The Python Project

move to readjust our combined body contours, and dreamily I thought, Why ever wake properly, why ever bother to move out into the shoddy half-baked world? The thing to do was to turn back, away from the world, and hide oneself in the tight rosebud of drowsy pleasure; to become larvae, just the two of us, hidden forever in the dark, sweet world of the ripening apple. . . . I smiled in half-sleep, knowing that somewhere I was getting mixed in my thoughts and not caring. Behind me she stirred. I felt her arms move slowly, caressingly, over the bare warmth of my neck and then slide across my cheek, the long length of her arm running after it over my naked shoulder. Her hand and arm were cold. She must have been sleeping, I thought, with the top half of the covers off. Full of tenderness, not wanting her to be cold, I began a lazy turn that would bring her into my arms and let me pull the sheet up around her bare shoulder. My eyes opened slightly in the move and I found myself looking into a small, wedge-shaped head, flat and—although much thicker—about the size of an axe-head. From low on the crown a pair of yellow-brown eyes watched me coldly. A little red, delicately forked tongue flicked the tip of my nose and then the head moved with a little curving movement away and over me and I felt the dry, relaxing and then muscular constricting of the long scaly body across my bare chest.

As my hair stood on end and my body stiffened, a detached part of my mind was wondering at the association of ideas that could go on in the brain while the body slept. Paradise, the sweet ripe apple . . . me and Letta in the garden of Eden and here, to complete it, was the snake. And a damned great thing at that. Just feeling it move across my chest told me that it wasn’t an inch under ten feet. It dropped off the bed with a clumsy thump—I learned later that pythons have that in common with Siamese cats, an arrogance which makes them clumsy, just going their own sweet way across tables or furniture, knocking over anything that gets in their path.

I sat up in bed with a jerk and cursed myself for not retrieving my gun from Wilkins. The python was rippling away across the room with a nice easy flowing movement. It did a figure of eight round the legs of a chair and then, unhurried, spiralled up a tall lamp standard to check that the bulb was a 120-watt.

I said with a terminal hiss that any snake could have been proud of, ‘Holy Moses!’

The sound and the proceeding jerk of my body made Letta roll over.

‘Whassa?’ she asked sleepily.

I looked down at her. She was naked almost to the waist and her position flattened her beautiful breasts a little. The areola around each nipple was a dark, crushed-grape colour. Even with your hair standing on end you notice things like that.

I said, ‘There’s a bloody great snake in the room.’

She opened her eyes and smiled at me. ‘There always is, darling—of one kind or another.’

‘But this—’ I gagged for a moment because my throat was dry—‘is a damned great python affair. You could make a pair of shoes and a couple of handbags out of it.’

She sat up, running her hands through her disordered hair. She looked across the room where the python was doing a complicated backward slide down the lamp standard.

‘That’s Lilith,’ she said.

‘What’s she doing here?’

‘She lives in that hamper over in the corner. She always comes out in the morning for a little exercise. She worries you?’

‘Not really. It’s just my hair I’m thinking about. I’ll never get it to lie down again.’

She giggled, a rich, warm, early morning, dark-brown sound, and then climbed across me, almost making me forget the snake. She padded across the room, picked up Lilith by a convenient loop, draped her across her shoulders, faced me and sketched a quick bump and grind. As a cabaret act it would have given a Freudian scholar stuff for two or three chapters, and then a hefty footnote on symbolism.

She kissed the beast on the nose and said, ‘You are happier if I put her away?’

‘Definitely. And see the catch is secure.’

She padded to the hamper, folded Lilith away with a bending rump-and-buttock exhibition that made me reach for the water carafe to slake my snake-parched mouth.

She came back, took a flying leap into bed and lay back laughing. Then she grabbed for me and, in the few moments before speech became impossible, said, ‘I will make you unafraid again. One man once, you know, had the same experience and had a bad heart attack. There was a lot of explaining to do.’

Later, lying relaxed, hearing Lilith curl and knot in the hamper, I said, ‘You use her in your act?’

‘Didn’t you see it last night?’

‘I was late getting here. But it doesn’t say anything about it on the showcards in the hotel hall.’

‘It is only a small part of the act. I use it as a surprise. And anyway, Lilith is sometimes in a bad temper and won’t act nicely.’

‘What gets her steamed up? Nostalgia for the past?’

‘Guinea pigs. They are her exclusive diet. Sometimes it is difficult to get them. Then, when she is hungry, she gets temperamental.’ That wasn’t hard to believe. I know a lot of people who get bad tempered if they don’t get their food regularly.

‘I see now,’ I said, ‘why Freeman had no trouble selling you that python bracelet. Is Lilith an Indian python too?’

‘Yes.’

I lit a cigarette. She took it from me, had a couple of draws and then handed it back. Staring up at the ceiling, she said, ‘Something else. I don’t want you to worry about my father any more.’

‘Why not?’

‘I telephoned him yesterday.’

‘Where?’

‘In the Florence flat.