The Snakes

by Sadie Jones

  ‘I guess not,’ said Dan, and a silence fell between them, then he got caught up talking to somebody else, but when she and her friends left a few minutes later he felt a gap behind him, and when he turned to check, the door to the stairwell seemed particularly empty because she had gone. Later on, up on the roof, he had a beer and watched her, waiting for her to be alone. She stood out, but he didn’t know why. It intrigued him that she had such a presence. Her girlfriends were better dressed than she was and one of them was very nice-looking, but only she stood out – in jeans and boots; not big but definitely not skinny – there wasn’t anything he could pinpoint that made her shine to him, except maybe that her hair was fair. But he wasn’t into blondes. When he knew her, and looked back, he thought it was her character, her inner heart he’d seen, and somehow known he had to try for her. There was a DJ that night, and the bar was glowing pink and green and you could see across all of the city, the small, distant lights dancing in the warm air. Dan stopped her when she was coming back from the toilets.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, approaching sideways so as not to scare her off. ‘How was your night?’

  ‘Good, thanks,’ said Bea, hoping he didn’t think she was there to buy paintings.

  They talked. She tried to be particularly forthright, so he wouldn’t guess she was attracted to him, but he knew anyway. It was obvious. He bought her a drink and asked her about herself. She told him she had just joined Stamford Hill Psychotherapy and Counselling, and he told her he had just started working as an estate agent. When he said that she stopped looking into his eyes.

  ‘My father’s in property,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not in property,’ said Dan. ‘It’s just a day job.’

  She didn’t say anything but her openness had gone.

  ‘Got to earn a living,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bea. ‘Sure.’

  They talked some more and he bought her another drink, and then she bought him one. He told her he had no future as an artist because he thought conceptual art was bullshit and abstracts were boring and people just got them to go with their furniture. She said he should forget the marketplace and just do the work he loved. He talked about Basquiat and Clemente, and explained his submission for Father had been defined by having grown up without one. He asked about hers.

  ‘He’s very domineering,’ said Bea.

  Dan said he hated that. ‘My mum’s the boss,’ he said. And he smiled.

  Six months later they were living together. Six months after that, he proposed – old-school, with a rose and a ring. They were married eighteen months from their first meeting, and a year on bought their flat. The deposit was made up from Bea’s savings and guilt money Dan’s father had sent him on his twenty-fifth birthday. Twenty-five thousand pounds. One for every year he hadn’t seen him. They called it the ‘adulterer’s cash’. Once, Dan asked Bea if she ever borrowed from her parents. He knew they were well off.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Never.’

  Their flat was a one-bedroom first-floor conversion with a brand-new IKEA kitchen.

  ‘It’s amazing! We’re so lucky!’ she shouted when they moved in, running up and down to touch the windows like a ricocheting pinball – the front, the back, the front – while Dan stood in the middle of the floor and laughed at her.

  He changed his job from Foxtons Peckham to Foundations of Holloway. It was her idea. He was still an estate agent but there was a veneer of morality; Foundations only took 1 per cent, whatever the property value. Ethical or not, Dan hated it, from coffee machine to commute, from suit to traffic stink, to almost every single person he met. A fucking estate agent. Ethical. It was just selling houses, or, more often, two rooms above a newsagent, or a basement needing change-of-use. He didn’t mind so much when he had what were termed ‘traditional’ buyers, but London had a dearth of those. Sales were often to overseas investors, or buy-to-let, or developers, wanting to knock everything down and start over. Sometimes Dan closed the deal on a property and closed the door, and pictured it; lights out, and no more human life for months. Nobody to pop out for milk or children on the stairs; a London that was rows and rows of film-set frontages. Selling houses was shit enough, without selling them to people who didn’t need homes.

  On bad days he missed her. He would sit on the train, desperate to be home, staring at his reflection and the other ghostly doppelgängers of his fellow travellers; their possible selves, and he would think of all the things he wanted, that he might never find. Fulfilment. Success. Money. Money – everything in London felt as if it were made of it. Cars were made of rolls of it, and clothes of flimsy sweatshop notes. It was all right for Bea, she loved her work, she didn’t mind she wasn’t paid enough for it, but Dan had taken years to get the courage up to study art, and now he didn’t know where to begin. His portfolio was gathering dust under the bed. At night, he would lie with her in his arms and feel it beneath him, unseen and reproachful. He pictured its dusty fingers reaching out to him as he slept, reminding him of his failings. His life was slipping from his grasp, days he would never have again.

  The night Bea came back from work with the Italian leather holdall had been one of those bad days, not because of all the shit that came with selling houses, but the worse shit that came from not selling them; sitting in the office all day, feeling like he was rotting from the inside out. That night, he’d made some pasta while she had a shower and changed, and then they sat eating and looking at the bag she hadn’t meant to buy.

  ‘I’m so worried about Emma,’ said Bea.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The girl today. In the shop.’

  ‘You can’t worry about everyone. What about you?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  They cleared the plates and turned out lights and took the leather holdall into the bedroom. They made love with it on the floor nearby and afterwards Dan reached down to pick it up and look at it.

  ‘This is quality,’ he said.

  ‘It should be.’

  ‘Was it a lot?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t bad.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a sign,’ said Dan.

  ‘I only bought it to make Veena feel better.’

  ‘Who’s Veena?’

  ‘The lady in the shop.’

  ‘Yeah, I think it’s a sign, though.’

  They sat up late and talked. He tried to say how much he hated his job without sounding like he was just complaining, digging out the worst part of his feelings. She wanted to join in, and admitted her own stress, and that the responsibility for people frightened her. But then she remembered the reward it gave her, and felt like she was pretending. Her own problems felt unimportant when she thought of other people’s. She didn’t say that, she didn’t want to undermine him. He had no reward, he was in deficit to his life, paying out and getting nothing back. It all seemed tied together, his pain, and the pain of others, the mob greed and unhappiness. If they could take themselves out, somehow, get away, then maybe he could start afresh.

  ‘We could travel. Just a couple of months,’ she said. ‘Or three.’

  ‘Away?’ he said. ‘Away?’

  He switched on the light and it shone straight down onto the red leather bag, making it glow brightly. She had said it without thinking, but looking at his face she realised she could not now take it back. Her words had voiced a need in him. His need not hers, to go back now would take something away from him. She knew she couldn’t do it.

  Bea had a small tattoo of a flame on the back of her neck, under her hair. She’d got it in Prague on her eighteenth birthday, for Dante’s Beatrice. The flame was meant to be a source of inspiration and guidance but she thought it looked like an advertisement for British Gas. Dan loved it. To him, it was a sign they were fated to be together and that she was his guiding light. He would lift her hair and kiss the flame, between the top bump of her spine and the nape of her neck. He did it now.

  ‘I’d follow you anywhere,’ he said. He would always be able to say it wa
s her idea. ‘Let’s go.’

  It wasn’t as radical as it felt. He would have to resign from Foundations but she could take three months unpaid leave from Stamford Hill Psychotherapy. Her post would still be there when they came home, as would the crisis helpline where she volunteered. He would have to find something different. They could get a short-term tenant for the flat and use the Cushion to pay their way. The Cushion was the £4,370 they had in a savings account. When money was tight they reminded themselves of it. We’ve got the Cushion. Sometimes it was the Fucking Cushion. The Tiny Cushion. The Shrinking Cushion.

  ‘It’ll be perfect, babe,’ said Dan. ‘We can use the Cushion, and everything good will still be the same when we get back.’

  ‘I know,’ said Bea.

  ‘Do you really want to go?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘You promise?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  She was happy to go. She was. She thought of work, and the constant effort of reminding herself that hard as she must try to help people, she must never fall into the trap of believing she could save them. She had tried to help Emma. She had failed. She was gripping the framework of her life, but she was powerless. Perhaps it would be good to let it go. She told herself she must. Dan was asleep beside her. Imagining their travels, she surrendered. Soon afterwards she fell asleep. She slept deeply for a while but later, in the darkest part of the night, she had the dream. There was almost nothing else in it but noise and terror; just her and Dan on a white road and the cacophonous sound of screaming like the sound of Hell. It woke her, and she lay trembling, staring into the dark as the sound faded. She lay in the grateful silence, with the white road still in her eyes and dread slipping away into the corners of the room. She thought how strange it was to have a nightmare when they had such plans, and she was so happy.

  2

  The service station on the A26 from Calais was sunny and civilised. The day was mild. They sat outside and had a coffee, watching children playing on the manufactured grassy slopes. They’d bought a left-hand drive Peugeot in London, the week before they left. It had seventy thousand miles on the clock and a manual gearbox. Most of the car was blue but the bonnet, for no reason the seller would commit to, was matt-black.

  ‘It looks like shit,’ Bea had whispered to Dan, out of earshot.

  ‘It is shit, it’s nine hundred quid.’

  They’d left London the morning before their tenant, a PhD student from Korea, was due to move in. Her rent would cover the mortgage and give them a little extra and they had the Cushion to pay their way. They had imagined their Peugeot would feel at home in France but all the other cars looked sleek and big and they felt like vagrants.

  Bea bought a paper map in the shop and spread it out on the table, trundling a peanut along their route. The A26 to Dijon, and her brother Alex’s hotel, then south to Lyons, and west, and pray the Peugeot survived the Alps, and on to Milan. Milan, Parma, Bologna – the peanut wobbled towards Rome.

  ‘I’ll get you a toy car,’ said Dan. ‘They had them in the shop.’

  ‘Can’t be worse than the car we’ve got.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘If it dies, we can get buses and trains.’

  ‘Buses?’

  ‘Think of all the people we’d meet.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I am.’

  They finished their coffee and set off again. The road was too loud for conversation. Bea spread out the map in front of her, comparing it to the satnav, dreaming. Lorries swayed above them and Dan gripped the wheel in the slipstream. A sideways wind spattered rain and dirt across the road. Then the country and the weather changed.

  They stopped again, and Bea drove, swinging back into the line of traffic. It was hot in the car now so they opened the windows an inch. Bea didn’t want to use air conditioning because it made her feel guilty.

  ‘Yes, babe, every time someone uses air con a polar bear dies,’ said Dan, sweating.

  She was not a person who ever dropped litter. He lovingly endured the bags and boxes of packaging that waited around the flat, and mocked her long scrutiny of the council website for collection days and recycling facilities. Christ, he would say, it’s only going to get melted down in China and sent back. I know, she would answer, but it’s all we’ve got. We have to try.

  The wind rushed and whistled and hot sun baked the black plastic on the dash.

  ‘It’s only two more hours,’ said Bea.

  ‘God loves an optimist, my mum always says.’

  Bea met Dan’s mother long before he met her parents. Jean had tidied and cleaned for her visit and put new antimacassars on the backs of the chairs and sofa, and there was freshly baked banana bread, warm, and spread with butter. Dan had met Bea’s parents only once, in a cafe on Marylebone High Street soon after they were engaged.

  ‘I suppose you have to, if we’re getting married, but it has to be neutral ground,’ Bea said. ‘I’m not going to Holford Road.’

  Dan thought the meeting went all right, but was glad he didn’t have to see more of them. Her skinny little mother had said almost nothing, and looked bored, and it was obvious her father wasn’t ecstatic his daughter was going to marry a mixed-race unsuccessful estate agent. He didn’t think Griff was racist in the way he might have anticipated, but he guessed he had the pragmatic prejudice Dan considered particularly British; if you were rich colour was an accessory, if you were poor it lowered your stock. In the eyes of his future father-in-law Dan’s stock couldn’t have been lower. They had all drunk their tea, then Griff and Liv Adamson had picked up their designer sunglasses and headed home. They hadn’t seen them since that day. They invited only friends to the wedding – and Dan’s mother and aunts and cousins – none of Bea’s family, except her brother Alex, who didn’t come. Dan didn’t much like the sound of Alex, a waster who returned Bea’s endless effort and generosity with apparent indifference. She had cried after seeing him once. Anyone who made Bea cry was an arsehole as far as Dan was concerned, it took a lot to rock her equilibrium. But Bea insisted she loved her brother. And she couldn’t go to France without stopping by.

  ‘He’s always asking,’ she said. ‘And the hotel is on our way.’

  They played music through their portable speaker as the trees flashed past like a beat. A family car overtook, with children staring out, squashed against the back window. The mother, glimpsed, was changing a baby, wipes and hands and the tiny feet waving, shouting at her husband.

  Alex was seven years older than Bea. She had last seen him at the Priory, when he’d checked himself in. He’d stayed three months that time. Alex hadn’t said in his emails whose idea it was to buy a hotel in Burgundy, his or their father’s, or Liv’s, but it was bizarre. Neither he nor their parents knew anything about the catering industry, and Alex had only been clean six months when he left London to go and run it. She and Dan had googled the Hotel Paligny, but apart from a fancy logo the website said it was under construction.

  ‘Do you think there’ll be an industrial kitchen in Alex’s hotel,’ she asked, ‘like in The Shining?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Dan, examining playlists on his phone.

  She was sick of managing his mood. He had been like this since they arrived in France, fractious about staying with Alex. Add up all the times we’ve visited your mother, she’d say, that’s how long we’ll stay with my brother. She was trying to overlook it, but it didn’t feel romantic, it wasn’t like the start of an adventure.

  Soon after Dijon they came off the autoroute, and through the tolls again. Dan took over the driving. Brown ‘ville historique’ signs instructed them they were somewhere beautiful, but it was still just a motorway. Alex had sent directions but they were different to the satnav.

  ‘Beaune,’ said Bea, map-reading, as they shot past signs. ‘No, sorry – Dole, no, Le Creusot. Fuck. Autun. Definitely Autun.’

  Several miles along a dual carriageway they saw the sign for Autun and Beaune, and turned off. Then,
suddenly, there were vineyards. The hills were striped with them, like graph paper. Dan slowed the car to a calmer eighty kilometres per hour and Bea looked out of the window.

  ‘It’s not far now,’ she said. ‘This is pretty.’

  ‘It’s not Milan,’ said Dan. ‘It’s not Rome.’

  ‘A few days, then it’s done.’

  They came to the outskirts of a village.

  ‘There’s a sign,’ said Bea. ‘Slow down –’

  ‘I am!’

  ‘Arnay-sur-Ouche, three kilometres.’ She checked the directions.

  They passed flat-fronted stucco houses with shutters and window boxes of red flowers that looked vaguely Tyrolean. Vineyards gave way to pastures, woodlands broke the view, and steep hills and bare rock.

  ‘Satnav?’ asked Dan.

  ‘It’s in and out. Just carry on.’

  She texted Alex to say they were nearly there, but the text turned green and she didn’t know if he’d received it. They could see a church spire.

  ‘Here we are,’ she said, ‘Arnay-sur-Ouche’

  They followed the one-way system to an irregular square.

  ‘Café de la Place,’ said Bea, peering out.

  The cafe was on the sunny side of the square, with a French flag on a pole above the door. She could dimly see two waiters inside, but nobody else.

  ‘Left, left here,’ she said.

  ‘Towards Clémency?’

  ‘Yes. Then Alex says it’s only six kilometres to Paligny village.’

  ‘Meaning what? In miles?’

  She ignored him. Narrow fields sloped up to trees on the brow of the hill, and then, as they rounded a bend, suddenly they saw enormous country, rolling and rolling into the distance, and the hills were an expanse of pale blue and greens and Bea had the sensation of being in the centre of a huge land, and the luxury of space.

  ‘Amazing,’ she said. Her heart opened up.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Dan. ‘That’s where we go, after this. That’s south.’

  They went away from the wide country, down, to flatter ground, and more vineyards, patchy and neat. They passed a farmyard and saw some chickens. On a featureless stretch of road, marooned, they saw the sign Paligny. They stopped talking. The village was very small, with no church, and no sign for any hotel. They passed some bungalows and a Parisian-looking town house, boarded up. They were out of the village in moments, accelerating.