Salt Rain

by Sarah Armstrong

  Dan raised his eyebrows and selected a toothpick from the jar on the table.

  The old woman looked over at Julia and then back to Allie, her voice soft. ‘It’s better you know what really happened. But it’s all over now, long gone.’ She sat up straight and passed Julia the serving dishes.

  ‘And no-one knows where he is, this balloon man?’ said Allie.

  ‘You don’t want to find him, my dear. Not a fellow like that. Your family is here, right here.’ The old woman leaned over and squeezed her hand, then got up and walked to the window. ‘Dan, I’m worried about this rain, the town bridge could well go under. I think we’d better go.’

  Saul stood beside Allie on the front verandah as they watched Julia walk the old woman out to the car with an umbrella.

  ‘You know, it really was terrible, the storm, the flood when you were born,’ he said. ‘There’s no way Julia or her mum could have got in. It’s a miracle she and her father made it. They could have ended up halfway down the bloody creek. It happens, you know. Cars get carried away. People have drowned.’ He leaned his elbows onto the railing, ‘She wouldn’t have wanted me to visit her anyway, even if I could have got through.’

  ‘Oh yes, she would have.’

  He looked at her and shook his head.

  Here he was, this man she had spent years waiting for, the heat of his body just an arm’s length away and nothing was like it was meant to be. Everything had started to go wrong, as if the world were thrown off its axis, the planet wobbling in the wrong orbit. She held her hands up in front of her and turned them back and forth. ‘You and I have the same shape hands, different to Mae’s.’

  ‘We do, too.’ He smiled. ‘Your father must have hands like this. I don’t know what Mae told you, I think it was what she would have preferred to have happened, you know. But there is no way that I am your father. There is absolutely no way.’ He rested his head in his hands for a moment. ‘I wish she was here. I wish she could clear things up.’

  Julia was picking her way up the path under her umbrella, stopping to examine some bushes.

  Allie spoke quickly, ‘Why didn’t you ever do it, then?’

  Saul reached his hand out into the rain and turned his palm back and forth. ‘She wanted to wait…’ His voice was quiet. ‘So we waited.’

  Allie felt like all the blood in her body was draining away, out through her feet, between the cracks in the verandah boards and into the wet earth.

  Julia walked up the steps and shook out the umbrella as Petal appeared out of the rain, her wet hair flat to her head. Petal ran up the steps and grabbed Allie’s arm. ‘Come on. My present for you is down here.’

  Allie let Petal take her down the path and through the gate, Petal’s torch bobbing crazily, lighting up the streaking rain. She looked back at the verandah where Julia was holding the door open for Saul, who laughed at something Julia said as he stepped inside.

  At the chook house, the birds were clucking and shuffling on their roost. Petal pulled her to one corner. ‘Look.’ She shone her torch on a small hen that turned its neat head to one side and blinked its eyes. ‘It’s for you. Your own bantam chook. Happy birthday.’

  ‘Oh. Thank you.’

  The hen fluffed its golden-red feathers and settled onto the perch. Allie sat on a wooden nesting box beside the hen, the dusty mealy smell of the chickens all around her. She pressed her fingers to the aching knot in her throat.

  Petal sat beside her and they looked over to the house, at Saul and Julia framed in the kitchen window, steam clouding the glass as they washed up. Saul’s hair was black and his shirt ruby red in the warm light. He nodded his head as he wiped the dishes, moving the tea towel slowly around and around a big white plate.

  ‘She didn’t want the guy from the Show to be the one,’ Allie said. ‘She wanted Saul. She didn’t even try to find the balloon man. She didn’t want to find him, right? What does that tell you?’

  Petal looked at her in the faint light coming from the house, then reached across and squeezed Allie’s knee.

  The chickens around them clucked companionably, feathers rustling as they shuffled and settled on their roosts.

  ‘You know that clown?’ Allie said. ‘She fucked him. It’s an easy way to pay bills, you know. Taxis…the local grocer.’

  ‘It’s okay, you know. It’s okay that she did that.’

  ‘You think so?’ Allie shook her head, ‘I saw you with a guy last night.’

  ‘You did? You saw me with Billy?’

  Allie nodded.

  Petal laughed, ‘I would have told him to be more dramatic if I’d known we had an audience. What were you doing outside my van?’

  Allie shrugged, ‘Walking.’ She watched Saul wiping a wine glass, carefully twisting the tea towel into the bowl of the glass. ‘He says they never had sex.’ She picked up a piece of straw from the floor. ‘When did you first have sex?’

  ‘When I was fifteen. Your age. With a friend of my brother’s, a surfer.’ Petal touched a finger to her tongue. ‘His skin tasted like salt. I found out later that my brother was watching through the window. I think he set it up.’

  ‘She told me they did it. But she told me a lot of things.’ Allie remembered sitting on the front step for hours. Sometimes Mae would come and sit behind her and when a man walked up the street, Mae would go quiet and examine him, then lean close and say, ‘No.’ Occasionally she would pause, and wait, letting him get closer and closer. Allie would hold her breath, waiting for him to see them, preparing to meet the First Love, until Mae said, ‘No. Not him either, sweetheart.’

  In the darkness of the chook house, Allie pressed her fists hard against her eyes. It was as if the burning tears were forcing their way out through the very skin around her eyes.

  chapter sixteen

  Julia passed Saul a soapy dish. ‘I hope you were categorically clear that you’re not her father?’

  He grimaced. ‘Julia, I was clear, I was absolutely clear. I don’t know where she got the idea. No, I do know. I’d forgotten what Mae was like.’

  ‘You have no idea it was Mae. It could just be a fantasy in Allie’s head.’

  ‘You think so?’

  Julia scrubbed at a saucepan with steel wool. ‘I don’t want you spending so much time with her, Saul. She’s been visiting you almost every day.’

  ‘What is this about?’

  ‘This is about the fact that you’re not her father and you’re too old to be her friend.’

  He put the tea towel down on the bench. ‘That’s not your decision to make Julia.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Yes, really.’

  ‘She’s been spying on you, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I know. She’s fifteen, Julia. Not a little kid. You don’t have to breathe down her neck. Remember Mae at that age? Don’t smother her.’

  ‘She’s not Mae and I’m sick of everyone saying it. She’s nothing like Mae! She hardly talks, I have no idea what’s going on…’

  ‘For God’s sake, she’s in grief! When my mother died I was in a dream for months.’

  ‘She’s not Mae! Just stop thinking that.’

  ‘I’m not thinking that. I’m saying she’s a young adult and you’ll drive her away if you treat her like a child.’

  Julia crashed the pan down on the sink. ‘I do not treat her like a child!’

  ‘Okay, okay… How about a cuppa? God, I need a cuppa after that dinner-table discussion. I’d forgotten what an arsehole Dan is.’

  Julia was silent, her hands in the soapy water.

  He reached for another plate. ‘How are your trees going?’

  ‘Don’t patronise me, Saul.’

  He sighed. ‘Fine. That’s fine, Julia. I’ve got to go.’

  He walked to the front door, Julia behind him. A car’s lights reversed into the driveway, then turned back down the road the way it came.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ he said.

  ‘So, both bridges… You can stay here. It’ll be dow
n in the morning.’

  He called his dog in from the rain. ‘I’ll sleep on the couch.’

  ‘No. Sleep in my bed and I’ll sleep in with Allie. There are two beds in there.’ She turned and went inside.

  Saul lay awake in Julia’s bed. The rain sounded hollow on the unfamiliar tin roof. He turned on the bedside lamp and from the high brass bed looked around the room at the piles of papers and the dusty wooden dresser. The leak bucket was almost full, brimming with clear still water and shimmering with each drip.

  He turned in bed, pulling the sheet around him and thought of Mae’s old man sleeping in this very bed, fucking here, dying here. Saul had left for Tasmania soon after Mae had gone. He’d never seen her father after the accident and it was hard for him to imagine the big man crumpled and weak. He didn’t feel any satisfaction to be lying in the man’s bed, to be alive when he was dead. Instead it felt like the bastard was still watching him.

  Allie’s questions had reminded him of the incredible frustration and delight of exploring Mae’s body. He realised now how generous she had been in opening her body to his curiosity. She had been a mystery unfolding to him, the smell of her, the soft folds of skin, the slippery eggwhite of her arousal. Except that she would never let him inside where he wanted to be.

  He held his hands up in front of him. It was just a crazy fluke that Allie’s were like his. When he was a boy, he wished for hands like his father’s—muscular, with thick fingers and broad palms. Farmer’s hands. He could recall even the shape of the moons on his father’s fingernails and his crooked left index finger. When Saul had mumps as a boy, his father had sat up all night sponging him with a damp washer, while outside the rain thundered down. ‘There you go,’ his father’s voice had been barely audible over the noise of the rain. ‘It’s okay, little man. It’s okay.’ His hands were gentle even as Saul called out for his mother who was not long dead. He was convinced she was in the next room, hiding from him, withholding herself. ‘Mummy,’ he called out. ‘Where are you? Go away, Dad.’ And still his father had sat beside him, fanning him with an old Japanese paper fan and in the pre-dawn carrying him through the rain to the dairy and laying him, wrapped in his bedclothes, on a row of hay bales. Saul had listened to the comfortable, familiar sounds of the cows and pulled the blankets around him—the fever finally gone—and watched his father working with those strong broad hands.

  He got out of Julia’s bed and walked through the dark house for a smoke on the verandah. He passed the shut door of Allie’s bedroom and wondered if she slept like Mae, with her eyes disconcertingly half-open. His dog greeted him, shivering with pleasure, then he saw Julia sitting in the dark on one of the cane chairs. She sat very still and didn’t look up.

  ‘Hi.’ He felt awkward after their earlier discussion and wished he’d gone to the other verandah but sat down beside her and started to roll a cigarette.

  She spoke abruptly. ‘I can see why she would want you to be her father. I mean, what’s the other option? Some unknown, untraceable guy who used to drag a balloon around with the Show.’

  ‘Is he really untraceable? I’ll help her find him. I mean, there must be some way to track him down.’

  ‘He’s untraceable.’ She was silent. ‘He’s probably running a pub in some town somewhere now, or… I don’t know.’

  In the darkness he felt bold. ‘How did she die, Julia?’

  ‘Mae drowned.’

  ‘Yes, but I also heard…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I just want to know if there’s more to it.’

  Her voice was tight. ‘Why do you need to know?’

  He shrugged and lit his cigarette, the flame lighting up his and Julia’s legs stretched out in front of them, identically crossed at the ankle.

  ‘I don’t really know, Saul, but the police are convinced it was intentional.’

  ‘And how are they convinced of that?’

  She pulled her bare feet up onto the seat, and hugged her knees to her chest. ‘This man saw her, you know. He was riding on the last ferry out near the Heads and looked down and saw a mermaid floating on the swell. The most beautiful woman he had ever seen, he said. A naked woman with long dark hair over her shoulders out in the middle of the bloody harbour. Apparently she smiled at him and then dived down and disappeared into the water.’

  ‘What the hell was she doing out there?’

  Julia stood up and reached her hand out into the rain, spattering it in on him. ‘He dived in after her, can you believe? I read his statement, the policeman showed me. This guy jumped off the ferry deck after her. It must have been dark as hell and he started looking for her, diving down, hoping to grab an ankle or a hand, but nothing. Just her little dinghy left floating out there.’

  ‘She could swim anywhere, you know that as well as anyone. She would never drown by accident.’

  ‘They’re saying it wasn’t an accident. No accident, Saul.’ Julia wiped her hands on her pants and walked inside the house.

  He followed her. ‘But how do the police figure it was intentional just because she dived down?’

  She turned and looked at him for a moment before replying, her voice a whisper, ‘Like you say, she was a brilliant swimmer…and she phoned me before she went out.’

  ‘That night?’

  She nodded and stroked the wood of the dining table.

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘That she was calling in her debts and I must get on the next train to Sydney and come straight to the house. And when I asked why, why should I get on a bloody train now, long after I’d given up waiting for her to ask me to come, she just said, “Please, please.” And when I spoke again she’d gone.’ She tapped the table. ‘I should have called someone. I could have called and woken Allie or called the police… I could have called someone but I hung up the phone and went back to bed. So, that’s the truth. I might have saved her and I decided not to.’

  ‘How were you to know? How could anyone expect… What did she mean “calling in her debts”?’

  ‘There are debts that run both ways between Mae and me.’ She picked up a torch by the front door and turned to look back at him. ‘I’m going out to check on the trees.’

  He followed her onto the verandah. ‘Hang on, Julia. Does Allie know how Mae died?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re going to tell her, right?’

  ‘I’m trying to find the right words. If you think of them, Saul, feel free to let me know.’

  ‘I can’t believe she would do it deliberately, leaving Allie all alone. I don’t believe it.’

  Julia walked down the steps. ‘She didn’t leave her alone, Saul. She left her to me.’

  He watched her disappear into the darkness then threw his cigarette out into rain, the glowing red tip extinguished in a second as it arced through the air.

  chapter seventeen

  Saul’s dog was nuzzling Allie, its wet nose nudging her where she was curled on the hard boards, her back to the rain driving in under the verandah roof. Mae’s skin would be silvery scales now, seaweed and fish tangled in her hair. When Allie heard Julia telling Saul the story, she could picture the man diving from the ferry, the fool not knowing Mae was long gone, fast and lithe through the water with her muscular mermaid’s tail. And while he was thrashing about looking for her, while the ferry was slowing and turning, there must have been the moment that Mae looked up at the trail of bubbles rising through the thick black water and realised that it was too late, that the surface was too far away and she had gone too deep. And as she tried to swim back up through the cold water, her breath running out, she would have thought of Allie.

  She woke again at daybreak. The dog was gone and she sat up, damp and aching. Inside, Julia was asleep on the lounge, her arms flung above her head, one breast half spilling from her muddy dress. She looked down at her aunt’s sleep-soft face for evidence of last night’s words, expecting to see bruising on Julia’s skin or a rent in her translucent eyelids.


  She had been asleep on the outside day bed when Saul and Julia’s voices woke her. For a while their voices merged with the rain and she started to drift back to sleep, until Julia’s words cut though the darkness, every syllable distinct. After they went inside she found herself down on the verandah boards, her cheek pressing hard onto the wood. It was as if a great weight was crushing her, tons of black water squeezing the breath from her.

  Saul’s car was gone and the rain was washing away the last of the paw prints and boot marks in the mud by the gate. She stood in the misty rain and looked up to the escarpment, where great white plumes of water sprayed out from the waterfall. Mae had pointed it out to her when they visited and told her that she used to go up and stand on the very edge, looking down to where the water exploded on the rocks at the bottom. She had once read Allie an article from a Reader’s Digest about some kind of force exerted at the edge of cliffs that had been known to draw people over against their will.

  It took her hours to get up there. She dug her fingers into the decaying leaves to climb the steep hill, prickly vines grabbing at her, sweat stinging her scratched skin. The roaring of the waterfall faded in and out as she pushed through the dense growth. She reached the top and came out onto a broad rock shelf where the water ran in a swirling frenzy, foaming through potholes and pools, rushing over the slick dark ribbon of rock. As it flung itself off the edge, the water seemed to slow and drift, each drop frozen in its own free fall.

  She didn’t believe Mae’s story about the bullocks anymore. She didn’t believe that a team of bullocks would be up there at the head of the waterfall, crossing with a load of timber. How many times had Mae described them struggling for a grip on the smooth rock, hooves scrabbling as the water swept them to the edge. She said they sailed out into mid-air with the rushing water, twisting and tangling in their traces, eyes wide with terror, falling slowly, silently, as graceful as the water. Allie used to picture them, the bullocky on the bank urging them on, shouting and cracking the whip as they slipped, their wagon skewing behind them, the load of logs loosening and somersaulting after them. Mae had let her believe the bullock story. She had just sat there on Allie’s bed and let her cry for them and ask again how desperately the bullock drivers tried to unhitch the wagon and save the animals.