.’

  ‘Well… ’ Kaylee said, and then stopped.

  ‘Well, what?’ Pierre fixed her with his warm engaged eyes. Kaylee melted.

  ‘I really shouldn’t talk about it,’ she said, ‘and you’ve got to promise not to breathe a word.’

  ‘I promise,’ Pierre said.

  ‘Not so fast,’ she said. ‘It concerns Ms Price, and you may still have feelings for her… ?’ I could see that although she couldn’t bear to ask directly, she was longing for him to answer directly.

  ‘She’s dead to me,’ he assured her obligingly. ‘Biggest mistake I’ve made in my life so far.’

  She sighed, smiled and said, ‘It may not be anything, but while I was waiting for an empty interview room at the police station, I heard a couple of quite senior officers discussing whether or not to take that particular rumour seriously. Apparently Billy isn’t the only neighbour to have suspicions about Ms Price.’

  ‘Why did you ever get involved with her?’ I cried. ‘There’s a reason why everyone hates her. Why couldn’t you see what was in front of your nose?’

  ‘Maybe I was lonely that night,’ Pierre said morosely. ‘She put out. It wasn’t supposed to be important.’

  ‘Not important? But you moved in with her. You made Li’l Missy, Electra and me into hostages. This wouldn’t be half so messy if you hadn’t been living in her house.’

  ‘Drop it,’ Pierre said sharply. ‘It happened and now it’s un-happened. Over. Done. Dead.’ He turned back to Kaylee. ‘So the cops might dig up Cherry’s backyard?’

  ‘I don’t know. They might.’

  ‘What about the mortgage?’ I asked stubbornly.

  ‘What mortgage?’ Kaylee asked.