The Serpent's Skin

by Erina Reddan

  I punched the newspaper into a ball and jumped to my feet. But a car was pulling up at the gates and I didn’t want to get nose to nose with anybody, so I dropped the newspaper and curled up on a grave further along with a tall enough stone for a bit of cover. Chin to knee to chest, waiting for them to get in and get to whatever far corner they were headed to so I could slip out unremarked. I did have something new to investigate for the Timeline, though: not a sign from Mum, but Tim’s address. It was something for my mind to work on while I waited to get away from this place of dirt and stones.

  It was taking so long, though. I peeked around the headstone hiding me. Shit. She was headed my way. There was something in the way she leaned into one hip. Then she stopped to fan herself with one hand and I knew what that something was. It was bloody Mrs Nolan. She moved her basket from one arm to the other and kept coming. And that meant it must have been bloody Tim! What was he up to? I bet that bastard rang Nosy Nancy. I got one arm to the other around my knees and squeezed, trying to Alice myself smaller. Mrs Nolan’s shoes scrunched against the tiny pebbles, closer and then closer. I shrank, dropped my head between my arms, hissed in air between my teeth and waited. And she did turn into Mum’s row. She groaned as she got to her knees beside Mum. I hardly let any air out of me.

  ‘I know you’re there, JJ.’

  Fuck. One hand flew to my forehead, the other close after. Hidden and exposed at the same time.

  ‘No shame in visiting your mother.’

  I glanced around the gravestone to look at her. She kept at what she was doing. Big black-red roses sticking out of her basket. I decided to play it as if I hadn’t been hiding. Not that I expected her to buy it.

  ‘Just taking a break, Mrs Nolan. Hard work, arranging flowers.’

  ‘Still got a mouth on you, then.’

  ‘They for Mum?’

  ‘Some for your mum, some for mine,’ she said, pointing towards the rows beyond to where her mother’s grave must be. ‘You did a good job.’ She snipped off half of the stem of one of her blooms and then did the same with two more, bringing them into height alignment with Shelley’s roses. ‘You always had the knack.’ She placed the blooms in among Shelley’s, sat back, head to the side. The new roses pulled the idea of the whole deeper. It was something, adding in that sorrow. She studded one up and down, shifting them all. Again, it was right. I moved to get closer in to them.

  ‘Your mum had the knack, too,’ she said.

  ‘She loved your roses.’

  ‘That’s why they’re here.’ She dusted her hands off. ‘Didn’t see you after Peg’s funeral.’

  ‘Needed a smoke.’

  She grunted.

  ‘Funerals are difficult,’ I said, my voice heading higher in defence.

  She touched this rose and that. Picked at them like guitar strings.

  ‘After what happened at Mum’s funeral,’ I said, all heckles raised, and sharp with blame.

  ‘Nothing happened at your mother’s.’ She flicked the cut-off bits away between the graves.

  ‘You attacked me.’

  ‘I tried to help you. You were hysterical with grief. Your father had no idea.’

  ‘You tried to take me away from my family.’

  She buttoned her lips, shook her head, looked out through the sighing of all those pine trees. Looked back at me, measuring something. ‘I…’ she started, then lost her way. Took a long breath in, gathered her words. Started again. ‘I felt that without your mother, you were… in some danger. You were… sensitive, like Peg had been as a girl. More so, because you didn’t have her lightness to go with it. You were a broody, fiery little thing. I felt you needed a firm hand to keep you on the straight and narrow. Jack…’ She shook her head. ‘I didn’t think he was the best thing for you.’

  ‘You said I had the devil in me.’

  ‘Peg’s devil. I said you had Peg’s devil in you.’

  Something popped in me. I dropped into a squat, my head buried in the cave of my arms. From the deep dark this new truth came rushing at me. All these years I’d held to this devil thing. It’d made sense. The way Dad had been after that, as if he blamed me for something. But she hadn’t meant it; she’d just been worried about me without Mum.

  I felt her hand on my shoulder, gentle. ‘But look at you. You proved me wrong.’

  I looked up. The sorry in her looking down on me. ‘I shouldn’t have said it at all. But at the time…’ She shook her head, did some more looking through the trees. Scratched under her jawline.

  I tried to clear the buzz in my head for this new thing she was trying to say. The build of it in her. I stood up, knowing I needed to be on my feet for whatever was coming next. She hadn’t been trying to find me at Peg’s funeral to apologise. It was for this. What was coming now.

  ‘I was mad with grief myself,’ she said. ‘Grief and guilt. And a terrible responsibility. You see, at the time, I thought it was my fault you didn’t have a mother.’ She rushed on now, the words tripping over each other to be out in the world now that she’d started. ‘That morning I drove her to the station, I mentioned something in passing that I thought she already knew. But I was very badly off the mark. She didn’t know, and I didn’t know she didn’t know. I thought… And…’ She shook her hands in the air. ‘And now that you’ve grown up it’s time one of you young people knew.’

  A terrible chill snaked along my spine.

  Was this it?

  I wasn’t ready, after all. All the not-ready coughed through me like pollution.

  ‘Did you try to tell Tes—?’ I asked to put off the thing right in front of me.

  ‘There’s no saying one word against your father with Tessa. There’d be no point telling Philly and Tim, either.’

  ‘I know.’ I shoved my fists under my armpits. ‘But I bet it was Tim who rang you as soon as I left his place.’

  She nodded. ‘Yep.’

  I couldn’t put the knowing off any more. All the dominos that had been set up over the years were crashing down, one after the other.

  Mrs Nolan licked her lips and looked out over the dry yellow paddocks beyond the cemetery. ‘It’s about why your mother threw Peg out of the house.’

  ‘But Mum didn’t. It was Dad.’

  ‘What?’ Confusion broke across Mrs Nolan’s face.

  ‘Mum wanted Peg to stay. Dad said he threw Peg out because she was a sinner and a bad influence on us kids, which we figured out later must have meant she wasn’t a stranger to sex outside wedlock. But Mrs Tyler told me at Peg’s funeral it was because she’d actually been pregnant.’

  ‘Peg? Pregnant? Kathy say that?’

  ‘Only for a bit.’ I shrugged. ‘Mrs Tyler said she miscarried.’

  Mrs Nolan shook her head as if she hadn’t heard straight. ‘Can’t be right. Peg would have told me.’

  ‘Mrs Tyler said Mum told her. Said it was a bloke called Sydney.’

  ‘No, no, no.’ Mrs Nolan shook her head faster. ‘Peg and Sydney never had it away.’ She plastered her palm to her forehead. ‘Sydney wasn’t even sweet on her. He was just a fella, bit older than the rest of us, late twenties, who liked her the way we did. She was full of spark and devilry, crossing lines the rest of us were too scared to even look at.’ Mrs Nolan let her palm fall. ‘Sydney felt sorry for her, gave her the house because she’d been thrown out on the streets, and he’d won the deed gambling the night before. When he sobered up he went back to ask for it, but she’d sorted all the paperwork so he couldn’t get his hands on it. He drifted back north eventually, none of us kept in contact.’

  ‘So why would Peg tell Mum she was pregnant to him, then?’

  Mrs Nolan squinted into the sun. ‘Oh God.’ She stumbled back, reached out for something to stop her fall. ‘Because she was pregnant, they were so close, she couldn’t have hidden that. But not to Sydney.’ Mrs Nolan’s face collapsed and her hand went to her gaping mouth. ‘Peg had to lie about who the real father was.’ Her wild eyes locked in on mine, communic
ating a new urgency. I both wanted her to tell me what it was and wanted to back the hell away from it, fast. A noise like a wounded dog came from her.

  ‘It was me. That morning she left. I was the one who told Sarah the truth.’ She whimper moaned and hunched all the slow way to her knees. ‘I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know. She’d just come back from settling you back to bed. I was trying to make it up to her for having said that terrible thing that set you off. Saying that she’d done a good job with you, given what she’d found out when you were a bub and how the shock must have bled into you, because of how sensitive you were. I thought I was telling her something she already knew. But, to her, it was so much more.’

  ‘What? What?’

  ‘Jack. It was Jack. Jack was the father of Peg’s baby.’

  ‘No.’ Just the one, horrified word. Not this. Bile shot up from my stomach. I clamped my mouth shut, gasping in air. Dad and Aunty Peg. ‘What are you even talking about?’ I bent to shake her arm. ‘They hated each other.’ Then it hit me. That’s why they hated each other. ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘She told me herself. Had to tell someone. It had only been the once. Jack had been broke. He didn’t know where he was going to find the money to fix the tractor before the harvest. Sarah in hospital with Philly. Both Peg and Jack mad drunk. I assumed your mother had found out because a few days after she came home from the hospital Peg was told to leave.’

  My body gave way too and I crumpled to my knees, facing Mrs Nolan.

  ‘She must have realised a few weeks later she was pregnant to Jack. She could never have told me that. Could never have told anybody. No wonder Peg lost her grip on life after she left us. It wasn’t the separation from Sarah and the isolation all the way over there, it was the guilt and the lies. It would have eaten her from the insides.’

  Mrs Nolan and I locked in together, eyes burning across the abyss, hands reaching. We held, forearm to forearm, drowning in too much knowing.

  ‘That’s why Mum left her wedding ring behind that morning,’ I said, my voice cracked open, dry.

  ‘Sarah…’ Mrs Nolan broke in over the top of my words, not hearing me. ‘Sarah looked at me like she’d never seen me before. Her mouth kind of… lost shape. I thought she was having a stroke.’ Mrs Nolan’s wet face looked into mine, pleading. ‘I didn’t know. We were finishing up the tomatoes. I thought—’ Mrs Nolan released one forearm to cover her eyes, still gripping me with the other hand, panting air in. I inched closer, not knowing what to do, how to comfort her—me. When she spoke again, I could hardly understand her through her gulping gasps.

  ‘I thought…’ Her head rocking from side to side. ‘At first I thought her distress was because something so private had got out. That I knew about Jack and Peg.’ Mrs Nolan slapped her chest for emphasis. ‘But then Sarah just kind of lost her stuffing. So I went down after her, both of us in the mud, and I realised she hadn’t known about it. That I’d been the one to tell her. I tried to apologise. Tried to take it back. Explain it away; such a long time ago, just the once, both out of their right minds, crippled with sorry ever since, nobody else but me knew, I’d never told a soul. Hadn’t. But none of it landed.’

  The sobbing overtook Mrs Nolan. Her body racked with the telling. This terrible truth, all these years. No wonder she’d needed to find me, to excavate all of this from her insides. I saw.

  My hands dropped back to my lap, now my eyes over the parch of the paddocks to the far horizon, back down the years to my poor, poor mother in that mud.

  Mrs Nolan righted herself enough to go on, drawing me back into the more.

  ‘Sarah didn’t say a word about it. Just put her palm up to stop me, shut me down. She took off her apron, like she was shedding skin, let it drop to the dirt. She went straight inside. She took pen and paper out of the drawer and disappeared into the bedroom. When she came back out to the kitchen, she picked up an overnight bag that had been packed and ready behind the door; didn’t even stop to wash her hands. Didn’t say a word on the way to the train. I was bitten through with misery. But at the station she did this one thing.’ Mrs Nolan clasped her hands over the top of mine. All of her burning into me, wanting me to understand, to be there in it with her. ‘Sarah put her hands out, just like I’m doing to you now.’ She shook mine. ‘Then Sarah looked straight at me, as straight as I’m looking at you now. “It’s not your fault, Nancy,” she said. “It’s theirs.” Her eyes as clear as clear, but I could hardly see her back for tears.’ Mrs Nolan released a bit. ‘And that was the majesty of your mother. I thought I was telling her something. But now I realise. I was telling her so much more. It wasn’t just the affair. It was the baby they made together and the lies they told together, drawing them in to a circle and leaving her on the outside. Making a fool out of her. Yet Sarah’s last words were all of comfort for me.’ Mrs Nolan’s folded her lips as if to put a stop to any more of the pain, but she lost the battle and it surged from her, and she let herself collapse the rest of the way to the ground.

  I let her go as a fresh horror found me. It made sense now. Why Mum had only stayed twenty-five-and-a-half minutes at Peg’s. Just long enough to have it out with her. The crime Peg’s even more than Jack’s. After their parents’ deaths, it was just the two of them, so close they were almost sewn into the same seam.

  What a terrible betrayal—skin flayed to bone.

  PHILLY’S PUZZLE PIECE

  Iwas completely done by the time I made it, shattered and bruised, back to the boarding house. This thing, it was just too big. It changed everything. How could Jack have done it? This moral man of God. He destroyed so many lives: Peg’s, Mum’s, ours. He had so many secrets. I stepped over all Tye’s messages pushed under my door. But Rat-Tail must have been hovering because he was there before I could even get the door closed.

  ‘He says you got to ring him.’

  I couldn’t. ‘It’s too late. Ring him in the morn—’

  ‘He says no matter what time, but.’

  ‘I’m too tired.’

  ‘He says no matter what you’re feeling, but.’

  Rat-Tail wasn’t going anywhere. I knew exactly what Tye would have said to him. I reluctantly pushed past him. ‘Okay. Okay.’ But Rat-Tail still wasn’t letting go. He shadowed me all the way to the phone and hovered.

  ‘Really?’ I asked as he watched me, head bent, eyes intent on my dialling fingers, but I knew there wasn’t much use expecting him to be anywhere else until it was mission accomplished.

  ‘Hi,’ I said for the benefit of Rat-Tail, giving him a significant fuck-off look. He repaid me with the biggest grin and a flare of grateful shot up in me for his sweetness in the middle of all this.

  ‘Don’t bloody “Hi” me, JJ.’

  ‘It’s—’

  ‘I don’t want to hear it. Maurice says you better call him tomorrow morning, Saturday or not.’

  He hung up.

  I looked at the phone as if he might still be in there somewhere. Felt Rat-Tail’s small, round eyes on me, so I replaced the phone gently. When I looked up, Rat-Tail had disappeared behind his door but it wasn’t closed. ‘You all good, JJ?’ he asked in a little voice.

  ‘Yep.’

  His pointed face showed back around my side of the door, all concern.

  ‘You’re a good guy, Rat-Tail.’

  His face broke open with another of his sweet grins. I returned as much of it as I could.

  I numbed my way back to my room. What now?

  The springs of the bed squeaked as I collapsed to sit on to it, folding forwards to grab my ankles, just breathing. The desert on the Timeline of Mum’s last days radiated urgency into my back from the wall behind me. Because despite all this revelation, there was still nothing to put into all that empty. Eventually I gathered my limbs for the supreme effort of getting up. I Blu-Tacked my Map of Mum back up along the other wall. I picked up the fact-red texta. Then, in big bold letters, right before the red of Peg’s miscarriage and Jack thr
owing Peg out of the house I wrote: Jack and Peg once, Jack and Peg baby. I stood away, heart burning, to take in the bold of it. I stepped back in and added: !!!!*F*!!!!

  The next morning, despite Tye’s warning, I still didn’t ring Maurice. I stayed in bed. I kept my back to the wall where the Map of Mum and all that terrible red was.

  Eventually, when the day had stretched long into the afternoon, I dragged myself to upright.

  I picked a black dress off the floor and pulled it over my head. Didn’t bother with underwear. I pulled a hat down over my hair and stabbed sunglasses on my face, even though there was nothing but grey out my window. I walked to the red phone box on the next corner where nobody could overhear anything, fed in some coins and rang Maurice.

  ‘JJ,’ he said, giving me a lot to work with. I pulled up something out of the earth and stuttered my way through an apology and some of the highlights of the past week, but avoided the things that were unthinkable. He let me get right to the end. Didn’t interrupt. Silence was among his superpowers.

  I didn’t like the continued silence so much once I was finished, though.

  Finally, he spoke. ‘You have a week to sort yourself out.’

  ‘What if I need more?’

  ‘You ring me like a normal adult and we discuss it.’

  Red surged through me. This wasn’t normal. I didn’t feel like an adult. My pillar-of-the-church father had sex with his wife’s sister, got her pregnant, threw her out of the house for being a slut, and lied to his wife about the whole thing. That wasn’t fucking normal.