The Serpent's Skin

let us live in that?’
That was the moment the serpent stirred.
I needed to write about that world.
The tribal pulling together in the epic struggle to survive; the unquestioned power of men and the Church and the destruction they made possible; the sheer joy of the things that shone light, like the mucking around and the kidding, as well as the incredible sisterhood.
A neighbour from across the creek, a woman with two toddlers of her own, took my newborn baby sister for six weeks when my mother nearly died giving birth. Another neighbour, with six kids of her own, took me in at eleven months. I didn’t get home for six months more.
I wanted to write about this complex world in which these unseen, unsung and profound acts of love and heroism made so much difference. I wanted to write about the everyday accommodations women had to make against the strictures of patriarchy and what it took to bring it down so that my life could be different. Notwithstanding, we all must fight on.
Books saved me. I never dreamed in that dark time that I would be writing them myself one day: stories that get deep into the bones of the reader and give them hope and strength, which is what I hope The Serpent’s Skin does for you.
I’m so grateful to you for going on this journey with me.
Much love and take care.
Erina Reddan

PART 1
BURIED
1968
The past is never where you think you left it.
Katherine Anne Porter


THE BEGINNING
Dad said she’d gone.
I didn’t reckon. I reckon she’d had enough, all right, but she couldn’t be gone gone. Mothers didn’t take off. Not any of the mothers I knew. And not my mum. She was too set on yanking my hair into twisty plaits, no matter what I might or might not have done to make her go.
Philly said Dad wouldn’t lie. ‘Dad hates sin more than he hates the devil.’
‘Shut your gob and go to sleep.’ I jammed my arms behind my head and got my eyes busy counting cobwebs on the ceiling. You couldn’t keep ahead of those spiders.
Philly jumped up in her flannel jarmies. Even in the moonlight I could tell Mum’d ironed em. Those jarmies made me bloody mad. I flung back the blankets and bolted to our chest of drawers, the chill of the floorboards nipping at my feet. I ripped open Philly’s drawer. She had her clothes in piles like soldiers, all squared up.
‘Get your filthy hands off my stuff,’ she said.
‘Your PJs are dirty. I’m getting you another pair.’
‘You’re a lying snake in the grass, JJ.’ She pushed back the covers and was on all fours.
‘It’s on ya collar—bleedin great stain.’
She twisted her head, plucking at her jarmies, like a maggie, over and over at the ground for a worm. She gave up and launched herself at me, roaring. At nine, she was only a year younger, but so little, I caught her scratching hands easy. She pushed her face into mine and hissed like a cat.
We both stopped, listened. Normally, Mum would be belting down the passageway, floor vibrating, yelling at me to stop riling up Philly again. But this time there were just the rats scratching about like nothing had changed on their side of the wall.
There was no Mum the next morning, either, rushing into our room with a big wind: ‘That Jack Frost—had the bug in him last night. Jump up and see if you can catch him at it!’
I was awake already without Mum, though. I poked my head over the window ledge. Out past the three pine trees in front of our place there was nothing but paddock after paddock, all silver and emptied over with frost. Inside it was all shivery bitey. Philly had a whimper up about how icy itchy her chilblains were. So I picked up the big warm wind Mum would have made and blew it all over her, dashing her and our school uniforms to the fireplace in the lounge. At twelve and thirteen, Tim and Tessa considered themselves too big to complain about a no-changing thing like the weather. I stabbed at the ashes in the grate for a spark of leftover orange hot from last night’s fire.
‘Bloody damn!’ I said.
‘You’ll go to hell.’
‘Least it’ll be hot.’
Philly clapped her hand to her mouth and made full moons with her eyes. I dropped the poker with a big racket to cover over her shriek, in case Dad thought about thundering in here. The freeze shivered us up as we ripped out of our pyjamas and into our polo tops and tartan skirts. Philly folded her jarmies so the buttons were in a dead straight line down the front. I balled mine up to shove under the pillow.
It was all tight around the breakfast table. Tessa had Mum’s apron over her school uniform. Mum always said it didn’t matter that the big yellow sunflower with all its joy on the front had worn gone—we knew it was there and that’s what counted. The apron was too big on Tessa because she was skinnier than most, but she’d wrapped the straps around and around so they were strangling into her like flat snakes across her belly. She’d got our bread turning brown in the toaster, put out Vegemite and poured milk into plastic cups. Mine was purple like irises. Mum said when I was a kid I wouldn’t have any other colour, so the others had to stop fighting me for it. I guess that was after she showed me irises in her book and said they were named after the Greek goddess who carried messages across the rainbow between heaven and earth. A bit like me, she said, cause I sometimes knew more than I should, and where I got that knowing she didn’t know but it had