Shape of Snakes

and talk to me about your children's progress.' I dropped abruptly onto my chair again, energy spent. 'Some joke, eh? We all knew the only direction your children were ever going was toward prison.'

'Don't you call us para-' began Derek.

But Geoffrey cut him short. 'What did you do to Rosie?' he demanded of Alan.

'Don't answer him, son,' snapped Maureen, spitting blood. 'Just because that bitch of a teacher tells lies about us, it doesn't mean we have to start explaining ourselves.'

'It damn well does,' said Geoffrey belligerently. 'If he raped my Rosie I want to know about it. He ought to be locked up.'

'Your Rosie?' demanded Maureen, dashing the blood from her mouth with the cuff of her sleeve. 'That's rich, that is. How come she's yours all of a sudden when you couldn't get shot of her quick enough to move in with the tart?'

'More to the point, Maureen,' said Wendy forcefully, 'when did Alan tell you about his part in all of this? And why did you do nothing to stop it getting any worse?'

She shrank into the back of the sofa. 'You should be asking Derek that,' she said mutinously. 'He's already said it was him told Alan what to do. What could I have done except take a beating myself ... which is what happened every time Derek reckoned I was interfering.'

But Derek gave an angry shake of his head. 'I said I'd take the blame for the schoolteacher.' he muttered. 'Nothing else.'

'There is nothing else,' she snapped angrily. 'All we ever did was thieve a few things off the nigger and teach Miss High-and-Mighty here a lesson in manners. All the rest is lies.'

I looked up. 'What about the cats?' I asked coldly. 'Were they a lesson in manners, too?'

She dropped her eyes immediately and fumbled for a cigarette.

'You were too precise about the numbers inside Annie's house. It's not a figure you'd have known if you hadn't notched up each sad little stray as you tortured it.'

Why should this be the key that unlocked Alan? Was a cat's death more dreadful than a woman's? A cat's humiliation harder to forget? A cat's cries more poignant? Apparently so. Annie could die ... I could be humbled ... Rosie could weep ... but an animal must be loved. His anguish was frightening for, as I watched him battle with tears for those long-dead creatures, I found myself wondering if he was still as dissociated from human pain as he so obviously had been then. If so, I had little hope for Beth and her children.

It would be impossible to relate what he said in the way he said it. Once released, his emotions were a river in spate, sweeping aside everyone's sensibilities but his own and given in stuttered sentences which were barely comprehensible at times. We became party to his mother's hatred of sex, his father's brutal taking of her whenever he wanted it, their drunkenness, their violence toward each other and their children. But, more than anything, he dwelt on Maureen's slaughter of the marmalade cat, repeating over and over that when he tried to stop her she turned the baseball bat on him.

I asked him why she'd done it and, like Michael, the only explanation he could offer was that it made her feel 'good.' She laughed when its brains went everywhere, he said, and she wished it had been the nigger's head she'd smashed.

'What about the other cats?' I asked him. 'Why did she go on with it?'

'Because it sent Annie 'round the bend to have them put through her flap. She took to wailing and hollering all the time and behaving like a crazy woman, and Mum reckoned if she didn't pack up and go of her own accord, it was a dead cert she'd be taken out in a straitjacket.'

'But if hurting animals upset you so much, why did you help?'

'I wasn't the only one,' he muttered. 'We all did it-the girls, Mike, Rosie, Bridget. We used to go out looking for strays and bring them home in boxes.'

I wondered sadly if that was the real explanation for Bridget's sacrifice of her hair. 'But why, if you knew what was going to happen to them?'

'It wasn't as bad as having their heads split open.'

'Only if you believe a quick death is worse than a slow one.'

'They didn't all die ... Annie saved most of them ... and that's what we reckoned would happen.' He pressed his forehead into his hands. 'It was better than having Mum kill them straight off, which is what she wanted to do. It was them dying that got Annie worked up.'

'The ones you put under my floorboards died,' I said, 'because I didn't know they were there.'

He raised his head with a look of bafflement in his eyes, but didn't say anything.

'And if you'd refused your mother,' I pointed out, 'none of the cats need have died. Surely Michael was bright enough to work that out even if you couldn't.'

'Us kids wanted rid of Annie, too,' he said sullenly. 'It wasn't right to make us live next door to a nigger.'

I don't know what was going through Maureen's mind while he spoke. She made one or two halfhearted attempts to stop him but I think she realized it was too late. The odd thing is I believe she was genuinely ashamed of her cruelty-perhaps because it had been the one crime she committed herself. More interestingly, she had eyes only for Sharon when Alan admitted that he and Michael had entered Annie's house together around 8:30 on the night she died.

'It was Mike spotted the door was ajar,' he said. 'We were going into his place to watch telly because we knew his mum was out, and he says to me, 'The coon's left her door open.' The place was black as the ace of spades ... no lights ... nothing ... and he says, 'Let's do a prowl before she gets back.' So we creep into the front room and damn near fall over her. It was Mike started it,' he insisted. 'He turns on the lamp on the table ... reckons she's drunk as a skunk and pulls out his dick-' He broke off, refusing to go any further.

'Did she speak to you?'