by Adam Colton
Snakes Alive!
There were two mysterious packets in the middle of the three drawers in the white-painted wooden unit in Harriet's bedroom. 'How did these get here?' she thought to herself.
Both were brown but one was larger, perhaps the size of an A4 sheet of paper, while the other was roughly half the size. Both were bulging from the contents inside.
She picked up the larger of the two packages by the top, in a way that meant her fingers would not have any contact with the contents through the brown paper. It felt heavy to lift and the lump inside fell to the bottom of the envelope.
Lifting the package from the drawer, she used her other hand to squeeze the bottom. It was clearly a coil of something and felt slightly squashy, like rubber. Just then she gazed down at the other envelope. It seemed to move. Had she imagined this? Suddenly, her worst fear came into her mind – snakes!
She let go of the package, allowing it to drop back into the drawer, and leaning heavily on the front, she quickly slammed it shut. And with her back pressed against the unit, she let out a deep breath and tried to regain her senses.
Nobody would deliver a snake in an envelope, surely? And if they did, why would they have left the very thing she feared the most in her drawer - in duplicate? She had some pretty mischievous flatmates, who all had knowledge of her phobia, but nobody would play a practical joke so irresponsible, would they? After all, had she opened one of the envelopes and seen the dreaded reptile inside, it could have sent her into a panic attack, or a catatonic state resembling anaphylactic shock.
Now, Harriet was an altruistic soul and could also see this from the point of view of the serpents. How horrible – to be sealed up inside a manila wallet for countless days until somebody had the courage to let them out. And all for some warped human idea of humour.
Having just climbed out of bed, getting dressed was going to be something of a challenge now - the top drawer was 'underwear' and the bottom drawer 'skirts and blouses'. Cardigans and trousers were the middle drawer. The quandary was that it was midwinter and Harriet had no desire to break out her summer wardrobe in February, but the very notion of opening that middle drawer again made her feel shaky and slightly sweaty.
And so, fifteen minutes later, she emerged confidently into the 'lounge cum kitchen cum dining room' into which the doors of the four bedrooms opened. Harriet had always thought that her student accommodation had far too little scope for privacy and seemed to be almost modelled on the 'Big Brother' house in the banal TV show that she despised.
“Morning,” she announced.
“Morning Harriet,” two male voices and one female voice retorted, and then looking at her flatmate attired in a short-sleeved, white blouse and knee-length skirt, the female flatmate added, “You're looking very summery today.”
“Wishful thinking,” said Harriet with a forced confidence, “This winter has dragged on for too long.”
“Well, you're living in the wrong country if you don't like the cold,” laughed one of the two young men, “I think summer is going to be the second week of July this year. You'd better put a jumper on.” Then the other male companion thoughtfully added, “And I'd switch on that funny light of yours for a few more months.”
Harriet suffered from seasonal affective disorder. The obvious solution to this annual bout of negativity brought on by a lack of sunlight was to up sticks and decamp to Italy or Spain. She had always fancied living in a hilltop village surrounded by vineyards, sipping wine with her amigos in the hot afternoon sun, as the shadow of the veranda crept slowly around the courtyard. She had always harboured a frustration that Britain was becoming more like America in its slavish pursuit of wealth and status, while the European people seemed to devote so much more time to simple relaxation and camaraderie.
Three months ago she had purchased an ultraviolet lamp from the Internet, designed to lift the mood on dull days by filling the room with simulated daylight. Rather that promote feelings of wellbeing or ecstatic pleasure, it tended to make the young woman feel simply relaxed, as she sat on the bed in front of it, reading books with titles like 'Stop thinking yourself to death' and 'How to liberate your mind.' The next minute she would be fast asleep. Well, you can't feel down if you are in the land of Nod, so in a roundabout kind of way the light did seem to work.
Today was going to be a challenge though; it was gloomy and crepuscular even at 9 o'clock in the morning and she had three lectures to attend. The incessant dullness outside seemed to rob her of all enthusiasm to face the world, but do this she must. So pulling on a thick, purple overcoat from her wardrobe, Harriet ventured out to face her first lecture of the day. Phillip, the 'switch that light back on' guy, was studying chemistry, so he decided to walk with her to the science block.
It was only a few days ago that Harriet had been cooking some pasta for her evening meal when she came across two Bunsen burners in the saucepan cupboard. It irritated her that Phillip's science equipment had now started to invade the kitchen. These two 'Bunsens' of differing sizes seemed to mock her as she reached for the stainless steel receptacle. But now she was glad of a fellow science student's conversation, as she pounded the grey pavement into another day.
Harriet's degree course was in biology. She hoped to become a doctor, or if she couldn't face a further six years of study, a nurse or something similar. She wanted a career she could believe in, and helping the sick seemed to fit the bill perfectly. As a side project she also had a vague notion of writing a book of children's stories which would teach them the basics of biology. 'That'll never happen!' she gloomily thought – pretty much her reaction whenever such fanciful notions invaded her mind.
During today's lectures she received several comments that she was the only pupil sitting bundled up in an overcoat. Her irrationality had begun to hit her – she was enduring a whole day of either shivering or looking ridiculous purely because she hadn't fancied pulling out some winter clothes from a drawer with two unidentified brown envelopes inside.
The weekend came, and as was the case for many students, Harriet spent her Saturdays working to fund her course. 'Surely education is a human right,' she always thought, 'If society was organised properly rather than being set up by the rich for the rich, homes, food and education would all be free and you would just work for luxuries.' Two of her colleagues had opted for evening bar work, but fearing the prospect of trying to decipher drunk people's inane orders over a background of ear-splitting rap and techno music, Harriet opted to spend the sixth day of each week working in the dispatch room of a busy parcel company.
From the University of Kent at Canterbury, there was a pleasant panorama of the city each time she left the campus to descend the hill and wander through the ancient stone archway into the bustling centre. The cathedral was always dominant in this view, come rain or shine. Harriet wished her moods could be as impervious to the weather as this historic building always appeared.
The warehouse where she worked was on the other side of town, where bland industrial estates sprawl out along the flatter terrain towards Margate. It was quite a trek, but the walk seemed to focus her mind for the day. As Harriet sauntered inside that Saturday, her clothing was immediately commented upon by her senior, “You're a bit smart today,” he ventured.
“Well, I'm going out for a few drinks straight after work and I don't really have time to get changed before my lift gets here.” Harriet hated lying and wished that she had been able to slide those wretched packages out of the way in order to pull out a pair of jeans, instead of taking the coward's option for a second day running.
Soon she was settled into the business of weighing and grading various parcels, and as usual Arthur, who was about two years away from retiring, was chatting about his working life there, randomly selecting tiresome tales from the past three decades for her edification.
“It was the day before the Christmas party and this huge, great, blue plastic package arrived. You couldn't see what was inside, but it was so heavy th
at it took two of us to shift it. It was like it was filled with water or something.
Anyway, a performing burlesque dancer had travelled to the office, as the theme of the party was 'the circus,' and the package was labelled for her attention. Well, I took it across to the canteen, with Bill carrying the other end. Madame Begonia, as she was called, seemed very pleased when it arrived and said something like, 'Monty died yesterday so I needed a new one for the act.' We just thought she was a bit nuts.
Anyway, when we got to the party, which was always held in the canteen, she came out on stage wearing very little except this python draped around her neck.”
Harriet's attention was suddenly grabbed.
“I can't stand snakes myself, but then it clicked that we had carried this huge python across the road inside that blue bag. I felt a bit queasy just looking at it wrapped around this woman's torso. I had to get out of there.
Well, I wasn't the only one who left the party because of this. I imagined that the other three all had ophiophobia as well – that's what they call fear of snakes, you know. Well, two of them were scared out of their wits and that's why they walked out, but prudish Pauline, the old secretary, had left because she thought it was appalling and degrading to have a woman prancing about on stage like that at the Christmas party. Well, that made me laugh my blinkin' socks off.”
Arthur's stories invariably ended with this line. But Harriet sat stunned, as though she had been stabbed by his words. 'So they do transport snakes around in packages,' she thought. Once again, her sympathy was with the creature being stuffed inside a bag for hours on end, maybe days, but just then it struck her that she had absolutely no idea what was inside any of the packages she was weighing. She imagined herself with X-ray vision seeing all sorts of nasties from rats to spiders inside those brown boxes. And then it hit her - her gut feeling about those two envelopes in her middle drawer could be right after all.
“I feel a bit funny,” she said to Arthur, “I've got to get some fresh air.”
“You're not another prudish Pauline are you?” joked Arthur, thinking she had merely been offended by the slightly bawdy nature of his story.
It was later that evening that the four students were sitting around the living room table, sharing a couple of bottles of rosé wine. Slightly emboldened by the haze of the alcohol, Harriet decided that it was time to confront her friends about the mystery gifts.
“I don't wanna be funny,” she ventured, “But have any of you been in my room in the last few days?”
“Oh, I popped in to get that book you left out for me,” said Lawrence.
“Oh yes, I'd forgotten about that. You didn't go in any drawers did you?”
“Don't be daft. You'd go crazy if anybody snooped around in your stuff,” he replied.
“Well, the thing is, something has just appeared in there, and it wasn't me that put it there.”
“Wooooo!” said Phillip, “Spooooky!”
Then Lucy spoke up, “I'm popping out for a cigarette. You coming Harriet?”
“You're forgetting one thing,” replied the biology student, “I don't smoke.”
Lucy made a gesture with her face while nodding towards the door, as if to say 'come outside anyway', and being an obliging kind of person, this is what Harriet did. A bit of passive smoking never hurt anybody after all!
As they huddled in the doorway, they stared past the hazy, orange glow of the streetlight into the cold night air, and Lucy's tone of voice changed to convey a more serious approach; “I am trying to help you Harriet. I know what your fears are and they are holding you back and keeping you down. Forget light therapy. Forget tablets. You must confront what you fear or you will always be held back.”
Harriet had heard a lot of mumbo jumbo from the psychology student before, but taking it into her own hands to cure somebody's winter blues by placing two live snakes in her drawer seemed a little extreme. Maybe it was Lucy that needed some form of therapy. A little knowledge can be dangerous in the wrong hands.
“You mean...?”
“Yes,” interrupted Lucy, “The two brown envelopes.”
Suddenly, Harriet's perception of her flatmate shifted. Her suspicion that there was something rather sinister about Lucy had now solidified into hard, concrete fact. Lucy dropped her cigarette to the ground and stubbed it out with her foot. Then wordlessly, she opened the door and went back into the house, with Harriet following after a pause of a few seconds.
The two lads were talking about a band called 'Elbow' now. This was of little interest to Harriet, so she leaned over them, picked up her half empty glass of rosé and announced that she was retiring to her room to read for a bit.
“Self-help books again?” posed Lawrence.
Harriet nodded.
“This is the only help you need,” joked Phillip, raising his glass and then draining the contents.
And with that, Harriet left the room and sat on the edge of her bed, trying to quantify Lucy's words while staring intently at that drawer unit. The words 'you must confront what you fear' reverberated in her mind, and at that she stood up and headed across to the chest, gently sliding open the middle drawer. The two packages were still there. There was no detectable movement, but her heart was pounding, as she reached in to poke the smaller package with her index finger. Still the contents remained static. 'The snakes are asleep,' she thought with a smile, and closed the drawer before getting changed for bed.
Carefully crawling in between the covers, she felt as if any movement of her own might create some kind of ripple effect and disturb the equilibrium, somehow bringing her into contact with her worst nightmare. Ideally she wanted to sleep in one of the other rooms, but she no longer trusted Lucy at all, and she imagined that Lawrence or Phillip would get the wrong idea if she asked to bed down in either of their rooms, especially after they'd had a few glasses of wine. No, she would have to stay in the 'snake pit.' She leaned across to turn out the lamp and then rolled over, in a way that created no additional disturbance to the bedclothes. Lying completely still, it was just a few minutes before she found herself 'blowing zeds' (as Phillip always called it).
The dream she had was interesting to say the least:
Harriet was back in the warehouse weighing boxes, when she got the notion to phone her mother who lived literally hundreds of miles away, in Derby. Using the mobile, she asked Mum to collect the two envelopes from her room and release the snakes into a forest a couple of miles along the cycle path to Whitstable. Somehow Harriet could then observe her mother carrying out these instructions, and in doing so, she could see what had been troubling her for so long.
The larger serpent was black and white striped, with the stripes in bands all the way down its body. It reminded her of the way some lighthouses are painted. The smaller one of the pair was both red and green with the two colours running the length of its body. She could see them slithering away into the brambles and her mother standing up from where she had crouched down to release them, and then wandering back to the tarmac path to put the empty envelopes into a litter bin.
Harriet then had the impression that she had woken up. The room looked as though all the rough edges had been knocked off of things, as if everything was soft and foamy. Even though it was dark, the bed, the chest of drawers and the window ledge all seemed to emanate light, in the way that a field covered in snow might appear on a night-time ramble. But there, standing alone in the middle of the room like a megalith, was the black, cylindrical litter bin where Mum had deposited the empty packets.
The bedroom door then opened and Lucy stuck her head round announcing “You still haven't faced up to things, have you?”
Harriet then found herself instantly back in the warehouse, certain that those snakes were still secreted among the jeans and sweaters in her chest of drawers.
Again, she picked up the phone and called her mother with the same instructions.
Again, she saw the two snakes, which even she now had to admit were
quite pretty, sliding away into the undergrowth.
Again, she dreamed of waking up with her room, doused in a surreal light, with a huge, black bin as a centrepiece.
Then Lucy's head popped around the door again to say those same words, and the sequence repeated.
Harriet realised that she was trapped in an endlessly cycling dream; she wanted desperately to wake herself up. As she stood in the warehouse again she could see things in front of her as usual, but placing her fingers over her eyes, she could feel that the lids were closed. She tried to force them open, presuming that if she did this, she would instantly find herself awake, with her room back to normal, but her eyes remained firmly closed, and so the dream continued, with the scene of Mother giving the serpents their freedom playing out once more in her mind.
As the final stage of the dream recommenced, Harriet realised that she was not going to wake herself up by fighting this sequence of events. In fact, she already knew of a phenomenon called 'lucid dreaming,' in which the sleeper becomes aware of his of her state, making it possible to take control of things and turn them around advantageously.
Harriet's natural desire was to simply wake up, but instead she climbed out of bed and slipped past the litter bin to open the bedroom door. When she opened it, she discovered a room humming with people. A middle aged man in a suit and tie held out his hand and invited her through the crowd and onto a stage which had been set up where the TV usually stood.
Harriet took to the stage, and the hubbub of conversation died. It was the presentation of an award for her recently published book. 'Oh yes – the educational children's stories!' she thought, 'I'd forgotten all about that idea.'
But as soon as she had begun to realise her hidden thoughts within the confines of her mind, she woke up. This was the very definition of irony. Thankfully, there was no strange aura about the room and definitely no black bin. 'Phew,' she thought, 'I've escaped from the vortex!'
Believing that dreams contain coded messages from the subconscious, Harriet spent the next ten minutes staring at the ceiling, trying to deduce some kind of meaning from the images that had just bulldozed through her brain. The most obvious interpretation was that she must confront what frightened her or risk being trapped in an endless cycle of repeating events, with problems never resolving. Maybe this is what her low moods were trying to tell her too, by returning like a tide to the shore every autumn and winter.
Tomorrow morning, she would summon up all her courage and take the envelopes into the woods herself, releasing the infamous reptiles into the wild once and for all. And with this resolve, she rolled back over and fell blissfully asleep for the rest of the night.
And so, the sun rose upon another day. After springing out of bed, Harriet took a deep breath and opened the drawer, bravely pushing the packages to the back to remove a woollen jumper and some jeans from underneath. When she emerged to the 'Big Brother lounge' Phillip immediately joked, “I see you are back in the same season as the rest of us!” Harriet just smiled at his ever-evident cheeky humour.
With breakfast safely dispatched, she grabbed an empty box which had once contained 2,500 sheets of blank A4 paper and returned to her room. If she could somehow get the two envelopes inside the box, the solid cardboard cube would prevent her from feeling the contents through the paper as she carried them.
Removing the envelopes from the drawer at fingertips and lowering them carefully into the box, this action was completed remarkably quickly. Sealing the lid with some noisy parcel-tape that she had swiped from the warehouse, Harriet donned her purple overcoat and her shoes, ready to greet the great, wide world.
With the box under her arm, she strode through the living room with a brief utterance of, “I am just going out to make a delivery.” And then she was outside, with the front door firmly closed behind her. There was no going back.
Prompted by the 'release' scene in her dream, she headed off along the 'Crab and Winkle Way.' This pleasant walk towards the seaside town of Whitstable, famed for its oysters, roughly followed the route of the first passenger railway in the world.
The tarmac cycle path left the urbanity of the campus to run between open fields, eventually leading into woodland.
Was this far enough from her house that the snakes wouldn't come crawling back?
A few hundred yards further, she turned ninety degrees and left the solid surface of the path to trample the undergrowth and fallen leaves into the thicket. It was beneath a spindly hawthorn bush that she decided to release her cargo.
Crouching down, she ran a long fingernail around the tape, and then reverently lifting the lid, she psyched up to face whatever sight she was destined to see. Lucy's words echoed around her head once again, 'You must confront what you fear.'
Pulling out the smaller of the two packages by her fingertips, Harriet carefully unsealed the envelope and lifted the flap, taking care not to look inside. She then laid the package down on the ground in front of her, with the open end pointing away. She repeated the action with the larger package. The two brown rectangles now lay side by side in front of her, like a pair of evil twins. The snakes could crawl out of their own accord.
Yet, as she sat there waiting for several minutes, neither of the packages so much as stirred.
There was only one course of action. She clasped the bottom of both envelopes between her fingertips and lifted them simultaneously, so that the contents could slither out onto the grass. She took a deep breath and leaned her head back as far from her hands as possible, bracing herself to run as soon as the snakes appeared.
'Here we go!'
Two orange coils rolled out, causing her to jump back, as though she had just scalded herself.
It was as she regained her composure that it became clear that it wasn't a pair of orange reptiles in front of her but two harmless coils of rubber tubing. Harriet exhaled what had seemed like the longest breath of her life. It was then that she remembered the pair of Bunsen burners in the saucepan cupboard – these were the tubes that connected them to the gas-taps in the science lab; one large and one small!
So what on earth was Lucy trying to prove? What was all that talk about facing her worst fears supposed to mean?
Still slightly apprehensive, the student stepped forward to investigate. She picked up a stick and used it to flick the large tube over. In black capital letters on the other side was written the word 'DEPRESSION' in marker-ink. Repeating the action with the smaller tube, she discovered similar hieroglyphs. The word here was 'BOREDOM'.
Harriet let out a huge laugh. “Stupid Lucy!” she exclaimed to herself.
In truth, Lucy had identified her flatmate's two biggest hang-ups, but had inadvertently managed to get Harriet to face her number one fear – her phobia of snakes.
It was as Harriet walked back to the path, with the two orange rubber coils looped over her right wrist like a pair of cumbersome bracelets, that she felt a rush of positivity.
She smiled at the whole silly affair, and feeling better than she had felt in years, she returned to the house to find Phillip still seated with his mug of tea.
“Ah, the wanderer returns. What's on the agenda today then? Reading one of those books of yours?”
She picked up a large jotter pad from the kitchen worktop and decided to embark upon a project that she had brushed aside for years.
“No,” she replied, as she reached for the pen on the coffee table, “I'm writing one!”