Snake by Sue Starling

Just after I turned thirteen I woke up one Saturday to find my snake had escaped. Mum said it wasn’t my fault, but it was. Later, Nan came round for mum to do her feet. When mum does Nan’s feet we always talk about things. It’s like going to confession except I tell the truth. I like to get everything ready. I put Radox in the washing up bowl and boil the kettle to fill it because the immersion’s always on the blink. I get the nicest hand towel (peach with a lace scalloped frill and an embroidered shell pattern), the scissors, the corn file and mum’s Lily-of-the-Valley scented lotion from Boots and lay it all out. Nan says mum has angels’ hands when it comes to her corns. While mum does nan’s feet, I tell her about the snake and how I hadn’t closed his vivarium properly and she makes a sound by sucking through her bright white false teeth and says ‘sure look it, there’s no point crying over spilt milk’. I did cry - at night, in secret. I cry at night because in the day our flat is filled with sadness that flows out of mum. Sadness so thick it is sometimes hard to breathe.

He was called Curl, the snake was, and I’d got him for my tenth birthday from dad. Not long after he got me the snake, dad left us. I knew that was my fault too. It was too much: having a child, living in a little flat. A little flat where sometimes you couldn’t breathe. The snake had cream and pale-brown scales and copper-coloured eyes. When I held him, I could feel how ancient his snake-being was. I could feel how he was made of instincts that were millions of years old. I could feel how he knew how to watch and wait until the time was right.

I made a snake-friendly zone on the floor to lure him back: his heat lamp; his hide; and once a week I put out a mouse. Before he escaped, I had to pay for the mouse out of my paper round money. But after he escaped, for a good long while, nan brought me one round: a ‘B grade large adult frozen mouse’. It was always on a Tuesday, after she’d got her pension, after she’d been the bookies and put a little bet on. B grade are as good as A grade but don’t look as good, according to nan. There would be blood or piss or shit on them and I’d have to rinse it off under the tap before I thawed it and left it out to tempt the snake. I think she did it to cheer me up: about the snake, about my dad.

After a while I gave up on the idea of him coming back.

I have this dream, over and over. I’m in this place — a sheltered bay, a natural port. There are lots of piers and ferries are constantly leaving. When I’m there, it’s always evening. The sun hangs low in the pale turquoise sky, which is shaded pink and orange where the sun is starting to set. There are fluffy white clouds and even though the colours are wrong the whole thing makes me think of ice cream piled in a bowl, melting. The colours of the sky are mirrored in the sea, apart from where ferries are sailing through, making lines in the reflected sky. Lines like when you wipe your finger round the bottom of a nearly empty bowl of melting ice cream.

In my dream I never manage to catch the ferry. Sometimes I’m late, hurrying, running down the pier. I stand and watch as it sails away and people on board wave goodbye. Sometimes I get there in time, but I can’t get on because I’ve forgotten something: my passport, my bags, my money. Other times, I’ve gone to the wrong pier. I start to board but the steward sees my ticket is for a different destination and stops me.

I have a feeling in my dream — the same one I get when I look at my mum’s magazines - of something fabulous being there, just there, just past the horizon, just out of reach. Mum buys Vogue every month. She saves coupons out of the free paper for money off our shopping. When she’s saved the price of Vogue she buys it, she treats herself. We sit and look through each magazine together. At the clothes, at the beautiful long-limbed sharp-angled models. I love the feel of the thick glossy paper, the smell of the pages and of the perfume samples. Opium, Samsara, Poison. I peel open the samples and rub the perfume onto my pulse points like mum has shown me. Mum tells me ‘the heat from a pulse point makes the smell of a perfume irresistible to a man’. Snakes make themselves irresistible. They hypnotise their prey.

We never go visiting, me and mum. Even though our flat is tiny, it’s the place everyone comes to. We don’t even hardly go to nan’s house. I think it’s because mum is the oldest daughter. I think it’s because mum is sad. I think it’s because she’s always got something she’s making that people are calling round for. Mind, nothing is ever finished when people call round for it. Like, half a sleeve won’t be knitted on a baby’s jumper. Or the buttons won’t be sewed onto a cardie. Else there’ll still be pins holding the seams of a dress together. A dress that’s on the blue dressmaker’s dummy in the window, the sun slanting through the net curtains onto it, onto the headless body. Through the nets that are yellow, stained with tobacco smoke from visitors because mum hasn’t got round to putting them in Glowhite.

We’ve got a mat by the front door that one of my aunties bought for mum. It says ‘Oh no, not you again!’ on it. I don’t really get it, isn’t it rude, won’t people think she doesn’t want them there? Anyway, people laugh about it. Uncle Brendan (who isn’t really my uncle but mum says I should call him that), he’s the one that laughs the loudest at the mat. The mat which isn’t a joke. Pretty much every time he comes round he laughs about the mat. For me, if something is funny it is funny the first time, then a bit funny the second and third, and then not funny. When he laughs at it over and over it makes me think of sitcoms with canned laughter. He’s laughing because he wants us to laugh, he’s telling us to laugh. I do not laugh.

When he first started coming round, it was always on a Sunday evening. Mum would put on records. She played things like Forty Shades of Green, The Green Green Grass of Home and Danny Boy. I hate these songs, they make me feel sick. Uncle Brendan — he’d sing along, he has a big deep voice — and mum would look at him like he’s something special, like he’s the best thing since sliced bread. Nan likes him. She says ‘he’s a fine figure of a man’ and ‘sure he’s a big boy for his mammy’. So that’s how it started. He’d come round, mum would play records and then they’d talk about ‘going back home’ — which means going to live in Ireland. Even though mum came over with nan when she was only nine and doesn’t sound Irish — or at least not like nan or Uncle Brendan sound Irish. At first, mum went out with him on a Friday night. She’d put on shiny high heels and a dress she’d made from a Butterick pattern, a beautiful dress and Uncle Brendan would say ‘you’re a cracker, so you are’.

Mum and Uncle Brendan. Mum doesn’t put records on now and doesn’t hardly go out anywhere with him now. Last time she got dressed up he said ‘do ye think yer lady muck?’ They also don’t talk about going ‘back home’, which is good because that one time me and mum went to Ireland I didn’t like it. So, I was glad about it all being finished with. But then I realised that the sadness was back. I hadn’t noticed it had gone, I’d been so focused on not liking Uncle Brendan.

Now it feels like we’re stuck in mud. Like we’re being sucked down and down, slowly, surely. Uncle Brendan has started coming round most days after work and mum makes him something to eat. She makes him these big dinners, a huge pile of food. Mum doesn’t like cooking. Usually we eat curry flavour Super Noodles, or something from the chippy, me and her. Or, if she’s on one of her diets, a big salad. We share a tin of tuna in brine (never oil), have half a boiled egg each. With this, we have lots of things that are ‘no points’ on her diet plan. I chop up iceberg lettuce, slice watery tomato and peppers (green, yellow and red), dice cucumber, tip yellow tinned sweetcorn onto our plates. We use special plates for our big salad. Mum got them years ago when she went to Benidorm with dad. They are hand painted and they have a yellow flower in the centre and a pattern round the edge done in that nice blue that is the colour of a summer sky.

For him, for ‘Uncle’ Brendan, she stands at the sink and peels potatoes. Her hands go bright pink from the cold water. She makes a big fluffy pile of mash. Sometimes she overcooks the potatoes and the mash looks a bit sloppy. That’s when he tells her she might not be able to cook good but at least she looks good. He sits in the armchair like he owns the place and he is always in charge of what is on the telly. He puts on the news, horse racing, boring films about the war. Mum brings him in his dinner (always mash with a piece of meat and two veg and gravy) on a tray with a can of beer. She sits on the pouffe and cracks the can open and pours it into a glass for him. I do not like to see any of this. I do not like how he acts like he’s a king. I do not like it when he picks up the salt shaker and shakes and shakes and shakes salt onto his dinner without tasting it first. I do not like how he sits, eyes fixed on the telly, putting fork full after fork full of dinner into his mouth. I do not like how he chews. I do not like how he waits until mum is out of the room and says ‘stop staring at me like yer love me’ and winks and licks his lips which are thin and pink and chapped.

Tonight we had a good night, me and mum. She sent me down to the corner shop with a note so I could get her a bottle of wine — Black Tower. Then, when she’d had a glass she was giddy and laughing and she decided we’d get a Chinese. We went out, arm in arm, to the Shangri La and the man behind the counter gave mum free chop suey rolls because — as she said when we were walking back — he has always had a soft spot for her. Walking back we were arm in arm again. Me with the takeaway in a bag digging into the crook of my arm, both of us eating our chop suey rolls, cutting across the green in the dark. Out loud, into the dark, mum said she’d had enough of Uncle Brendan, that she was sick of cooking him dinner, and I nodded even though she couldn’t see me and felt delighted.

We ate our take away sat on the floor at the coffee table, watching TV. We had crispy chilli beef and egg fried rice. Crispy chilli beef is my favourite. The way the beef is translucent and sticky and sweet. I had a can of Lilt and poured it into one of the fancy glasses out of the display cabinet and mum had another glass of wine. She let me have a taste and it was sweet and acid at the same time. I pulled a face and she laughed. The sadness was gone.

After dinner I lay dozing, laid out in front of the fire with the telly turned down low, looking over at mum as she nodded off to sleep in the armchair. I was thinking of the snake. Thinking of how he might still be in the flat, in a secret corner. That’s when I hear noises — a bang, a shout. I look through the spy hole in the door but I can’t see anything so I press my ear against it to listen. Faintly, I can hear a man singing ‘oh Danny Boy’.

I get the key and click the front door shut, dead quiet like. The way the stairs are, you can see who is on the floors below if you look down through the central bit — the stairs spiral round and round. I look and it is Uncle Brendan, staggering along the landing two floors below. We’re on the seventh floor so not that high, but high enough to make my stomach do a little flip when I look down. Nan has made me scared of the stairs — she’s always they’re a death trap, that the hand rail isn’t high enough to stop someone toppling over. I go back past our door, round the corner, so that I’m sat on the stairs leading up to the next floor. I sit and think.

When I hear him come onto our landing, I stand and steady my nerves. I feel like I’m in my dream but everything is going right, the stars are aligned. Me and mum, we’ll get to somewhere good. He is stood leaning against the central railing, puffed out. I walk towards him and lock eyes with him and I can see he is surprised to see me. I concentrate on being a snake and keep eye contact to hypnotise him. When I am close enough to strike I push him hard, out towards the central void. Everything is speeded up, everything is in high definition, in glorious technicolour. It must be my animal instincts, kicking in. In a flash I am back in the flat. I go to lie down in front of the fire, to act like nothing happened. That’s when I see him, laid out in my place, his copper eye glinting, the light from the fire reflecting off his cream and pale-brown scales. The snake has come back.

………………..

Sue Starling lives in Liverpool and likes writing about class and nature. She was short listed for The White Review short story prize in 2021.

Twitter: @SueStarling_