Shape of Snakes

said idly. 'My screams are always silent ones that circle 'round my head for days until they run out of steam and die naturally.'

'It's pure affectation to scream at all. You should learn to deal with your problems quietly instead of making a song and dance about them.' I gave a weary sigh as I thought to myself that that was precisely what I had done, and she cast me a suspicious glance. 'I suppose that's why you brought me here? So you can scream at me?'

'Not at you,' I corrected her. 'At the wind.'

'You'll only embarrass yourself,' she said. 'Someone's bound to appear up the path at the wrong moment.'

'Perhaps that's the point,' I murmured reflectively. 'A double whammy. Physical and mental adrenaline all in one shot.' I watched a dinghy, full of divers in wetsuits, motor out of the bay and head toward the southwest. 'Would it embarrass you?'

'Not in the least.' She perched her behind on the edge of a rock. 'If I wasn't embarrassed twenty years ago when you were behaving like a madwoman then I'm hardly likely to start now.'

She has a short memory, I thought, as I lowered myself to the ground to sit cross- legged in front of her. Her embarrassment had been colossal. I concentrated my attention on a clump of pink thrift that had rooted itself tenaciously in a crevice. 'I wasn't mad, Ma, I was exhausted. We were kept awake night after night by the phone ringing nonstop, and even when we changed our number the calls just kept on coming. If we took the damn thing off the hook, we had mud thrown against our windows or constant hammering on the front door. We were both suffering from sleep deprivation, both behaving like zombies, yet for some reason you decided that everything Sam told you was true while everything I said was a lie.'

She examined the distant horizon where the blue of the sea met the blue of the sky, and I remembered her telling me once that the difference between a woman and a lady was that a woman spoke without thinking while a lady always considered what she was about to say. 'You screamed and yelled about rats in your downstairs lavatory,' she said at last. 'Are you saying that wasn't true? You poured gallons of bleach down the loo in order to kill them, then became hysterical because you said they'd moved into the sitting room.'

'I'm not denying I said some strange things, but they weren't lies. I kept hearing scratching sounds and I could only think of rats.'

'Sam didn't hear them.'

'He most certainly did,' I contradicted her. 'If he told you he didn't, he was lying.'

'Why would he want to?'

I thought back. 'For a lot of very complicated reasons ... mostly, I imagine, because he didn't like me much at the time and thought that everything was my fault. He said I was making the noises myself to get attention and was damned if he was going to pander to any more of my childishness.'

She frowned. 'I remember him saying he called in the rat catcher to try to persuade you it was all in your imagination.'

I shook my head. 'It was me who called in the rat catcher, and for exactly the opposite reason. I wanted proof that there were rats.'

'And were there?'

'No. The man said there was no evidence of rodent infestation, no nests, no indication that any food had been eaten, and no droppings. He also said that if we had rats then our neighbors would be complaining as well.' I ran my finger lightly over the thrift and watched the pink heads shiver. 'The next day Sam phoned you to tell you I was going 'round the bend and he wanted a divorce.'

She didn't say anything for several moments, and I raised my head to look at her. There was a perplexed expression on her face. 'Well, I'm completely lost. If you and Sam both heard it but it wasn't rats and it wasn't you, then what was it?'

'I think it might have been cats,' I said.

'Oh, for goodness' sake!' she declared crossly. 'How could there be cats in your house without your noticing?'

'Not in,' I said, 'under. It took me a long time to work it out because I didn't know the first thing about building houses. I couldn't even change a plug when I married, let alone get to grips with the importance of underfloor ventilation.'

Her mouth thinned immediately. 'I suppose that's a sly dig at me and your father.'

'No,' I said with an inward sigh, 'just a fact.'

'What does it have to do with cats?'

'Houses have holes in their walls below ground level to allow a free flow of air under the floorboards. It prevents the wood from becoming rotten. They're usually constructed out of airbricks, but the houses in Graham Road were built in the 1880s and in those days they used wrought-iron grills to make a design feature out of them. Before he left, the rat catcher mentioned that one of ours was missing from the back of the house. It happened all the time, he said, because there was quite a market for them in architectural salvage. It wasn't a problem because someone had wedged a metal bootscraper over the hole, but he suggested we get it replaced at some stage if we didn't want trouble in the future. He kept calling it a ventilation grill, and I assumed he was talking about something that was attached to the extractor fan in the upstairs bathroom because that was the only ventilation I knew about.'

I fell silent and she made an impatient gesture with her hand, as if to say, 'Get on with it.'

'I wasn't very with it at the time-all I wanted was confirmation that rats existed-so it went in one ear and out the other because whatever was missing didn't seem to stop the extractor fan working. Then, one day in Sydney, I watched our neighbor's Jack Russell dig a hole in the flower bed beside our house and vanish through a hole into the crawl space beneath the house, and I realized the rat catcher had probably been talking about underfloor ventilation. He was telling me we had a hole in our back wall at ground level, and probably quite a sizeable one if a wrought-iron grill had been hacked out.'