Seagulls in the Attic (24 page)

I check the chickens on the way home and throw them some of the stale bread one of my customers always gives me. I squat down, letting them eat from my hand. They cluster around and as usual Pavarotti thrusts out his feisty little chest and struts about importantly. Then I get a shock when I realise there are only five hens. I rush up to the nest boxes, to see if one is in there laying an egg but it’s empty. It’s one of the brown Rhode Islands that’s missing. I rush about the orchard, afraid that she’s ill or that a fox has got her. I doubt that she could have got out as their area is well fenced with chicken wire, but if she were all right, she’d be bustling around me like the others.

The hens and rooster follow me as I go searching under and around the tufts of long grass growing about the trunks of the gnarled, old apple trees. I’m clucking all the time, calling to her. The hens join in, like some feathered Greek chorus. Before I know it, Edna and Hector, hearing the commotion, have joined me as well, and the three of us, plus five hens and one cockerel, are all madly scrabbling about the place making ridiculous chicken noises.

‘No sign of her,’ Hector says finally.

‘She must have got out,’ I wail. ‘But where?’

We circle the perimeter of the fence, trying to find where she could have got out but there’s nowhere we can see. I cry, ‘A fox must have got in somehow and dragged her away.’

‘There’d be feathers everywhere. Sign of a struggle. Let’s have a look outside the compound.’

So off we go, searching and calling throughout the overgrown
old garden but after twenty minutes, we give up. I’m still convinced a fox got her, or even a stoat – I saw one not far from my allotment a few weeks ago – but the Humphreys are adamant that if something had got her, there would be some sign of a struggle with feathers everywhere.

Despondently, I return to the henhouse to collect the eggs while the Humphreys, as they often do, chat to the chickens, calling them ‘gorgeous girls’ and ‘you handsome old cock, you’. It soothes me, picking up the eggs from the clean straw, feeling the warm roundness in my hand. I put them in a basket and join the Humphreys, still upset about my hen but resigned to my loss.

Edna says mildly, ‘Look at your chickens, my dear.’

I do and can’t believe my eyes. There’s the prodigal hen, scratching away at the ground with the others, feathers intact, looking as if she hasn’t moved an inch. ‘But where was she?’

Edna shrugs as Hector says, ‘It’s a mystery. Life’s one continuous mystery, even with chickens.’

With this sage pronouncement we drop the subject, though I do check the fence once more. There is no way that hen could have got out but somehow she did. And got back in, too. I decide not to worry about it, to let it go, to accept Hector’s philosophy.

Before I go I take a quick look at my allotment. I’m pleased to see that the vegetables survived the recent storms and though the earth was soggy for days, the hot sun has efficiently dried everything out. My beetroot are getting bigger; I thought they’d never grow larger than a ping-pong ball but they’ve surprised me.

I tell the Humphreys, ‘Doug keeps reminding me that I promised I’d put in an entry in the Treverny show and I guess I must, since I said so, but I don’t want to compete, vegetables are for eating not for showing, I feel. But I’ll have to do something.’

Edna says, ‘I’m sure you could win a prize for the tastiest carrots. Yours are delicious.’

I pull one up for the Humphreys’ dinner that night. It’s a weird shape, sort of curled one way then backing up onto itself to curve another way. Still it’s edible, though it might be a bit hard to peel.

As I’m brushing the earth away from it Hector says, ‘Is there a category for the oddest-looking vegetable? If so, that carrot would surely win a prize.’

With a giggle I agree it would and wonder if perhaps that’s how I’ll keep my promise and enter the autumn show.

It’s hot today and so warm that I need to open all the windows in the house when I get home. I can’t leave them wide open when no one’s inside as Google gets in and causes havoc, guano everywhere and food stolen. I wonder if you can house train seagulls, though somehow I doubt it.

Going into Will’s bedroom I open the window wide to get a cool breeze and turning around get a nasty shock. The snake cage is empty. No snake. I freeze, unable to move. For what seems like hours but can only be a few minutes I stand there petrified. After a time I try to calm down, telling myself that this is a corn snake, totally common, the favourite pet of little boys and weird adults who actually like snakes. Elvis will not hurt me, I say like a mantra, over and over. He slithers and slides up and down Will’s arms and if he slithered and slid up my leg – but I can’t imagine it and shudder just thinking about it. However, I can’t stand here until Will comes home and finds his snake gone. How did he get out anyway? From where I stand I peer at the vivarium. He must have got into the thin glass shelf inside it and from there manoeuvred the sliding glass lid open.
Where is he now?

Finally I force myself to move, taking each step slowly, watching where I tread, my eyes darting around like a feral beast
looking for any sign of Elvis, though God knows what I’d have done if I’d spotted him – run hollering out of the house, no doubt. Will is devastated when he hears the news and runs upstairs to check if I’m mistaken. For a few seconds I harbour a wild hope that Elvis has returned to his happy home but Will’s cry of anguish shatters that hope. He and Amy start searching the house while I try to prepare a meal. Every saucepan I get out, every cupboard I go into, I’m looking for signs of a snake.

By the time we all go to bed there is still no Elvis. My recurring nightmare is to share a house with a three-or four-foot snake on the loose. My sleep is troubled and I wake in the middle of the night needing the loo but I’m too nervous to move. I know that snakes are more active at night so Elvis might at this moment be roaming about doing whatever snakes do right under my bed. Finally I have to get up. Every step I take is torment. I turn put on the lights but every shadow I see is ominous.

The next day I phone the reptile centre to ask if they have any tips for finding a missing snake. The woman on the phone says brightly, ‘Just make sure all of you check your beds before you get in at night. It could be under the blankets, or even tucked in between a duvet and its cover . . . Sorry, did you say something?’

‘Uh, no, please go on,’ I try not to make any more strangled noises to distract her.

‘Snakes like warm, dark places. Your snake could be behind the fridge or television, or even inside the video machine.’

‘But he’s huge. Well, long, anyway.’

‘Snakes can curl up into quite small places. Look for it in anywhere unlikely you can think of. But don’t worry if you don’t find it immediately. You’ve said that your snake is a young healthy snake with quite a bit of weight on him. It could live happily on the loose in your house for months.’ I shudder.

The next thing we do is contact the RSPCA, in case Elvis gets out and goes walkabout in the village or beyond. If he’s found, he’ll be returned to Will. When I tell Susie at the post office, she says I should tell all my customers.

‘Goodness,’ I say, ‘he’s not going to wander that far.’

‘You never know, my bird. You just never know. Cunning, snakes are.’

‘Well quite honestly I hope he does go walkabout and ends up far away.’

‘Aw, poor Will.’

‘I mean far away so that someone will find him and bring him back to Will,’ I say hastily. ‘I want Will to have his snake back but I don’t want to be the one to find it in my duvet one night. Or to find it anywhere. I want someone else to find Elvis.’

But no one does. Elvis becomes the favourite conversation amongst my customers, with many of them having tales to tell of their own pet snakes or those of their children/nephews/ nieces/cousins/uncles/grandparents. Everyone has a story about everything, in Cornwall. One elderly man tells me about stepping into his wellie boots one morning to find his grandson’s pet snake curled up inside and someone else mentions a snake found in her handbag.

By the time I get to the village where Elizabeth and Adam, my favourite dotty second-homers, live, I don’t want to hear another snake story ever again. But as freak coincidence would have it, the first thing Elizabeth says to me is, ‘Oh Tessa, I’m so glad you’re here. Our cat has brought a dead snake into the house and I don’t know what to do with it. Adam isn’t here, not that he’d know what to do. And the twins won’t go near it. It’s not very long, it’s just a grass snake, or it must be, that’s what Adam said on the phone when I rang him in London. He says there are no poisonous snakes in Cornwall only adders
but he didn’t think our cat would try to catch an adder. Anyway if it is an adder it wouldn’t hurt would it? I mean, it’s quite dead.’

She tells me all this in a rush, her voice breathless. As usual she’s looking country-smart with a fine patterned skirt, definitely not from a charity shop, with a cute summery top. Even her flip-flops are a world away from my own tatty ones at home: hers are clean new leather with some trendy intricate design etched in.

She is looking at me appealingly. I grin and say, ‘Sorry, Elizabeth, I don’t do snakes, but how about I tell the people next door when I deliver. I’m sure they’ll help.’

‘Oh would you? I feel such a fool asking myself.’

Luckily the neighbour next door, a dour local woman in her late fifties, is in and I tell her about Elizabeth’s dead snake. The woman sighs mournfully. ‘That woman do be missing a bolt or two in her head. The snake be dead. You pick it up and toss it out. I swear she’s two shillings short of a pound, like my gran used to say.’

‘She’s just not used to the country, that’s all. She’s got quite a responsible job in London.’

‘Hah, fat lot of good it does her here,’ the woman snorts then sighs again. ‘Well, poor dear, she can’t be helping it if our ways be strange to her. I’ll get along over there right now and rid her of the vermin.’

I tell her that it’s kind of her and she brushes me off. ‘’Tisn’t kind, ’tis neighbourly. Besides, they two aren’t a bad sort. Simple but well meaning. Poor sods, must have a dreadful life Up Country, to keep running away from it like they do.’

The next few days are nerve-wracking. There is no sign of Elvis anywhere but that doesn’t mean he’s not in the house. Like the woman at the reptile centre said, he’s probably hiding out in some warm, dark place and roaming our house at night
when everyone is asleep. I’m careful to shake out my clothes every morning before getting dressed and open cupboards slowly with great trepidation. Going to bed is a nightmare as I take my duvet cover off then put it back on again after I’ve made sure nothing alive is lurking there. Because all our duvet covers have poppers at the end rather than a zipper, Elvis could easily crawl between them and snuggle inside.

I talk to Ben that night on the phone, missing him even more than usual. I know he misses us too, like mad, yet he feels good acting again which is as it should be. They’re doing three plays in repertoire and
The Taming of the Shrew
is one of them. He’s revelling in it, playing Petruchio at last. I’m glad he’s doing it but it’ll be terrific to have him home again.

‘So still no sign of Elvis?’

‘Not a sighting. Will leaves food out for him at night, in the vivarium, hoping to entice him back, but it’s untouched.’

‘He’s probably nibbling elsewhere, at night. In the breadbin maybe.’

‘Oh God. Don’t.’

Before I go to bed I do my usual shaking out of the duvet and checking under the pillows before settling in for the night. The woman at the Reptile Centre said it could be months before we found Elvis, so I’ve got to get used to it, though sharing a house with a snake is not my idea of an idyllic Cornish paradise.

A few days later Al, the friendly repair man from a local electrical shop, comes out to look at our washing machine. We brought it with us from London and it’s been playing up again, as has our television and our freezer. All of our appliances are old now and we can’t afford new ones so we keep calling Al out. His dad owns the shop and his prices are reasonable.

Al sits at the kitchen table and has a cuppa before he gets going. He’s a good-looking, spiky-haired young man in his early
twenties with a cheeky grin and a wide assortment of jeans fashionably torn at the knees and other places. At first I thought they were the same pair every time I saw him but I’ve realised that some are torn at both knees, some only at one, and some have a rip or two at the thigh as well. I do hope he made the tears himself and didn’t buy them that way, as I’ve seen for sale in some of the more fashionable shops in Truro.

‘So what’s up with the washing machine then?’ he asks after he’s consumed two cups of tea and half a carrot cake one of my customers gave me. He’s skinny as a rake and eats like a horse. Last time he came out he polished off the rest of a lasagne Ben had cooked the night before. I’d made the mistake of asking him if he was hungry, as it was an early call out and he said he hadn’t had breakfast; before I knew it my dinner of leftovers for that evening had gone.

I tell him the problem and Al goes to his scruffy van, brings in his tools and begins to undo the back of the washing machine to check the electrics. As he starts to take it off and expose the insides I say, ‘Uh, Al, be careful of the snake.’

He jumps back with a yell and the back of the machine drops with a great clatter. ‘What? Where? Shit, man, what snake?’

‘No, no, no, I mean it’s probably not there, but it could be. The woman at the reptile centre said a snake could get coiled up inside a electrical appliance. We’ve lost a snake in the house, you see. So be careful.’

‘Shit. Hell.’ Poor lad, he looks white as a sheet. ‘I hate snakes.’

‘Oh it’s only a pet corn snake and harmless,’ I can’t believe I’m giving the same reassurances to Al that everyone has been giving me for weeks. I’m saying the words but I know how useless they are for people who are truly frightened of snakes. Rationally we know they cannot hurt us but reason does not come in to it. I know from the look on Al’s face that he feels the same as I do.