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

was my fault you didn’t have a mother.’ She rushed on now, the words tripping over each other to be out in the world now that she’d started. ‘That morning I drove her to the station, I mentioned something in passing that I thought she already knew. But I was very badly off the mark. She didn’t know, and I didn’t know she didn’t know. I thought… And…’ She shook her hands in the air. ‘And now that you’ve grown up it’s time one of you young people knew.’

A terrible chill snaked along my spine.

Was this it?

I wasn’t ready, after all. All the not-ready coughed through me like pollution.

‘Did you try to tell Tes—?’ I asked to put off the thing right in front of me.

‘There’s no saying one word against your father with Tessa. There’d be no point telling Philly and Tim, either.’

‘I know.’ I shoved my fists under my armpits. ‘But I bet it was Tim who rang you as soon as I left his place.’

She nodded. ‘Yep.’

I couldn’t put the knowing off any more. All the dominos that had been set up over the years were crashing down, one after the other.

Mrs Nolan licked her lips and looked out over the dry yellow paddocks beyond the cemetery. ‘It’s about why your mother threw Peg out of the house.’

‘But Mum didn’t. It was Dad.’

‘What?’ Confusion broke across Mrs Nolan’s face.

‘Mum wanted Peg to stay. Dad said he threw Peg out because she was a sinner and a bad influence on us kids, which we figured out later must have meant she wasn’t a stranger to sex outside wedlock. But Mrs Tyler told me at Peg’s funeral it was because she’d actually been pregnant.’

‘Peg? Pregnant? Kathy say that?’

‘Only for a bit.’ I shrugged. ‘Mrs Tyler said she miscarried.’

Mrs Nolan shook her head as if she hadn’t heard straight. ‘Can’t be right. Peg would have told me.’

‘Mrs Tyler said Mum told her. Said it was a bloke called Sydney.’

‘No, no, no.’ Mrs Nolan shook her head faster. ‘Peg and Sydney never had it away.’ She plastered her palm to her forehead. ‘Sydney wasn’t even sweet on her. He was just a fella, bit older than the rest of us, late twenties, who liked her the way we did. She was full of spark and devilry, crossing lines the rest of us were too scared to even look at.’ Mrs Nolan let her palm fall. ‘Sydney felt sorry for her, gave her the house because she’d been thrown out on the streets, and he’d won the deed gambling the night before. When he sobered up he went back to ask for it, but she’d sorted all the paperwork so he couldn’t get his hands on it. He drifted back north eventually, none of us kept in contact.’

‘So why would Peg tell Mum she was pregnant to him, then?’

Mrs Nolan squinted into the sun. ‘Oh God.’ She stumbled back, reached out for something to stop her fall. ‘Because she was pregnant, they were so close, she couldn’t have hidden that. But not to Sydney.’ Mrs Nolan’s face collapsed and her hand went to her gaping mouth. ‘Peg had to lie about who the real father was.’ Her wild eyes locked in on mine, communicating a new urgency. I both wanted her to tell me what it was and wanted to back the hell away from it, fast. A noise like a wounded dog came from her.

‘It was me. That morning she left. I was the one who told Sarah the truth.’ She whimper moaned and hunched all the slow way to her knees. ‘I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know. She’d just come back from settling you back to bed. I was trying to make it up to her for having said that terrible thing that set you off. Saying that she’d done a good job with you, given what she’d found out when you were a bub and how the shock must have bled into you, because of how sensitive you were. I thought I was telling her something she already knew. But, to her, it was so much more.’

‘What? What?’

‘Jack. It was Jack. Jack was the father of Peg’s baby.’

‘No.’ Just the one, horrified word. Not this. Bile shot up from my stomach. I clamped my mouth shut, gasping in air. Dad and Aunty Peg. ‘What are you even talking about?’ I bent to shake her arm. ‘They hated each other.’ Then it hit me. That’s why they hated each other. ‘How can you be sure?’

‘She told me herself. Had to tell someone. It had only been the once. Jack had been broke. He didn’t know where he was going to find the money to fix the tractor before the harvest. Sarah in hospital with Philly. Both Peg and Jack mad drunk. I assumed your mother had found out because a few days after she came home from the hospital Peg was told to leave.’

My body gave way too and I crumpled to my knees, facing Mrs Nolan.

‘She must have realised a few weeks later she was pregnant to Jack. She could never have told me that. Could never have told anybody. No wonder Peg lost her grip on life after she left us. It wasn’t the separation from Sarah and the isolation all the way over there, it was the guilt and the lies. It would have eaten her from the insides.’

Mrs Nolan and I locked in together, eyes burning across the abyss, hands reaching. We held, forearm to forearm, drowning in too much knowing.

‘That’s why Mum left her wedding ring behind that morning,’ I said, my voice cracked open, dry.

‘Sarah…’ Mrs Nolan broke in over the top of my words, not hearing me. ‘Sarah looked at me like she’d never seen me before. Her mouth kind of… lost shape. I thought she was having a stroke.’ Mrs Nolan’s wet face looked into mine, pleading. ‘I didn’t know. We were finishing up the tomatoes. I