Salt Rain (12 page)

But Mae pursed her lips and shook her head.

It was difficult for Allie to see him in the dark but there was the faint smell of incense and the soft intake of his breath. It was the most intimate sound of him, the breath moving in and out of his body. Creatures rustled in the big mango tree beside his house. She liked being in the forest at night, the sounds of other life going on all around her, the clickings and scurryings of small animals.

Her eyes found the outline of his body where he lay on his back, his hair dark on the white pillow. People’s faces were naked while they slept. Mae seemed sad when she was asleep, the corners of her mouth pulled down, a faint crease between her thin eyebrows. Allie wanted to shine her torch onto Saul’s face. What she was looking for might be written on his face.

She put her hands on the wooden windowsill and pulled herself up so she could lean her body into the air of his room. The sill creaked under her and he stirred. She dropped to the ground and heard the sheets rustling and then his footsteps through the house.

His front door banged shut and he was coming down the steps, pulling a T-shirt over his head. ‘Allie?’

The pulse in her neck ticked as he walked across the wet grass towards her. How inevitable it felt, this circling to the truth, like the stars wheeling their way across the sky. She and Mae used to lie back and watch the night sky turning around them.

He stood in front of her, his voice sharp. ‘What are you doing here?’

She looked up at him. ‘I can’t sleep.’

He turned to look out at the forest, his hands on his hips. ‘So what are you doing here, at my house?’

Her mouth was dry. ‘I don’t know.’

He squatted beside her. There was the fuggy smell of sleep on him. ‘You frightened me. I don’t want you looking in on me in the middle of the night. Come and visit me during the day but not like this.’

‘I was just walking. If I walk then I can go back and sleep.’

He was silent for a moment. ‘You know that Mae used to walk at night? She’d come to my window and chuck stones at it and I’d go out and we’d sit on the verandah under my mum’s old mosquito net.’

‘She never told me that.’

‘I thought that was why you’d come.’ He smiled. ‘So, maybe she didn’t tell you everything after all.’

‘She told me everything important.’

He looked at her for a moment, then said, ‘Did she tell you that I went to Sydney?’

‘What?’

‘I went looking for her, I tracked her down.’

‘No! I don’t believe you. She would have said.’ She swayed a little on her haunches and reached back to the warm brick pier behind her.

‘It’s true. She’d been gone two years and I was on my way back down to Tasmania and I just got off the train in Sydney and went looking for her.’

‘You found her?’ Allie sat down and the damp ground soaked through her thin cotton dress.

‘Yeah. I found you both. You were little, a toddler. I waited at the post office and eventually she came to pick up her mail. She was unwrapping a package on the steps and I sat down next to her.’

‘And?’

‘And we went and had a milkshake at a place just down from the post office.’

‘The Parthenon.’ She shook her head. ‘I was there?’

‘Yeah.’

‘But I don’t remember! I’d remember.’ He had come to find her, actually come to claim her and Mae never said anything.

‘You were only little.’ He threaded his fingers together. ‘Maybe she never told you because it was kind of awkward. We ended up arguing, there in the bloody milk bar…while the guy cooked hamburgers and chips five feet away.’

‘What did you argue about?’

He lifted his hands into the air. ‘It just wasn’t… I just wanted to make contact with her, you know.’ He was measuring his words. ‘I thought I could put something to rest, I guess. But she was kind of nervous. I think that the guy, what’s his name… Tom, must have been on the scene and I guess she was worried about getting home to him. She kept saying she had to get home, that she was expected. Then she just stood up, and said that I was crazy and that she couldn’t just pick up and try again somewhere else, it was just too hard and I should go off and find myself a good wife.’

‘What was too hard? What did she mean, it was too hard?’

He shrugged. ‘Things hadn’t exactly been easy.’

‘But Tom wasn’t around then. She didn’t meet him till I was like five or six!’

‘I don’t know, then. I didn’t understand it.’ He stretched one leg out in front of him and leaned back against the house.

Allie was silent, looking up at the clouds scudding across the sky, letting moonlight leak through. ‘Don’t you think she would have been a good wife?’

He nodded slowly, ‘Yeah.’ He emphasised each word, ‘She would have. She was a good woman.’

‘Is that what you wanted? Did you want her to be your wife?’

He took a moment to reply. ‘Not then. Not when I went to Sydney, that wasn’t what I was trying to… I just wanted to see her, that’s all.’

Allie shielded her face as a flying fox swooped low in front of them, its black wings buffeting the air. It landed in the dark shape of the tree above them. How could Mae have not told her? Day after day, Mae had let her wait for him.

A mango dropped to the ground in front of them. Saul reached over to pick it up. ‘Not ripe yet. Iris always wants me to pick them for her but I prefer to leave them for the bats and the local kids. This tree has been here at least eighty years, the original homestead on the property was down here. All the kids come every summer. These are the best mangoes in the valley.’ He tossed the fruit into the bushes. ‘Once, when I was little, maybe in second or third class, I came down here one day and there was a group of boys teasing this little kid. They started beating him up, pelting him with rotten mangoes and stones. He was a scrawny little guy, from a poor family up the valley. He’d come down with an old carry bag to get mangoes. And I did nothing, I just stood and watched. They wouldn’t let him run away, so he just curled up in a ball while they pelted him. And a few times he looked over at me, while I just stood there. He works at the co-op in town now, he’s a big guy with a beard and beer gut. I tried to apologise to him once. I started, you know, describing the incident and saying how sorry I was. And he just laughed and said I was confusing him with someone else.’

Allie stood up. He was worse than Mae, holding out on her, distracting her with stories. It was up to him to say it, she wasn’t going to extract it from him as if it were some terrible confession. She spoke abruptly. ‘Goodbye. Sorry I frightened you.’

He called after her, ‘Hey!’

At the edge of the clearing she looked back. He was still sitting there, his face pale in the darkness, watching her.

When she was little she would use the back lane to get into the next-door neighbours’ garden and look in their window. She was most interested in the father, the way he rolled his shirt sleeves up and let his hand rest on the head of his little girl as he talked to his wife. A golden light seemed to emanate from their house, the same warm light she saw in windows when she and Mae walked at night. Then one evening they saw her looking in at them and the father came out to where she stood in the dark garden. ‘What are you doing?’ he had asked. She couldn’t recall what she said to him, but remembered his big hand warm and firm around hers as he led her home. Mae was lying upstairs listening to the radio. ‘I don’t want her lurking in our backyard,’ he told Mae. She nodded and took Allie into the kitchen for a cup of hot chocolate. The next weekend, he put a lock on their back gate.

Lights blazed from the farmhouse and wood smoke hung in the damp air.

Julia was stoking the old wood stove and looked up when Allie walked in. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Out.’ The kitchen was humming with heat and the smell of caramelising fruit.

‘At midnight? Are you okay? You look pale.’

‘I’m fine.’ Mango skins and seeds were heaped on the table. She traced a finger through the sticky juice. ‘Did you know Saul went to look for Mae and me in Sydney?’

Julia looked up from weighing dried fruit, her face shining with perspiration, ‘Who told you that?’

‘He did. She never said anything.’ The heat in the room was tremendous and passed through her body as if she wasn’t there. She sat down and stroked a glossy smooth mango. ‘She kept…’ Allie lifted her hands up as if holding a ball. ‘She kept all this information…’

Julia nodded. ‘Yeah. A lot of people do.’ She tipped a dish of red glacé cherries into a big bowl and used her hands to mix them through the cake batter. ‘Sorry it’s so hot in here. I’ve always used the wood stove to bake the Christmas fruitcakes. I just normally do it earlier in the year when it’s not so warm. Thought I’d make some mango chutney while we had the stove going.’

‘She just let me wait for him to come! I used to listen to cars stopping on the street at night, thinking it was him. I’d sit on the front step watching strange men walking down the street, wondering if they were going to turn in at our gate. She just let me go on waiting.’ Juice dripped through a crack in the table onto her leg. She remembered the milk bar run by the skinny Greek guy and his wife. Year after year Allie had walked across the lino and stood at the counter waiting for a parcel of chips and Mae never told her that the First Love had been there too. He should have tried harder and come back when she was old enough to recognise him. He owed it to her.

Julia shook her head and scraped the last of the thick cake mix into greased and papered tins. She slid them into the oven and went out onto the verandah, lifting her shirt and turning her body to meet the faint breeze. She called back to Allie, ‘You know, sometimes the stories we tell are not for other people, they’re for us. We’re really telling them for ourselves.’

‘She thought I couldn’t tell which were the real stories. She thought I couldn’t figure it out. I should have had him before now. I should have had him a long time ago.’

‘What do you mean “had him”?’

‘I mean I should have had a father.’

Julia tilted her head. ‘You don’t think he’s your father?’

‘I don’t think it. I know it.’

‘Oh no. No, he’s not your father.’ She shook her head vehemently, and stepped back inside. ‘Bloody hell, he hasn’t told you this, has he?’

‘I just know it.’

Julia came close to her. ‘Allie, he’s not your father. Don’t you think Mae would have wanted him to be? Don’t you think it would have been easier for her if he was? Have you asked him? Ask him, he’ll tell you.’

‘You just don’t want him to be. How would you know, anyway? I mean, what has any of this got to do with you?’

‘God. I’m sorry. I should have realised this was what you were thinking,’ Julia rubbed her face.

‘It’s nothing to do with you, Julia. I know what the truth is and he knows it too. You think you know Mae. You pretend you do but you know nothing about her. Nothing at all.’

She ran down the steps and into the paddock. She found one of the pathways through the weeds and hurried towards the light coming from Petal’s caravan. As she walked into the dark dripping forest, she could see in the end window of the van. Between the red curtains there were two bodies, Petal and a man with the same long blonde hair, moving like one creature. She stood watching them, the same electricity in her body as when she used to hear Mae and Tom. She would try to block out the rhythmic, rocking sounds from upstairs, turning one ear into her pillow, but still the warmth would come, spreading between her legs like shameful hot urine, spreading while she listened for her mother’s cry. The sound that came from her mother’s lips would drop through the air and into her window.

She turned away from Petal’s van and walked blindly into the black forest, branches and vines tearing at her skin.

The blood came in the middle of the night, black on her pants and thighs and fingertips. She sat on the toilet in the dark house, Julia’s room quiet and the air still heavy with the sugary smell of cake. With one hand she gripped her wrist and looked down at her fingers, so thin and fragile, daubed in the blackness.

In the morning Julia gave her pads and she lay in bed, listening to the rain, the blood trickling stickily down the crack of her buttocks onto the sheet. Julia came in with a cup of milky tea and sat on the edge of the bed, her face soft. She patted Allie’s leg through the sheet and the weight of her aunt’s hand made hot tears rise behind her eyes. She rolled away from Julia and pulled the sheet up to her chin and traced her fingers down her side, following the lines of sweat, imagining them his fingers on Mae’s skin. Julia was wrong about Saul. What would Julia know? She was only a girl when Mae and Saul were together.

She drifted back to sleep, the smells of Julia’s cooking all around her. She dreamt of thick drops of blood sitting plump on the front path in Sydney. In the dream she was in Mae’s nightdress, the cement digging into her knees as she bent to lick at the drops with her tongue. She licked until her tongue was raw, to take something of Mae into her, one last bit of her mother.

The pad was thick between her thighs. Neither Mae nor Julia had told her that the blood kept coming and coming or that the cotton wadding would be soaked in a few hours. When she undressed to have a bath, it skimmed a crimson line down her bare leg and dripped perfect shining circles onto the linoleum. Everything was blood—her skin, her underpants, the back of her dress, the sheets. It lay just under the skin of her whole body, like tears ready to burst.

Julia was watching her closely, leaning out the kitchen window to check on her where she sat on the verandah. Allie waited until she heard her aunt go into the bathroom, then she ran down the steps and into the forest.

His front door was unlocked, like last time. She stood on the threshold and looked around the room. He had left a towel hanging over the back of a chair and a stick of incense burned on the kitchen table, a thin thread of smoke rising into the air. Allie stepped inside and rubbed the silky ashes of the incense between her fingers.

In the bathroom, a razor balanced on the edge of the sink, trailing a line of tiny black whiskers and soap foam. She squeezed a bead of his toothpaste onto her finger and touched her tongue to its gritty sweetness before she walked across the hall to his bedroom, her bare feet whispering on the smooth floorboards. His bed was unmade, the sheets and pillows tangled. She riffled the pages of the book beside the bed and had a sudden pang for the long neat rows of books in the school library. A dog barked in the distance and a fly buzzed insistently against the window. She knelt and pressed her face into the mattress, silently mouthing their names to herself. Mae and Saul.