The Lizard Man of Rotherhithe
Tony P.
Outside of the grocery on Albion Street, the local copper, landlord and the grocer regarded the local paper and pondered on the events reported about the man who had rented the room over the shop. ‘Age was difficult to determine’ so says the coroner presiding over the inquest in 1971 and, as soon as he saw the corpse, immediately drew a cover over the proceedings citing something about ‘protection of the public’.
The living Tzardif Dyskynyzych was a difficult bloke to age. Tricky to approach, he shied away from folk as best he could, but a chap has to eat and earn a living. In actuality, our man probably emerged in 1920 or thereabouts, and I have a reliable source who tells me Tzardif was born to poor country people on the southern Polish region of Zaglebie Dabrowskie, which is a hard and unforgiving land to live on. Showing the enlightened attitude of all shepherd folk who scrape a living on the edges of this scrubland, the locals cursed his young mother, quite literally, after she was caught with her knickers down.
Tzardif had a difficult early childhood as a consequence of his parent being ostracized from their kin and he was eventually left outside an orphanage aged about 18 months and his mother was never seen again. Unremarkable in his achievements and unnoticed by most, he lived without making any friends and this rarely caused him concern. At the age of seven however, Tzardif brought notoriety upon himself. He chanced upon the open school gates and wandered out into the woods. He tripped on his laces and banged his head on a tree stump covered in a pungent vermillion fungus. Dazed, the boy made his way back and stumbled into the orphanage, damp and bedraggled with a few cuts and bruises. He struggled to understand the concern and amazement of the priests who ran the institution (as well as the other orphans and the folk from the village) as he had actually been gone a year to the day.
To some in the orphanage he was the same boy, he had not aged, or so it appeared, and he was wearing the same clothes. Tzardif thought he had been gone an hour or so but the priests soon became angry and accused the boy of the same witchery as his mother. What happened during that year is not known, though some of the other orphans believe he had not been missing for a year at all. Some thought he may have been held captive by one of the more peculiar priests, but others said they had never noticed the boy before and didn’t know his name. Was he new?
Tzardif was dispatched to the north and placed into a family of a seaman who lived in Danzig to rid the establishment of the unwanted attention such things might attract. Though barely in his teens, he was soon living the life of a merchant sea farer. This quiet and dull but fidgety child turned into an unremarkable and ungainly gangly young man, with just enough nous about him to get by in the claustrophobic world on board ship. Tzardif worked the trade routes along the ports of northern Europe and further a field. Never one to leave the confines of the ship when in port, the fellow crew members soon got used to this land-shy sailor and left him to his own devices. There was another curiosity aboard ship, however, and one that no one managed to connect with Tzardif. Any ship that he worked on was amazingly rat free.
Things changed somewhat when war broke out but being the simple fellow he was, he let it break out around him and he just got on with life as a sailor as best he could. At least that is until his ship was caught in the sights of a German U-Boat in the North Sea and was sunk. Tzardif and some of his crew were rescued, cold and shivering by a British navy vessel and brought to London.
He settled where foreign sailors have for centuries, along side the south east shore of the Thames and this part of London was where he stayed for thirty years or so, picking up enough English to get by and earning a living as best he could in what was left of the Surrey Docks. He blended well into his surroundings of the dirty red brick terraced houses and tenement buildings in and around the isolated peninsular of Rotherhithe. In all this time, Tzardif had not made any friends amongst his fellow workers, nor with the other dinners in the café on Albion Street, where he ate every evening, nor with the other drinkers in the Ship and Whale not far from his lodgings. Despite this, he was hardly ever still, his gestures where almost elegant as he would sweep up the pack of cigarettes from the table, tap one out and light it, all seemingly in one dramatic movement, holding his head back for the first drag and slowly exhaling the smoke into a shroud over himself, making him appear to disappear.
During the hot and sunny summer months, Tzardif would sit out in Southwark Park as mums and nannies pushed children in shiny prams. One afternoon, two mums stopped to chat in front of Tzardif as he sat on a bench. The two women were oblivious to the man but the small boy with them eating an ice cream smiled as the strange man’s face seemed to just blend in with the background except for his big eyes, which inched closer. Tzardif’s eyes were fixed on the ice cream. He steadied himself and then, in a split second, Tzardif opened his mouth and his tongue shot out and enveloped the icy treat, removing it from the child’s grasp. It was back in Tzardif’s mouth before the boy could react as best a young child can and burst into stinging tears and cries. Completely unawares, the mother looked round and comforted her child. The odd man on the bench seemed to be swallowing something but she just pushed the pram away muttering disapproval but without really knowing what had just happened.
Tzardif worked long hours in the bakers on Bermondsey Street. He would always walk home and hang his old navy great coat on the hooks on the back of the door along side the skin he shed once a year around July or August. Tzardif had somehow managed to keep this a secret throughout his life. It was a difficult process that required some time, about 2 or 3 days in all and he would stay in his room, managing to get by without food or water. This was usually the time when his foreman at the batkers would actually notice Tzardif by his absence and would regard him on his return, with suspicion, that he had somehow changed.
So Tzardif Dyskynyzych shed his skin once a year and hung it up on the back of the door for a while to dry it out and then sometimes threw it on the fire. If anyone was to see Tzardif sitting there in the quiet in his room, they would see him move with the careful movements of a chameleon. With wide sweeping arcs of his arms and tongue extending out to taste the dusty smoky air. Rarely ever exposing his body even in the privacy of his room, but stripping off to wash in his vest and pants, Tzardif would almost disappear, as his skin blended into the dull brown austere surroundings of his room above the grocers, attributes that would not endear him to anyone at all.
The weather-worn face of Tzardif Dyskynyzych was hard, red and round. One day in 1971, his hand clutched the razor as he stared into the small shaving mirror on the wall above the sink and the exaggerated movements of his hands waved the blade here and there and finally resting on to his neck and he would find the wherewithal to bring it up across the stubbled skin, rinse it in the bowl and maneuver the blade across his neck again. This time, pausing to steady himself in the mirror, Tzardif repeated the action once more, but tilting the blade, he cut through his skin and brought an end to his miserable and lonely existence as the lizard man of Rotherhithe.
It was the landlord who broke the door down when the rent wasn’t paid. In the gloom of the upstairs room, he pulled the curtains open, which blew up the dust from the bare wooden floor boards. A shiny blade glinting with light from the window lay amidst a large papery husk in the shape of a man. The landlord walked over to see the shriveled remains covered in many skins dried and cracked, layer upon layer and within, a small dead boy.
They found within these skins the almost perfectly preserved corpse of a small child. In his hand he clutched a cut throat razor blade and on his neck was a cut, deep into the vein. Inside the bare room, the police found little to identify the Polish man who was supposed to have lived there. Besides the bed and small table next to it, there was just a larger table to eat at and chair next to a small fireplace. There was a cupboard with a few yellowing shirts and vests and on the wall hung a small crucifix and small colour printed calendar in Polish, dated 1951.
Local police investigations revealed that no one could actually picture the Polish man. The café owner knew he ate liver and onions. “He paid is bill on time, no worries, but I could not tell you what he looked like. You know, he was sort of very plane-looking”. None of the blokes with whom he worked with could do any better. His foreman also struggled to picture him. “Yes, he came in every day and just got on with it and I did not know he was there half the time. I don’t know what he did, but since he’s gone, we’ve got one hell of a mouse problem”.
‘It was best to keep this quiet’, the copper said.
‘It would be bad for business’, said the grocer.
The dead Tzardif Dyskynyzych was very difficult to age, especially for those who found his mysterious corpse in the darkened room above the grocer’s shop. His remains puzzled everyone who saw it. Just a cold dead boy in the middle of snake-like skins, bearing the faintest resemblance of the man that could be the Polish man who lived there. As for the folk of Albion Street, who went about their lives without much thought about the man above the grocers, there was not much guilt felt about the matter. After all, the Pole was alien to them. Not from round here.
