Salt Rain

by Sarah Armstrong

  He called after her, ‘Hey!’

  At the edge of the clearing she looked back. He was still sitting there, his face pale in the darkness, watching her.

  When she was little she would use the back lane to get into the next-door neighbours’ garden and look in their window. She was most interested in the father, the way he rolled his shirt sleeves up and let his hand rest on the head of his little girl as he talked to his wife. A golden light seemed to emanate from their house, the same warm light she saw in windows when she and Mae walked at night. Then one evening they saw her looking in at them and the father came out to where she stood in the dark garden. ‘What are you doing?’ he had asked. She couldn’t recall what she said to him, but remembered his big hand warm and firm around hers as he led her home. Mae was lying upstairs listening to the radio. ‘I don’t want her lurking in our backyard,’ he told Mae. She nodded and took Allie into the kitchen for a cup of hot chocolate. The next weekend, he put a lock on their back gate.

  Lights blazed from the farmhouse and wood smoke hung in the damp air.

  Julia was stoking the old wood stove and looked up when Allie walked in. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Out.’ The kitchen was humming with heat and the smell of caramelising fruit.

  ‘At midnight? Are you okay? You look pale.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ Mango skins and seeds were heaped on the table. She traced a finger through the sticky juice. ‘Did you know Saul went to look for Mae and me in Sydney?’

  Julia looked up from weighing dried fruit, her face shining with perspiration, ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘He did. She never said anything.’ The heat in the room was tremendous and passed through her body as if she wasn’t there. She sat down and stroked a glossy smooth mango. ‘She kept…’ Allie lifted her hands up as if holding a ball. ‘She kept all this information…’

  Julia nodded. ‘Yeah. A lot of people do.’ She tipped a dish of red glacé cherries into a big bowl and used her hands to mix them through the cake batter. ‘Sorry it’s so hot in here. I’ve always used the wood stove to bake the Christmas fruitcakes. I just normally do it earlier in the year when it’s not so warm. Thought I’d make some mango chutney while we had the stove going.’

  ‘She just let me wait for him to come! I used to listen to cars stopping on the street at night, thinking it was him. I’d sit on the front step watching strange men walking down the street, wondering if they were going to turn in at our gate. She just let me go on waiting.’ Juice dripped through a crack in the table onto her leg. She remembered the milk bar run by the skinny Greek guy and his wife. Year after year Allie had walked across the lino and stood at the counter waiting for a parcel of chips and Mae never told her that the First Love had been there too. He should have tried harder and come back when she was old enough to recognise him. He owed it to her.

  Julia shook her head and scraped the last of the thick cake mix into greased and papered tins. She slid them into the oven and went out onto the verandah, lifting her shirt and turning her body to meet the faint breeze. She called back to Allie, ‘You know, sometimes the stories we tell are not for other people, they’re for us. We’re really telling them for ourselves.’

  ‘She thought I couldn’t tell which were the real stories. She thought I couldn’t figure it out. I should have had him before now. I should have had him a long time ago.’

  ‘What do you mean “had him”?’

  ‘I mean I should have had a father.’

  Julia tilted her head. ‘You don’t think he’s your father?’

  ‘I don’t think it. I know it.’

  ‘Oh no. No, he’s not your father.’ She shook her head vehemently, and stepped back inside. ‘Bloody hell, he hasn’t told you this, has he?’

  ‘I just know it.’

  Julia came close to her. ‘Allie, he’s not your father. Don’t you think Mae would have wanted him to be? Don’t you think it would have been easier for her if he was? Have you asked him? Ask him, he’ll tell you.’

  ‘You just don’t want him to be. How would you know, anyway? I mean, what has any of this got to do with you?’

  ‘God. I’m sorry. I should have realised this was what you were thinking,’ Julia rubbed her face.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with you, Julia. I know what the truth is and he knows it too. You think you know Mae. You pretend you do but you know nothing about her. Nothing at all.’

  She ran down the steps and into the paddock. She found one of the pathways through the weeds and hurried towards the light coming from Petal’s caravan. As she walked into the dark dripping forest, she could see in the end window of the van. Between the red curtains there were two bodies, Petal and a man with the same long blonde hair, moving like one creature. She stood watching them, the same electricity in her body as when she used to hear Mae and Tom. She would try to block out the rhythmic, rocking sounds from upstairs, turning one ear into her pillow, but still the warmth would come, spreading between her legs like shameful hot urine, spreading while she listened for her mother’s cry. The sound that came from her mother’s lips would drop through the air and into her window.

  She turned away from Petal’s van and walked blindly into the black forest, branches and vines tearing at her skin.

  The blood came in the middle of the night, black on her pants and thighs and fingertips. She sat on the toilet in the dark house, Julia’s room quiet and the air still heavy with the sugary smell of cake. With one hand she gripped her wrist and looked down at her fingers, so thin and fragile, daubed in the blackness.

  In the morning Julia gave her pads and she lay in bed, listening to the rain, the blood trickling stickily down the crack of her buttocks onto the sheet. Julia came in with a cup of milky tea and sat on the edge of the bed, her face soft. She patted Allie’s leg through the sheet and the weight of her aunt’s hand made hot tears rise behind her eyes. She rolled away from Julia and pulled the sheet up to her chin and traced her fingers down her side, following the lines of sweat, imagining them his fingers on Mae’s skin. Julia was wrong about Saul. What would Julia know? She was only a girl when Mae and Saul were together.

  She drifted back to sleep, the smells of Julia’s cooking all around her. She dreamt of thick drops of blood sitting plump on the front path in Sydney. In the dream she was in Mae’s nightdress, the cement digging into her knees as she bent to lick at the drops with her tongue. She licked until her tongue was raw, to take something of Mae into her, one last bit of her mother.

  The pad was thick between her thighs. Neither Mae nor Julia had told her that the blood kept coming and coming or that the cotton wadding would be soaked in a few hours. When she undressed to have a bath, it skimmed a crimson line down her bare leg and dripped perfect shining circles onto the linoleum. Everything was blood—her skin, her underpants, the back of her dress, the sheets. It lay just under the skin of her whole body, like tears ready to burst.

  Julia was watching her closely, leaning out the kitchen window to check on her where she sat on the verandah. Allie waited until she heard her aunt go into the bathroom, then she ran down the steps and into the forest.

  His front door was unlocked, like last time. She stood on the threshold and looked around the room. He had left a towel hanging over the back of a chair and a stick of incense burned on the kitchen table, a thin thread of smoke rising into the air. Allie stepped inside and rubbed the silky ashes of the incense between her fingers.

  In the bathroom, a razor balanced on the edge of the sink, trailing a line of tiny black whiskers and soap foam. She squeezed a bead of his toothpaste onto her finger and touched her tongue to its gritty sweetness before she walked across the hall to his bedroom, her bare feet whispering on the smooth floorboards. His bed was unmade, the sheets and pillows tangled. She riffled the pages of the book beside the bed and had a sudden pang for the long neat rows of books in the school library. A dog barked in the distance and a fly buzzed insistently against the window. She knelt an
d pressed her face into the mattress, silently mouthing their names to herself. Mae and Saul.

  There were loud footsteps on the stairs and his voice, talking to the dog. She crossed to the open window and climbed out, dropping to a squat on the grass just as his dog ran down from the verandah towards her, wagging its tail. She walked up the stairs and met Saul coming out the front door. He had keys in one hand and was about to take a bite from an apple with the other.

  ‘Hello again,’ he said, raising his eyebrows.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Into town.’ He started walking across the lawn then turned back to her. ‘Do you wanna come?’

  She nodded and followed him to his ute.

  She wound down the car window to let the air onto her skin. The midday heat gathered around her and pricked behind her knees. Saul drove with one hand and took the corners fast. When the car reached the top of the escarpment, the clouds suddenly cleared and they could see right across the bare plain, past the town and looping river, to the sea glittering in the distance. She watched his hands loosely grip the wheel as he steered the ute down past the wind-shredded bananas onto the river flats. There was something so familiar about the square shape of his palm and the angle at the base of his thumb, as if she had always known it. She shut her eyes and tried to find the right words to prompt him.

  He spoke suddenly into the silence, ‘You know, I was thinking, maybe she didn’t say anything about me going to Sydney because it was so complicated.’ He smiled. ‘Sometimes it’s easier to keep things simple.’

  ‘Yeah? I don’t think complication was a concern for her.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She thought of Tom leaning back in his chair in the kitchen while Mae straddled him, her skirt cutting into her thighs, and how he had once reached up and deliberately smeared her red lipstick across her face.

  ‘Like Tom. We’d never know when he was coming over. He’d come after work, or at midnight. And mostly he’d leave before dawn, so he’d be home and his kids wouldn’t know he’d spent the night away.’

  ‘His kids?’

  ‘His wife knew about us. But he didn’t want his kids to know…’

  A herd of caramel-coloured cows was crossing the road. Saul slowed the car and put his arm out the window to wave to the farmer standing by the road. ‘Hey Bill.’

  The farmer nodded back as Saul edged the car forward past a cow that had separated from the herd and was lumbering down the road, her heavy udder swinging.

  ‘His wife tracked him down once and found his car parked out the front. She stayed outside for hours and Mae and Tom hid inside, laughing. His wife didn’t know which house was ours. She was just waiting for him to turn up…’ She watched his face. ‘Mae was never really in love with him.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘She told me.’ She didn’t want to think about Tom. The sound of his voice from upstairs, loud, telling Mae to stop crying. Tom yelling down the stairs in the morning, ‘Why didn’t you take a fucking key, Mae?’ then coming down in his singlet and opening the door to the policeman.

  Saul slowed the ute as they entered town and a solitary boy rode his bike across the pedestrian crossing, under a limp streamer of tinsel. Saul pulled up outside the old corner pub. Shapes moved in the gloom inside and there was the sound of laughter and glasses clinking. Upstairs on the wide verandah, a line of red-checked tea towels hung over the lace fretwork.

  ‘What did you and Mae argue about when you came to find us? What did you talk about?’

  He shook his head. ‘I can’t remember exactly. I guess we talked about us…’

  ‘So why didn’t you come again?’ she said as a man in a faded brown felt hat left the pub and came towards Saul’s open window.

  ‘I…what was the point?’

  ‘What do you mean, what was the point?’

  The man reached them. ‘Saul, mate. What you doing in from the hills? Big day in town, eh?’

  Saul smiled at him and undid his seatbelt. ‘Yeah, yeah. How ya goin’ Mike? Mike this is Allie, Julia’s niece.’ He nodded at her and got out. ‘I’ll be back in a tick. I’ve just got to run in and get a bottle of brandy, then we can go over to the shop.’

  She watched him disappear into the dark doorway and shut her eyes for a moment. A loud burst of laughter came from the pub. She hadn’t been into town since the funeral, since Mae was buried under a ton of dirt, deep down where she could never be reached. The smell of bubbling tar rising from the road made her feel sick and she shifted so her back was towards the cemetery. She lifted her thighs off the burning vinyl seat and rested them back onto her palms, the sweat slippery between her fingers.

  She could just see the slow river drifting by on the far side of the park. Mae had told her how she used to visit friends in town and they would let the tide pull their little tin dinghy down the river towards the ocean, rowing and hanging a fishing line over the side until they reached the mouth of the river, where they tied up and bought hot chips from the fish co-op and swam all day in the lagoon before letting the turn of the tide take them back to town. Allie picked one of the houses fronting the river, with its wide verandahs and palm trees, and imagined her mother as a girl, running barefoot along the hot grass and in the front gate.

  Saul came out of the pub carrying a brown paper bag and squinting his eyes against the sun. He stopped to talk to someone on the footpath and Allie suddenly didn’t recognise anything about him, this short man with broad shoulders and muddy boots. For a moment, she didn’t know how she could possibly be connected to this stranger, sitting in the front seat of a stranger’s car, on a street in a strange town. Panic swelled in her chest and she shut her eyes to call up the vision of Mae trailing behind the dinghy on a lazy summer’s day.

  ‘Doing a big shop for Christmas are you then, Saul?’ the man at the grocery shop weighed the dried fruit and tipped it into brown paper bags. He didn’t wait for a reply. ‘Can’t see you in the kitchen cooking up a batch of mince tarts, but there you go. Nice to have a bit of sun then, isn’t it? But doesn’t it make things steamy?’ He wiped his hands on his apron and looked at Allie. ‘Now you’d have to be a Curran, wouldn’t you? You’ve definitely got the family look.’

  Saul spoke, ‘This is Allie. Julia’s niece.’

  The man bent to pick up a cardboard box. ‘Julia’s niece…?’ he said, then exclaimed, ‘Oh!’ just as Saul said, ‘Mae’s daughter.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. I remember.’ He smiled at Allie again. ‘Is it hot enough for you then?’

  She nodded. She didn’t like his oily grey hair slicked back, his too-white teeth. They each carried a box to the ute and the man tapped the bonnet as he turned to go back to the shop. ‘Well, see you later then. Let’s hope we get a bit more sun before the rain comes back.’

  Saul pulled across the street and turned onto the road out of town. Massive old fig trees lined the road, dwarfing the neat timber houses. At the edge of town he pointed to a light blue house with a hedge of red hibiscus bushes. ‘You know that’s where your great-grandmother lives?’

  ‘There?’ The small house was quiet, the curtains drawn against the heat, an old white station wagon parked in the driveway. It was the last house before the wide unfenced cane fields.

  She wanted him to stop so she could open her great-grandmother’s front gate and walk up the neat cement path to the door, like Mae would have done if she were there. She would step into the cool dark living room and sit down on the couch beside the old lady.

  He sped up as they left town. ‘You asked me why I didn’t go to see Mae again. She wouldn’t have wanted to see me. It was…it wasn’t great, that meeting we had. It was clear…’

  ‘So, why did you go the first time if you didn’t want to get back with her?’

  He frowned and shook his head, ‘Oh. I’m not sure. It was just so awful the way it had all ended, up here in the valley. I wanted to understand…’

  ‘So the point was to make you
feel better.’

  ‘Ahh, Allie,’ he shook his head, his voice exasperated. ‘I just wanted to see her, that’s all.’

  She spoke quickly, the words tumbling out, ‘Did you ever think you might be my father?’

  He slowed the car then pulled over onto the gravel beside the road. ‘Is that what you’ve been thinking?’ His face was serious, and he looked away from her for a moment. She could see each dark curl at the nape of his neck. ‘I wanted to be,’ he said as he turned back to her. ‘I wanted to be your father. But I always knew I wasn’t.’

  ‘So you believed every single thing she said, did you?’

  ‘It wasn’t about what she said. I knew it.’

  ‘But how…? How did you know it?’ They were parked out the front of the town pool, a bright blue rectangle in the middle of the cane fields. In the silence that hung between them, there was the lonely sound of crows in the trees behind the pool. She kept her eyes on the chemical blue of the water, she didn’t want to see him saying these words.

  ‘’Cause we never…’ he shifted his legs. ‘We didn’t actually…have intercourse, you know. It wasn’t…’

  ‘You never had sex?’

  He shook his head.

  She wanted to get out into the shimmering heat and step over the small ditch of water beside the road and run down one of the narrow dirt tracks between the tall rows of cane, right to the centre of the vast field. She remembered very well Mae’s descriptions of how gentle he was as they made love, his hands holding her so tenderly, the motion of their bodies together. Mae used to lie back in bed, her eyes shut, and tell Allie how they would wrap themselves in a blanket, the wool rough on their bare skin.

  He put the car into gear and pulled back onto the road. ‘I don’t know what to say… I don’t know what Mae told you. Maybe she wished it too, you know. I’m sorry.’ He turned the car onto the road that led up into the hills. Heavy rain clouds were rolling down from the escarpment.