Two weeks at Christmas when it’s absolutely empty, and three in September when it seems empty because all the foreign-language students have gone home and the University isn’t up, but the rest of the year it’s wall­to-wall rubbernecks. It starts about Easter, little bunches of people silting up at Carfax and wandering down the High Street staring upwards at an angle of forty-five degrees (what are they staring at?) but as spring turns to summer the little bunches gradually become bigger bunches and they stop wandering and start shuffling, and sometimes there’s a great mob with identical day-glo back-packs and the shuffling turns to marching and Carfax looks like the Last Night of the Proms and suddenly it’s Crocodile Time.

I’ve heard that it’s worse in York, but I don’t believe it. Nothing could be worse than Oxford when the crocodiles come out.

It isn’t only the numbers, it’s what they do. Cameras are OK. People with cameras just stand in the middle of the road on traffic islands and take long shots of the colleges, or else teeter on the edge of the pavement and photograph relatives posing in front of Laura Ashley, glaring at you if you get in the way. But at least with a snapshot you can get out of the way. The real buggers are the video freaks, the ones who take moving pictures of Magdalen Tower and the Sheldonian Theatre, as if buildings look more real when they are in motion, if you see what I mean. Look, folks, an action shot of the all­singing, all-dancing Martyrs’ Memorial.

I don’t know how many home videos I’ve featured in as a walking extra, restless native, and so on; not always walking, either. For example, one hot day last year George and I spent the morning in Angel Meadow with a few cans and a funny ciggy that some kind soul had given George, and then we went into town and did our Pratman routine, George in a balaclava and wearing swimming slips over his tracksuit bottoms. Pratman has, of course, special powers, but he’s taken this vow never to use them because his metabolism is based on anti­matter, so his daring deeds consist of leaping out of doorways, flexing his biceps and saying, in what George thinks is a New York accent, ‘Hey there, little girl, can I be of any assistance?’

For obvious legal reasons he rarely says this to real little girls. Instead he tries it on grown women, grown men, bus drivers, vicars and, on this occasion, tourists. It went down with varying degrees of success. Some of them laughed, some of them-the British ones-thought it must be Rag Week and gave him money (we made £1.23), some took one look at the balaclava, assumed he was the IRA and screamed, and some of them turned the video camera in his direction.

I don’t play a very important role in the Pratman adventures, being Neville the Boy Psychopath, in fact I don’t do anything (which is just as well) except rush up to George crying, ‘Gee, Pratman, wuddawedo now?’ and gallop away again with my cloak rippling in the wind at speeds of up to four miles an hour. Countless home videos taken in Oxford last summer must feature George in his green knickers, jumping out of doorways, and me whizzing past yelling, ‘Gee, Pratman, wuddawedo now?’ You can imagine it; living rooms in Chicago, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Bangkok: ‘And here we have a peaceful afternoon in Oxford, England. Observe, please, the merry English going about their daily lives in quaint national costume. ‘Enter George, leaping out of the Body Shop, biceps a-twinkle. ‘Hey there, little girl, can I be of any assistance?’ Enter me. ‘Gee, Pratman, wuddawedo now?’

Sometimes we molest the crocodiles-this is when we aren’t being Pratman and Neville the Boy Psychopath. The best way to molest a crocodile is to join it. There is a number of ways of doing this. Ifwe are feeling fit we trek down to Oxpens and catch it as it gets off the coach, but this never lasts long because the minders are doing headcounts and can usually speak good English, like the time we were mingling with a croc of German kids and up comes this very lovely big lady in tiny shorts and says ‘What do you want?’ in an unencouraging sort of way. ‘Oh, we want to practise our German,’ says George, leering at the shorts.

‘How unfortunate,’ says Fraulein X. ‘We are Martians, now sod off.’ Usually their English isn’t that good.

Better crocodile sport is to wait till they really get into their stride, on that wide bit of pavement in New Street alongside Nuffield College, and then infiltrate, which is easy because all you have to do is walk slowly and let them engulf you from the rear. Then, like the Fifth Column, you begin to promote alarm and despondency from the inside. This works best with English-speaking peoples (we aren’t total xenophobes).

‘Pity about the Bodleian,’ says George. ‘I mean, fancy pulling it down just to build an Asda. I think that’s really bad.’

Or, ‘Have you seen the hurricane damage at Christchurch?’

Or, ‘I wonder if the nuclear accelerator building’s still sealed off.’ I think myself that that last one is pure genius. We are not, in fact, xenophobes at all, but if you’ve got two intelligent young lads with an urge to commit a nuisance (and who hasn’t?), the intelligent thing to do is to make use of the local raw material which in our case is tourists. This is not to suggest that the nuisance is necessarily directed at the tourists; sometimes they just come in useful, as in the case of the Guided Crocodile.

The Guided Crocodile doesn’t get out of a coach, it assembles on comers around the city and is made up of singletons and renegades from official crocodiles. People put out crocodile bait in the form of notice boards: ‘See Historic Oxford with friendly undergraduates’: ‘Tour of Historic Oxford conducted by cheerful graduates’ (marvellous what a degree can do to your attitude): ‘Walking tour of Historic Oxford with experienced guides’. They lurk, these notice boards, at strategic points around the city, some with little clocks on them; next tour starts at IO. 30 or 11.15 or whenever.

‘Why don’t we do that?’ George said one day, as a crocodile with thirty-six beautiful legs set off for Christchurch behind a friendly undergraduate.

‘What, join a crocodile? Gee, Pratman—’

‘No, you drongo, lead one. Quite apart from the money we might meet some interesting people.’ He was looking at the legs.

‘Where would we take them?’

‘Where everybody else takes them. Broad Street, Sheldonian, Bodleian, Radcliffe Square—’

‘Quite,’ I said, ‘and that’s as far as we’d get. These cheerful guys can take them round the colleges, that’s what they want to see. We couldn’t do that, we’d never get past the gate.’

‘What about Guided Riverside Walks?’

‘How can you charge people to walk along the Thames?’

‘Easy, you start at Folly Bridge and walk all the way down to Iffley Lock, and then they’ll need you to find their way back again.’

‘They’ll just turn round and walk upstream, won’t they?’

‘Not if we make historic Iffley Road part of the tour.’ ‘What about Cowley? Take them to see the Austin Rover plant – if it’s still there.’ ‘The iron foundry—’

‘The railway sidings—’

‘The Ice Rink—’

‘The Polytechnic—’

‘Alernative Oxford! The parts other tours cannot reach.’

We were, by this time, sitting on the grass by the canal basin (very alternative) being mugged by ducks who are a depraved mob down there and will stop at nothing for bread.

‘Wild-life tours?’

We were running out of ideas.

‘Why don’t people want to see alternative Oxford? How do we know they don’t?’

‘Because alternative Oxford looks just like anywhere else. It looks like all the bits of London they saw from the coach, or Birmingham, or Wigan—’

‘Let’s put up a sign at Oxpens: Oxford full: try Wigan instead.’

It was getting chilly down by the water so we wandered back into the city to find a Guided Crocodile to harass.

You need a straight face and a good memory for this one, also a lot of bottle. To begin with we made it up as we went along, but we soon realized that to be completely convincing we’d have to formalize it, abide by a few rules; dammit, we needed a grammar.

What we do, see, is ask questions in a foreign language. Between us we have three foreign languages and one of them is Latin. Unfortunately the guides nearly always speak French or German, and Latin has contributed words to so many other languages that everybody recognizes it. And ying-tong noises don’t work, either, because they sound exactly that – ying-tong noises. It was George who pointed out that the reason foreign languages, English included, no doubt, sound like gibberish the first time you hear them, is because you can’t tell where the words end. The most you can hope to identify is a sentence; individual words come later. So Crocodile-speak is made up of sentences, delivered very fast, with a few key words chucked in when we wish to communicate with the natives. But we were agreed on one vital thing: we had to know what we were saying.

We need a pretty big crocodile, too, or the guide rumbles at once that we were not there when the tour left base. This time we found a huge one, winding round the Radcliffe Camera, one of our favourite places, for reasons which will become apparent.

‘Olve,’ says George. ‘Decuercut bastis, ikut?’

‘Parkut,’ says I. (All verbs end in ‘ut’; it makes life simpler.) ‘Decuer ab mala, e mala baskis mir devardut, zu?’ Which, being translated, means, ‘Oh my goodness, whatever is this great big round building with a dome on the top?’

To which I am replying, ‘I cannot imagine, but it is certainly very large and can’t possibly be a telephone box, can it?’

‘Devardut ni, devardut nu,’ says George. (‘Well, it might be, but there again, it might not.’) At which moment we close in on the guide, smile hopefully and point.

‘Gdansk?’

Gdansk is one of the key words and means, as you have no doubt deduced, ‘What is this?’

The guide, being no slouch at foreign lingo, cottons on immediately.

‘This is the Radcliffe Camera,’ he says, slowly and rather loudly. ‘This-is-the-Radcliffe-Camera.’

George and I look at each other in consternation.

‘Cameraskdevardut?’

‘Oh, vehen decuer mala, mala, mala ignut deber, zu?’ and George whips out his Instamatic.

We look at it, we look at the Radcliffe, we look at the guide and smile kindly.

‘Giversut! Baskis djang seher.’ (‘Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.’)

If you’ve never been to Oxford-is there anyone out there who hasn’t been to Oxford? – you may not know that the Radcliffe Camera is not for taking photographs with, it is a library, and if you happen to know Latin then you may be aware that camera means chamber, which the Radcliffe is, inside; one big room; but how could two innocent East Frodoxians be expected to know that? We come from East Frodox, me and George, as we try to explain if anyone tries to ask.

‘Oriesis Frodoska mihirgut,’ we cry, with our arms flung in the direction of the rising sun (and East Oxford, incidentally). ‘Zemianos modrovi mala, bar gamel zermut, revier seven four seven zuti, saskut lthro dodona.’

(‘We travelled many, many days on a camel and then boarded a great silver bird which brought us to a beautiful place called Heathrow.’)

Then we spot a rather handsome edifice opposite the Radcliffe and as one man turn on the guide.

‘Gdansk?’

There is, of course, a limit to how long we can keep this up, and we have to be careful that we don’t nobble the same guide twice. Once we landed ourselves with a guy who must have been a linguistics expert because he kept trying us with different languages, and we had a hell of a job getting away.

*

But on this day, (oh yes, there was a day, a day of days) I was alone. It was the end of August, the crocodiles were getting thin and scarce and hardly worth the bother of molesting. School was due to start in six days’ time, even for me and George, in the Sixth Form. One is expected to show up, at least on the first morning, and although we don’t have to wear school uniform in the Sixth we are supposed to look a bit respectable, in case there are any new parents knocking about, probably, and it was a good excuse to invest in a new pair of trousers.

There was the usual dispute about this.

‘More clothes?’

‘I’m paying for them.’ I have this evening job in a deli up Cowley Road.

‘The fact that you can afford them doesn’t mean that you have to buy them,’ etc., etc.

Most of my wages had gone on this really nice leather jacket I got in a sale, and I thought it was worth going back to the same shop to see if they had anything left in the final reductions. I’d just got off the bus in Corn­ market and was crossing the road to the shop, when I saw her, on the corner of Market Street, with a map.

It was the way she was standing that caught my eye. Oxford, after all, is full of people with maps, littered with them; great big maps and little street guides and limp photocopied things. It’s odd, really, because you can practically see from one end of the city to the other; the part that the crocodiles infest is about the size of Trafalgar Square, and who needs a map to get round that?

But there she was, in this very slim yellow sun dress that was slipping off one shoulder, and a tote bag made of old prayer mats over the other, holding her map. She had no shoes on, I think that’s why I noticed her, that and the way her hair, yellow hair, really yellow, almost the same colour as her frock, fell over her face when she bent her head, so that I could see the back of her neck with the sun glinting on all the little gold hairs there. She was golden, all over.

I changed direction.

When George and I are in a socially responsible mood we assist people with maps, and even when we aren’t we never knowingly misdirect anyone, not even crocodiles, although the temptation to send them off up Cowley Road is often strong. Coming to the assistance of people with maps is a good way of getting to know them. Sometimes we offer to take them where they want to go, and sometimes we stick around when they’ve got there, but this applies only to lady singletons; we do not stick around with crocodiles.

This was exactly in my mind when I saw my golden girl in Market Street, but as I swerved, some dickhead in a car-which is prohibited, Cornmarket being pedestrianized; that is why it is full of buses-came belting down on the left and almost rubbed me out. We had a full and frank exchange of opinions and he revved off again, straight towards a cop, I was pleased to note, and when I reached the pavement she was gone, my girl, but with that colouring she showed up at a distance. She was on her way up Market Street, actually passing the covered market as it happened, and heading for Turl. Trousers be damned; I followed her.

When she got to Turl she didn’t, as I’d hoped, pause and consult the map again (thus giving Neville the Boy Psychopath a chance to rush up and cry ‘Hey there, little girl, can I be of any assistance?’); she strode – yes, folks, no shoes, you see – she strode straight across, down Brasenose Lane, the silky yellow skirt trilling round her legs and the silky yellow hair rippling in the breeze like the aforementioned cloak of Neville the Boy Etcetera. Which last thought made me very happy that I was alone and not accompanied by George, particularly not accompanied by George in his Pratman outfit. George does not appreciate the finer things and parts of our city are very fine indeed. He would have appreciated my girl, but he would have seen only the girl. He wouldn’t have realized that to truly appreciate her, you would also have to appreciate Brasenose Lane.

I knew just how she was feeling, having come out of Cornmarket, which is your average British shopping area, along Market Street, which is straight grot, and then finding herself in Brasenose Lane on a summer morning. The lane was in shadow and at the end of it the sun was shining in Radcliffe Square, on the big oval of grass where the Camera stands, on the walls of All Souls, on the cobble stones of Catte Street. And when she reached the end of the lane the sun hit her and she seemed to ignite, glow, she burst into flames, I mean, the air shone round her.

I felt my heart lift, I really did, I shed pounds, I was weightless, like being on the moon. I was bounding along Brasenose Lane in ten-metre strides. I took off. She turned right.

I wasn’t so far behind her now, but I hadn’t been trying to catch up, I was enjoying the view so much. Impure thoughts, such as those secreted by George’s depraved brain-substitute, had left me entirely. I felt so bright and clean-but I didn’t want to lose her. I’m not the kind who can survive on beautiful memories, so I accelerated into Radcliffe Square and turned the corner.

There she was, shimmering away down past Brasenose College and into the little alley past St Mary’s Church. And there she stopped. I thought she was going for the map again and really stepped on it now, before some other Good Samaritan elbowed in with offers of assistance and evil intentions, but there was no sign of the map. As 1throttled back for the final approach she put her hand into the prayer mat and drew out a purse. She handed someone some money; there were several people standing around; and when I arrived I discovered what they were standing around; a notice board. I’d seen it all before; cheerful graduates, friendly undergraduates, the next tour starts at 11.30 . . .

She was joining a crocodile.

How could you? I asked her, silently. Do you realize how this wounds me to the heart? I thought you were a free spirit, a lone operator. You are not the stuff that crocodiles are made of.

On the other hand, I thought, I shall know exactly where you are for the next hour and three-quarters. I can follow at a respectful distance.

It was a very scrawny crocodile, average for the time of year, only about two dozen legs; not the kind that George and I would consider interfering with. Then I noticed the guy who was taking the money. He was looking at my girl in a mildly carnivorous way, and tour guides are not like doctors. They don’t, I imagine, get struck off for unprofessional conduct with the crocodiles, and this specimen looked as if he might get very unprofessional. There was only one thing for it. I withdrew three quid of my trouser money and went up to him. Reader, I did it. I joined a crocodile. Oh, the shame of it.

Now George and I had never been in at the start of a tour and we didn’t know how it worked, so it hadn’t occurred to me that the guy who takes the money isn’t necessarily the guy who leads the crocodile, so I was not best pleased-not in the least pleased-when who should come trotting up the High Street but Magdalen Mike.

We call him Magdalen Mike because in spite of his being a cheerful graduate or whatever, we once heard him do a really chilly put-down on a nice little Indian lady who had asked if the tour included Magdalen College?

‘In Oxford,’ said our man, ‘it is pronounced Maudlin.’

‘No,’ said the little lady, who clearly hadn’t under- stood a word. ‘Please, we see Magdalen?’

‘Maudlin,’ he said. ‘Maudlin.’

‘Magdalen?’

‘MAUDLIN!’

Which is why we have ever since called him Mag­da-len Mike. It was probably Mike who started us on the East Frodox kick in the first place, him or someone like him, so you can see why the sight of him caused a frost upon my· soul, especially when I guessed that he was heading for my crocodile. We had met before.

I looked at the ground. I don’t have a particularly memorable face, but I do have a memorable language problem and I could see that I might have trouble losing myself among the massed ranks of this crocodile, because massed they weren’t. But I had just parted with three quid’s worth of trouser, as it were, and I wanted my girl who was standing not two metres away, soaking up the sunshine and converting it to twenty million volts, just like our nuclear accelerator.

‘Why do we wait, please?’ said a crocoperson, after the money man and Magdalen Mike had conferred for a bit and half past eleven had long gone but no one else had gone anywhere.

‘We are waiting for a party to join us, sir,’ said Magdalen Mike with a terrible smile, brought on by the effort of saying ‘sir’, and I screwed my eye up sideways and looked where Magdalen Mike was looking and, oh God, here came the rest of the crocodile, another sixty legs at least, swarming over the pelican crossing from the bank where they’d been clogging up the queues changing travellers’ cheques. I’ve been on the butt-end of those queues many a time.

But to look at it another way (you can see what an optimist I am) these were definitely the massed ranks in which I could lose myself. Moreover, they were all talking a language which sounded very much like East Frodoxian. Now that Magdalen Mike’s attention was diverted elsewhere I could make my move. The existing members of the croc were getting ready to go, shoulder­ ing bags and swinging cameras into position. My own little Van den Graf generator pushed her hair out of her eyes, adjusted her prayer mat and stood-alone! I sidled round a hefty Hanimex and there I was where I longed to be, and she turned and smiled, all shining and happy and innocent. Oh, I was glad George wasn’t there.

We moved off, like a good crocodile, behind Magda­ len Mike, down the High Street. B.ehind his back I took the opportunity to scrape my hair forward into a kind of fringe, which ruined the image, man, but changed my appearance dramatically. And I hadn’t been wearing the leather jacket last time we’d gone Gdansking. I was biding my time, waiting for a really auspicious moment to open the conversation and praying that she would understand a little English at least, even if she didn’t speak it, or alternatively that she spoke the kind of language in which remarks like ‘I think you are fabulously beautiful, will you come and have a drink with me?’ sound much as they do in English, can be readily translated and answered with a nod. What I was trading on, though, was the knowledge that most people speak English as well as the English do, if not better.

I was half hoping that she’d say something first, such as, ‘Oh, I feel faint. May I lean on you?’

But Magdalen Mike had led us safely to the gate of All Souls and it was just as we were passing through it that I felt a really heavy presence beside me, an unwelcome certainty that something horrible was approaching, like that depression over Iceland that’s always heading our way.

And a voice in my earhole said: ‘Davar vasien mihirgut, inula libertik mala, zu?’

This is what we always say when we enter the gate of All Souls, and means, ‘Doesn’t this remind you of the entrance to the collective farm back home?’ The way George was saying it now definitely meant, ‘Fancy meeting you here.’

I stole a quick glance at Golden Girl, but she was staring up at the gateway.

‘Bog off,’ I said, out of the corner of my mouth.

George beamed and clapped me on the shoulder.

‘Oh, vehen Bogoff.’ This is not part of the script. ‘Oriesis Frodoska mihirgut.’

‘All Souls College,’ intoned Magdalen Mike, ‘was founded in 1437 by Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury.’

‘Olvi,’ says George, getting into his stride, ‘decuer zin Chichele dur Chichele jarut modrovigamel men Oriesis Frodoska pan dihedin, zu?’

(‘Ah, now, can this be the Chichele who is the Chichele that introduced the camel into East Frodox at the end of the fifteenth century?’)

Tm not playing,’ I hissed, but too late. Magdalen Mike had broken off his discourse on Henry Chichele to look in our direction, a long look that passed through three distinct stages; irritation at being interrupted, vague suspicion and deep dislike. I was waiting for the fourth stage, recognition, but George wasn’t bothered. He had no idea why I was there. He certainly had no idea that I had actually paid hard cash to join a crocodile and assumed that while out shopping for trousers I had been smitten with an irresistible urge to annoy one, instantly rushing, with deranged fervour, in the direction of the nearest croc.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Magdalen Mike, with a barely suppressed sneer. I was fairly sure that we had only once before interfered with one of his crocodiles, and I knew that he hadn’t so far remembered me, but George was another matter. I would never mention this to his face because George is as vain as the next man, me for instance, but George looks as if he died last week. His skin is the colour of a peeled banana and you would swear that through his pallid veins courses not blood but embalming fluid. If he didn’t wear the balaclava while doing the Pratman act people might be impaired for life and go away convinced that Oxford is the home of the Living Dead.

I could see that Magdalen Mike was fairly sure that he had come across George before and was trying to work out where, but George was bashing on regardless, embarking upon our most ambitious spiel, to the effect that the University of East Frodox is much larger than that of Oxford, but suffers in comparison by being built entirely of two-storey prefabricated units manufactured in Bulgaria out of reprocessed fish boxes; it goes on for ages. I began to shuffle away from George, but everyone had seen him greet me like a dear old mate, and to tell the truth, only Magdalen Mike seemed to be getting the slightest whiff of rat. The rest of the crocodile, it appeared to me, were listening with approval to this courageous character who refused even to try and speak English to the English.

Why don’t we just yell at them in Serbo-Croat? you could see them thinking, and now that I had distanced myself from George I could understand why. He really did sound as if he was saying something, he was so passionate and committed, remembering the dear old Uni back home, all those millions of Bulgarian fish boxes. Then he saw that I was getting away and grabbed my sleeve, urgently.

‘Shmeher!’ he pleaded. ‘Shmeher mir devardut nu!’

This normally translates into something along the lines of, ‘Blimey that’s a big one, isn’t it?’ but from the vicious squint in his eye I could tell that today it meant, ‘Don’t drop me in it, you little bastard, what the hell are you playing at?’

‘I think we had better move on,’ said Magdalen Mike, evidently deciding that an attempt at conversation with George was a distinct no-no.

George’s hand fastened like a manic crab round my leather sleeve.

‘Vehen!’ he cried, waving at Magdalen Mike. ‘My vriend-vill-dranslade!’

Dilemma: did I forfeit my lifelong friendship with George by denying all knowledge of him, or did I abandon any chance of making headway with my golden girl by throwing in my lot with the East Frodoxians? Golden Girl was just standing there, twiddling her prayer mat and looking from me, to George, to Magdalen Mike.

‘I don’t think there’s much point in that,’ M M said, with some degree of truth.

‘Scharr,’ I said, nodding vigorously, scharr being another key word meaning, variously, ‘How right you are’, ‘fair enough’, or ‘don’t let’s argue about that right now’.

‘Med svarga parkut,’ George persisted. He was getting out of hand, now, making it up as he went along. The crocodile was becoming restless. Magdalen Mike turned his back and began heading across the quadrangle.

‘Oh, wait!’

They all stopped. Crocodiles are like that, programmed to instant obedience. All heads turned, including Magdalen Mike’s, to see who had spoken. It was my girl. She was English. Of course she was English, she was embarrassed; nobody else would have been. She was embarrassed for us, two poor foreigners being brow­ beaten by an unfeeling Brit.

‘I’m sure I can help,’ she said, and something about the way she said it made my blood run cold and no doubt had the same effect on George’s formalin. She would not be amused when she knew the truth. She was as good and sweet and kind as she looked, and she was earnest. She had absolutely no sense of humour. There was no future in it, I saw in an instant. We could go on codding Magdalen Mike all the way round Oxford, but it would mean codding her, too. I looked at her tenderly, took out my diary which was bound in red leather and could, from a distance, pass as a phrase book, and peered in, thumbing the pages.

‘Ah, yez,’ I said, relieved, grinding my heel, mean­ while, into George’s instep, ‘my vriend vant – vot you say – zer gehents.’

‘The what?’ She was trying so hard to understand. Never, in a million years, would she have a good laugh about this afterwards.

‘Zer gehents.’ Jeez, how explicit was I going to have to get? I made violent chain-pulling motions. ‘Zer vader glozzid.’

‘Scharr,’ George agreed enthusiastically. ‘Zer vader glozzid parkut.’

‘Over there,’ said Magdalen Mike, frostily, and led his crocodile away. Golden Girl tagged along behind, blushing a little. Whatever it was she thought George had been asking for, it wasn’t the loo.

When we got back to the High Street I shoved George up against the wall and pinned him there with a friendly arm across his throat.

‘Right,’ I said, ‘now I am going to kill you.’

‘Whaaa? Why?’ George said. I let him breathe – once. ‘What have I done?’

‘What do you think I was doing?’ I screamed at him. ‘I paid to join that crocodile.’

‘Paid?’ His jaw would have dropped if my arm hadn’t been holding it up. ‘You paid to join a crocodile? Why?’

‘I was following someone,’ I growled, and let go of him, noticing that a small feeble crocodile had gathered round to watch. Somebody had a video camera trained on us. (‘And here are young tribesmen engaged in a manhood ritual.’)

‘Oh no,’ George said. ‘Her?’ He didn’t have to elaborate. There was only one her it could have been.

‘Satisfied?’ I said.

‘Go back,’ said George. ‘You didn’t have to come away. You paid.’

‘How can I?’ I said. ‘Now she thinks I’m an East Frodoxian who can’t speak more than six words of English. Where would I go from here; old Frodoxian mating calls?’

‘Get her address. Send her a letter explaining that you write it better than you speak it,’ George urged, but without much conviction. He looked really fed-up and pleasantly guilt-ridden. I didn’t kill him, but we kind of lost heart after that. Pratman and Neville the Boy Psychopath have gone to that Great Comic Book in the Sky, and this year the crocodiles are enjoying a close season. We’re getting old.

(c) the Estate of Jan Mark. First published in A Can of Worms, the Bodley Head, 1990. All rights reserved.