Shape of Snakes

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?'