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

I walked beside him up the track, making a game out of keeping in his shadow.

Standing in his shed now, I rubbed my palms along my jeans again, all softened by the idea of Dad’s hand on my head. In that moment I wanted to believe Dad so badly my hands shook. I wanted to believe Tim had picked up the butter box by mistake.

I heard Blue, one of Dolly’s, bark a long way off. It was time to get out of there. I took a quick inventory to see if I’d disturbed anything, and then I realised I was busting to pee. I swayed for a moment undecided: the long trip home holding it in or a quick trip to the outback toilet shed?

I heard the flies before I even opened the door. Big, fat, blowsy ones. I held my breath and dashed in, counting. Now it was just Dad on his own, he didn’t have to change the pan that often. I had my jeans undone and peeled down before I’d counted to four. I was not even up to twenty-eight and I was buttoning up again. Under a half a minute. Record. That was when I saw the butter box beside the old copper washing machine that was still there from when the toilet shed used to be a laundry.

Bastard.

My eyes took a moment to adjust to the dark. The pale wood of the butter box announcing itself in the gloom. I lifted the lid, but it was all empty space inside. I sat back on my haunches, relief rolled up in the disappointment, like twisting fingers. This box must have been Mum’s. I fitted the lid back on, smoothed my hand over it and turned to go.

But there they were—a stack of black notebooks butted against the tin wall opposite the toilet pan. I kicked a can across the shed. It skidded and crashed. I was in after it and kicked and kicked and then missed and crashed my boot into the wall.

‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’

All fucked out, I stood there panting in the quiet, hands up against the wall in among the cobwebs.

I gathered the notebooks into my arms and then carried them down the track, tipped them onto the passenger’s seat and climbed in beside them. I didn’t start the car because my arms were concrete heavy on my lap and the ignition too far to reach.

The cows had ambled back to the far side of the paddock, but Max stared straight at me.

It was Blue’s bark, closer now, which finally got my hands working and the key turned. The car got on the track and followed the potholes and curves to the road. It went past Pete’s place, down the hill, but not over the creek. The car came to a halt just beside the ford. A full stop. I took my hands off the wheel and they fell like stones back again into my lap. The heat sweated me up and the blood in my head got itself pulsing, so I had to unwind the window, then chock the door open, but it wasn’t enough, so I got myself out and wrapped Peg’s diaries in a shirt from the back seat and headed down to the cool of the creek.

The sky was burned free of clouds and dragonflies skimmed over the dank, dark surface of the water. As I got closer, a frog leaped from a fallen tree and into the water, its charcoal body no bigger than my thumb, sinking below without a splash.

My feet got lost in the slow cold of the water, the detritus collecting around my calves, clinging and then sweeping away with the current, on to the next thing in the way. I hunched right over and trailed my hands in the chill. A bird called and nobody answered.

I wiped my hands on my jeans and opened the first diary. There was no date. I flipped through the pages. The sugar tasted like salt today and I saw a box of good cherries at the shops. No dates anywhere. Oceans of Peg’s kind of ordinary. I kneaded my palm. And settled to proper reading.

It was in the fourth diary that I found something. But not words. There were a whole lot of pages ripped out. I ran my index finger along the jagged edge left behind.

‘Fuck.’

He was always one step ahead.

TIM’S LEAD

There was one person in this family who might just be on my side. And right then I needed him. I loaded the diaries back into the car and drove the quiet farm roads to Tim’s place. As I pulled on the handbrake in their driveway, Shelley was down the steps of the house to greet me, her wide eyes smiling and her fair ponytail swinging.

‘Got the jacket you loaned me,’ I said as I opened the door.

‘Thought I’d lost it forever.’ Shelley grinned her big-as-a-moon smile, walking me through the rose bushes and up on to the verandah. I’d often thought she was so sunny because of the roses and all that love and appreciation. Even her dad was a steady, light kind of bloke.

‘What’s cooking?’ Shelley asked, because she was far too polite to ask why the hell I had turned up on their doorstep for the first time in a year.

I shrugged. ‘Around at Dad’s. Had to pick up something he took from Peg’s.’

‘Tim’ll be in for a cuppa soon.’

‘Your dad?’

‘Rounding up cattle in the Dargo.’

‘Playing house, then?’

Shelley grinned again. ‘Think Tim’s coming around. He’s worried it’s a breach of my dad’s trust if he sleeps up here.’

The fly-screen of the front door slapped shut behind us and the cool of the dark in the corridor got its arms about us.

‘Funny boy, that brother of mine.’

‘He’s got morals. Like your dad.’

I sewed my lips up tight so not a sound could get out about how Dad might not measure up to his publicity.

I