THE SERPENT
January 1965
Plum knew where Fable got the baby. Plum had seen, that night, the lights in the forest: first, just the one – dancing across the field, weaving lightly between the trees – then the second, striding out, converging on the first. They’d whirled sharply into a single light, and disappeared.
Fable had gone away on the train the next day, and nobody mentioned any of the lights Plum saw. She had been relieved, for Fable’s sake.
But then Fable came home again, and all hell had broken loose. Because Fable was pregnant, and she wasn’t married!
Babies born outside wedlock were a ‘monstrous problem’ in society – it had said so in Olive’s book, the one she had given Plummy some months back, when asked how babies were made.
Plum had stared at Fable across the dinner table, trying to imagine her sister in contortions of monstrous-problem-making until Fable had tossed a bread roll at her and told her to take a picture because it would last longer.
Since then, Plum had watched Fable sitting longingly by the window, all pent up and sputtering, and she’d known Fable was thinking about the forest, and the lights.
Plum wondered if Fable knew just how much trouble she was in now.
When Fable moved to the cottage to be with Sonnet, but really to be closer to the creek, a terrible thought occurred to Plum: perhaps Fable could actually die in childbirth, punishment for this abominable thing she’d let happen to her. Women did die, all the time! Plum had seen it in movies, read it in books. Ergo, childbirth could also kill Fable.
It was up to Plum to protect her.
Ever since, Plum had been keeping vigilant guard over the cottage, and over Fable. She closed and locked the cottage windows whenever she found them open, and sealed the front gate with vine. She filched a box of nails from Uncle Gav and dropped them in a perfect perimeter around the cottage fence. Three times a day, compulsively, Plum performed her checks on the cottage – plus once more after she’d been sent to bed. She didn’t miss a single check.
Which was how she came, one sweltering morning, to find the serpent.
As she passed the cottage, creek-side, there it was: the iridescent sheen of an amethystine python, coiled beneath the dove orchid. It was thicker than a man’s arm, with a waiting maw wide enough for Plum herself.
When Plum flapped onto the veranda at Heartwood, crying alarm, it was already an outpost of urgency. Her shouts were lost in the general commotion. Gav was boarding up windows and Olive was atop a ladder, removing hanging ferns. Sonnet was unpacking bags of canned food, divvying them into piles, distracted thoughts playing across her brow. Fable was nowhere to be seen.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked, cross at their indifference.
‘The red pennant is out in front of the post office. The Wet’s finally coming in, on the front of a monster cyclone.’
Cyclone. Any other day, that word alone would have tipped her into a wretched terror. But today, she had even worse news to break.
‘Uncle Gav, there’s a giant python at the cottage!’
‘Ay?’
‘A snake – a horrible, horrible snake. Down the cottage. You’ve got to come!’
‘Inside, is he?’
Sonnet and Olive didn’t even look up.
‘Uncle Gav!’
‘All right, Plum-pie. Gimme a sec.’
*
Gav crashed through greenery while Plum shrieked at him from the cottage gate not to go any closer.
‘Do you want me to find him or not?’ her uncle asked, pitchfork gently pushing aside a prolific shower of white flowers.
‘Big rain on the way,’ he said. ‘The dove orchid hasn’t flowered like this in decades.’
‘Uncle Gav!’ Plum cried, stomping.
‘Ah, here he is. Geez he’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen. Might be over twenty feet long, what a beauty you’ve got!’
‘He’s not mine! Uncle Gav, take it away!’
‘No need. He’ll take off himself to find shelter from the storm soon enough.’
‘What if he tries to shelter inside? Would you get rid of it!’
Her uncle stood a moment admiring the python. He rapped on Fable’s bedroom wall, just above it. ‘You in there, Beauty? Seen your visitor out here?’
Gav stepped back from the orchid, its tiny birds falling into place once more. ‘Come on, we’ve got more than enough to keep us busy at Heartwood. And you, little miss, have got chores to start on. Let’s go.’
Just before the gate squealed shut behind them, Gav mused: ‘It’s funny, though, that snake turning up right now.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Nothin’ really. Just, there used to be an old wives’ tale you’d hear in Noah, years ago, ’bout them big pythons turning up on properties, just in time for mother’s milk. Apparently, they’ve got a taste for it. Or maybe it’s the smell of a woman full of baby. Anyway, women used to say: if your wee babe’s just not thriving, all skin and bones, fadin’ away, best you check them rafters above for a big healthy-looking snake.’
‘But how would they get a mother’s milk . . .’ Plum trailed off. ‘Oh, I see.’
‘Look out,’ said Gav, ‘here comes breakfast again!’