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

I was glad when Mrs Tyler changed the subject.

‘Little bird tells me you’re up for an award at work?’

‘Mm,’ I said, wary about where this new subject would take us.

‘Smart as a whip, just like your mum said. She would have been over the moon. Nobody else from around home had got close to going to university, let alone the law.’

I noticed my ciggie burning away. It took a couple of goes to shake ash off the end. She watched me at it.

‘We all were,’ she said when the job was done. ‘Proud as.’

‘Not Dad. Said it was a waste of time. Better off getting a bank job, start paying board. Roared like a bull.’

She laughed and took another puff. ‘No wonder you kept at it, then.’

I kicked at the skinny blade of grass that had grown up through the crack in the asphalt.

Mrs Tyler opened her handbag and investigated its innards. She gave me a look and snapped the bag shut, her handkerchief in hand. She dabbed at her forehead.

‘Your dad was a bit surprised to hear of the award.’

‘How the hell does he know?’ I pressed back into the heat of the bluestone. I’d only told Philly and she wouldn’t have said a word.

‘He said some bloke from your firm rang.’

A cold hand grabbed hold of my throat. I coughed to get it off my windpipe. ‘What bloke?’ I said when I could.

She shrugged. ‘Had a plummy voice, your dad said. Very posh.’

Bloody Maurice. It was my business. I ashed my smoke again. I did owe him. Going above and beyond for me like no other lecturer. He stopped me from leaving uni more than once. Even gave me a place at his firm. But this was crossing a line. He had no right to talk to my father.

I pushed down against the dart of red shooting up from my gut.

Maurice had this idea that I was dragging the past around behind me like an anchor. Shit! What if he pumped Dad for answers? The thought of them talking scraped at my insides. Dad, stitched up with fury that a daughter of his had broken from the tribe to go to university in the first place, and Maurice, who expected me to make partner and broker peace in the Middle East some day.

‘What’d they talk about?’ I managed to ask, voice steady as if I were asking what the time was.

‘Your dad didn’t let on.’ She grunted. ‘Keeps his secrets tight, that one.’

I stared, jolted by this abrupt new turn in the road. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I think you know what I mean.’

I stoned over.

‘You know.’ She tapped at the end of her cigarette again, all careful casual. ‘With Peg gone…’

I scratched my eyelid so I didn’t have to look at her.

She was all eyes watching. After time stretched out about as far as it could go, she went on like some kind of relentless machine. ‘You’re the only one.’

She was right. I was the only, only one. The others had all let Mum and all the mystery go a long time ago.

‘Peg ever say anything about it all?’ she asked.

‘Never to me.’

‘You ever see anything while you lived with her?’

‘I wasn’t there that long.’

‘Can’t blame you there. But?’ she prompted, ignoring my efforts to ignore her.

‘Look!’ I threw my hands up. ‘If the others can forget everything, so can I. Mum’s dead! Gone! Buried!’

Mrs Tyler barked out a starved laugh.

‘Kathy?’ Mrs Nolan’s voice sailed through the heat straight at us. ‘You seen JJ?’

I flattened against the wall, hiding beside Mrs Tyler and shaking my head frantically. She gave me another measured look. ‘JJ runs her own race, Nancy,’ she called back at last.

‘Dear Lord.’ Mrs Nolan’s voice continued to sail in from afar. ‘I was depending on catching her here.’

I shook my head like it might come off at Mrs Tyler. She grimaced. ‘You might have to make it another time, Nancy.’

‘It’s like trying to pin down the jolly Scarlet Pimpernel.’

Mrs Tyler laughed and waved her cigarette. Mrs Nolan must have headed in another direction because Mrs Tyler turned back my way, fishing with her free hand for something in that handbag again. She kept her fist tight around whatever it was. ‘Listen.’ She shivered like somebody had walked on her grave. ‘I’ve been holding on to something for you.’ She rubbed her chin with her closed fist.

‘Come on, then.’ I half laughed, thinking it was unlike Mrs Tyler to trowel on the drama. She opened her hand and nestled in the cave of her palm was Mum’s cameo brooch.

‘Fuck.’ My eyes blinked. I didn’t move to take it.

‘You were so distressed about it not going in with your mum at the time.’ Her voice was low and sympathetic. ‘I didn’t think you could handle knowing it hadn’t. So I waited. But it belongs to you girls. It’s time you had it back.’

‘Yeah, sure,’ I said, automatically. She passed it over and I shoved it in the pocket of my jeans without looking at it. A snake’s nest of jangle firing up inside me. I stared at the fence like it was my job to keep the boards upright with the force of my focus.

‘Peg getting cremated,’ she said. ‘Suppose that’s why Jack’s not here. Against his religion?’

‘Or…’ I grabbed the distraction with two hands, grateful to her. It was a Mum thing to do. That quiet seeing and making something else possible. ‘It’s because Dad hated Aunty Peg.’

Mrs Tyler’s eyebrows shot up, surprised at the corner we’d turned.

‘From what Mrs Nolan said in there, though,’ I said, ‘it sounds like they were all pretty matey before Dad chucked her out.’

This time she got busy looking in another direction. She pointed her cigarette at the listing boards. ‘That fence needs bringing down.’ She did some more fence inspecting, but I waited. ‘They were… close when they were younger, going around the dances together,’ Mrs Tyler finally said, folding under the pressure. ‘You couldn’t