Salt Rain (16 page)

Saul’s dog was nuzzling Allie, its wet nose nudging her where she was curled on the hard boards, her back to the rain driving in under the verandah roof. Mae’s skin would be silvery scales now, seaweed and fish tangled in her hair. When Allie heard Julia telling Saul the story, she could picture the man diving from the ferry, the fool not knowing Mae was long gone, fast and lithe through the water with her muscular mermaid’s tail. And while he was thrashing about looking for her, while the ferry was slowing and turning, there must have been the moment that Mae looked up at the trail of bubbles rising through the thick black water and realised that it was too late, that the surface was too far away and she had gone too deep. And as she tried to swim back up through the cold water, her breath running out, she would have thought of Allie.

She woke again at daybreak. The dog was gone and she sat up, damp and aching. Inside, Julia was asleep on the lounge, her arms flung above her head, one breast half spilling from her muddy dress. She looked down at her aunt’s sleep-soft face for evidence of last night’s words, expecting to see bruising on Julia’s skin or a rent in her translucent eyelids.

She had been asleep on the outside day bed when Saul and Julia’s voices woke her. For a while their voices merged with the rain and she started to drift back to sleep, until Julia’s words cut though the darkness, every syllable distinct. After they went inside she found herself down on the verandah boards, her cheek pressing hard onto the wood. It was as if a great weight was crushing her, tons of black water squeezing the breath from her.

Saul’s car was gone and the rain was washing away the last of the paw prints and boot marks in the mud by the gate. She stood in the misty rain and looked up to the escarpment, where great white plumes of water sprayed out from the waterfall. Mae had pointed it out to her when they visited and told her that she used to go up and stand on the very edge, looking down to where the water exploded on the rocks at the bottom. She had once read Allie an article from a
Reader’s Digest
about some kind of force exerted at the edge of cliffs that had been known to draw people over against their will.

It took her hours to get up there. She dug her fingers into the decaying leaves to climb the steep hill, prickly vines grabbing at her, sweat stinging her scratched skin. The roaring of the waterfall faded in and out as she pushed through the dense growth. She reached the top and came out onto a broad rock shelf where the water ran in a swirling frenzy, foaming through potholes and pools, rushing over the slick dark ribbon of rock. As it flung itself off the edge, the water seemed to slow and drift, each drop frozen in its own free fall.

She didn’t believe Mae’s story about the bullocks anymore. She didn’t believe that a team of bullocks would be up there at the head of the waterfall, crossing with a load of timber. How many times had Mae described them struggling for a grip on the smooth rock, hooves scrabbling as the water swept them to the edge. She said they sailed out into mid-air with the rushing water, twisting and tangling in their traces, eyes wide with terror, falling slowly, silently, as graceful as the water. Allie used to picture them, the bullocky on the bank urging them on, shouting and cracking the whip as they slipped, their wagon skewing behind them, the load of logs loosening and somersaulting after them. Mae had let her believe the bullock story. She had just sat there on Allie’s bed and let her cry for them and ask again how desperately the bullock drivers tried to unhitch the wagon and save the animals.

She stood on the edge of the cliff, where gusts of wind blew the water mist back and the rain pelted her until everything was water, running down her face, gluing her eyelashes together and sliding between her lips.

The water slipped over the edge so easily, it glided like glass over the lip of rock. She was sure that Mae had stood there and wondered what it would be like to take a step, an everyday step out into the air.

How long had her mother waited at Allie’s door before she went down to the harbour that night? How long had she stood there, in the dark hallway, listening to her breathe, like she did when Allie was a baby? In the morning Allie had woken to the banging on the front door and from her bed saw Tom coming down the stairs, buttoning his pants. He had opened the door and there was the rumbling of male voices. She remembered Tom’s singlet was nubbly on her skin where he crushed her against him and she noticed that his wrist was pale where his watch normally sat. He shuddered against her and she didn’t realise until later that he was crying. The fisherman standing at the front door beside the policeman had smiled at her, a fleeting smile until he looked away and smoothed his pants. She had fixed her eyes over the man’s head, on the patch of sky framed in the doorway, an early morning pale blue. She had thought that if the sun was coming up as usual, everything would be okay. She had convinced herself that things must be all right if the sun was shining over the whole wide city.

Allie found the path back down from the escarpment and started running, barely staying upright, her feet sinking into the leaf litter. It was as if she were just staying ahead of a chasm opening in the ground behind her. At the bottom of the valley she followed the small flooded creek towards Saul’s place, and stepped from rock to deep silty mud, struggling through sodden banks of reeds. The curves in the creek were flooded over, the water flowing swift and brown, fence posts and tree trunks slicing the satiny surface. She shut her eyes to the rain. Rain and mud. That’s all there was in the end. Ashes to dust to dirt to mud. Mae was everywhere. She was the red mud being washed down into the swollen creek, her mother slipping through her fingers again.

She lay on his back verandah and waited. When she heard his car pulling up and the front door banging shut, she stood up and let her feet take her to him. He gave her a dry T-shirt and shorts and pulled the sticky black leeches from her ankles. He washed her scratches, the cotton wool and warm water like balm on her skin, bloody water trickling down her leg into a bowl. He carefully stretched a Band-Aid over the cut on her calf.

Lightning and thunder rolled around the valley and there was the seamless sound of the rain, on and on, filling every crevice in the room, stopping every thought before it began. His hair was soaking wet and she could see through the strands of black to his pale scalp. One curling slick of hair brushed his ear, a drop of water quivering at its tip.

When she leaned forward and kissed him, he pulled back for a second, then there was the soft muscle of his lips moving against hers, his whiskers scratching her chin and his hand cupping the side of her head.

Julia sat on the couch in the dim light of her living room, for the first time afraid that the thin layer of roofing tin between her and the rain would not be enough.

Allie had been gone for hours. Julia had woken to an empty house, her own bed neatly made, Allie’s not slept in. She had walked down the road in the rain and stood by the side of the raging creek. It was just passable and she could see the tracks of Saul’s tyres in the mud on the other side.

She hated how her words had spilled over Saul last night, looking for some absolution that could never be given, least of all by him. The night that Mae telephoned her, Julia had hung up the phone and gone back to bed and simply waited. It seemed she had spent years of her life lying in bed, waiting. Waiting for Mae to sneak back in from Saul’s, waiting for the baby to come, waiting for Mae to contact her, waiting for her father to die. Waiting for the forest to consume her.

There was a loud noise at the verandah door. A pigeon was fluttering wildly against the glass, panicking in the storm. She went out onto the verandah and shooed the bird back out into the wind and rain. After her father died, Neal would come to the door at dusk. He would appear without a sound, used to moving silently after years of living in the forest, and he would wipe his feet and knock, an incongruous sight with his long beard and hand raised, tapping formally on the door. She missed the sense that he was just out there in the forest, only a ten-minute walk away. He showed her the cave the first time they made love. She had followed him in silence along the forest track, just the crackling of the heated bush around them and small birds flitting though the undergrowth. They climbed hundreds of metres up a steep slope to the cave, where snakes had left their sinuous trails on the sandy floor and swallows peered from small mud nests. They sat and looked out at the sea of trees below. The dark rainforest and bright green camphors. For hours it seemed they sat there, the sounds of birds and distant farm machinery rising from the valley. He had unbuttoned her shirt as if he had never seen buttons, as if he were figuring out how to work them. His body over hers had been so big, his broad square shoulders and muscular arms. The sand shifted under her and the breeze coming up from the valley brushed against her bare skin.

She grabbed her raincoat from its hook and hurried down the steps into the house paddock. Two days ago she had planted a silky oak right into the faint furrow where her father’s tractor had rolled. Her mother had got there first and dragged him across to the house, leaving a trail of blood in the grass and dirt. Julia remembered standing on the verandah looking down at him while her mother called up to her and Mae to help carry him to the car. He had looked like a snail crushed on the cement path, broken and oozing juice.

She stood in the paddock and turned in a slow circle, listening. The roaring of the creek echoed around the valley as if it were flowing right by the house. There was something frighteningly relentless about the way the creek was rising this time, the water stronger and rougher than it had been for years.

Two nights before Allie was born, Julia and Mae had lain in their beds, listening to the boulders crashing down at the creek. Mae was curled on her side and had lifted her nightdress so Julia could lay her hand on the taut warm skin and feel the shape of the baby underneath. That warmth, that quickening, was Allie.

Julia hadn’t touched Mae’s belly before, horrified by the way it had stretched and stretched until it seemed her skin would split. Everything at home seemed normal, the milking went on every day and preparations for Christmas had started but in the midst of it all there was Mae’s belly swelling grotesquely, ignored by everyone.

When Mae’s contractions started in the middle of the night, her mother came into their room and sat on Mae’s bed. ‘It’s okay. This is normal, sweetheart.’

Mae’s face was pale. ‘But how am I going to get to the hospital?’

‘The flood waters are going down. You won’t have the baby yet, that’s quite a few hours off, I’d say. Just try and get some rest.’

Mae had walked around the house through the night. She wouldn’t sit. She wouldn’t take the cups of tea her mother offered. Dawn came and their father called Julia out to the bottom paddocks to help move the cattle up to the higher ground. She hated it, slipping in the mud and manure, cows’ tails flicking her with watery shit.

Mae’s contractions came and went all morning and she drifted in and out of sleep. After lunch their mother sent Julia down to the creek to check the water level, even though they all knew that with the rain so heavy there was no way it would have dropped.

Julia woke the second night to Mae screaming, ‘Get me the doctor!’ Mae and her mother were in the kitchen, the lights blazing on Mae where she leaned her elbows on the table, retching. Her mother was calmly stroking Mae’s back until Mae started sobbing that something was wrong with the baby. ‘It’s dying, I can feel it. It’s dying. It’s not going to come out.’

Her mother looked up at Julia. ‘Go and get your raincoat, quick.’

Julia was pulling her coat down when her father came in from checking on the cattle. He saw Mae curled on the floor and walked right into the house in his gumboots, red mud on the lino. He bent down and picked her up. ‘Right, I’m driving her in.’

‘You won’t get over the town bridge. Don’t even try.’ Her mother took hold of his elbow but he brushed her off and carried Mae through the rain to the truck.

Julia and her mother stood on the verandah watching the tail-lights disappear. Her mother’s voice was flat. ‘Go to bed Julia. Get some sleep.’

Julia was standing by the little silky oak sapling when she heard the tree fall. It began like a distant gunshot, piercing the sound of the rain and the creek. Then came the long dull roaring of the tree ripping through the forest canopy, tearing down other trees and vines. On her walks Julia had seen the massive trees lying in the forest, shattered limbs all around and a bright gaping hole in the canopy above.

Petal came running up the dark paddock not even two minutes later, barefoot and eyes wild. She grabbed hold of Julia’s arm, her hands cold. ‘A tree smashed my van, a great fucking trunk right through the middle of it.’

Julia looked across to the wall of forest and felt a wash of fear.

‘I pissed myself. I nearly died. And now everything is getting soaked, all my clothes and books.’