Snakes' Elbows

by Deirdre Madden

  Dandelion decided to try a little experiment. ‘Hello, my name is Dandelion,’ she thought, feeling foolish as she did so, because of course she knew her own name. All of a sudden, two more thoughts popped into her head.

  ‘Hello, Dandelion.’

  ‘What a beautiful name.’

  Goodness – it was possible! The dogs started barking again but she realised now that they were excited rather than angry. Dandelion was very excited too. ‘Thank you,’ she thought. ‘What are your names?’

  ‘I’m Cannibal and this is Bruiser.’

  ‘Hello, Cannibal. Hello, Bruiser.’ The cat made a huge effort not to think about what terrible names these were because she didn’t want to hurt their feelings, so instead she thought, ‘I saw you both at the auction yesterday.’

  With that her head was full of delighted laughter, so much of it, flooding out everything else like a great river breaking its banks.

  ‘Oooh, that was good fun!’ came the thought at last as the merriment ebbed away.

  ‘The look on his face when you smashed his paddle!’

  ‘Serves him right!’

  ‘It isn’t his real name, you know’

  ‘What is it then?’ thought Dandelion.

  ‘Jimmy. Jimmy Jellit. He thinks it isn’t posh enough so he calls himself Jasper.’

  ‘Wish I could change my name. I’m not really a Bruiser.’

  ‘And I’m not a Cannibal.’

  ‘If it comes to that, I’m not a Dandelion,’ thought the cat to comfort them and again her head was filled with laughter.

  ‘If you had the choice, what would you like to be called?’

  ‘I see myself as a Rex rather than a Cannibal.’

  But the other dog stared at the ground and it was some moments before a small faint thought finally drifted into Dandelion’s mind. ‘I know this must sound foolish but I’d like to be called … I think my name was always supposed to be … Snuggles.’

  ‘Gosh! You don’t look too snuggly!’ The thought was out before Dandelion could stop herself.

  ‘I could try,’ thought Bruiser, lifting her head and staring with her gentle brown eyes at the cat. ‘If someone loved me and snuggled me and cuddled me, I’m sure I’d become one of the snuggliest dogs in the whole world.’

  ‘Will you be my friends?’ thought Dandelion.

  With that the dogs jumped up and started to bark loudly. ‘Oh yes please! We would love that!’

  Dandelion was delighted too. Although she was extremely happy living with Barney and Wilf, sometimes it was a bit lonely, because Barney was so shy and no one ever came to the house. ‘Will you come and visit me?’

  ‘We’ll try. Jasper doesn’t let us out much on our own. We were only able to sneak away this morning because he’s in bed in a great big huff.’

  ‘Oh I’m so happy that you’re going to be our friend!’

  At that very moment the back door of the house opened and Barney came out. He had heard the dogs barking and there they were, jumping up and down outside the gates, with Dandelion sitting on the wall high above them.

  ‘Bad dogs! Shoo! Shoo! Go home!’ By standing on his tiptoes, Barney could just about reach the cat, and he scooped her up.

  ‘No, leave me, please! I want to stay here, I’m with my friends,’ she thought. But it didn’t work with humans, only with other animals. As she wriggled and mewed in Barney’s arms he didn’t understand what the matter was; he thought she was afraid.

  ‘There there, poor little Dandelion cat,’ and he turned again to Cannibal and Bruiser who had stuck their snouts through the railings of the gate. ‘Bad dogs!’ he said again. ‘Go home! Shoo!’

  They watched as he walked up the garden path holding Dandelion and thought how nice it must be to have an owner who cared for you like that, even if he didn’t always understand what you wanted. They waited until the back door of the house was closed and then sat there looking at it for some moments before finally drifting away.

  On Sunday afternoon Jasper went creeping around Woodford looking for the black and white cat that had been sitting on the Mystery Buyer’s head. Almost immediately he found it. To his astonishment it was sitting in the front window of his old teacher Mr Kelly’s house. Good Gobstoppers! Was it possible that he was the Haverford-Snuffley Angel’s new owner? Old Jelly-Belly-Kelly? He sneaked up to the window to have a closer look at the cat. Yes, there was no doubt about it: it was black with a white bib and socks and a splodge over its nose. This was definitely the cat he had seen at the auction!

  Just at that moment, he heard someone coming out of the front door of the house. His old teacher had never quite forgiven Jasper for putting a toad in his desk and mice in his coat pockets and for a thousand other mean tricks. To this day old Jelly-Belly used to chase Jasper down the street when he saw him, waving a cane and shouting, ‘Hi you boy! Come here!’ And so as soon as he heard the door opening, Jasper nipped smartly around the corner of the house and ran off up the road.

  He stopped to get his breath back outside the chocolate shop. But no! It was impossible! There, sitting on the step, was ANOTHER cat and it was also black with a white bib and socks and a splodge over its nose! It looked exactly like both the cat at the auction and the cat in Mr Kelly’s house. Jasper picked it up to have a closer look. One of its socks was longer than the other one. Did the auction cat have two socks the same length? Jasper couldn’t remember. Its bib went the whole way down to its tummy. Perhaps the other cat had a shorter bib? Jasper wasn’t sure. He was eyeball to eyeball with the cat now, who stared coldly at him.

  ‘Has an angel come to live in your house?’ Jasper whispered.

  In reply the cat lashed out, dragged its claws down his cheek.

  ‘Ow! That hurt, you little monster!’ He let the creature fall to the ground and it slunk off.

  As Jasper turned away a third cat darted across the road and jumped up on to a wall. It was also black with a white bib and socks and a splodge over its nose and as soon as he saw it he burst into tears. This cat on the wall really was Dandelion but there was no way Jasper could know this. They all looked so alike, he thought; there was absolutely no way of telling them apart. He wondered if they were doing it deliberately. Jasper had never liked cats. Dragging his feet with misery, he gave up and went home.

  *

  There were no coins or banknotes or gold in Jasper’s dreams that night, only cats: thousands and thousands of black and white cats. Each one was different from the others in only the smallest detail and it was impossible for him to know which was the one cat he needed to find. They swirled through Jasper’s mind, chasing their tails or washing themselves, snoozing or purring. Suddenly one of them spoke directly to him.

  ‘Do you really want to know which one of us you saw at the auction? Well then, we shall tell you.’ With one voice, every last cat of all the thousands and thousands shouted, ‘IT WAS ME!’ Helpless with laughter, they fell around the place, and with a loud scream, Jasper woke up.

  Because he had slept so badly he was still tired on the Monday morning, and even more grumpy than usual. To make matters worse he had to go to work that day. As his car moved through the forest towards the factory he was once more in a deep sulk.

  Mr Smith greeted Jasper at the door of his office. ‘Let’s get straight down to business, shall we?’

  Together they went through an order form. ‘Hand guns, how many of those do you want?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘I can let you have four hundred.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘And what about stun guns, the same number?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Jasper wasn’t really paying attention as he sat there with his lower lip stuck out. Eventually Mr Smith put his pen down.

  ‘Couldn’t believe what happened at that auction the other day,’ he said. ‘I mean, Mystery Buyer, my granny. Everyone knows it has to be that piano man.’

  Jasper almost fell off his chair. ‘Barney Barrington?’

  ‘Ye
s, him,’ said Mr Smith, staring hard at Jasper. ‘He’s got a black and white cat. He sent that little fat fellow that works for him to do the business. Wilf Somethingorother. Criminal type. Violent, from what it says in the papers. Ooh yes, a nasty piece of work, he is,’ and Mr Smith shuddered at the thought. ‘And above all, Barney Barrington’s the only person in Woodford who’s got enough money to buy himself a stupid little thing like that, just because it takes his fancy. Apart from yourself, of course.’ And he smiled at Jasper, briefly showing his gold tooth. ‘You’d have to be thick not to work it out. I mean it’s obvious, isn’t it?’

  ‘Obvious,’ said Jasper, who had gone very pale.

  ‘It should have been yours,’ Mr Smith said softly. ‘You was robbed, Jasper. Robbed.’ They sat in silence for a few moments and then Mr Smith picked up his pen again. ‘Anyway, where were we? Machine guns.’

  They continued to fill in the order form but Jasper found it impossible to concentrate. After some time Mr Smith put his pen down again. ‘Silly me,’ he said. ‘Here I am nattering on about boring old assault rifles and hand grenades and forgetting to show you our newest and most exciting product.’ From the drawer of his desk he took a bright red object the size of a pea. He held it out so that Jasper could inspect it, and then he stood up. The two men crossed to the door of the room.

  Like all the doors in the factory it was stout and strong with a heavy lock. Mr Smith turned the key and then invited Jasper to try the handle, like a magician asking a member of the audience to make quite sure that the top hat was empty before he went on to produce a rabbit from it. The door was tightly locked.

  ‘Now watch this carefully.’ Mr Smith removed the key and pushed the red object into the keyhole. ‘Stand well back please. Five, four, three, two, one …’

  BOOM! In the air between Mr Smith and Jasper the word appeared in large red letters. The door flew open wide – and as all of this happened, there was complete silence in the room. The word looked as though it were made of coloured light. It hovered there for a moment and then slowly started to fade and dissolve, like the moment when a firework dies against a black sky. ‘Good, isn’t it? We’ve discovered the way to turn things you can hear into things you can see.’

  At Jasper’s feet was a little pile of red dust. He was too astonished to say anything. Mr Smith put his face up close and spoke softly, urgently.

  ‘Take it!’ he said. ‘If somebody has something you want and you can’t have it, just take it! There’s no other way.’ His voice was hoarse now and even Jasper found it frightening to have Mr Smith’s cold face so close to his. ‘Even if you have to use force it doesn’t matter. If you want something Jasper, there’s only one way to get it:

  ‘Just take it!’

  The following day was hot with a clear blue sky and for once Barney didn’t feel like playing his piano after breakfast. Instead he threw the window of his bedroom open wide and looked out into the garden where Wilf was working. There was a pleasant grassy smell because he was cutting the lawn. Dandelion was also there, sunning herself and chasing birds. Afterwards when Wilf moved on to the flowerbeds, he stopped from time to time to talk to people who were passing the house.

  A couple wheeling their new baby in a pram paused so that Wilf could admire her. A short while later the postman came by with his huge leather satchel. Some little children stopped and gave Wilf a boiled sweet out of a paper bag. In return he picked Dandelion up and held her so that they could stroke her head and tickle her tummy. Even from where he was, high up above the garden, Barney could hear the cat purring with delight. An extremely old lady came past and Wilf gave her a huge yellow rose.

  When he brought the lunch up later he would tell Barney all the news he had heard from the passers-by, all the strange and funny things that were happening in Woodford. It was the same when Wilf went shopping, for he didn’t just bring home loaves and potatoes and apples and eggs. He brought tales of how a long bright snake had been found in a box of pineapples at the greengrocer’s and how everyone had run out into the street screaming. Without Wilf, Barney would never have known that the baker’s granny was having her hundredth birthday, nor about her birthday cake and how huge it had to be to hold all the candles. No one else would have told him about the single pink flamingo that appeared in the public park of Woodford one day, and disappeared the next. It was never seen in the town again and people would have thought they had imagined it, had it not been for the few pink feathers left behind.

  Barney turned away from the window and looked at his room. There was his great piano, black and silent. The Haverford-Snuffley Angel hung nearby. There was the miniature tree, there were his many books. Barney loved these things and he realised how lucky he was to have them, together with all his other paintings and his beautiful house. But today he realised that it wasn’t enough. Barney was lonely.

  At lunchtime Wilf appeared wheeling the trolley. On the top level were two mushroom pizzas, on the bottom was a grilled mackerel for the cat. Whistling a little tune, he set the table and they all three settled down to eat, because they always had their meals together now.

  ‘I saw you talking to all the passers-by. What did they say to you?’ Barney asked.

  ‘The postman told me that someone wrote an address on a banana the other day, stuck a stamp on it and posted it. The new baby’s only five days old and she’s going to be called Minnie. The children are going on a school trip to the seaside next week. I gave a rose to the lady because she doesn’t have a garden at her house and hasn’t got enough money to buy herself flowers.

  ‘And you,’ Wilf said, cutting himself a big wedge of pizza. ‘What news have you got for me?’

  ‘Why nothing,’ Barney said.

  ‘It’s a pity. There are lots of nice people in Woodford. It would be good if you made friends with some of them.’

  ‘Oh I couldn’t, I just couldn’t.’

  ‘Course you could,’ Wilf said. ‘What about that Philomena Phelan woman who works in the gallery. I bet she’d love to be your friend. She’s a good person and you’d have lots to talk about because she likes paintings too.’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ Barney said again, and he went red and looked at his hands.

  Wilf simply couldn’t understand how anyone could be so shy. He thought it was silly. ‘You should get out more,’ he said.

  ‘I do go out. I go out on my bike.’

  ‘But I bet you just whizz past people and never say hello, much less stop to talk to them. Am I right? Is that what he does, Pussens?’

  Dandelion looked up from her mackerel and nodded her head.

  Barney looked so sad that Wilf felt sorry for him. ‘Tell you what,’ he suggested. ‘Because it’s such a lovely day why don’t we go for a picnic later, down by the river.’

  ‘Thank you, Wilf! I should like that very much indeed.’

  And so in the late afternoon they set off together, Barney carrying a rug for them to sit on and Wilf carrying the picnic hamper. Dandelion trotted ahead of them with her tail straight up in the air. They found a quiet spot near a bridge and settled themselves down on the sloping green bank of the river. Wilf unbuckled the hamper and opened it out. Inside there was a red and white checked tablecloth, white plates and napkins, glasses, knives and forks. There was a special plate for Dandelion, and a gammon steak. For Barney and Wilf there were sausage rolls and cheese sandwiches, oranges, crisps and a chocolate Swiss roll. Wilf tied a string to the neck of their bottle of lemonade and floated it in the river so that it would stay cool.

  ‘We should have invited some other people along,’ he said. ‘One of the good things about having a picnic with your friends is that everyone brings along food. Then you can share it out and there are always lots of lovely surprises.’

  ‘If O-Haru came to a picnic she might bring some raw fish,’ Barney said. ‘It’s her favourite food. But I don’t think anybody else would want to share that.’

  Dandelion was listening to this. ‘I would like to share
it,’ she thought. ‘If O-Haru were here she could have some of our chocolate Swiss roll and I could have some of her raw fish.’

  ‘She’s ever so nice,’ Barney went on, ‘and so clever. She knows how to make animals out of folded paper, foxes and birds. It makes me sad to think that I’ll never see her again. She lives so far away, right on the other side of the world.’

  Just at that moment, Dandelion happened to glance up and was astonished by what she saw. For who was sitting on the bridge, gazing down at the little party? Only Cannibal and Bruiser!

  ‘Hello, Dandelion.’

  ‘Why hello! I was thinking only just this minute how much nicer it would be to have friends along on a picnic, and here you are.’

  ‘We’d love to join you,’ came Cannibal’s wistful thought. ‘We’d bring our own food. We’d bring meat pies.’

  ‘If you wanted, we could swap them with you for some of those sausage rolls. They look very tasty,’ Bruiser added.

  The poor dogs were always hungry because Jasper never gave them enough to eat.

  ‘I wish I could give you a sausage roll each here and now,’ she thought.

  ‘Don’t worry. We know we can’t join in with your picnic. Your master doesn’t like us,’ Cannibal thought.

  ‘Nobody likes us.’

  ‘That isn’t true. I like you!’ Dandelion thought. ‘I like you hugely.’

  Barney had finished his cheese sandwiches and was eating a bag of crisps while Wilf tugged on the string of the lemonade bottle. Neither of them had noticed the dogs and the cat did her best not to draw attention to them. Cannibal and Bruiser themselves sat quietly and took care not to bark. ‘But we didn’t come today to have a picnic with you. We’ve come to warn you. Dandelion, you’re in danger! You and everyone in your house!’

  ‘This very night!’

  ‘Beware, Dandelion! Beware!’

  The poor creature was so shocked to hear this that she jumped up. All her fur was on end and her green eyes were open wide.

  Immediately Barney saw that something was wrong. ‘What is it, my dear Puss?’ he asked, and he followed the line of her gaze up to the bridge. ‘Oh no, it’s those nasty, wicked dogs again. Shoo, shoo! Bad dogs, go home. Help me, Wilf. Frighten them off.’