Snakes' Elbows

by Deirdre Madden

  From his pocket Jasper took one of the tiny grenades he had got from Mr Smith and held it out on the palm of his hand. He explained what it was to The General, who was very impressed. ‘How much do they cost?’

  Jasper named his price, which was five times what he had paid Mr Smith, adding, ‘I can let you have two hundred of them here and now, and I can get you loads of other stuff too: guns, explosives, anything you want.’

  ‘Done deal,’ said The General, who placed his order, paid Jasper and went off happy with his bag of grenades.

  But what would The General have said had he known that five minutes after they parted, Jasper was sitting on a bench elsewhere in the garden with The President, having exactly the same conversation and selling him the other two hundred grenades?

  As The General and The President went back into The Villa to meet again, Jasper slipped out through the hole in the fence and hailed a passing taxi. ‘Take me to the airport.’ As he was going up the steps of the plane, already he could hear the first explosions.

  Tired after his long day, he slept the whole way home. All the stewardesses were pleased about this, because although he was snoring so loudly you could hear him even over the engines of the plane, it was still better than having him awake and pestering them all the time.

  Night had fallen by the time he got back to his own country, and by now he was grumpy. ‘Everything all right?’ he asked the butler when he arrived back at the house.

  ‘Not really, Sir,’ the butler said. ‘The butcher came round with a big bill for some steaks Cannibal and Bruiser stole from his shop this afternoon.’

  ‘If he thinks I’m going to pay he can think again. He should look after his meat, not leave it lying around where the dogs can get at it.’

  By the time the maid brought his cocoa up to his room, Jasper was already in his blue and white striped pyjamas and tucked up in bed. It was the same maid who had brought him his cornflakes that morning and she was exhausted because she had been working hard all day. While Jasper was sitting in the plane drinking champagne she had been beating carpets and scrubbing floors.

  ‘And what,’ he said, pointing to three biscuits beside his cup, ‘are those things?’

  ‘Biscuits, Sir. Chocolate fingers.’

  ‘I can see that,’ Jasper thundered. ‘I’m not stupid, woman. But don’t you know that I only ever have chocolate fingers with my afternoon tea? I have to have malted milk biscuits with my cocoa every night, pink wafers with my elevenses and jammy dodgers after my lunch except for Saturdays, when I have Jaffa cakes. Have you got that?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘HAVE YOU GOT THAT?!!!’

  ‘Yes, Sir. Sorry, Sir.’ The woman was trying hard not to cry. ‘I suppose,’ she thought to herself, ‘I could simply climb out of the window in the middle of the night and run away.’

  After she had left the room Jasper drank his cocoa and ate his biscuits, even if they were chocolate fingers. Then he turned on the radio. ‘Good evening. Here is the news. Reports are coming in that a horrible war has broken out between…’

  ‘Oh snakes’ elbows! Who cares!’ Jasper said crossly, and he turned the radio off again. He switched the light out and curled up in his bed.

  And within five minutes Jasper was fast asleep, dreaming about money, about coins and banknotes and gold.

  Even though his house was enormous, Barney lived in only one room, on the top floor at the extreme right of the building. ‘Why did you buy such a big place?’ Wilf asked him.

  ‘The man in the estate agent’s told me it was all they had left.’

  ‘They saw you coming,’ said Wilf, shaking his head. He now lived in a room beside the kitchen on the ground floor, at the extreme left of the building. The first time he saw Barney’s room he had thought it very odd, the strangest place he had ever seen in his whole life. And in truth, it was an unusual room.

  Just under the window was Barney’s little bed. Beside it was the wicker basket in which Dandelion slept (although it was not unknown for her to climb out of this in the middle of the night and snuggle in beside Barney until morning came). There was the table and chair at which Barney ate his meals (although it was not unknown for Wilf to eat with him and so there was an extra chair). There was the cosy sofa on which he sat to listen to music or to read, for there was also a bookcase crammed with good books. On the wall was the painting of the lady with a yellow butterfly balanced on the tip of her finger. There was a miniature tree growing in a shallow pot. But what made the room remarkable was that slap bang in the middle of it, taking up all the spare space, was a huge black grand piano with its lid propped open. Even though he no longer gave concerts, Barney still spent hours and hours every day playing the piano. It was his greatest happiness in life.

  *

  Every afternoon now at half past four, Barney and Wilf had milk and cherry buns together and talked about things.

  ‘Why don’t you put the piano in another room?’ Wilf asked one day as he poured the milk.

  ‘I like to be near it all the time,’ Barney said. If he woke in the night, it comforted him to see the piano looming there in the darkness.

  ‘And the little tree: where did you get that?’

  ‘A lady in Japan gave it to me.’

  He told Wilf that the lady’s name was O-Haru. She wrote poems using a brush and ink rather than a pen. She grew miniature trees, Barney said, she had a whole perfect forest of them. In the autumn their leaves turned gold and yellow and red. In the springtime tiny buds appeared, then tiny leaves and blossoms. O-Haru lived in a house with paper walls and had a garden in which there were no flowers, only stones and fine raked sand.

  Wilf, who had never been out of Woodford in his life, listened to all of this with astonishment. Some of the things Barney spoke of were so extraordinary that at first Wilf wondered if he was making it all up, just to tease him. But then as he got to know him better he realised that Barney would never do such a thing.

  ‘Were you always as shy as you are now?’ Wilf asked. ‘Were you one of those little boys who wouldn’t sing a song at a party unless you were hiding behind the door so that no one would know it was you, even if they did know because they saw you going behind the door in the first place?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then how did you manage to give all those concerts in front of hundreds and thousands of people?’

  ‘Oh it was awful, Wilf!’ Barney exclaimed. ‘I can’t tell you how terrible it was, at least to begin with.’

  He went on to describe how scared he used to be when he was little, standing in the wings in his best suit waiting to go on. He could sense the audience out there on the far side of the footlights, snuffling and whispering like a thousand-headed monster. Barney knew that as soon as he put his toes on the stage everyone would start to clap their hands and he hated that too. The noise frightened him. Out there in the middle of the stage in a pool of bright light he could see his beloved piano. He knew that if only he could get to it and start to play, then everything would be all right. He would be happy and feel safe. But getting from the wings to the piano was like walking along the edge of a high cliff, with an angry sea crashing on the rocks below and thinking that at any moment you might fall in.

  ‘But then,’ he went on, ‘my mother found a magic curtain. Every night before a concert she hung it up at the edge of the stage. It was invisible, but I knew it was there. It meant that I could see the audience, but they couldn’t see me. I felt that I was completely on my own and so walking over to my piano wasn’t a problem.’

  ‘Do you still have the curtain?’ Wilf asked, and Barney gave a strange little smile.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I grew up and then I grew old and my mother wasn’t there any more. But by then I understood how the magic curtain worked. I didn’t need it any longer. I was able to walk across the stage alone. But I always loved the end of a concert.’

  ‘Because it was over?’

  ‘Because I knew I’d made t
he people happy,’ Barney said. ‘When I heard the applause at the end, I knew that I’d given them something special, something wonderful that they would remember for the rest of their lives. And that made me very happy.’

  ‘You’re still very shy,’ Wilf remarked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Barney, ‘I suppose I am. But O-Haru is even shyer.’

  Wilf imagined them sitting side by side, silent and blushing but completely happy in a forest of miniature trees, or in a garden in which there were no flowers, only stones and fine raked sand.

  *

  Later the same day, as darkness fell, it began to rain. A man on his way home from work stood under a chestnut tree opposite Barney’s house to take shelter. As he waited there, he noticed that in all of the great house only two lights were lit, one on the top floor at the extreme right of the building and one on the ground floor at the extreme left.

  Just at that moment a young woman appeared beside him. ‘Has it started yet?’ she asked, peering anxiously at the house from under her dripping umbrella.

  ‘Has what started?’

  ‘The lights,’ she said. ‘The switching on of the lights. Look, look, it’s beginning now!’

  As she spoke, the window to the left of the one at the top right of the house also lit up and then the window to the left again, and then the one beside that. Slowly the yellow light seemed to flow along the whole of the top floor of the building in a steady wave from right to left, until all the windows were lit. ‘It happens at this time every night,’ the woman said breathlessly. ‘I always try to get here in time to see it because it’s such a beautiful thing.’

  The man agreed. There was something mysterious and fascinating in what was happening. By now a window had been lit up on the extreme left of the floor below the one that was already completely illuminated, and now the yellow light was again flowing steadily, only this time left to right.

  ‘They say he’s weird, and I read in the Woodford Trumpet that he’s very mean.’

  The young woman shrugged. ‘You can’t believe everything it says in the papers.’

  Now the light was flowing along a third floor. They stood watching in silence until finally it reached the last window in the house, on the extreme left on the ground floor, the window that had been lit up all along. The whole huge house was now ablaze with light against the darkening sky. ‘It is beautiful,’ the man admitted.

  ‘It’s magnificent.’

  ‘It looks like an ocean liner,’ he said, ‘out at sea in the middle of the night.’

  But the woman said that it reminded her of that moment at a party when all the lights have been put out and the birthday cake is carried into the blackness of the room. ‘And all the small soft flames flicker on the candles and then everyone begins to sing.’

  The house remained lit up for some ten or fifteen minutes and the woman and man stood there in the shadow of the great tree, simply looking at it. And then all of a sudden, the light in the extreme bottom left-hand window went out. Then the light in the window beside that was also extinguished, and then the window beside that. Now it was darkness rather than light that was flowing along from one window to the next, and as it did the house seemed to disappear from the bottom up.

  ‘How strange it is,’ the woman said softly. ‘How strange and how lovely.’

  Only the top floor of the house was lit now and gradually darkness overcame that too, in a wave from left to right. Eventually a light was burning in only one window of the great house: the window on the extreme right of the top floor of the building. It remained lit for some five or ten minutes and when all of a sudden it went out, the whole building disappeared.

  ‘And you say this happens every night?’ the man asked the woman.

  ‘Every night,’ she replied. ‘Sometimes, like tonight, it happens very smoothly. Then on other occasions the light might suddenly stop flowing for ten minutes or more before beginning again.’

  ‘Why?’

  The woman shook her head. ‘I have no idea,’ she said, ‘absolutely no idea whatsoever. It’s all a complete mystery.’

  Suddenly the man and woman realised that they were standing there in the darkness together under the woman’s umbrella.

  ‘I suppose I’d best be off,’ said the man.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Goodnight then.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  Even though they didn’t know each other it had been wonderful to watch the strange light show in each other’s company. They felt shy and they blushed but they were completely happy too, like Barney and O-Haru in the miniature forest or the garden where there were no flowers, only stones and fine raked sand.

  What on earth was Barney doing?

  As with so many things that seem completely mysterious, the explanation was really quite simple. At the exact moment when the young woman with the umbrella arrived at the chestnut tree, Barney turned to Dandelion who was curled up snoozing under the piano. ‘Come along, Puss,’ he said. ‘It’s time to go.’

  With the cat at his heels he stepped out of the bedroom and switched on the light. Before Barney was a long dim corridor. All along the left-hand side were windows, and all along the right-hand side hung a series of marvellous paintings. The first showed a handsome man in a dark red robe and a velvet hat.

  ‘Good evening, young sir,’ Barney murmured as he passed by and switched on the second light. This revealed the second painting, of a bowl of wood strawberries on a crisp white linen cloth. Barney paused briefly to admire it. The strawberries were so lifelike that he could almost taste them in his mouth. He switched on the next light and smiled. ‘You like this one, don’t you,’ he said to Dandelion.

  The cat mewed and put her paws up on the wall, trying to touch the painting of a fine fat silver salmon lying on a china plate.

  Barney plodded steadily onwards, switching on light after light as he went on looking at all his paintings. At the end of the corridor was a short spiral staircase which he carefully descended, bringing him onto a similar passageway, although now the windows were on his right-hand side and the paintings on his left. Click, click, click went the light switches. Clump, clump, clump went Barney’s feet. Dandelion’s soft paws made no sound at all. Slowly they made their way through the house until they were on the ground floor.

  At the end of the final corridor was a stout door on which Barney knocked.

  ‘Come in, come in.’ Wilf was standing by the stove in his slippers and dressing gown, his eyes bright and his hair on end. As soon as Barney came into the room Wilf set a pan on the stove to heat, then bent down and poured out a saucer of milk far Dandelion. ‘There you go, Pussens, there’s your supper.’ As the cat drank, Wilf pottered around the kitchen preparing two mugs of cocoa and chatting to Barney about the day that was ending.

  ‘Thank you for helping me with everything and looking after me so well,’ Barney said.

  ‘My pleasure. There you go. Mind now, it’s hot.’

  ‘Thank you, Wilf. Sleep well.’

  ‘You too, Barney. Have nice dreams. Night night, Pussens.’

  With Dandelion licking the milk from her whiskers and Barney carrying his mug of hot cocoa, they set out to retrace their steps through the house. Barney switched off each of the lights in turn as they went and said a last goodnight to his paintings. By the time he reached the bedroom his cocoa had cooled enough for him to drink it. Then he said goodnight to Dandelion, turned out the light and in no time at all Barney was fast asleep.

  *

  The following morning, Wilf soft-boiled two eggs for Barney’s breakfast and grilled a mackerel for Dandelion. He brought the food upstairs on the trolley as usual. ‘There’s something in the paper this morning that you’ll find interesting,’ he said.

  On the front of the Woodford Trumpet was a photograph of Barney out cycling. He was freewheeling down a hill on his bike with his hair on end so that it looked even wilder than Wilf’s. Dandelion’s face peeked out above the middle button of his cardiga
n, for he often carried her around like this now, as he had done on the day he found her.

  ‘BARMY BARNEY GETS ON HIS BIKE!’ said the caption below the photograph.

  ‘To be honest, that sort of thing doesn’t interest me,’ Barney said, carefully tapping at the top of his boiled egg. ‘It doesn’t even bother me any more. It’s just silliness.’

  ‘No, no, I didn’t mean that. Look here, at the top of the page,’ and Wilf pointed to the headline ‘ANGEL GOES UP FOR SALE.’

  ‘That’s just silliness too,’ Barney said, glancing at the paper again as he put salt on his egg. ‘Everybody knows you can’t buy an angel and even if you could, what would you do with it?’

  ‘Oh just read it will you!’ exclaimed Wilf, who was beginning to lose patience.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Barney, and putting down his egg spoon he obediently picked up the newspaper. ‘The Haverford-Snuffley Angel is up for sale. The Haverford-Snuffley Angel! My goodness why didn’t you say so? This does interest me, Wilf. It interests me very much indeed.’

  *

  Surprisingly enough it interested Jasper too. At that very moment he was also sitting up in bed reading the paper and eating soft-boiled eggs. (It was a Tuesday.) ‘Listen to this, lads,’ he said to Cannibal and Bruiser, who were still snoozing in their basket.

  Barney and Jasper began to read aloud the same piece from the paper at exactly the same moment.

  ‘The Haverford-Snuffley Angel is up for sale. “It’s a TINY little painting, no bigger than a POSTCARD,” Mrs Haverford-Snuffley told our reporter yesterday in an EXCLUSIVE interview with the Woodford Trumpet. “It’s been in our family for HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of years, ever since it was PAINTED for Theophilus Haverford-Snuffley. I don’t WANT to sell it now but I HAVE TO because I need the MONEY. Haverford-Snuffley Hall is FALLING DOWN. There’s a great big HOLE in the roof. I have a JAM JAR at the bottom of my BED to catch the rain and I’m FED UP with having to rise in the middle of the NIGHT to empty it. It’s freezing cold in ALL the rooms because there’s a great big HOLE in the FRONT DOOR too. Then last month we discovered heaps of BATS living in the ATTIC and even they were cold and damp and SHIVERING. Although the Haverford-Snuffley Angel is a TINY painting I expect to SELL it for POTS and POTS of money. So I’ll be able to FIX the front DOOR and the hole in the ROOF and make the ATTIC nice and COMFY for the BATS. Who knows, I might even have enough LEFT OVER to buy myself a NEW HAT!” The Haverford-Snuffley Angel will be sold by SPECIAL AUCTION in the Woodford Sale Room next FRIDAY at 1.00pm sharp.’