The Serpent's Skin by Erina Reddan (top 5 books to read .txt) 📕

was too late. It took a few steps towards me, alerting the others. A roan took the lead and trotted in my direction like X marks the spot, the others falling in behind. Big side to side belly joggling. Nothing wrong with Dad’s eyes if he happened to be looking this way from wherever he was.

I threw myself into a low huddle run, fast along the grass line as best I could, until I reached the gate where they wouldn’t be able to follow. They petered out to a bewildered stop. I wanted to be sorry for them. Max, in the next paddock, took a few hopeful steps towards the herd. But there was a fence between them and a bullring through his nose tethered to a stake, and he knew all of that.

I made it level with the house and got behind the rusty combine harvester that had been peeling paint from its skin since before I was born. As I’d figured, Dad’s ute wasn’t in the yard, so that was a good start. I filled my cheeks and blew the air out. The morning sun was just getting going on laying shadows down so Dad still had plenty to do, what with only one set of hands left to do it all, and he was farmer slow.

In the kitchen there was a new jacket over the back of a chair like a bruise. Tessa would have been behind getting it for him, as if it could make up for something. There were the remains of only one meal across the table so I knew that if I opened the fridge there’d be a bit of order in there and a fresh set of plastic containers with the days of the week on them. She must have made a quick recovery; that, or such was her level of devotion to Dad’s wellbeing.

I checked the benches for Peg’s notebooks. I moved through the house, lifting, replacing, being careful. Deep down, I knew I wouldn’t find the diaries. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe he had them, but it was too much to expect that he’d leave them out for me to pop by and pick up. Although I had held out a small candle for finding them in his wardrobe or under the bed.

I investigated the toolshed for good measure. My watch reckoned it was time to get out before Dad came in for lunch, and I did want to go. On the other hand, I still had nothing. I wiped the residue of grease from the tools down my jeans, the smell pinging me back to a time when Dad was just about God, sorting out an engine with a grease tin and a rubber band. ‘Give the motor a kick, JJ.’ I’d turn the key and away it’d roar. ‘Good job, JJ,’ he’d say, as if I’d been the one to turn it over.

For a while when I was a kid I’d got it in my head not to go to the toilet at school. I liked the ovals of the plastic seats, but I didn’t want to sit on them. I held on and on all the way home on the bus. ‘Not again,’ Tessa said when I dashed into the clump of boxthorn bushes at the end of our track. Tim got so mad he’d just march off. After a couple of weeks, Tessa took off, too. Nobody told Mum they were leaving me behind.

Then one day I had a spot that was just right between two bushes in front of the strainer post. I got my knickers off and had them bunched up in my hand. I was squatting and about to go when I felt a charge in the air. I went still. A bird was going on in the gum tree above me. But that wasn’t it. I went in deeper. It was behind me. I turned as far as I could without falling. Then it broke over me and I couldn’t believe I’d missed it. The hissing was coming from a bloody big brown up on its belly aiming at my bare bum. I shot out of there like a bullet.

‘Tim, Tim,’ I screamed. Tessa pelted back down the track to me with Tim hard on her heels.

‘There’s a worm. There’s a worm. It’s up on its hind legs and hissing.’

Tim tore off up the track towards the house and Tessa grabbed my hand and towed me along behind. When we burst into the house, Dad was already there, his shotgun lying across the kitchen table, Tim handing him bullets. Dad’s calm hands loading them up, his steady eyes checking the sight line down the barrel of the gun. He swung it up over his shoulder.

‘Stay here.’

He slid one foot and then the other into his boots, lifted his beaten hat off the nail and his footsteps thudded down the path. I raced to my bedroom window, glad Philly was out with Mum. I watched Dad until he was a speck swallowed by the trees. The light glinted from the gum tree leaves. I sat by the window making finger patterns in the dust on the glass— rainbows and high half suns—waiting for Dad.

There was one gunshot and, ten minutes later, a second.

As soon as I saw him, moving like a shadow through the gaps in the bushes, I raced out of the house.

‘Did ya get him, Dad? Did ya?’

‘Got em both, JJ. Snakes come in pairs.’

‘Where’d you put em?’

‘Over the fence.’ He grabbed me by the back of my T-shirt as I turned to bolt off down the track. ‘Time for that tomorrow. You get in the house and help your mother with the tea. She’ll be back soon.’

He must have seen something missing on my face because he reached out and mussed the top of my head. ‘And don’t you be doing that any more. Plenty of good toilets at that school we send you to, or wait till you