*

When we were kids my da loved to take me and my brother to the reptile house in the Belfast Zoo at the Cave Hill. I was never a fan of snakes, but I always loved that bit when you walk through the door and you’re plunged into darkness and it takes you whole minutes to get your eyes accustomed to the light, that bit when you have your arms out in front of you to steady yourself and all you can see are these aquariums floating in mid-air, all of these colour tellies from hell.

My da always says to us that snakes are the most innocent creatures in the world. Look into their eyes, he says to us, take a good look and be honest with yourself. There’s not a bad bone in their bodies, he says. I didn’t even know snakes had bones in their bodies.

Then, one day, he brings one home, as a present, for my brother. He brings a real-life snake home as a pet and starts feeding it on live hamsters, live hamsters that he’s breeding in the garage and that never see the light of day outside of when he marches across the back garden with one of them squirming in his hand on its way to getting eaten whole.

I need to teach you, he says to us, then he would sit us down, in the dark, in Peter’s room, in front of this lit-up aquarium, like we were at the movies, and he would educate us. A snake is just doing what it does, he says to us, with no malice whatsoever. It’s playing with it, Peter says to him, look, it’s taunting it. Snakes don’t taunt, my da says, what are you talking about? Then the snake would pounce and its big hinged jaw would go back and it would swallow half the body of the hamster, whose legs would be kicking out behind it as its head disappeared down this great black throat and endless belly that God Himself had created, that’s what my da says, God Almighty Himself created snakes, he says to us, and then Saint Patrick kicked them out of Ireland. Beat it, Patrick says to them, go on.

But that was your man Saint Pat’s big mistake, my da says. Saint Paddy’s original balls-up was booting the snakes out of Ireland in the first place, because that meant there was no one left, no thing left, is what he meant to say, no thing left to get victimised, no thing left to take all of the blame for the suffering of the world, and so the Irish turned on one another. In the absence of snakes they just fucking went at it, but they went at it as innocent as snakes themselves, with that same look in their eyes, that same look that says, what about you?

If snakes could shrug, my da says to us, they’d be at it all day. But you need shoulders for that.