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

Eventually the grief evened out through me enough for us to lie on the floor, arms around each other, and I was full of the kindness of him coming to check on me in his lunch break even after everything and the not-deserving of me.

‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘This is what you wanted. Now you can get on with your life.’

‘But it’s such a tiny truth. How can such a tiny thing set me free?’

He laughed. ‘It doesn’t matter the size of the truth, it just matters that you finally have the answer: the facts all add up.’

I gave him a lopsided smile at Maurice’s words from his mouth. He full-smiled back. Maybe he was right. It just didn’t feel like it. Surely, after all this dark time, the truth should come with a marching band and streamers.

‘I didn’t think you’d come back,’ I said. ‘After that last phone call.’

‘Me neither,’ he said, his fingers playing across my belly. ‘But Philly rang me about your fight. She wanted me to come check up on you.’

I captured his hand under mine. ‘Thanks.’

He smiled back. I took a big breath. If this was the beginning of the rest of my life, I’d better make a start.

‘I’m pregnant,’ I said, as raw a fact as you can get.

He drew back to look at me, really look at me. He placed his palms on my cheeks and cradled my face, staring deep and deep into me. ‘Is that a good thing, or a maybe thing, or a definite not good thing?’

I smiled at his ‘JJ-ism’ as he called them and shifted so I could cradle his face, too.

‘It’s an I’ve-got-no-idea thing.’ I paused to search for the first time since I knew there was a baby growing for what the parameters of this might be. ‘It feels important that it happened while I was looking for Mum, really looking for her, not just expecting to see her around every corner.’

He nodded seriously.

‘So maybe that’s enough to bring it the rest of the way into the world.’ I paused again, looking for more of it. ‘And maybe it’s not. It’s too early for us. You’re even younger than me.’ I screwed up my face. ‘What about you? What might this be in your world?’

He shifted to lie on his back. He put his hands behind his head and studied those same cracks I’d been considering. ‘I don’t know yet. It’s new for me. What I can say is that I don’t hate the idea.’

I surprised myself by laughing at his cautious, careful phrasing.

‘How long have we got?’ he asked.

‘Maybe a few days more. It’s just gone six weeks. If we’re not going to do it, I think it’s only fair to send it off before it’s too much, so it can find the right place for it somewhere else and settle in there.’

He laughed gently, turning back over so we could hold each other again. ‘Bed?’ he asked.

When Tye had gone, I did feel more resolved, clearer. So it was a small thing I’d found out. Maybe that’s how life was. It had to be enough. But, still, things kept turning me around and sitting me up and turning me around again.

I cast about my room for something to make my mind stop jerking from this to that. I wished I’d bought a telly after all. I turned the radio on. The verdict was in. They were going to try Lindy Chamberlain for murdering her nine-week-old daughter, Azaria, in the shadow of Uluru.

I turned the radio off again.

Aunty Peg’s diaries were on the bedside table. I pulled one on to my lap, opened the first page and smoothed it down. The oranges were lovely today, I read. The ordinary in it soothed me. I got worried when her writing got loopy and charged across the page. And there were some wild things like: the rainbow over the house pressed me into the carpet this evening. But my eyes swept past those bits. For a while I avoided the section around the torn pages. But then I made myself be braver because that’s what the truth had to mean.

There was some interesting stuff about money further along from the torn section, which Peg had to have written around the time of Mum’s death, although the dates were all mussed up. How she wanted to give Mum the money she’d needed but how Mum wouldn’t take it over her dead body. Now she’s the dead one. Direct quote. That was Peg. Blunt to the point of pain.

A terrible wave of sadness washed through me. It probably meant Mum had to stay in some dive those last days rather than the half-decent place she’d planned on to take some time away from us, further than Jean’s Corner where I always tracked her down, further than Peg’s where she’d be more worried about Peg, right off into the world where nobody could bother her. Then I shivered and pulled myself together. Knowing what I knew had to mean that I couldn’t get pulled back into the deep like this. I had to stay above the waterline. I pulled out Mum’s cameo from under my pillow. The truth had to also mean I could finally do this. My fingertip traced the raised contours of the delicate cream curls of the woman’s head and shoulders just like I had done as a kid. The clean lines of her elegant beauty and all it had made possible for us in that bare world, with the cold wind always moaning through the cracks and the colour leached from the threadbare carpet. I smiled, pulled back into its magic. Yet I also saw the spot of discolouration which I’d thought back then was part of the design.

Still, this thing passed down from Mum’s great-grandmother was full with so much beauty that it was time to share it with Philly and Tessa.

I got out of bed to lay Mum’s cameo