Fin Crowther-Wade is a writer from Brighton practising short-fiction and scripts. His work is often character focused and takes interest in stories about the conflicts characters have in accepting the world as they find it, and their interactions with those doing the same.

Email: finlay.cw@hotmail.co.uk

Ouroboros

Liam was leaning towards me over the table, resting his elbow on a beermat and rolling his sleeve up over his shoulder to show me his new tattoo. On the soft hock of his newly adult arm, a snake ate its tail. In thin and flexing blue lines it circled round on itself, opened its toothsome mouth and bit down. Its cross-hatched back turned perfectly, to follow itself perpetually; it offered its philosophy as eagerly as he offered his arm and waited for me to let him explain.

‘It’s the world-serpent, circling the earth forever.’

‘Where’s the earth?’ I asked. In its middle there was nothing but the rosacea and follicles that speckled his downy arm.

‘It’s a myth,’ he said, ‘so it’s a metaphor. Everything goes on forever because the snake keeps turning.’

The tattoo was smudged along one edge where the shading was dark and he rubbed it as he told me about getting it. The needle hadn’t hurt, the flesh made tender only hurt later, when he touched it. He hadn’t expected them to wrap plastic on his arm or to have had to wait as the dye itched and settled into his skin.

‘I can scratch it now though,’ he said and as he did the snake seemed it might come loose in flakes of skin, the colour shown as fissured and rough. Then he told me about leaving home. I hadn’t seen him since I’d left for uni, but before the first summer I’d come back he had found a job and moved out of his dad’s. That house fell apart, so he moved into another, and when that one failed, followed a rotation of housemates through a series of short-term lets to Manchester. He lived now with a single dad whose cousin he knew and a kitchen porter he never saw.

‘Do you come home often?’

‘Yeah, a bit. I used to offer a lot but Dad just asked what I wanted to do, who I wanted to see. He thought it was pointless me leaving if I was going to come back so much.’

As Liam spoke, he was reflexive in touching the tattoo, and I imagined him on his phone in his room, seeing a photo of the snake tattooed on someone else and holding his phone up against his arm in the mirror.

‘Evie’s at uni now so I thought he might like to have someone back in the house a bit. But I guess it’s up to him.’ He looked over my head at the pub’s faded décor, framed rugby shirts hung alongside St. George’s cross bunting on plastic ribbons, and cabinets of yellowing steins and crockery covered in dust. It was cheap and fine for a catch-up; no one would come in. Liam had insisted we drank here and all night he looked up at the ceiling’s crumbling plaster and said, ‘it’s alright,’ whenever we lapsed into silence.

‘I suppose so. Have you seen Evie?’

‘No, she’s not come home yet.’

He showed me a picture of her in her room at uni and it was as if her half of the room the two of them had shared as kids had hunched over into a different space. The star charts and tarot cards she had begun to collect as she got older still hung reverentially over her bed, alongside posters of indie bands and pages from an old botanical index. Her tray of brittle cactus still struggled up in front of the window, which before had looked down into their garden, but was now a view of flats emerging above shops. I could see her reflection in the photo he was showing me. A different person now she was older, with an expression I had never seen her with around Liam. She looked taller than her brother and posed awkwardly, twisting her arms down to show she was also tattooed, in discrete scribbles of laurels and cursive script that ran over her arms. But the main difference was the room was hers, it did not divide in half between them along its diagonal as it did before, where each half had opposed their hostile tastes.

By the time we moved into secondary school, Liam had collected cow skulls and dog teeth, magazine cuttings of horror film special effects, military surplus, old toys and any other objects he found that might keep his sister from sleeping. He would take his pocket money to boot sales and buy whatever he could afford, and so when Evie complained, their dad took away his money. But this only encouraged him to take it out on her, and when he found the skulls, he arranged them so their bare sockets faced her bed, but by this point she was bored of it and took no notice. It was only when a mouse pelt appeared, tacked to the wall, that Liam claimed to have skinned himself, that their dad took it all away, going through his side of the room with a bin bag until all that was left were Liam’s own childhood toys, library books and the vivarium that housed his snake.

Liam got the snake the first Christmas his dad had to do without their mum. His dad took them out the week before and asked what they wanted, and they got it there and then.

The man in the pet shop had told them it was a dwarf reticulated python, but once it was home and Liam got a book on snakes, the markings didn’t look right. He just swore it must not be a dwarf, and would tell Evie it was going to grow and grow and take over their room in massive teeming coils, but then it hardly grew at all. It was just a rat-snake, already an adult, and would lie still under its heat lamp until it was fed. Liam fed it like a circus act and as his audience, I would watch with Evie as he dangled stiff mice until the snake raised its head and took them up in its body. He had named the snake Eden and would name the mice after the friends and characters that Evie spoke about always, and he would tell her he would stop if she just stopped talking.

I think that Christmas she got a pink plastic doll house with a garage and a car that she begged for and had lost interest in by Christmas Day, but Eden obsessed Liam. He would take the snake out anytime he was in their room and as he spoke to you, would let it turn slowly up his arms and gather round his shoulders. I was staying there once and he brought it into his bed. We were head to toe and still sat up talking and he got up, slid open the vivarium’s glass front and picked Eden up in a twisting handful. The snake froze when Liam touched it until it felt the warmth from his skin and climbed closely over him. He seemed to barely notice and sat back on the bed, still talking about MSN messages from girls in our form, and he petted its head with his finger and stopped talking to kiss it when it reached his face. Then I watched it coil around his neck, and as its sinuous length passed through the sliver of light from the heat lamp beside the bed, its patterned colours bloomed and the contoured shadows showed it was thick and muscular. Liam continued talking in the fake whisper that was supposed to let Evie sleep until his voice started to thin. I just sat there at the other end of the bed watching the snake constrict gently, and Liam continued to try and talk normally. I remember wondering why the snake was trying, it struggled to eat anything besides the mice. Once he worked his hands inside the coils he started to prise it slowly away, and I came over and helped until its coils were wide enough to lift over his head.

Liam sat breathing for a few seconds and in the relative silence we could both hear Evie was upset, burying faint sobs in her bedding. I was about to say something to her but Liam said hoarsely, ‘Thank you, if you’d have grabbed her she would have just crushed faster. You did the right things.’ He still held the snake in his lap and seemed reluctant to put it back.

‘Do you sleep with it?’

‘Sometimes.’ 

The knot it made around his hand seemed to tighten in its movement and he held it out in front of him at a distance. 

‘I don’t though really. I’m not allowed.’ 

He lifted the snaked hand gentler now towards Evie, who was quiet now, and held herself so still she seemed to will sleep on the room. Then he stood and took it back to its vivarium. He spent a moment petting it then he turned off the heat lamp and the room went dark. I heard the glass slide shut and felt Liam get into bed and I sat and kept my eyes on where the snake had been until I could see its faint outline. Liam carried on talking and I pretended to fall asleep.

I was watching his beer swill in his glass and almost spill as he spoke, until he put it down hard and it ran over the edge onto the table.

‘Nobody has it anymore, do they?’

I gave him an idiot smile and vaguely assented and he kept talking.

‘Sure, it’s evolutionary, you need a pack, you need your people. But you don’t have to—you don’t have to.’ He interlaced his fingers until both hands made one swollen fist and shook them emphatically. ‘It’s about self-reliance, nobody has it anymore. They need approval, don’t they? To do anything—to think anything. Someone has to tell them it’s okay, right?’ He took a drawn-out sip of his drink and wiped his mouth. ‘People are afraid to be alone on anything, but you have to be a free-thinker. You can’t be afraid to be alone on things.’

I nodded and tried to keep up with his drink and I saw him glance over the room through the fishbowl bottom of my glass. Then he asked, ‘Do you believe in anything?’

‘Another?’

He gripped his empty glass and said, ‘No, seriously, do you?’

I was looking at his tattoo again, he had left his sleeve rolled up, and as we spoke still stroked his fingers across it, unthinking. ‘No.’ I said, ‘Do you?’

‘I don’t know. There’s got to be something always there, if there’s nothing ever created or destroyed.’ And he made a circle in the air with his finger, presumably to illustrate recurrence.

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Makes sense.’

He lifted his empty glass and shook the dregs in its bottom, then as I rose he caught me. ‘I don’t mean to be, like, religious. It’s just important to me.’

‘What is?’

‘That—I don’t know. That I make myself understood. That I’m not just caught up in whatever I’m supposed to think. Autonomy.’

I took our glasses to the bar and ordered, and as I waited, tried to keep my back to Liam. I looked around the room for a clock amongst the displays of loyalty and sentiment that took the form of little engraved shields, tobacco tins and beer mats pinned to the walls; it wasn’t long until eleven, when the bell would ring. This kind of talk was recent. He had messaged me in the years since I had last seen him and had sent clips of lifestyle podcasts I knew I wouldn’t like, so I hadn’t watched them and I hadn’t responded. Over my shoulder, I saw Liam had sunk comfortably into the thinning red seats and was texting under the table. There were crushed crisps in the carpet around his feet and looking back over the bar at the floor, I saw mouse droppings on the speckled lino.

He came up behind me as I paid for the drinks, clapped his hand on my shoulder, and mouthed an apology with his phone to his ear. He took one of the drinks from the bar and took the call outside, and I took mine back to the table and tried to find somewhere to put my feet where they wouldn’t touch the floor.

Liam had become impatient and I woke to his toes poking my ribs. When I got out of his bed to go to the toilet he followed me and sat at the top of the stairs in his pyjamas, until I came out and he led me downstairs to the TV. We ate cereal and he made me watch Top Gear repeats until he got bored and went into the garden. I followed him around as he found insects under the hedge and joked that he would put them in Evie’s bed. I told him to feed them to Eden instead, and suddenly he got excited and went inside to bring her out. She wouldn’t eat the insects but would rush over the grass towards the fence, with Liam following her, and me behind him. I waited for him to come back, holding Eden and a mouse she might actually eat, and stared at the window and pulled at the grass as he left me waiting.

Then I saw Evie back against the window; Eden must have been hanging from Liam’s arm in front of her face. Evie mostly never minded touching Eden. Sometimes she got the snake out when me and Liam were ignoring her and would sit on the floor of their room playing with her toys with the snake around her shoulders. She must have even fed her when Liam stayed at mine. But it was Liam holding Eden, so she would back away.

Then Liam came outside without Eden and his eyes fixed wide on me before he dropped to the grass and crawled under the hedge. He was mostly incoherent but he said her name, muttering, ‘Eden. Eden. Eden,’ to himself as he dragged his front along the damp morning ground. He got up and pulled apart the weeds in the flower beds desperately and he shook the tree and climbed up to look over the fences. Then he went back inside and I saw Evie still at the window. She must have been watching her brother to see if he would find Eden or come back to their room, but now with him coming up the stairs, she looked at me with her childish brow furrowed and her mouth hung open. She disappeared from view as he came in and I didn’t see or hear anything until I heard her shout, ‘Stop,’ as Liam cried, ‘It’s just a dragon!’ And I knew he was trying to tear the soft toy from her bed apart. Then they both spat out a torrent of accusations as their dad came in. I was at the bottom of the stairs when his shouting overcame theirs, but by the time I’d reached their room, they were fighting again, and his clamorous voice was mixed up in theirs.

They didn’t stop or look over when I came in and I stepped over Evie’s books torn, bent and open on the floor, amongst the ripped-up drawings she’d done of horses, her friends and herself, to sit on Liam’s bed. Evie’s piggy bank was on the floor under their desk. Liam must have thrown it but it hadn’t broken, it just lay on its back kicking its feet in the air. I was surprised, he seemed to have been indiscriminate in destroying their room, the few things he still had were strewn across the floor too. But Evie just had more stuff and now she was sitting on her bed amongst its mess and insisting, ‘I haven’t done anything. Just go away.’ Liam wouldn’t leave and came and sat beside me on his bed, taking fistfuls of his duvet and pulling at it, so she got up and began picking up her stuff. 

Their dad kept asking ‘What happened?’

Liam just said, ‘I don’t know,’ again and again. Evie took her books and put them back on the shelf above her bed, and she took the ruined drawings and left them on the desk while their dad hovered between them, unsure who to comfort. Then he turned to Liam and told him to wait downstairs, still not acknowledging I was there, and Evie pressed, ‘Dad, please, leave me alone.’

As we left, I looked into the vivarium. Its front was open and it was empty except for the woodchip and foliage piled haphazardly into some kind of shelter, and a mouse left dead on its side, uneaten. All the hollows and canopies Liam had made for Eden seemed to promise they were hiding her, but they were empty, dark and grey without the heat lamp. We went downstairs and their dad went to call my parents, leaving me with Liam in the living room. I remember I stood in the middle of the room as he flung the cushions off the sofa and struggled to lift and look under it, and he pulled the shelves and the cabinet away from the wall, letting anything atop them fall. I could hear his dad on the phone, but he must have been waiting for me to leave to talk to Liam, so I just waited, too scared to touch anything in the fragile space he had exposed. When there was nothing left to upend he went through everything in the hall, then he pulled everything from its place in the kitchen. I heard the pots clatter on the floor and looked through the doorway. Liam was on his knees pulling pans from the cupboards, and his dad was taking the dishes and the cooking books out of those his son couldn’t reach. When he had removed everything, he stopped and stood watching Liam as I was; he had searched every cupboard and the oven, the fridge and the freezer, but was going back to each and looking again. His dad stood behind him and slowly he leaned over and put his hand on Liam’s shoulder. ‘Liam, stop. Calm down.’ Liam stayed on his knees and carried on searching through the cookware until his dad crouched beside him, awkwardly and cautiously moved his hand to the crown of Liam’s head.

 ‘Liam.’ The two were still, Liam exhausted, hanging on the cupboard door, while his dad’s hand pried his slowly away, and I was embarrassed watching, so went back into the living room to wait. 

Eventually Liam came through and said, ‘I think you should probably go home now.’

‘Yeah, I am soon I think. Your dad has called.’

He didn’t say anything else but fretted about the room then left again. I heard him go upstairs to his room and I heard his interrogation of his sister muffled through the walls. I could hear his agitation in his steps across the floor above me, working himself up until he was angry again, as his voice grew louder over Evie’s. Then I heard his childish feet stamp and his weak voice groan and then the shatter of the vivarium as it hit the floor, and both children’s sudden shouts.

The pub had emptied before the bell; the few grey men that had sat around the bar left the mute kid serving to wipe down, and we were the only people left. Liam came back inside and put his empty glass down in front of me on the way to the bar.

‘Can I get another?’ I heard the kid mumble his apologies and Liam said loudly, ‘But you’ve just called it.’

The kid looked around the bar and soberly replied, ‘You’re the only people here,’ and Liam sat down across from me again.

He looked at my glass, mostly full. ‘Finish that, we’ll go somewhere else.’ I held my stomach, took a large drink and felt it all the way down through my throat.

‘I think that’s it for me, Liam.’

‘I’ll have it.’

‘No, I’ll finish this. Then home.’

He sank back into the seat in his coat and looked to the room once again. ‘It’s not that late.’

I swallowed at my drink and thought about what might have happened. I had heard Liam shut the vivarium and I saw the snake lying in the dark, still for ages, and then I fell asleep. I imagined Eden finding the glass still parted slightly by something hidden in the dark, or finding a weakness in her home. She drew herself out into the silent room half-empty, held herself taut in the air, and dropped her head slowly until it met the floor. There was nothing of Liam’s to be left in the snake’s way and it circled beneath us before it found the window open, and passed its flexing length from the windowsill to the drainpipe and down. I imagined it moving tirelessly as it tasted the things clung on the air and finally hiding in the weeds and the hedges and disappearing. With Liam across from me I imagined it circled the earth until it found itself back on his arm, the world pulled out from under it.