My sister is a prankster. She always has been. In a house of silence and sullen stares, Samantha found ways to force other people to make noise. Rubber snakes, canned worms, plastic spiders, fake vomit. Jump scares, fake hauntings, elaborate April Fools where she would prank call the house in near-perfect fake accents. One day, when I was nine, I opened the linen cupboard to get a towel, and saw a snake curled up perfectly on the top of a towel pile. I shook my head, reached out to grab the plastic snake to toss it into Samantha's room, and as soon my hand hit the smooth scales of a live eastern brown snake, I screamed to raise the dead. Our father came running, saw the snake where I had dropped it on the floor, and the blood drained from his face. He yelled at me to get up, and I scrambled into the raised laundry sink. The snake raced from the laundry, and my father moved as fast as he could to find it before it could nestle unseen somewhere in the old house. I heard him thumping through the hall. It was about a year before Thomas died and I could hear dad yelling to Thomas to bring the shovel. My heart slowed, and curiosity got the better of me. I crept out of the laundry and found Samantha in the hall.
"Where is it? I thought it was one of your stupid rubber ones."
"It's in our room. Dad and Tommy are after it."
I clung behind Sam, who was about thirteen then, and we peered around the doorway of our bedroom, like cartoon characters with our heads stacked one on top of the other, Sam crouched down in front of me.
Tommy was standing behind dad, thick gumboots on. I saw that dad was lying on the floor, his top half under a bunk bed, and I felt cold dread wrap thin fingers around my stomach. An eastern brown will kill a man without too much trouble, especially if he's cornered. It was a large snake, and to this day I cannot understand how it got into the linen cupboard, though dad has always said it must have come down through the roof. After a minute or two of us frozen in our strange tableau, my father emerged, his hand clamped down around the neck of the snake, as it thrashed it's long body and tried to escape.
I thought he was going to take it outside, and set it free into the bushland behind our house. But instead he set it on the floor, inched his hand back a little, and told Tommy to bring the shovel down. I hid my face just in time, but Samantha didn't, and to this day the sight of the old bloodstain on the beige carpet where the snake lost its head puts her in a strange, sad mood.
Sam never played snake pranks on me after that. She carried on with all the others, but dad made her switch her plastic spiders to tarantulas, as they don't live in Australia, so that none of us would see a real redback and assume it was plastic.
After Tommy died, and Kane became a problem child, Sam and I stuck together. She started to abandon practical jokes after Tommy's death, and became more like another adult in the house. She was fourteen, but in the absence of any nurturing from our broken parents, Sam provided me with a great deal of emotional nourishment. She never kicked me out of her bunk when I crawled in. She read me stories even though I was more than able to read them on my own. She learned to cook pancakes because I loved them, and she told me all the stories of the nights she snuck out to be with her friends and nervously meet boys. I felt like we had our own life, within a bubble inside our house. Kane spent more and more time with Gran, who Sam nicknamed Caustic Gran, because of her acidic personality. This did not improve Kane's general humour, and his edges hardened.
After I woke up under the floor, I had made the decision to remove Greg from my life, by hook or by crook. I knew that I had to, it had become a matter of my survival. I could not risk my death, and having my children raised by Greg alone. It would be a matter of seconds before he was sick of it and the children began to pay for it in some way. I could not risk sharing custody in a divorce which was sure to be vicious. He would fight tooth and nail to take them from me and if he had even one day alone with them, I felt in my bones that he would harm them, just to spite me. You cannot poke the bear, as my father always said. Greg's entire identity was the perfect family, and if I dismantled that, he would have nothing to lose. I had to find a way to remove him, like one removes a tumour before it kills you. And I knew I had no hope alone. So I called Samantha. It was only a week or so after the near-death incident, and I was beginning to formulate a plan, through the mental fog of my own misery. I continued on with life like a robot, claiming to all and sundry that I was perfectly fine, honestly, I just can't seem to shake this head cold, thank you for asking.
