The Crocodile Bird Read online

  It took only one more car to pass for Liza to know she couldn’t wait there, she couldn’t stand on the verge and wait for the bus. What was she to do there? Stand and stare? Think of what? She couldn’t bear her thoughts and her fear was like a mouthful of something too hot to swallow. If she waited here by the old woman with the downcast eyes, she would fall down or scream or cast herself onto the grassy bank and weep.

  An impulse to run came to her and she obeyed it. Without looking to see if anything was coming, she ran across the road and plunged in among the trees on the other side. The old woman stared after her. Liza hung on to the trunk of a tree. She hugged it, laying her face against the cool smooth bark. Why hadn’t she thought of this before? It had come to her suddenly what she must do. If she had thought of this last evening, how happy the night would have been! Except that if she had, she would have left last night, gone when Eve first told her to go, fled in the darkness across the fields.

  A footpath ran close by here and through the pass. You couldn’t really call it a pass, a pass was for mountains, but she had read the word and liked it. First of all she had to scramble up a hundred yards of hillside. The rumble of the bus, whose engine made a different noise from a car’s, made her look down. Somehow she guessed it had arrived exactly on time. The old woman got on it and the bus moved off. Liza went on climbing. She didn’t want to be there still when the cars came by. The footpath signpost found, she climbed the stile and took the path that ran close under the hedge. The sun was up now and feeling warm.

  It was a relief to be far from the road, to know that when they came back they would be down there below her. When the path came to an end she would find herself in a web of lanes, buried in banks, sheltered by hedges, far from thoroughfares that went anywhere. The nearest town was seven miles off. It ought not to take her more than half an hour from here and she would be with him soon after eight. She wouldn’t let herself think he might have gone, he might have moved on, that, angry with her, he had abandoned her and fled.

  The birds had stopped singing. All was still and silent, her own footfalls soundless on the sandy track. The white and gold faces of chamomile flowers had appeared everywhere amid the grass and the old man’s beard that had been clematis clung to the hedges in cascades of curly gray hair. She encountered her first animals, half a dozen red cows and two gray donkeys cropping the lush grass. A ginger cat, going home from a night’s hunting, gave her a suspicious look. She had seen few cats, most of them in pictures, and the sight of this one was as pleasing as that of some exotic wild creature might be.

  With the bright morning and her marvelous decision, fear was fast ebbing away. She had only one isolated fear left, that he wouldn’t be there. The path came to an end with another stile and she was out in a lane so narrow that if she had lain down and stretched her arms beyond her head, her hands might have touched one side and her feet the other. A small car could have got along it, tunneling between the steep, almost vertical banks, green ramparts hung with the long leaves of plants whose flowers had bloomed and faded. The tree branches met and closed overhead.

  It was flat, even a little downhill, and she began to run. She ran from youth and an increasing sense of freedom but from hope and anxiety too. If he had gone, meaning to let her know tomorrow or the next day … Her hands in her pockets closed over and crushed the notes, two thin fistfuls—a lot or a little?

  She ran on through the green tunnel and a rabbit ran across ahead of her. A cock pheasant squawked and flapped, teetered across the lane, a poor walker and a worse flier, its two hens following it, scrabbling for the shelter of the bank. She knew about things like that, knew far better she suspected than most people, but would it suffice? Would it do until she could learn about the other things?

  The lane met another and another at a fork with a tiny triangle of green in the midst of it. She took the right-hand branch where the land began to fall still farther, but she had to go past one bend and then another before she saw the caravan below her. Her heart leapt. It was all right. He was there.

  It was parked, as it had been for the past few weeks, since midsummer, on a sandy space from which a bridlepath opened and followed the boundary between field and wood. Horses were supposed to use it, but Liza had never seen a horse or a rider on that path. She had never seen anyone there but Sean. His old Triumph Dolomite, like a car from a sixties film, was parked where it always was. The curtains were drawn at the caravan windows. He only got up early for work. She had been running, but she walked this last bit, she walked quite slowly up to the caravan, mounted the two steps, and taking her right hand from her pocket and the notes it had still been enclosing, brought it to the smooth surface of the door.

  Her hand poised, she hesitated. She drew in her breath. Knowing nothing but natural history and scraps of information from Victorian books, she nevertheless knew that love is unreliable, love is chancy, love lets you down. It came to her, this knowledge, from romantic dramas and love poetry, the sighs of the forsaken, the bitterness of the rejected, but from instinct too. Innocence is never ignorant of this, except in those nineteenth-century novels, and then only sometimes. She thought of how he could kill her with the wrong word or the abstracted look, and then she expelled her breath and knocked on the door.

  His voice came from in there. “Yes? Who is it?”

  “Sean, it’s me.”

  “Liza?”

  Only amazed, only incredulous. He had the door open very quickly. He was naked, a blanket from the bed tied around him. Blinking at the light, he stared at her. If she saw a sign of dismay in his eyes, if he asked her what she was doing there, she would die, it would kill her.

  He said nothing. He took hold of her and pulled her inside, into the stuffy warm interior that smelled of man, and put his arms around her. It wasn’t an ordinary hug but an all-enveloping embrace. He folded himself around her and held her inside himself as a hand might enfold a fruit or a cone, softly but intensely, sensuously appreciating.

  She had been going to explain everything and had foreseen herself telling her long tale, culminating in what had happened yesterday. It was a justification she had had in mind and a defense. But he gave her no chance to speak. Somehow, without words, he had made plain to her his great happiness at her untoward unexpected arrival and that he wanted her without explanation. As his arms relaxed their hold she lifted up her face to him, to look at his beautiful face, the eyes that changed his whole appearance when they grew soft with desire. But she was deprived of that too by his kiss, by his bringing his mouth to hers, so sweet-tasting and warm, blinding and silencing her.

  When the bed was pulled down out of the wall the caravan was all bed. Her face still joined to his, she wriggled out of her clothes, dropped them garment by garment onto the floor, stepped out of the tracksuit pants, kicked off her trainers. She put her arms up again to hold him as he had held her. He let her pull him down onto the bed. It was warm where he had left it. They lay side by side, her breasts soft and full against his chest, hip to hip, their legs entwined. He began to kiss her with the tip of his tongue, lightly, quickly. She laughed, turned her face.

  “I’ve run away! I’ve come to you for good.”

  “You’re a marvel,” he said. “You’re the greatest,” and then, “What about her?”

  “I don’t know. The police came, they came in two cars, they’ll have taken her away.” She appreciated his look of amazement, his interest. “I’d gone by then. Are you pleased?”

  “Am I pleased? I’m over the moon. But what d’you mean, the police? What police?”

  “I don’t know. The police from the town.”

  “What’s she done?”

  She put her lips close to his ear. “Shall I tell you about it?”

  “Tell me the lot, but not now.”

  He ran his hands down her body, down her back in a long slow sweep, and drew it close to him in a delicate arch. Without looking, she sensed him viewing her, appreciating her smoothness, her whiten
ess, her warmth. His hip touched hers, his thigh pressed against hers, warmth to warmth and skin to skin.

  “Don’t talk now, sweetheart,” he said. “Let’s have this now.”

  TWO

  SHE slept for a long time. She was very tired. Relief had come too and a reprieve. When she woke up, Sean was sitting on the bed, looking down at her. She put out her hand and took hold of his, clutching it tightly.

  Sean was wonderful to look at. She hadn’t much to judge by, the painted man at Shrove, grainy monochrome images of actors in old movies, the postman, the oilman, Jonathan and Bruno, Matt, and a few others. His face was pale, the shape of the features sharply cut, his nose straight, his mouth red and full for a man’s, dark eyes where she fancied she saw dreams and hopes, and eyebrows like the strokes of a Chinese painter’s brush. She had seen a painting in the drawing room at Shrove with willow leaves and pink-breasted birds, a strange flower Eve said was a lotus, and letters made up of black curves like Sean’s eyebrows. His hair was black as coal. Liza had read that, for as far as she knew she had never seen coal.

  “You’ve been asleep for six hours.” He said it admiringly, as one acclaiming another for some particular prowess.

  “For a minute, when I woke up, I didn’t know where I was. I’ve never been to sleep anywhere but in the gatehouse.”

  “You’re kidding,” he said.

  “No, why would I? I’ve never slept away from home.” She marveled at it. “This is my home now.”

  “You’re the greatest,” he said. “I’m lucky to have you, don’t think I don’t know it. I never thought you’d come, I thought, she’ll never come and stay and be with me, she’ll go and I’ll lose her. Don’t laugh, I know I’m a fool.”

  “I wouldn’t laugh, Sean. I love you. Do you love me?”

  “You know I do.”

  “Say it, then.”

  “I love you. There, is that okay? Haven’t I proved I love you? I’d like to prove it all the time. Let me come in there with you, love, let’s do it again, shall we? D’you know what I’d like best? To do it to you all the time, we wouldn’t eat or sleep or watch TV or any of those things, we’d just do it forever and ever till we died. Wouldn’t that be a lovely death?”

  For answer she jumped up, eluding his grasp, and shifted to the far corner of the bed. He had laid her clothes there, the garments shaken and carefully placed side by side, like Eve might. Quickly she pushed her legs into the tracksuit, pulled the top over her head.

  She said gravely, “I don’t want to die. Not that way or any other.” A thought came that she had never considered before. “You wouldn’t ever do it to me without me wanting it, would you, Sean?”

  He was angry for a moment. “Why d’you say things like that? Why did you ask me that? I don’t understand you sometimes.”

  “Never mind. It was just an idea. Don’t you ever have nasty ideas?”

  He shrugged, the light and the desire gone out of his face. “I’m going to make us a cup of tea. Or d’you fancy a Coke? I’ve got Coke and that’s about all I have got. I haven’t got nothing to eat, we shall have to go down to the shop.”

  Anything, she thought. I haven’t got anything to eat. She wouldn’t tell him this time. “Sean,” she said, up in the corner, her back to the wall. “Sean, we’ll have to go. I mean, leave here. We ought to put a good many miles between us and her.”

  “Your mum?”

  “Why do you think the police came? I told you they came.” As she spoke she knew he hadn’t thought, he hadn’t listened. Probably he hadn’t heard her say that about the police. He had been consumed by desire, mad for her, closed to everything else. She knew how that felt, to be nothing but a deaf, blind, senseless thing, swollen and thick with it, breathless and faint. “I told you the police came.”

  “Did you? I don’t know. What did they come for?”

  “Can I have that Coke?” She hesitated and made the hesitation long. “I’m supposed to have gone to her friend Heather. That’s where she thought she’d sent me. But I came to you.”

  “Tell me what she’s done.”

  His expression was a bit incredulous and a bit—well, indulgent, she thought the word was. He was going to get a surprise. It wasn’t going to be what he thought—she searched her imagination—stealing something or doing things against the law with money. He sat down where he had sat before and became intent on her. That pleased her, his total absorption.

  “She killed someone,” she said. “The day before yesterday. That’s why they came and took her away and I’m afraid they’ll want me, they’ll want me to be a witness or something. They’ll want to ask me questions and then maybe they’ll try to put me somewhere to have people look after me. I’ve heard about that. I’m so young, I won’t be seventeen till January.”

  She had been wrong about his absorption. He hadn’t been listening. Again he hadn’t heard her, but for a different reason. He was staring at her with his mouth slightly open. As she noted this he curled his upper lip as people do when confronted by a horror.

  “What did you say?”

  “About what? My age? Being a witness?”

  He hesitated, seemed to swallow. “About her killing someone.”

  “It was yesterday, after I came back from meeting you in the wood. Or I think so. I mean I didn’t actually see it, but I know she killed him.”

  “Come on, love.” An awkward grin. “I don’t believe you.”

  It left her helpless, she had no idea how to respond to this. She drank a few mouthfuls out of the open triangle in the top of the can. Eve had once told her that when a cat is in doubt how to act, it waves the tip of its tail. She felt like a cat but with no tail to wave. He must make the next move, for she couldn’t.

  He got up and took a few steps away. The caravan was too small for more than a few steps to be taken. She drank some more of her Coke, watching him.

  “Why did you say that,” he said, “about her killing somebody? Was you kidding? Was you trying to be funny?”

  “It’s true.”

  “It can’t be.”

  “Look, Sean, I didn’t make it up. It’s why I came away. I didn’t want them to take me and shut me up, make me live somewhere. I knew they’d come this time. This time they’d find out and it wouldn’t take long. I was expecting them all night.”

  His naturally pale face had gone whiter. She noticed and wondered why. “You mean she killed someone by accident, don’t you?”

  “I don’t understand what that means.” It was a sentence she was often obliged to utter since she had been with him.

  “She was shooting birds and she shot someone by mistake, is that it? You told me she wouldn’t never kill birds or rabbits, you told me that when we first met.”

  Only the last four words really registered with her. They made her smile, remembering. She slithered down the bed, jumped off, and put her arms around him. “Wasn’t it lovely that I met you and you met me? It was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  This time it was he who pulled away from the embrace. “Yes, love, okay, it was great. But you’ve got to tell me. About this killing, this is serious, right? What happened? Was it some guy poaching?”

  “No,” she said, “no, you don’t understand.”

  “Too bloody right I don’t and I won’t if you don’t tell me.”

  “I’ll try.” She sat down and he sat down and she held his hand. “She murdered him, Sean. People do do that, you know.” It seemed a wild and curious statement for her to be making. “She murdered him because she wanted to be rid of him. She wanted him out of the way, it doesn’t matter why, it’s not important now.”

  This time he didn’t say he disbelieved her but, “I can’t credit it.”

  What had Eve said? “Then you must just accept.”

  “Who did she murder?”

  She could tell from his tone that he still thought she was lying. That made her impatient.

  “It doesn’t matter. A man. No one you know. Sea
n, it’s the truth, you have to believe me.” She was learning truths of her own. “I can’t be with someone who thinks I’m telling him lies.” From delighted laughter, she was near to tears. She sought for a way out. “I can’t prove it. What can I do to make you believe it?”

  He said in a low voice, “I sort of do believe you—now.”

  “I’ll tell you all about it.” She was eager. She took hold of his shoulders and brought her face close up to his. “I’ll tell you everything, if you like, from when I was small, from when I can first remember.”

  He kissed her. When her face was as close to his as that, he couldn’t resist kissing her. His tongue tasted of the caramel sweetness of Coke as she supposed hers must. They were on the bed, that was where you sat in the caravan, and her body grew soft, sliding backward, sinking into the mattress, she was wanting him as much as she had when she first arrived that morning. He pulled her up, grasping her hands.

  “I want you to tell me, Liza. I want to know everything about you. But not now. Now tell me what your mum did.”

  Being frustrated made her sulky. “What’s the good? You won’t believe it.”

  “I will, I’ve said so.”

  “I think we ought to leave, we ought to be on our way, not sitting here talking.”

  “Don’t you worry yourself about that, I’ll see to all that. You tell me about your mum and this man.” She saw it in his eyes as the idea came to him. “Did he try raping her, was that it?”

  “He was teaching her to shoot pigeons with a shotgun. He was out there shooting and she said, show me how.”

  “You’ve got to be joking.”

  “It’s the truth. If you’re going to say that, I won’t tell you.”

  “Right, then. Go on.”

  “I hate shooting birds. I hate people shooting anything, rabbits, squirrels, anything, it’s wrong. And I thought Eve—my mother—I thought she did too. She said so, she taught me to think like that. But she told him the pigeons were eating her vegetables and she asked him to show her how and he said he would. You see, I think he’d have done anything she asked, Sean.”