Realistic snake tattoo across the chest

You will not believe who turned up at the reunion in the sports hall on Saturday. Not Dave Coyle, who still owes me a fiver from the Year Eleven trip, but Mr Hollis, looking every year of eighty and carrying a shoebox with air holes punched in the lid. He said he had kept his promise. Do you remember the boa in the biology lab, the one we called Gordon because nobody ever bothered to give it a proper name? Hollis told us at the tombola stall that Gordon had died in 1997 and been buried under the rhododendrons. Nobody believed him, and we were right not to.

The box came open beside the raffle prizes. Gordon slid out in slow, heavy coils, tan and brown, the pale saddles down his back catching the strip lights the way the lab windows used to in March. Priya from the fourth form screamed, a mum knocked over a crate of Fairy Liquid, and Dave Coyle swore he would be on the news. I stayed very still. Gordon's head dropped low over the parquet, his tongue tasting the air near Hollis's sandwiches, and I thought about the glass tank we had all been warned never to tap.

Hollis said he only wanted us to see him once more before the care home took the box away. I wanted to ask whether Gordon had been fed properly all those years, but the question stuck. Instead I asked whether he still knew his own name, and Hollis just smiled and said the snake knew when it was being looked at.

I am writing this on the back of a menu because I cannot sleep. Gordon is back in his tank now. Every time I close my eyes I see that head lowered over the floor, patient as a teacher waiting for the room to go quiet.