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

got to it. She ate alone for a few moments, then extended the tub to me. I dug my spoon in and slipped the cold into my mouth. I was glad to be there with her, just this simple of how-we-are together.

‘What?’ asked Philly.

She knew me so well. I stared at her, long and hard, trying to work out how I could ask her without telling her anything.

‘No. No. I know that look. No.’ She dropped the spoon and plastered her hands to her ears. ‘La la la.’

‘Okay.’ I nodded. ‘I’ll do you a deal—I won’t tell you anything, but you have to answer one question.’

‘Nothing. I know nothing.’

She picked up the spoon that had fallen on the floor. It was a measure of her distress that she didn’t immediately head to the kitchen for a paper towel and a new spoon. She hunched back in among her cows, getting her legs up close to her chest.

‘You heard Mum tell Dad she was leaving.’ I said it as gently as possible.

Her eyes darted left then right. ‘I never told you that. I never told anybody.’

I let her think about that a moment.

‘Oh,’ she said.

‘Yeah, you did. You told Tessa, back then.’

She blanched. ‘I was just a kid. Probably didn’t hear right.’ I saw a flash of the grown-up woman, all bluff and smoke. I bet that worked with people who didn’t know her. That’s the thing. You might get away with living without a past, but your past can’t live without you.

I won the stare-off and she bent to wipe the table with her sleeve. Underneath the glass were three magazines fanned out and a copy of Alice in Wonderland.

‘That’s where my book got to,’ I said.

She followed my eyes. ‘It’s my book.’

‘Mine.’

She snatched it up and hugged it to her.

‘It’s got my name on it,’ I said. She opened the fragile hardcover of the book and turned over the sticky-taped first page. I pointed. ‘See.’

‘Just because you wrote your name on it.’

I threw up my hands. ‘Okay, so it probably doesn’t belong-belong to either—’

‘It’s mine now.’ She put it behind her back.

I brought my eyebrows together. ‘Are you reading it at the moment?’

The weight of things in her stopped up her words. Then she made the decision to lie and shook her head.

‘So that’s why it’s sitting out here all on its own, away from its friends, all alphabetically ordered in your bookshelf,’ I said, jumping from my armchair on to the couch beside her. ‘And that’s why it has a nice bookmark with a lovely pompom thing in the middle of it.’

The annoyed dark on her face ripped the years away and she was our little Philly monkey again, as if the past had stretched out its fist and punched me right in the face.

‘You started reading after I finished it, the day Mum disappeared,’ I said, my voice full of quiet. Alarm lit her up and got her off the couch. She took the book into the bedroom. I watched her and I let her go. For a moment I wanted to ask her to bring out Mum’s special pink snowdrop dress so we could both sit under it as we used to when we were kids and missing her. But as much as I longed to feel this thing of Mum’s, I knew it would be too much. It would undo me. It was better hanging quietly in Philly’s closet rather than dancing with ghosts out here.

When she came back I was pretending to be busy with the ice cream again.

She plumped down on the couch and crossed her legs. ‘I’ll tell you what I remember, which is almost nothing, but you’ve got to promise you won’t speak to me about it again.’

I nodded, fingers crossed behind my back, though, because she would have to hear it some other time. She had a right to know. When she could bear it. And maybe that knowing could shift something in her. Make her and Ahmed more possible.

‘They were out by the tractor the night before she left,’ Philly examined her nails and worked her cuticles, ‘not realising I was in the long grass behind when they got stuck into it. Dad told her he was the head of the family, he made decisions. Mum flew at him.’ Philly was speaking like she’d learned this by rote. I wondered how many times she might have said this in her head. ‘She said he was more worried about what the bloody priest and his Southern Cross cronies thought than what was best for his own wife and kids. Told him all this stuff he’d done wrong. How he made Mrs Salvatino pay for their wheat after her husband died, even though the bill had already been paid, blah blah blah, and how she lay in bed beside him at night and she saw as much as God.’

Philly stopped. I knew there was more. I kept my mouth shut.

‘So yeah, she said she was leaving,’ Philly said eventually.

‘She’d known that about him for a long time. Why leave then?’

Philly jerked straight. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘She’d just had it. It happens to all of us. And, she did say—’ She stopped short. Looked at me apologetically.

‘Say it.’

‘No, nothing.’

‘You were going to say—’

‘We were so poor and—’

‘And she said on top of that there was me.’ I jumped in.

‘No. No.’

I gave her a look.

‘Okay, yes. Yes. But we were all hard. Four of us to feed and clothe. It wasn’t just you.’ She laid a hand on my knee.

I pulled away. I’d bloody known it all along, but still to hear it from her.

‘Look. She said something else.’

I didn’t look. Kept staring at that mauve runner.

‘It didn’t mean anything, but she said she was going to die.’

‘What?’ I swivelled back, on full wide-eyed stare. ‘She was dying?’

Philly’s head went into automatic shake. ‘No. No. See, this is why I didn’t tell you before. It’s just a figure of speech. It’s simple. They