‘How old are you?’
‘How old do you think?’
Allie shrugged, ‘Twenty?’
‘I’m the same age as Julia. Twenty-seven. She’s like twenty-seven going on forty, don’t you think? Sometimes she treats me like the naughty kid camping up in the forest.’
‘You camp in the forest?’
‘Didn’t you know? I live up the back of Julia’s property in my caravan. I parked it there a few years ago. Couldn’t tow it out now, though, even if I still had a car. Julia’s bloody trees have closed me in. The van will just disintegrate there I guess.’ She finished her long braid and turned to Allie. ‘Want me to plait yours?’
Allie turned her back to Petal and shut her eyes to the familiar sensation of fingers threading through her long hair, tugging painfully at her scalp.
Petal spoke close to her ear, ‘What do you think someone who’s lonely looks like?’
‘Huh?’
‘You said you thought Julia was lonely. How do you know?’
‘Well… I don’t know. She’s on her own here and she wants me to stay.’
Petal took an elastic hair band from her wrist and tied the end of Allie’s plait. ‘I saw her shoot a calf once. Someone hit it out on the road in front of her place. She put the gun to its head and blew its brains out. Then she went home and had a cup of tea. She’s tough as anything, you know. She doesn’t need other people.’
Allie shrugged. Her skin smelt of the brackish creek water and the plait was too tight. She stood up and pulled her damp dress over her head.
The sugary smell of baking reached her as she walked through the misty rain and up the back steps. She stopped on the verandah to watch Petal crossing the paddock, picking her way through the shoulder-high trees. When Allie turned to open the glass door into the house, her legs turned to water at the sight of Julia sitting at the kitchen table, her face in her hands, slowly moving her head from side to side as if grinding her hands into her face. Allie sank down on the damp verandah boards and wrapped her arms around her legs.
Julia opened the door and came to sit close beside her. A stream of fruit bats flew over the house towards the forest and the smell of the lemon pie grew stronger. The longer Julia was silent, the more afraid Allie felt.
‘Allie?’ Her aunt’s voice shook. ‘They’ve found her. Mae’s body. Around at Middle Harbour. I just got a phone call…’
‘Who? Who said they’d found her?’ Allie heard her own voice as if from a distance, while her eyes followed the drips falling from her plait onto the boards, where the water sat in neat circles, like plump drops of blood.
‘The policeman left his number,’ Julia put her hand on Allie’s arm. ‘In case you want to speak to him. Come inside.’
She shrugged Julia’s hand off. ‘But she was the best swimmer.’ Her voice was just a whisper, ‘We swam in the harbour all the time.’ The bats were still flying into the distance, as if nothing had changed.
Julia nodded. ‘Yeah. She was a good swimmer. We’ll have her…body sent up here. I said that we wanted her up here. I’ll ring Barry Brooks in town. He did Mum and Dad’s funerals.’ She rubbed her face. ‘Something happened didn’t it, that last night? Before she went out? Did something happen?’
Allie slowly undid her plait. She had lain awake for hours after Tom came, waiting for the calm, waiting for him to go. She could have got up and stopped Mae going down to the harbour, she could have done something.
She let Julia reach an arm around her and, as she leaned into her aunt’s body, she remembered the day that she and Mae had found a fairy penguin at Goat Island, its bloated body split open and leaking the salty stench of death. They had stood on the rocks looking down at it, its fur matted and dirty and its beak open in a grotesque yawn. Her stomach cramped and she doubled over, the terrible smell of the burning pie all around them.
chapter four
The rain gouged at the land and washed streams of red mud into the creeks. In the morning, Julia brought her tea and buttered toast in bed, then Allie followed her aunt down the paddock, where the girl slid the saplings from their pots and slowly packed soil around them, her fingers in the red dirt, pressing and pressing at the grains of soil while the rain beat down on her. She could still feel the last warm touch of Mae’s skin on hers. The frantic hand waking her, to urge her down the stairs to tell Tom to leave. Her own fingers left watery muddy marks on her legs.
Julia gave her the job of pricking-out the tiny seedlings from the trays into individual tubes. ‘Just don’t damage the roots or stem,’ she said as she demonstrated. ‘If you do, then chuck it. Best to spend time growing only the strongest ones.’
Allie spent hours in the quiet of the potting shed, carefully lifting the little four-leafed plants, their delicate roots quivering. Even while it rained outside, the sprinklers sprayed mist onto the hairy leaves of the tiny trees. She sat on the damp wooden chair in the corner, the sweat rolling down her body, waiting for the seedlings to grow and watching the discarded ones wilt on the ground.
When they came up for Mae’s father’s funeral, her mother told her, ‘This is just meat, you know.’ She had pinched her arm. ‘Bodies go back to dust but we leave traces here and there, atoms of ourselves. We float in the air everywhere we have ever been. Every word spoken, every breath exhaled. Every drop of sweat. My father and mother are still all around this farm.’
While Julia spread straw in the chicken house, Allie rested her cheek against the cool plaster walls of the bedroom and trailed her fingers along the stainless steel of the kitchen sink. She stood at the bathroom mirror, close, so her breath fogged the glass, while she searched for Mae in her own wide-set eyes and small nose. She hurried to her bedroom and pulled out the musty cotton sundresses that had hung in the wardrobe since Mae left. She tried them on one after another, dropping them to the floor. Green spots and blue flowers and light pink with blue piping. The thin material hung loosely, her small breasts lost in the bodice. Through the fabric, she cupped the rounded shape of her breasts, her hands warm and tender, the same way that the First Love had touched Mae.
Outside, she lifted her face to the rain. This very drop may have once slid down Mae’s cheek, the clouds trapped inside the valley walls year after year, the same drops of rain falling back into the valley. It was salty on her tongue, like tears, like blood, and for a moment she could taste her mother. Then there was nothing but the ceaseless rain, running down her body, soaking the soil, filling the creeks.
The First Love would hold the strongest traces of her mother. His skin would still carry her touch. Their afternoons by the creek must be held somewhere in his body.
Allie went inside and put on one of her mother’s dresses, looping the belt tight. She walked down the muddy driveway and along the gravel road that followed the curves of the meandering creek. She would walk until she found him.
A car came around the corner and she stepped off the road into the dense bush, sinking deep into the dark leaf litter as she gripped the slippery tree trunks and vines and pulled herself up the steep hill. The soaking rain entered her nose and eyes and glued her stringy hair to her cheeks. Everything was wet, and as she climbed, she surrendered herself to the blood-warm air and rain.
She found a forestry road cutting a clay swathe through the trees and then narrow animal tracks that led through a wall of prickly lantana to an abandoned banana plantation. The banana palms leaned down the hill, small overripe fruit hanging in heavy bunches and purple flowers dripping pollen. She pressed her cheek hard against a shining rain-slick trunk, like Mae would when they hid in the Botanic Gardens at night. In the dark, after the park rangers had gone, Mae would run across the springy grass to one of the huge fig trees and climb its buttress roots. Later, Allie would lean back against her mother, wrapped in the coat that Mae turned fur-side in, and she would reach up to trace the indentations that the tree had left on her mother’s cheek.
Through the tattered banana leaves she could see down to the
emerald green paddocks dotted with tin roofs. If she were Mae, she would know which was his. Mae would walk down the hill and straight into his waiting house.
The last letterbox at the end of the valley had ‘Philips’ painted across it in uneven black letters. Saul Philips. The dogs started barking before she had reached the first bend in the driveway so she slipped into the bush and slowly approached the white weatherboard house with its neat mown lawn and dripping Hills Hoist. The dogs strained at the end of their chains, tails and hackles stiff, and a peacock with a drooping tail peered down at her from the roof of a tin shed.
A woman with short grey hair came out onto the verandah and called the dogs back to their kennel. She reached up to a shirt hanging on the line strung under the verandah roof and pressed it to her cheek before slowly unpegging the clothes and folding them onto a chair.
Allie backed away through the bushes and found a well-worn path leading around the base of a steep rocky bluff. It led her over a small side creek where she stepped from boulder to boulder, the water tumbling under her, reeds pulled straight by the current.
The timber cabin was in the middle of a small clearing, its wood dark with rain, the roof a patchwork of second-hand tin. She moved quietly through the bush at the edge of the clearing and squatted in under a tangle of lantana near the house. Hanging from the verandah beam were his wire shapes. A dog with nails for teeth, a unicorn, and faces, turning slowly in the breeze, dripping with rain. There was a pair of his muddy leather boots by the door and a haphazard stack of firewood. She settled in the damp gloom under the lantana and waited for him to show himself to her.
Finally, in the fading light, after what seemed like hours, she walked up the wooden stairs and went straight to the wire face hanging from the corner of the verandah. She stroked the thin strips of metal curling into cupid’s bow lips and long wild hair. They were her mother’s almond-shaped eyes. My eyes, she thought and caressed the hard grey wire. She unhooked it from the nail and hurried across the lawn.
Of course it was her mother. All the face needed was the crooked eye tooth that Allie and Mae shared. ‘Our vampire tooth,’ Mae used to call it. Mae would let her sleep in the big bed on the nights that Tom didn’t come and before she turned off the light, she reached for Allie, ‘Good night, little vampire.’ Allie would arch her neck for her mother to press the tooth into her skin. ‘You’re marked now.’ Mae pushed her cool finger into the faint mark her tooth left. ‘You’re mine.’
If Tom went in the middle of the night, Allie would wake in her downstairs bed to the sound of his car engine booming around the narrow street and she would wait for Mae to come down and collect her. When she was little, Mae used to carry her up the stairs, her sleepy limbs knocking the banister and brushing against the cool plaster wall. The sheets smelt of cigarettes, perfume and sweat and her mother’s naked body was warm and soft.
In the mornings, she watched Mae’s pale sleeping face and looked for the flicker of a pulse at her neck, a sign that the heart was still urging the blood around her mother’s body. She wondered how much blood vampires needed. A bowlful? Or just the puddle under the raw hunk of meat waiting to be cooked for the Sunday roast?
Sometimes Mae cooked Tom a roast with potatoes and carrots and onions, like she said her own mother and grandmother used to. While she carved, she would tell them how every Sunday her family went to eat with her grandparents and four uncles, all of them around the long dining table that her Pa built from a huge red cedar tree, the whole tabletop one piece of wood. They would arrive back from church to the smell of the slow-cooking lamb, a rich, sweet smell, the house hot from the wood stove that burned even in summer. Mae helped set the long table with a white tablecloth and was sent out to pick mint for the mint sauce, while her mother stirred the gravy, an apron over her good Sunday dress. The uncles watched Mae from the verandah, and flapped their white shirtfronts at the breeze before coming to sit at the table, all of them in a row along one side.
One day before Tom came to Sunday lunch, Allie found her mother crying on the steps of their tiny backyard, the smell of roasting meat strong in the air, an oven mitt dangling from her hands. ‘We should have mint growing,’ she wept. ‘It’s no good without mint sauce.’
Julia’s room was quiet and dark when Allie left the house. The forest at night was even blacker than she had imagined. The bush pressed in on her and she stumbled on the narrow, rocky path. Small animals blundered away through the undergrowth and she listened for the feral dogs that Julia said ran in packs in the hills. She imagined them silently tracking her through the bush, muzzles lifted to catch her scent.
He was never home during the day. She had waited and waited in her place under the lantana but he didn’t come. There had been signs of him—a window propped open and shirts strung on the verandah clothesline—but the house was always quiet, just the tin roof creaking in the heat and the currawongs crying out as they flew overhead.
She walked slowly across the clearing towards his open bedroom window, the lawn silvery with moonlight. The wire shapes hanging on the verandah moved in the darkness and an owl flew out of the forest, its wing-beats loud and close. She reached his window and leaned on the sill, the wood hard against her ribs. There he was at last, one arm stretching across the bed towards her, fingertips half-curled as if beckoning. She stood perfectly still, only her eyes moving, tracing the way his limbs had fallen in the night, following the arrow of dark hairs down to the sheet twisted around his waist. His face was turned away from her and she willed him to sigh and shift in his sleep and turn towards her so she could see his face, so she could recognise something of herself in him, some small sign. She imagined Mae sleeping beside him, her creamy body curved around his, their bellies rising and falling together. Allie sank to her knees in the damp grass under his window and matched her breath to his, the cool air streaming down her throat.
chapter five
Julia followed her niece at a distance, her torch lighting the unfamiliar narrow path through the forest. As they approached Little Banana Creek, she realised Allie was going to Saul’s place and she stopped, her feet suddenly heavy, the same churning in her gut as when Mae used to run into the house and dump her school bag before slipping out the back door to meet him.
She continued over the creek and in the moonlight could see Allie standing at his window. She wanted to grab the girl away and shake her. Shake her then rock her. Rock her in her arms like her own mother used to do. Like she saw Saul do to Mae one day down by the river. She had hidden in the bushes and watched them, a kind of agony to see Mae’s face shining under his touch.
An old helplessness that she hadn’t felt in years rose in her and she rested her face into her hands and pressed her fingers hard onto her eyelids. She was no better than her father when he used to sneak around after Mae and Saul. She was no better than her father in lots of ways.
Since Allie had come to the farm, scraps of old memories had been rising in her. The yellow lace dress Mae was wearing the day she left, her hair pinned high as if she were going to a dance. Mae had run out into the rain, heaved her suitcase into the tray of the ute and settled the baby onto the passenger seat. ‘Say goodbye to Mum,’ she had said as she tucked the blankets around the baby’s face. ‘And will you tell Saul? Promise you’ll tell him goodbye for me?’ Her skin showed pink through the wet dress as she tied the tarp over her bags. ‘Julia, will you tell him that I’m sorry? Hey, don’t look so glum…it’ll all be okay. You can come later and we’ll live together, eh? You can help look after the baby.’
Julia remembered standing under the jacaranda tree looking down the driveway, long after the red tail-lights had disappeared, long after Mae would have reached town and the train station and left the ute there, keys in the ignition, long after she would have boarded the train and settled into a compartment and slid away into the night. Julia had waited outside for hours, a fluttering in her chest like a panicked bird.
Allie was walking back across th
e clearing towards her, Saul’s house still dark behind her. Julia tried to think of what she should say but she knew she had little of her mother’s sensitivity. She was blunt like her father. Blunted.
She waited for Allie to see her where she sat beside the path, but the girl passed by, just an arm’s length away and disappeared into the dark of the forest. Anyway, this was not the right day. Julia leaned back against a tree and tried not to think of the Hanley brothers waking soon and, after their breakfast, walking over to the cemetery to dig Mae’s grave. The ropes that they slung under the coffins always slipped so smoothly through their solid hands. She sat for a long time, looking up at the comforting shapes of the tall trees, imagining their roots slowly spreading through the whole valley again, laying a vast web of underground life. She used to spend hours lying on the forest floor, listening to the birds and the wind in the leaves. Sometimes she would drift to sleep and wake with a start, late for the afternoon milking. That was how Neal had found her. He told her that he watched her sleeping for a couple of hours, the dappled light moving across her face as the sun dropped.
She looked over to Saul’s place, he’d be getting up soon to milk at his father’s dairy. He had touched her once, when she was thirteen, down at the cattle dip. She had gone to tell him that Mae had left the valley and the instant that she told him, her head began to spin and he had dropped his hammer and knelt beside her. And there in the sun by the dip, he had stroked her, his big hand gently cradling her head and even then she knew that it was Mae he was touching.
She got back to her farm just as the sun was rising, the bottom of her jeans wet and muddy. Down at the old dairy, she had to clear dirt away to drag open the heavy wooden door and let the first light into the musty shed. A bale of hay had broken apart and was turning to dust on the floor, and along the corner beam, little black bats were settling for their day’s sleep. They shuffled their wings and tried to protect their twisted faces from the daylight. She sat heavily on a dusty wooden bench and thought again of Saul’s touch that day down at the cattle dip and how she had missed her one chance to tell him that Mae had said goodbye.
Salt Rain Page 4