The Serpent's Skin

by Erina Reddan

‘What the hell is wrong with you?’

  ‘Me?’ I couldn’t hear what was going on in my own head any more because cymbals were making such a racket. I scrabbled about in there, but I couldn’t get still enough to locate my well-made plan. ‘What happened to you when Mum died?’ I said, voice pumped up with accusation. ‘It was like you’d died, too.’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish.’

  ‘Dad, it was like we were invisible.’

  Jack tapped the table faster and faster. ‘You were never satisfied after your mother died. You carved me up with a knife and a fork, then left me out to rot.’

  ‘You were the parent, Dad. I was ten years old. You left me to rot.’

  ‘Ten years going on one hundred. You were a bloody handful. Still are. Causing trouble from one end of the ship to the other. If Tessa’s drinking—if Philly’s living in sin—it’s your fault. You’ve never let any of us settle. It’s all raw and bleeding and picking at scabs for you.’

  The screech of the chair as I pushed it back ripped through the house. ‘I haven’t said a word to you about Mum’s disappearance for fourteen years.’

  ‘The bullshit. You never had to say anything, JJ. Your snarky face was always saying it for you.’

  I picked up the plate and threw it across the room, smashing it against the fireplace, showering the kitchen with bits of cheap china. The shock of it rushed me out of the house. It was Blue who found her way into my arms, brushing up against the thing that needed to be brushed up against. I pushed my face into the long, tough hair on her neck. Counted down from ten, over and over, and Blue stood there counting with me.

  The dark had taken over the sky, layering it now in a thick threat. A flash of lightning split it in two. I went back inside and ignored Dad, who hadn’t moved an inch. I went to the fridge and pulled out three sausages. I took them out to Blue and patted her as she wolfed them down. Went back inside.

  ‘Hey, they’re for my lunch tomorra.’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘What the hell?’

  ‘Blue was hungry.’

  ‘She’s a working dog.’

  ‘Everyone needs love, Dad.’

  I sat down opposite him again. ‘You got Aunty Peg pregnant.’

  ‘The bullshit out of your mouth.’

  ‘Mum’s watching everything you do. Same with God. You’re down here burning through your heaven points right under their eyes, right now.’

  ‘I’m dead weary, JJ. Just give it a bone.’

  ‘You were tired out years ago from all your lies. Admit it. You and Aunty Peggy. Under Mum’s nose.’

  ‘Leave it alone.’

  ‘Where did Mum get to after she’d had it out with Aunty Peg? You know as well as I do that she didn’t stay there.’

  ‘You worry a snake’s nest long enough, one of them bastards is going to rise up and bite you.’

  ‘That’s the plan.’

  ‘I don’t know. All right.’ His fist slammed into the table. ‘I don’t know where your mother went.’

  ‘You do because she rang you.’

  ‘I made all that up. Why do you think she never spoke to you buggers? Because she didn’t ring. I made it up. That’s the lie. And I can’t be sorry about it. I didn’t want you blokes hurting.’

  For a moment I believed him and the anti-climax of it was all cold water. But then I saw a shift in his eyes as they paused on Mum’s photo again and then headed back out the window and over the paddock he couldn’t see in the night.

  ‘Did she have a friend in Richmond?’

  His hand stopped tapping.

  ‘How would she know anybody in Richmond?’

  ‘The address in her prayer book.’

  He stood up abruptly. ‘You go there?’

  I nodded.

  He spread his legs, hands to waist. ‘And?’

  I couldn’t work an ‘and’ off my tongue.

  He leaned over to steady himself on the back of the chair. ‘I been there, too. The day after the police came, told us your mother was gone. I went to that address. Said they never heard of her.’

  ‘Who did? Who lived there back then?’

  ‘Some doctor bloke.’ He rubbed his hand against his thigh. ‘I believed im. That doctor, he looked steady.’

  ‘There were two girls there this morning. Slammed the door in my face, actually.’ I said. I didn’t add any of their other weirdness.

  He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘Righto, then,’ he said softly. ‘End of the line.’

  ‘It can’t be.’ I balled my fist. ‘There has to be something else, Dad.’

  ‘Who says so?’ He stared at me. ‘Just because a thing is hard to live with doesn’t turn it into a crime.’

  ‘What did you fight about the night she left?’

  ‘How can I bloody remember?’

  ‘Really?’

  A snakey look passed over his face. ‘Peg, then. I probably told her about Peg.’

  ‘So you’re admitting it. You had sex with Peg.’

  He looked cornered.

  I didn’t breathe.

  ‘Okay. Okay. The answer is yes.’ He held his hands up in surrender. ‘It was just the once. Years before. When your mother was pregnant with Philly. Sarah was tired and sick and scared and miserable with being pregnant again. And it was all my fault she was. I was the man. And I just…’ He shook his hands in agitation. ‘Just. Just couldn’t take it any more. And Peg…’ He petered out.

  ‘And the pregnancy?’

  ‘I don’t know nothin about any pregnancy.’ He flicked it away. His eyes flashing between me and the past. ‘I felt that bad about it. All those years. I had to finally tell Sarah. So I did that night.’

  ‘Stop lying,’ I yelled. ‘It was Mrs Nolan who told her about you and Peg. By mistake, the next morning.’

  Defeat greyed across his face.

  I let him sit with it for a while. But then I didn’t. ‘But Mum was already leaving you, anyway. Why?’

  He held every muscle tight, like an animal in a spotlight.

  ‘Forgot to feed Max,’ he got out at last.

  ‘Don’t be stupid. It’s pitch black, and it’s starting to pelt down. Leave him to the morning.’

  He stopped still on his way to the door. Turned to point a stubby finger at me. ‘When I get back, you be gone.’

  ‘It’s going to come out, Dad. It will.’

  The first thunderclap came loud and I jumped. Lightning cracked across the sky outside the window.

  He got to the door and leaned on it, saying nothing. The air between us thickened until I could bear the tension no longer. But I did.

  ‘You’re right,’ he burst out. ‘Okay! I’m a hypocrite and a liar and all the things you’ve ever thought I was. She knew it. She knew it, too. That’s what we fought about that night. She told me she was leaving because she’d had enough of me.’

  I stared at him. This was the tawdry nothing it had come down to. All the puff went out of me.

  ‘I didn’t believe her. It wasn’t the first time we’d blued,’ he said. ‘I could have worked on her the next morning. Settled her down. Just like always. But then bloody Nosy Nancy told her about Peg, and she left before I could explain.’ His voice went up like he was the victim. ‘Tell her how sorry I was. Tell her she was more to me than the air I breathed.’

  He held my gaze with indignation for a few beats and then his face collapsed. Shame and sorrow oozing from his eyes like rivers of pain. ‘Truth is, I’m down on my knees every day of my life asking for forgiveness. But it’ll never come. I’m a sinner.’

  Tears blurred my eyes, too. All that rice digging into his knees as he knelt beside his bed every night. It had started back then.

  ‘Your mother was a saint.’ His voice broke. ‘I was the husband. My job was to protect her. Instead I cast her into hell. I as good as killed her.’

  I was full of not knowing what to say. This new father of mine. Raw and broken.

  ‘It wasn’t your fa
ult,’ I finally got to. ‘She died of natural causes. It was just her time. Remember Silver, the brumby? It was just her time. That was all. And the only bad thing was we weren’t there to be with Mum. But none of us could have saved her. Not one of us.’

  And the truth of it was like water surging through me, gushing and raging, carrying everything before it.

  ‘You made one mistake,’ I continued. ‘You’re right. She would have cooled off, eventually. She just needed some time. She wouldn’t have left us.’

  His eyes veiled with confusion—lost between the yes and the no of it. His hand dropped from the door handle, he stumbled away, out into the storm. I got the dustpan and broom and swept up all the broken bits of china.

  THE SIZE OF TRUTH

  Ipulled my hair away from my skull as I lay on my bed. I didn’t even know how I had got home from Dad’s last night. There was pelting rain and hectic, whining windscreen wipers. There was the vomiting pity of all those years wasted, chasing ghosts and shadows. What do you do when you come to the end of a thing? A full dead stop. A thing you thought would end up somewhere. And that somewhere would have made sense of the whole way leading up to it. But instead you were left with palms open, full of empty.

  I traced the web of cracks crawling across my ceiling until I came to the end of the line. What did I do now? My hand went to my stomach. Then I let it drop. One thing I wouldn’t be doing was having a baby just to fill up the wasteland I’d created.

  I remembered that science book I’d had before Mum died. Every cell in our body is supposed to be renewed every seven years. Maybe we were supposed to do that with our stories, too. I’d ossified mine shell hard around me. But this was the fourteenth year. Could I let it shed its skin this time round?

  I filled up with the possibility of it, groaning to a sitting position, back against the wall.

  I saw Dad hunched over between the trees that morning before we found out Mum died, I saw him standing in the kitchen in his trousers pulled up by twine, I saw the stubble across his chin, I heard him telling Mrs Nolan that he wouldn’t be letting Sarah down again, he’d be keeping the kids, every single one of them.

  Mum’s Timeline on the wall pulsed at me. I’d been such an idiot. I got out of the bed, took it down and lay it along the ground, like I had that first night with Tye.

  How had I stuffed up with Tye so badly? All I had to do was pick up the phone. Even to let him know I couldn’t talk about it, but I was alive. Would it have been so hard?

  I unfolded the Map of Mum from my backpack and put it beside the Timeline.

  And Maurice? Quitting. Did I really do that? I winced. I sat back and scratched my head like I was a mad thing, wondering when was the last time I’d even washed my hair.

  I picked up the red texta and weighed it in the palm of my hand. Bloody facts. I finally had them. I knew what had to be known. I uncapped the texta and bent over the Timeline. I added the details of the fight the night before Mum left. Then I leaned further over to add to the Map. I hesitated over using opinion-blue or fact-red. Since it was the end, it had to be red.

  I’d found out everything. It had been a run-of-the-mill argument the night before. Maybe worse. Enough for her to need a few days away. But then she found out about Peg and Jack. I could see why he hadn’t told her. Mistake? Yes. Gutless? Of course. Flawed? Definitely. But not a monster. He hadn’t admitted to knowing about the pregnancy and maybe he didn’t know since Peg lost the baby, anyway.

  It all added up. Why he hated Peg. Why he chucked her out of the house even though he was as ‘loose’ as she’d been. Mrs Nolan’s revelation accounted for Mum being furious with Peg and only staying twenty-five-and-a-half minutes. She probably slept in some cheap room somewhere. We’d never find out where she’d been those last three days. And Philly was right. We didn’t have to.

  The futility of it ripped through me. I slashed red across the Map, and slashed it back the other way. I zigzagged that texta back and back and back, again and again, until I couldn’t see through the blear in my eyes; until the paper tore and I was running red across the floor.

  Suddenly Tye was there, his arms around me.

  ‘What? What?’ he asked over and over, gentling me as I sobbed out words that meant nothing. He held me, rocked me, murmured to me. Then I was back in our kitchen the day Mum left. Her rocking me in her muscle-hard arms. Me smelling the dirt of the tomatoes on her apron.

  Eventually the grief evened out through me enough for us to lie on the floor, arms around each other, and I was full of the kindness of him coming to check on me in his lunch break even after everything and the not-deserving of me.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘This is what you wanted. Now you can get on with your life.’

  ‘But it’s such a tiny truth. How can such a tiny thing set me free?’

  He laughed. ‘It doesn’t matter the size of the truth, it just matters that you finally have the answer: the facts all add up.’

  I gave him a lopsided smile at Maurice’s words from his mouth. He full-smiled back. Maybe he was right. It just didn’t feel like it. Surely, after all this dark time, the truth should come with a marching band and streamers.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d come back,’ I said. ‘After that last phone call.’

  ‘Me neither,’ he said, his fingers playing across my belly. ‘But Philly rang me about your fight. She wanted me to come check up on you.’

  I captured his hand under mine. ‘Thanks.’

  He smiled back. I took a big breath. If this was the beginning of the rest of my life, I’d better make a start.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ I said, as raw a fact as you can get.

  He drew back to look at me, really look at me. He placed his palms on my cheeks and cradled my face, staring deep and deep into me. ‘Is that a good thing, or a maybe thing, or a definite not good thing?’

  I smiled at his ‘JJ-ism’ as he called them and shifted so I could cradle his face, too.

  ‘It’s an I’ve-got-no-idea thing.’ I paused to search for the first time since I knew there was a baby growing for what the parameters of this might be. ‘It feels important that it happened while I was looking for Mum, really looking for her, not just expecting to see her around every corner.’

  He nodded seriously.

  ‘So maybe that’s enough to bring it the rest of the way into the world.’ I paused again, looking for more of it. ‘And maybe it’s not. It’s too early for us. You’re even younger than me.’ I screwed up my face. ‘What about you? What might this be in your world?’

  He shifted to lie on his back. He put his hands behind his head and studied those same cracks I’d been considering. ‘I don’t know yet. It’s new for me. What I can say is that I don’t hate the idea.’

  I surprised myself by laughing at his cautious, careful phrasing.

  ‘How long have we got?’ he asked.

  ‘Maybe a few days more. It’s just gone six weeks. If we’re not going to do it, I think it’s only fair to send it off before it’s too much, so it can find the right place for it somewhere else and settle in there.’

  He laughed gently, turning back over so we could hold each other again. ‘Bed?’ he asked.

  When Tye had gone, I did feel more resolved, clearer. So it was a small thing I’d found out. Maybe that’s how life was. It had to be enough. But, still, things kept turning me around and sitting me up and turning me around again.

  I cast about my room for something to make my mind stop jerking from this to that. I wished I’d bought a telly after all. I turned the radio on. The verdict was in. They were going to try Lindy Chamberlain for murdering her nine-week-old daughter, Azaria, in the shadow of Uluru.

  I turned the radio off again.

  Aunty Peg’s diaries were on the bedside table. I pulled one on to my lap, opened the first page and smoothed it down. The oranges were lovely today, I read. The ordinary in it soothed me. I got worried when her writing got loopy and charged across the page. And ther
e were some wild things like: the rainbow over the house pressed me into the carpet this evening. But my eyes swept past those bits. For a while I avoided the section around the torn pages. But then I made myself be braver because that’s what the truth had to mean.

  There was some interesting stuff about money further along from the torn section, which Peg had to have written around the time of Mum’s death, although the dates were all mussed up. How she wanted to give Mum the money she’d needed but how Mum wouldn’t take it over her dead body. Now she’s the dead one. Direct quote. That was Peg. Blunt to the point of pain.

  A terrible wave of sadness washed through me. It probably meant Mum had to stay in some dive those last days rather than the half-decent place she’d planned on to take some time away from us, further than Jean’s Corner where I always tracked her down, further than Peg’s where she’d be more worried about Peg, right off into the world where nobody could bother her. Then I shivered and pulled myself together. Knowing what I knew had to mean that I couldn’t get pulled back into the deep like this. I had to stay above the waterline. I pulled out Mum’s cameo from under my pillow. The truth had to also mean I could finally do this. My fingertip traced the raised contours of the delicate cream curls of the woman’s head and shoulders just like I had done as a kid. The clean lines of her elegant beauty and all it had made possible for us in that bare world, with the cold wind always moaning through the cracks and the colour leached from the threadbare carpet. I smiled, pulled back into its magic. Yet I also saw the spot of discolouration which I’d thought back then was part of the design.

  Still, this thing passed down from Mum’s great-grandmother was full with so much beauty that it was time to share it with Philly and Tessa.

  I got out of bed to lay Mum’s cameo out in the open on the desk. I considered it for a few moments, then realised I was busting, so pulled a pair of jeans up under my nighty and dragged a cardigan over the top. I checked the corridor and dashed to the bathroom, where I scrubbed my face and cleaned my teeth for good measure because there was no way I was planning on making the trip again any time soon.

  Back in my bedroom, I closed the door and fell against it for a moment. The phone dringed at the other end of the corridor. I slid to the floor. I’d been hoping to hear from Philly. I’d never walked out on her before. And now I had something good to tell her that might make it right again, but I couldn’t say it right now. There was nothing in the tank.