The Serpent's Skin

by Erina Reddan

  ‘You had no right to ring my father.’

  He didn’t skip a beat. ‘I’m the host. I issue the invites.’

  ‘Not him. If I don’t want my lying mongrel father there, that’s my business.’

  He was all silence.

  I was all runaway red, but I still wasn’t ready to throw my unwashed past at him to make him understand. Not until I made sense of it, or didn’t; not until I’d fitted it into whatever place it would end up in.

  ‘He doesn’t deserve to be there. He threw me out because I went to uni.’

  ‘Go back to the facts,’ he interrupted quietly, his voice reaching out to steady me. His bloody ‘facts sing’ mantra. ‘That fire in you, JJ,’ he said. ‘Don’t let it consume the facts.’

  I felt a swirl of guilt because I knew I was lying: Dad didn’t throw me out, I left.

  I was drowning in lies: his, mine.

  ‘Here’s a fact for you. You can stick your award. I quit.’

  I hung up.

  I left the phone box and took off, running, until my thongs tripped me, so I shucked them off and left them behind. Bare feet on hard ground. Eventually I came to a stop, lurched forwards, panting, holding my knees. When my breath evened out I found a tree and leaned back against the ridge of its bark, eyes closed. Minutes or hours ticked by and things smoothed long again so I had enough to look around to see where I’d ended up.

  I was where I needed to be. I’d wanted to spare her all of this. Especially with everything going on with Ahmed. But now I couldn’t. That thing that had nagged at me all night. I had to know if Mrs Nolan was right. Had she been the one to tell Mum this terrible truth? Or had Mum worked it out the night before in that argument with Dad, and that’s why Philly had overheard her threatening to leave? It would make sense of why Mum’d filled the freezer with food. That overnight bag, already packed behind the door before Mrs Nolan had dropped the bomb. And then one thing more, something I remembered. Mum had come tipping-toeing in that night, after she thought we were asleep, to snuggle our blankets under our chins and kiss the top of our heads. If she took off because of all that betrayal, maybe that was enough to stretch across those six last days of Mum. But the way she’d reacted to Mrs Nolan’s telling— as if she was hearing it for the first time— I’d bet Mrs Nolan was correct. Which meant there was something else that Philly might know to fill in all that space on Mum’s Timeline.

  Philly held the key underneath the layers of her denial.

  I checked my watch. It was early for Philly, but she might be home. I realised how much I needed her.

  She didn’t show any surprise when I knocked. ‘Call Tye,’ she said as she went to close the door in my face. I stuck my leg forwards to stop her. She sighed. ‘He’s going nuts, JJ. Call him.’

  ‘I did,’ I say shortly. ‘Are you okay?’

  Smudged mascara. Chipped nails. Facts.

  She turned away, leaving the door open, and headed to the fridge.

  ‘Are you?’ She turned back to pointedly look at my bare feet. She opened the freezer.

  I saw the hole on the table where Ahmed’s mosaic glass lamp used to be. That was a fact she couldn’t deny just because she needed to. I wasn’t sure why she was surprised that Ahmed had moved out because he’d been talking about it for weeks. I went up behind her and hugged her hard. She leaned into me for a moment before reaching to topple the container of ice cream down from the top shelf.

  She flicked the freezer closed and crossed to the drawer.

  ‘Haven’t seen these cow pyjamas since you were fifteen.’ I made an effort to be myself so she wouldn’t suspect how much shit was going on beneath my surface. If she didn’t already know about Jack and Peg, there was no way she could handle that now and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to stop myself if she gave me even the slightest opening.

  ‘Surprised you even kept anything so… not silky.’

  ‘Not helping,’ she said. She only had one spoon. She shrugged when I drew it to her attention. ‘He didn’t leave you,’ she said.

  ‘He didn’t leave you, either.’

  Philly turned at the sound of the key in the door. Ahmed stopped short, his satchel over his shoulder. ‘I thought you were still at work, Feely. I left my soccer bag behind the laundry door.’

  I looked from one to the other and made myself scarce. In the lounge my fingers itched to mess up the line of candles on her neat sidetable runner. It was more than enough that the mauve in the runner was the exact same shade as the circles on the couch cushions.

  ‘I’m home early,’ she said to Ahmed, ‘because I’m in the middle of an emotional distress.’ I heard her pick up her keys from the bowl on the kitchen bench. ‘I’ll leave you in peace to get the rest of your stuff.’

  He followed her through the lounge, where I was, laughing as she opened the front door. ‘You’re wearing your pyjamas,’ he said.

  She looked down and covered herself with her arms as if she were naked. He reached for her hand, but she twisted away and ran into the bedroom. He tried the handle. ‘Feely, open the door.’

  ‘Go away. Don’t muddy the waters now.’

  ‘That’s life, Feely. Water is always muddy. You move, you stir up the bottom. Being alive is moving. Open the door.’

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘Your head is so hard, Feely.’

  I returned Ahmed’s wave on his way to the laundry. The strap of his soccer bag went over his head and shoulder in one graceful move as if it knew its place. His aftershaved sweetness filled the air around him. No wonder Philly went for him. That and the way he built a whole new wardrobe with extra shelves at the passing comment from her that it was getting squishy for her clothes in there. He was the opposite of Dad. As Ahmed headed towards the front door, he twirled his finger around his ear in the way Philly had taught him. I didn’t know whether he thought I was mad for hiding behind the rocker, or that Philly was mad for locking herself away.

  ‘See you around, Feely. Soon.’

  He opened the front door and closed it, staying on my side of the door, in the lounge.

  Philly unlocked her bedroom and headed for the table.

  ‘I knew the ice cream would win,’ said Ahmed, opening his arms wide for her. Philly had her fists up and flung herself at him. He grabbed her and held her tight. ‘I’m not leaving,’ he said. ‘Just moving out.’

  ‘It’s the same.’

  ‘You really need to get used to muddy water. I’m just moving out so I can see you more.’

  ‘It didn’t make sense the first time you said it—and not in the seventeen times since.’

  ‘But by number forty, you’ll get it. Your head is so full of old facts, it’s hard for any new ones to get in.’

  ‘Because this is not a fact. It’s…’ She threw her arms up and twisted away from him. ‘Something different.’

  ‘I’m not your mother. I’m not your father. I am not abandoning you.’

  She stopped still. I crawled into the kitchen and hunched against the fridge hoping I could disappear.

  ‘JJ,’ she called.

  I didn’t say a word.

  I heard her smack Ahmed. ‘JJ told you, didn’t she?’

  ‘She gave me a hand to move a few of my things last week.’

  ‘Bitch!’

  ‘Actually, I find JJ very helpful girl.’

  I screwed up my face and when I opened my eyes there she was, two inches away. ‘What the hell did you think you were doing?’ she asked.

  ‘He didn’t have a car.’

  ‘You gave him the Cook’s tour of your version of our past.’

  ‘Nobody else in this family listens to me.’

  ‘I don’t want to be that girl. That sad little girl who lost her mother and… you know… the rest.’ She mocked strangled me in the air. ‘It’s my life. I get to tell it my way.’

  I locked away all the new things I could say about that life and bit my lip to make sure I didn’t give in to the temptation. ‘You share a b
ed with him every night. You’d think you could share some head space, too.’

  ‘That’s the point,’ she said. ‘It’s not in my head. It’s all in yours.’

  I bit harder. Held my breath. Reminded myself over and over like a mantra: Keep your mouth shut, don’t break her.

  Ahmed appeared around the door. ‘I gotta go. I don’t want to be late for practice,’ he said, pulling out something from his satchel. ‘I’ve bought you a present.’ It was a dreamcatcher as big as the kitchen clock and shot through with reds and pinks and golds. ‘Now that I’m not here all the time—it will keep your nights safe.’

  ‘It doesn’t match the colour sch—’ she began.

  He tapped his foot, his head to the side.

  ‘Ah, that’s the point,’ she said.

  ‘See, your brain does take on new facts when you give it a chance. A little bit of chaos is good for the soul.’ He dropped his satchel by the door. ‘I’ll be back to pick this up after soccer, so put a nice coat over those nice pyjamas and we’ll get some pizza. You can come if you’re still here, JJ.’

  ‘Thanks for deserting me.’ I forced myself to laugh, which came out more like a hiccup, but I had to try to pull the normal back into me so I wouldn’t lose it with Philly.

  The door closed on his laugh, which had the lightness of a real one. I slipped away from Philly, grabbed a spoon from the drawer and dashed back to the armchair in the lounge.

  She followed me, flopping on to the couch and snatched up the tub before I got to it. She ate alone for a few moments, then extended the tub to me. I dug my spoon in and slipped the cold into my mouth. I was glad to be there with her, just this simple of how-we-are together.

  ‘What?’ asked Philly.

  She knew me so well. I stared at her, long and hard, trying to work out how I could ask her without telling her anything.

  ‘No. No. I know that look. No.’ She dropped the spoon and plastered her hands to her ears. ‘La la la.’

  ‘Okay.’ I nodded. ‘I’ll do you a deal—I won’t tell you anything, but you have to answer one question.’

  ‘Nothing. I know nothing.’

  She picked up the spoon that had fallen on the floor. It was a measure of her distress that she didn’t immediately head to the kitchen for a paper towel and a new spoon. She hunched back in among her cows, getting her legs up close to her chest.

  ‘You heard Mum tell Dad she was leaving.’ I said it as gently as possible.

  Her eyes darted left then right. ‘I never told you that. I never told anybody.’

  I let her think about that a moment.

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, you did. You told Tessa, back then.’

  She blanched. ‘I was just a kid. Probably didn’t hear right.’ I saw a flash of the grown-up woman, all bluff and smoke. I bet that worked with people who didn’t know her. That’s the thing. You might get away with living without a past, but your past can’t live without you.

  I won the stare-off and she bent to wipe the table with her sleeve. Underneath the glass were three magazines fanned out and a copy of Alice in Wonderland.

  ‘That’s where my book got to,’ I said.

  She followed my eyes. ‘It’s my book.’

  ‘Mine.’

  She snatched it up and hugged it to her.

  ‘It’s got my name on it,’ I said. She opened the fragile hardcover of the book and turned over the sticky-taped first page. I pointed. ‘See.’

  ‘Just because you wrote your name on it.’

  I threw up my hands. ‘Okay, so it probably doesn’t belong-belong to either—’

  ‘It’s mine now.’ She put it behind her back.

  I brought my eyebrows together. ‘Are you reading it at the moment?’

  The weight of things in her stopped up her words. Then she made the decision to lie and shook her head.

  ‘So that’s why it’s sitting out here all on its own, away from its friends, all alphabetically ordered in your bookshelf,’ I said, jumping from my armchair on to the couch beside her. ‘And that’s why it has a nice bookmark with a lovely pompom thing in the middle of it.’

  The annoyed dark on her face ripped the years away and she was our little Philly monkey again, as if the past had stretched out its fist and punched me right in the face.

  ‘You started reading after I finished it, the day Mum disappeared,’ I said, my voice full of quiet. Alarm lit her up and got her off the couch. She took the book into the bedroom. I watched her and I let her go. For a moment I wanted to ask her to bring out Mum’s special pink snowdrop dress so we could both sit under it as we used to when we were kids and missing her. But as much as I longed to feel this thing of Mum’s, I knew it would be too much. It would undo me. It was better hanging quietly in Philly’s closet rather than dancing with ghosts out here.

  When she came back I was pretending to be busy with the ice cream again.

  She plumped down on the couch and crossed her legs. ‘I’ll tell you what I remember, which is almost nothing, but you’ve got to promise you won’t speak to me about it again.’

  I nodded, fingers crossed behind my back, though, because she would have to hear it some other time. She had a right to know. When she could bear it. And maybe that knowing could shift something in her. Make her and Ahmed more possible.

  ‘They were out by the tractor the night before she left,’ Philly examined her nails and worked her cuticles, ‘not realising I was in the long grass behind when they got stuck into it. Dad told her he was the head of the family, he made decisions. Mum flew at him.’ Philly was speaking like she’d learned this by rote. I wondered how many times she might have said this in her head. ‘She said he was more worried about what the bloody priest and his Southern Cross cronies thought than what was best for his own wife and kids. Told him all this stuff he’d done wrong. How he made Mrs Salvatino pay for their wheat after her husband died, even though the bill had already been paid, blah blah blah, and how she lay in bed beside him at night and she saw as much as God.’

  Philly stopped. I knew there was more. I kept my mouth shut.

  ‘So yeah, she said she was leaving,’ Philly said eventually.

  ‘She’d known that about him for a long time. Why leave then?’

  Philly jerked straight. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘She’d just had it. It happens to all of us. And, she did say—’ She stopped short. Looked at me apologetically.

  ‘Say it.’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘You were going to say—’

  ‘We were so poor and—’

  ‘And she said on top of that there was me.’ I jumped in.

  ‘No. No.’

  I gave her a look.

  ‘Okay, yes. Yes. But we were all hard. Four of us to feed and clothe. It wasn’t just you.’ She laid a hand on my knee.

  I pulled away. I’d bloody known it all along, but still to hear it from her.

  ‘Look. She said something else.’

  I didn’t look. Kept staring at that mauve runner.

  ‘It didn’t mean anything, but she said she was going to die.’

  ‘What?’ I swivelled back, on full wide-eyed stare. ‘She was dying?’

  Philly’s head went into automatic shake. ‘No. No. See, this is why I didn’t tell you before. It’s just a figure of speech. It’s simple. They fought, Mum got mad. She took off, stayed with Peg, who made a mistake on the calendar, then Mum collapsed. Et cetera. Coincidence. That’s it. You’ve got way too much time on your hands. Go back to work.’ She stood up and paced the room.

  Bloody Tye. The thought flashed between all the other lightning strikes. Keeping Philly up to date with my business. He must have Philly’s number memorised.

  But I’d got what I came for. This was something else. Mrs Nolan had been right. Mum had a reason to go before she knew about Jack and Peg.

  ‘So what was killing her?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.’ Philly shook out her hands as she walked. �
��She said she’d die if she stayed. If things stayed the way they were.’

  ‘Instead she left and she still died.’ But I could see it had taken everything Philly had to finally let that ‘die’ word into the world. With that and Ahmed moving out, I didn’t want to push her over the edge. The way I’d pushed Tessa.

  ‘You’ve got to drop this, JJ. There’s no point to any of it. You’re going nuts.’

  Stung, the red sparked up. ‘It’s not nuts to consider the crooked road.’

  ‘It’s nuts to keep dashing down rabbit holes.’

  ‘It doesn’t add up, Philly. Something happened to Mum. You can’t run away from it just because it’s not black and white.’

  ‘It’s not like he did anything terrible. You can’t keep making up a mystery because you want colour.’

  I slammed down hard on that red but it octopused into too many tentacles. ‘She wasn’t at Aunty Peg’s. It’s like Mum waded out into the grey mist and disappeared. Then she turned up dead. If we could just make sense of those last few days it might feel more…’ I searched for the word ‘… more survivable. I just want the truth.’

  ‘The fucking drama.’ Philly hit one hand into another. ‘Knowing where she was doesn’t change the ending. Mum’s dead. You’re not. That’s the truth. Let her go.’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘Do so. I’ve got a job. I’m pushing ahead.’

  ‘You’re spinning your wheels so fast you’ve got no time to feel. Why do you think Ahmed had to get out of here? Couldn’t live with your speed, filling up all the corners of your life with activity, running from one thing to another.’

  She came to a complete stop. Put her hands by her side. She did that thing she was so good at: drawing in everything so it was right where she needed it, close and tight and controllable. ‘It’s Aunty Peg all over again,’ she said. ‘All this…’ she opened her arms up ‘… stuff you go on with.’

  I put my hands in front of my face and crossed them like I was scrubbing something away, fighting against her tide. ‘There’s no stuff.’

  ‘There’s stuff, all right,’ she said. ‘Calendars and diaries, and driving Tessa to drink.’