The Serpent's Skin

by Erina Reddan

  Mrs Nolan’s voice rose high above my twisted thoughts as she weaved together all those threads of truths and not truths about Peg.

  ‘Picnics by the creek, singalongs around the piano, keeping Great Aunty Dot happy in the corner with a nip of brandy in the teacup.’

  The women across the aisle sniggered.

  ‘She wasn’t like the rest of us. All that gaiety, smoking when you didn’t, terrible flirt, did the things the rest of us couldn’t. That’s what we loved about her.’

  Heads bobbed in agreement.

  Mrs Nolan wound up with a hope that Peg was finally at peace and crossed herself. I squeezed Philly’s hand and released it.

  Before she left the altar, Mrs Nolan spotlighted her eyes on me with furious intent, but I flicked mine away before I got rabbit-stilled.

  I lost the next bit of the funeral as my mind focused on the problem at hand, trying to figure out how I was going to keep out of Mrs Nolan’s determined-to-speak-to-me way. I wasn’t letting her off the hook with something as light as an apology. Not after all these years of silence.

  When it came to the end of the mass, I had the advantage because Tessa had us up and out and following this other coffin, as if we were always the ones who had to follow the dead first. It was a slow march down the long pull of the church and out through the doors and under the fresh open sky.

  Outside, the sun had its teeth in things. I stopped for a moment, blinking it in, then I touched Philly’s hand to let her know I was disappearing around the corner. Once hidden behind my buttress, I pressed back into the church wall. The bluestones had taken on a bit of heat behind my shoulder blades. I fished out my smokes, struck a match, and was taking a deep, filling drag when Mrs Tyler hurtled around the bluestone like a bullet from a gun.

  I scrabbled to stub out the cigarette against the stone.

  ‘Don’t bother.’ She collapsed into the wall beside me and exhaled long and hard. She glanced over.

  ‘Got a spare?’ The shock of it pulled an eyebrow up, but I shook one out of the pack for her just the same and she leaned in as I lit it. She took in her first puff in the same drowning way I had. I watched the blue veins ridge across the back of her hand. There was a fragile thing about her up close that I hadn’t seen in the church.

  ‘Did she see you coming?’ I asked.

  She steadied her eyes on me, taking in another long drag. ‘Nancy’s all right.’ She tapped the ash off the end of her smoke and let a sly grin tug at the side of her mouth. ‘Busy straightening the priest out.’

  I took an equally long drag and slumped back, something in me giving way to this new world order where Mrs Tyler talked to me like I was all grown up. I looked down at myself. I was tall enough for it.

  She dragged on her cigarette and turned to examine the now clear blue of the sky. Her hand fluttered, and I thought of a sparrow. When she turned back to me her face was full of the same slow sorry as it had been the day she told me in the sacristy that Mum would be back soon. ‘Nancy probably just wants to make sure you made it to adulthood in one piece.’ She tapped the sticky ash off. ‘How long is it?’ she asked, saying the words I didn’t want to have out loud and shaped in the world. ‘Fourteen years?’

  I grunted agreement, although sometimes it felt like fourteen seconds.

  It’s funny that every cell in your body is replaced every seven years, so after two complete changeovers there’s not one cell left of the little ten-year-old me who lost her mother.

  Yet, miraculously, the pain lived on in the same old skin, located somewhere beyond blood and bone.

  Maybe it suited me; I didn’t want to forget Mum. Sometimes I thought I was the only one keeping her alive. Everyone else zipped up tight whenever I tried to bring her up.

  Not Mrs Tyler, though, by the look of things. But there was something about the sharpish way she kept looking over her shoulder back to where we could hear the others talking low that made me jumpy. So this time it was me who zipped up. I realised I didn’t want to share Mum with anybody after all, not even her best friend. It suited me to have just Mum and me locked tight together in the deep dark below the earth.

  I was glad when Mrs Tyler changed the subject.

  ‘Little bird tells me you’re up for an award at work?’

  ‘Mm,’ I said, wary about where this new subject would take us.

  ‘Smart as a whip, just like your mum said. She would have been over the moon. Nobody else from around home had got close to going to university, let alone the law.’

  I noticed my ciggie burning away. It took a couple of goes to shake ash off the end. She watched me at it.

  ‘We all were,’ she said when the job was done. ‘Proud as.’

  ‘Not Dad. Said it was a waste of time. Better off getting a bank job, start paying board. Roared like a bull.’

  She laughed and took another puff. ‘No wonder you kept at it, then.’

  I kicked at the skinny blade of grass that had grown up through the crack in the asphalt.

  Mrs Tyler opened her handbag and investigated its innards. She gave me a look and snapped the bag shut, her handkerchief in hand. She dabbed at her forehead.

  ‘Your dad was a bit surprised to hear of the award.’

  ‘How the hell does he know?’ I pressed back into the heat of the bluestone. I’d only told Philly and she wouldn’t have said a word.

  ‘He said some bloke from your firm rang.’

  A cold hand grabbed hold of my throat. I coughed to get it off my windpipe. ‘What bloke?’ I said when I could.

  She shrugged. ‘Had a plummy voice, your dad said. Very posh.’

  Bloody Maurice. It was my business. I ashed my smoke again. I did owe him. Going above and beyond for me like no other lecturer. He stopped me from leaving uni more than once. Even gave me a place at his firm. But this was crossing a line. He had no right to talk to my father.

  I pushed down against the dart of red shooting up from my gut.

  Maurice had this idea that I was dragging the past around behind me like an anchor. Shit! What if he pumped Dad for answers? The thought of them talking scraped at my insides. Dad, stitched up with fury that a daughter of his had broken from the tribe to go to university in the first place, and Maurice, who expected me to make partner and broker peace in the Middle East some day.

  ‘What’d they talk about?’ I managed to ask, voice steady as if I were asking what the time was.

  ‘Your dad didn’t let on.’ She grunted. ‘Keeps his secrets tight, that one.’

  I stared, jolted by this abrupt new turn in the road. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I think you know what I mean.’

  I stoned over.

  ‘You know.’ She tapped at the end of her cigarette again, all careful casual. ‘With Peg gone…’

  I scratched my eyelid so I didn’t have to look at her.

  She was all eyes watching. After time stretched out about as far as it could go, she went on like some kind of relentless machine. ‘You’re the only one.’

  She was right. I was the only, only one. The others had all let Mum and all the mystery go a long time ago.

  ‘Peg ever say anything about it all?’ she asked.

  ‘Never to me.’

  ‘You ever see anything while you lived with her?’

  ‘I wasn’t there that long.’

  ‘Can’t blame you there. But?’ she prompted, ignoring my efforts to ignore her.

  ‘Look!’ I threw my hands up. ‘If the others can forget everything, so can I. Mum’s dead! Gone! Buried!’

  Mrs Tyler barked out a starved laugh.

  ‘Kathy?’ Mrs Nolan’s voice sailed through the heat straight at us. ‘You seen JJ?’

  I flattened against the wall, hiding beside Mrs Tyler and shaking my head frantically. She gave me another measured look. ‘JJ runs her own race, Nancy,’ she called back at last.

  ‘Dear Lord.’ Mrs Nolan’s voice continued to sail in from afar. ‘I was depending on catching her here.’


  I shook my head like it might come off at Mrs Tyler. She grimaced. ‘You might have to make it another time, Nancy.’

  ‘It’s like trying to pin down the jolly Scarlet Pimpernel.’

  Mrs Tyler laughed and waved her cigarette. Mrs Nolan must have headed in another direction because Mrs Tyler turned back my way, fishing with her free hand for something in that handbag again. She kept her fist tight around whatever it was. ‘Listen.’ She shivered like somebody had walked on her grave. ‘I’ve been holding on to something for you.’ She rubbed her chin with her closed fist.

  ‘Come on, then.’ I half laughed, thinking it was unlike Mrs Tyler to trowel on the drama. She opened her hand and nestled in the cave of her palm was Mum’s cameo brooch.

  ‘Fuck.’ My eyes blinked. I didn’t move to take it.

  ‘You were so distressed about it not going in with your mum at the time.’ Her voice was low and sympathetic. ‘I didn’t think you could handle knowing it hadn’t. So I waited. But it belongs to you girls. It’s time you had it back.’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ I said, automatically. She passed it over and I shoved it in the pocket of my jeans without looking at it. A snake’s nest of jangle firing up inside me. I stared at the fence like it was my job to keep the boards upright with the force of my focus.

  ‘Peg getting cremated,’ she said. ‘Suppose that’s why Jack’s not here. Against his religion?’

  ‘Or…’ I grabbed the distraction with two hands, grateful to her. It was a Mum thing to do. That quiet seeing and making something else possible. ‘It’s because Dad hated Aunty Peg.’

  Mrs Tyler’s eyebrows shot up, surprised at the corner we’d turned.

  ‘From what Mrs Nolan said in there, though,’ I said, ‘it sounds like they were all pretty matey before Dad chucked her out.’

  This time she got busy looking in another direction. She pointed her cigarette at the listing boards. ‘That fence needs bringing down.’ She did some more fence inspecting, but I waited. ‘They were… close when they were younger, going around the dances together,’ Mrs Tyler finally said, folding under the pressure. ‘You couldn’t separate those girls. After their parents died, Sarah would never have survived Great Aunty Dot without Peg’s spark. Dot was in her seventies when she got them, and she ran a very tight ship. Didn’t believe in kids. Did believe in the Almighty. But Peg could get round her. Naughty as hell. And Sarah was like a mother to Peg. Just about killed her when your dad kicked Peg out. She was never the same.’

  ‘Peg must have had the smarts, though, ending up with her own place.’

  ‘That was Sydney. Never knew his real name. Older fella from Sydney who kicked around with us for a bit. He got lucky one night at poker, won the deed of the Parkton house. Signed it over to Peg as soon as Jack threw her out.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Well.’ She seesawed her hand again. ‘He got her pregnant.’

  ‘Peg was pregnant?’

  ‘Happened then. More then than now, tell you the truth, what with the pill.’ She examined the remains of her cigarette.

  ‘What happened to the baby?’

  I touched my hand to my belly and then realised what I was doing and let it fall before Mrs Tyler put two and two together.

  ‘Miscarriage.’ She massacred the cigarette under her heel. ‘Filthy things.’

  I stabbed at the stones behind me with my Doc. ‘Okay,’ I said, putting this new thing into what I knew. ‘But even though somebody gave her the house, she had to keep paying the bills all these years, somehow.’

  ‘All that hoarding,’ Mrs Tyler said. ‘Peg went through the mountains of junk she picked up from those garage sales with a fine-tooth comb first, found a lot of things worth a few bob and kept herself afloat.’

  ‘Not only mad, then.’

  ‘She had a solid vein of sanity in there, all right.’ She stabbed a finger at me. ‘Find it. That’ll tell you something about what really happened to your mother. About time we know, don’t you think?’

  MARKING TIME

  ‘Casual Thursday, hey JJ?’ asked Suze as I passed her desk.

  ‘Nope. Casual funeral,’ I said, wondering what I’d been thinking turning up to work in jeans. ‘Just popped in to double-check everything’s set for next week.’

  ‘Hey,’ Tye said to me as he dropped a file on Suze’s desk, giving her a gratitude smile. Despite everybody knowing about us, he was scrupulous about professional relations at work, but his drawn-together brows were busy asking a lot of questions.

  ‘I skipped out on the spread,’ I said, biting my lip. ‘With the court date for the Stintini case being moved up…’ I ran out of steam and investigated the corners of the ceiling.

  ‘That bad,’ he said, pulling me down the corridor. He closed the door to the photocopying room behind us. ‘You are such a chicken.’ He made a few noises he thought a chicken made, although I’d never heard anything like that from any chicken I’d been acquainted with, which I told him.

  ‘Who was there?’ he asked, ignoring my careful evidence-based analysis of farmyard culture.

  ‘Not my dad. Not my brother.’ He hadn’t met Dad even though we’d been going out a couple of years. I gave him the rundown on who had showed up.

  ‘So you ran away from a few CWA women and their scones.’

  ‘You are such an innocent,’ I said, taking a precarious seat on the paper-shredder bin.

  He squatted down in front of me getting serious with a few well-honed lawyerly questions that went to the heart of things. He laughed in all the right fire-engine-red-knickers and bowling-skittle-priest places. ‘But you’re okay?’ He ran his golden-brown hand over the sandy pale of my bare arm, his eyes wide and warm. I nodded. It was the truth—if I focused on just what I’d told him. And the thing was, I had no plans to focus anywhere else. Not on Mrs Nolan trying to track me down to apologise. Not on Mum’s cameo burning a hole in my pocket. Not on Mrs Tyler trying to rope me back into ‘Mum’s Mystery’. I’d never not told him stuff before. But since I was busy not telling myself the same things, I didn’t consider it deception. It was survival. I was good at survival. Besides, we had bigger things to talk about. I scratched in the hollow above my hip bone.

  ‘Still,’ Tye said, leaning in to brush his eyelashes over my cheek, before locking in to me, eye to eye, a breath apart. ‘Can’t have been easy,’ he murmured. ‘I don’t think you should be at work.’

  I shrugged. ‘Nobody else’s going to sort out the Stintini case.’

  He sat back, knowing I was nothing but right. Everybody had to do pro bono stuff, but I had a habit of taking the no-count ones that nobody else would touch because it would never put them a rung higher on anything.

  ‘Except me.’ He smiled.

  I grinned back. ‘You and all that time you got on your hands.’ He was working directly with Maurice on a big case they weren’t talking about and his hours had gone from ridiculous to insane.

  ‘I’m free tonight,’ he said. ‘Fried rice on me.’

  It was my favourite. I closed the distance between us to press my lips into the sweet musky smell of his.

  In the end, what with the jeans and the questions and avoiding Maurice because I needed to take him on about inviting my dad to the ceremony behind my back but wasn’t up to it, I gathered a few files and left the office. It was Maurice who put me up for the award in the first place. He’d called me into his expansive, windows-everywhere office at the end of a long day, gestured towards the hard leather armchairs in what he thought of as his informal alcove and told me about the award. I’d argued with him, told him there were plenty of others who deserved it more, had been there longer—Tye, for instance. Maurice raised his right eyebrow in that way that had intimidated many a witness and waited for me to finish. Then he took a long sip of the forty-year-old whisky he was so proud of, swirled the rest of the amber liquid in the glass, the ice clinking into the silence. Finally, his face broke wide in that open-hearted smile few saw.
‘You don’t get it yet,’ he said. ‘Good lawyers have good brains, are forensic. They hunt down the facts mercilessly. We have a lot of good lawyers here. Very good lawyers use their gut instinct to make those facts sing; we have a few of those.’ He sat forwards. ‘But great lawyers have fire.’ He pointed his glass at me. ‘You’ve got a lot to learn, JJ, but you could be a great lawyer, and that’s why you’re Smith and Blake’s nomination for this award.’

  I shrugged because nobody argued with Maurice unless they really had to and the nomination would come to nothing anyway. Only I’d picked up the gong. The first time Smith and Blake had won the prize in ten years so Maurice was inviting selected clients to a fancy restaurant, turning it into something. I winced. He was stoked. I got it. But still there was a line and ringing my dad without telling me was not just over the line but in another country.

  Back at the boarding house, I made it past Rat-Tail’s room without him coming out to investigate what I was up to and got to Marge’s door. I rapped a quick knock and poked my head in, waving a paper bag in the air like a password. She grinned as she lowered the volume on the telly and made an effort to get out of her armchair, but I waved her back and tossed the files on her bed. I flicked the switch of her kettle as she wound up her knitting, skewering it into the bag on the floor by her side. The purple hibiscus on the knitting bag was a lift of colour beside threadbare carpet and rickety pinewood furniture. I wasn’t normally a hibiscus fan, it was too postcard and shower cap for me, but in this case it was doing a good job. Besides, a little peace never went astray. I poured her tea into the rosebud cup I’d found in the op shop the week before, liberated the vanilla slice from the bag and put them all on her dinner tray.

  ‘You?’ she asked.

  ‘I ate already.’ I placed the tray over her lap.

  ‘Not from the look of you.’

  ‘I eat plenty.’

  The springs of the bed squeaked as I sat, crossing my legs and leaning forwards to counteract the dip in the mattress.