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The Crocodile House
By Emma Seaman

I suppose I should describe Lars as my best mate, but actually he’s more of a habit. Not a particularly bad one, just something minor and rather irritating like absent-mindedly picking the skin at the side of my fingernails while I’m watching TV. We were at school together so I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know him, though I regularly wonder if I like him very much any more.

I always take my daughter Cora with me when I go to the zoo with Lars. She likes the zoo best of all; it’s our Daddy-and-daughter place, always has been, ever since she was a baby. Even before she could tell me so, she’d clap and wave and smile when we walked down the slope to the entrance, and that was good enough for me.

When she sings Old Macdonald had a farm, the animals she populates it with are all exotic; lions and tigers or what she still calls rhine-oss-o-noses. Well, living in the city, she never sees cows or sheep. A few weeks ago, I heard myself telling her that the zoo used to be a once-a-year birthday treat, in that ‘when I were a lad’ voice you hope you’ll never use on your own kids.

I think she knows how lucky she is. We generally have lunch at the café, stay most of Saturday. I do this to give my wife a break. For Lars, I think it’s because he can’t think of anything else to do with his custody visits. His son George is even younger than Cora but while his divorce drags on, Lars only gets him one weekend in four.

Cora is bouncing alongside me today, tugging on my hand and hopping up and down as if ants-in-the-pants are a real physical manifestation. She hasn’t yet learned to be bored, to be cool, to be cynical. Thank God. She’s desperate to visit the new crocodile house. We missed the opening weekend and accompanying hoopla, for though I offered to take her, it didn’t fall on one of Lars’s custody weekends, and Cora insisted she wanted to go with George.

Cora’s always had a thing for crocodiles. She saves her pocket money to buy little plastic animals for her toy zoo and over the years, she’s amassed a collection to rival Longleat. I remember Cora picking her own creature for the first time, reaching out a plump hand to grasp it, refusing to let it go so the shop assistant could scan the barcode.

The woman leaned over the counter indulgently, then recoiled in horror at the sight of my pretty little moppet clutching a crocodile, its jaws agape to display formidable plastic fangs. When you’re a Dad, you find that kind of thing endearing, while at the same time vaguely wondering if you need to start saving now for future counselling.

Of course, George, mad for anything transport-related, clamours to go on the little train that runs around the zoo’s perimeter. When Cora pleads to go straight to the crocs instead, his mouth takes on an unattractive square shape, like a small fleshy letterbox; the threatening prelude, as we all know only too well, to one of his foot-stomping meltdowns. Lars shrugs; boys will be boys.

I feel, more than hear, Cora’s sigh. Once the kids are safely on the train, Lars sparks up a cigarette and lungs a scrunched-face drag like he’s choking down paint-stripper. He thrusts the pack at me. I gave up smoking when my wife was expecting Cora, but when I’m with Lars and he’s in this kind of mood, you can’t tell him that.

“You’re either a smoker or a non-smoker. Ex-smokers just smokers who haven’t relapsed yet,” he insists. Annabel smacks me when I pass on these nuggets of Lars’s wisdom, smacks me lovingly, but still, it’s another demerit chalked up against him. She’ll snuff at my coat when I get home, will know I’ve been smoking.

“Don’t breathe on me,” she’ll say, clutching her belly with that half-sweet, half-selfish pregnancy paranoia. “And for pity’s sake don’t exhale near Cora.”

I will deny having smoked, a kind of unspoken pact, because I know that if I acknowledge it, she will have to deal with it in some way, and she doesn’t want to force a showdown at the moment. She’s very carefully cutting me some slack; pregnancy makes her insecure.

“George is well stressed-out today,” says Lars. “Angie gave me a right mouthful when I went to pick him up.” He leans moodily over the railing, waiting for the little train to come by. I used to sit on that train with Cora on my knees, but now she’s got all independent and won’t let me go with her. I wonder whether the baby will like riding in the train, what the baby’s favourite animal will be.

“God, Annabel’s baby could be another girl,” muses Lars, “You poor sod, nothing but trouble. At certain times of the month, you’ll have a house full of …”

He pauses for a moment. Bitches, I’m sure he was going to say, but remembered that presumably I quite like my wife and daughter. That’s how he’ll tell it to others though - this poor old mate of mine, surrounded by women and all bleedin’ hormonal. I wonder if we’ll still be doing this by the time Cora hits puberty; me and Lars leaning over the railing, fatter and greyer, while Cora and George either ostentatiously ignore each other, or steal kisses on the train.

I joke about it, but then Lars gives me a funny look, like he thinks my Cora won’t be good enough for George. The other way around, I reckon. As well as being a grumpy little sod, George has always been kind of slow, but then my wife reckons he doesn’t get much in the way of conversation at home. One of Angie and Lars’s weirder ideas was to hire a Chinese nanny who’ll only speak Mandarin; it’s supposed to give George a head-start in the business world.

“Poor you if it is a girl,” Lars continues, “no-one to play football with.”

Now that’s two interesting assumptions; one, that you can’t play football with daughters, and two, that I give a stuff.

“Yeah,” I say, stung. “And when did you last play football in the park with George?”

“That’s different,” he says huffily, “if Angie wasn’t being a total cow, as well as taking me for every penny I’ve got, maybe I’d be able to spend more time with my boy.”

Hmm, maybe, I think. Lars has been boasting ever since Angie filed for divorce that his accountant is cleverly hiding his assets, and anyway, with the hours Lars works, being forced to care for his son one weekend a month probably means more hours of contact than George got when they all lived under the same roof. If anyone ever takes poor George to the park, it’s that Chinese nanny.

I don’t understand what he does, but Lars always has loadsamoney, and I mean stacks. He’s tried to explain it to me, but I found it as unintelligible as he’d find a minute-by-minute account of setting up a product shot. I’ve been shooting pics for a cookery book recently and tried to tell him about it; using tiny spotlights to highlight the details of a pudding, applying delicate layers of glycerine to make sauces shine, using nuggets of dry ice to mimic steam. He practically yawned in my face.

I suspect I’m his token creative friend; it makes him look more of a rounded personality if he can say to his City bosses - “Yeah, my best mate’s a photographer, works for magazines.” God knows what else he tells them about me. I once spent most of a very drunken night out patiently explaining to one of his thicker colleagues that I do landscapes and product shots, and couldn’t introduce him to any glamour models. No, really.

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