Salt Rain (8 page)

‘Silly. They have nets out there to stop the sharks.’ Mae bobbed up and down and waved her arm towards the lights at the harbour entrance. ‘They have nets. Come on. Be adventurous, Allie. It’s a midnight swim.’

The last time they went out together, Allie finally slid into the briny water, fear speeding through her as she swam to her mother. Their limbs glided together like warm silk and she clung to Mae’s strong body as the swell lifted them then rolled away into the darkness. Mae pulled away from her and dove straight down, her white feet the last to slip under. Allie felt strangely peaceful, floating alone in the middle of the harbour with nothing but the glinting waves and the small dinghy. In the distance a ferry rumbled its way back to the Quay, its lights spilling onto the dark water. She had no doubt that Mae would reappear, breathless and exultant.

‘It’s like flying!’ her mother cried as she burst to the surface. ‘Swimming underwater is like gliding through the air, your hair streaming back, the world way below.’

Waves came from the darkness and jostled them. ‘How deep is it here, Mum?’

‘Deep.’

‘How deep?’

‘Oh…’ Mae floated on her back, dark nipples pointed, ‘maybe a mile or two deep.’

Allie clawed her way through the water to the flimsy dinghy, the depths pulling at her frantic legs.

The rain was singing in the downpipes and falling in thick cords from the gutters. As the weak dawn light entered the house, Allie went to the back door and stood looking out. The dirt would be heavy on Mae’s coffin now, the rain percolating down through the mud to make a sticky red seal on the lacquered wood.

She walked down the back steps and into the forest. Her dress was soon pasted to her thighs and the rain ran in runnels between her breasts and down the back of her neck.

As she entered Saul’s clearing, a group of black-faced wallabies thumped a warning with their back feet and bounded away into the gloom of the forest.

Through the window she could see that his bed was empty, the sheet crumpled to one side. On the verandah table there was an empty coffee mug and a shirt hanging over the back of a chair. She touched her wet hand to the soft cotton of the shirt. She wanted to see the curl of his ear again and the way the corners of his mouth pulled down for a moment before he smiled.

‘Is that you Allie?’ He was behind her, at the foot of the stairs in a hooded yellow raincoat, his hand lifted to shield his face from the rain. ‘What are you doing here?’

She took a step towards him.

He looked at the shirt in her hand. ‘It’s early to be paying a visit. I’ve only just finished milking.’

‘I was just walking. Mum told me about the paths that you and she had.’

‘Oh. A lot of them are overgrown now.’ He started up the stairs, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘Okay.’

‘Just go in,’ he gestured towards the door as he hung his raincoat on a hook. ‘It’s not locked.’ He followed close behind her as she walked inside. ‘So, how are you coping with the rain? It’s been pretty full-on, even for this time of the year.’

At last she was inside his house, in the dim spicy atmosphere, a row of plants along the windowsill, a glowing red leadlight window and a forest of wire sculptures hanging on twine from the high-pitched ceiling.

He struck a match and lit the gas stove. ‘It’s the wettest it’s been in years. It’s a real early wet this year. My dad reckons we’re heading for one of the big floods.’

‘I don’t mind the rain,’ she said. She wanted to explain that the rain, falling day after day, had come to soothe and contain her, that the clouds resting on the steep valley walls held her fast. She made her voice stronger. ‘I do… I like the rain, now.’

‘Like your mother.’ He passed her a towel from a pile of folded washing.

She sat on a chair and pressed her face into the rough towel. Like Mae, she knew the smell of him and the way he slept, his body flung down onto the mattress, the tender white skin of his inner arm exposed.

‘How did you sleep last night?’ He stood at the kitchen bench and spooned tea-leaves into the pot.

‘I think I heard a baby crying in the night.’ She had lain awake for hours listening to the faint mewling outside, afraid of what she might find if she went to look for it.

He paused as he poured boiling water into the teapot then looked at her. ‘Might have been a plover. They squawk around in the night.’

‘A plover.’

‘Or foxes. They can make strange noises. You know, I was surprised that Mae told you about the first time we kissed.’

‘Why? Why wouldn’t she tell me?’

‘Milk?’ He held up a big glass jug of milk, a layer of yellow cream on the top.

‘Yes, please.’

‘Come out onto the verandah.’ He carried the tray of tea things. ‘I guess I didn’t imagine she would even think about it…’

‘She told me lots, like how you danced with her that first time up at the hall, how she felt the muscles of your back under your shirt and how you smelt like soap.’ She spoke slowly, watching the smile flicker at the corners of his mouth. She could read him just like she could read Mae.

He nodded. ‘She left early, I remember. Her Dad came to pick her up and she was wearing a green dress with no sleeves.’ He smiled and touched his upper arm, ‘I could just see under her arms and the wisps of hair there. Her mum wouldn’t let her shave.’ His dog ran out of the bushes and up the steps to flop at his feet, its coat wet and sticky with grass seeds. ‘Does it help to talk about her? I used to want to talk about Mum but Dad just couldn’t do it. It was too hard for him.’

He passed her a cup of tea, his fingers big on the delicate saucer. Fingers that had touched the warm flesh of Mae’s pregnant belly, only a thin sheath of skin between him and Allie’s curled body.

She inhaled the steam from her cup. ‘What did it feel like, her stomach, when she was pregnant?’

‘Oh…’ He paused. ‘Firm…and kind of hard.’

‘So you touched it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Was she happy to be having me?’

‘Was she happy? Oh yes. Yes, she was happy.’ He smiled at her then rubbed a foot across his dog’s belly and looked out to the forest where the misty clouds moved down the valley, snagging on the tallest trees.

Allie wanted all his memories of Mae. She wanted to know her mother paddling in the waterhole during a storm, her bright face floating above the rain-pocked water, limbs trailing greenly behind her. She wanted to see red mud squeezing between Mae’s toes down by the creek, where she first took his hand under her school dress and held it against the swell of her breast.

She sat forward. ‘Did you ever meet the balloon man? Did anyone actually meet him?’

‘The balloon man again…yeah, he came to a few Shows. I met him.’

‘You did?’

‘Yeah.’

She was suddenly conscious of the way her wet dress stuck to her body and crossed her arms over her chest. ‘Did you see them together?’

‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘I was away… I didn’t find out until later. She didn’t tell me until quite a bit later.’ He sat back in his chair and lifted his feet up onto a stool.

‘But no-one saw them together, did they?’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘What do you mean?’

She shrugged.

‘People saw them together, Allie. Lots of people.’

When she was little she imagined the balloon floating high above the crowd at the Showground, tethered to the ground with thick ropes, Mae and a dark-haired man held in the sway of the creaking wicker basket, the great canopy billowing above them and the town’s streets laid out below, the river like a green ribbon tossed on the ground. For a while Mae used to talk about the balloon man a lot, but in that offhand kind of way that Allie had learned meant that she was just trying a story out. Then she simply stopped talking about him.

He put his tea down, with a slight frown. ‘What gives you this idea that they weren’t really together? Did she say something?’

‘No. Not in so many words.’ She watched his face carefully.

‘So, what did she say?’

‘That she went out with him for a little while.’

He nodded. ‘Well, there you go.’

‘But you were going out with her at the same time. She told me that, too.’

He looked at her a long moment. ‘Well, I guess that’s also right…’

She waited for him to say more. The rain suddenly stopped, leaving drifts of cool air and startled calls from birds in the forest. He was silent, looking down at his hands.

The weave of the cane chair was hard under her thighs and the tea bitter on her tongue. ‘We were waiting for you to come and find us, you know.’

‘That’s what you said to me yesterday, isn’t it?’ He sighed. ‘Was she really waiting for me?’

She nodded slowly.

His voice was quiet. ‘When was this?’

‘The whole time.’

‘But did she say she was waiting for me?’

‘She was waiting. We were both waiting.’

He was silent, then nodded. ‘I’m sorry.’

She walked back through the forest thinking of Mae’s stories and secrets, handfuls of them that Mae would sometimes let slip between her fingers. It was in the upstairs bed that her mother would lie back, her arms above her head, the stories slowly unfolding as she chose her words.

At the farmhouse Allie peeled off her wet clothes and dropped them to the bathroom floor. She lay back in the bath, her small breasts rising from the water, and she said his name out loud, letting it whisper around the bathroom, testing the sound of it. He had said he was sorry. She sank under the bath water and opened her eyes to the murky water, her hair silky around her face. Sorry for not coming to find them? Or sorry that he wouldn’t say what they both knew to be true? It was up to him to offer it. He had to come to her like she had always imagined he would.

‘Allie, are you in there?’ The sound of Julia’s footsteps through the house boomed underwater.

Allie surfaced. ‘Yeah.’

‘Are you having a bath?’

She slid back under the water. Julia had seen Mae and Saul together, she had been there, but Allie would never ask Julia what she knew. Allie wanted to keep them to herself.

Julia’s muffled voice was close to the door, ‘I’m cooking bacon and eggs for breakfast. Do you want some?’

Allie sat up, water sluicing from her. ‘I want Saul to come to my birthday dinner.’ Her voice echoed around the small room.

‘Saul? Why Saul?’

‘Can I ask him?’

There was a pause. ‘Yeah. Sure.’ Julia walked away from the door.

The bathwater was a reddish colour from the rusted water tank. As Allie dried herself she bent her knees to look between her legs. The blood would come soon, it should have come already. All the other girls in her class had started menstruating. She had seen her mother’s blood, those mornings Mae woke and clattered down the stairs to the outside toilet, cupping her hands between her legs, leaving a dark stain blooming on the white sheet. And she had watched her mother throwing bloody pads into the incinerator, grey smoke threading through the branches of the big tree in the backyard. It was Allie’s job to poke the pads with a stick until they were just powdery ashes.

Every day she looked for the blood between her legs and sometimes slid a finger inside herself, like she had seen her mother do. ‘Just checking if it’s started,’ her mother used to say. Allie whispered her mother’s words, ‘Oh, nothing yet,’ as she wrapped a towel around herself.

Julia was squatting on the verandah, sorting through her stacks of black plastic pots when Petal called from halfway up the driveway, ‘There’s a wallaby been hit, Julia. You’d better deal with it.’

Julia stood up slowly. She knew what to expect, a wide-eyed terrified animal, its useless legs scrabbling to get away. She walked to the shed and picked her rifle off the wall and two bullets from the box on the bench. ‘How far up the road is it?’

Petal dropped a plastic bag of avocados onto the grass. ‘You can have some of these if you like. It’s right at the bottom of your driveway. I’ll come back with you.’

The pale gravel road was bright with blood. The wallaby’s lower half was contorted, its muscular back legs twisted the wrong way. As they approached, it grunted and frantically turned its narrow furry chest back and forth.

‘Who hit it?’ Allie had silently appeared at Julia’s side, her bare feet muddy and dress wet.

‘I don’t know. Someone who didn’t have the decency to stop.’ Julia shifted the gun to her right hand and took a step towards the animal. It slumped down onto the road, its brown eyes following her every move. Its breath came in short panicked blasts and blood glistened on soft flared nostrils.

Then Allie was on her knees beside the wallaby, her small fingers tracing the length of the thick black tail. She stroked the wallaby’s furry flank, dark with blood and silvery with droplets of light rain.

‘I need to put it out of its misery Allie. You’ll have to move back.’

‘We can look after it.’

‘Its back is broken. And probably its pelvis. See,’ Julia pointed.

‘Oh. So we’ll kill it.’

‘Yeah.’

Julia waited while Allie fingered the sticky blood where it soaked into the gravel. She suddenly saw that Allie was like her. More like her than Mae, who could never cope with dying animals or a cow birthing gone wrong.