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

thought the bush telegraph was plenty fine because all the people who knew her came from around here. We headed to the lounge where Philly was playing with her doll and a handful of pebbles.

‘Get the washing in,’ Tessa said.

‘Can’t reach the line,’ said Philly without breaking her stride in moving the pebbles from the imaginary kitchen to the imaginary sewing room.

‘What’s the drum for, then?’ asked Tessa.

Philly sighed and got up. Tessa watched her go until she was well out the front door. We turned the phone around so it was between us.

‘What’ll we say?’ I whispered.

‘We’ll ask how she is.’

‘You do it.’

Tessa shook her head.

‘Give me the number.’ I picked up the phone from its cradle and put it against my ear. I dialled and then held the phone in a way so Tessa and I could both hear.

‘Aunty Peg?’

‘Who’s there?’

‘It’s me—JJ—and Tessa.’

‘Needs a good haircut that Tessa.’

Tessa flew her hands to her twisty neat plaits.

‘How are you?’ I asked, to get Tessa’s mind back on the job.

‘Good as gold.’

‘Better, then?’ I said. What now? I asked Tessa with my eyes.

‘Nothing wrong that a stiff tot of Scotch wouldn’t fix.’

Tessa grabbed the phone, her hands over mine, so we were both holding on. ‘Aunty Peg, when did you last see Mum?’

‘Why? What’s wrong with her? Finally left His Highness, has she?’ She laughed. ‘Must be why Your Lordship is gracing me with his presence this afternoon. If she’s got any sense in her at all, now she’s got away she should stay away.’

See, I’m nodding at Tessa. She doesn’t even know Mum’s dead. See, Mum wasn’t at Aunty Peg’s at all. See, Dad’s been lying all right.

Tessa’s eyes were going wild and her teeth were pulling at her lip, but not because Dad lied to us. But because Dad was on his way over to Aunty Peg’s and Aunty Peg would tell him we called and he’d know we’d been using the phone. Then we heard Aunty Peg drop the receiver and walk away. Tessa squeezed my arm so hard I wanted to pinch her, but I just held the phone tighter.

I imagined Aunty Peg moving careful like a cat through the mountains of newspapers stacked all over her house. She reckoned things were always whispering at her and she needed them papers to check the truth. Made sense to me. Things whispered at me all the time.

Aunty Peg came back.

‘Sarah hasn’t been for sixteen and a half weeks,’ she said. ‘That’s a long time.’

‘Sure is,’ I said.

Aunty Peg’s voice changed so she was speaking in a posh accent. ‘It’s as if she believes I don’t speak the Queen’s English or that I’m not good enough.’

‘Goodbye, Madam,’ I said, in the same posh voice. Tessa gave me a look as if I was as mad as Aunty Peg.

‘Who shall I say called?’ Aunty Peg said.

‘It’s the electricity company,’ I said. ‘I bid you good day.’

I put down the phone.

‘Good one, Elizabeth Jane,’ Tessa said with a grin.

‘I hope she doesn’t go through all those newspapers looking for Tessa and JJ from the Electricity Company.’

‘Dad won’t believe a word she says now, anyway,’ said Tessa, clapping her hands. We heard Philly coming into the laundry so we ran the address book back to Mum’s room to put it exactly where it’d been.

‘What are we going to do?’ We sat in the muddle of blankets on the unmade bed. Tessa was scratching her head and looking at the blankets as if she was planning to make the bed right then and there. Mum would never have left it like that. I hooked her back to the big thing before us. She was wringing her hands like there was a sudden frost on. ‘I don’t know—Dad—he’s not like that. He wouldn’t tell a lie. He’d rather die.’

‘But Aunty Peg said,’ I listed them off, ‘she hasn’t seen Mum, didn’t have a turn, didn’t know Mum had appendicitis.’

‘I know, I know.’ She was squeezed up and twisted in. So was I. All these lies soring up Dad’s mouth. I was as sure as sure now. Mum wouldn’t want me doing all that lying, too. I had to tell Tessa. Now. About maybe it was me who made Mum leave. But the words didn’t know how to say themselves, like they didn’t have the get up and go to get out my throat. What did come out was this terrible strangled cat noise.

Tessa’s face jerked up, alarm switched up high. She gave me a quick thump on the back. I yanked away, heaving hard to get my breath right. I held up a hand to let her know I was fine, which maybe I was and maybe I wasn’t. It took me a while to get myself straight. She had her forehead all scrunched, waiting. I shrugged my shoulders up and down a couple of times real fast to loosen the words up. Took a steady breath and started in on everything I’d done.

I got right to the end. Tessa didn’t interrupt once. I sat back, twisting my hands around and around.

Tessa furrowed up her eyebrows again, clicked her tongue. ‘Don’t be stupid, JJ. You are a pain, but you’ve been the same pain forever.’

I scratched hard at the palm of my hand and it felt good to get at the itch. What Tessa said made sense and it was like something had been smashed up good. Mum hadn’t acted like something was broken between us. She’d rubbed my back and washed my face. I rounded out my eyes and smiled, all hopeful. But Tessa didn’t smile back and then I lost mine as well.

‘If Dad wasn’t covering for me,’ I said, ‘then he lied for himself. That blue they had. Maybe it was real bad. Maybe Dad’s got something real bad to hide.’

‘It’s probably just a mistake,’ she said. ‘Let’s see what he says first.’

‘But Aunty Peg’s calendar is never wrong.’

She nodded, all serious, caught between the two true things— Dad would