Salt Rain (3 page)

Allie squatted and stroked the leaves of the tiny tree.

Julia stopped digging. ‘Did Mae really say that about me?’

‘Say what?’

‘That I wasn’t brave enough to leave the valley. That I wasn’t as brave as her.’

Allie rubbed the hairy leaf between her fingers. No-one was brave like Mae. Allie was terrified whenever Mae took her out into the middle of the dark harbour. She used to stay in the rocking dinghy, hands gripping the thin tin sides while Mae somersaulted and dived, her white legs disappearing under the glinting waves.

She looked up at Julia. ‘Why didn’t you leave?’

Julia rolled up a sleeve on her faded blue shirt before she spoke. ‘There’s nothing special about leaving somewhere.’

‘She says that brave is just a choice you make and some people don’t make it.’

Julia nodded. ‘Yeah? Perhaps. And maybe the bravest choices just don’t look that way.’ She turned back to her digging.

Allie stared at her aunt’s back, then snapped the leaf off and took a handful of the red soil. She closed her fist tight and the sticky clay squeezed out between her fingers. Her mother’s childish sandal might have pressed for a moment on this very piece of earth as she ran down the paddock in her school dress. Allie imagined Mae running, the cotton of her dress straining against the warm air, the sun stinging her arms, and him too, of course he would have been there, the First Love. Mae and the First Love, both of them descending through the thick summer air to the creek.

‘Where’s the First Love?’

‘Huh?’ Julia kept digging. ‘What’s the first love?’

‘Mum’s First Love. The boy she loved.’

‘Do you mean Saul Philips?’ Julia turned to her, frowning.

‘Saul,’ Allie repeated. It wasn’t right somehow. Why did Mae never tell her his name?

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Where is he?’

Julia’s wet boot slipped off the shovel. ‘Shit!’ She stood up and rubbed her hands on the seat of her overalls. ‘I don’t keep track of him. He’s probably at his house or over at his father’s place, working.’

So the First Love was still in the valley, his cells still holding traces of their first kiss down by the creek, where the cicadas had been so loud around them that they couldn’t talk. Mae had told Allie her surprise at the heat of his tongue in her mouth and how a rash had spread over his chest and neck as they walked home that first day, great blotches rising red on his skin, that his father had called heat rash and treated with calamine lotion.

‘Where does he live?’

Julia’s brow furrowed. ‘Up the end of the valley, on the back section of his dad’s property.’ She picked up another sapling.

‘Where up the end of the valley?’

‘Why are you so interested? That was all years ago, you know.’

‘He makes those wire things, right?’

Julia turned back to Allie and raised her eyebrows. ‘How do you know about them? Have you met him?’

‘No. Mae told me.’

‘Oh. Well, yes. He does still make them.’ Julia looked at Allie for a long moment, then bent down to plant the tree.

After dinner, Julia sat at the kitchen table writing out the day’s plantings in her diary. Red cedar, quandong, white lilly pilly, native tamarind. She liked to imagine the forest slowly enfolding the farm while she slept, the mottled trunks swelling with sap and vines snaking in the windows.

It was still light outside, the only sounds her pencil whispering across the paper and insects flying into the window panes. Allie was in one of the cane chairs on the verandah, her arms wrapped around her knees, looking out at the forest. When Julia got to Sydney she had reached for Allie, wanting to wrap that small body up and protect her from what she guessed was coming, but the girl had pushed her away, surprisingly fierce. On the train down to the city Julia had stupidly imagined her as the eight-year-old she had met years before at the farm, but when Julia walked in the open front door of the tiny terrace house, Allie was lying on the couch in the bare living room, her eyes shut, arms flung above her head, a young woman with long dark hair and a face frighteningly like Mae’s. The same beautiful face.

Julia spread out her big hand-drawn map of the farm and carefully drew a symbol for each tree she had planted that day. In Mae’s narrow hallway, the policeman had unfolded his map of the harbour, his voice quiet as he moved his finger across the crazy curves of the foreshore. ‘This is where we are looking. And this is where the people on the ferry saw her.’ He spoke to her as if she was familiar with this Mae who lived in a dingy house, who had erotic books beside her bed and a wardrobe full of silky dresses. He spoke as if she knew Tom, in his sharply creased dark suit, leaning against the counter in the kitchen, his impatience with the police obvious. She was thankful that Tom didn’t try to make eye contact. She was afraid he would see her thinking about Mae’s phone call, hearing over and over again her sister’s voice leaking from the handset into the dark farmhouse.

That first night in the city, she had lain awake in Mae’s bed. There was too much noise, too many people, too close. She got up and sat on the chair by the open window, counting the lights being extinguished one by one in the dark buildings, marvelling at the lives of strangers unfolding so close to each other. Sitting there, waiting for the dawn, she knew that her mother had been right, she would never have survived in the city, after all. She had never imagined it so hard, so overwhelmingly treeless. She wondered if Mae had ever sat in that same chair and thought of Julia doing time on the farm, shovelling shit, heaving the cows in and out of the stalls and creeping past her father’s door. Did Mae ever think about Julia growing older up in the valley, passing out of her teens, into her twenties, a farm wife before her time, a farm wife with no husband? Perhaps some people were simply destined to stay in the valley and some were meant to get away. Saul left, but he told her that for weeks before his father wrote to ask him to come home and help, he had dreamt of the valley every night, of flying slowly above the forest, then swooping down over the lush paddocks and the cows gathering at the dairy.

At the first glow of sun in the sky, the streetlights sputtered out and the tiny morning birds began flitting from rooftop to rooftop, their chirping thin and weak. Through the buildings, Julia could just see the harbour and how much darker and denser it was than the ocean or the river back home. The policeman had talked to her about the harbour currents and the way the water could sweep unpredictably from cove to cove.

Once the sun had risen and filled the attic bedroom, she knelt on the floor in front of Mae’s wardrobe and swept her face back and forth across the dresses, then buried her face deep into the slippery silky fabric. She pressed it hard against her eyes and waited for the day to begin.

Allie woke to Julia’s voice loud on the phone in the hallway of the farmhouse, ‘Okay. Okay. Don’t worry, we’ll get her across. Yep.’

She swung her legs to the edge of the bed, her heart hammering. It could be Mae on the phone, standing in a phone box on a wide empty street in some beach town, propping the door open with one leg, coins ready to drop in. And as she waited for Allie to come to the phone, she would be looking down to fishing boats leaving with the tide, like they saw in that town Tom took them to.

Julia turned on the hallway light and came to Allie’s bedroom door wrapped in a sheet. She whispered, ‘Are you awake?’

‘Who was that on the phone?’

‘A neighbour. I’m going down to the third crossing. The creek’s up and I have to re-string the old flying fox. Do you want to come?’

The floor was gritty and damp under Allie’s feet as she stepped into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and followed her aunt out into the misty dawn air.

Julia drove slowly down the muddy driveway, steering the tyres either side of deep ruts. ‘Marion—who lives up the valley—her baby’s coming and there are problems. We need to get her across. They made three of these flying foxes to bring the bananas over, before the bridge was built. They’d hook a hand of ’nanas on and send it flying down from the shed up the top. But we used it for all sorts of things. The road used to go under all the time and we’d send food across to the Burns and the McAlisters in the big floods. Mum would do up parcels of corned beef and flour and sugar. The Burns were always hopeless at stocking up before the wet. But we haven’t had a really big flood for ages. This is nothing, it’ll be down by this afternoon, I bet. Still,’ she turned to look at Allie, and smiled, ‘you got your flood, sooner than I thought.’

They turned a corner and there was the churning creek. The road on each side sank down into the wide band of brown water that heaved with branches and dirty foam.

Allie looked back the way they had come. ‘Is the road to town flooded too? Can I still get to town?’ She pictured the train disappearing down the coast without her.

Julia turned off the engine and there was just the thundering of the creek. ‘We only brought a person over once before, when the youngest Watson boy broke his leg. He came across, his leg in a splint, howling all the way.’

She waved to the two people getting out of the car on the other side then reached over to the back seat for her toolbox. Her voice was conversational, ‘I won’t just let you take off, you know. If you go, I’ll follow you. Simple as that.’ She got out and climbed up the bank to the thick wooden post of the flying fox, her toolbox hanging from one arm.

Allie opened the car door and crossed the muddy gravel to the edge of the forest. She peered into the dense tangled foliage. How easy it would be take a few steps, slip between the trees and disappear into the dimness. She would find her way over the hills and down onto the plain. She glanced over to see if Julia was watching her, just as a Land Rover pulled up and a grey-haired man got out, buttoning up a raincoat. He waved across the creek and stuck his thumb in the air. When he saw Allie he paused for a minute, and then smiled and called across to her as he climbed the embankment to Julia, ‘Hi, I’m Michael. The doctor.’

‘Hello,’ Allie could hardly hear her own voice for the sound of the water.

The pregnant woman over the other side was carrying a striped umbrella as she walked slowly back and forth across the road, her belly jutting before her. Every few minutes she stopped and squatted on the rutted gravel. The man who was walking with her bent down and leaned in close while the umbrella trembled over them.

Allie went to the edge of the creek where it eddied onto the road and looked upstream, searching for the rock where Mae and the First Love had kissed, but all the boulders were hidden under the seamless rushing water. Mae had told her about the cracking sound the boulders made as they collided underwater, but there was only the tremendous roar of the water being sucked downstream and Julia’s voice as she bellowed across the creek.

The man on the other side threw a rope across. It fell short and he retrieved it hand over hand from the pull of the water. Julia waded out knee-deep and the water ran up her side, so her clothes stuck to her stomach and heavy breasts. The man inched his car into the creek and stood on the bonnet, bracing his feet to throw the rope again. Julia caught it and they held it in the air, a sagging, dripping line stretching defiantly over the creek.

While Julia rethreaded the flying fox, her lips white with the effort of twisting the ends of the wire together, the woman walked back and forth on the other side, crying, her face contorted. The man carried the umbrella for her but she kept turning, suddenly changing direction and walking out from under its shelter into the drifting rain.

Allie wanted to capture it all, like a photo, for Mae. The forest growing right to the edge of the creek, the tendrils of mist caught on the trees, the brightly dressed woman under the umbrella and Julia frowning as she cut the wire.

She stepped closer to the forest and peered in, but could see only a few metres into the dense foliage. Mae had told her about the paths through the forest that she and the First Love had used to go between their houses. Allie wondered if he was awake, looking out at the misty clouds resting on the treetops. A stream of cool dank air came from the forest and brushed against her face. She stepped backwards and hurried over towards Julia as her aunt stood up and yelled across the creek for the man to get in the harness and come across, to test the wire.

The man’s hands were shaking when he reached their side and undid the harness. He stepped off onto the dirt. ‘Quick, get it back to her, Julia. She’s not doing so well.’

When the woman got into the harness, she dropped her umbrella to the water’s edge where it rocked from side to side. She was halfway across when the rain became torrential, the air suddenly thick with water. Allie shielded her eyes to watch the woman, who was swaying over the river, her body glowing in the silvery light.

Allie imagined her dropping into the rushing water and being sucked downstream. She wondered if the baby would sense it was in danger or if it would be in its element, tumbling and turning in the waters of its mother’s womb as the river delivered them both to the ocean.

Mae used to tell her about the little Islander girl found floating way out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Allie couldn’t remember the American sailor who had told Mae the story but she knew every detail of how he had traced the currents back to figure out which island the little girl came from. She knew how tiny the girl’s body appeared from his big ship, just a piece of flotsam on the vast ocean. A motorboat was sent out to retrieve her body and the wake rippled her long hair and disturbed the phosphorescent fish nudging at her. The sailor said that when he reached down to pull her from the water, it took him a few moments to register that her body was warm and that she had opened her eyes and was staring up at him.

Julia and the man pulled hard on the rope and the woman slid along the wire to safety. The two men carried her to the doctor’s car and they drove off with a spray of gravel.

Julia threw the toolbox onto the back seat of the car and sat for a moment before she started the engine, rubbing the muddy fingers of her right hand. ‘That’s going to have to be done again, properly. That was a real bushman’s job.’ She reached down to pluck a leech off her leg and flicked it out the window. ‘Michael was the doctor at your birth, you know.’