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

hand snaked up between my arms until I caught it between my own. And I held on and on to her until the shuddering passed and something new of my mother came to me.

The clean, sharp poetry of her.

She could stand quiver still in a storm.

One time, in the late afternoon, out of nowhere, the sky darked up and split open, bucketing down curtains of rain after years of hard, drought-baked skies. Us kids got straight out and under it. Dad came racing up from the cowshed and joined in, side-kicking and tossing Philly and me up into it.

Not Mum.

She let her tea towel fall to the ground and just stood there, eyes closed, face turned up to the sky, rain rivering over her.

She was our true north.

In that moment I saw I was looking for my own in-between. That narrow strip between being tied to the oven with short apron strings like Mum and all these other women, and giving into madness like Peg. If I were honest, though, it was always going to be more Peg than Mum for me. But I stayed alert. Never kept so much as an extra plastic bag at my place. Made sure I never did the same thing twice unless I was convinced it was for the convenience of taking the same shortcut, not for the obsessive of it.

Mrs Nolan’s voice rose high above my twisted thoughts as she weaved together all those threads of truths and not truths about Peg.

‘Picnics by the creek, singalongs around the piano, keeping Great Aunty Dot happy in the corner with a nip of brandy in the teacup.’

The women across the aisle sniggered.

‘She wasn’t like the rest of us. All that gaiety, smoking when you didn’t, terrible flirt, did the things the rest of us couldn’t. That’s what we loved about her.’

Heads bobbed in agreement.

Mrs Nolan wound up with a hope that Peg was finally at peace and crossed herself. I squeezed Philly’s hand and released it.

Before she left the altar, Mrs Nolan spotlighted her eyes on me with furious intent, but I flicked mine away before I got rabbit-stilled.

I lost the next bit of the funeral as my mind focused on the problem at hand, trying to figure out how I was going to keep out of Mrs Nolan’s determined-to-speak-to-me way. I wasn’t letting her off the hook with something as light as an apology. Not after all these years of silence.

When it came to the end of the mass, I had the advantage because Tessa had us up and out and following this other coffin, as if we were always the ones who had to follow the dead first. It was a slow march down the long pull of the church and out through the doors and under the fresh open sky.

Outside, the sun had its teeth in things. I stopped for a moment, blinking it in, then I touched Philly’s hand to let her know I was disappearing around the corner. Once hidden behind my buttress, I pressed back into the church wall. The bluestones had taken on a bit of heat behind my shoulder blades. I fished out my smokes, struck a match, and was taking a deep, filling drag when Mrs Tyler hurtled around the bluestone like a bullet from a gun.

I scrabbled to stub out the cigarette against the stone.

‘Don’t bother.’ She collapsed into the wall beside me and exhaled long and hard. She glanced over.

‘Got a spare?’ The shock of it pulled an eyebrow up, but I shook one out of the pack for her just the same and she leaned in as I lit it. She took in her first puff in the same drowning way I had. I watched the blue veins ridge across the back of her hand. There was a fragile thing about her up close that I hadn’t seen in the church.

‘Did she see you coming?’ I asked.

She steadied her eyes on me, taking in another long drag. ‘Nancy’s all right.’ She tapped the ash off the end of her smoke and let a sly grin tug at the side of her mouth. ‘Busy straightening the priest out.’

I took an equally long drag and slumped back, something in me giving way to this new world order where Mrs Tyler talked to me like I was all grown up. I looked down at myself. I was tall enough for it.

She dragged on her cigarette and turned to examine the now clear blue of the sky. Her hand fluttered, and I thought of a sparrow. When she turned back to me her face was full of the same slow sorry as it had been the day she told me in the sacristy that Mum would be back soon. ‘Nancy probably just wants to make sure you made it to adulthood in one piece.’ She tapped the sticky ash off. ‘How long is it?’ she asked, saying the words I didn’t want to have out loud and shaped in the world. ‘Fourteen years?’

I grunted agreement, although sometimes it felt like fourteen seconds.

It’s funny that every cell in your body is replaced every seven years, so after two complete changeovers there’s not one cell left of the little ten-year-old me who lost her mother.

Yet, miraculously, the pain lived on in the same old skin, located somewhere beyond blood and bone.

Maybe it suited me; I didn’t want to forget Mum. Sometimes I thought I was the only one keeping her alive. Everyone else zipped up tight whenever I tried to bring her up.

Not Mrs Tyler, though, by the look of things. But there was something about the sharpish way she kept looking over her shoulder back to where we could hear the others talking low that made me jumpy. So this time it was me who zipped up. I realised I didn’t want to share Mum with anybody after all, not even her best friend. It suited me to have just Mum and me locked tight together in the