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

‘Be quiet, woman,’ thundered Dad. He leaped to his feet, the chair screeching backwards across the lino. ‘Have you got your pills?’

Aunty Peg waved her fork.

‘I suggest you take them if you want to stay here even one night. I’ve about had enough of you.’

Aunty Peg shook her head from side to side, mimicking him.

Dad stalked off, leaving his food uneaten.

‘You don’t frighten me, Jack McBride. That’s what the doctor said, fair and square. She nearly died with the last one, Philly, or JJ, was it?’

‘Instead she died of something else,’ Dad yelled back.

‘True enough.’ Aunt Peg turned. ‘Dead now, so what does it matter?’ She cut into the pumpkin. ‘What did she die of again?’

‘Burst appendix, Aunty Peg,’ said Tessa.

Dad came into our room that night for the first time since Mum’d gone.

‘Can Aunty Peg stay a few extra days?’ I asked, wanting him to feel better after the day he’d had being mad with grief and then mad with Aunty Peg. I squashed down what he’d said in the dairy until it was flat into the mud and I didn’t see it any more. Tessa had to be right. Dad had been full of normal when he’d had his cuppa with Father McGinty. Talked about the hymns Mum liked best. Father McGinty had found a better reading than the one they’d picked out together in the presbytery the other day. Dad had sandpapered up his chin, allowing as how that was a good one and just right for Sarah, and thanking Father McGinty for coming all that way to suggest it. He was just like always.

‘Cheeky bugger.’ He swatted me now as I lay in bed, with a ghost of a grin, but there was no fuel in his tank. ‘Been saying ya prayers?’

We nodded. ‘We say them to each other,’ Philly said.

‘Good girls.’ He sat on the side of Philly’s bed. His eyes travelled the ceiling, corner to corner. ‘Your mother would be proud of yous,’ he said.

I blinked. Not once but three times. ‘Why?’

‘Why?’ he echoed, searching my face for answers. ‘She always was’ was the best he could do. For me, it had been a serious question. If I knew, I’d do more of it.

‘Is Mum our guardian angel now?’ asked Philly.

‘Reckon so.’

‘So can we pray to her?’

‘Reckon she’d like that.’ He kneeled down beside Philly, turned our bed light off. We all said our Hail Marys together. Afterwards, he leaned back on his heels. ‘Don’t listen to Peg, girls.’

‘Peg was right, though. I did nearly kill Mum,’ said Philly matter-of-factly, her hands tucked under her little monkey face.

I saw it then—that was why Philly had been upset in the chook shed. She must have believed Aunty Peg telling us she’d poisoned Mum from the inside when she was growing in her. I put my hand across the space between our beds, but Philly just looked at it like it came from The Planet of the Apes, so finally I snuck it back under my covers.

‘Peg’s a sick woman,’ said Dad.

‘Why isn’t she up at The Hill, then?’ asked Philly.

Dad sighed. ‘She should be, by rights. But it’s not a nice place. Your mother was nursing up at that loony bin on the night shift for years.’

‘If they put Aunty Peg there, she could have ended up like Old Mary,’ I told Philly with authority.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Don’t go frightening ya little sister,’ Dad said. He got to his feet and lifted the blankets to Philly’s chin. Smoothed them down.

‘Night, little chickens,’ he said.

‘Night, Dad.’

He closed the door just enough to leave a strip of light across our beds. I wished he’d smoothed my blankets as well. Maybe he thought I was too old now.

We listened to the thud of his footsteps back to the TV.

‘Who’s Old Mary?’ Philly whispered.

‘They locked her in a padded cell and had one little slit that they opened to give her food. Mum said she was wild. Said she was the only one who could calm Old Mary. Mum was worried about her when she quit but more worried about me cause my hair had turned to straw and fallen out with her not being around in the nights, so she had to stop work. Mum reckoned they would have put Old Mary in a straitjacket.’

‘What’s a straight jacket?’

‘One of them things you can’t move in, it’s like torture.’ I had only the haziest of ideas. ‘It’s white all over, white for madness.’

‘Do you reckon Aunty Peg is as mad as Old Mary?’

I considered. ‘Aunty Peg can still cook and stuff; don’t reckon Old Mary could have done that.’ Mum said Aunty Peg wasn’t mad all through. Said she made a meal of it whenever she got around Dad, just to rile him up good. So maybe she was also as brave as brave.

‘I’m glad Aunty Peg isn’t up at The Hill,’ said Philly. ‘But she’d better go home after the funeral.’

THE MORE THAT DOESN’T ADD UP

The next day I was staying out of Aunty Peg’s way and her cut-cut eyes. I wandered across a paddock or two and found myself on top of the gully. Before I could give myself a chance to say no, I skidded down the mud into the long, dark crack between the two hills to kick at a few old bones. I squatted to line them up to see if I could tell which bone had been what. But give them enough time, all bones ended up dried out, white and cracked through so you couldn’t tell the difference. The skulls were good, though. I did a better job there.

I got hold of a beauty, almost perfect, little lamb’s skull, I reckoned. I rubbed the dirt away and stared long and long into the black hollows, trying to put the eyes back and give them a bit of spark. One day Mum’s head would be all empty gone like this. I traced