THE SNAKE IN THE GRASS

Turn facts on their heads and who do you suppose is to blame?

The flowers in my garden were good that year. They had done as they were told when I planted them, and the colours were exactly as they should have been. But it wasn’t the flowers that were my problem, it was the snake.

It slithered along, all slimy and filled with deceit, and it was clever because it had adopted a human form. And not just any human form but one it knew I would take to straight away, and love.

Let me introduce myself. I’m Gladys Bendacott, and I’ll never see eighty again. So I’m getting on in life, but I don’t feel any older than a did when I was twenty-one and it was my wedding day and I was looking forwards to that first great carnal adventure when night fell and the air was filled with melodies from Liverpool. But I know that I am a great deal older than I was then when I find myself reaching for my walking frame because I sense my legs giving way.

But it was the other year when it happened, what, four or maybe five years ago.

I was in my garden and everything was just right. Spring was giving way to summer, and it was going to be a glorious summer as well, so to make absolutely sure that all was well I pushed a few weeds into a tidy pile where they would crumple and die out of sight.

And then the snake came.

Disguised as a toddler in a nappy that sagged because it was full of something rancid, it smiled at me.

“Baba,” it enunciated with a clarity I found almost, but not quite, endearing.

Was that a forked tongue I could see between its partly open lips, and was that smell really coming from it? I thought so, and so I told it to shoo as any sensible person might,

“Shoo!” I said again. I wanted to call it a naughty boy or a naughty girl but I couldn’t tell which and I wasn’t going to check inside that disgusting nappy to find out.

“Granny, are you there?” came a voice I did recognise. It was my granddaughter, a flighty bit of stuff that some might suggest hadn’t fallen far from the tree, because my son had married a flibbertigibbet piece of stuff called Annette who hadn’t been round long before she went off in search of fresh beds to conquer. But before she slid off she had left Deirdre squawking in her pram, and in the fulness of time my son Neil had decided he wasn’t father material and had invited a blonde called Perry to stay with him, giving Perry too much autonomy when it came to parenting. Poor Deirdre, I had thought.

And Deirdre, now old enough to be able to puff away at one of those electronic cigarettes and buy gin without blushing when asked her age, had produced a squawking mess of her own. They had called it Jane for want of a more memorable monosyllabic name, and it looked very much as if droopy-nappy in front of me was Jane.

“Could you watch her, darling?” cooed Deirdre, “I’m off to get a tattoo. Booked in for eleven o’clock, I am.”

“You stupid child,” I told her, not because she is stupid but because in my considered opinion tattoos might be all right on young, firm skin, but when you reach my age they’re far from being all right. I had my hero Ringo from the Beatles tattooed on my left breast, a really recognisable image of my drumming hero, and as I aged so did his image. I won’t even try to describe what he looks like now, only to say that if the real Ringo looked like my wrinkled portrait of him he wouldn’t be able to draw breath because he’d have been long dead.

“I know you don’t approve, granny, but I’m only having her name tattooed on my arm, and it would be a kindness for you to watch little Jane for me. I won’t be long and there’s a clean nappy in the bag.” She indicated a bag which probably contained more than one nappy, which was a warning, I suppose.

Then she was gone and I was left with the snake, who as if to prove her genetic heritage stuck her tongue out at me. To my surprise it wasn’t actually forked.

You might not approve of my attitude to a toddler, but I was forewarned. I had brought up the brat’s own mother for a few weeks when the flibbertigibbet had sauntered off to beds anew in the sunset and before Neil had cast his fishing net into the sea of young tarts and found Perry.

Now. Let me be fair. Perry was really quite decent and she proved a perfectly capable mother to Deirdre until she died unexpectedly. And it had been unexpected. She wasn’t much more than thirty and nobody had suspected she had a heart defect that she’d carried with her since her own birth. By then, fortunately, the child had been in her younger teens and was quite capable of doing things for herself and had been quite happy to be a latchkey kid, as they were called if they had to let themselves into their homes after school.

And now here I was with Jane.

I’ve changed good old fashioned nappies in the past, of course I have, and the modern disposable ones are a vast improvement, but that doesn’t make them pleasant. But it had to be done, so done it was.

“Poo poo, great granny,” enunciated the child as I struggled to clean her, “poo poo poo.”

She knew all right.

“You can have a nap,” I told her, because the one task of nappy changing had tired me. So I rooted round in the bag Deirdre had left looking for a dummy because in my experience youngsters like Jane needed something clean to suck on if they were going to be sociable and go to sleep.

No dummy, so I found a sweet for her to suck, a barley sugar, the sort I like and assumed she must.

Fully equipped, I lay the child on my settee because the whole prospect of me carrying her up stairs to a bed was thwart with dangers. As I may have pointed out, I’m by no means as fit as I was.

It was then that Jane showed her true colours. Very skilfully, and knowing I wouldn’t be able to get to her quickly enough, she spluttered and coughed and rolled off the settee onto the carpet. Maybe it was the sweet.

And once landed, she roared as if all hell was being let loose, which it wasn’t because the fall wasn’t that far and anyway the carpet was thick enough to absorb most of the snake’s weight on landing.

And Deirdre, freshly tattooed, chose that moment to return for her.

“Haven’t you got eyes in your head, granny?” she had shouted when she saw the precious lump of her serpent wriggling on the floor and heard her howling as if I’d taken a hammer to her.

And that was five or six years ago.

All sorts of things have happened to me since then. Deirdre made sure of that. I was even locked up for a short time in what was falsely called an open prison because the version she put out was that I had deliberately smashed the innocent Jane onto the ground. As if I would!

Then a doctor decided that Jane was an abused child because there were signs of healing fractures in a couple of bones. Deirdre was accused of neglecting her and Neil of being complicit in systematic cruelty.

Then a nosy copper decided to look into Perry’s premature death, and more useless questions were asked. One thing piled on top of another and suspicions were roused. Unnecessary and irrelevant questions were asked.

The snake is now in a foster home where they say she’ll be safe, as if she wasn’t before.

Which is only right and fair because I happen to know just how miserable she is. She told me when I visited her in my sleep last night.

And Deirdre had her tattoo surgically removed. She decided that Jane must have been a mix-up in the maternity hospital and rightly belonged to somebody else.

Neil has another lady friend now, quite buxom, I’m told, and childless, and has moved far enough away from me for us to never meet.

And in my eighties, I’ve got the shiniest of clear consciences and two walking sticks as well as a walking frame, and a garden to die for. And my tattoo of Ringo doesn’t look so bad after all.

© Peter Rogerson 05.04.23

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