Salt Rain (13 page)

There were loud footsteps on the stairs and his voice, talking to the dog. She crossed to the open window and climbed out, dropping to a squat on the grass just as his dog ran down from the verandah towards her, wagging its tail. She walked up the stairs and met Saul coming out the front door. He had keys in one hand and was about to take a bite from an apple with the other.

‘Hello again,’ he said, raising his eyebrows.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Into town.’ He started walking across the lawn then turned back to her. ‘Do you wanna come?’

She nodded and followed him to his ute.

She wound down the car window to let the air onto her skin. The midday heat gathered around her and pricked behind her knees. Saul drove with one hand and took the corners fast. When the car reached the top of the escarpment, the clouds suddenly cleared and they could see right across the bare plain, past the town and looping river, to the sea glittering in the distance. She watched his hands loosely grip the wheel as he steered the ute down past the wind-shredded bananas onto the river flats. There was something so familiar about the square shape of his palm and the angle at the base of his thumb, as if she had always known it. She shut her eyes and tried to find the right words to prompt him.

He spoke suddenly into the silence, ‘You know, I was thinking, maybe she didn’t say anything about me going to Sydney because it was so complicated.’ He smiled. ‘Sometimes it’s easier to keep things simple.’

‘Yeah? I don’t think complication was a concern for her.’

‘What do you mean?’

She thought of Tom leaning back in his chair in the kitchen while Mae straddled him, her skirt cutting into her thighs, and how he had once reached up and deliberately smeared her red lipstick across her face.

‘Like Tom. We’d never know when he was coming over. He’d come after work, or at midnight. And mostly he’d leave before dawn, so he’d be home and his kids wouldn’t know he’d spent the night away.’

‘His kids?’

‘His wife knew about us. But he didn’t want his kids to know…’

A herd of caramel-coloured cows was crossing the road. Saul slowed the car and put his arm out the window to wave to the farmer standing by the road. ‘Hey Bill.’

The farmer nodded back as Saul edged the car forward past a cow that had separated from the herd and was lumbering down the road, her heavy udder swinging.

‘His wife tracked him down once and found his car parked out the front. She stayed outside for hours and Mae and Tom hid inside, laughing. His wife didn’t know which house was ours. She was just waiting for him to turn up…’ She watched his face. ‘Mae was never really in love with him.’

‘How do you know?’

‘She told me.’ She didn’t want to think about Tom. The sound of his voice from upstairs, loud, telling Mae to stop crying. Tom yelling down the stairs in the morning, ‘Why didn’t you take a fucking key, Mae?’ then coming down in his singlet and opening the door to the policeman.

Saul slowed the ute as they entered town and a solitary boy rode his bike across the pedestrian crossing, under a limp streamer of tinsel. Saul pulled up outside the old corner pub. Shapes moved in the gloom inside and there was the sound of laughter and glasses clinking. Upstairs on the wide verandah, a line of red-checked tea towels hung over the lace fretwork.

‘What did you and Mae argue about when you came to find us? What did you talk about?’

He shook his head. ‘I can’t remember exactly. I guess we talked about us…’

‘So why didn’t you come again?’ she said as a man in a faded brown felt hat left the pub and came towards Saul’s open window.

‘I…what was the point?’

‘What do you mean, what was the point?’

The man reached them. ‘Saul, mate. What you doing in from the hills? Big day in town, eh?’

Saul smiled at him and undid his seatbelt. ‘Yeah, yeah. How ya goin’ Mike? Mike this is Allie, Julia’s niece.’ He nodded at her and got out. ‘I’ll be back in a tick. I’ve just got to run in and get a bottle of brandy, then we can go over to the shop.’

She watched him disappear into the dark doorway and shut her eyes for a moment. A loud burst of laughter came from the pub. She hadn’t been into town since the funeral, since Mae was buried under a ton of dirt, deep down where she could never be reached. The smell of bubbling tar rising from the road made her feel sick and she shifted so her back was towards the cemetery. She lifted her thighs off the burning vinyl seat and rested them back onto her palms, the sweat slippery between her fingers.

She could just see the slow river drifting by on the far side of the park. Mae had told her how she used to visit friends in town and they would let the tide pull their little tin dinghy down the river towards the ocean, rowing and hanging a fishing line over the side until they reached the mouth of the river, where they tied up and bought hot chips from the fish co-op and swam all day in the lagoon before letting the turn of the tide take them back to town. Allie picked one of the houses fronting the river, with its wide verandahs and palm trees, and imagined her mother as a girl, running barefoot along the hot grass and in the front gate.

Saul came out of the pub carrying a brown paper bag and squinting his eyes against the sun. He stopped to talk to someone on the footpath and Allie suddenly didn’t recognise anything about him, this short man with broad shoulders and muddy boots. For a moment, she didn’t know how she could possibly be connected to this stranger, sitting in the front seat of a stranger’s car, on a street in a strange town. Panic swelled in her chest and she shut her eyes to call up the vision of Mae trailing behind the dinghy on a lazy summer’s day.

‘Doing a big shop for Christmas are you then, Saul?’ the man at the grocery shop weighed the dried fruit and tipped it into brown paper bags. He didn’t wait for a reply. ‘Can’t see you in the kitchen cooking up a batch of mince tarts, but there you go. Nice to have a bit of sun then, isn’t it? But doesn’t it make things steamy?’ He wiped his hands on his apron and looked at Allie. ‘Now you’d have to be a Curran, wouldn’t you? You’ve definitely got the family look.’

Saul spoke, ‘This is Allie. Julia’s niece.’

The man bent to pick up a cardboard box. ‘Julia’s niece…?’ he said, then exclaimed, ‘Oh!’ just as Saul said, ‘Mae’s daughter.’

‘Oh yes, of course. I remember.’ He smiled at Allie again. ‘Is it hot enough for you then?’

She nodded. She didn’t like his oily grey hair slicked back, his too-white teeth. They each carried a box to the ute and the man tapped the bonnet as he turned to go back to the shop. ‘Well, see you later then. Let’s hope we get a bit more sun before the rain comes back.’

Saul pulled across the street and turned onto the road out of town. Massive old fig trees lined the road, dwarfing the neat timber houses. At the edge of town he pointed to a light blue house with a hedge of red hibiscus bushes. ‘You know that’s where your great-grandmother lives?’

‘There?’ The small house was quiet, the curtains drawn against the heat, an old white station wagon parked in the driveway. It was the last house before the wide unfenced cane fields.

She wanted him to stop so she could open her great-grandmother’s front gate and walk up the neat cement path to the door, like Mae would have done if she were there. She would step into the cool dark living room and sit down on the couch beside the old lady.

He sped up as they left town. ‘You asked me why I didn’t go to see Mae again. She wouldn’t have wanted to see me. It was…it wasn’t great, that meeting we had. It was clear…’

‘So, why did you go the first time if you didn’t want to get back with her?’

He frowned and shook his head, ‘Oh. I’m not sure. It was just so awful the way it had all ended, up here in the valley. I wanted to understand…’

‘So the point was to make you feel better.’

‘Ahh, Allie,’ he shook his head, his voice exasperated. ‘I just wanted to see her, that’s all.’

She spoke quickly, the words tumbling out, ‘Did you ever think you might be my father?’

He slowed the car then pulled over onto the gravel beside the road. ‘Is that what you’ve been thinking?’ His face was serious, and he looked away from her for a moment. She could see each dark curl at the nape of his neck. ‘I wanted to be,’ he said as he turned back to her. ‘I wanted to be your father. But I always knew I wasn’t.’

‘So you believed every single thing she said, did you?’

‘It wasn’t about what she said. I knew it.’

‘But how…? How did you know it?’ They were parked out the front of the town pool, a bright blue rectangle in the middle of the cane fields. In the silence that hung between them, there was the lonely sound of crows in the trees behind the pool. She kept her eyes on the chemical blue of the water, she didn’t want to see him saying these words.

‘’Cause we never…’ he shifted his legs. ‘We didn’t actually…have intercourse, you know. It wasn’t…’

‘You never had sex?’

He shook his head.

She wanted to get out into the shimmering heat and step over the small ditch of water beside the road and run down one of the narrow dirt tracks between the tall rows of cane, right to the centre of the vast field. She remembered very well Mae’s descriptions of how gentle he was as they made love, his hands holding her so tenderly, the motion of their bodies together. Mae used to lie back in bed, her eyes shut, and tell Allie how they would wrap themselves in a blanket, the wool rough on their bare skin.

He put the car into gear and pulled back onto the road. ‘I don’t know what to say… I don’t know what Mae told you. Maybe she wished it too, you know. I’m sorry.’ He turned the car onto the road that led up into the hills. Heavy rain clouds were rolling down from the escarpment.

Allie’s voice was blunt. ‘Either she’s lying or you are.’

‘What did she tell you?’

‘She told me lots. There’d be no reason for her to lie. Don’t you think she’d know who got her pregnant?’ Even as she spoke, she remembered how Mae used to change her stories over time, the description of the first kiss getting more and more detailed and changing location from the bank of the creek to a boulder. The truth was that Allie couldn’t keep track of Mae’s stories but she was sure that Mae had always meant her to know that the First Love was her father and the Balloon Man was just an invention.

He put his hand out the window, as if testing the air as it streamed past. ‘Everyone knew it was him, Allie. People saw them at the Show together. She was upfront about it, she told everyone. Believe me.’

The wind was whipping up, spinning twigs onto the roof of the car and down onto the road. The air coming in the window was suddenly cooler. She could feel sticky blood on her inner thighs.

He said, ‘I can help you find him if you like. I’ll help you.’

‘What? The Balloon Man?’ He didn’t even have a name. A nameless, faceless man that Mae never meant her to find. ‘Why would you want to get involved? And if you’re going to find him, what was his real name?’

His voice was soft, ‘Didn’t she tell you anything about him?’

‘She told me about you.’

‘I’ll help you. If you want, I’ll help you.’ He sighed. ‘Oh look, here comes the rain.’ Fat drops split open on the windscreen like small ripe fruit and spattered through the window onto her hot bare legs.

When he pulled up, Allie leapt out without a word and ran towards the house, leaving the car door wide open to the rain. He sat, letting the rain wet the seat, watching her run down the path, long dark hair swinging, the shape of her exactly like Mae. Bloody Mae, what had she told her? He thought about getting out and going to speak to Julia, but he was already late for milking.

At his father’s place, he parked under a tree and hurried across the grass to the dairy. The yard was mucky with red mud, the cows standing patiently in the rain. Inside, his father had turned the lights on against the gloom, and was kneeling, inspecting a cow’s hoof. Saul started work, and as he moved the cattle through the stalls he thought of what might have been if Mae had pretended to everyone in the valley that Allie was his child. She could have, they would have believed her. Perhaps they would have married and built the cottage on his father’s land, but it was more likely that they would have descended into arguments like that day in the milk bar when she had seemed like another person altogether.

His father came over and leaned against a post. ‘How are you doing, son?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s that girl back in the valley isn’t it? It’s like young Mae’s come back. I know she’s been visiting you. Iris and I see her walking over to your place sometimes…’

Saul turned back to washing down a cow’s udder.

His father leaned towards him. ‘Are you listening?’

‘I heard you.’

‘I saw Julia today and she said to remind you about the girl’s birthday dinner next week. I asked Julia why on earth you would be going to her birthday, and she said she didn’t know. Just mind yourself, Saul. Mind yourself.’

Saul stood up and went to the far end of the shed and heaved a sack of barley onto his shoulder.

Working his body had been his only comfort after he found out Mae was having the balloon man’s baby. Each day when his father went back to the house to eat lunch and rest for half an hour in the shade of the verandah, Saul had stayed out in the paddock, digging postholes for a new fence, letting the midday heat course through his veins. He wanted his sweat to slough the longing for Mae from his cells. He started avoiding people, despising them for agreeing that she was not good enough for him and that he was better off without her. At the last Hall dance he ever went to, an old school friend came to lean on the wall beside him and described the balloon man buying Mae a stick of fairy floss at the Show. He had ignored his friend and concentrated instead on the dancers spinning past, churning up the hot air and trailing cigarette smoke and scent. A plump girl from down the valley kept asking him to dance. She had slipped easily into his arms, her perfume strong and perspiration shiny on her neck. They kissed outside and he nearly recoiled. Her lips were different to Mae’s and she sucked on his tongue in a strange way. He wanted to say no, that she was doing it wrong, that he wanted Mae, then he found himself imagining that it was Mae that he was kissing and was suddenly aroused to think of her familiar mouth sliding beneath his. He fucked her up against the back wall of the hall, imagining Mae’s body opening to his.