Calum and the Snails

　
Calum always took the river route to the library. He would watch out for muggers and kingfishers with equal care on the fifteen minute walk from his flat by Kelvinbridge underground station, along the river and exit at the Botanic Gardens, then just a couple more minutes to the library on Byres Road.
He always had his camera slung from his shoulder, concealed by his jacket; there was no point in advertising it’s presence to the various ne’er-do-wells he passed on the path. A leaf or spider’s web might be worth a picture and once he got some really close up shots of a heron perched on the rail of the bridge that leads to the botanics; the one at the south end, not the north. The bird may have been a youngster; unsure of the correct flying away distance when approached by one of those ghastly humans. He got several photos- both full length and head shots, the bird almost as still as one of the plastic ones on sale at garden centres, the ones meant to scare real birds away from precious goldfish. In summer he’d look for bugs on the fence as he walked along. He got three kinds of ladybird, weevils, shield bugs and one day a spider with the cool name of Large-Jawed Orb Weaver. He would have to look that one up to find the name. Cool arachnid; he gave high-fives to leaves of Himalayan Balsam as he passed.
Today he took the heronless bridge and turned right along the path though the trees and up the slope. He passed some squirrels but didn’t have any peanuts in his bag, so they watched him carry on and went about their business. He emerged into the botanic gardens and decided that he would drop in to see the snails.
Through the doors and beyond the begonias was a section with small tanks displaying water plants from the tropics and a larger stone pond with fish and snails.
He hadn’t noticed them at first until one day when he almost reached in and took one from the water, thinking it a piece of plastic, a bottle-top perhaps, that someone had littered the tank with. It was big and round and yellow and not at all like the snails outside. Peering hard and bending close to the water like another heron, he could make out several more. On the next visit, he watched one surface to breathe. It didn’t actually break the water surface; he figured that in the tropics this might lead to it being spotted by a predator. Instead, it adhered to the pond side just below the surface and extended a sort of fleshy snorkel. This broke the surface and the snail began to sort of foot-pump itself, drawing in air and storing it within its shell. Once it had refilled its tank, it detached itself and slowly sank to the murky depths.
After that, he would return once a week or so to see how the snails were getting on. He would watch the fish too; catfish and cichlids. Signs on string dangled over the water identifying the various types and one named the snails too; they were Golden Apple snails from South America. The snails were not always visible, he thought that they might keep to the cooler, more shaded parts of the pond when the sun got high and made it too bright and warm out in the open. So then he would just watch the fish for a while as they languidly loafed around. He felt that he was self-medicating at those moments, thinking of the tropical aquaria that became more part of the therapists’ office than the couch, but it did not stop him relaxing as he watched. That was only when there wasn’t anyone else there. If someone came in he would leave, thinking that that person might prefer the solitude just as he did.
Sometimes Calum reversed the walk. If he wanted to get to the library early he might just go by road. Then, when done, go home by the botanics and river walk. One day he left the library and headed to the botanics in spite of the dark clouds that were clambering over one another in their haste to give the city a good soaking. The gardens had that strange light where the ground is brighter than the sky and more so than he had noticed elsewhere, the light changed by the white ironwork of glasshouses, the reflections from clear glass and panes that had been whitewashed to protect delicate plants inside. As rain began to cascade down he thought it a good moment to enter the begonia house and make his way through to the fishpond. He thought that the darkness and coolness of the stormy day might encourage the snails out from their lairs, but could see none. On the floor, though, something yellow stood out. He picked it up. It was a fragment of snail shell. He picked it up held it in the palm of his hand as he peered even harder into the pond, leaning over until his nose almost touched the water, but the snails were gone.
He saw a couple more pieces leading toward the door and headed outside, into the rain. No more shell showed up against black wet tarmac. He turned to head for home, giving up on the river path, which would be a quagmire now. But as he passed the palm house he noticed that there were some people inside, the only ones he had seen in the whole gardens. Probably just sheltering from the rain, he thought, but perhaps they have seen suspicious, pond-robbing characters around. He walked through the doors and paused to shake some of the rainwater from his coat, then made his way past another fishpond and into the main palm house. The indistinct figures that he had made out through the wet glass were now seen to be several attractive young women. They were dressed, he reflected, in a way incompatible with the weather, in fact seemed to be in some kind of costume. Perhaps there had been a rehearsal for a play or something in the gardens and they were forced to take cover. He remembered vaguely that there was a Shakespeare in the Park type of thing every summer. These must be actresses in what, Antony and Cleopatra? Something Mediterranean, he thought, judging by the diaphanous robes they were wearing. It didn’t really help. Titus Andronicus? A Midsummer Night’s Downpour? They seemed completely dispirited by the interruption to the rehearsal, sat looking dispirited and inanimate, sisters to the marble statues which were placed with fern fronds and palm leaves giving a dark green background to their pale hard figures. Four of them. Girls that is, not statues.
‘Are you Greek characters?’ They all looked at him. ‘Or Roman?’
‘Roman? Do we look Roman?’ Not sure if it was a trick question, he still detected that the answer expected was a no, as if he should be well aware of the differences between your classical Greek and Roman women’s wear.
‘I think it safe to say that we are Greek characters. I am Aigle, that is Crytheia, Hestia, and that saucepot is Arethusa.’ He got two nods and a wink. ‘Sometimes there are more of us, sometimes fewer.’
Odd names, maybe their characters in the play.
‘Are you rehearsing for a play? Shakespeare in the park? You’re not a band are you? Sort of themed? Original, I suppose, can’t think of anyone else doing a classical Greek thing.’
‘We are classical Greeks! We are The Hesperides.’ A definite capitalised definite article there, he thought. And like he would recognise the name. Not the islands off the west coast; she didn’t say ‘Hebrides’, that’s a start. She did say Hesperides didn’t she, hang on; they were like muses weren’t they, sort of nymphs or naiads or something. So this lot are like a tribute band. Or believe in Greek deities and their creations. The alternative is that they believe they are the Hesperides and that they believe that he would believe that they would turn up in his local botanic gardens as evening drew on and the gloom deepened and rain grew ever heavier and no park staff came to shut up the place and the public too were noticeable by their absence.
‘I’m Calum. Sorry, but I’ve never heard of you. If you’re a band; I don’t really listen to much music now. And if you’re a theatre group; well I still haven’t heard of you, sorry. Don’t keep up with drama much either.’
They looked resigned rather than indignant. Then he noticed that each held something in her hand. Snails. His snails. Each had one large yellow snail cupped in her pale fingers.
‘You shouldn’t have those, the snails, what are you doing with them? You have to put them back!’
Each held up a snail. ‘We didn’t take them all. And mine is just a shell anyway, said Hestia, and she broke off some pieces of the shell. He saw that it had already begun to disintegrate, must be the one which had given him the clue of the abduction. ’Do you look after them? Are you a snail-keeper’, teasingly. They all started to look a little happier, distracted from their problems. He had thought they were just down at the weather interrupting their rehearsal, and come to think of it, where were all the other personnel; the wardrobe and make-up and stage people, caterers, technicians and all that?
They all walked toward him with the snails outstretched. He saw that they seemed fine; antennae waving, enjoying the excursion, except for Hestia, who casually crushed the empty shell in her hand and dropped the pieces on the flagstones.
Calum took the snails from the other three and put them into a voluminous jacket pocket. He was a pocket person; coats, jackets, trousers all had to be well-pocketed and he still thought fondly of the time a new pair of shorts had turned out to have one more pocket than the manufacturers had even realised- their label said six, but he found seven! So snail-pocketing was not the problem for Calum that it might have been for another man. One not obsessed by things like pockets.
‘Why’d you take them? If the staff had caught you, you’d have been done. Snail rustling. Barred. No performance, no visits to the annual orchid show or ice-cream on the grass, watching the talent.’
Crytheia was looking at a statue of a woman sitting with one hand cupping her chin. She read the inscription.’ This is Ruth, holding sheaves of corn gathered in the fields of Boaz.’
‘Boaz. Is that a person or a place?’
‘Sounds like a corporation:” BOAZ, British and Overseas Annihilation of Zephyrs.”’
‘It’s a person, her husband. She was a symbol of virtue it says. Looks bored to me, living with Boaz, gathering sheaves of corn. Dull.’
‘Excuse me, I asked why did you take the snails. Remember?’
‘Well, you’ll think us rather dim,’ said Arethusa, looking over Crytheia’s shoulder, ‘but we heard something about golden apples being here. We’d lost some so thought that these might be them. So here we are. And here they are not.’
‘Explain it correctly, if you feel you must explain it at all,’ said Aigle. She turned to Calum.
‘The golden apples were a wedding gift from Ge, or Earth, you’d call her, to Hera on her marriage to Zeus. It was the job of the Hesperides to guard them. Unfortunately, when we were distracted one day the tree which bore them was destroyed and the apples lost.
‘Distracted, laughed Arethusa, ‘we were shopping!’
‘That is immaterial. The point is that the apples were lost and, if you knew Hera, you would know that you don’t go losing her golden apples without suffering the consequences.’
Calum recalled watching an American television programme about Hercules where Hera was certainly someone you wouldn’t cross. He could feel the snails sliding up inside his pocket toward fresh air and freedom.
‘But why take the snails?’
‘Well we heard where these golden apples were and went in and looked into the green depths of the pond and, well, you know, they could have been our apples. We fished them out and, of course, they weren’t. I suppose we just wandered off with them. But you can put them back and no harm done.’ Aigle arched an eyebrow.
That was true. ‘How was the tree destroyed?’ Calum was sympathetic, though he thought that it was their marbles they’d lost, and not the Elgin ones at that.
For the first time the women looked angry, vengeful. The rain battered against the hundreds of glass panes around them with increasing ferocity.
‘Some corporation. Maybe BOAZ. For a road. Or an airport extension, some such nonsense.’ Aigle, in illustration of destruction, stood on the fragments of snail shell, crisply crushing them to dust.
‘It’s like Joni Mitchell said, they paved paradise and put up a parking lot,’ said Arethusa, ‘Joni should never have left us for the human world,’ she mused, ‘she had real insight.’
‘Of course, Hera is really angry and taking out her vengeance on the world; hurricanes, droughts, floods,’ said Aigle,’ but I am not sure if there is any real point, since people don’t really believe in her or Zeus or any of us, so they aren’t going to do anything about finding some mythical apples. And the tree is still gone. We complained to the local council about it being destroyed and they just said that if it was that important, we should have taken out a tree preservation order on it.‘
‘The council? Back in Greece?’
‘The tree was nearer Greenock than Greece, sonny, we guarded it in the far west, to the Greeks, that’s why our other name is The Atlantides’. That capitalized definite article again. She saw Calum looking doubtful, confused even. ‘You’re not the sharpest arrow in the quiver are you, Calum? Atlantides from Atlantic, the ocean which beat upon the shore whereon grew our tree and which is as we speak is probably being viciously developed as a hotel and golf course.’
‘A curse on their honeymoon suites, let them know no fun therein,’ hammed up Arethusa,’ and let their bunkers be of quicksand.’
Hestia took up the explanation. ‘Hera had overlooked that what you humans are doing to the planet far outweighs any of her acts. When it dawned on her she said that we find the apples or she sends in the heavy mob.’
‘Then it’s pretty much goodnight Irene from the present six billion humans. Peace at last for the planet. Back to square one, clubs and caves for you lot, not clubbing and cappuccinos’ said Arethusa sadly, ‘ and no more shopping for us, nor make-overs, movies…it is going to be such a bore.’
‘This “heavy mob”, what is it? Spartan types?’ Calum pictured the scene; a few score helmeted and skirted swordsmen against machine-guns, bombers and tanks.
‘I think not. We were not the only guardians of the apples. There was Ladon too, though he had been asleep for the last few centuries, now he’s awake and just raring to obliterate civilization.’
‘Ladon?’
‘Ladon the dragon.’
‘A sort of figurative dragon? One that is revealed as a sort of symbol of our brutal handling of the planet, where heat and smoke produced by us becomes the dragon that will consume us all?
‘Not figurative, no. He’s in there.’
They all four turned and pointed into the main body of the palm-house. Within the tall palms and dense undergrowth of tree ferns something large and green shone dully in odd glances of light from the street. A thin spiral of smoke wound toward the glasshouse roof.
They just rebuilt this thing, Calum thought, what was it, seven million? Maybe he should get those snails back in their pond. Maybe it was too late.