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

yous and the world, keeping your mother’s reputation pure and white.’

‘None of that shit mattered to Mum,’ said Tim.

‘Your mother,’ said Dad, his voice rising thin, ‘was a good, upstanding Catholic woman.’

‘Who kept the address of an abortion clinic in her Mass book just in case she’d be wanting it one day,’ I said.

‘But she was pretty Catholic,’ said Philly. ‘Why did she even want an abortion?’

That stopped us in our tracks. Dad, too. He licked his lips. Looked shifty again. He searched the bare paddocks beyond the window. He bit his lips and looked at us each in turn again. He slowly rose, a sudden old man, and shuffled to the bench. He brought back the photo he’d kept hidden from us all those years, fumbled at the back of the frame.

We leaned forwards.

Philly saw it first. She recoiled, then stood up, eyes on the door, then half sat again. She stopped in mid air, stuck between whatever she already knew and what she didn’t want to know. She looked over to Ahmed, reached across to grip his hand, found enough to sit all the way down. Back still straight.

We all looked back at Dad, who’d worried a corner of white paper out from the back of the photo.

The rest of us got it at the same time.

Finally, after all these years.

Mum’s voice.

I wanted to run, too.

Dad had a large enough section of the note freed for him to slide-pull the rest of it out. His callused, farmer-thick hands trembled as they unfolded it four times and smoothed it flat on the table, creases worn thin from many unfoldings.

He stared down, expressionless, knowing the words without reading them.

If there was anyone breathing in the room, I couldn’t hear them.

This was the moment.

If I’d been religious I would’ve said what I heard was the slow, rhythmic beat of angels’ wings, like we were in the presence of something momentous.

He pushed it towards Tessa.

‘Just one more lie, then, Dad,’ she said. ‘You told us there was no note.’

He grimaced. ‘Didn’t lie. Not the first day, anyway. Found it under the bed the second day. That’s why I said first up she’d left us. Didn’t know any better.’

He shrugged. ‘Couldn’t read it to you, though.’ He stopped until he found words again. ‘It was just… not… well, you’ll see.’

Tessa stared at Dad as she pulled Mum’s words to her.

She pressed the back of her wrist into each eye. She dropped her hand to her chest and pressed her palm flat against her heart.

All of us let her take her time.

All of us, suspended between the knowing and the not knowing.

All of us.

When her words came out, they were toneless.

You played me for a fool, Jack McBride. With my own sister. And then that snake pit of lies you had me live in all these years. You are nothing more than a small man, playing at God, rotted through with hypocrisy.

How dare you accuse me of being a sinner for helping Peg get rid of that baby. Your baby. The one you paid to have murdered, making such a show of how it was against your holy principles, and only out of Christian charity and knowing you’d be spending longer in purgatory because of it. Weren’t you the saviour? And me forever grateful to you afterwards. I only let her go because of what you’d done for her. The debt I owed you. And didn’t that suit your purposes.

Yet you couldn’t bring yourself to do the same when it came to me. You’d rather see me dead than risk the world finding out that your wife had had an abortion, in defiance of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. The shame of ex-communication in front of Father McGinty, and the grown men at your club playing at Knights.

You have broken my heart, crushed my soul, destroyed my faith.

But I will do what needs to be done to stay alive. For our living children.

Tell the kids I’ve gone to Peg’s for a few days because she’s had a turn and I’ll be too busy to call. Tell Tessa I’ve left a week’s worth of meals in the freezer. Do not call me. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look you in your lying, hypocritical face again.

Nobody filled the silence Tessa left. All of us seared in the scorch of Mum’s words from the grave. Dad hunkered down in the cave of his arms.

It was both too much and not enough.

‘Why was having an abortion the thing that needed to be done to stay alive?’ asked Philly, the first to rally. ‘When it was so risky back then?’

His disembodied voice, when it came, was muffled. ‘The doctor said she’d likely die if she had another one of yous.’ He dropped his arms away, straightened against the back of his chair like he was a mighty weight. ‘That’s what she was talking about that night. But I couldn’t give her the money, see?’ He appealed to us one by one, passing over Ahmed, Tye and Shelley, as if it were just us again, back in the capsule of the gone-ness of our mother. ‘We’d been so careful with the rhythm method for years. Not one slip-up. Except that one night. The night they made me President of the Knights. It was God’s will that she got pregnant again. She was in a blessed state. I told her she had to put herself in God’s hands. That, if she had an abortion, she’d end up in hell, but if she died in childbirth it was all part of God’s plan and at least she’d get to heaven. Told her that her everlasting soul was more important than her earthly body.’

‘Shit,’ I said, putting all the sorrow of the room into it.

Tessa pressed her lips together to stop something getting out. Tim reached for Shelley. Philly curled into Ahmed, her legs into her armpits just like she used to do