When she sees the snake she inevitably thinks of him.
It’s the same as the one — perhaps it is the same one — that she saw the day he came home early in the afternoon. Green with a gold inlay, a stiff gleaming cord, bright and then invisible against lime-coloured railings. Even the scenario of its movements is the same. The entanglement around the cold metal as it tries to reach into the near empty water trough, then the seeming panic as it twists its body in the effort to wriggle free, as it finally does, away across the paving stones into the garden. Now, as then, all the surrounding sounds held in breathless suspension - cicadas, tree frog, a car on the road - suddenly collapse into the silence of her watching. Look, isn’t that strange, she almost asks, turning her head and then remembers that she has been doing this a lot lately and must stop.
She relives it in all its details now, that afternoon when she had told him about the snake. He had sat down with a glass of water and, straightening his face into textbook correctness, had started to reel off the creature’s identifying features, quite sensibly at first: gold-flecked skin, body like oiled rope, very stiff, rearing up like a ladder. Then the twinkle had come into his eye and she had seen that with every addition, each more ridiculous than the last–reddish head, brown tail spots, devilish blue eyes--he was mixing her a cocktail of snakehood, most of it not native to this or any other part of the continent. After the Western Taipan, the Brown, and a python or two, he threw in a South African Boomslang, a Pennine Adder amid an assortment of vipers, all rolled into one. He knew his snakes inside out of course, mouth to tail. A trained zoologist, Sub-Warden of the Wildlife Sanctuary in the country’s reptile-infested tropical north, he had to deal with them all the time. Her own snake, as she expected, was none of them. With a ludicrous final flourish–cobra, mamba, gaboon–her intruder was unmasked as the harmless grass snake it had been all along. He had started to laugh and abruptly stopped himself, like a man who was a stranger to laughter. Then she had started, and he joined in, and soon neither of them could stop. She laughs now, for both of them, and stops, afraid that she will weep.
It was rueful fun at times, but it made them laugh. He’d told her that he had never been so happy, how it didn’t get better than this. It wasn’t the kind of thing he said so she knew something was wrong. What he hadn’t told her was that he’d had another angina attack at work that morning and had been sent home by the Sanctuary doctor who advised him to stop work for a while, reduce stress. Which he didn’t. That afternoon was the last time they had laughed.
Three months into his death she stands here on this morning of the snake, thinking back to that day. She’d always expected he would go first. He was fifteen years her senior and there had been health problems, ones she knew about and some she didn’t. He hadn’t told his employer until he got ill at work, didn’t tell her till it was too late. But she never thought it would be so soon, only a few weeks into his retirement, when he was still working part-time. Why did he have to go now? Why hadn’t he listened, how had she missed the signs? She realises she is speaking out loud, uninhibitedly, and stops herself from turning to check that he isn’t there.
So, she would have to decide, then - what would she do now? Had she thought, possibly, of going home, a woman at her weekly book-club had asked. The words shot out like bullets, catching her off-guard, and for a second the air in the room chilled. She’d had to remind herself that because of her near-faultless English, with barely a trace of an accent, most people up here assumed that she was English--even some of the British-born expatriate wives who still spoke of England as the home country. She didn’t have one of these, only the one she had lived, worked and been at home in for most of her adult life, where she was already into her fourth decade of residence, three of them as a fully paid-up citizen. The gloomy redbrick university in the British Midlands where she had met her husband had been home to neither of them. She was a Languages graduate from the picturesque medieval Swabian town halfway between the Black Forest and the Austrian Alps, and had crossed the Channel to take up a two-year position as a lektor–really a glorified Language Assistant - in the university’s German department. He was a Queensland vet who was slowly winding up his post-doctoral research in Veterinary Science. One rainy winter evening she had turned up at a talk on Animal Intelligence that he was giving at the university’s Anglo-German Society. She was Arts, he was Science. She was German, agnostic, twenty-three. He was Australian, atheist, thirty-eight. They’d ridden out the clichés together–chalk and cheese, Autumn to May, mutual attraction of opposites–but there were bridges aplenty to get them across the gulf. Not a whirlwind romance, it was simply that they’d clicked on almost everything: politics, music, theatre, the great outdoors. In university vacations they’d walked Lyke Wake, half the Pennine Way, Three Peaks, Scafell. A month before the expiry of their contracts they were man and wife. Then, after a rapid gathering of goods and a blitz of licences–marriage, driving, dogs and passports–plus medicals and jabs, they were up and away on the great adventure, first to the sunshine state where he rejoined his veterinary practice and then to the small city in the deep north where he quickly rose to the position of Deputy Director of the Sanctuary. She herself, after a Masters in Business Administration, began a career in government services where she still worked part-time. It had been a happy marriage, a good life.
Now, over thirty years on and newly widowed, with the words of the Book-Club woman ringing in her ears, had she really heard herself being asked if she might consider going back home? Were the unspoken words and back to where she came from hanging in the air? Had the rising tide of anti-immigrant feeling finally washed up at her own door or was she paranoid, over-reacting to a harmless habitual expression? Had there come upon her, in her sudden isolation, a frightening fantasy of herself as foreigner when the woman had most likely not meant anything and there had been no menace or malice in her words? It was ridiculous nonsense of course to imagine that she could now go and live in cold crowded cities on the other side of the world, quickly snuffed into anonymity by the sheer weight of numbers. She shuddered at the memory of her final trip back to Germany for her mother’s funeral—slick December ice underfoot, freezing winds stinging her face, screwing up her eyes, her terror of the subway’s robotic rush-hour stampede. And before that the English Midlands’ miserable wintry rain and dark dank streets. No, she insisted, knowing she didn’t need to speak the words aloud because he would have understood. No, she could not face any of these after half a lifetime of bright blue skies, warm earth and air, land, and space. Anyway, there was no one and nothing to go back to. She was an only child, both parents dead and no family of her own. This was his country and she had made it hers too, her whole life for so long now that there was nothing else, and she would stay and keep it for him for however long that would be.
This morning’s snake plunges her into a fit of hysterical weeping. It is good, she tells herself, a relief, a cleansing. Inside the grief is an intimacy, something physical, almost visceral, which brings him close to her, as if he is there beside her on the path. But it is also unbearable, not a healing purgation but more like a real fit, a seizure convulsing her, a minor earthquake shaking her body to bits. Or a kind of exorcism, driving out demons in a howling fury that leaves her drained and empty - exhausted, breathless, unable to speak - only with the torment still there. She wonders if you could choke on sobs, suffocating as you gasped for air, your lungs imploding under the strain. There have been other attacks, but not as bad as this one and she does not want it to go on happening, even though it is her deepest link with him.
It isn’t that she wants not to think of him. There will never be a day when she does not. What she wants is not to be engulfed in grief at the sight of a grass snake drinking from her water trough. She wants to think of things in the world other than him, as well as him, now that he is no longer in it, and to keep him alongside these other, continuing things. She already feels guilty about a planned house move, knowing that the Sanctuary will want its house back by the end of the year, accusing herself of trying to make him less a part of her by being somewhere other than here. It’s not because you are here, she explains to him, which you’re not because you’re in a grave behind the Sanctuary chapel, though you’re not really there either. She is having trouble with here and there. You’re not really anywhere now, but if you were, then here is where you’d be because you were part of this house for so long, and the house was so crucial in our being part of each other that I cannot imagine it without us.
But this is exactly what she has to imagine, to see and feel and register on her senses. The house, the Sanctuary, his work, his books, without him. Her life without him, for what is the alternative? Where to start then? She’d started to delete his phone messages but had broken down at the first sound of his voice. Do it later, she’d told herself, and save just one—a poor testament to a thirty-year marriage but better than nothing. Best start with the books, she thinks, going into his study and taking down the big snake book from the shelf. She remembers consulting it, inconclusively, after the green snake’s first visit, but notices now that while the main body of the work, devoted to identifying markings, venoms, and treatments, is well-thumbed, smudged, and dog-eared from overuse, a short section on snake mythology at the back still has a shiny, pristine newness, as if fresh from the shop. She turns to these pages now. They are untouched. Here was a part of his subject that he knew little about or was simply not interested in. There were snakes aplenty but not his kind of snakes. Not the green one that had set off his little comic tour de force in that last week, or the myriad that had featured in it, or this morning’s one reappearing with all its echoes. Not any of them, but a different kind.
Strangely, she feels she has stumbled upon something of his that is not actually him, not integral to his life but there before he came and still there after he had gone and continuing without him, as she does. Something that, through all his studies and work, he’d managed to get by without, as it had without him, as she must. Oh dear, she thinks, any minute now I’m going to veer off into some crazy, left-field nonsense which disapproving psychologists would call magical thinking. Next she’ll be telling herself, impossibly, that you can learn to live without someone from all the other things in the world that did—which means almost all of it, the whole universe! Silly, spurious logic, laughable really, stuff you can’t explain to yourself because it’s irrational, perverse. That way, madness… Stop it now, stick to the snakes…
Safely grounded again, leafing through the pages, she thinks how odd it is that such a multitude of myths has gathered round these sluggish, lethargic reptiles, so slow-moving and clumsy except when striking, especially on man-made surfaces like railings, paving stones, troughs. Look, here they are now, these fabulous creatures, most of them looking strange in the light of reality and as they doubtless would have done in his eyes, each appearing to reflect some ancient magic or mystery that we ourselves were seeking. Here is Quetzalcoatl’s plumed serpent from Aztec mythology (didn’t Lawrence write about it?) and the reincarnated ancestor in Indonesia. Here the potent phallic symbol from ancient China and, inevitably, the satanic serpent in the garden (was anything less tempting than a snake?). Then, on our own doorstep, the aboriginal lore of the rainbow serpent, emblem of creativity and regeneration, depicted in Arnhem Plateau rock paintings over six thousand years old and painted parrying shields from the Roper River Valley, also in modern artistic representations where a day-glow green figure makes back upon itself in a near circle or square, the mouth busying but not meeting the tail. And last, the image that most resonates with her now, common to many of the world’s remote cultures: the snake with its tail in its mouth. A symbol of eternity, of time returning, bending upon itself to form a perfect circle. Well, no, not really, because eternity was not unending time but the absence of time, something that was not really in time at all but rather in space. Existence as an unbroken circuit without beginning or end which you could not join or leave at any point because it existed only in its entirety as a single flow. It was simply there - unchangeably, interminably there. What said the scientist who had not read this part of the book? Mystic mumbo-jumbo he’d had no time for, he would scoff. But wait a minute…
This was ringing a bell, a science bell in fact, where was it? It must have been ten years or more now when they’d gone to a talk by a physicist from one of the U.K.’s northern universities on the rancorous debate between the old and the new physics. She expected it would all be over her head and was surprised as the bells went on ringing in the jeep all the way home. The speaker, an old man, made it clear at the outset that the altercation was long over, all done and dusted, the battle lost. Since Hawking, the newbies held the field and the oldies, whom no one listened to anymore, were in permanent retreat. As science and technology went deeper into a sub-atomic multiverse, future debates would be between the new and the ever-newer physics. What the speaker wanted to do, he said, was not to defend the old science—how could you defend something that was now virtually obsolete?—but to show that there was still some value and purpose in what the Big Bangers claimed to have completely discredited. What was it called now? She couldn’t quite remember—the Steady something…. The Steady State Theory, yes! The notion that the universe, though expanding, remains overall in an unchanged, unvarying condition, regenerating itself through the continuous creation of new matter replacing what’s lost. The process of creation is something that is always going on and always has, not a single act at any one particular time, which means in effect, that there isn’t any time. The universe has no beginning and no end. What an elegant idea, she had loved it!

*

So, there was never a time when there wasn’t anything, she said. Never a time when there wasn’t time—
Or was time, he said, because really there is no time —
Because time’s an illusion (her), it’s just the measure of movement, of matter transforming itself from one thing into something else. Isn’t that good?
Or true, rather, shouldn’t we be asking? (him)
Good and true (her). Good for there always to have been everything, for there never to have been nothing. Better than everything coming out of nothing, which can’t be true. That’s what the Bangers think, isn’t it? Isn’t that what they’re banging on about?
Some do (him). Others seem to think it came out of whatever was there before.
Well, better than believing that there was never anything but nothing (her) - or nothing but nothing —
Aren’t we getting a bit stuck on semantics? (him)
But isn’t it beautiful - a beautiful, elegant concept? (her)
Doesn’t that make it a bit suspicious? (him). Moves it into the realm of mysticism?
Isn’t that where we find some of the deepest truths? (her)
Not the scientific ones (him). All the current evidence is with the Bangers. I’d have to go with them.
I’ll stay with the Steadies (her). They’re more aesthetically pleasing, more poetic.
And gone (him).

*

End of discussion. Yes, they were gone. Shame on the Bangers for demolishing such a noble, majestic idea. But what did she know? She was a Languages person, not a scientist. She knew no more about the old laws of physics than she did about the new ones, only that it was the older ones which seemed to answer to some of our most precious intuitions and spiritual notions about the nature of existence. She puts the book down but leaves it open. Her mental romp around the universe hasn’t turned the page on its resonant image. The tail-mouthed snake. Something that has no start or end, which exists circularly out of time and is simply, eternally, there.
Not long after the Steadies versus Bangers ding-dong, they’d had to dinner a young African academic, a visiting philosophy lecturer on a research scholarship. The talk hadn’t been of snakes, far from it, but about religious beliefs, and the snakes had happened to pop up in the iconography. The lecturer had told them that the worshippers of one of the ancestral deities in his home country actually wore around their necks the figure of the snake eternally eating its tail. She thinks maybe this was when she’d first encountered the image. The young man explained that the figure signified the unbroken life-death cycle through which the universe was continually recharged. In his people’s traditional beliefs, he said, this was a seamless continuum in which the living turn with the dead and the unborn on a wheel. Then there was something about these three being interdependent, each containing within itself elements of the others, and the past, present and future, all coexisting at any moment of time. It was impossible to generalise because of the enormous diversity of African cultures, he conceded, but if there was a basic common ground it was probably this circuit of passage through a spirit world. Into this realm the world’s dying are reborn as ancestors to watch over the living, its outgoing spirits guarding the material world’s new births. This sounded all rather neat and grand, she thought, a sort of spiritual carousel, and a smirk must have shown on her face because the young man was quick to insist that it wasn’t the same as reincarnation. Nothing as clockwork as that, he said, but rather a salvaging operation that carried bits of the ancestral past back into the world of the living so that nothing was lost. Well, it was modern genetics, wasn’t it, she remembered thinking. Genetically we were all ancestral beings a hundred, a thousand, a million years old. The genes of a great-grandparent resurfaced in the child in virtually indecipherable combinations with other genes and the living world. The ancestors lived on, if only randomly in little bits and scraps.
She hadn’t entirely trusted the young man’s sophisticated, rather highfalutin metaphysics, and wondered if they led a chiefly academic, scholarly existence. But if you looked to what revealed itself from beneath, as it had to her on that evening, then you might find yourself amongst a whole gallery of gods and beliefs about time, a mythology and world order you didn’t even know was there. Was it necessary to go to the laws of modern physics and genetics or to ancient Mexico and Mesopotamia for a steady take on existence? Wasn’t it all around her and in her mind now, prehistoric symbols congregating grandiosely with the scientific stuff around that single reverberant image? Eternity, the transcendence of time, the ancestral survival machine. What everlastingly is.
Only it isn’t. Because he isn’t. Because he’s dead. It pulls her up with a thud, a thump in the heart. The weeping woman has found her voice again and the man too, with the twinkle back in his. What would he say to her, what is he saying now as he speaks into her thoughts, this woman who a few minutes ago was sitting with her head in her hands, scalding tears streaming through her fingers?

*

Spirit guardian speaking. Newly dead ancestor at your service.
How’s the dead world?
It’s not.
No, knowing you, it wouldn’t be.
Enjoy your little perambulation?
Well, it got me away from you for a while—
Not for long. Here I am again—So it didn’t…  And somehow…  it didn’t sound quite real…  It never really touched—
No, it wouldn’t. All those laws of physics and genetics, there’s nothing human about them, nothing personal. They don’t touch our emotional lives.
No, not at all. There’s no you and me. No him and her.
Quite. They’re about particles, not people. Bits of subatomic matter. What’s a gene? A sequence of letters bookended by a pair of symbols. Genes, neutrinos—you can’t picture or describe them, you can’t hold them even though they’re speeding through us every second.
And the mythology, all the gods and stuff -
Almost as useless. The African gods are just a series of cosmic essences when all’s said. They’re abstractions, extrapolations from humanity, like the Greek gods, projections of humanity. Vices and follies magnified. And they’re all humanist creations anyway, usable and disposable. The Africans make them up and get rid of them when they’re past their sell-by date. Mythologies come and go.
So, no one really believes in them?
Well, perhaps not in any way that we’d understand.
So, do they believe in anything?
Oh, yes. The Greeks in fate, for example, their deities are all mixed up with destiny and determinism. The African ones are gods of utility and convenience. Like the ancestors they’re called upon when they’re of some use.
And modern gods—what of them?
They’d be existential—gods of chance, contingency, accident. They preside over a world where anything can happen to anyone. Ancestors don’t play much of a role there.
Like you now. That’s what you are now, aren’t you? One of them. You’ve joined the ancestors—
Regrettably.
Right…. So, ancestor, do you want me to make you a libation?
Oh no, a dreadful waste of whiskey, I always thought. But you could have a picnic at one of our old favourite haunts with a packed lunch for two and leave my half on a rock by the stream. Not that we dead have much appetite—
I’d sneak back after five minutes and eat your share.       
Good for you.
And anyway, I don’t intend to spend my widowhood retracing our steps and revisiting the places where we went together—
And saying to me, look dear, at that beautiful butterfly. Don’t you remember the kingfisher? And over there, coiled around that tree trunk, isn’t that one of your dangerous grass snakes?
In which case I’d rather not be haunted, thank you. So, if you were thinking of going ghostly on me on a regular -
I wasn’t.
So, you’re just here to tell me that you’re not here?
I’m not here.
Good. Have you quite finished now?
I never started. You did.
You going now?
I never came. I’m not.

*

She feels the hysteria rising under the whimsy. Still the expert, even on his own non-existence. No, you aren’t, she tells him, and if you were, I wouldn’t be saying these things to you. I’d be livid, furious, screaming. Why didn’t you let on how serious your condition was? Why wasn’t I told, by you or somebody, about three angina attacks at work? How come I didn’t get to know about the erratic prescriptions, pills hidden away in offices, secret medical appointments? Why did I have to find out from the doctor about the refused bypass option? Maybe I wouldn’t be talking to you at all if you were here. But I am, I’m saying it all anyway. I’m only talking to you because you’re not here, I’m only asking why you had to leave because you’ve left. It’s what we do, we newly bereaved, talking in our heads or out loud to a ghost that’s shadowing us, like a child to an imaginary friend. Men do it more than women apparently. Some go on the same walks and revisit the same pubs, churches, and spots dear to their memories, still conversing with their late wives. She remembers one of their evening strolls, passing a house where they’d overheard what sounded like a mother bawling out her teenage daughter, one voice hectoring, shouting, the other quietly protesting.  The odd thing was that the two voices similar in timbre, never talked over one another, taking it in turns to speak rather like stage actors waiting to deliver their lines. It wasn’t two people in fact, only two voices. One person doing both. Had the woman been rehearsing a play, reading scripted dialogue, and taking both parts, or conducting a whole conversation with an imaginary daughter? No please, she prays to herself now, let me not, let me never go there. That way, madness too…
But wasn’t he right—about the physics of existence, the laws of the universe, the mythological doodles? You couldn’t do much with any of them, could you? Did it matter whether in death you disappeared into the chemistry of the cosmos or transmigrated into nature, your spiritual essence interfused with matter that was constantly replenishing itself? The personal you wouldn’t know anything about it because whatever it had become wouldn’t be you anymore, would it? Not much help to be had from either the Steadies or the Newbies on that one. Physics old or new, the same stony indifference to the human. And the philosopher’s African life-death cycle, where everything is forever turning effortlessly into something else—what of that? She remembers at the time it sounding a little bland, all a bit pat in fact—everything wrapped up in tidy absolutes. Where was the violent personal transition of the human animal into another stage of being, the visceral terror and dread? As a world order it was too orderly. Its orderliness was deathly. Life wasn’t order; it was chaos. The universe didn’t run on rails conducted by a celestial stationmaster or spin on carousels in rituals of imaginary “renewal”—that old science-fiction film Logan’s Run, which she’d only ever seen dubbed into bad German, came facetiously to mind.
Wasn’t it all, finally, illusion? The passage of the dying from the illusory world of the living to the even more illusory world of the dead—wasn’t that the only real continuum? But not a continuance, only the genes managed that. The primary law of existence was that it ended, leaving one of the two alone—the curse of coupledom, to be left desolate with only a memory for company. The dead man a sadness in the mind of the other, who will herself become a sadness in the minds of other others until we are out of minds to be sad in… and so, on and on. Even grief, though it knew no statutes of limitation, wasn’t ageless. It was something we’d always known, when had we not? Mortality: no exemption or protection, no getting round it. Time is real, only the genes go on. It was the utter unutterable truth. The final total absence of the dead, the absolute subtraction of a life from existence. After such knowledge, what… what anything? And what of this man who isn’t there, the one who has suddenly stopped talking in her head and vanished from her hearing? If he were there, would he be laughing? Perhaps. Crying too of course. With her, for her. For her who is without him.
She is looking through the window of her suddenly unhaunted house. A new spiritless cycle of seasons is approaching. The dog days of humid overcast skies and soaked air will drag themselves out breathlessly to the start of the rains, the time when the year always seemed to be stripped of its soul. The months of flying ants will be here soon, then fruit bats, tree frogs. The seasons will slip into one another, the dry into the cool, into the wet, and the old year, silently devouring its tail, will slide imperceptibly into the new one, making it exactly like itself. Wherever you stepped into the cycle it was the same monotonous shuffle between variants, unstarting and unfinished. The seasons are only of earth and sky, no more than these, but the stability and certainty they provide are satisfying. There is at least this, perhaps only this for now. Sometimes the repetition will grind her down. After a while the same sound made over and over again will be like no sound at all, petering away into silence. She will listen, with sharper ears, for the sudden heightening, the rise in volume or varying of pitch, the odd snake on the stone.