Salt Rain

by Sarah Armstrong

  Julia shook her head. ‘I don’t think it will recharge. It was dying anyway. I have a new battery at home. Will you give me a lift?’ Tears pricked at her eyes as she flicked the useless headlight switch off.

  He nodded, ‘Sure.’

  He drove slowly up the narrow track until they came upon a fallen tree blocking their way. He went back for a chainsaw and she stood to one side while he cut through the thick trunk. The noise of the saw and the tang of fresh-cut wood reminded her of taking afternoon tea up to the mill. She and Mae spent every Saturday at their grandmother’s house, learning to cook. Then the three of them would walk to the mill, a basket over their grandmother’s arm, the girls taking turns to hold her free hand. Julia’s grandfather and uncles would stop the saws to come and eat slices of butter cake and date scones with their milky tea, while powdery sawdust drifted from their hair and eyebrows.

  As Saul sliced the trunk into segments, the thick brown bark fell away in curves, exposing the tender inner skin of the tree, its wood folded like Julia’s own belly that she ran her hands over in bed at night. Neal loved her body. He never said so, but she knew. She squeezed her eyes tight against the image of her father and Mae, his hands gripping her, pushing her down into the hay, even though she was as limp as a rag doll.

  Saul turned the saw off and rested it on the tree trunk. ‘Didn’t your mother know, Julia? She must have known.’

  Julia bent to roll a piece of trunk off the track. ‘Why must she have known? No-one could imagine it unless they saw it.’

  He grunted as he heaved a branch into the lantana thicket.

  She stroked the smooth tree bark, her fingers tracing the undulations. When her mother was dying, she became so angry at Julia’s father that she couldn’t bear to be in the same room as him. Her mother moved to the narrow bed in the sunroom and gave up looking after him. That was when Julia had to take over washing him every day, gagging at the sight of his shrivelled old penis and wasted body.

  ‘Mae mentioned it on the phone, Saul. You know, when she rang me that night.’

  He straightened up. ‘She did?’

  ‘I was so bloody angry at her because it’s only the second time she’s called me in fifteen years and it was to ask a favour. And I said, why should I go when I’d waited years for her to call. She said the only reason she’d stayed, the only reason she hadn’t left the valley before she did, was to keep him from me. When he had the accident, she figured I was safe from him.’ Julia dusted her hands on her pants. ‘So how’s that? She didn’t stay for you, Saul, she stayed for me.’ She wiped roughly at her tears. ‘She stayed for me.’

  He got back into the ute and started the engine.

  Julia got in. ‘She thought he was going to die when the tractor rolled. When she came up for his funeral she told me that when she got to Sydney, she found herself a church and went in and knelt down and prayed he would die.’

  They drove past his father’s house where the dogs peered out from the dripping eaves of their shelter and a dark sally wattle tree lay shattered across the lawn. The creek was still running fast and high but had dropped, leaving grasses and bushes brutally flattened and muddy rubble over the road. The air in the car was damp and stale.

  ‘You won’t tell anyone will you?’ Julia said. ‘It’s too much for Allie to hear.’

  ‘You’re going to tell her, though?’

  She was silent.

  He shook his head and slowed to drive over a hump of gravel left by the flood. ‘She’s living in a bloody fantasy world Julia. Now she thinks it’s the poor bastard from the Show. You can’t let her keep believing that.’

  ‘It’s not as easy as all that.’

  ‘I think it is that easy, because it’s the truth.’ He stopped at the flooded causeway and opened his car door. ‘But it’s your business. I don’t want to be part of it.’

  Julia watched him wade out into the water. She wound down her window and called to him, ‘You are part of it. You’re part of it all, Saul. You chose that when you slept with her.’

  He got back in and drove forward slowly. ‘Okay, so if I’m part of it, I think she should be told.’

  Julia looked out at the foaming brown water rushing up the side of the car. ‘What if I’d told you? Back then. What would you have done?’ The car surged forward as it climbed out of the creek.

  He bounced his palm on the steering wheel. ‘I would have helped her. I would have taken her away.’ He steered up Julia’s driveway, his tyres slipping on the mud. ‘I want to talk to Allie about what happened yesterday. I want it to come from me not you.’

  Julia reached for the door handle. ‘Listen, I am the one who will decide when she is told about her father. All right?’

  ‘Oh yeah, fine, Julia. You’re the boss.’

  She got out of the car. ‘So, just talk to her and then leave us alone. Just talk and go, Saul. I’ll ride the motorbike back with the battery later when the creek drops.’

  chapter twenty-three

  Saul stood on the front path, waiting for Julia to reach the lower paddocks, where she dropped onto her knees and started digging around a tree. He climbed the steps to the verandah, looking carefully at the house, at every nail that had been driven in by Mae’s father, every cladding board fixed in place with his hands. The man had always towered over Saul, with his barrel chest and legs planted wide.

  Inside, the house was silent except for the ticking of a clock and water dripping from the gutters. There was a branch sticking through a broken window in the living room, towels crumpled on the floor to soak up the rain, and shards of glass piled neatly on a piece of newspaper. He looked into Mae’s old bedroom, but it was empty, clothes strewn around the room and the bedclothes messed up. She had taken him in there once, when her father was away, and he had been surprised how austere the room was. He sat down on her old bed and remembered the smile on her face as she ran her hand along the tightly tucked bed cover and around the hospital corners, mocking how neat it was. She could have told him in that instant, she could have turned to him right there in her room and told him.

  A distant cow mooed and a chainsaw whined somewhere down the valley. He passed Julia’s bedroom and saw Allie and Petal asleep in the high double bed. Petal lay with her limbs sprawled, a long tanned thigh exposed. Allie was twisted in the sheet, her legs tucked up. He stood in the doorway, examining her soft face, trying to see Mae’s father in her.

  ‘Saul?’ She opened her eyes and looked at him with an unsmiling, steady gaze. Petal was motionless, her face slack with sleep.

  He whispered, ‘Can I talk to you, Allie?’

  She nodded.

  He went out onto the front verandah and sat on the top step. The sunlight seemed weak and pale after the storm. He could see Julia down with her trees, banging stakes into the ground.

  Allie came to sit beside him. She had wrapped herself in a white sheet. The cicadas suddenly started singing, a wall of noise. She stretched her legs out. ‘Where do the cicadas go when it rains? Do they hide somewhere?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps under a leaf?’ He took a breath. ‘Julia wants me to stay away from you.’

  ‘What do you mean stay away from me?’ She hesitated and then reached out and touched his forearm.

  He took her hand and enclosed it in his own two. She had a familiar sweet earthy smell and he was not sure if he was remembering it from yesterday or from years before with Mae. Julia was watching them from down the paddock.

  He squeezed her hand. ‘I’m a lot older than you, and she reminded me of that.’

  ‘It’s none of her business! Why are you even taking any notice of her?’

  He could see tears rising in her eyes. ‘I just feel like…it wasn’t something that was thought out and it was very sweet, you were very sweet…’ He heard how patronising he sounded. ‘I don’t think I was clear, I was still caught up in stuff around your mother… I wasn’t clear and that’s not fair to you.’

  She lifted her chin and leaned a
way from him. ‘So you imagined you were in bed with my mother?’ She pulled her hand from his.

  ‘No, not exactly…well yes, I guess that part of me did, it just confused things for me.’

  She stood up, shaking her head. ‘No,’ her voice was quiet, ‘I don’t believe you.’

  She was so like Mae, the way she stared back at him, unblinking, waiting. It used to disconcert him, how adult and contained Mae was. ‘Julia’s right, you know. It wasn’t appropriate in the circumstances. I wasn’t being responsible…’ Oh God! He sounded so pompous. ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry for messing things up like this. Anyway, Julia more or less forbids me to see you.’

  ‘And you are so obedient?’

  ‘Well, there’s the question of the law. You’re fifteen.’ And only just turned fifteen. What the hell had he been thinking?

  She turned and started to walk away, across the muddy yard, the sheet trailing on the ground.

  ‘Don’t Allie. Don’t just run away. Come back.’

  ‘What for?’ She turned around, her cheeks flushed and eyes wide. ‘No-one tells the truth around here. At least be honest, if you’re scared of the cops, or if you’re scared of Julia then say so. Were you or Julia ever going to tell me about Mae? How she died? Or were you going to let me go on and on, not knowing? I should have been the first to know, before you, before her.’ She jabbed her finger down the hill towards Julia.

  ‘I didn’t know until the night of your birthday!’

  ‘Exactly.’ She dropped the sheet and walked down the driveway in her crumpled cotton dress and bare feet.

  ‘Hey!’ He stood up and walked after her. ‘You’re right, you should have been the first to know. And you know, I am afraid, afraid of myself and how I’ve confused you and Mae in my head. That’s the truth, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry that that’s the truth.’

  She shook her head at him and walked away.

  Saul sat back on the step, then lay on the damp verandah boards and shut his eyes. The nails sticking out of the wood dug into his back. What he hadn’t said was that he was most afraid of the desire that he still felt for her. He banged his fist onto the verandah. He felt like a teenager. He was still the teenager who wouldn’t have been able to handle it if Mae had told him. It was clear to him that he wouldn’t have known what to do and that Mae must have realised that. He couldn’t stop thinking of what Julia had seen. The image, stark in his mind, didn’t fit with the peace of the morning after a flood. But the fact of it had always been there. Every moment he had been with Mae, it was under the surface, the whole time. He hadn’t known Mae at all.

  He sat up and watched Julia coming up the paddock, swishing through the high weeds. Mae should have told him. He should have known.

  chapter twenty-four

  She was running like her mother used to. Mae would jump on any train or bus that came along or she would hitch a lift with strangers. She used to say that she liked to keep moving, going somewhere, even if it was just around and around in circles.

  The woman who picked up Allie didn’t try to make conversation, she didn’t even ask where she was going. She just swept the old newspapers and balls of wool off the passenger seat and turned the radio on. When they reached the outskirts of town she slowed and pulled up outside her great-grandmother’s house. ‘This is where you’d be going, then?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  The old woman came to the door in a dressing-gown. ‘Oh, hello dear. Come in.’

  The house smelt of toast and wet clothes. Her great-grandmother walked to the back door. ‘I’m just clearing up the backyard.’ Allie followed her across the squelching lawn.

  ‘Dan did some cleaning up before he went to work, but it was a rough storm, that one.’ Branches had fallen into the garden, crushing plants and gouging holes in the lawn. The old woman struggled with a branch. ‘I’m sorry we had to leave early the other night. We only just made it back across the bridge as it was. Here, grab the end of this, will you. Did Julia drop you off?’

  ‘No. I came in on my own.’ Allie gripped the grainy wet bark.

  ‘Oh.’ She looked up at Allie. ‘How do you get on with Julia?’

  Allie was silent, then said, ‘She doesn’t talk to me about some…things.’

  The old woman nodded. ‘Apparently she and her father hardly spoke a word in his last years. Someone I know did some nursing, you know community nursing, up at the house before he died and told me that he and Julia barely said a word to each other. She’s never been a great conversationalist, I guess, even when she was a little girl. And he was such a surly man. But so handsome before the accident. So handsome.’ She wiped her hands on her dressing-gown. ‘Oh, this will have to wait for Dan. Come inside, dear.’

  She washed her hands at the kitchen sink. ‘She was taken in by his looks, Bess was. He didn’t charm the boys though. They were set against her taking up with him. A no-hoper, a drifter.’ She tied an apron over her dressing-gown and started slicing a loaf of bread. ‘We did give him the poorest piece of land, you know. Julia was right, but she shouldn’t have brought it up. We didn’t have enough to go carving up the best bits of it. All my boys except Dan had to move away, find their own land or get town jobs, while their sister’s husband worked a piece of their family land. And look what happened in the end, we couldn’t really keep going with what we had.’ She poured boiling water into the teapot and dropped a slice of bread into the toaster. ‘Fried or scrambled?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’ Allie watched her great-grandmother cracking the eggs one-handed like Mae used to and wondered if Julia had told the old woman. Did she carry a picture in her head, too, of the man from the ferry diving in after the mermaid? It was wrong that everyone but Allie had been intimate with Mae’s last breath. The stuffy kitchen filled with the smell of burning butter. The old woman poured the bowlful of yellow eggs into the pan and Allie lay down on the lumpy couch along the kitchen wall. She tried to imagine how it would feel, that last moment, the last snatch of thought before opening your mouth and sucking a wall of water down your throat, solid into the lungs, silent coughing only drawing in more cold salty water.

  ‘Are you all right, dear?’ The old lady was standing over her, her white hair sticking out at angles. She bent down and rested her soft hand on Allie’s forehead.

  She looked up at her great-grandmother’s flesh, at the loose skin, dry and spotted around her neck and jaw. One day the faint warmth in the old woman’s hand would go cold too. The skin would desiccate and shrink from the bones, shred to dust, deep under the ground, the last atoms slowly leaking from the coffin into the heavy wet soil.

  The heaped eggs glistened on the plate that the old woman put on the little table beside her. Outside, there was the sound of kids shouting and cars swishing along the wet road. Cars going somewhere. Everyone but Allie was going somewhere, everyone had a momentum and knew what they were meant to be doing.

  Those last nights that her mother sat out on the roof she told Allie she wasn’t running anymore. Mae had slid her fingers over the dew-damp corrugations, her long fingers slowly tracing the ripples of cool metal. ‘Feel it, Allie. Perfect symmetry. It’s the perfect symmetry of creation.’ Once Allie sat all night on the dark roof with her mother, the city lights laid out before them, the arc of the Harbour Bridge just visible through the buildings. Mae took Allie’s hand in the dark and pressed Allie’s fingertips to her wrist. ‘Can you feel the tick of each moment passing? Here? I’ve never felt each moment passing before, the way it just slides away. There’s a split second when it’s right there, that’s the moment in its fullness. Then we can never have that moment again. It’s gone, it’s dead. A million deaths a day.’

  Allie sat up and took a cup of tea from her great-grandmother who sat in the armchair beside her.

  ‘Are you going to eat your eggs, dear? They’re getting cold.’

  Allie poked a fork into the yellow mound.

  ‘Did your mother have chooks, Allie?’

  �
�No. Our house is in the middle of the city. Our backyard’s the size of your kitchen.’

  ‘Oh. Somehow, I thought you had a proper house, with a garden.’ She drank some tea and balanced the cup and saucer on her lap. ‘This is too crowded for me, down here in town. I can hear the neighbour’s toilet flush. I’d give anything to be back in the valley. Still, what can you do? I couldn’t divide the farm up among the boys, and it wasn’t fair for Dan to be the one getting all the benefit of the place. No, I just sold up and gave the boys a bit each, to help them on their way. Small farms just aren’t viable anymore. God knows what Julia is living on, must be stringing out the last of her father’s life insurance, unless she’s on welfare.’

  Allie drew her hand across her nose, expecting to see bright blood but there was nothing, just a faint smear of mucus. Mae wouldn’t let Allie wipe the blood off her face that night down in the motel. She had pushed her away. ‘Leave me alone, sweetheart.’ In the morning there was a bloody stain on the white pillowcase, and as they left the room, Mae went back and turned the pillow over.

  Allie closed her eyes and let the sounds wash around her, a plane passing overhead, her great-grandmother clattering dishes in the sink and the washing machine spinning in the laundry. Saul had kissed her skin so gently. He had smiled up at her and then touched his lips to her breast. She slipped her hand inside her dress and cupped the weight of her breast. It was a warm and private curve. This was the perfect symmetry of creation. Like the warmth of his body the length of hers.

  She looked up to where her great-grandmother was scooping a mass of pale bread dough out onto the floured table. ‘What was Saul Philips like when he was younger?’

  ‘Saul? Oh, he was a sweet boy you know. Sweet little boy. Actually he was a little girlish when he was young, not that you’d know it now. His father let his hair grow long and curly, because the boy wanted it. But it looked kind of funny. And his clothes were often too small, his father didn’t think to buy him new clothes.’ She started kneading the bread, leaning her weight onto the table. ‘Apparently he did all the cooking at home after his mother died. He baked cakes and boiled up corned beef, the whole thing. I remember he was just wretched when she died, poor mite.’