A Short Affair

by Simon Oldfield

  ‘Morelia spilota,’ he said with some authority. ‘Carpet snake,’ he clarified. ‘They don’t bite.’

  I knew this. But it didn’t mean the creature was harmless. And in any case, a snake could be a great pretender. The elaborate patterns of a poisonous kind might be perilously close to one much more benign. It was safer to be afraid of the lot of them.

  ‘We should just leave it be,’ I said.

  But the priest continued to study the dirt around the snake. He was muttering, his lips moving silently around something I couldn’t make out and I wondered if he was a little crazy. When you’re hitching alone and you get in a car, you learn what to look for. Only I’d been with Lester too long; I was out of practice. I’d seen black cloth, a cross, a square white collar. But maybe this man’s collar was cut out of card, his shirt adapted from something plain and black from Woolworths. It was about thirty miles back that I got in his car. My bag still lay on the backseat where I’d flung it.

  The priest knelt near the snake and pressed his hand in the dirt. He examined the indentation it left. He placed both hands there and looked again. Then he stood and checked the trail his shoes had left between the edge of the gravel, where the car was parked, and the loose dry dirt where the snake lay.

  He brushed his hands together and turned to me. ‘We are going to take this snake with us,’ he announced.

  I tried to read his face, to see what game he might be playing, or if he genuinely believed in a sane reason to load a snake into the back of his car. After all, it might not even be dead. The blood on it could be a surface wound from sliding over something sharp – a farm tool or the curled-over lid of a can. And venomous or not, many a snake will draw its coils tight around a person’s neck.

  ‘Open the boot,’ said the priest.

  There’s nearly always somewhere to run to so long as you’re safe out of the car. But you need to know if running alone into those aching miles of darkness is the better risk. I stood there half-decided until the priest came over and opened the boot himself. He was thin and not especially tall and I thought I could probably escape him if necessary, though you can’t always judge a man’s strength by his size. He went back now, and he bent down and he took that snake in his arms. Its coils seemed to loosen and I wondered if it was dead after all. A neat round depression remained in the soft dirt where it had lain.

  The priest deposited the snake in the boot of the car. The interior light made its patterns uncertain, its colours sallow and strange.

  I turned and searched in the direction from which we’d come. The rough forms of ragged-edged hills pitched up from the flatness. The uncertain horizon dissolved in places into an inky sky. I wanted a set of headlamps or any kind of light that might indicate I wasn’t marooned out here with a deranged priest and a snake in questionable health. I half-lifted my arm, as if by doing so I might conjure a vehicle.

  The priest must have noticed. His arms still rested against the lid of the boot. ‘There’ll be nothing along this stretch of road,’ he said with some authority. ‘Not at this time of night.’ He turned and smiled blandly. In the low light he appeared quite young, perhaps not even thirty. ‘I’m afraid I’m your best bet,’ he added. ‘Go on. Get in.’

  But I wouldn’t do it. ‘Not with that snake,’ I said.

  The priest checked his cargo. ‘Python,’ he corrected me. ‘Carpet python. Morelia spilota.’ He closed the boot. ‘Not venomous,’ he said.

  I chewed on the inside of my lip for a moment, considering. ‘But you’re not sure,’ I said. ‘You’re no expert. In fact, I’d bet that’s the only kind of snake you know.’

  There was a pause, only a brief one, but it was pause enough for me. Then the priest said, ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Go on then,’ I challenged him. ‘Name another.’

  He didn’t hesitate. ‘Pseudechis porphyriacus,’ he said. ‘Red-bellied black snake. Venomous. Pseudonaja textilis – eastern brown snake – poisonous, but rather plain-looking. Acanthophis antarcticus,’ (he hissed the ‘s’) – ‘common death adder.’ He turned his head a little, raising his eyebrows. I still couldn’t tell if he was mad or just weird – or if this whole thing was a prelude to something else altogether. He folded his arms. Chanted: ‘Notechis scutatus – mainland tiger snake. Extremely venomous,’ he said, like he was making a promise. He clicked open the boot again. ‘Beautifully patterned,’ he added, looking a little too long at the snake lying in his car, perhaps making sure, ‘but differently marked to this creature.’ He checked the place where the snake had lain, as if to reassure himself. ‘Shall I continue?’

  I kept my voice level. ‘No,’ I said. ‘You could go on and on; they’re all just snakes as far as I’m concerned.’ I measured the distance between us. ‘And I’m not getting in a car with one. I’m just not,’ I said.

  The priest held himself perfectly still for a moment. Then he opened the passenger door and reached into the glove compartment and my legs went to jelly. But it was just cigarettes he was after. He offered me one. I shook my head, and he frowned and took one for himself, then tossed the pack through the window into the front of the car. Only he did this awkwardly, as if he was aware of his brain sending each individual signal to his limbs and did not trust that they would obey. He lit his cigarette and inhaled. I observed how deeply he drew back and I saw that he needed it.

  Scrutinising his half-lit face, I said, ‘You don’t behave like any priest I ever met.’

  ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,’ he huffed.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Picking up girls like me, for one thing.’

  ‘I didn’t pick you up,’ he said hotly. ‘I offered you a lift.’

  ‘Call it what you like,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve done nothing wrong,’ the priest protested.

  ‘But you want to,’ I said. ‘And you’re a long way out of town to be alone with a girl like me.’ I folded my arms. ‘People around here might be interested to hear about your night rides with hitchhikers.’

  The priest held himself perfectly still.

  ‘Can I have a cigarette now?’ I asked.

  For a moment, he didn’t move. His face was shrouded and I couldn’t tell what he might do. But then he went back into the car and fussed about in the semi-darkness, retrieving the packet. He held it out to me. His hand was shaking. I took one and he offered me a light. But I said no thank you and I put my cigarette in the pocket of my t-shirt. I didn’t want a smoke. I just wanted to watch him fetch me one and I wanted him to understand this.

  Something came over him then and I did not anticipate the speed of it. He seized the back of my t-shirt. The thin fabric, and my bra strap too, were bunched tightly in his grip. He handled me around to the back of the car and when I was before the snake he prodded the air above it with the fingers that still held his cigarette. ‘It will only hurt us if we let it,’ he said. ‘Touch it. Go on.’

  The snake lay perfectly still and the priest’s grip on me did not loosen. It seemed best simply to do as I’d been told. So I put my hand out and I touched that snake, and although it felt slippery it was not smooth in the way I expected. The patterns on the animal’s skin were like something embossed in cool polished leather. My fingers came away dusty and I wiped them on my shorts. But right then, at the very moment I did this, the snake flicked its tongue and gently, almost imperceptibly, it drew its coils into itself.

  The priest about jumped out of his body.

  ‘You can let go of me now,’ I said. I wasn’t sure if he would, but he did. ‘So,’ I said. ‘Now it’s your turn.’

  ‘But I’ve already touched it,’ he protested. ‘I just carried it to the car.’

  He was unsettled, but it wasn’t enough for me. I wanted the pleasure of making him do something he didn’t want to. ‘When you thought it was dead,’ I taunted. ‘Are you afraid? A man of God shouldn’t be afraid.’ I said ‘man of God’ like someone who knew better.

  At this, the priest threw down his
spent cigarette. ‘I have nothing to fear,’ he announced and he swished a hand along the length of the snake. It was done with a flourish – like a performance – to demonstrate fearlessness, I suppose. Though he might simply have wished to better my tentative prod. In any case, he must have moved too quickly because at the very moment he swept his hand over the snake, suddenly and without warning, it lifted its head and, in a brief darting movement, it speared itself at his fingers then sank back into its own safe shape. It may have even hissed. The whole thing was so fleeting I’d have wondered if it’d happened at all, except that the priest screamed, clutching his hand.

  ‘Oh God,’ he moaned.

  His face was like wax. A fine, dark lacework of blood patterned the skin of his finger. He sank to the dirt at the back of the vehicle.

  The still air seemed to massage the darkness. The outline of a nearby ridge leaked into the sky. I stood over the priest and moved my sandalled feet about in the loose gravel at the edge of the tarmac. I was caught somewhere between triumph and contempt.

  ‘I thought you said it wasn’t venomous,’ I smirked.

  The priest didn’t answer. His breath came fast and shallow in the hot still night.

  I prodded him with my foot. ‘If it’s not venomous how come you’re poisoned.’

  He cradled his injured hand. His eyes moved but nothing else. He raised them to mine. ‘There was no trail,’ he said. ‘How could that be?’ He lowered his eyes.

  I was merciless. ‘Are we far from town?’ I demanded.

  ‘Half an hour, maybe,’ he murmured.

  ‘It was half an hour from where you picked me up,’ I said. ‘And we’ve been driving a good deal longer than that.’

  The priest seemed to tip a little to the side. His head drooped. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know. I shouldn’t have brought you this way.’

  A drop of blood fell to the dirt and in the flat, strained light it was the wrong colour. I squatted beside him. I smoothed my hand over the fine hairs on my arms and I watched him.

  ‘I just can’t work out how it got there,’ he said.

  ‘It doesn’t really matter now, does it?’ I folded my arms.

  He sniffed and angled his bony shoulder so he could scratch at his cheek with it. ‘But did you see the size of it?’ he said weakly. ‘And no trail. No trail. It’s not possible.’

  ‘But that’s not why you stopped, is it?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know why I stopped,’ the priest replied. And I saw that this was true.

  ‘Well,’ I said, drily. ‘You shouldn’t have put that snake in your car.’

  ‘I just wanted someone to see,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Anyone.’ He slumped. ‘They like to look at things like that around here.’

  ‘They like to look at roadkill,’ I said. ‘They don’t care what it’s called in Latin.’

  The priest leaned back and closed his eyes slowly, as if he was shutting them to everything he’d ever hoped for. His forehead and his neck were damp with perspiration – the light that leaked from the interior of the car caught the shine of it. Without opening his eyes, he whispered, ‘They probably wouldn’t look at anything I showed them anyway.’

  My stomach did a sort of flip-flop. How young he looked. Not thirty – not that old. At this moment he didn’t even look twenty. He seemed younger than me, his hair damp and curled around his forehead. He plucked at the white rectangle of his collar as if he might stop pretending if he could only take it off, but he was shaking too much, so he gave up and let his hand rest in his lap. He tipped his head back and swallowed, and shadows shifted over his skin. I imagined him propped against the bumper, skin blue and marbled. Or maybe he’d tip over in the dirt as his strength drained away. I wondered who would stop for him, or if anyone would. Where might I be by then?

  I heard myself speak and I could have been someone else my voice was so thin and so cautious. ‘You were probably right though,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t look deadly. Maybe I could draw off some of the venom.’

  The priest seemed to have sunk even further into himself. ‘I don’t know how,’ he said. He waited a moment. ‘You don’t see many snakes where I’m from,’ he added.

  ‘Where I’m from,’ I told him, ‘there are plenty but we don’t pick them up.’

  I got onto my knees and I put his finger in my mouth, tasting the tang of the blood and the tar of the fag. I thought I should taste something else too. Something poisonous. Sour-bright yellow, I imagined, or milky and bitter. But when I drew from the wound, there was only blood and an angled edge, sharp and foreign.

  I released his hand. ‘Ow!’ I ran my tongue along the roof of my mouth. Then I ran my finger over his injury, and I felt it again – long enough to pinch out easily. Glass. It must have been lodged in the skin of the snake. Gently I prised it loose. ‘Look!’ I said, holding the fragment up in the light. ‘You’ve not been bitten at all!’ I lifted the hem of my shirt and used it to clean his finger and then I held that up too. ‘See?’

  I can’t explain what happened next, except that colour returned to his face, and there was something in his expression, like he’d found a thing he’d given up for lost. And I wanted a bit of that too. He laughed, and I laughed with him, and then without missing a beat, without even thinking, I put his finger back in my mouth.

  The priest shifted abruptly, straightening his legs. Pressing his knees together, he pushed me away. Then he was on his feet. He turned and was wiping his hands on his trousers, brushing dust off his shirt, and I felt as if he was already far away from me, accelerating along a slip road that would take him fast into his future. Whatever he might have wanted when he picked me up, he no longer did. Whatever he had hoped for, or not admitted he wanted but half-hoped for anyway, something had shifted and a new kind of something had replaced it. And I felt inside me an absence, an emptiness, the same as when Lester had fallen, rotten with drink, by the roadside – his vodka-meth scent, the heat of the sun. I’d hoped we’d be on our way north where there were mangoes waiting to be picked and wrapped in squares of tissue, then gently laid in flat wooden crates and shipped south. I’d hoped we’d get there quick enough to bag the better accommodation. I’d imagined us in a room, not a tent, with a bed and a cotton sheet to go over us both, and a window that looked away from the road, maybe onto some trees. But it had been a foolish thing to hope for.

  Right then, out of the darkness came bright lights. A heavy rising rumble and a semi-trailer hefted past. The car rocked with the force of the air the truck took with it, and the night whirled around us. The priest coughed as dust flew about and he adjusted his collar. He put his hand up, perhaps to acknowledge that everything was okay, that we hadn’t broken down, that we had merely been observing some roadkill. I watched the silty cloud billowing into our footprints and sinking into the place where the snake must have lain while vehicles passed and dust rose and fell, erasing the trail that the creature had left. I thought about how that priest had pushed me off him, and how, soon, I would be getting in and out of cars with people who might want to talk to me, or who might want to hurt me, or who might not even notice me, just let me out again twenty miles later and forget I ever existed.

  I wrapped my arms around myself.

  The priest was pressing at his finger where the glass had pierced him. He sighed and walked over to me, and maybe he noticed what the dust had done to the prints in the dirt, I don’t know, but he leaned in and he touched my face and he stroked my hair and I saw that he didn’t want to take his hand away, but he did. After that, he went to the boot of his car and placed both arms beneath the snake and lifting it gently, almost tenderly, he carried it over the gravel and through the dirt, beyond the place where we’d found it, to the edge of the field, where he set it down.

  ‘We should go,’ he said, when he was done.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  We got in the car. He spoke little, though at one point he asked my name and I told him, and he told me his.
He whistled as he drove us through the night until we reached a cotton farm where I’d heard there was work. There, he thanked me for my company and gave me a crisp new banknote before we parted and he said to save it so I could travel by bus when I was ready to move on.

  HOW THEY TURNED OUT

  Lionel Shriver

  Artwork by Adam Shield

  HOW THEY TURNED OUT

  Lionel Shriver

  Whatever Became of Whatsherface had doubtless become a national preoccupation (if not also an exercise in self-abasement; as a rule, the subject of your web sleuthing would never in a million years do a search on you). But she’d long been one of the looked-for, so tracking down an old classmate was a brand-new game for Sloozie Twitch.

  So far, poking around another person’s digital residue felt defiling, as if she were rifling someone else’s underwear drawer. Getting the scuttlebutt on the long lost in the analogue era would have entailed, say, chatting with the mother on the phone, and only after proving bona fides. The target would hear about the call. By contrast, prying by search engine seemed cowardly. You weren’t required to declare yourself. You didn’t have to confess to a curiosity that granted this person an unacceptably large place in your history – worse, that allowed them a place on a rainy winter evening in your very present. These searches felt sneaky, underhanded, and strangely invasive, however ignorant of the impertinence the victim would remain. The violation recalled assault cases in which dentists felt up patients who were under general anaesthesia.

  Except maybe the real revelation of these enquiries (with reading glasses, magnification two-point-five, and wine) was less the lowdown itself than what you hoped to find.

  Thus before inputting Grier Finleyson into Firefox, when the surprising or simply boring results had yet to contaminate her virgin mindset, Slooz missed a valuable and currently rather rare opportunity for soul searching. Did she want to discover that her old suitemate from senior year in college had done spectacularly well for herself, or was she looking to crow over a shockingly poor showing? Surely the spirit in which she began this idle research might have testified to whether or not she was a Good Person.