Salt Rain (20 page)

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.’

The yeasty smell of bread dough filled the room, moist, fecund. Allie ran her hand down over her breasts to her belly. Her body felt super-heated and sweat was soaking her dress. Their skin had felt like it would melt together with the heat and sweat. Mae had once told her that the moment of sex she liked best was just as the penis slipped in, when the empty space filled. Allie knew she could go back and make him do it again, it was so easy the first time and she had seen the softness in his eyes as they sat on the verandah steps and he tried to tell her that it was wrong. She wished that he had stood up to Julia, that he had stood up to her because he wanted Allie more than anything else. Her before all else.

The old woman slapped the mass of dough down on the table. ‘He went a bit odd after he and Mae broke up. He left a wire thing on Bess’s verandah, a kind of wire sculpture of a heart, you know, a love heart, but it was all wrapped in barbed wire. They never showed it to Mae. It was a nasty tangle of rusty barbed wire. I think it made him a little crazy, what happened.’ She sighed. ‘I think it made us all a little crazy.’

‘You would have to be crazy to kill yourself, wouldn’t you?’

The old woman leaned on the table and considered her before saying, ‘You’re talking about your mother?’

Allie nodded.

‘Did Julia tell you?’

‘I overheard her.’

The old woman sat down at the table. ‘Oh dear… You know, no-one knows for certain. It may be that it’s not true, I mean, they don’t really know.’

Allie could barely speak, her throat was closing. ‘No. They’re right.’ If her throat closed completely, she wouldn’t be able to breathe.

‘Here.’ Her great-grandmother came over and sat on the couch beside her, and pulled her into a tight hug with floury hands. Her apron was damp and she had a musty smell.

The back door opened and Julia stepped inside, kicking her boots out the door. ‘I thought you might be here.’

The old woman stroked Allie’s hair. ‘She’s got a fever, Julia, feel her temperature.’

Julia’s face loomed large over her, the bony nose and lank hair. Her hand was heavy on Allie’s forehead.

‘Don’t touch me Julia!’ She brushed her aunt’s arm away. ‘You had no right to go and talk to him. It’s none of your business.’

They moved her to the bed in the spare room, onto the cool, musty sheets. She wondered if Julia looked for evidence of Saul on her body as she tied Allie’s sweat-soaked hair up into a band and peeled off her dress. Her great-grandmother sponged her with tepid water.

She drifted in and out of sleep, the heat moving through her. Julia sat in the dappled sunlight by the window and as the afternoon passed, the light faded until it was nearly dark in the small room.

Her aunt’s voice was quiet. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you what the police said. I didn’t think it was the right time. I couldn’t… I didn’t think you could handle knowing that about your mum… No-one ever looked after her. That’s all I’m trying to do. Look after you. I’m trying to second-guess what she would want…but you were right when you said I don’t really know her. So it’s just mad wild guesses. I’m sorry. Just guesses.’

Allie could hear the blood pumping around her body, the squelching sound as it was propelled through her arteries. She didn’t need Julia to look after her, she didn’t need anyone to look after her. She was like Mae, she could get on the next train and leave them all behind.

‘Even when we were kids I didn’t know her,’ Julia said. ‘Even when we slept together…did she tell you that when we were little we used to sleep in the same bed? She would crawl in with me in the middle of the night and we curled up together like spoons, until they started smacking her for it. They threatened to put her out in the back sunroom on her own. So she went back to her own bed.

‘She never even told me she was pregnant. I just found out when Mum guessed. She didn’t tell Saul either. The kids were whispering it up and down the school bus every single day…and she just let him find it out, so she lost him as well. It didn’t have to be so complicated…’

Allie turned in the bed, her great-grandmother’s nightie and the sheets under her were damp and hot. She stretched her body along the cool wall beside the bed and let it take some of the heat from her. She couldn’t see her aunt’s lips moving in the dim light and sometimes she wasn’t sure if Julia was really talking.

‘Mae understood what I wanted to do with the trees though, when she came back for Dad’s funeral, when you both came back. I’d started planting them in the bottom paddocks before he died. Just planting up the far corners so no-one would notice and tell him. I even thought about moving a fence line, bringing it in so I could plant on the other side and pretend it was the forest’s land. Mae was the only one to get it, other than Neal. She really understood that it’s about returning to natural order. I told her that you really can recreate a rainforest in a bare paddock. It takes a hundred years, or maybe a couple of hundred years, but it happens, tree by tree by tree.’ Julia’s clothes rustled as she moved in her chair. ‘Neal lives up near the bluff. In a little tin shack. I don’t really talk to anyone about him, but you’ll meet him when he comes back from up north. He collected my very first seeds for me. He wouldn’t come to the house when Dad was alive, he’d just leave them down in the dairy in old jars, with little notes about what the tree was, and a sketch of how it would look when it was mature.’ She leaned forward. ‘How’s your temperature?’ Her hand was warm and steady on Allie’s forehead. ‘That feels better. Drink some more water.’

Allie’s neck shook with the strain of lifting to drink from the glass that Julia held up. She sank back onto the bed and curled up, her back to her aunt, surprised at the comfort she felt letting Julia’s words wash around her.

‘Do you know who built Neal’s shack originally? My father. Dad hated people to know that when he came to the valley he was a hobo. He came over to the coast after his father’s farm was repossessed and he built a tin shack in the forest and got a job at Grandpa’s sawmill. He bathed in the creek every evening and my mother did his laundry for him. But he would never admit to it. Mum told me.’

Allie’s voice came out quiet. ‘You shouldn’t have gone to see him, you know. It’s just between me and him, and you’ve scared him off.’

‘He was already going to come to you and say…’

‘You should never have even got involved! She wouldn’t have. Mae wouldn’t have. She would have let us be.’

‘She wouldn’t have got involved? I can hardly believe it, Allie.’

‘Believe it. That’s not the kind of thing she worried about.’

‘Oh Allie, I don’t know how to look after you.’

‘I don’t need looking after.’

Julia leaned forward. ‘I don’t want people talking about you like they used to talk about Mae. They used to say it, just because she was beautiful, you know. The men used to say it. They wanted her and she played up to them, the stupid fool. She led them on and flattered them, the old farmers, Dad’s friends. She flirted with them, then she’d lie in bed at night, laughing, imitating them ogling her. And some day they’d realise that she was taking the micky out of them and they’d start to badmouth her. She was too much for the valley, you know… Sometimes I’ve thought she took my share of liveliness too, it’s as if she got it all…’ Julia fell silent.

There was the sound of pans clanking in the kitchen and the rumble of a male voice. It must be Dan home from work. The heat had passed and Allie felt empty and hollow, her body curled around the space inside her. She tried to conjure the sensations she felt after making love to Saul—she had been so full, bursting from her skin—but they were gone. She was as light and insubstantial as that night she stood on the stairs and faced Tom and he had moved her to one side like a paper doll. How on earth had Mae thought that Allie could stop him?

‘You know…’ Allie’s mouth was dry, ‘I could have followed her and stopped her.’

‘What do you mean? How could you have done anything?’

She shut her eyes. She could have pinned Mae to the footpath. She could have laid down on her mother’s body with the weight of her own and kept her from the harbour.

Julia’s voice was close. ‘You once said that Mae and Tom had an argument the night before she…went out…before she drowned. What happened?’ Her aunt was kneeling by the bed. ‘Was he rough?’

His hands on Allie had been firm, not rough. But what were the shapes of his hands when he went in to Mae? How had their bodies collided to make the sounds that paralysed Allie where she lay in bed, fingers stuffed into her ears? ‘He was rough.’

There had been such a mild look in Tom’s eyes, just a casual glance up at her as he rubbed at the blood on the floor with his handkerchief, the policeman only a few metres away in the kitchen. Then he had neatly folded the hanky and put it back in his pocket, stained with the blood and grey dust from the floorboards.

‘She phoned me that night, from a phone box,’ Julia was whispering. ‘She said she wanted me to come down, to take care of you…’ She stroked Allie’s hair back from her face.

Mae in a phone box somewhere, thinking of Allie, speaking Allie’s name. ‘What did she say?’

‘She asked me to go to Sydney, to get you and bring you back up here.’

Was she still thinking of Allie as she fitted the oars into the rowlocks and pushed off from the pier? And while she was rowing? It must have taken her hours to get out to the Heads, rowing close to the harbour shoreline, slowly passing hundreds of people sleeping in their beds and the silent yachts at private jetties.

‘Did she say she was going out in the dinghy?’

‘No. No…she didn’t say anything like that.’

Allie had pretended to be asleep when her mother came and stood at her door. She lay there, hating Mae for asking her to stop Tom and for making her listen to it all, the crashing furniture, the thump of a body against the wall and the same old scraping of the bed. Car headlights coming down the road shone into the room and she could see the marks on her mother’s face, but she didn’t see the blood until the next morning. She found the half-dried drops inside her door only a few seconds before Tom did and then he was on his knees, wiping them away. The last of her mother on his handkerchief, folded into his pocket, to be washed down some laundry drain.

Allie knew that when Mae stood at her door for those few minutes, while that random scattering of drops fell to the floor, it wouldn’t have occurred to Mae to take the four steps across the room and reach down to wake her daughter. Because she had always done things on her own. She had always left Allie behind. She had always left her behind when she caught those trains to anywhere and got off in some new country town, phoning in the afternoon and telling Allie to go down to the neighbour’s for the night. Mae would have turned and gone out the front door without thinking to wake her.

Julia must have left the room while Allie slept. She woke later to darkness, and when she got up her head was light and her feet uncertain on the floor. She opened the bedroom door and her great-grandmother’s voice came from the kitchen. ‘And why would you wait all this time? Years and years. It doesn’t make sense to me. What are you trying to do?’

Julia’s voice was faint. Allie could picture her, leaning back in her chair, stubborn chin dropped, her voice quiet. ‘I can’t believe I am the only one who had any idea. I don’t think it works like that…’ She started mumbling and Allie couldn’t make out the words.

‘It doesn’t work like that because it’s not true, Julia.’

Their voices disappeared under the clatter of crockery and a running tap. Allie crept down the hall, past doors opening into dark rooms, towards the light of the kitchen.

The old woman’s voice became clear, ‘…and it’s not fair to spread stories that could destroy a family.’

‘I saw it!’ Julia was almost shouting. ‘With my own eyes. How can you call it a story? Am I a liar now? I was there.’

‘Keep your voice down! You’ll wake Dan and Allie.’

Allie inched further along the hall until she could see into the kitchen and the two women sitting at the table, blue light coming from a small lamp, a mosquito coil burning on the windowsill. She leaned against the wall, her breath shaky, waiting for whatever they were going to say next. She thought of Saul’s steady breath while he slept.

‘You know Grandma, I’d hoped that when I told you, you would say to me, “Yes, I thought there was something going on too and I was also too afraid to do anything.” I was hoping that I wasn’t the only one…’ Julia’s chair scraped on the floor as she stood up. ‘So you think the story will destroy the family, do you? I think the fact of it has already done the job. Look! I’m all that’s left.’

Allie hurried back down the hall and out the door onto the wet lawn where she stood, her heart racing.

She could hear her great-grandmother going into the bathroom, the pipes clanking and the old woman muttering to herself. Allie’s mouth was dry. She sat down on a lawn chair as the back door opened and light flooded onto the grass.

Julia leaned against the doorframe as she took her socks off and came down the steps and across the lawn. She sat on the chair beside Allie and opened a pouch of tobacco. ‘I haven’t smoked for years.’ Her fingers were clumsy as she started rolling a cigarette. ‘I was just thinking about how much she loved you. She told me that from the moment she guessed she was pregnant, she loved you. There was a real…ferocity in it. A fierce love.’