Too Cold For Snow

could buy increasingly endangered or dangerous species. Her secret plan was very much in train. They bought glass cages for arriving stock and Higgy marked out a feeding regime – mainly of rats and mice – in a black ledger, which she kept scrupulously up to date, as if it were a way of keeping her memory intact.
    They bought poisonous snakes from all continents: corals and coppermouths and rattlesnakes of all kinds, diamondback, timber, sidewinder and the most serious of all – the aggressive Mojave rattler. Higgy loved tapping her fingers on the glass in the cage in the cellar to stir him up. He lunged directly at the glass as if it could head butt its way out. Their contacts in Asia got them cobras of all lengths and dispositions: seemingly languid king cobras that could rear up in a flash, and Egyptian cobras so lethal that minutes after a bite necrosis was sure to set in, the skin of the victim turning into a spreading, dark contusion as the cells simply died away. In the back bedroom there was the fearless fer-de- lance which attacked quite without provocation and then speedier serpents such as the black mamba and the bushmaster. Her house slithered.
    The ledger took note of each arrival, giving marks out of five for innate aggression and general state of health. But the animals that took pride of place among all her reptiles were the top five dangerous snakes of Australia, the top five most dangerous snakes in the world. The inland Taipan, five out of five. The Eastern brown snake, not much to look at, but another certain five. And full marks too to the peninsula tiger and the mainland tiger. Venomous, chilling, angry. They would certainly do the trick. How she hated her family, especially as her illness took hold of her and her resentment of their collective health grew like topsy.
    But the snake buying activity accelerated the decaying effect of her illness and she died, as everyone had predicted, entirely alone.
    So she missed out on key events in her body’s passage through the closing chapter of her life. That would have really upset her spirit. If she’d been able to lie down next to the coffin and hitch a lift to her own funeral she’d been puzzled not to see any other cars making up the cortege. Behind her own vehicle was the hearse taking Bessie, who’d looked terrible before they slapped on a bit of makeup, bringing some colour to her chalk-white cheeks. She lay there on the slab like a turkey that had been stretched on the rack by a medieval torturer, her legs as white as bone.
    They got to the church and by now she wouldn’t have just been offended. It wasn’t even St. Saviour’s, where she’d been as a girl, but rather a modern box of a place in the middle of the crematorium grounds, which was just the sort of place she hated. Had she been there she would have been agonisingly angry, vowing that she would wreak revenge for this slight on her memory. But all that was arranged, conveniently enough. Maurice and Clitheroe would see to that. They would allow her to express the whole spectrum of spite.
    It had once mattered to be a Pearson: a playground slight against a younger member of the clan would bring down the wrath of the other Pearson children who would be as avenging angels, scrapping dervishes in the dust of the yard. In one such attack a bullying lad had actually had his leg broken by two Pearson siblings as they pulled in different directions.
    And they would stand together in other matters as well and even Higgy would not stand for anyone to say a bad thing about any one of them, even though she would vent her spleen about them herself at the drop of a hat. She said such horrible things that sometimes the family would have an away day at the seaside or at a country park when they would try to purge themselves of all the half-lies, untruths, slurs and brickbats Higgy had unleashed as a swarm of attacking bacteria against them.
    At the church entrance the two men deftly manhandled the first coffin onto a trolley and rolled it in front of the pine pews. Her own coffin followed, a cheap affair with imitation brass handles and small wreath on top with a label which said noncommittally: ‘In our thoughts. The Pearson family.’
    The officiating minister sped briskly through the brief biographies. Higgy merited some ninety seconds in total. Her full name. Where she was born. How she had been a staunch attendee at Rehoboth chapel before it was sadly knocked down to make way for the