Light green rain

​

Then there was that time a snake appeared on a paving slab in her garden. It was early spring and still quite cool so we were surprised to see it there. It must have slithered out from wherever it lived, in the compost probably or under a stone, to lie for a while in the weak sunlight. 

 

My son was with us. He must’ve been about four or five. He stood behind my mother and me who were sitting on a bench staring at the snake. It hadn’t moved a muscle, its beady black eyes unblinking in front of the saucer of water we’d put there – a gesture I performed really for my son, thinking it unlikely the snake would stick out its tongue and start lapping.  

 

It was a long and beautiful snake. It had a slim black collar and dark zigzaggings all down the greeny-yellow skin of its body. My son had never seen a live snake before. I could feel his breath as he hovered behind me, peering over my shoulder. I said something about how unusual it was, so early in the year, it wasn’t even warm, what was it doing here, and so unbothered by our presence. 

 

My mother sat at her end of the bench fiddling with a blade of grass. She was looking steadily at the snake but I don’t think she was seeing it. When she was in one of her depressions, as she was then, she didn’t seem able to connect what she was looking at with what was happening inside her, and yet it seemed as if in some remote part of herself she was conscious of this and trying hard to summon up the right emotion. But whatever she was trying to feel for the snake had gone into her fingers that were twisting and shredding the blade of grass.

 

I began to think there was something wrong with the snake. I wondered if it wasn’t in some way damaged. The word came out with an emphasis I hadn’t intended. My son leaned in over my shoulder, repeating it in a whisper like a spell. I could feel his excitement at the thought the snake might be afflicted in some way. I wished I hadn’t used that word. I wanted to take it back. I wanted to take it away from my son as I might a toy I was afraid would lead him to some harm. 

 

Saying it had made it difficult for us to go back to looking at the snake as we had been. We weren’t looking at it so much now as studying it there on the paving slab. But looking at it nonetheless since it was easier to look at than anything else, especially my mother who sat there with a look of complete indifference on her face that was usually so expressive, one that pulled itself this way and that, its many lines a testament to all that she had felt in response to being alive. And even though it was just a surface, it was the continually moving surface of all that she was feeling, or thought she was. But now it had stopped. Something inside had shut down. The signals weren’t making it up to her face which made it hard to look at because of how broken it appeared. It was easier to rest my hand on her shoulder or kiss the top of her head than look at that face where nothing happened.

 

I was grateful for the snake. I was glad that it had appeared and given us something to look at and think about, even if there was something wrong with it. Perhaps I was glad for the opportunity to feel concern for this creature who wasn’t behaving in the way we thought it should, and glad too that I could share this concern with my son, who kept jumping from one foot to another saying, ‘What should we do, what should we do?’ 

 

I glanced at my mother, not sure if she was hearing him or even thinking about the snake and it struck me how this depression, that had like the others come and taken such a hold of my mother, felt in a way as if it had nothing to do with her or her life. It  seemed to have come from somewhere else entirely, as if she’d been caught by some invisible thing and utterly subdued by it.

 

When I spoke to her she’d look down at her hands or out of the window as if she were afraid to catch my eye in case I too would be lured into the same terrible trap she found herself in. There were times when this reluctance to meet my gaze had the peculiar effect of creating a space – an impersonal, almost confessional space outside our relationship – in which I felt I could say anything I wanted to without fear or the smallest threat of judgement.

 

My son had wandered off to another part of the garden, leaving us alone where soon I began to find myself inside this clear, expansive space feeling that I might be able to say something I’d never dared say before – about how much I loved her and how much, as a child, I had needed her, how there had been times I’d longed for her, even when she was right there beside me. And feeling that I might at last be able to open my mouth and say these things, I became aware that I’d been staring at the snake, into one of its beady black eyes. I’d been staring into the eye without seeing it. And I knew without looking that my mother was also staring into that eye that seemed now to be holding our two gazes, absorbing all our attention, and somehow preventing me from uttering a single word. I had at that moment the strangest feeling that the snake was protecting my mother from me, and all that I had wanted to say.

 

My son came back and began picking tufts of grass and throwing them in the air so that a light green rain fell on the snake, but it didn’t seem to mind. I watched the little blades of grass land on its thick patterned skin and wondered to what extent the animal felt anything. Not just the grass being sprinkled over its skin but anything at all. And I wondered, as I often did, what my mother was feeling and when her face would come back to her, when all the lines would remember how they were supposed to move, in the ways that had made them so deep and beautiful.

 

I knew that when my mother recovered, as she always did, it would be as if nothing had happened. The last thing she’d want would be to talk about it. I’d try asking her what it had been like for her. I’d want to know if there might be some way we could prevent it from happening again but I think for my mother there was nothing to learn from that state and she’d make it clear, in her lack of response, that I, in seeking an answer there was profoundly misguided. So it became something beyond my understanding, something I couldn’t question and to which I came to attach a bleak mystery – one to which I, in some deep unknowable part of myself,  aspired. 

 

She got up then and smiled weakly at the snake. It was time for her nap. How willingly she’d go for her nap. Sometimes I felt that sleep was all she wanted to do. The door at the end of the landing would shut and my son and I would know to keep away. She was at last where she wanted to be. Whether she felt that by absenting herself we’d forget she was suffering or that she simply knew we couldn’t help her, I don’t know. 

 

And in that room she slept and slept. It was a torment knowing I’d have to wake her because while she lay there, oblivious to the world, it was impossible for her to be unhappy. But I knew I’d have to. Dusk was falling and I wanted to wake her before it got completely dark. I didn’t want her to wake alone and get confused and think she’d slept the day away. 

 

Standing there with the glass of water I’d brought for her I wondered if I might gently sprinkle her with it, if that might be a nice way to wake up or why didn’t I just throw the whole lot over her, give her – or whatever it was that was keeping her from me – a shock, why not, anything to try and put a stop to it. And although I knew nothing would be achieved by such an outburst, she’d only be hurt and bewildered, it took some control to place the glass down on her bedside table.

 

I heard my son calling me. His light footsteps approach the door, then silence. He knew to be quiet at such times. 

‘Mummy’, I heard him whisper on the other side of the door, ‘the snake’s gone, I saw it go into a bush, I know where it lives, I think it woke up, I saw where it went … shall I show you?’

 

I pictured darkness falling over the garden, the snake returned to the darkness from where it had come, the flecks of a light grassy rain still floating in the saucer. I didn’t answer my child. I stood on one side of the door knowing he was there on the other. I didn’t go to him. I told myself I wanted to be there when my mother woke up even though I stood there not wanting to be the one to wake her.