Snake in the Grass

by Dominic Luke

  And now, as if he didn’t have enough on his plate, the panther had turned up to torment him. She had to be up to something. It was too much of a coincidence that she had come calling today. And that story about an exhibition: as if anyone in their right mind would want to look at his mother’s paintings!

  He sighed, sat up, decided he’d better at least look as if he was studying in case his mother barged in. He reached down for a book from amongst the untidy heap of clothes, trainers, pens, notebooks and magazines strewn over the floor. Geography. That would do.

  As he flicked through the textbook, he wished that Lydia Taylor was as mythical as those Radio 5 beasts. But she wasn’t. She was real. He had very good reason to know just how real.

  He shuddered, but there was no shaking her off. Very well. He’d think about it logically. He’d go through it point by point. To start with, in the plus column—

  Plus column! Oh my God! He was turning into his stepfather, adding and subtracting, balancing the books, looking at the world in a mealy-mouthed, pedantic way.

  The textbook slipped to the floor as Dean turned on his side, facing the wall. Never mind plus columns. Just concentrate on facts. And the fact was, he was no longer a virgin. He would no longer be the odd one out at college. He could hold his head up at last. There was no need to tell anyone who he’d actually done it with – although, come to think of it, wasn’t there a certain cachet in snaring an older woman? (He needn’t mention that she had been the one doing the snaring.)

  But what was the use? He’d never be able to tell anyone what had happened. It was too embarrassing – too humiliating.

  He threw himself onto his back, stared up at the ceiling. It seemed very low today, pressing down on him, boxing him in, leaving him no room for manoeuvre. The thing was, he’d thought he was up to speed on the subject of sex. He’d done his research, been meticulous about it. He’d even lowered himself to buying certain top-shelf magazines – in a spirit of scientific enquiry, naturally. But nothing in all his research had led him to expect the actual act to be so … well, sticky, smelly, messy; so very crude and mechanical. The panther had taken control. ‘Not like that, like this … let me show you.’ He should have known she was a teacher, the way she’d carried on, knowing best. He knew what to do, he wasn’t stupid! But the problem was, he’d been in no position to think about anything as she poked him and prodded him and squirmed against him, squashing him against the upturned boot of his car. Had it been exactly … manly … to let himself be pushed around like that?

  He turned on his front, buried his head in the pillow, wishing the panther had left him alone, wishing he was still a virgin. Life was tough enough already, a daily rollercoaster taking him up and down, up and down, doing his head in until he wanted to scream. Now there was even more to torment him.

  It was all Richard’s fault, this latest debacle. Richard had started it, gatecrashing the party.

  Richard was the bane of his life.

  FOUR

  SO FAR, SO good.

  Walking through the village, enveloped in a charity shop Burberry and knitted red bobble hat complete with matching scarf, Lydia experienced a sense of relief, knowing from their brief conversation that Gwen Collier was unaware of the seduction of her son. Nor had there been any hint of it at college today: no nudging or winking, no whispering amongst the boys in the back row. I might, thought Lydia pulling up the scratchy scarf to cover her nose and mouth; I just might have got away with it. In any case, she added stubbornly, I did nothing wrong. The boy is an adult, of legal age. He is eighteen.

  Eighteen! ‘Why oh why did I do it?’ she wailed out loud, startling the vicar who was just coming through the lichgate from the churchyard.

  He peered towards her through the gloom, made a tentative identification. ‘Miss Taylor, is it? Good evening.’

  ‘Evening … er … evening.’ She was never sure how one addressed a vicar. Vicar? Reverend? Your worship? His name was Garth (it would be) but he was known in the village as Dick Emery on account of his buck-toothed appearance. Whatever form of address one adopted, Dick Emery must be avoided at all costs. ‘Lovely evening.’

  ‘Cold,’ said the vicar as he hurried on his way.

  Lydia cringed. Lovely evening! What was she thinking of? There was nothing lovely about it. Not only was it cold, as the vicar had correctly pointed out, it was dark and dismal too; and Christmas was looming menacingly on the horizon to add to the misery.

  ‘I am going round the twist,’ Lydia muttered as the vicar disappeared into the night. ‘Talking to myself. Hearing voices. I am on the slippery slope to hysteria.’

  Her brief sense of complacency shrivelled and died in the cold, clammy evening. She drew her scarf tighter, shoved her hands in her coat pockets. The boy – the boy whose name she couldn’t even remember – had not yet given the game away, but he wouldn’t keep quiet for ever. Boys of that age were loud, boastful, facile. The contents of their minds were endlessly disgorged in a stream of dirty jokes and puerile comments. But the boy was not her only problem. She was also beginning to have second thoughts about the ruse she had just used to call on Gwen Collier. All that talk of an exhibition had seemed to spark some interest in Gwen. Against expectation, she had agreed to cooperate. But perhaps she was simply being polite. Perhaps she would forget all about it.

  ‘Please God,’ muttered Lydia as she approached the bright lights of the pub.

  She hesitated under the thatched eaves. The pub had just opened for its evening session. Breathing in the icy air, the cold and damp working its way through her multiple layers, Lydia looked through a window that had been sprayed with lavish amounts of aerosol snow, saw the flickering glow of the tempting log fire inside (real, not plastic). She listened. There was not even the faintest echo of her mother’s ghost, no strictures on the evils of drink, no disapproving tut. The wide, dark December evening was empty and silent.

  She thought of her cottage, desolate without Prize.

  With a decisive movement, she opened the pub door and walked in.

  ‘Ah! I’m sure this beautiful young lady would like a drink!’

  Lydia’s elderly neighbour Mr Wetherby was at the bar. His wife was sitting by the fire with her coat on. The only other people in the lounge were the barmaid and a mechanical polar bear in a Christmas hat, jerking wildly (dancing?) on a metal stand. Tinsel glistened, Christmas baubles hung from the ceiling. Warm air wrapped Lydia round like an embrace.

  ‘That’s very kind, Mr Wetherby. I’ll have a gin and tonic if I may. Good evening, Mrs Wetherby.’

  ‘Hello. Yes. We’re just … Hmm.’ Mrs Wetherby was her usual vague self. She had a scrawny neck, sunken cheeks, looked half dead. Her husband was much more robust; red cheeked and white haired. He was rather on the short side, looked (thought Lydia) rather like a gnome – a particularly pernicious gnome.

  Lydia shrugged off her coat but kept it close at hand, ready for a quick getaway. How soon could she make her escape without seeming rude?

  ‘It’s a cold evening,’ Lydia offered up as she poured tonic into her gin.

  ‘Cold. Yes. Hmm.’

  ‘Not as cold as it used to be.’ Mr Wetherby sat down with his pint of real ale. ‘We used to get snow.’ He glanced at his wife and bawled, ‘We used to get snow, didn’t we, Jeannie?’ Turning back to Lydia, he went on, ‘We don’t get proper winters now. Everything’s changed. This country’s changed – and not for the better.’ (Lydia braced herself.) ‘I blame the unions. Ruined this country, they did.’

  ‘Nothing to do with Mrs Thatcher, then?’ Lydia muttered.

  ‘What was that?’ Mr Wetherby looked at her suspiciously. ‘What did you say?’

  Lydia, who knew better than to begin an argument with Mr Wetherby, smiled beatifically and sipped her drink.

  ‘You wouldn’t know, my dear; you’re too young to remember. The unions held this country to ransom in the sixties and seventies. It was a disgrace, an utter disgrace!’ Mr Wetherby banged
his glass on the table to underline just how disgraceful it was, took a breath at the same time and continued. ‘And now it’s immigrants. You can’t move for foreigners. They come flooding in through the Channel Tunnel. They get houses, jobs, handouts, no questions asked. We get nothing. If you’re English, you get nothing. Isn’t that right, Jeannie? If you’re born here, you’re ignored.’ (Why, Lydia wondered, did he feel it necessary to raise his voice when speaking to his wife? Mrs Wetherby wasn’t deaf.) ‘Second-class citizens: that’s what we are. Second-class citizens in our own country.’

  Another pause for breath, another bang on the table. Lydia, who had heard this litany several times, tried to remember what came next. Sex offenders, perhaps (‘they should be castrated, the lot of them, and have done with it’); or one-parent families (‘whores and spongers spawning delinquent bastards’). After that, he might go on to outline his scheme for combating the spread of HIV by culling the victims (‘works with foot-and-mouth, why not AIDS?’).

  At that moment, however, there was a welcome interruption as the landlady came moseying into the lounge bar: a rather plump woman, no more than thirty.

  ‘All right, Donald. All right, Jean. All right, Lydia. A cold one this evening. Do you think we’ll have snow? Might get a white Christmas for once, ha ha ha!’ The landlady cackled. She always found herself most amusing.

  ‘Ah, it’s you, is it.’ Mr Wetherby’s watery blue eyes slowly focused on the landlady’s breasts. ‘I never see you do any work, you know,’ he said silkily.

  ‘What do you mean? I’m always working, ha ha ha!’ The landlady moved to stand in front of the fire, blocking the comforting glow with her ample posterior. ‘I’m not like you pensioners, living it up. I daresay you’ve forgotten what work’s like. Isn’t that right, Lydia?’ The landlady’s eyes swivelled round to focus on Lydia. ‘Not often we see you in here at this time of day. But I suppose you’d have been out walking your dog normally. Such a shame about your dog. You’ll miss him, I expect.’

  This brutal reminder of Prize – hearing mention of him on someone else’s lips – brought involuntary tears to Lydia’s eyes. The library books said it got easier with time, that the wounds began to heal; but Lydia’s experience so far was that it got worse. She usually prided herself on being level-headed but right now she felt like that dancing bear on the stand, going through jerky mechanical motions, unthinking, pointless.

  The landlady was eyeing her inquisitively. ‘Prize. Such an unusual name for a dog, I always thought.’

  Lydia gulped her drink, steadying her nerves; managed to wipe her eyes surreptitiously at the same time. ‘Yes, it is an unusual name, isn’t it!’ She spoke brightly, shielding her grief from the landlady’s probing eyes: her grief was private. ‘He was given to me by an ex-boyfriend who, on dumping me, said that he was sorry to deprive me of his obvious and superior charms, but I could comfort myself with his gift, a sort of consolation prize.’

  ‘I had a goldfish once,’ said the landlady. ‘It died too. I overfed it. Killed it with kindness, my dad said. I buried it in the garden in a matchbox, but the cat dug it up and ate it, ha ha ha!’ Her eyes zeroed in on Mrs Wetherby. ‘Did you ever have a pet, Jean?’

  Mrs Wetherby blinked. ‘Oh. Well. I. No.’

  ‘No pets! No thank you very much!’ Mr Wetherby levered himself back into the conversation. ‘Dog hairs all over the furniture, it’s unhygienic. And the way dog owners let their animals shit all over the place: a disgrace! Wouldn’t happen in Singapore. If you drop litter in Singapore, you go straight to jail, no questions asked. We should take that line here.’

  ‘We could have electric shock therapy for litter louts,’ Lydia suggested.

  ‘Electric chair, more like. Why should taxpayers foot the bill for their mess? It’s a disgrace!’

  ‘Disgrace,’ muttered Mrs Wetherby. ‘Litter. Electricity. Hmmm.’

  Lydia wiped her eyes again. The tears wouldn’t stop. Even pulling Mr Wetherby’s leg – a favourite pastime – didn’t make her feel any better this evening. Now that she had finished her drink, she had nothing to fall back on. And the landlady – of course – had taken note of the empty glass. It would be the talk of the pub later. You know that Lydia Taylor? She can’t half knock them back…. There would be yet more gossip if the tears were noticed too.

  Lydia got to her feet. ‘I … er … there’s someone I need a word with, in the … in the public bar.’

  She blundered through the doors into the public bar, taking the opportunity to dry her eyes, using the sleeve of her coat as she’d forgotten to bring a handkerchief. The public bar was empty: there was no one to have a word with except the barmaid polishing glasses. The landlady, of course, had known this; hence the sly look as Lydia left the lounge – as if the two of them were involved in some sort of secret conspiracy. The landlady liked to be involved in things.

  ‘Gin and tonic, please.’

  The barmaid put her cloth aside. ‘Ice and lemon?’

  ‘Of course.’ Rather a pretty girl, thought Lydia: sandy hair, a small nose, a sprinkle of freckles. She had something about her: a mind of her own perhaps. Girls with minds of their own were a rare species these days. (I must stop being so cynical.) ‘You are new here, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m Sandra. I’m supposed to tell you, introduce myself. That’s what the landlady said. “Hello, my name is Sandra, how may I help you today?”’ Sandra raised an eloquent eyebrow, smiling as she used tongs to put ice in a glass, adding a half-moon of lemon too. ‘The landlady is rather bossy,’ Sandra confided, pouring gin from an optic. ‘Everything I do is wrong. She spent fifteen minutes showing me the right way to cut up a lemon.’

  ‘She knows everything about everything.’ Lydia handed over a ten pound note. ‘She’s known as the Stasi around these parts.’

  ‘As in the East German secret police?’ Sandra gave change and laughed. ‘It does seem to fit.’ She picked up the cloth. ‘I’d better get back to the glasses. I’m supposed to look busy at all times.’

  ‘You seem remarkably unperturbed by the Stasi’s strictures.’

  ‘I’m immune.’ Sandra leant on the bar, wrapping the towel round her neat hands. ‘You see, I’ve met this boy – well, man, really: he’s older than me. I met him at a party. It’s early days, I know, but….’ Her eyes grew wide and happy, she was smiling all over her face. It warmed the heart, thought Lydia, just as the fire warmed one’s toes; but as she sat down she could not help feeling sorry for the girl, too. At that age, one was so unaware of the risks.

  But perhaps there were no risks where this boy (or man) was concerned. Not all men were like Nigel.

  Were they?

  Swirling the slice of lemon with her finger, Lydia admitted that there was no escaping the risks even if one avoided men. She had thought she would be safe, falling in love with a dog. She had been wrong. But at least in the empty public bar she could let her tears fall with impunity.

  She looked out at the December night through a window daubed with aerosol snow, her vision blurred, and wondered how long she could put off going home – going back to her empty cottage where Prize would not be waiting.

  FIVE

  GWEN COLLIER, HOOVERING the hallway, was tormented by thoughts of spiders, earwigs and moths.

  It is December, she said to herself sensibly. They have all been killed by the frost, or else they are in hibernation – or whatever it is that creepy-crawlies do. (What do they do?) There are none in my nice, clean house. My house is creepy-crawly free.

  She told herself this, but she did not believe it. For one thing, there was never any frost inside a centrally heated house (Basil: ‘Have you seen the size of this gas bill? Is it absolutely necessary to heat the place to the temperature of a sauna?’). And even if, by some miracle, the creepy-crawlies were all dead, that did not mean they had gone away. What about their corpses? What about their eggs? (Did creepy-crawlies lay eggs? Dean would know, she must ask him.) Aside from that – if one ignored the cre
epy-crawlies (one could try) – there were a thousand and one other manifestations of dirt to torment one. Human skin, for instance. Human skin was for ever flaking off, drifting across the carpets, accumulating in the corners, filling in cracks, settling under the settee.

  It was never ending. One struggled to keep one’s head above water.

  The hoover hummed and whined on a rising note, matching Gwen’s increasing frenzy.

  I must calm down, she told herself. I am becoming overwrought. It is not good for me.

  With a sigh, she switched off the hoover and propped the attachment against the wall. It was all very well telling oneself not to get worked up, but it was almost impossible at this time of year, with Christmas stalking her and the calendar down to its last page. It was a race against time: so much to be done and the days running out.

  She grabbed polish and a cloth, attacked the frosted panels in the front door (look at those greasy fingerprints). If only her family weren’t so untidy, so messy. Basil, for instance: she spent half her life trailing after Basil, picking up books, newspapers, the remote, his brief case; closing doors and drawers; putting the toilet seat down; folding and arranging hand and bath towels. Amanda, it was true, was not quite so bad, liked her things in their proper places, was punctilious over her personal hygiene; but every inch of her bedroom walls was plastered with huge posters. Gwen could not look at them without imagining the swarms of creepy-crawlies massing behind them, breeding, gestating, hatching, multiplying. Did Amanda need quite so many posters? Who were the people in them? Many were scantily clad, looked faintly menacing, disreputable; nothing like Bucks Fizz or Shakin Stevens. But if Gwen ventured a remark on those lines, Amanda would roll her eyes and say, ‘Oh my God, Mum, you’re so out of touch.’ It was the note of sympathy which Gwen took exception to.