Shape of Snakes

*23*

Sam doubled up and backed away from the edge, roaring obscenities from an overdose of adrenaline, but I stayed to watch Drury rise. Luke had assured me that the westerly tidal stream in Weymouth harbor would carry a floating body toward the pontoons, but I had a small twinge of concern about how good a swimmer Drury was. When his face bobbed to the surface, we stared at each other for a moment before I gave him a one-fingered salute and turned away. Gotcha!

"We ought to call the police," said Sam, taking deep breaths to calm himself while he watched the man swim to safety.

"He can do it himself if he wants to. He knows our address." I walked back to the car. "But he won't. He'll bury his head in the sand and hope this counts as an eye for an eye."

"And does it?" he asked, following me.

"No chance," I said cheerfully, opening the passenger door. "He still has to answer for Annie, and he'll only do that when his name's plastered across every newspaper in this country with 'racist' attached to it." I slid onto the seat. "Come on," I called, buckling my seat belt, "let's shift. He'll be after your blood if I know anything about anything. Not reporting you to the police doesn't mean he won't break your jaw at the first opportunity."

Sam scrambled in beside me and fired the engine, twisting 'round to reverse the car out on the road. "I should have seen to him twenty years ago," he said as he spun the wheel. "I would have done, too, if I hadn't believed him."

"About Annie?"

"No," he growled, "about you stalking him. I know it sounds absurd now but at the time it seemed to make sense. The way you went off me after Annie died ... the hours you spent at the police station ... the fact that you were prepared to talk to him and not me." He eased the car forward and pulled out onto the road. "I started to think he was more your type than I was."

"That figures," I said sarcastically, reaching across him to buckle his belt. "I mean he had everything I wanted in a man: hair, a uniform, not to mention an enormous dick, which he kept permanently erect for the purposes of rogering every bit of totty that crossed his tracks."

He gave me a sheepish grin. "Actually, I'm being serious. I was incredibly jealous but I didn't think I had much of a leg to stand on after Libby. Then you got pregnant, and I thought, Shit, is the baby mine or Drury's? ... and I was so bloody churned up that when you agreed to try to make a go of it, all I could think about was getting away, burying the whole bloody saga and starting again."

I was so surprised that I felt as if my jaw had just hit the floor. "You thought Luke was Drury's?"

He nodded.

"Good God! What on earth gave you that idea?"

He took his foot off the pedal and the car slowed to a crawl. "Because the only time we had sex throughout that whole miserable period," he said with a sigh, "was when I forced myself on you and you told me you never wanted to see me again. You really hated me that night ... and I couldn't believe that something that was done with so much viciousness could produce something so grand."

I shook my head in amazement. "Why didn't you say something?"

"Because it didn't matter," he said simply. "I always thought of Luke as mine whether he was or not."

I was humbled. If our roles were reversed-if Libby had given birth to Sam's child-1 could never have been that generous. "But of course he's yours," I said, touching the back of my hand to his cheek. "You should never have doubted it for a minute."

He leaned his head to one side, trapping my hand against his shoulder. "I haven't for a long time ... not since Tom was born, anyway, because they looked so alike." He gave an abrupt laugh. "Then you insisted on bringing me here for lunch so that Drury could leer at you, and I thought, Is this the first step to telling the sod that my son is really his?"

I snatched my hand away. "You said you didn't recognize him."

He speeded up again. "I never forget the faces of men who make me jealous."

"There haven't been any."

"That's what you think." He leaned forward to wipe mist from the screen. "Where are we picking up the boys?"

"Beyond the swing bridge."

"Well, be prepared for some embarrassed silences," he warned matter-of-factly. "I spotted them creeping in behind one of the other cars, so I think the chances are they heard every word."

"Damn!" I said with sudden weariness, leaning my head against the seat. "I told them to make themselves scarce."

"Mm, well, I suspect curiosity won out. You can't blame them. We've both been behaving very oddly lately. It could makes things difficult with Danny," he warned again. "And I'll have to come clean about Libby ... why I lied ... why I ignored Annie. It's only right they should hear the truth from me."

"It's not what I wanted, Sam," I said with a sigh. "It was supposed to be just you who heard it because I didn't think you'd believe it if I told it to you cold."

"You should have trusted me," he said lightly. "I stopped being a bastard twenty years ago."

"I know." I felt tears prick behind my eyes. "But I could never find the right time to tell you. I'm sorry."

"Well, I'm not," he declared with sudden boisterous good numor. "You've got more balls than an entire rugby team, my girl, and it's about time the boys found out what an amazing mother they have." He slapped his hands against the steering -heel. "I keep thinking of this Chinese proverb Jock quoted to me the other day. It's a variation on the theme of 'everything comes to him who waits'"-he turned to me with an-ocher grin-"and it's peculiarly apt in the present circumstances."

"How does it go?"

" 'If you sit by the river long enough the bodies of all your enemies float by.' "

1 thought I knew the man I married before that night, but now I know I could live to be a hundred and still not understand the twists and turns of human nature. I don't know what he said to the boys but whatever it was made them treat me like a valuable antique for twenty-four hours, until I started effing and blinding out of pure frustration, and normal service was resumed. They carefully avoided any reference to the Slaters, all of them understanding that it is one thing to reveal the presence of a scar, quite another to have it split open under the pressure of constant examination.

Nevertheless, it wasn't a subject that could be avoided forever and, after much shuffling of feet on Saturday night, Tom confessed they were supposed to be meeting Danny Slater for a drink but weren't sure whether they should. Sam and I said in unison that Danny bore no responsibility for what his father and brother had done and that it wouldn't be fair to tell him. Leave him in ignorance was our advice.

"Has Dad told you he's thinking of letting Danny use the barn as a studio?" Tom asked me. "Assuming we buy the place, of course."

"It's just an idea at the moment." said Sam, "but I'd like him to know that we aren't just fair-weather friends."

''He'd have to slum it," put in Luke, "because Dad won't let him smoke dope in the house. But he can clean out the tack room and make it reasonably habitable. There's electricity down there and the loose boxes are big enough to work in. All he'd need to do then is beg some stone off one of the quarries, and he could have a bash at being a sculptor without having to bankrupt himself in the process."

Three eager faces turned toward me. What did I think?

I nodded and smiled and said it was a grand idea. But I knew it wouldn't happen. Danny would never forgive me for what I was about to do to his family.

The following Monday I visited Michael Percy in prison on Portland. It was a troubling experience because I was constantly reminded that his life was in limbo. Perhaps the extraordinary setting of the Verne, built inside an old citadel overlooking the harbor and standing alone at the end of a series of hairpin bends, added to my sense of unfulfilled promise and waste. Certainly, I felt its isolation very strongly and wondered if the same feeling was shared by the inmates.

The weather had turned blustery again and the wind plucked at my hair and clothes as I scurried from my car to the main entrance in the wake of a huddle of similarly windblown visitors. I hung behind them, following their lead, unwilling to show my ignorance in front of older hands who, by their relaxed expressions, had queued at reception a hundred times to present their visiting orders.

I thought of Bridget repeating this process month after month, year after year, and wondered if it was a cause for depression or happiness that at the end of it she would see her husband. For myself, I was overcome by a frightening regression to the agoraphobia of twenty years ago when I hadn't been able to leave my house for fear of being watched. Perhaps it had something to do with the officers' uniforms-or being touched during the searches-or having to sit at a table, twiddling my thumbs until Michael was brought to me-certain that everyone's gaze was upon me, even more certain that their gazes were hostile.

Whichever the case, his arrival was a relief, and I watched him walk toward me with an intense-and pleasurable-recognition. There is no accounting for taste, I thought. He was as bad-if not worse-than Alan, but, like Wendy and Bridget and every other woman he'd ever met, I imagine, he had won a place in my affections. He gave me a shy smile as he shook my hand. "I wasn't sure you'd come."

"I said I would."

"Yeah, but not everyone does what they say." He dropped into the chair on the other side of the table and scrutinized my face. "I wouldn't have recognized you if they hadn't said it was Mrs. Ranelagh."

"I've changed a bit."

"That's for sure." He tilted his head to one side to examine me, and I became very aware suddenly that the fourteen-year-old didn't exist anymore and this was a thirty-five-year-old man with a troubled background and a history of violence. "Any reason why?"

"I didn't much like that person," I said honestly.

"What was wrong with her?"

"Too complacent by half." I smiled slightly. "I decided to try lean and hungry instead."

He grinned. "I bet it made your husband sit up and take notice."

I wondered if he'd known about Sam and Libby, or if his intelligence was even more acute now than when I'd known him in school. "It helped," I agreed, scrutinizing him in return. "You haven't changed a bit, although Mrs. Stanhope, the vicar's wife, claims not to have recognized you from the photograph in the newspaper. She's still hoping it was a different Michael Percy who robbed the post office."

He ran the flat of a hand across his closely cropped hair. "Did you tell her?"

"I didn't need to. I'm sure she knows."

He sighed. "She was pretty decent to me when I was a kid. I bet she was wrecked to find out I got done for pistol-whipping a lady."

"I doubt it. She has no illusions about you."

"She offered to adopt me one time, you know, and I said, 'You've gotta be joking.' It'd be like going from the ridiculous to the gorblimey. On the one hand there was Mum who couldn't give a shit if I never came home ... on the other there was the vicar who kept giving me lectures about how Jesus could change my life. The only one who was halfway sensible was Mrs. S ... but she kept wanting to hug me, and I didn't much fancy that." He leaned forward to create an enclosed space for us among the intrusive hubbub of conversation around us. "I wouldn't have minded you giving me a hug," he said with an amused up-from-under look, "but you never showed much inclination."

"I'd have been sacked on the spot."

"You weren't sacked when you gave Alan Slater a hug."

"When did I give Alan a hug?"

"When he bawled his eyes out because the nurse found lice in his hair again. You put your arm 'round his shoulder and said you'd give him some shampoo to get rid of them. You never did that for me."

I had no recollection of it-as far as I knew I'd only put my arm 'round Alan once-and I wondered if Michael was confusing me with another teacher. "Did you ever have lice? You always looked so spick and span while, most days, poor Alan smelled as if he'd emerged from a sewer."

"He was a slob," said Michael dismissively. "I used to nick Prioderm out the chemist for him but he never bothered to use it until the nurse spotted eggs in his hair." He favored me with a crooked smile. "It bugged me that everyone thought I was a neat little kid with clean clothes and felt sorry for Alan because he came from a shit background. I started washing my own stuff myself when I was six years old, but it was only ever Mum who got credit for it."

I wondered fleetingly if the hug I gave Alan, and the hug I hadn't given Michael, had resulted in one settling down and the other doing fifteen years. "Most people thought she was a better mother than Maureen," I told him, "but it wasn't much of an endorsement. On a scale of one to ten, Maureen scored nought."

"At least she wasn't a prostitute," he said bitterly. "It does your head in to have a slag for a mother. Did you know that's what she was at the time?"

"I didn't know anything, Michael. I was very naive and very stupid, and if I had my life over again I'd do things differently." I watched him for a moment. "You were too sexually aware," I said gently. "I never felt threatened by Alan in the way I felt threatened by you. I didn't think you'd be content with a hug."

His smile became even more crooked. "Maybe not, but I'd have been too scared to do anything about it."

"That's not how I saw you," I said with a small laugh. "You had a knack of singling out women who were vulnerable ... like Wendy Stanhope. She becomes very wistful when she talks about you, so I doubt her feelings were entirely maternal."

"What about yours?"

"I don't know. I never tested them."

"But you did like me?"

I wondered why that was important. "Oh yes."

"What about Alan? Did you like him?"

"No," I said flatly, wondering how much he knew.

"He had a crush on you," he said. "Used to talk about how you couldn't keep your hands off him and how the only reason you refused to get the police involved when you caught him nicking from your handbag was because you were afraid he'd spill the beans about the sex he'd had with you." He examined my face closely and seemed to find the reassurance he wanted. "I knew it was a load of crap but it used to bug me the way you put yourself out to be nice to him."

I didn't say anything.

"And you're wrong about him not being sexually aware," he went on. "He was so damn big he had tackle the size of an elephant's by the time he was ten. Sex was the only thing he thought about. He used to nick porno mags and wank himself stupid over the pictures. It was pretty funny till he started doing it for real. He got hold of Rosie, Bridget's sister, and said he wanted to do it with her, and when she told him to fuck off he pushed her to the ground and said he was going to do it anyway. Poor little kid, she was only twelve and she didn't stop bleeding for weeks." His mouth thinned angrily at the memory. "But she was too frightened to tell anyone except me. Her Mum was ill and her dad was never around. So it was down to me to do the business. I beat the shit out of Alan and said if he ever did something like that again, I'd rip his head off."

"How old were you?"

"Fifteen. It wasn't long after you left."

"Did he do it again?"

Michael shrugged. "If he did, I never got to hear about it. He turned on his dad with a baseball bat a week or so later ... almost as if his brain caught up with his size and a bubble came out of his head saying, 'I'm big enough to take on guys.' After that, he didn't seem so interested in sex."

I tried to get a grip of the timing. "His wife told me you and he came to blows over Bridget."

He shook his head. "We only fought the once, and that was over Rosie."

"She told me Alan was besotted with Bridget until he found her in bed with you ... then he beat you half to death and spent time in juvenile prison for it."

"In his dreams maybe." He pulled a puzzled frown. "Bridget never gave him a second look after what he did to her sister, so why pretend otherwise? Who's he trying to con?"

"Beth?" I suggested. "His wife."

"Why?"

It was my turn to shrug.

"Stupid bugger. It's always better to be honest"-he smiled as he listened to himself-"after you've been caught anyway. Nothing remains secret very long in this kind of environment."

I looked around the room, which was packed with prisoners and their families-all talking, all listening, all under observation from prison officers-and I thought I could easily believe it. There was no privacy in a goldfish bowl. And I wondered what sort of control Maureen Slater exercised over her family that no hint of Alan's viciousness had ever leaked out.