Salt Rain

by Sarah Armstrong

  ‘Yeah. I remember.’ She was eight years old and she had sat up beside her aunt at the kitchen table, helping wrap each smooth brown egg in a piece of newspaper and packing it into a small cardboard box. She had carefully carried the box onto the train, thinking of the plump hens scratching at their straw. Halfway home, Mae had taken the box from her and dumped it into one of the rubbish bins and Allie had quietly cried for the golden yolks the chickens had made for her.

  She hardly recognised the farmhouse for the trees and bushes growing up against the walls and over the rusted tin roof. Last time, the cows had grazed the pasture right up to a neat wire fence around the house.

  Straggly hydrangea bushes wiped against her legs as she followed Julia up the cracked cement path, past the fence, rusting where it lay in the waist-high grass. Mae would laugh when Allie told her that purple fluffy-topped weeds were blooming in the cracks between the verandah boards.

  ‘They’ll be mad at me for leaving them for so long,’ said Julia, looking over to where Petal was opening the door of the chicken shed, the birds clucking indignantly. ‘I’ll take them some green stuff later.’ She banged the front door open with her hip.

  Inside, there was the sour smell of mould and every flat surface was stacked with books and papers and glass jars of what looked like dust.

  ‘Seeds. They’re seeds,’ said Julia, as Allie bent to look at one of the jars. ‘I’m helping the forest reclaim its land.’ She waved her hand towards the paddock outside the window and walked through into the next room.

  The place was even messier than last time. A vine curled in an open window by the front door, its fine green tendrils reaching for the curtain rod, and blue work shirts hung on a line sagging across the room. Last visit, Mae had stopped at the front door as if reluctant to step inside, then she had walked slowly through every room in the house, trailing her fingers over the walls and the heavy dark furniture, leaving shiny tracks in the dust and collecting spider webs on her fingertips.

  ‘You’re in here.’ Julia put one of Allie’s bags in Mae’s old room, with its two narrow single beds. She touched the toe of her boot to the puddle on the floor. ‘I’d better get you a bucket for that leak.’

  From the window Allie watched Petal walking across the paddock under a red umbrella, past dozens of small trees growing up through green plastic tree guards. Petal closed the umbrella, then bent to climb through the wire fence and disappeared into the tall forest. Allie didn’t recall the forest being so dark or close to the house.

  Julia sat down on one of the beds. ‘I’ll make some space for you in the wardrobe. There’s some old dresses of Mae’s in there you might like to wear. They should fit you.’

  ‘I’m not staying, Julia.’

  ‘Allie? I’m just trying to be realistic…’

  Her voice was loud. ‘You know where she is? She’s in some hotel down south. She’s staying down there and getting herself together. She’s done it before.’

  ‘You never said she’d left you alone overnight.’

  ‘I never said she didn’t!’ She paused, ‘She’s only done it once or twice.’

  Julia shook her head, and spoke quietly, ‘Listen to me. She’s not at some country pub. They found her dinghy. It’s just a matter of time…’

  ‘It’s not her dinghy! It’s my dinghy. And what gives you the right to make me stay up here? You’re not my mother.’

  Julia looked down at her feet. ‘You know what the police said.’

  ‘No! That’s just what you want. I know you were always jealous that she got away from the valley and you never did. Because you were never brave enough to leave.’

  ‘What?’ Julia’s eyes widened. ‘Is that what she told you?’ She got up awkwardly and stood in the doorway, shaking her head. ‘Oh, that’s rich. That’s bloody rich, that is.’ She walked out, her boots heavy on the floorboards.

  Allie sat down on the bed that she knew had been Mae’s when she was a girl. Everything was damp, the blanket under her and her school blouse sticking to her hot skin. She lay down and rolled over to face the wall. The house shook as Julia banged open the swollen wooden door onto the back verandah.

  The first night that Mae ever stayed away, Allie had sat up in the dark kitchen, her senses tuned to the faintest noise or movement as she waited the night through. She never spoke to anyone about it, not her teacher when she took herself to school in the morning and not even to Mae when she found her mother sitting on the back step in the afternoon, smoking and reading a magazine, the oars laid out on the kitchen floor, ready for a row on the harbour.

  The day they got the dinghy was Allie’s ninth birthday. Mae had woken her early and the sun was just starting to rise as they let themselves out of the house and walked down the empty streets. At the wharves, fishermen in gumboots hosed down boat decks and wheeled crates along the dock. Inside, they skated boxes of fish and ice over the floor, shouting across the room to each other, and there was the sharp smell of raw fish. It was embarrassing the way men noticed Mae, heads turning to watch her pass.

  After a few minutes a tall man with a thin red face came over and stood beside her. ‘Mae,’ he said and started to roll a cigarette.

  ‘Hey George.’

  ‘I’ve got it down at the wharf for you. You still want it then?’

  ‘Uh huh,’ Mae nodded and reached for his pouch of tobacco. He smiled and handed her his just-rolled cigarette and leaned forward to light it for her.

  ‘So, this is your daughter?’

  ‘This is Allie. It’s her birthday.’ Mae’s warm hand rested on her shoulder.

  He smiled at Allie. ‘You like fish?’

  She liked crumbed fish fingers but not the whole fish with dead eyes that Mae sometimes brought home and baked in the oven.

  ‘Go and pick one, love. From that box over there.’ He pointed, ‘Go on. It’s okay.’

  She walked over and stood before the box and then turned back to look at Mae. The man and her mother watched her, smiling. She looked down at the slimy skin and glistening eyes. Then he was behind her. ‘That one?’ he pointed.

  She nodded.

  He picked it up and wrapped it in paper and gave it to her. ‘Come on. Let’s go get your birthday present, Miss Allie.’

  At the wharf, seagulls screamed, rising and falling with the wind, orange legs extended. The small tin dinghy floated down below, a puddle under its wooden bench seat.

  ‘You can leave her at my mooring if you want, Mae. You know where it is. You’d best take the oars with you, though. I might be able to find somewhere for you to leave them. But take them today.’ He stood with his legs wide and arms crossed.

  Mae smiled up at him. ‘You’re a winner George. It’s perfect.’

  ‘Whatever you say, Mae. Whatever you say, darlin’.’ He rested his hand on her cheek for a moment.

  They walked back through the streets, Mae holding the oars across her shoulders and Allie carrying the heavy fish. At home, Mae leaned the oars behind the door in the laundry.

  ‘Can we row out to one of the harbour islands for a picnic?’ Allie asked.

  ‘Sure, sweetheart. Of course.’ Mae washed her hands at the laundry tub.

  ‘Can we take Clare from school with us? I owe her a visit to my house.’

  Mae turned off the tap. ‘Let’s make it our secret. Just you and me. You won’t say anything to Tom, will you? Let’s not share it with Clare or Tom or anyone.’

  Allie didn’t see the fisherman again until he appeared at the front door the morning that Mae disappeared. He stood beside the policeman, the two of them silhouetted in the sunlight.

  In the afternoon, she stood at the bedroom window and watched her aunt wheel a barrow of saplings down the long slope to the bottom paddock. Julia had trampled the weeds to make paths to the newly planted trees. All signs of the cows were gone, except for the old dairy building and a tractor, streaked brown with rust and abandoned in the house paddock.

  Soon she would be sitting on the t
rain again, watching the landscape change back to dry eucalyptus and sandstone, gliding alongside the Hawkesbury River where oyster frames break the glassy surface. Mae would be waiting for her in their little kitchen, wearing one of her sundresses, her hands around a steaming teacup.

  Julia disappeared behind the high weeds and there was just the wind scattering rain across the tin roof and a distant cow lowing. Allie had heard quiet crying from Julia’s room earlier in the day and the memory of it turned her guts to ice in the heavy afternoon heat.

  She found a pair of muddy gumboots on the verandah and hurried down the stairs and through the wet grass, the oversized boots slapping her calves with every step. She was surprised by the wave of relief she felt when she saw Julia bending to pick up a potted tree.

  Her aunt looked up and stood with her hands on her hips as Allie hurried through the sticky weeds towards her.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Allie was breathless.

  ‘See this one I’m planting now?’ Julia pointed with her chin as she picked up the shovel again and pushed it into the ground with her boot. ‘In a hundred years its trunk will reach from here over to the wheelbarrow.’

  Allie’s throat tightened at the sight of the red soil. Rusty red like dried blood, spilling onto the luminous grass.

  ‘This whole farm will be rainforest again. Even the house, I hope.’ Julia smiled as she tipped the sapling from its pot and slid it into the hole. ‘I’m letting the forest take its own back. Letting natural order re-establish itself.’

  Allie turned to look at the sea of tree guards and tall weeds bending with the weight of the rain. ‘And what then?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘When the forest has taken it back, what then?’

  Julia shrugged, smiling. ‘Then my job will be done. I won’t be needed anymore.’

  ‘But look at it!’ Allie waved her arm around. ‘It’s nothing like rainforest. It looked better before, when the cows were still here.’

  Julia nodded slowly. ‘Yeah. Well, there are some in the valley who’d agree with you. Your great-uncle, for instance. And your great-grandmother.’ She flicked her long plait over her shoulder as she bent to scoop soil around the tree roots. ‘But it’s my farm to do what I want with. And I know the forest will reclaim it eventually anyway. I’m just helping it. See, here’s one that came up on its own.’ She tenderly moved the long grass from around a seedling. ‘A sandpaper fig. There must have been a huge one right here somewhere, until my father or grandfather cut it down.’ She turned and started digging another hole. ‘That seed was in the soil the whole time, just waiting for a safe time to grow.’

  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.

  chapter two

  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.

  chapter three

  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.