Snake in the Grass Read online

  On the other hand … (Oh, Dean, you live with your head in the clouds. You never see what’s right under your nose.)

  ‘Here we are.’ The car pulled up outside Dean’s house, which was all in darkness. ‘Looks like the party’s over.’

  ‘Humph!’ He got out and slammed the door.

  ‘Auf wiedersehen!’ The woman waved out of the window as she drove away.

  ‘Nazi,’ muttered Dean.

  The partygoers had gone. They had turned off all the lights before they went but had left the front door wide open. There was no sign of Richard. Dean ventured indoors, turning the lights back on, surveying the wreckage with a sinking feeling as he passed from room to room. The place was littered with empty and half-empty glasses, cans and bottles. Crisps and nuts had been trodden into the carpets. Cheap cider had been poured lavishly over the polished surface of the dining-room table. His mother’s best saucers had been used as ashtrays. There was a definite whiff of marijuana in the air. The vodka jelly, however, had vanished.

  Dean knew he ought to make an effort to tidy round, but he did not want to risk being up and about when his mother and Basil got home. Best to hide in bed now and face the inevitable recriminations tomorrow. By then he’d have had time to get it straight in his mind. He’d have some explanations ready. It was all Richard’s fault: this must somehow be made clear. Richard had hijacked the party, enjoyed himself, then cut and run, leaving Dean to cop the flak. Richard should be the one tidying up; he should be the one getting it in the neck. And, thought Dean as he stomped up the stairs, I bet he got off with Sandra Hays, too, the bastard, the bastard, the bastard!

  Twisting and turning in bed, Dean groaned, unable to find sleep. He kept thinking about the accident. He broke into a sweat, reliving the blind panic he had felt as his car swerved and skidded; experienced once more his abject terror as it slid into the ditch. All because of the beast: the enigmatic black beast with green eyes. But as the accident grew more and more real in his memory – making him go hot and cold in turn, shivering under the duvet – the beast grew more and more hazy and dreamlike. Perhaps it had never existed in the first pace. Perhaps there had not even been a small cat. There were such things as optical illusions, not to mention the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. You could not always believe the evidence of your own eyes.

  So the beast had been an optical illusion. But that panther, that succubus, that witch on a broomstick (or Fiat Brava, to be exact): she had been real, all right. Dean curled up, clutching his knees to his chest, trying to blot out the panther, but he couldn’t. Was sex always like that, so mechanical, so fleshy and rudimentary, so slapdash? Were the lads at college lying through their teeth when they went on (and on and on) about how brilliant it was? Or, Dean asked himself, is it just me?

  He groaned some more, grinding his teeth. It’s just me. I know it’s just me. Oh God, why am I such a freak?

  He tried to calm himself down. He’d be having another of his panic attacks if he wasn’t careful. He had to get a grip, look on the bright side.

  Look on the bright side. Another of his mother’s phrases. Why did she have to talk such rubbish?

  It was all Richard’s fault.

  Dean yawned as his mind finally slipped into a well-worn groove. Hating Richard was comforting and soothing. Its normalcy induced sleep.

  He slept.

  TWO

  LYDIA TAYLOR BACKED her car slowly along the narrow drive, craning over her shoulder to see where she was going, taking care not to ride over Mr Wetherby’s neat lawn (heaven forbid….) Her home lay back from the road. Two new villas flanked the driveway, almost blocking from view her little old sandstone cottage.

  As she opened her front door, she listened from force of habit for Prize’s welcoming bark, but she listened in vain, for her dog was dead and the cottage was cold, dark and empty. She closed the door. The clicking of the latch marked the moment when she was cut off from the land of the living, trapped once more in a limbo of ghosts and memories and deafening silence.

  She turned on lights, stoked the fire, warmed herself in front of it (what had possessed her to go out dressed in such flimsy clothes?). She looked down at the sofa, strewn with the daily newspaper and several library books. She had thought the books might help in some way. She had read in them that loneliness and grief were part of the healing process, a natural stage in mourning, but they were talking of human deaths, not canine. Nobody had anything to say about the death of one’s dog. The books were useless.

  Going through to the kitchen, Lydia reached for the gin bottle, glugged a generous measure into a glass, searched for tonic (surely I must have some somewhere….). Delving into her cupboards, she wondered if she was being silly, hysterical, making a fool of herself. The vet had not exactly said so, merely hinted at it by the tone of his voice, the roll of his eyes. She seemed to remember him saying, ‘It’s only an animal’, but that might be putting words into his mouth.

  She gave up her search. There was no tonic. Curses. Perhaps the pub? She glanced at the clock, squinting to bring it into focus. As late as that. Chucking-out time had come and gone. But they might still be up and about, the landlord and his wife, clearing up. If she telephoned, would they let her pop down to fetch some tonic? The landlord was always eager to please, especially where women were concerned. But it might be his wife who answered the phone. Lydia decided not to risk it.

  Gin and lemonade it had to be, then. And a slice of lemon. She sliced a lemon, slicing her finger at the same time. Blood ran onto the chopping board. The lemon juice got into her cut, made it sting. She hopped up and down, sucking her finger, wincing.

  Rinsing her finger under a tap, drying it, applying a plaster, Lydia winced again as she caught a glimpse through the kitchen window of her car parked outside. What had she been thinking of, driving in her state? She was absolutely plastered, couldn’t even walk straight. Nor was she dressed for December. She could not imagine why she had dressed up in these old clothes. She had barely looked at them in years – not since the days of Nigel, in fact.

  Going for a drive must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but that time was now lost in an alcoholic haze. It made her blood run cold, thinking what might have happened, how she might easily have killed someone – or killed herself. And as for what had actually happened….

  ‘Oh God. Oh please no. No, no, no.’ Every inch of her cringed at the memory, the young man – the boy – by the roadside.

  ‘Shameful, that’s what it is.’

  The disembodied voice made her jump. ‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’

  Her mother’s ghost tut-tutted. ‘What a performance. And to think you’re nearly forty. You really ought to know better at your age.’

  ‘I am not nearly forty. There are still two years before I’m forty.’

  ‘Nineteen months.’ The voice was as irritatingly precise in death as in life. Lydia ignored it.

  She picked up her drink, went back to the main room, took up a position in front of the fire. Goose pimples rose on her arm as she saw in her mind’s eye the wide-eyed stare of the boy caught in her headlights. She had stepped out of her car and straight into the role of a femme fatale, as if it was a part she’d been playing all her life. Where had it come from? More to the point, why? Another manifestation of grief? Or was she going round the twist? It was not as if the young man had been handsome or personable. Pale-faced, spotty, inarticulate – like one of those impermeable blank-faced clods who always sat at the back in her classes. It had been like making love to a lump of dough. She had found it necessary to prod, poke, pull and guide him. The femme fatale had been amused. It seemed to Lydia now more like a nightmare.

  Back in the kitchen, Lydia slopped more gin into her glass. Mother’s ruin, they called it. Perhaps a good measure of it would blot out her mother’s ghost – not to mention the boy by the roadside; and, of course, her dog.

  Curses! Here she was, back to thinking about Prize. But why shouldn’t she? Poor old m
utt. It was not his fault if he’d grown decrepit and riddled with disease (it had never occurred to her that dogs got cancer: it seemed an unnecessarily cruel stroke of nature). She had put off and put off the inevitable visit to the vet; but when all was said and done, she could not see the dear thing suffer in any way.

  ‘I’m afraid there’s not a lot more we can do, Mrs Taylor,’ the vet had said. It was what, in her heart of hearts, she’d expected.

  ‘Miss Taylor,’ Lydia had corrected him: a bald vet, she recalled, with a huge bushy beard. The hairless pate and hairy chin had given his face a topsy-turvy appearance. She had quite liked the vet to start with.

  ‘Would you like to hold him one last time?’ the vet had asked.

  ‘Oh yes. Thank you.’ Lydia had thought him very perceptive and sensitive. She remembered looking down at Prize. How thin he’d gotten! He’d been half the dog he used to be. His trusting rheumy eyes had stared into hers.

  ‘Now then.’ The vet had produced a hypodermic needle.

  Lydia had watched in mute horror as the vet plunged the needle deep into Prize’s body. The poor hound had twisted and jerked, nearly wrenching himself free of Lydia’s grasp. He had tried his best to muster a bark, but all he had managed was a whimper as he expired. It had all been so quick, so unexpected. She could have sworn that the vet had given her no indication of what he was about to do.

  Lydia, gulping gin, wandering from room to room, experienced again the shock and rage she had felt at the surgery.

  ‘You have murdered my dog in cold blood!’

  ‘Now, now, Mrs Taylor: his time had come, it was all for the best. Would you like us to dispose of the body? Yes, I think that would be best. Much less fuss for you. There’s a van that comes, collects all the carcasses, takes them for incineration.’

  Finding herself in the kitchen once more, Lydia sloshed another helping of gin into her glass, thinking of her final glimpse of Prize, recumbent on the vet’s table. She had been in a daze, hardly aware of what she was saying, of what she was agreeing to. Prize had been taken away to be burnt. She didn’t even have a grave to visit, somewhere to take flowers. The vet, in her memory, showed no remorse. Had he really said something along the lines of all major credit cards are accepted, or was she making that up after the fact?

  Lydia dropped another slice of lemon into her glass. The lemon was spotted with blood, turned her drink a rather pleasing pink colour. She concentrated on the colour, tried to forget the topsy-turvy-faced vet.

  In the main room she sat down heavily on the sofa, books and bits of the newspaper cracking and crackling beneath her.

  ‘My word! Look at the state of this place!’

  The disembodied voice of her mother caught her off guard as usual. She jumped, spilling gin. It slowly soaked into her short, black skirt.

  ‘Problem with you, my girl, is that you’re too wrapped up in yourself. You always have been. You should spend less time contemplating your navel and make more of an effort with your housework.’

  ‘Stop bossing me around. I am not a child.’

  ‘Speaking of children: that poor boy. What were you thinking? He’ll be scarred for life, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘Oh, shut up, you interfering old bat.’

  Lydia silenced the ghost, but could not silence the doubts and fears crowding into her mind as she stared at the flames of the gas fire. What if the boy told his friends? Teenage boys always boasted about things like that. It would be all round the college in no time. It might even come to the attention of the principal. And what about his mother? What if he told his mother? It would be impossible to ever look her in the eye again.

  ‘My life,’ said Lydia, ‘is over. In tatters.’

  She sipped her pink drink and tried to pull herself together. No good wailing and beating her breast. If she was heading for a crash, then at least she could face it full on, make Prize proud of her. She must take the bull by the horns. Her first task would be to go and see that woman – the boy’s mother, whatever her name was: she’d forgotten. The best plan was to march up to the woman’s door, ring the bell – some legitimate excuse would come to her when sober – and look straight into the woman’s eyes. Yes. That’s what she would do.

  Leaving her drink unfinished on the floor, Lydia wobbled up to the bathroom, brushed her teeth, splashed water on her face, swayed and stumbled into her bedroom where she divested herself of her clothes. She attempted to put on her nightie, gave up, crawled under the duvet from the bottom of the bed and collapsed onto her back.

  I must stop drinking so much, she told herself as the room spun round.

  There was no heavy weight warming her toes, no sound of snuffling. Prize was gone. Dead.

  ‘He was only an animal,’ she muttered as she tumbled headlong into oblivion.

  She snored.

  THREE

  DEAN LOITERED ON the stairs in a state of suspense, listening to his mother talking at the front door.

  ‘Do you really think they’d be good enough? To tell the truth, I haven’t looked at them in ages. They’re buried under the stairs.’

  Dean could not make out what the woman on the doorstep was saying.

  ‘Well, if you’re sure….’ Dean’s mother expressed doubt. ‘I’d like to help, naturally, but I was only ever a very amateurish amateur.’

  ‘Mumble, mumble,’ said the woman on the doorstep.

  ‘Do you really think so? I was quite proud of that one, if I do say so myself. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll unearth them all and bring them down to you, then you can decide if they’d be suitable. Would that be all right?’

  ‘Mumble, mumble.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. It’s no trouble at all. Goodbye, then!’

  His mother shut the door. Dean descended.

  ‘Who was that?’ he asked.

  He knew who it was. Peering from his bedroom window through a chink in the curtains, he had seen her approaching the house, walking purposefully up the drive towards the front door: the panther. The blood had drained from his face; he had felt a panic attack coming on. Why was she here? Was she stalking him? Just how dangerous was she?

  He had been ensconced in his bedroom all morning, too ill for college. He really did feel ill, he wasn’t just trying to avoid the fallout from his party. His stepfather, of course, had suggested otherwise, bellowing up the stairs at the top of his voice, demanding Dean show himself. Dean had taken no notice.

  He now faced his mother in the hallway. She looked harassed, was wearing an apron, holding a tea towel. The wreckage of the party was clearly keeping her busy.

  ‘Who was that?’ Dean repeated.

  ‘It was only Lydia Taylor.’

  ‘Lydia who?’

  ‘Lydia Taylor. You know. She lives in that little cottage down Well Lane.’

  ‘I don’t know. She’s a complete stranger.’

  ‘Oh, Dean, you live in a world of your own! She teaches at the sixth-form college in town – your college.’

  So it was true. She did work at the college, like she’d said. ‘What did she want?’

  ‘She’s organizing some sort of exhibition for village artists, wants me to contribute.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yes, well, I was rather surprised, I must admit. And it seems a bit off-the-cuff, this exhibition. A bit vague. But I suppose it’s early days. Lydia thought of me because of those classes I took. I did art, if you remember. She was the tutor.’

  Dean said, ‘I don’t remember that,’ but he did. His father had been enthusiastic. ‘Of course you must do evening classes, Gwen! It will be good for you, get you out of the house.’ Get her out of the way, more like, thought Dean sourly. That had been back in the days before his father’s defection. They had often run out of milk in those days. ‘Dean, I have to pop to the shops. Your mother’s at her evening class, so you’ll have to look after Amanda for half an hour, all right?’ It must have been going on even then, Dean realized in retrospect: his father must have b
een carrying on with his business partner’s wife all that time ago. His father, Dean affirmed, was a lying, cheating scumbag. But Dean was forced to admit, in the name of scientific accuracy, that the business partner’s wife had in fact worked as the company’s – and hence his father’s – secretary.

  His mother put the tea towel aside on the hall table. ‘I think I’ll root out those paintings now, before I forget. It’s rather a nuisance when there’s so much else to do, but one doesn’t like to let people down. You can give me a hand, Dean.’

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘They’re in the cupboard under the stairs. You know what a jumble that is. I need a man to move the heavy things.’

  Buttering him up by calling him a man, thought Dean, was not a ploy that was going to work. He was wise to her ways. She ought to realize that by now.

  She sighed. ‘Of course, you don’t have to help. I just thought, as I’d spent all morning cleaning up your mess—’

  ‘Richard’s mess.’

  ‘It wasn’t Richard’s party.’

  ‘Richard was in charge. I wasn’t even here.’

  ‘No. You were out in your car, driving into a ditch. Which reminds me: if you’re not going to help with the paintings, you can phone the garage and see if they’ve finished with your car.’

  ‘Can’t. Got to study.’

  Dean beat a retreat to his bedroom, slammed the door, threw himself on the bed. The curtains were closed, the radiator on full blast. Usually it soothed him, lying in the heat and the half-light and thinking about important things such as the history of the universe; but today the trivia of daily life kept intruding. I’ve spent all morning clearing up, his mother had said, like it was a big deal or something; but what was one morning when the universe had been around for thirteen billion years? Did she actually realize how petty she sounded?

  He hadn’t heard the last about his party, that was clear. And there was his car as well. His mother wouldn’t say much, of course. She’d just wear that martyred look as if you were the world’s biggest disappointment. But his stepfather – his stepfather was another matter. No one could shut Basil Collier up once he got going. It never helped to point out that it was none of Basil’s business. Dean had grown weary of repeating, ‘I’m not your son, you can’t tell me what to do!’