by Nina Jon
“The only thing I don’t understand,” her sister-in-law said to her, as they sat in the car eating their sandwiches, “is how Sam doesn’t already know this?”
“I think Sam is one of those people who can make herself believe anything she wants to, and vice versa.”
“Any idea who the young woman you saw him with is?”
“That I still have to discover.”
“Maybe her family has money? His have a title and a hall, or they would have if they used her money to buy it back. It wouldn’t be the first such marriage, let’s face it.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
TEA WITH THE GRAYS
Iain Gray’s parents lived in a modern detached house on a fairly new housing estate, built within the last twenty years. Jane parked in their drive as instructed. Iain’s parents were both gardening when Jane arrived. Dawn, who had been kneeling by a fl ower bed pruning everything back, stood up and brushed her hands on her shorts, while her husband, Alastair, doing the same elsewhere, put down his shears on a pile of cuttings on the lawn, and joined his wife. Jane would have put the Grays in their thirties. “Thank you so much for coming,” Dawn said, brush- ing her hands on her shorts for the second time, before shaking Jane’s hand. “Maybe we’re worrying unneces- sarily. I mean there’s nothing wrong with him. I cer- tainly wouldn’t want to call in a so-called professional or anything.” “Maybe Mrs Hetherington would like to go inside, Dawn?” Alastair Gray asked. The Grays both spoke in South African accents. Iain was in the corner of the living room, logged in to the family computer when Jane and his parents walked into the room. He was a small, fair-haired ten-year-old. The boy initially ignored the grown-ups, until his mother called him away from his computer.
“There’s a lady here to meet you, Iain,” she said.
The boy obediently stepped down from his computer screen and stood beside his mother. Jane noticed the image on the screen was of the internal organs of a snake. The boy glanced at the computer screen and back to Jane.
“I want to be a zoologist when I grow up,” he said earnestly, and also in a South African accent. “You have to work really hard to do that.”
“I have a present for you, Iain, if it’s all right with your parents,” she asked, glancing at Dawn and Alastair. They nodded and she unrolled the poster that Alfie had given her. The boy’s eyes widened.
“It’s a Mozambique Cobra,” Iain informed her. He returned to his computer with the poster in his hands. “You can tell from the markings. I’ve got a picture of one in my snake folder,” he added, calling up the picture.
Jane stared at the image on the screen. The Cobra displayed on it had half uncoiled itself and raised its upper body up above its coiled lower body, displaying the smooth dorsal scales of its underbelly. Its hood was open aggressively. The snake stared directly into the camera with jet black eyes, its tiny mouth half open. Captured this close, the reptile appeared vulnerable and even quite attractive.
“It’s a movie star,” Jane said. The little boy stared at her and then broke into a wide smile.
“She likes snakes, Mum,” he said.
“Let’s not get too carried away,” Jane muttered, under her breath.
“I’m going to scan this poster on to my computer,” Iain announced.
“Lunch?” Dawn asked.
Over a lunch of salmon and cucumber sandwiches and freshly squeezed orange juice, taken in the kitchen, Jane asked Iain how he enjoyed school.
“It’s all right,” he said, removing the cucumber from his sandwich, before biting into it. “Haven’t been there long enough to find out.”
“I keep suggesting to Iain that he should invite some of his school friends home for tea, don’t I Iain?” Dawn said. If Iain heard his mother, he didn’t reply.
“When it’s your birthday, we’ll invite your entire class here for a party,” she announced.
“Only if Iain wants us to, Dawn,” Alastair said.
“Of course he wants us to. Why wouldn’t he want to have a party?” Dawn snapped at her husband.
Jane looked over to Iain. The poor lad was fidgeting in embarrassment.
“How are you finding the UK?” Jane asked.
“Me, I’ve settled down fine,” Alastair answered. “But Dawn is having second thoughts, wondering if we should have stayed. You know, with the lifestyle there – bigger houses, staff…”
“I beg your pardon?” Dawn interrupted her husband angrily. “Who’s the one who’s always complaining about the weather over here, the food, the wages, the fact that you can’t get a plumber for love or money ‘in this damned country’. Not me, that’s for sure.”
“I was only saying…”
To Jane’s amazement, not only did the argument continue unabashed, but it quickly descended into Afrikaans, leaving her able to understand only the occasional word, which she thought was probably just as well.
“I’ve got to feed Sigmund,” Iain announced, jumping off his chair, and almost running out of the room.
Jane glanced at Dawn. She was still seething in anger. Luckily, before another full-scale argument could break out, the phone rang. Alastair got up to answer it.
“It’s your dad,” he told Dawn.
“I’ll take it in the hall,” she said. “If you’ll excuse me,” she said to Jane, before leaving the room.
Alone with Jane, Alastair was free to open up more.
“I don’t think Iain is being bullied,” he said. “He actually shows every sign of enjoying school. He’s quite happy to go off in the morning, and we know he’s not truanting. It is true that at his last school he was a member of every sports club going, but that’s because we put him down for them before he was old enough to complain.
“Dawn’s making way too much about this. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but we certainly don’t need the services of a private detective. I wasn’t particularly popular when I was a boy. The only friend I had at school was a boy called Ted. He was cross-eyed and went on to pass the Cambridge entrance. He had nothing else to do but study basically. Besides me he hadn’t any other friends, either. What a pair we two were. It hasn’t done him any harm though. He’s doing very well in your civil service and now has a lovely wife and children. He’s one of the reasons we came to the UK. Dawn’s more of an extrovert than I am. To her, popularity is everything. Her family are miles away. She hasn’t been much more successful at making new friends than Iain. She was hoping she’d make friends with the other mums at school – but it’s not easy with Iain refusing to mix with the other lads. This is about Dawn needing someone to talk to, as much as anything,” he said. “As you’ve probably gathered, she holds me responsible for dragging her here.”
Whilst there was sense in what Alastair was saying, Jane could see that the father wasn’t prepared to consider the fact that Iain might actually be being bullied at school, and Jane wondered if maybe that was because if it were true, he would feel partly responsible. To get to the truth, she’d have to find a way to get the boy to open up.
“Could I speak to Iain?” she asked Alastair.
Jane walked into the boy’s bedroom with his father.
“I know a young man who has four snakes of his own. He’s a bit older than you. His name is Alfie and he lives near me,” Jane said.
Iain’s mouth opened wide on the mention of a boy with four snakes.
“Would you and your parents like to meet him?” Jane asked.
Iain hesitated and he looked at his father.
“Iain’s mum’s not really into snakes,” Alastair said.
“Maybe just you and Dad, then?” Jane said to Iain.
Iain looked at his father – his face a picture of expectation.
“Can we, Dad?” he asked, apparently losing his reticence to make new friends.
“I don’t see why not,” Alastair replied.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE SNAKE CHARMER
I
It was still morning when Jane joined Iain Gra
y and his father at Alfi e’s house. Margaret greeted them at the door as though they were long-lost friends. “No Mum?” Margaret asked, looking from Iain to his father. “Snakes aren’t really my wife’s thing,” Alastair Gray said. “They are an acquired taste,” Margaret agreed. “One I’m still acquiring.” Margaret led the group through the house to the conservatory at its rear, where Alfi e was with his reptile collection. Jane was rather disconcerted to fi nd Alfi e trying to tempt his snake with a live, wriggling mouse, which the boy held by the tail. Alfi e looked up at her and grinned widely. She grimaced. “I don’t think he’s hungry,” Alfi e said, shutting the hatch of the snake’s tank. “Mickey lives another day,” Margaret said, as Alfi e dropped the rodent onto a pile of sawdust in its cage. “You can buy frozen mice for these things to eat, but Alfi e here prefers to use live mice; he maintains it makes the snake use his brain. I think he just does it to freak me out.”
Alfie and Iain grinned at these remarks.
“My man,” Alfie said, on sight of young Iain.
He embraced the boy and made a high-five in the air, holding it there until Iain slapped it back. “You’ve arrived just in time, my friend,” Alfie said. “Come over here. The Ringed Snaileater is up to something.” Iain hurried after Alfie to the snake’s cage, while Jane and Alastair reluctantly trailed after them both. Jane thought she might have become desensitised after her last visit, but upon sight of the snake’s brown, patterned body through its glass cage, she began to feel uneasy, even though it was safely encased. The snake’s eyes were cloudy and it was rubbing its face on a small rock.
“It’s shedding its skin,” Iain squealed. “Dad, it’s shedding its skin,” he repeated.
Alastair moved to stand beside his son, and took his hand. Jane stayed where she was. In the cage the snake had managed to rip its skin on the rock and had begun to wriggle out of its coat. Watched by its human audience, the snake twisted and turned, as it slowly pulled its body out of its skin, leaving the old skin inside out as it did. Eventually, the snake slithered away in its shiny new skin, leaving its old skin behind. Alfie retrieved the shed skin from the tank with a pair of wooden tongs. He held the long intact snakeskin out to Iain, who opened his hands out wide to accept it.
“Let’s leave the boys alone,” Margaret said, and the three adults retired to another room, to drink tea and chat, while Alfie and Iain perched on a couple of stools by the window.
“You see, my man,” Alfie said, one foot on the floor, the other resting on the stool’s bar. “Snakes are misunderstood, and, as the misunderstood always are, they’re loners. You, like this snake, Iain, are misunderstood, and as such you’re a loner. But whereas snakes are meant to be alone, you Iain, are not a snake. You are a boy and are not meant to be alone.”
“I’m not misunderstood,” Iain said. “Nor am I a loner. If people don’t know what’s really going on in my head, it’s because I don’t want them to.”
The two boys chatted on for some time. When they finished their conversation, Alfie left Iain with the snakes, and rejoined the adults in his mother’s living room.
“It’s as we thought,” Alfie explained. “On his first day in school, some of the older boys in another class invited him to join them after school to throw stones at cars. The boy was horrified and told them he couldn’t. When pressed to come up with an explanation, he said he had to go home and feed his snake. Since then the boys laugh at him and call him snake boy whenever they see him.”
“Why didn’t he tell me? Or his mother?” Alastair demanded, clearly hurt that his son chose to confide in a stranger.
“Come on,” said Alfie, leaning forward in his chair. “You’re his dad and an adult. You’d’ve gone straight round to the school and confronted them. Hell, that’s the last thing a kid in that position wants. He’d have got picked on more than he does now if you did that. All respect and everything. I have a much better idea. We need to make the kids at school respect him – then they’ll like him. I’ve got an idea. He told me his school’s got some kind of production coming up. What say Iain gives a presentation about his snake? It’ll show he’s not some introverted weirdo but an intelligent kid, confident enough in his own subject to want to share it. If they know more about snakes then they might not find the whole thing so weird. I’ll help him prepare for his big night and we can all go and support him? Yes?”
Jane didn’t think the suggestion could hurt and although she’d seen enough snakes to last her a lifetime, she did like to see a job through to its end and so she agreed that if Iain wanted her to, she would attend his presentation.
Iain, Alastair and Jane parted company on Margaret’s doorstep.
II
When Jane turned into her road, she found Jack roller-skating along it. She stopped the car to speak to him through the open car window, but before she had a chance to speak Jack said, “Charity’s split up with Johnny!”
“Again?”
“Again. Only this time it’s over for good,” the boy said.
“Really?”
“So she says,” the boy said with a shrug. Without another word he sped away down the pavement on his roller skates.
Charity’s boyfriend, Johnny, was a tree surgeon by profession. Charity had been involved with him since he’d called into her salon for a haircut on the off-chance, and had asked her to shave his hair off. In Charity’s version of events, she’d stood behind him and put her hands on his head and teased her fingers through his thick, dark curly locks and said, ‘You’re surely not shaving all these beautiful curls off, are you?’ and he’d replied, ‘You’re right. I’m too damned sexy to change anything about me. Just give me a quick trim, then.’
From then on in, Charity called him, ‘Johnny, Johnny, quite contrary, how do your gorgeous locks flow?’ That had been nearly two and a half years ago.
In truth, both Jane and Jack rather liked Johnny, despite his cavalier treatment of Charity. He was self-deprecating, witty and when he wanted to be, attentive. Unfortunately, in the time he’d been with Charity, he’d left her more than once, each occasion for the same reason: ‘She was suffocating him’; ‘Things were moving too fast’; ‘She was putting him under too much pressure.’ Jane knew this was nonsense. The reality of the situation was that it was only when his relationship with Charity settled down into any form of routine and normality that he suddenly upped and left. Charity had taken him back on each previous occasion, and Jane had no doubt that this time things would not be any different. It wasn’t just that Charity was a perennial optimist and a hopeless romantic (which she admitted she was) the problem, as she herself put it, was meeting men.
Jane could remember Charity in tears over this many a time. One evening, before Johnny came on the scene and with Hugh out for the evening, Jane suggested Charity pack Jack off to bed and come round. She’d turned up with a bottle of wine. Two glasses of wine later she was wailing, ‘I never meet anyone. It’s so hard finding someone when I’ve got Jack to look out for. I’m not blaming him or anything you understand, but it is.’
‘Hugh and I will always babysit, you know that. There are always internet dating sites.’
‘It isn’t just meeting someone that’s the problem – it’s getting to know them properly. I don’t want to introduce someone to Jack until I’m sure the relationship is going somewhere, and that takes time. I think I’m going to have to put my sex life on hold until Jack’s left home. Hope he doesn’t hang around till he’s thirty-five!’
Only a few weeks after that conversation, Johnny Lambert walked into Charity’s hairdressing salon and her life. He said he understood Charity’s predicament. He’d been happy to see her on her days off, or when Jack was at school, or with friends. Hugh and Jane did their bit, stepping in to allow Charity and Johnny to meet up more often than they could have done otherwise. When Charity did eventually introduce Johnny to Jack, they hit it off immediately and became the best of friends, much to Charity’s relief.
‘I don’t know w
hat I would have done if they hadn’t liked each other!’ she’d said.
Things were going so well the couple talked about moving in with each other, until suddenly, out of the blue, Johnny ended the relationship. Even Jane had been taken by surprise. Eventually Johnny called Charity, promising he’d changed and asking if they could start again. She took him back only for him to do the same thing again. Jane had a sinking feeling that whatever Jack said about the relationship being over for good, history was going to repeat itself. She would say nothing on the subject. It was Charity’s life and Jane could only do for her what she would do for her own daughter were she in the same situation – be there for her, and hope she eventually met someone who treated her better.
On her way along the lane, she passed a car driven by one of Mr Kim’s sons. Jane caught sight of Mrs Kim in the passenger seat, her head down, her face covered with a scarf. Tomorrow, Jane thought, you must call on her. Your situation and hers aren’t so different.
She pulled into her own drive to discover Jack’s rucksack lying on her doorstep and Jack roller-skating along her garden path.
“I forgot to say, Charity asked if I could spend the night here,” he said sheepishly through the open car window. “She wants to get drunk and I’m not allowed to see it! She gave me twenty pounds to get fish and chips,” he added.
Jane peered over the fence and saw three cars parked outside her neighbour’s house. Her neighbour’s friends were there in force.
As soon as he was inside the house, Jack dropped his rucksack on the floor, as was his custom. Jane picked the rucksack up, “I know I said you should treat this place as your own home, but…”
“Johnny’s moving to the Falkland Islands!”
“He’s what?” Jane asked incredulously, Jack’s rucksack still in her hands.
“Johnny’s moving to the Falkland Islands. He’s on his way to the airport now. He bought his ticket on impulse, so he says. He said he didn’t want to split up with Charity, but he needed to get away from here. He had itchy feet. He said we should get tickets and join him there. I don’t think I would have minded going. They’ve got penguins there and stuff, but Charity went off on one. ‘Start Jack in a new school?’ she yelled. ‘Give up my job and spend every penny I’ve got on the airfare just so you can follow your dreams? Dreams which you didn’t even bother to discuss with me first! What happens when you get bored with the Falklands? What happens then? You going to drag us somewhere else, or abandon us there and waltz off into the sunset!’ That’s what she said. Then she told him to pack up his belongings and get out for good, and this time she meant it. Just like that. It’s really over this time.”