We’d never had a garden before. And we’d certainly never had one with a snake in it. So we were fascinated when we saw it, a finger-thick, pinky-brown body, writhing out of sight beneath the leaves, its movements smooth and sure and muscular.
Later, we looked it up in a musty copy of the Illustrated Book of Nature. Among the chalky fifties’ colour-plates, faded and precise, we found the object of our search shaping an S across the sheet. The little taupe-coloured snake was a ‘slow worm’, informed the text, and was ‘common throughout the British Isles’.
Weeks later, we saw it again. I was gardening when I caught a corner-eye glimpse of something brown at the edge of the lawn. Moving closer, I saw it was the snake, statue-still, basking in a splash of sunlight.
“Sam!” I summoned my son. “Come quickly! It’s the snake!”
He ran across to me at once, his face alight with excitement, but I put out my arm to stop him.
“We must move slowly, so we don’t frighten it,” I cautioned. Then, Sam’s hot hand squeezing mine, we crept, like a game of Grandmother’s Footsteps, carefully forwards.
The snake was still there, curled around in the warm light like an ouroboros, the ancient symbol of serpent eating its tail that represents the endless cycle of life and death. Its eyes glistened like tiny golden rivets, reflecting back the light.
“It must be sunbathing,” I whispered. “Snakes love the heat.”
“Can we take a picture, Mummy?” Sam asked, as we continued to watch the motionless snake.
“Good idea,” I said. “I’ll get the camera.”
Sam was still engrossed in the snake when I rejoined him. It didn’t appear to have moved, and I hoped the whirr of the camera wouldn’t frighten it.
No movement. The snake seemed drugged by the warmth of the sun, glazy gazed and motionless, its tiny scales soaking up the heat like solar panels.
“I don’t know if the photo will come out,” I told Sam. “I’ll try and take one more. It’s amazing it’s letting us get so close to it.”
So I moved even nearer to the sun-drunk creature, conscious of my shadow falling to its left, as I squared it in the camera window. “It’s so beautiful…” I marvelled, lining up the shot, then, still squinting through the lens, I finally noticed.
“Oh no!” I said sharply, jerking back, my breath an almost-gasp.
“What is it, Mummy?” Sam demanded, instantly picking up my tone.
“I think it’s dead,” I blurted, unthinking of the effect my words might have. “It looks like its tail’s been bitten off…”
And then I remembered my audience, as Sam let out a wail of horror. I reached quickly for him, but he was already running for the house, in the staggering, instinctive way of someone in shock.
I followed him inside. His eyes were wide and his mouth a wobbly O. “I don’t want the photo to come out,” he sobbed, shuddering in my arms as his tears wet my neck. “It won’t come out, will it, Mummy?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Sam continued to cry, his small frame buckling, as I rocked him like the baby he had been such short years before. Then he asserted: “I’m never going in the garden ever again.”
I stroked his hair. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll move it.”
In the garden, I slipped the trowel gently, reverently, under the snake’s body, rigid in its single, burnished coil. It spun slowly over onto its back, offering its pale, copper underside to the summer sky. Its skin glistened, laced with intricate chainmail, a thousand interlinking calligraphy Vs. Poor snake, I thought. It seemed so beautiful and otherworldly, despite its sad, truncated tail. Eternity cut short.
Bearing the trowel in front of me, unlikely funeral bier, I wondered what I should do with this untimely little corpse. Should I bury it? Where, in this nature-riot garden, would I find an appropriate plot? And would Sam want to know what I had done?
Then, before I could decide its final fate, the snake, agile even in death, slid sideways off the trowel blade into the brambles.
Inside, I found Sam foetused among the armchair cushions, his face striped with drying tearstreaks. Wordlessly, I scooped him into my arms.
“It’s gone,” I said eventually, feeling the steady weight of him settling against me, tightness releasing.
“Are you okay?” I murmured, nuzzling the place on the top of his head where the soft fontanelle used to be.
I felt him snuggle closer, and his voice, when he spoke, was muffled against my chest. “If the photograph does come out,” he said, “let’s just put it in the bin.”