The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  ‘God bless her soul,’ said the nun sadly. ‘You must have been very sad to hear that she died.’

  He did not say anything and they took his silence for consent. ‘Well, I’m sure you pray for her, Geoffrey. She was a good woman.’

  ‘How’s your knee, Geoffrey?’ said one, who seemed to be in her forties, although the tight headpiece and the extreme paleness of her skin made it difficult to guess her age with any certainty.

  ‘Oh, fine now,’ he said for lack of anything else to say, although it was not entirely true.

  ‘You had a nasty fall, Geoffrey,’ said another one. ‘It was bad luck to snap a ligament at your age.’

  ‘And you such a fine runner. We were very proud you did so well for the school. What was it you won, now?’

  ‘I didn’t win, I came second,’ he said, with a mixture of pride and embarrassment.

  ‘Ah, but you were much younger now, weren’t you, than those other boys?’

  Geoff was obliged to admit that his second place in the All England Under-15s 200 metres had been against much older opposition.

  ‘You’re still under treatment, though, aren’t you, Geoffrey?’

  ‘Oh, twice a month at the Nuffield.’

  ‘Will you be able to run again, now?’

  ‘Oh, yes. But . . . not as fast . . . probably not.’

  ‘That’s a great shame, Geoffrey. But you mustn’t be unhappy about it. God has great plans for you. Doesn’t he, Sisters?’

  They all agreed, smiling at his embarrassment, that God indeed had plans for Geoffrey Healey. They seemed to know an extraordinary amount about him, not only what had happened to him recently, but also since he had come to the school, a small, frightened, fat boy of ten. They were a benign Stasi, a beneficent KGB who only wrote down nice things about you and wished you well. They could call up events in his life that he had long forgotten. And this interest was not confined to him. He was questioned sweetly but carefully about other boys, what they were doing or not doing, whether they had been in more trouble or less, how they were taking a father’s death, a mother’s illness.

  ‘You’ve grown in the last year, I’d say, Geoffrey,’ commented the nun who’d invited him in.

  ‘Oh,’ said Geoff, astonished, ‘you’ve seen me before.’

  ‘No,’ she said simply. ‘We’ve seen none of you. I can tell you’ve grown because your trousers are halfway up your legs.’ They laughed at him and he felt annoyance, but not much.

  Gradually, without fuss, they ceased to focus on him and Geoff listened to them as they talked, joking about this, complaining about that. They were particularly indignant about a recent ban on Catholic civil rights marches in Northern Ireland.

  ‘All that Gerry Fitt is saying is that Catholics in Derry should have the same rights as someone in Doncaster. It’s a disgrace in this day and age.’

  ‘That O’Neill is a great hypocrite, Sister. All he’s after doing is stalling for time until the Labour government falls and the Conservatives get back in.’

  ‘Well, he won’t have to wait long, will he?’

  ‘Direct rule from Westminster is what’s needed. That’s the only solution. O’Neill will never give anything away. He’ll have to be forced, that’s all there is to it.’

  Bored, he gradually floated into the background, drinking his synthetic juice and eating his currant bun, with the sun streaming through the window, and the nuns talking. For a while his sourness ceased to taint everything he felt. Sullen and cynical as he was, he liked them. There was something about them and the way they were with him and with each other that he had never experienced before.

  It was a distant sound but everyone in the room heard the shrill clatter of the school bell summoning the school to evening prayers. He stood up, thanked them and said goodbye.

  ‘God bless you.’

  ‘God bless.’

  ‘God bless,’ they called after him, as the nun led him out through the cool corridors and into the world outside. He stepped down into the street and looked back.

  ‘Pray for us, Geoffrey,’ she said, and shut the door.

  It was the last time he would ever enter the convent, but it had not been the first.

  It had happened a year earlier during the Feast of the Assumption, when Ginky and Biffo Guareschi, twins in the fourth form who were as fat as they were violent, had decided it was time they found out what was on the other side of the drum – this was mostly out of nosiness, but partly because they wanted to know if there was anything worth stealing, given that they made most of their money from the other boys by selling everything from slide rules to Playboy magazine at half the price charged by W. H. Smith. This was an arrangement that had its problems, given that Smith’s took part on an involuntary strictly non-profit basis. The twins had recently had several narrow escapes, which meant they had decided it might be wise to develop alternative suppliers. Too large to fit into the drum themselves they had bullied Geoff into going in on their behalf. Geoff was deeply unwilling. If found, he would be beaten and possibly expelled. But more than this was the chance that he might encounter his old tormentor from St Matthew’s primary, Sister Grace. St Matthew’s supplied boys who had passed their 11-plus to the secondary school. Sister Grace was a member of the order that served the needs of the priests and boys of the Catholic grammar school, but she was one of three trained teachers whose salaries helped maintain the convent. She had become ill, however, and had stopped teaching for a year and was now living at the convent until she recovered. Nevertheless, the Guareschi twins were an unpleasant pair and Geoff knew that he had every chance of getting away with going into the convent while the nuns were at High Mass, but absolutely no chance of getting away from the twins.

  The three hid until all the boys had been herded across the road to the local church, and gave the nuns ten minutes to follow. The nuns always waited until the boys were settled, then crept up into the balcony at the back where they could see but not be seen.

  Once the three boys were sure the school was deserted, they went into the refectory, the Guareschis shoved Geoff into the drum and turned it round. As the drum revolved, he felt he was not just entering another world but going back in time to the point of greatest dread in his life. He found himself staring into a kitchen. There was nothing homely about the place. It was an industrial workshop for the daily preparation of hundreds of meals. There were vast ovens and dishwashers and stacks of plates in metal cages, huge towers of china, stained as old teeth. There was a loud thump on the wooden divider. ‘Come on, you useless spaz, we haven’t got all fucking day.’

  Slowly, as reluctant as the first soldier over the top, Geoff eased himself out. He listened: it was as silent as if it had been empty for years. He started to walk towards the kitchen door, feeling more secure. Outside the kitchen was a hallway, and on the other side a room as large as the kitchen full of enormous washing-machines for the boys’ laundry. To his left was a flight of stairs. And still the absolute silence. Mass would take another hour at least, and in any case the nuns waited up in the balcony for the school to leave, as fearful of the male gaze as a breed of rare penguins who had been hunted to the point of extinction by adolescent boys. More confident now, he started up the stairs, but halfway up he felt a surge of old panic and stopped for a full minute before the reassuring silence and a growing curiosity drove him on. He wanted to see where these mysterious women lived whose disembodied voices he had known for almost three years. And also he wanted something deeper, something alarming and unclear – a kind of revenge on the monster who had terrified him for so long. To stand where she slept, perhaps, maybe even to steal from her room, and puzzle her and have power over her because she would never know. He had pilfered things from Smith’s for the Guareschi twins; now he would take something for himself. His heart raced at such a daring thought, at the possibility after all these years of a measure of retribution. He kept walking, the smell of old vegetable-water receding as he made his way to the top of t
he stairs.

  On the landing, everything was now on a human scale and very simple. It was not like someone’s home, but neither was it like the regimented deadness of his dormitory, which slept one hundred and eighty boys, a hangar filled with steel beds and floored with brown lino. This place was austere but still human. People lived here; they were not lodged or barracked. Off this landing there were eight doors, all shut. He felt the sudden urge to run but he did not move. Neither did he dare to turn the handle on the nearest door. He could lie to the twins, having already been here so long, but something kept him there. Very slowly he put his hand on the doorknob. He waited. Then he turned it. Stopped. Waited. Then turned again. He opened the door onto a small bedroom, plain, hospital neat. There were some photographs on the bedside table – a father, a mother, a sister, perhaps – a missal, and on the wall a print of Jesus with His sacred heart exposed for all the world to see his suffering. He did not go in. Shutting the door, he went to the next room, which was much the same – few possessions but enough to make it clear that this was not her room. Finally there was only one door left on this floor and a washroom next to it. He was getting nervous about the time. There was another staircase leading upwards but he did not have the nerve to go any further. Opposite the next door was a deep alcove full of brooms and buckets, and a canvas-bagged Hoover almost hidden in the gloom. He turned the handle of the next door and opened it slowly. He stood still. It was her room. And she was asleep in the bed.

  He knew she was asleep because she did not move but he could not have accounted for how he knew it was Sister Grace: her head was almost buried under the blanket and she was turned away from him. He felt nothing, only a stunned sensation, not fear at all. But when she started to shift uneasily, the terror swept though him as if his blood had been charged with electricity. He did not have the presence of mind to shut the door but he was able to step back into the alcove whose deep shadows swallowed him up, so that unless you looked directly into it he could not be seen. Frozen, he waited as she sat up, swung her legs to the floor and began looking for her slippers. She stood up and saw that her door was open. She seemed to shrug this off as of no significance. Picking up a plain washing-bag, she made her way to the door with the familiar, dread beauty as if she moved on silent wheels. Coming into the corridor she turned, without looking at the dark alcove, and turned into the washroom.

  She flicked a switch and the room was illuminated by a fierce fluorescent light. It had a tiled floor, several hand-basins and a butler’s sink set low so that it could be easily stepped into. As she turned on both taps and it swiftly began to fill, he looked at her, for the first time seeing all of her face and head. The face was the same, though paler, still pinched and angry – or, rather, with a kind of anger in repose, as if her fury slept just below the skin ready to surge, like a flash flood sweeping all before it. Her hair was cut very short, shorter than his, and she was wearing a long white shift that fell to the floor and also covered her arms. As she stood and patiently watched the basin fill, she swayed like an invalid who had been standing too long. She turned off the taps, reached into the small bag and took out a small bar of Camay. She undid the top buttons on the shift and, reaching to her thighs, pulled it over her head then hung it on a hook by the basin. In this way the thirteen-year-old Geoffrey Healey saw a naked woman for the first time. Then the subcutaneous anger seemed to ebb like one of those sea creatures whose colour changes as you watch and there was only a pale woman, so pale that she seemed to soften, and an expression came over her he had never seen before, except in a cartoon he had seen on television about the Snow Queen who stole a boy from his true love by causing a splinter of ice to enter his heart through his eye. He had stopped breathing as he looked at her as she stood waiting patiently for the basin to fill. The skin below her neck was white, almost like paper. But there was something that made him feel sick to his stomach, mesmerised and frightened. Her breasts, untouched by pregnancy, were round and high for a woman of her age. The nipples were small and pointed and a colour he had never seen before, an intense but soft pink. Her belly was curved but it did not sag, and below was the most astonishing, terrifying shock of all: a mass of blackest hair, almost alive in its blackness, luxuriant and thicker by far than the short fine hair on her head. It reached up to her lower belly and down to her thighs, covering her like some wrap or mantle.

  She bent to the basin, and began to wash herself. This was not done gently at first but with a need to get this over with. She almost punished her face as she rubbed. She rinsed and then began to wash under her arms – more of the thick, black, living hair. Then it was her breasts – but she took more care with them as if they were tender and needed a delicacy that only pain could force on her. The pink nipples became hard as the water cooled over them, but the soft flesh moulded and shaped itself to her touch like another living thing. Quickly she washed along her stomach curve then down to her pubic hair. The black hair and white of her hand seemed to merge as she washed below, between and behind.

  In his shadow cave Geoffrey Healey watched as she parted the lips of her so very private parts, the soft skin, almost as pink as her nipples, and then the flash of a deeper red more terrifying than anything since the dreadful beatings he had endured from her. He felt sick, as if he would die with the rush and tenor of his beating heart.

  Now cleansed, she took a towel, and began to dry herself, again rough on her face but soft on her breasts, then rougher again between her legs. Dry now, she reached for the white shift and, facing the hidden boy, raised it above her head – allowing him one last stretching look at round and pink and black – and then it fell to her feet.

  She sighed pleasurably, as if refreshed from her illness, for sick she must have been to be in bed at such a time. Then she put on her slippers, came out onto the landing, turned to her room and closed the door behind her.

  Geoff stood and waited. He felt his heart begin to slow, then surge again. Fear was what he felt, the terrible impact of a few moments in which everything was utterly changed and could never be the same again. Something was lost and something dreadful that he could never understand was found. He did not move until the sound of a car horn outside brought him back. Taking one slow, terrified step at a time he made it to the top of the stairs. Then he bolted, racing down and almost falling, through the kitchen, clambering into the drum and banging on the wooden wall in desperation.

  ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ said Ginky furiously.

  Then the drum was turned and he was back once more in the world of men.

  The Cruel Madness of Love

  The trouble with villains in books and films is that they are held to possess the one quality genuinely worth having: clarity. They always know, these monsters, exactly what they want: money, power, sex, revenge. I blame Shakespeare for this rubbish: the origin of evil is confusion.

  Louis Bris, The Wisdom of Crocodiles

  As Michael McCarthy approached Lucy Bradd she was looking irritably at a group of secretaries standing over by a water-cooler chatting. In fact, he noted, it was more than irritability: blind loathing and absolute hatred would have been closer. McCarthy passed her desk and signalled that he wanted to see Winnicott. Barely taking her eyes from the women at the water-cooler, she nodded and he went through the open door, knocking as he did so.

  Winnicott was looking down at his desk in the slightly dazed manner of someone who had just been sick. He looks dreadful, thought McCarthy. Winnicott looked up. ‘I just thought I’d bring you up to speed on the Nancarrow case. Not that it’ll take long.’

  ‘Don’t tell me he’s confessed and named every one of his . . .’ The good-humoured but tired expression on Winnicott’s face was replaced by one of frustration as he failed to find the word he was looking for, ‘. . . you know, people who criminals are in league with.’ McCarthy looked blank for a moment.

  ‘Associates? Companions?’

  ‘. . . accomplices,’ said Winnicott with relief.

&n
bsp; ‘No such luck. He’s refusing to say a word. And I mean not a word. He’s gone silent. He’s also lost a lot of weight. Two or three stone, I’d say.’

  ‘The punishment is the process.’

  ‘Sorry?’ said McCarthy.

  ‘One of our policemen said it when I first came here. Um . . .’ He screwed up his face, frustrated at not being able to remember. ‘Sergeant Stowell,’ he said at last. ‘He said that for a respectable person with a position in society, just being accused was enough to ruin their life. His view was that we should charge more people – that would discourage the others like them from putting their fingers in the till. Looks as if he has a point if Nancarrow is in such a bad state.’

  McCarthy sniffed. ‘Perhaps – but he might be swinging the lead.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  McCarthy laughed bitterly. ‘As a copper used to prosecuting less socially advantaged members of the public, you may not have come across some of the more unusual ways of evading consequences which obtain in the Upperworld. During the Guinness trials, the case against Roger Seelig was dropped on the grounds of suicidal depression and breakdown – only for him to be seen a few months later terrifying the yokels by driving his Porsche like Toad of Toad Hall through the leafy lanes of Oxfordshire. Then there was Ernest Saunders. His medically well-attested case of Alzheimer’s was miraculously cured on his release, a spontaneous remission hitherto unknown to medical science.’

  Winnicott stretched his aching back. ‘What do you suggest doing about Nancarrow?’

  ‘He’s out on bail, so I think we should keep building the case and let him stew. Once we’ve got enough evidence I have the feeling he’ll change his tune. The real question is whether he was acting in concert with the rest of the senior managers at TLC or if he was off on a frolic of his own. Perhaps you’d like to review it before we have another go at him. You’re the man with the experience of dealing with awkward customers.’ McCarthy wondered whether to bring up the matter that was really on his mind. ‘The thing is, this case is pretty important. Unless we feel a couple of high-profile collars successfully in the next year or two, we could all be spending more time with our families. We need TLC and Nancarrow – and we need them badly.’