'Big deal.' Keith felt icy fingers clutching at his heart, Kirsten being wrenched from him by parents who had dominated her all her life. 'Maybe your folks would like me to do their garden for them.'

'You're impossible,' she snapped. 'Anyway, I don't think you're pregnant.'

'You don't think!' She almost screamed. 'And what do you know about it? But I'll tell you this, Keith, we continue going out together and if I let you have sex with me again, you're going to wear something every time. None of this not taking precautions a few days either side of my period. If I have another period!'

Keith would have liked to phone Kirsten this morning. Just to put his mind at rest. Or otherwise. He could have gone into the house to make the call, there was a key kept just inside the garage, but he would have to think about it. It was something that would require a certain amount of courage. Kirsten worked at the drapery shop in town and Mrs Holloway, the proprietor, was a peculiar old bird. 'I don't like my staff having private calls during working hours,' Keith decided he would leave it a bit, think about it some more. In the end he would probably wait until tonight, meet Kirsten down by the church, if she came. Lately there were too many bloody ifs to everything.

He attacked the weeds, a legacy from old Fred's days. A marvellous tool the hoe, cutting them all out. You either left them to wither and die in the sun or else you raked them up and carted them away in the barrow. Keith did the latter.

Ten o'clock was 'bait-time'. Bait was a cup of tea out of a flask and a sandwich. Keith ate the rest of his sandwiches at half past twelve, and by six he was ravenous for the cooked meal which his mother had on the table on his return home. He had lived with his mother in Stainforth ever since his schooldays; his father had run off with a young village girl when Keith was ten and they had not heard from Peter Doyle since.

Keith was sweating profusely as he sat on the edge of the lawn sipping his tea. He looked up at the sky, a gun-blue universe with not so much as a wisp of white cloud in sight. The farming weather forecast on Sunday lunchtime had predicted dry and hot for the whole week.

Time to get going again. He peeled off his shirt, dropped it down on the grass. He did not have the inclination to walk back to the van. Just take your time, you've got all day and it's going to get hotter.

The ground was hard-baked, every weed required a good pull to free it, toss it clear of the soil. He wondered again about Kirsten. A lot of girls had had their futures ruined by this kind of class consciousness, sheer bloody snobbery. He would fight for her every inch of the way. Sod it, she was twenty, old enough to please herself, an adult. But when you were brainwashed, indoctrinated, age didn't matter. Some people got into the habit of doing whatever anybody told them throughout their entire lives.

He wondered what would happen if she was pregnant. Her old man would go up the wall but that wouldn't remove the baby from inside her. Unless ... God, he wouldn't make her have an abortion, would he? Legalised murder. The bastard would, Keith knew he would, and it made him angry, had him chopping viciously at a clump of chickweed.

He'd like a baby, a son or a daughter, he didn't care which. One day he would have one. In the meantime he needed the flat hoe on this chickweed. He dropped the one he was using, heard it rattle on the hard ground, picked up the other. The hoe rattled again.

It was some seconds before he looked round, before he realised that the hoe should not have rattled a second time, could not possibly have rolled and clanked again. Even then he did not spot the lurking creature right away and when he made it out amongst a thick growth of weed he could not be absolutely sure what it was. Unsuspecting, he stood there just staring at it.

At first he thought it was a frog or a toad; light coloured with dark markings, giving it a kind of slimy slippery look in the bright sunshine. He peered closer, noticed that it tailed off back into the undergrowth, that what he had mistaken for a frog was only its head, that it had a body attached to it, a long thick one that went on and on, partially screened from his vision so that he could only hazard a guess at its length; several feet for sure!

Keith's mouth went dry and there seemed to be a constriction in his throat. He met those eyes, felt an inexplicable force boring into him, numbing him. A slight shifting of that lengthy body as it began to uncoil, a noise that reminded him of a football rattle on the terraces when he went along to watch United play at home. The sound broke the spell, brought him back to reality, a jumble of warnings. PC Aylott's curt sarcastic tones,' The snakes could be anywhere.''

He leapt backwards, landed on the lawn, caught his feet in the shirt which he had thrown carelessly down; fell, extricated himself, burst into headlong flight.

And behind him he heard that rattling, angrier and faster now like far-off bursts of machine-gun fire trying to gun him down. Running blindly, anywhere, his panic like a coronary attack thudding in his chest. He heard his heartbeat (or was it that snake rattling with a deeper tone?), his pulses thudding, a roaring in his ears, sweat lathering his naked torso.

He did not look back, dared not waste a second; off the lawn and on to the drive. The van was too far away, it would have to be the garage; pull the shutter down as you go through. Oh Jesus Christ, I hope it's flush with the floor because if there's a gap then I'm trapped!

The reptile was close behind him. He didn't look, he knew. He felt its vibrations like a sack of loose beads, its malevolence and determination to overtake him. An anticipation of pain as it struck, an agony that would have him writhing and screaming on the tarmac drive, helpless as it struck again and again, its vile body close to his own, those evil eyes watching his death throes.

Almost there. He reached up for the handle of the shutter as he ran beneath it, tugged downwards with all his strength. For one terrible moment he thought it had jammed or that perhaps for some reason Peter Eversham had fitted a locking device to stop kids from playing with it. Keith almost yelled his relief out loud as the shutter began to move almost silently on its oiled mechanism, gathering speed downwards, clattering.

Only then did Keith Doyle look back, had a momentary view of his pursuer before the shutter crashed down to the floor; saw a reptile that was close on six feet in length, light-coloured with distinctive dark diamond markings, looking like the personification of evil in serpent form. It rattled viciously, was still some yards from the garage; Keith's lead had been greater than he had dared to believe. He had won by a clear length. Temporarily, anyway.

One awful thought that the shutter might bounce back up, or not close properly. He anticipated a metallic bang as it hit the floor; instead there was a well-oiled click, a mechanical sound as though levers had slotted into place. The door locked, held, and there was not so much as a sliver of daylight showing beneath it.

He leaned back against the wall, thought that he was going to faint and buckled his knees into a crouching position in anticipation of blacking out. The feeling passed. He closed his eyes, could not shut out a mental picture of that rattlesnake, saw again its anger and its hatred for Man; heard its deathly rattle.

Sweat poured off him. The bloody thing had been lying in wait for him amongst the weeds and if he had not decided to change hoes and thrown the first one behind him, disturbing and frightening the rattlesnake as it waited to strike, then he would not have forced it to give a warning rattle. So close, but he had been given those few vital seconds' grace which was the difference between life and death. Jesus Christ Almighty!