Chapter 5: The Snake Speaker

The building watched him as if it had never once stopped. Soot clung to the bricks in a thin, greasy bloom; the windows, warped with age, held the summer sky in a dull grey. Even in warmth, the orphanage smelt faintly of boiled cabbage and coal. The door stuck in the frame, as it always had, and the runner on the stairs was balding and mean with dust. He did not touch the seam in the banister where the wood had split; he took the steps without looking, counting them, hearing the muffled clatter of children behind walls, the tick of the iron clock in the hall, the whisper of paper under Mrs Cole’s hands as she pretended to be busy at her desk.

“Back then, Mr Riddle,” she said, without rising. She liked to say Mr Riddle. It cost nothing and sounded as if she had granted him something. Her cardigan was buttoned wrong, one high, one low, so the front sat askew. There were new posters around her desk—EXCEPT IN CASE OF AIR RAID—GAS MASKS MUST BE CARRIED—KEEP CALM—odd blocks of shouting that made the corridor look like a newspaper had exploded.

“Yes,” said Tom. He did not put his trunk down. He waited for her to look at him; when she did, he inclined his head by a fraction. “Thank you.”

“Your school,” she said, every time, as if testing it for cracks, “sent a letter. They said you’d be home for the summer and that you were to be treated as before.”

“As before,” he said.

The skin around her mouth moved. He thought it was a smile. “You’ll muck in same as the others. No special favours. You understand.”

“I always have.”

She tapped the page and the clock went on ticking. “They’re saying in the street,” she went on, as if he had asked, “that the children will be sent away. Not yet, they say, but soon. Imagine. Out to the country.” Her laugh was soft and strange. “We’ll see. Until then—everyone has chores.”

“I’ll do mine,” said Tom. “May I go up?”

She flicked her hand in a not-quite-dismissal. “And, Tom—no funny business. I don’t mind what your school calls it. I don’t want it here.”

He set his trunk down with care. The strap left a faint damp print on his palm. He was aware, quite precisely, of the weight inside the trunk: his books, the thin, sharp smell of bottled ingredients he had been allowed to keep, wrapped in newspaper and distrust; the narrow box that held his wand. He could have named the exact position of each thing in the trunk with his eyes closed. He did not look at Mrs Cole again.

His old room was two beds and a window like a blind eye. The mattress had a trough where a smaller version of himself had lain for years, waking to the early trains, the cries of someone else’s nightmare. Someone had folded a rag of curtain back to let in the heat. He put the trunk under the bed, made himself kneel, and slid the bolt of the trunk across until it clicked. His fingers, when he drew them away, were dusty.

He stood with one hand on the bedframe. The metal was cool under his palm. Hogwarts had been stone and green light and voices that knew what he was; it had been work that sharpened the mind like a knife taken to a whetstone. Here was air thick with cabbage, and children’s sighs, and the damp towel he would not put to his face. He looked at the window. Below, the garden had the same bitter stretch of weeds and nettles and one overambitious rhubarb; the brick wall at the end he had once believed no boy could climb.

They brought his tea to the long table with the others, where the knives had no edge and the bread was tired. He sat while the others talked in little darts and bursts, like sparrows. Dennis, who was red-eared and always had been, nudged a girl with plaits and tilted his head in Tom’s direction.

“That’s him,” Dennis said. “He’s back.”

The girl glanced, then looked away. None of them met his eye for more than a breath. That suited him. He cut his bread with the knife that did not cut and ate without looking up. Mrs Cole’s chair scraped the floor. Across the table someone’s laughter died mid-sound.

Afterwards the evening went sludgy. He did not join their game in the yard. He took a cloth and a pail from the scullery and scoured a bit of banister no one noticed, then the window outside the boys’ room, then the sink. He did it because she had said chores, and because it covered other things. He could think while he worked. He could keep his hands busy and his back turned. He could be exactly what they expected: quiet and diligent; harmless, if they did not know how to look.

Dark came late, unwillingly. Heat gave up the day slowly. The brick wall held on to it and breathed it back at him as he stood in the garden and told himself he had no intention of being sentimental. It had never been his way. Still, there was a shape in him, not thought, not feeling exactly; a narrowing, a drawing in around a point he would not name. He opened the gate into the narrow passage that ran along the side of the building, between the orphanage and the ash pit. The Muggle world clanked and hummed beyond the wall, and somewhere, thin and tinny, a wireless spoke of ministers and arrangements and a line on a map.

He crouched by the rhubarb. The leaves were big as plates and beaded with evening damp. A buzz from the nettles rose and fell like breathing.

Something moved beneath the spread of those leaves. A slight shiver in the soil, a line cut through dust. It was not so remarkable—there were always things here: beetles, slugs, pale worms. He reached to push a leaf aside.

Cold touched his fingers. Then he saw it: a slick, dark line, coil on coil, a head like a pencil end lifting, tasting. The stripe was green-brown, the eyes small and bright. A grass snake. Common. Harmless. It looked at him with its mouth slightly open, tongue tasting the world in quick threads.

He had been sure, for a while now, that sometimes the world contained sounds other people did not hear. He had noticed them at school: a whisper from the radiators that seemed more than pipes, a faint susurrus when he crossed the lower corridors, something like breath through reeds, like a voice without words. He had told himself it was the old building speaking; he had not liked how plausible that sounded. He had stopped thinking about it. He had not wanted to be foolish.

Now, the snake’s tongue flicked again, and the sound came with it: a receipt of air that was also something else, an intention, a small, clean hunger.

Warmth, the snake breathed, and in the hearing of that word, the garden changed. It was as if he had been straining at a door and it had swung inward, silently, on oiled hinges. He did not wonder, he acted.

He lowered his hand, palm up, not quite touching the soil. “Come,” he said. It was not English as he knew it; he felt his mouth shape itself around breath and heat, around the line of the tongue. He did not plan the word. It came the way breathing came.

The snake’s head angled, held. It watched him. He kept his hand still.

Here, he said, and it meant more than location. It meant the hollow of his palm, cool skin, safe.

The snake flowed towards him. It was the simplest thing in the world; it was as if this were what hands were for. He felt the weight of it lay itself along his fingers—a curious, cool pressure. The small head bumped his thumb and paused there, a question of its own.

He did not entirely remember to breathe until his lungs took a breath for him.

“Up,” he said, and his voice made that shift, the gentle rasp, as if there were a second mouth in him that knew how to speak. The snake slid across his wrist and coiled carefully halfway up his forearm, neat as rope. Its tongue brushed his skin: two points, a tickle like thought.

He looked at it. It looked back. Its eyes were gold with a black pin at the centre. Nothing moved except its tongue.

Curious, the snake said, and the sound lay against the inside of his ear as if someone had leaned close. You are warm.

“And you are not,” he said. His teeth touched; he felt the word in the back of his throat. The rhubarb leaves made a green ceiling and the last of the light turned the metal of the pipes to pale fire. He could hear the clock inside the orphanage though the window was shut. Behind the wall a boy shouted, and another shouted back.

He lifted the snake a little, so it would not fall. Part of him—small and precise—wanted to test exactly how far he could go. “Stay,” he said.

It stilled. Even the tongue froze. The only movement was its ribs, minute and shivering under his hand.

“Down,” he said.

It loosened, and slid into his palm with such obedience that laughter pressed suddenly at the back of his mouth. He did not allow it. His hand remained steady. If there were any tremor, it was not visible.

“Are you hungry?” he asked, because the word had presented itself, and because he wanted to know if he could ask questions and not only command. The shape of the sound was different; coaxing leaned forwards into command, but did not become it. He could feel all of that happening under the words. He could feel that the word itself was not the whole thing. Intention, some part of him, steady and cold, told the rest of him. Intention, and the thought of the thing, and the image: the snake sliding into grass under the wall, striking.

Hunger. Warm, moving. Not now. The snake flicked its tongue again, brushed him, and he felt oddly as if he had been touched in the centre of his chest.

A cat could have come into the garden. A child could have run to fetch him for some invented council of children—a game, a war. Instead, the street outside did whatever it did, and inside the orphanage Mrs Cole breathed and turned a page.

“Go,” he said. “Quietly.”

The snake flowed off his hand and went noiselessly into the green and brown beyond him, and when it had gone, he realised he had been kneeling, and that his knees had left impressions in the dry earth.

He put his hand against the warm pipe and stood. He looked at where the snake had been without really seeing the place. His palm still felt the weight of it, a small coil pressed to skin. He turned to the wall and pressed his thumb into a flake of brickwork until it broke and powdered. His mouth had gone dry. He swallowed once and the sound was loud in the small space.

He ought not to stand and stare. He stepped back into the yard. Dennis looked up from the tin soldier he was smashing with his heel and looked away again quickly, guilty and bored. Tom crossed the yard and went inside and washed his hands as if they were sticky, though they were quite clean.

That night he lay on the shallow trough of the mattress and kept still. Someone down the corridor coughed twice in the dark, and once a train passed, a weight and a rush and a sound like metal being pulled through a narrow place. The boy in the next bed turned on his side, blanket rasping. The window would not shut entirely; the air came through the crack with a soft, persistent sigh, like something with lungs. He did not sleep at once.

He did not like—he did not have the habit—of being surprised. He lay with his arms straight and watched the unlit ceiling and let his thoughts move as they wanted. Underneath all of them lay the precise sensation of the snake’s body along his arm, the sensation of his mouth changing shape for those sounds, and the exact second when the thing outside him had understood him, as if all the noise and clutter of the day had fallen into place. He had not needed to pretend to himself that it was his imagination. There was a point at which pretending became vulgar. This was not that. This had the clarity that he valued.

He breathed out. It sounded like a decision being made.

He woke with a cold line of sun on his face and the sense that the day would be ordinary if he allowed it. He did not intend to allow it. After breakfast—bread, tea of an ochre colour, and jam that tasted of fruit only in the idea of it—Mrs Cole caught his sleeve.

“You’ll take the rubbish out,” she said. “Mr Bell hasn’t been by. Heap’s getting high.”

“I’ll do it now,” said Tom.

He did what she had asked, dragging the bin lid and not coughing at the stink. He cleaned the steps, too, and shook out the mat. He could measure a day in the small tasks that satisfied no one but gave him a way to move from morning to afternoon without being bothered by Dennis wanting a fight or one of the little ones wanting him to be kind. He could be neither kind nor unkind if he was busy.

In the small hours after dinner, when the light had edged away again and the heat had turned to something like a memory in the bricks, he went to the garden. He took the same place by the rhubarb. He dropped his hand again as if he had done it every evening of his life. He breathed, the way he had done. He thought the word and then he did not need to think it. He made it.

Come, he said. Come here.

The snake came. It might have been the same one; he liked to think it was. It flicked forward out of shadow at a speed that startled him—he made no noise—and laid itself against his wrist with an air that could almost have been trust.

Curious, it said again. It had a limited set of shapes, like any mouth. But he could hear difference even in its sameness. He could hear it say: yours, and mean his skin, and mean his smell, and mean something like recognising the place where it had been and found warmth.

He thought: Stop. And did not say it. The snake stopped, all the same.

He thought: Move. And it did.

He stood with his arm held out a fraction and watched himself control something that had not known him twenty-four hours before. The satisfaction went through him sharp and clear as the taste of mint. He let himself smile at nothing.

The thought came afterwards, as he set the snake back into the grass: it was one thing to know he had a capacity that was rare, that not everyone could do; it was another to realise that there was no one to tell him what it was, or what to call it, or whether someone would see it and hope to take it away. He stayed in the garden until the sky lightened from one darkness to another and the first train passed, hooting a melancholy sound. He did not speak to the snake again. He did not need to. When he went inside and closed the door, a crack moved in his face and was gone—no more than a breath that found it had been held and released at last.

He did not ask Mrs Cole for a book. He knew what books the orphanage had; he had scoured them years ago, looking for things with meanings beyond the words offered. Still, in the afternoon, he went to the shelf under the stairs where the books leaned away from a damp patch. A torn encyclopaedia (B—C), an atlas with Africa faded to the colour of straw, a book about British birds with three plates missing, an old green thing about reptiles and amphibians with illustrations of frogs that looked like old peas. He took that one and the encyclopaedia and sat on the bottom step where the air was cool and smelt of dust and wood.

The reptiles book had a pompous tone and did not know anything important. It said that the English grass snake (Natrix natrix) was non-venomous, and liked ponds and slow water, and ate frogs, and could feign death when attacked. It said nothing of what to say to it or how the sound would sit in the mouth. The encyclopaedia told him that snakes heard through their bones, which pleased him. He traced a finger under the line. He could feel the faint drag of old paper under his fingertip. It was almost possible to imagine someone else had learned that here before him and had put a finger on the same sentence.

He looked up the word snake languages; it did not exist. The encyclopaedia told him that people had once charmed snakes in India by playing a pungi; the book’s tone suggested disapproval. He read the paragraph twice and thought about a flute, then thought about how unnecessary a flute would be if one could speak to the thing itself. He had the sense of someone standing behind him; he turned his head, but there was no one in the corridor.

He put the books back. He did not take them upstairs with him. He knew how Mrs Cole’s eyes worked; she would notice, then ask, and her face would arrange itself into concern that smelt of old tea. He would not let it happen.

He went back to the garden that evening not because he could not wait but because waiting when he could act felt vulgar, a performance of patience he did not need. He lowered his hand again, and the snake came again, and he said, quietly—because he wanted to know whether he could—follow.

It followed, longer than he expected. It wound round the heel of his shoe and across the dry patch where nothing grew and along the base of the wall. He kept his steps small and exact. He looked ahead to where the angle of brick met shadow. He said turn and the snake turned when his breath was still finishing the word.

When he bent down by the spot on the wall where the brick had crumbled and had become soft as pressed sugar, he put the snake there, in the hole, and said, wait.

Wait, the snake said back, as if tasting the edges of the instruction.

He stood, glanced once towards the kitchen window where a strip of light lay on the garden like a fallen card, and slipped back inside. He rinsed a cup. He made himself walk as if he had been to the privy. His hand looked different when he put it on the kitchen table—there was nothing on it, there was no mark, but he could have pointed out the exact places where the scales had pressed. He returned to the garden and found the snake where he had left it. Good, he said, and that word too had a shape he had not known he knew. He brought the snake out and let it go, and it went as any wild thing goes, without gratitude.

The next day an owl came for him. The children were at breakfast; their voices made a cluttered noise, like spoons on glazed plates. The window had been left open because it was already stifling. The owl came in at a sensible height, not low enough to startle anyone into hysteria. It was brown, and held its wings as if they mattered. It dropped on to the back of a chair near him and met his eye. The room had a full second of silence in it.

Mrs Cole said, carefully, “I suppose that is for you.”

The owl did not condescend to her. It stuck out its leg.

Tom reached, unwound the string with careful fingers, and took the letter. He did not stroke the owl. It was businesslike. It would despise that. “Thank you,” he said.

The owl left without fuss. Dennis said, in a whisper that carried, “Blimey,” and flinched, as if he had surprised himself.

Tom put the letter on the table next to his bowl of porridge and did not open it at once. He could feel Mrs Cole choosing to be brave, which was tedious. He finished what was in the bowl with neat, unhurried movements, disliking it in honest proportion. He drank the tea and set the cup aside and then, when he could see that Mrs Cole had permitted herself to breathe, he opened the letter.

The parchment had a smell that was not the orphanage’s smell. He had not noticed until it touched his hands how he had missed it. There were neat, spare lines across it, no flourishes.

Tom,

I suppose it is to be the same everywhere: all the grown-ups whispering in corners and pretending children can’t see them, but saying very loudly that they aren’t afraid. The mills have shortened hours but no one admits it is for fear of what may happen. My mother’s opinion is that if anything does happen we shall do what the Prince family has always done: endure, and make a list of the ways other people have failed. She says, “We do not ask for scholarships.” I thought you would like that. If a scholarship wants you, in her view, it can convince her of it by looking at her crosseyed and then dying.

I found a book that might interest you: some old edition of Phials and Philters, not very good, but the section on root maceration is plainly copied from Borage and then muddled, which I suppose is why it makes some things sound more dangerous than they are and others less. This is gratifying; it makes me feel superior to a dead man. I will bring it in September if you like. I am sorry the library at your home is unhelpful. Our library is, above all, damp.

I do not see why the school should not do better than this business of handing you off for the summer. If they do not, we shall have to do better ourselves. Write, or I shall write again and say more unpardonable things and you will feel obliged to scold me.

Eileen

He read the letter once, then again, slower. The way she had written: the words were weighed out. A wit there, dry and wanting to bite. Not pleading. Not even particularly kind. He could see, in his mind, the tilt of her chin when she said the thing about the scholarship. His mouth made the smallest curve.

He folded the letter crisply and put it in his pocket. He did not, because the room held too many eyes, go up to his trunk at once. He waited for the moment when Mrs Cole would have to stand to see to the washing-up. He went then, with no haste, and took the wooden pen he had saved from school, and a sheet of paper that had lines that wanted to shiver off under one’s hand.

He wrote at the table under the eaves near the boys’ room, where the light came in thin and grey. He did not like to blot. He kept the letters steady and chose, with care, not to say: I have found something; I know something that will matter.

Eileen,

You will make me scold you if you require me to defend the school to you. It has nothing to fear from you, and you have nothing to fear from it. As to the library at home: this place owns a book on reptiles that believes a snake’s primary quality is its moral character, so we are not yet at the point of learning anything important here.

If you bring the Phials book, I will be appropriately grateful and feel superior to the dead man with you. You ought not to give much thought to your mother’s philosophy. If a scholarship wants anything, it will not be persuaded by her.

If you are enduring, try to do it while reading. The mills and the whisperers will do as they please whether you watch them or not.

Tom

He sat and looked at the paper for a second after he had signed his name. It would not do to sound as if he cared what she thought of how he wrote. The letter was not sloppy. He folded it, slid it into an envelope, and wrote the address she had given him at the end of term. He did not know whether it would reach; owls found places by a logic of their own.

He went to the kitchen, where Mrs Cole was rinsing plates, and said, with exact civility, “May I have some twine?”

Her head came up as if he had broken something. He had not used that voice with her often, because it made people show their ages. She turned, and her face became the face she used for someone she might be able to say had been raised well.

“There’s string in the drawer,” she said. “And you ought to ask for it, not just take it.”

“I did,” he said. He took the string and went away and tied the letter to the leg of the owl when it returned, as he had known it would. He did not watch it leave. He put his cup in the sink and walked back to the door, ordinary.

On the third evening after the letter, it rained. The rain came in with the dogged determination of someone doing a dull job very well. The smell of it came up from the pavement and made the inside of the orphanage feel newly rotten. The garden turned slick; a snail left a long silver line over the brick.

He put his hand under the lip of the window and leaned, listening. The rain made a steady drumming on the pipes and the leaves. It also made a sound he knew now as part of something else: under the noise, a thread. He went anyway, with his jacket slicking under his fingers.

He crouched under the rhubarb. Water ran off the leaves and down his neck and into the collar of his shirt. He put out his hand, palm up, and said, not loudly, here.

The snake came. It was wet and cold and angrier than it had been before. He could hear it think, the word edged, sharp. Wet. Cold. He kept his hand steady.

Warm, he said again, a promise, and felt the strange thing one feels when one keeps a promise the moment one makes it: the word had a taste. He bent his head so his breath fell warm over his hand. The snake paused, then settled more heavily in his palm. He spoke to it until the rain eased, and then he did something he had not done: he lifted his hand so the snake was level with his eyes, and he tried to sing to it as he had heard that punji sounded in the foolish book. He did not, of course, sing.

He breathed a long breath and let intention run along it—soft, coiling, not a command. The snake’s tongue flicked and flicked again, and then he could hear—the best he could call it was a pleasing attention. He did not know whether to name it as anything else. The rain moved to a fine spray. He let the snake go.

In the following days he practised the way a person practises scales. He did not draw attention to it. He went to the garden at odd hours, when the younger children slept, when the wash was on the line, when Mrs Cole had the insurance man, when the wireless from next door shouted that someone had made a speech in some other country. He learnt quickly how little he needed to say. He learned that if he thought of striking—if he imagined, minutely, the flow of movement and the bite—the snake would coil with interest that had heat in it. He imagined other things. He was polite. He asked. He did not ask every time.

Once, in the narrow passage by the ash pit, he stopped breathing because the snake he had called—or one that had come of its own—lifted its head, tasted, and then spoke without waiting to be spoken to.

Sssmell, it said. Its tongue moved; the word contained more than he could unpick. Stone. Damp. Old.

He touched the brick wall with his fingers as if the words had made it interesting. The brick was already interesting. Still, he looked at it differently. He knew about old things in walls. He glanced at the angle in the brick where a darker line ran; it could have been a stain. It could have been where something once had been and was not now. The thought sat down slowly in him and made itself comfortable.

He did not go fooling at the wall with a knife. He did not stand and puzzle with his head cocked like a child in a fairy story. He had learnt, even before Hogwarts, that the right thing sometimes was to look away until you could see better. He let the snake leave and went inside and, to satisfy Mrs Cole and the version of himself that wanted a small thing to hold in his hand, he took the wash off the line before rain came.

Dennis cornered him the next day in the muddied yard. He had a cut across the bridge of his nose that looked new and had been left to scab. “Do you think we’re going to be sent away?” Dennis asked, belligerent because he was worried. “’Cause of the war. If there is going to be one.”

“There will be trains,” said Tom. “They will load the children on to them. Someone will meet them with a clipboard. There will be names called.”

“Will they send you away?” Dennis asked. “Or will your school—”

“It will be as it ought to be,” said Tom. He did not bother to fill the space in Dennis’s face, which was marked with hope and fear and the desire to pull him down to the ground.

Dennis scowled. “You think you’re clever,” he said.

“I know what I am,” said Tom.

He went to the corner of the yard where the wall flaked like old pastry; he put his hand to a loose piece and pressed until brick dust gritted in his fingerprints. He did not tug it free. He let Dennis go. He was busy.

The owl brought a second letter from Eileen a week later. It came at noon, when the youngest were meant to be napping and were not, and Mrs Cole had a headache that showed in the tightness on either side of her nose. He took it into the yard to read it alone.

Tom,

I am sorry to say that I have broken something that was in no way my fault. It was a vase, a fat stupid thing, and I lifted it with one hand because it was in the way and it slipped and proved that it had no right to be in the world. I have been told that a lady would have asked someone to move it, in a tone that made it someone’s pleasure to do so. If I am a lady, I would rather not be.

I have written an essay to Professor Slughorn on the matter of the liverwort, which is as dull as it sounds; but it was dull for ten minutes and then interesting, and then not dull at all. I have learned something I did not know I could learn on my own. I thought you would enjoy knowing that.

They say in the papers that we have peace. My mother says it will last until it stops. I liked the sentence about the reptiles and their moral character. I will not pretend to be certain that snakes do not have one. I suspect they have a better one than most people. I am making bread now as penance. I do not do it badly.

Write. I will send you a book if the post will take it. Our owl bit me yesterday. I admired it for not pretending to be tame.

Eileen

He read it with the same attentive pleasure he took in a good argument. He could hear her voice; he had the feeling that if she had been there and had said the thing about the bread he might have allowed himself to say something that came very close to teasing.

He wrote back that afternoon. He did not have much to say—he had more than enough—but he shaped what he could: weather, dust, the way Mrs Cole seemed to have a new headache every other day, a line about the atlas whose world had faded. He did not mention snakes or the wall with its seam of something older than the orphanage or the fact that he could think a movement and hear it happen. He folded the letter and sent it and found himself, afterwards, in front of the trunk without having decided to go there.

He slid the bolt, lifted the lid, and looked into the dark. The box with the wand lay to the left, under an old scarf; the book he had taken from the library shelves at school—older than the one the other students used—lay wrapped, as he had left it. He had no need, at the moment, of either. He touched the handle of the wand through the scarf—once—and the book not at all. He let the lid down gently and slid the bolt across.

On a morning when the air had the heavy feel of a day that would end in thunder, he went down to the cellar. He had never liked the cellar. It smelt of mouse and dust and old coal, and it had a scratchy sound to it, as if the walls were always thinking. He took a candle with him and a stub of a match tucked under his thumb. He stood in the shallow dark and let the air shift against his face. He blew the match out before the candle took entirely and stood, the candle a finger of light.

There were pipes down there, running along the ceiling, sweating a little. Moisture had beaded; it made small, unlikely jewels. He put his hand to one, and it smelt like a place that had been inside the earth a long time. He said, very softly, because the room would tell sound everything it knew and then some, come.

It took longer in the cellar. He did not mind that. The waiting was not an emptiness; it was an extension of intention. He stood with his arm down, hand open on the edge of an old crate. He looked at the places where there could be movement. He heard—no, he nearly heard—the sound he knew was the beginning of the snake’s speech.

When it came, it was not the same snake as the others; it was darker, duller. It slid with purpose and made a shape around the leg of the crate, dragging one side of itself: it had a scar, or a wound, or a way of being. He did not pity it. He did not need the word. He made his hand a place; it came.

He said: pain? It was an odd try of a word, and he could feel the edges of it not fitting in his mouth. The snake tasted his hand and thought something back that was acceptance as much as answer. The word for is-ness came, and with it he understood that what he had named pain to himself was simply how this thing moved through the world.

He thought of making it strike, not because he wanted it to but because he wanted to learn the shape of not-doing. He shaped the thought minutely, held it still in his mind, and did not breathe. The snake coiled, and then—because that was what he meant—it uncoiled. He knew, then, that he could. He set the thought down. He did not use it.

He found, too, as the summer wore on, that he did not need to call a snake to listen. Sometimes he would set his back to the wall in the yard and let his eyes shut and breathe the air of the orphanage, with its cabbage and soap and iron, and he would hear, faint and thin as if it were on the other side of a curtain, a conversation that might or might not be there: a thin ribbon of thought, this side and that side, moving. It made the walls feel less solid. He liked that.

The weeks slid by, holding small samenesses. He polished the banister. He took out the bins. He washed the cups. He learnt how to make the sound that meant come without moving his lips. He learnt that snakes had very little use for names. He learnt that if he wanted to move a snake one way and his mind wavered with the thought of a different way, the snake would not be confused; it would do the thing he had wanted the most, the thing at the bottom. That was useful to know. It was more useful to know how to keep the bottom thought still and clear.

Once, Mrs Cole opened her mouth as if she meant to ask him something that would be foolish to ask. She shut it again and took up the wet tea towel. He could have told her to ask. He could have said: say it. He did not. He let her give herself the kindness of not asking and moved away from her.

On an afternoon that had been prepared for thunder all day and had not had the decency to deliver it, he sat on the back step and held the letter from Eileen he had been carrying in his pocket, folded and warm. He read it again. Her line about snakes and moral character pleased him. It was not that he thought snakes had moral character; it was that he liked the way she had refused to say the expected thing.

He went to the garden as the day finally cracked. The storm came in a sudden, impatient throw of light and noise. The rain hit the earth hard. In the thick of it he spoke to the snakes and they came, one and then another, water-slick and intent, and he shaped them soft and precise, and he commanded them with the kind of command that did not feel like force because it fitted so exactly that there was no room for refusal.

It was not that he was fearless. His hand shook once, and he stilled it. Fear did not change the shape of his desire. It did not alter the use. He laughed—and this time let himself—and the sound was lost in the rain.

He did not tell anyone. He did not tell Mrs Cole, who would have thought of sending him to a doctor with a soft voice. He did not tell Dennis, who would have tried to fetch one for him with words. He did not tell Eileen. He read her letters and kept them and returned what he chose to return. He kept this, wholly, and practised. He let the snakes taste his breath and learned when to let them go.

On the last evening of August, when the sky had the reddish colour of brick rubbed on brick and the walls of the orphanage had begun to sweat a little with the day’s leftover heat, he went to the place in the passage where the brick had flaked and pressed both hands flat against it. He did not say anything. He allowed himself to imagine the wall thinner; he allowed himself to know that somewhere in the world there were walls that opened and did not show their hinges. He thought of the school underground, and of stone that had been there before there were words for it, and let the thought sit with him like a person sitting down beside him who could not be seen.

He stayed until the light was gone and the sky had its old bruised look again and the first train of the night went by, a long slow thunder. His hands had brick dust on them; he did not wipe it off at once.

He went upstairs and lay down with his arms flat at his sides and did not sleep. He did not need sleep to hold a thing still in his mind.

In the morning there would be lists and packing and Mrs Cole’s face pinched with purpose. There would be a letter from the school. There would be the small engines of children’s voices clanking up again with a different feel to them, because the summer would have been named over, and this would mean something in the ordinary way of things.

He had found, in the dullness and sameness of this place, a point of difference that was not any of theirs. He could speak and be obeyed by a thing that listened with its bones. He had known he was unusual; now he knew it the way one knows the feel of a key in the dark.

He rolled to his side and stared at the grey shape of the window. His fingers lay still, but inside them something wanted to move. That was all right. It could wait. He did not require haste. Patience had uses.

Outside, on the brick where the passage turned and shadow pooled, something slid with a sound like silk on stone and was gone.