Salt Rain (18 page)

‘Oh God, Mae.’ Saul lit a cigarette, his hand shaking around the flame. He kept the match burning, to catch its faint warmth, to ease the vein of cold that snaked through his body. He pulled his knees up. Not the old man with Mae, not the old prick’s prick. He shook his head. ‘I didn’t know, Julia. I had no idea.’

She nodded, ‘I know.’

Saul pulled on his cigarette as a terrible sadness washed over him. ‘The balloon man?’

‘No. She went up in his balloon, that’s all. I was with her all day, when we went up in the balloon and he tried to chat her up. She thought he was a joke. A skinny old guy with greasy black hair.’ Her voice shook. ‘He went along with her story, my dad did. Do you remember? How he wanted to track him down? He wanted to make the guy take responsibility.’

‘I remember.’ He pressed his fingers hard onto his shut eyelids. It was as if some crazy movie was running in his head—images of Mae, smiling up at him as he undressed her, turning her head away and closing her eyes when he pressured her again to let him make love to her. Mae across the table from him in Sydney, ‘I’m not good enough for you, Saul. Go and find yourself a good wife.’

Julia had gone out onto the verandah and was looking out to the forest. She seemed so fragile standing there in the darkness. He remembered how small and nervous she was as a kid and thought of her carrying around the image of what she had seen. He curled up on his bed and wished he could weep for Mae. He curled up and prayed for sleep.

Petal shook her awake. ‘Look, the flood’s coming up to the house.’

They stood at the bedroom window watching the lightning illuminate the great sheet of water creeping up the paddocks.

Petal said, ‘It flows really fast underneath the surface, you know. I waded out into the last flood and it nearly took me away. It’ll be ripping all her poor little trees out.’

‘Where is she?’

Petal shrugged. ‘I think she went to Saul’s.’

‘You told her!’

‘Don’t you think she could figure it out on her own?’

Allie walked away from Petal into the dark kitchen. ‘I told you not to tell her.’ She looked out the window. A white flash lit up the front garden. Julia’s car was gone. Allie wondered whether he would describe to Julia how he had lifted her up to him, his hands spanning her back. Would he tell her the minute sensations of her skin under his fingertips?

Petal came up behind her, cupping her hand around a candle flame, her fingers glowing pink. ‘What would Mae think of you and him?’

‘Don’t call her Mae. You don’t even know her.’

‘But what would she think?’

‘She knows how gentle he is. She’d be glad.’

‘She’d be glad?’

Allie nodded.

Petal put the candle down on the table. ‘Even if she had…you know…a free attitude to sex, I don’t think she’d be happy about you doing it with a man twice your age.’

‘What do you mean a free attitude to sex?’

‘Well, you told me about the clown and the grocer.’

Allie gritted her teeth against the memory of strange footsteps down the stairs late at night.

She looked out the window, waiting for another lightning flash. She pressed her nose to the cool glass. ‘Plenty of men wanted to. They used to come around, knocking on the door. She’d send me down to tell them to go away.’ Tom had been almost gentle in the way he gripped her arms and moved her to one side of the stairs.

The rain struck the glass so hard she was afraid it would break. If she had her dinghy they could moor it to the verandah in case the house went right under. Mae would be outside in weather like this, naked on the roof, arms spread to the sky, the rain like needles on her bare skin. After it ended with Tom, after that trip down south, she used to go out onto the roof every night. She would climb out the bedroom window, her bare feet gripping the sloping corrugated iron, and lean back against the painted brick wall and look out over the city. Sometimes Allie would get up in the middle of the night to go outside to the toilet and in the faint street light she could see her mother still up there, arms wrapped around her bent knees.

Allie opened the back door and Petal yelled across the room, ‘Shut the door, it’s a bloody gale.’

She stepped outside. The wind and rain whipped at her hair and clothes as she walked over to the chook house. The hen tucked neatly into the bodice of her dress, warm against her skin. Out on the road there was only twenty metres of gravel left and she waded into the dark floodwater until the tug of cold water at her knees threatened to knock her over. She grabbed hold of a tree and climbed up onto a branch, cradling the chook close to her and waiting for the lightning to show the ripples in the water running swift and muscular underneath her.

It was on the trip down south that things had started to change. She had detected a false note in Tom from the moment he came to pick them up. He drove fast along the highway, refusing to stop for water or something to eat, only pulling over for a pee break on the side of the road outside Wollongong. The three of them walked into the bush, into the smell of hot eucalyptus, twigs crackling underfoot and cars whizzing by on the highway. Allie found a tree to hide behind and she watched Tom where he stood next to Mae, looking down as she squatted and pissed onto the dirt and dry leaves. Mae’s face was blank until she sensed him watching her, then she smiled and stood up, turning her bare bum to him before pulling up her underpants.

The motel was a grey cement box right on the beach. He switched off the engine and turned to look at Mae, his voice tight. ‘She saw you last night.’

Mae reached for the door handle, smiling. ‘Oh? Well, so what? Just say I’m some mad bitch you’ve never seen before.’

He grabbed her arm. ‘She knows who you are and she’s flipped her lid. She’s gone to her mother’s with the kids. And it’s your fucking fault.’

‘
My
fault?’

‘If you didn’t come prowling around in my garden like some bloody peeping tom…’

Mae stared back at him. ‘Peeping at Tom.’

He was silent, then got out and slammed the car door.

The small motel room was crowded with four sagging beds. Mae changed into her swimmers as soon as Tom put their bags down and ran down the grassy dunes onto the white beach. She was like a bright crazy bird staggering across the shimmering sand in her red bikini, hands waving, shouting back at them, her voice swallowed by the sound of the surf.

Later, the weak trickle of warm water from the shower scalded Allie’s sunburnt skin as she listened to them arguing through the bathroom door. Mae didn’t usually talk back to Tom, but her voice was loud. When Allie came out of the bathroom, Mae rubbed cream onto her burnt back with rough hands. They sat on the grassy dune and picked at lukewarm Chinese takeaway while Mae kept going on about how wonderful it was to finally make the trip they had been planning for months. The louder she got, the quieter Tom became. Their dinner congealed in the plastic containers until the mozzies came and they went back to the hotel room. Allie lay on one of the beds and inched the rusted window open, so she could hear them outside on the balcony. She was shaken by the dismissive tone in Tom’s voice. ‘You did well enough from the arrangement, Mae, don’t kid yourself. You could have ended it just as easily as me. It’s just not working anymore, not the way you’re carrying on.’

‘Oh very nice, Tom. This is how you tie up eight years, huh? Just like this? Take us away to some cheap mouldy motel and call me a crazy bitch.’ Mae spat out her words. ‘Well don’t think you can come sliming around, crawling into my bed any time you like. I couldn’t stomach fucking you if the rent wasn’t being paid, sweetheart.’

There was a scuffling noise then a slap and a sound like air being punched from a cushion. Mae came into the room, holding her face. She bolted the door behind her, told Allie to lock the window and disappeared into the bathroom. Allie hardly slept all night, afraid Tom would try to force his way in. Every noise woke her, footsteps outside, car doors slamming, even the waves crashing onto the beach.

He was gone in the morning but had paid the bill. They got a lift back to the city with a travelling salesman who tried to chat Mae up the whole way home.

Mae started sleeping in the day and staying up all night. Sometimes Allie would sleep in her mother’s bed and she’d wake in the night and slowly reach out in the darkness, to the cool, flat sheet on Mae’s side of the bed.

The last night, Allie woke to Mae’s hand on her and the sound of Tom’s key in the front door. ‘It’s him. Go down and stop him.’ But he was already in the door and starting up the stairs. He smelt of the wet street outside and aftershave and alcohol. Allie wobbled sleepily, her hands outstretched to stop him like Mae had said, but he had moved her to one side and pressed her against the wall. And she had simply turned and watched him go through the door at the top of the stairs.

The dawn light showed the damage. A carpet of twigs and branches littered Saul’s lawn and a big tree on the edge of the clearing had split in two, its pale inner wood jagged and exposed.

Julia sat on the step to pull her boots on. Saul was the one she had imagined telling, even when she was a kid. But she had always anticipated feeling a great relief, an unburdening. The fact was that she had waited too long, it was too late for the telling to help Mae. She shut Saul’s front door behind her and walked across the fallen debris to her car but the engine was dead.

Sitting there, her hands resting on the steering wheel, she tried to remember what had happened when Mae came back up to the house after milking, that awful morning. But she couldn’t remember any morning in particular, just her mother in an apron, serving porridge in winter, cereal in summer, boiled eggs and toast. Mae always sat across from Julia, with long neat plaits, carefully sprinkling salt onto her egg and spooning it into her mouth. Mae was the one who chatted, and stole her mother’s toast, and recounted the latest school gossip. Julia recalled it as if she wasn’t there at all. As if there were only three in the family and she were simply a pair of eyes recording it.

Julia tried to talk to her mother about it once. She couldn’t remember what she had said, but her mother had looked at her as if she was crazy. ‘What are you talking about, Julia? What’s wrong with you?’ Every day Julia woke and was going to tell someone and every day she didn’t. Then Mae was gone and she had missed her chance. But she paid for it. By the time her father died she had paid for it.

Saul appeared on the verandah, his clothes crumpled. He leaned against the verandah post and looked down at her where she sat in the car, the door open. She wanted him to say something, to acknowledge what had passed between them in the night. Eventually she spoke. ‘The car won’t start.’

‘I think you left the headlights on.’ He stepped off the verandah and started towards the shed. ‘I’ll get the jumper leads.’

Julia shook her head. ‘I don’t think it will recharge. It was dying anyway. I have a new battery at home. Will you give me a lift?’ Tears pricked at her eyes as she flicked the useless headlight switch off.

He nodded, ‘Sure.’

He drove slowly up the narrow track until they came upon a fallen tree blocking their way. He went back for a chainsaw and she stood to one side while he cut through the thick trunk. The noise of the saw and the tang of fresh-cut wood reminded her of taking afternoon tea up to the mill. She and Mae spent every Saturday at their grandmother’s house, learning to cook. Then the three of them would walk to the mill, a basket over their grandmother’s arm, the girls taking turns to hold her free hand. Julia’s grandfather and uncles would stop the saws to come and eat slices of butter cake and date scones with their milky tea, while powdery sawdust drifted from their hair and eyebrows.

As Saul sliced the trunk into segments, the thick brown bark fell away in curves, exposing the tender inner skin of the tree, its wood folded like Julia’s own belly that she ran her hands over in bed at night. Neal loved her body. He never said so, but she knew. She squeezed her eyes tight against the image of her father and Mae, his hands gripping her, pushing her down into the hay, even though she was as limp as a rag doll.

Saul turned the saw off and rested it on the tree trunk. ‘Didn’t your mother know, Julia? She must have known.’

Julia bent to roll a piece of trunk off the track. ‘Why must she have known? No-one could imagine it unless they saw it.’

He grunted as he heaved a branch into the lantana thicket.

She stroked the smooth tree bark, her fingers tracing the undulations. When her mother was dying, she became so angry at Julia’s father that she couldn’t bear to be in the same room as him. Her mother moved to the narrow bed in the sunroom and gave up looking after him. That was when Julia had to take over washing him every day, gagging at the sight of his shrivelled old penis and wasted body.

‘Mae mentioned it on the phone, Saul. You know, when she rang me that night.’

He straightened up. ‘She did?’

‘I was so bloody angry at her because it’s only the second time she’s called me in fifteen years and it was to ask a favour. And I said, why should I go when I’d waited years for her to call. She said the only reason she’d stayed, the only reason she hadn’t left the valley before she did, was to keep him from me. When he had the accident, she figured I was safe from him.’ Julia dusted her hands on her pants. ‘So how’s that? She didn’t stay for you, Saul, she stayed for me.’ She wiped roughly at her tears. ‘She stayed for me.’

He got back into the ute and started the engine.

Julia got in. ‘She thought he was going to die when the tractor rolled. When she came up for his funeral she told me that when she got to Sydney, she found herself a church and went in and knelt down and prayed he would die.’

They drove past his father’s house where the dogs peered out from the dripping eaves of their shelter and a dark sally wattle tree lay shattered across the lawn. The creek was still running fast and high but had dropped, leaving grasses and bushes brutally flattened and muddy rubble over the road. The air in the car was damp and stale.