The Serpent's Skin Erina Reddan (affordable ebook reader .TXT) 📖

‘Dead’s not spring.’

‘In heaven it is.’

I turned the page.

‘Maybe you would have been nicer if you stuck with Elizabeth,’ said Tessa.

I lowered the book. Tessa was the one who called me Jane-Jane after my second name to start with, because she couldn’t get her baby tongue around Elizabeth. When I was old enough I got it nice and short and snappy into JJ.

‘What do you bloody want?’ I spat at Tessa and her big fat opinions. ‘Because if you’ve got nothing nice to say, you can walk right on out.’ I said it just the way Mum did.

She let it go, which was nowhere near like her. Instead she said, ‘Reckon we should ring Aunty Peg and find out once and for all if she did have a turn.’

My mouth dropped open.

Her eyes darted out the window. ‘Just to shut you up.’ She flicked lint off the bedspread.

‘I’m good,’ I said quickly. After the Milo I saw I couldn’t be talking out aloud about why Mum left. Cause if she didn’t go to help Aunty Peg, sure as dirt they’d find out it was all my fault she’d gone.

‘Philly’s right, Dad would never lie.’ I crossed my fingers behind my back and added in my head, Unless he had a good reason. Maybe God might think Dad covering up for me was a good reason.

Tessa squinted at my sudden change of heart, but then got back on her own track. ‘Philly says she heard something when they were fighting the night before.’

‘What?’ My voice came out a bit hoarse. I cleared my throat.

‘Mum told Dad she was leaving him.’

The words struck me like a fist in the gut. This was something new. It’d have to be real bad for Mum to say she was leaving Dad. Nobody left their husbands. Not even if they got beat up. They just went to the neighbour’s until things settled down again and the drink made its way out of the father’s system.

‘What did Dad do wrong, then?’ I asked.

Tessa shrugged and picked at the lint. ‘Philly didn’t hear that bit.’ She locked eyes with me. She had this emptiness where an answer should have been. The nothingness went on and on so I stopped looking before we both got drowned deep.

That gumboot by the dam. I caved over, stubbing the edge of the book into my gut hard, panting and desperate for air, just like Dolly after a full-tilt chasing after runaway sheep.

‘What?’ asked Tessa, on alert.

I shook my head. ‘Nothing.’ Because it couldn’t be anything. Mum’s boots were right where they should be, standing tall and neat between Tessa’s and Philly’s in the middle of the puddle of the rest of ours. I straightened back up. Closed the book.

Dad would never. He loved Mum. More than any of us.

Then the new thought. Mum told Dad she was leaving before I ate the cake and told her she was a bum. She did all that baking in the morning instead of the afternoon like normal, and she’d cooked food and put it in the freezer for us. Enough for a few days at least, Tessa said. What if she left not because of what I did, but something Dad did? For a second that perked me up. But then I remembered she was still dead.

Tessa was back at her plucking at the bedspread, waiting. I gave her a long look weighing things up. Squinshed up my face because this new thing meant we had to call Aunty Peg, even if it also meant Tessa finding out what I did.

‘We’re not allowed to use the phone,’ I said.

‘We won’t tell Dad.’

‘What about when the bill comes?’

She shrugged.

‘Got Peg’s number, then?’ I asked.

‘In Mum’s address book.’

‘We’d better get on with it then, before Dad gets there to make her say what he wants her to.’ I was starting to get all itchy inside so I shot off the bed, trying to stay in front of it. Mostly because I remembered something. I’d heard Mum asking Dad the other day if we could bring Aunty Peg back to live with us. Dad had said, ‘Over my dead body.’

‘I need the help,’ Mum had said.

‘She’s a bad apple.’

‘One mistake, Jack. A very long time ago. She’s a grown woman now. Where’s your Christian charity?’

Then Dad’s voice had got all fierce and whispery. ‘You know we can’t have a filthy woman like her under our roof. What would Father McGinty say to us having her back if he found out?’

‘It’s none of Father McGinty’s business,’ she whispered back just as fierce.

‘I think you’ll find that’s exactly whose business it is,’ finished Dad.

Mum must have been disappointed because Aunty Peg was her only sister and they were orphan girls. Maybe Mum left us to go live with her. Maybe. Except for, she hadn’t bothered leaving before and she did take us down the city to see Aunty Peg behind Dad’s back pretty often. We knew enough to not let on to Dad.

But what else was big enough for Mum to leave Dad? Tessa was right. First off, we had to find out if Peg had a turn or not.

Tessa raised her hand to knock on Mum’s bedroom door as if Mum might be home.

I pushed her hand away before she could connect to the door and the silence behind it. I leaned the door open. It was all dark and shroudy because of the curtains. Tessa crossed the room to yank them open. Mum’s address book wasn’t where she normally kept it in the drawer by her bed. We walked around, too scared to move anything. But I told myself to offer the scare up to purgatory for Mum, so I started moving papers on the big round table and that got Tessa to work. She found Mum’s book in Dad’s drawer, where it shouldn’t be. Tessa frowned, turning it over, before her face cleared. ‘He’ll have wanted to let her friends know.’

I shrugged ‘probably’, but