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

that address. But maybe not knowing suits you a whole lot better so you can keep your tortured-soul act up.’ He cracked his neck. ‘Dad’s a good bloke, JJ. Been through hell.’ He bared his teeth. ‘So either put up or shut up.’

‘You can’t have it both ways,’ I spat. ‘You can’t figure out what happened to Mum and protect Dad at the same time.’ I smashed one fist into the other. ‘Because sure as shit he’s hiding something fucked up.’

Tim turned away, two hands gripping the side of the sink, shoulders hunching, making a cave for his chest. I felt the strain of all the knots he was tied up in from where I sat, and the red in me dissolved with a pop. I wanted to get up and put my hand to his back. But we weren’t like that. In the stillness of him I saw it was even worse for him—I felt the years of its rust—this tug between the loyalty for the lying living and loyalty for the beloved dead. And he didn’t have the red to help him.

‘Got to get back on the tractor,’ he finally said, voice evened out. ‘You should go. See Mum. If you think she’s got something to say about all this, it’ll be there.’ He turned fast and pecked Shelley on the cheek. ‘Shelley will sort you some roses.’

After he left, Shelley brought the kettle over to pour boiling water into the teapot. She put the kettle back on the stove and sat at the table again. ‘See what I mean about Tim?’ she asked.

I nodded, still too churned up to trust my voice.

She didn’t say anything else. Instead she turned the teapot three times. I stared at the blue rosebuds across the china long enough to let the silver of their outlines put down some roots into me. Blue roses were always tricky to interpret. They weren’t in Mum’s book. She said they could mean something as simple as love at first sight or as complicated as reaching for the unattainable. She’d taken my two hands and weighed them in hers, smiled her tired smile deep into me. ‘Sometimes you got to feel, here,’ she placed the tip of her index finger to my heart, ‘for what the flowers are telling you. You’re a feeler, JJ. That’s a powerful thing.’ Then she pointed to my head, nodding like it had the same power. ‘With this and this,’ pointing back to my heart, ‘nobody will be able to put a thing over you, JJ.’

‘I haven’t seen this tea set before,’ I said.

‘Mum’s. Wedding present. Dad had it put away when she died. I was going through the attic.’

‘My mum would have liked them.’

‘Dad said my mum did.’

‘Was it hard for him to see them out and being used?’

‘He said you have to draw a line sometime and go on living.’

‘Do you miss her?’

‘I miss something, but it’s all talcum powder stuff because I never knew her. Better than what you and Tim go through, though.’

‘Hard to say—’ I began.

‘I don’t have nightmares,’ she cut in. She drained the last of her teacup to make way for the new. ‘Go see your mum. At least you had one you remember.’

WHAT NANCY REALLY KNEW

The spray of Shelley’s all kinds of red and pink roses across the seat beside me meant that at Tim’s gate I could do nothing but turn right towards the cemetery. I couldn’t ignore all that love and appreciation. At the wide iron gates I turned off the rumble of the Austin’s engine and wound down the window. I couldn’t figure out if the hush of the breeze was telling me to grow a backbone and get out of the car, or drive the hell away fast. I had Mum with me every day so maybe I didn’t need this under-the-ground, only dirt thing. The crowing stutter of a kookaburra cut into the hush, but I couldn’t track it down when I looked for it in the tall pine trees encircling the dead. I opened the car door.

I used to like the weight of time here, with the weeds pushing up through the baked hard ground and the broken gravestones, but that was before Mum went under it. I got the roses into my arms so I could smell them. The Catholics were right up the back and there were a lot of Protestants to get past first.

I couldn’t remember where she was so I wandered up one row and down the next, reading names, dates, all the love contained to the most affordable number of letters. Not Mum’s, though, I saw when I found it. Dad had spat chips about the sister part, but Aunty Peg was paying so there was nothing to be done. He’d sworn out of his window in the ute, Aunty Peg had smiled out of hers, and I’d sat in between.

I kneeled to Mum’s grave and felt to see if she was any closer. I couldn’t feel her at all. I thought about dumping the roses and getting away, but I was there and she hated dead flowers, so at least I could give her fresh ones. I flicked away the old stems withered dry in the plastic vase at the end of her gravestone. Tessa must not have been for a while. I opened Shelley’s newspaper and laid the new flowers out, reds by reds by pinks, just like Mum and I used to. The blooms like velvet footsteps across the newspaper. I took my time feeling out their fullness, texture, height and rightness as I put them in the vase, as if there’d be dozens of Sunday eyes next morning sizing things up, or swimming in whatever it was I was pulling together. I tried to imagine Mum’s hand on my shoulder, reaching over me to straighten one rose, push another a heartbeat away. I reached right into the ground