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

One summer, not long before Gran left the house to him, Caleb slipped over in Damper Creek, where moss grew over ash and the ground was least likely to hold. He remembered crashing into shallow water, his ankle twisted, knees grazed. The world splashed, mocking him – that earlier drought broke with a string of deluges. He’d felt like a giant upturned insect, a beetle that couldn’t right itself. Except his arms and legs then were more fitted to a spider, a daddy-long-legs that shivered from the cold. He’d been thin then, as skinny as his empty suit. Damage wasn’t always from fire. Now his body showed the corpulence of overeating, the scars of being burned. He should have an old man’s voice, to match his old man’s hands, hands he had already, though he wasn’t even twenty. If he kept his voice really, really low, then maybe he could tell the truth without screaming.

He had spent a lot of this time in his room, drawing charcoal versions of Brunton’s trees in their black funeral dresses. On later sketchbook pages, the seared valley moved out of mourning. With his watercolour pencils, the grey-toned world on his pages gradually developed hints of a single shade of bright green. It was inevitable. One thing led to the next. The world was aging. Time blew through their lives, as destructive as a northerly wind in a firestorm. Mum did nothing but prepare for the committal hearing. Caleb had been to all the meetings she demanded. He knew what was coming. He’d face the people who’d been hurt and the people who loved them and, if justice existed in the world, he’d finally go to jail.

But even if the court would only let him get as far as Dad’s place in Hawthorn, he had to escape the sound of Mum’s pacing.

PART ONE

1

JUNO | Queen of Heaven

Goddess of both love and beginnings.The mother of the god Mars, she protected all women and in Roman iconography she often looks as warlike as her son.

FOURTEEN MONTHS EARLIER

PHOEBE

A magpie woke me early, its warbling carried on waves of heat that sat on my chest like a nightmare. My curtains hung limp and open, like patterns painted around a sky shimmering with heat and foreboding. Beside me rested the manuscript pages of an amateur History of Brunton I’d promised to look over.

Even before my clock radio turned on, the premier’s warning message, delivered yesterday, was constantly replaying in my mind:

Victoria’s weather will be extremely dry and hot, reaching well into the 40s. There’s a total fire ban. Any fire that begins could quickly become lethal. Warning signs will be set to catastrophic. Be prepared and survive.

The premier’s advice amounted to one commandment: stick to your plan. Which meant leave early, if we planned to leave, and be prepared to defend our home – possibly alone – if we stayed. As far as I was aware, Caleb and I were safe. This area had never burned before. I didn’t know then how long it would be before the sky was blue again, how long before the sun would lose its smoky orange haze, or I’d hear another magpie. I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. Time to wake him.

Before we moved here permanently, this had been the location of long summer holidays. His room was still at the back of the house. Ten years previously, I’d find him in there, sleeping with his head at the foot of the bed so he could keep a closer eye on the door, and on me. Six years before that, I’d be summoned by the banging of a Fisher Price activity centre against cot bars. The past irretrievable, I paused and let myself imagine that the sunny infant Caleb had once been, or the eager boy he’d grown into then out of, might be behind that door.

But… the smells. The adolescent stench leaching vaporously around the doorframe. Body odour, dirty clothes, something male, young, offensive. It was six months since Caleb stopped resenting the man I was dating, Jack Laskin, and instead took Jack’s advice and volunteered with the Country Fire Authority. Today, Caleb would be with Jack and I’d be worried.

I pushed his door open and walked in, collecting discarded black clothing. Sometimes I found him moving his legs, restless as a dog’s dream of running, beneath the mess of bed coverings. His sleep was often unquiet. Today everything was as I expected – the sketches of his first girlfriend, Penelope, complete with long yellow and pink hair, a very short, full skirt above bare thighs and long white socks; Caleb’s laptop open to a Facebook page with the cover image of two dark-lipsticked girls in black lace dresses, headed Goth Chat – except that, for the first time in what would be a pattern, Caleb wasn’t there. His bed was empty.

Could he be outside? His window revealed an overgrown yard fringed with bush. That dry, hot morning, every plant was dead, kindling. Damper Creek traversed my view like a vein on the back of Caleb’s hand. This was Taungurung land, cleared in the nineteenth century by Gold Rush fortune-hunters, subdivided into town lots fifty years later. Gold dust is sprinkled over our lives here, mixed with the detritus of mining: mercury and arsenic poisoning the soil. If my former flame, archaeologist Marco Ossani, excavated here, he’d find creek bed beneath creek bed beneath creek bed, the lower ones transfigured into fossilised reefs that hoarded gold for millennia, awaiting discovery by heavy machinery or humble panning.

Just as hints of Caleb’s previous life existed in the young man he’d become (the limp from his accident, his knee scarred by primary school asphalt, his shoulder marked by chickenpox), the landscape contained traces of its history. His grandmother left an old Hills Hoist and a brick barbecue, now falling to pieces. The fossicker, our neighbour across time, left a few tools