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

nothing to put into all that empty. Eventually I gathered my limbs for the supreme effort of getting up. I Blu-Tacked my Map of Mum back up along the other wall. I picked up the fact-red texta. Then, in big bold letters, right before the red of Peg’s miscarriage and Jack throwing Peg out of the house I wrote: Jack and Peg once, Jack and Peg baby. I stood away, heart burning, to take in the bold of it. I stepped back in and added: !!!!*F*!!!!

The next morning, despite Tye’s warning, I still didn’t ring Maurice. I stayed in bed. I kept my back to the wall where the Map of Mum and all that terrible red was.

Eventually, when the day had stretched long into the afternoon, I dragged myself to upright.

I picked a black dress off the floor and pulled it over my head. Didn’t bother with underwear. I pulled a hat down over my hair and stabbed sunglasses on my face, even though there was nothing but grey out my window. I walked to the red phone box on the next corner where nobody could overhear anything, fed in some coins and rang Maurice.

‘JJ,’ he said, giving me a lot to work with. I pulled up something out of the earth and stuttered my way through an apology and some of the highlights of the past week, but avoided the things that were unthinkable. He let me get right to the end. Didn’t interrupt. Silence was among his superpowers.

I didn’t like the continued silence so much once I was finished, though.

Finally, he spoke. ‘You have a week to sort yourself out.’

‘What if I need more?’

‘You ring me like a normal adult and we discuss it.’

Red surged through me. This wasn’t normal. I didn’t feel like an adult. My pillar-of-the-church father had sex with his wife’s sister, got her pregnant, threw her out of the house for being a slut, and lied to his wife about the whole thing. That wasn’t fucking normal.

‘You had no right to ring my father.’

He didn’t skip a beat. ‘I’m the host. I issue the invites.’

‘Not him. If I don’t want my lying mongrel father there, that’s my business.’

He was all silence.

I was all runaway red, but I still wasn’t ready to throw my unwashed past at him to make him understand. Not until I made sense of it, or didn’t; not until I’d fitted it into whatever place it would end up in.

‘He doesn’t deserve to be there. He threw me out because I went to uni.’

‘Go back to the facts,’ he interrupted quietly, his voice reaching out to steady me. His bloody ‘facts sing’ mantra. ‘That fire in you, JJ,’ he said. ‘Don’t let it consume the facts.’

I felt a swirl of guilt because I knew I was lying: Dad didn’t throw me out, I left.

I was drowning in lies: his, mine.

‘Here’s a fact for you. You can stick your award. I quit.’

I hung up.

I left the phone box and took off, running, until my thongs tripped me, so I shucked them off and left them behind. Bare feet on hard ground. Eventually I came to a stop, lurched forwards, panting, holding my knees. When my breath evened out I found a tree and leaned back against the ridge of its bark, eyes closed. Minutes or hours ticked by and things smoothed long again so I had enough to look around to see where I’d ended up.

I was where I needed to be. I’d wanted to spare her all of this. Especially with everything going on with Ahmed. But now I couldn’t. That thing that had nagged at me all night. I had to know if Mrs Nolan was right. Had she been the one to tell Mum this terrible truth? Or had Mum worked it out the night before in that argument with Dad, and that’s why Philly had overheard her threatening to leave? It would make sense of why Mum’d filled the freezer with food. That overnight bag, already packed behind the door before Mrs Nolan had dropped the bomb. And then one thing more, something I remembered. Mum had come tipping-toeing in that night, after she thought we were asleep, to snuggle our blankets under our chins and kiss the top of our heads. If she took off because of all that betrayal, maybe that was enough to stretch across those six last days of Mum. But the way she’d reacted to Mrs Nolan’s telling— as if she was hearing it for the first time— I’d bet Mrs Nolan was correct. Which meant there was something else that Philly might know to fill in all that space on Mum’s Timeline.

Philly held the key underneath the layers of her denial.

I checked my watch. It was early for Philly, but she might be home. I realised how much I needed her.

She didn’t show any surprise when I knocked. ‘Call Tye,’ she said as she went to close the door in my face. I stuck my leg forwards to stop her. She sighed. ‘He’s going nuts, JJ. Call him.’

‘I did,’ I say shortly. ‘Are you okay?’

Smudged mascara. Chipped nails. Facts.

She turned away, leaving the door open, and headed to the fridge.

‘Are you?’ She turned back to pointedly look at my bare feet. She opened the freezer.

I saw the hole on the table where Ahmed’s mosaic glass lamp used to be. That was a fact she couldn’t deny just because she needed to. I wasn’t sure why she was surprised that Ahmed had moved out because he’d been talking about it for weeks. I went up behind her and hugged her hard. She leaned into me for a moment before reaching to topple the container of ice cream down from the top shelf.

She flicked the freezer closed and crossed to the drawer.

‘Haven’t seen these cow pyjamas since you were fifteen.’ I made an effort to be myself so she wouldn’t suspect how much shit was going on beneath my