Salt Rain (7 page)

Julia brushed the crumbs from her plate out the window. ‘So you met Saul at last.’

‘Yeah.’

‘What were you talking about over in the graveyard?’

‘Nothing. What do you want to show me?’

‘Nothing.’ Julia looked closely at her. ‘Have you eaten anything?’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘You know, if you go walking at night, take a torch for the snakes.’

‘What?’

She looked directly at Allie, ‘Take a torch next time. They’re on the shelf near the back door. Snakes are out at night, you know. It’s not the best time to go wandering around the valley.’

‘She walked around at night.’

‘I know. She took a torch. Are you going to eat that sandwich?’

Allie shrugged and passed it to her aunt, who tossed it out the open window onto the neatly mown grass, where it lay, its yellow guts exposed.

Julia turned to her and smiled. ‘It’s all right. They expect me to do things like that.’

Outside the hall, the whirring of cicadas was piercing. An old dog slunk under the wooden building and disappeared into the darkness. Allie followed him, sliding between the lattice into the dim forest of shadowy brick piers, footsteps loud above her, high-heeled shoes marching across the floorboards.

She looked out between the piers to the bright white sunlight. On the other side of the road, two little girls in their swimmers were squealing, running back and forth through a sprinkler. Down at the motel by the beach, Mae had rubbed cream into Allie’s sunburnt skin before Allie lay back on the stiff sheets and listened to Mae and Tom argue on the verandah outside, her hot skin prickling.

The dog came and sniffed her and turned in a circle before settling, panting, onto the cool earth. So Julia knew she had left the house last night. She didn’t care what Julia knew. She wished she had woken Saul, called his name through the window like Mae would have and pulled herself over the sill to lie down beside him.

A group of people walked along the path beside her, just their legs showing. They crossed the lawn to the shade of the big camphor laurel tree. Through the lattice she could see that he was with them, smiling, lighting someone’s cigarette. She used to lie in her bed, imagining him coming for them. Even when she was little, she would listen to the cars on the street outside and the hollow sound of the train crossing the Harbour Bridge, and think of him going from house to house, tracking them down. One day there would be a knock and there he would be in the doorway.

Petal squatted on the cement path and looked through the lattice. ‘Hi.’ She ducked underneath and crawled across the dirt, marking her white lace skirt. ‘Thank God it’s a bit cooler under here.’ She passed Allie a glass of red cordial and opened a silver cigarette case. ‘Julia’s up there, determined to piss them all off.’ The fragrant smoke from Petal’s clove cigarette merged with the smell of buttery sausage rolls and hot grass. ‘I tell her that she takes them for granted. If she really needed them, they’d be there for her, you know. She doesn’t give them a chance.’ She rested back on her elbows and blew smoke rings. ‘What are you looking at, darl?’

‘Him.’

‘Saul?’

‘Mmmm.’

Petal smiled and shook her head. ‘Oh yeah. Imagine him at seventeen.’

Silently, they watched him. He leaned against the tree, listening to the people around him, his hand stroking the bark on the tree trunk. Then he turned and seemed to be looking straight at them, a half-smile on his face.

Petal whispered, ‘Don’t worry, he can’t see us through the lattice. It’s too dark under here.’

Allie took a sip of the drink and the intense sweetness caught in her throat. She was suddenly desperate to remember the details of Mae’s face but couldn’t conjure even the shape of her mother’s nose or the way her dimples flashed when she smiled. Allie’s gorge rose and she felt she might just lean over and spew her bloodied insides onto the grey dirt. She shoved the glass back at Petal, spilling some of the drink onto the ground. Petal took the glass and drank it, then stubbed her cigarette out. ‘Julia wants to go. Are you ready?’

He woke before the alarm clock and lay in the dark, his mind still numb with sleep, for a moment not understanding the sound of his dog’s claws clicking on the wooden floor. He rolled over, tucking the sheet around him, and suddenly recalled the sight of Mae’s coffin slipping down into the grave. He couldn’t imagine her body contained within that white box, her strong limbs stilled. They used to run down the hill to the creek together, the blanket stretched between them and flapping like a great wing in the humid air. There was the sound of their feet on the spongy pasture and the rumble of a distant tractor and there was Mae, her hair streaming behind her as they flew down the hill.

He got out of bed and pulled on his jeans and T-shirt in the dark. At the kitchen sink, he stood looking out at the faint line of light above the trees and ate a slice of his stepmother’s orange cake.

It was years since he had thought of how Mae used to lie naked on the blanket for him, pale against the dark wool. She would let him put his lips to her soft breasts, to her moist neck, to the palm of her hand, to her stomach. He had sucked her skin into him, taken her soft flesh into his own. He had cupped that belly in his hands, kissed it, blessed it, unknowing.

He pulled on his boots and stepped out into the half-light. He knew every turn and rise in the path he had cut to his father’s house. At the dairy, he walked slowly through the gathering cows, their big warm bodies swaying heavily out of his way.

‘Hi Dad,’ he called.

‘Son. How’d you sleep?’ His father limped across the shed and let another cow into a stall.

They worked in silence, the rhythmic sound of the milking machine filling the room. When they finished, they stood in the doorway and looked out at the soft morning light.

His father knocked a clod of mud from his boot. ‘Isn’t the girl the spitting image of her mother? Clarry had told me, but still, I was surprised. God, she used to really unwire your brain, that Mae. I remember how you used to be.’

‘Is that so?’ It had taken him a moment to recover every time he caught sight of the girl sitting at the front of the church. She had the same long dark hair and wide mouth as Mae, even the precise curve of cheek.

His father laughed. ‘She gave you such a hard time. I just hope the daughter’s not too much like her mother.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know…you wouldn’t want the girl to do to some boy what her mother did to you. I imagine folks will be watching for it. I know they will be.’

‘Since when are you so up on the valley gossip?’ He shook his head, and his voice rose, ‘You know, what she did is my business. Mine and hers. Nothing to do with you, Dad, and nothing to do with the girl.’

‘Yeah? Well, you forget that I was there,’ his father snorted and walked down to the house.

Saul leaned back against the wall of the dairy, surprised at the heat of his old shame. He had just turned sixteen when his father had stopped him, there in the yard, at the same time of day, as they started to walk back to the house for breakfast.

‘I’ve been waiting for you to say something to me. But…’ His father had shaken his head. ‘You’re an idiot. You’re a bloody idiot, you know. It’s obvious to the whole valley that she’s carrying!’

‘What?’ Saul, wary of his father’s raised hand, hadn’t understood.

‘What do you think you were doing, then? Why the hell didn’t you take precautions? What kind of fool are you?’

‘What? Who’s carrying…?’ Then an icy chill had trickled into Saul’s body and he knew what his father meant. He saw it. How her dress had caught on the small mound of her stomach down at the creek the day before, how the fabric shifted over it. Her taut breasts under his tongue.

‘Who’s carrying?’ his father laughed and shook his head incredulously. ‘Are you serious? I thought you were smarter than that Saul. A lot bloody smarter.’

Somehow he had found himself swinging at his father, who was strangely soft and yielding. His fists disappeared somewhere into his father’s body, then the two of them were on the ground, wrestling, and he heard a voice, high and whining, ‘But we never did it. Mae, oh Mae, oh Mae.’ His fist hit the ground over and over, skin and bone jarring on the compacted dirt, then his father was gone and Saul was left lying on the ground by the shed, his eyes wide to the clear morning sky.

In the afternoon he had waited for her in the shade of the mango tree. She came through the gate flushed with heat, her smile fading when she saw him. ‘What happened to your face?’

He turned and ran down the hill, the air around him vibrating with the sound of cicadas, and as he ran he tried to forget, for a moment, what his father had told him.

At the creek she came to stand in front of him, all shining hair and school dress, and took his hands. ‘What happened, Saul?’

‘I had a fist-fight with my father.’ He looked down at their hands and then to the cotton dress over her belly. He spat out the words, ‘Were you just going to wait until I figured it out? Why did I have to hear it from my father, like some cheap valley gossip? How could you let me be the last to know?’

When she spoke he could barely hear her over the creek. ‘I love you. I love you, Saul.’ Those words that he had waited to hear, that he had whispered in her name, holding his hand over his mouth to take them back into himself. ‘It was…someone…at the Show. Just someone at the Show, I’m so sorry.’

‘Who?’

She shut her eyes and whispered, he had to lean close to hear, ‘A showman, the man who took people up in his hot-air balloon…remember you were away in Brisbane…’

The balloon man. One of those men who go around with the fairs, one of those hard-faced men. While Saul had been in Brisbane at his uncle’s funeral, Mae had spread her legs for another man.

‘How could you? How could you give some…stranger what you promised me?’ He gripped her shoulders and pressed his mouth hard onto hers. There was the familiar slide of their lips together and breath ragged into each other’s mouth. And then he was pulling her down onto the ground. He could go there too, like the dirty balloon man. The heat ran through him, snaking to his groin. He felt her firm belly under him as he fumbled with his fly and pulled at her underpants.

Then he looked down at her. Her eyes were shut and she was slowly shaking her head from side to side, grass in her hair and tears sliding down her cheeks. And all he wanted was to cradle her to him, to feel her skin sliding over her fragile bones and the press of her breasts against his chest. He levered himself off and knelt on the grass, his body trembling.

She got up, brushed the grass from her clothes and walked away, that body he knew so well, her golden legs moving under her school dress and her long dark hair down her back. He called after her, but knew she was too far away to hear, ‘I hate you Mae. Do you hear me? I hate you for this.’ He wanted to punch the balloon man. He wanted his fist to break on the bones of the man’s face. Then she was gone and he was alone by the creek, his belt undone, his cock shrivelling and he thought the sound of the water would send him mad.

That night he had carried his mattress out into the garden and stretched naked and sweating under an old mosquito net tied to a branch. He woke to the raindrops stroking his cheek like gentle fingers and lay listening to the drops tapping on leaves until the water collected in his navel and the corners of his eyes. He got up and jogged across the grass with the mattress balanced on his head and sat on the verandah in the dark, listening to the rain and waiting for his father.

A light went on inside and there were footsteps through the house. Every morning since he could remember, he had woken to his father silhouetted in the golden light from the kitchen, a big broad-shouldered shape filling his bedroom doorway.

His father pushed open the screen door onto the verandah. ‘Been raining long?’

He shook his head and stood up, avoiding his father’s eyes. They walked down to the dairy in silence, the dog at their heels, his father shining a torch for snakes on the path. While his father started the milking machine, Saul walked slowly around the dark paddock, letting the dog bring in the last sleepy cows. In their stalls, the cows nosed the barley, their udders hanging full and tight. His father passed him a sterilised bucket and he walked up to the end stall to milk by hand the one cow frightened by the machine. Neither man mentioned Mae nor the darkening bruise on Saul’s face but he couldn’t help thinking about her, about where she would be moment by moment, helping her own father with the milking. He leaned his forehead against the cow’s warm flank and tugged at the leathery udder, shooting stream after stream of milk into the foaming bucket. He tried to set his mind on the rhythm of the milking, but still she came to him, and finally he let himself picture her long slim hands on the cow’s teats, her smile as she turned to look at him and spray the warm milk up into his mouth. He remembered her cool wet lips slipping under his and the resistance of her breast against his palm. His hands loosed from the cow and he pressed his face into its side to muffle the sound that came from him.

She dreamt that Mae was rowing them up the harbour, oars splashing the oily water, the small dinghy weaving its way into the darkness, the tide slowly drawing them towards the Heads. Allie was sitting on the wooden plank seat, looking back to shore, her fear growing with every stroke. Then the drumming on the roof woke her from the dream and she lay, her eyes wide open to the dark, the sound of the rain pressing her down into the mattress. Even though it took hours, Mae loved to row way out towards the mouth of the harbour where the swell was highest and the black water heaved under their little boat. Mae would slither from her clothes and into the water, her skin gleaming in the faint moonlight. Like a slippery fish, she would dive under the dinghy, bumping against it, her pale form blurry underwater.

‘Come in sweetheart, come in with me,’ she would call up to where Allie sat clutching the tin sides of the dinghy. Allie knew there were sharks gliding out there, the faint splashes she could hear, their fins slicing the surface.