Too Cold For Snow

new by-pass. It described her as a backbone of the Pearson family and, just as he said that, one of them arrived in the otherwise empty church. Mark Pearson, one of the nephews she despised the most, a gracile weasel of man with sharp little teeth to match. She would have known why he was here, drawn by the possibility of her dying intestate. Little did Mark know that she had left everything, including the silver and china, to the Witnesses. One of them, a cross-eyed woman called Letitia, had brought her a copy of The Watchtower every week for four years and had asked for nothing more than considering their way to God. She knew that would put the cat among the pigeons. It would put a starving Siberian tiger right in the loft.
    Mark felt a pneumonic chill running through his body and imagined cold lips pressing against the part of his collarbone that was visible through the shirt. Higgy’s anger would have become incendiary rage when the minister pressed a button and her body was summarily consigned to the flames! A crematorium! She would have been furious beyond speech or action. Higgy’d made sure that every one Jack of them knew she wanted to be interned with all the rest of the family. This final slight would have been the last straw, which made the revenge she would never actually taste all the more sweet.
    The velvet curtains closed on her coffin and slid along the rollers to the flames. Greedy Mark went out to the car. He was so eager to leave he forgot to acknowledge the minister who held out a consoling hand to a man whose head was full of speculative figures about Higgy’s house and how many ways they had to divvy up the cash. He was almost the nearest relative to her.
    The disco would have upset her almost as much as seeing her body being burned and her ashes scooped up on a long handled shovel and put in the sort of plastic bag you used when carrying a goldfish back from the fair. The screeching, unfamiliar music was a chimpanzee cacophony resonating in her cranium. On the neat parquet dance floor were four generations of Pearsons, entirely unaware of the fate that was to befall them. Dancing to the Gap band and Showadywaddy, Shakin Stevens and Meatloaf. And a few more up-to-date numbers. Madonna duetting with Justin Timberlake.
    Her henchmen took the bulging bin sacks and hauled them up the steps of the hotel kitchens and into the ballroom. Score settling was their unbridled delight.
    The D.J. was animatedly encouraging everybody to get on down, and even the boozers from the sports bar drifted in when they heard the opening bars of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’. He might be a one-man freak show but he made some of the most danceable music this side of Burundi.
    On a nod from Maurice, Clitheroe opened each of the straining bin sacks and shook out the writhing, spitting contents on the floor. The animals slithered and reared and coiled and spat and hissed and bit. Adults and children scattered in all directions but many couldn’t get over the metallic arc of the balustrade that hemmed them in on two sides and the panic sent many of them crashing into each other. Some of the snakes were already out in the hotel reception and others were climbing up the indoor trellis work.
    A king cobra, hood fully extended on the longest neck, reared up next to a yucca plant, ready to pick off anyone foolish enough to stray within range. Some snakes struck out at other snakes even as Maurice and Clitheroe were driving off in their white van, smugly satisfied that not one of them had been attacked as they dumped them all out. Maurice had already been bitten by a mamba in Higgy’s basement and it had been touch-and-go whether the anti-venom would work in time.
    The hotel manager gabbled words down the phone after dialing nine-nine-nine and had to be persuaded to stop saying the word “snakes” over and over and calm down so he could explain which service was needed. All of them, he babbled. Snakes!
    The D.J. had the worst time of it, mainly because of the potted olive trees that hemmed in his booth in the corner. Some of the arboreal snakes had immediately gravitated upwards, and he had to fend them off with the sleeves of his precious Northern soul records. He batted a mamba with a really rare copy of Tommy Navarro’s ‘I Cried My Life Away’.
    When he was about twelve years of age Owen Peredur’s favourite family story was about the sacks full of snakes someone had unleashed on his christening. They were