Salt Rain (4 page)

‘The guy that was here just now?’

‘Yeah.’

Allie’s voice rose with indignation. ‘Why didn’t he say something?’

Julia shrugged. ‘I guess he didn’t know it was you or… I don’t know. I’m sorry. I would have introduced you but I could see Marion was panicking. I was just trying to get the wires tied off and bring her over.’

Allie knew that the flood when she was born had nearly washed away the town and filled the little hospital with water. Countless times she had pictured the patients on their trolleys, leaving a wake as they were wheeled down the corridor, while all around them bandages and stethoscopes and vases of flowers bobbed in the muddy water. Mae’s bed was an island, her legs in the air, her private parts covered with a sheet, the doctor standing at the end of the bed in his gumboots. That very doctor. Mae told her that the rain had been so loud on the tin roof that she couldn’t hear herself scream. No-one came to visit her, not her own mother, not Julia. Not even the First Love. No-one except her teacher, Mrs Brickner, who brought five de-thorned yellow roses wrapped in a wet tissue and tinfoil and stayed for just five minutes. Mae had got up in the middle of the first night and waded up to the nursery to stand looking at the two babies lying in their cribs. Two babies born in a flood. She told Allie that she couldn’t tell which was her baby. She couldn’t even remember if she had birthed a boy or a girl.

While Julia was planting down the paddock, Allie walked from room to room of the house. When they had come up for her grandfather’s funeral, it was unsettling to see her mother so at home there. Mae had moved confidently to a drawer in the wooden sideboard to get soup spoons, and when she lit the woodchip water heater for Allie’s bath, she had reached without looking to the top of the bathroom cabinet for matches.

Allie knelt down and touched the floorboards, soft and satiny from the stroke of her mother’s feet. Mae had walked across these boards the day she met him, and then on the day of the first kiss. Later, quietly, she had carried the hidden weight of Allie through this very room.

It was still raining, the clouds low over the house. Allie stood in the doorway to Julia’s room and wished she were at the little fishing town down south, lying back on the burning white beach with Mae, their wet bodies caked with fine sand and shell grit. Mae had showed her how to dive down and claw her fingers into the sandy bottom while the waves crashed over them and dragged at their trailing legs. Perhaps Mae had gone back to the same motel and was stretched out on one of those sagging beds, gritty sand on the sheets and the sound of the ocean loud through the night.

Julia’s bed was a square of patchwork in a sea of papers and books and jars of seeds. Allie looked inside the wardrobe but it was almost empty, just three pairs of worn jeans on hangers and work shirts folded neatly in a pile, her bras stacked, the big cups fitting into each other. Papers on the dressing table were weighted with river rocks, each one labelled in texta,
Seed Collection, Propagation
and
Local Weeds.
Allie picked up a notebook from the bedside table. The latest entry read,
Train tickets $100, taxis $25, tea on train $2.

She had seen her mother setting off on one of her train trips once. Allie was coming home from school early and caught sight of Mae standing on the next platform at Circular Quay station, gently swinging her handbag as she waited. It was the look on her mother’s face that had surprised her, the transparent excitement. Mae had once told her that catching random trains was the perfect kind of gambling. After her mother’s train left, Allie had climbed the stairs to the other platform and went right to where her mother had stood. The next train to come along rattled its way out through the suburbs. She let her eyes blur the houses as she sped past, hundreds of people left behind, the train like an arrow to somewhere. She waited for the impulse to get off, wondering whether Mae did the same, standing by the carriage door, letting it begin to close before she slipped out onto the small station in the middle of bare cow paddocks. Allie stood at the end of the empty platform in the cool afternoon air and watched the train tracks disappearing into the distance.

There was the sound of someone walking up the verandah steps. Allie put Julia’s notebook back and from the bedroom door watched Petal wipe her bare feet on the mat and step inside, letting the screen door bang behind her.

‘Oh, there you are. Julia said you were up here. Do you want to come for a swim?’

‘In the rain?’

‘That’s the best time. We’ll go to one of the little side creeks.’ Petal picked up one of the biscuits cooling on a cake rack and took a bite. ‘She’s such a good cook.’

‘Brown sugar shortbreads. My mother makes them too.’ She walked over to the table. Julia had forgotten to press a fork into the top of the pale discs. ‘Can you explain to me where Saul lives?’

Petal smiled and brushed crumbs from around her mouth. ‘What’s your interest in Saul Philips?’

Allie could hear Julia coming in the back door. She picked up a warm shortbread and held it to her nose. ‘Mae’s got all her recipes in her head. She can only remember them when she’s right there cooking. Once a neighbour asked her to write the fruitcake recipe down and she had to make it to remember it. When she was a girl she used to make a fruitcake for the Show every year. They each cooked one, her and Julia, to enter in the kid’s section and everyone thought they cheated and got help from their mother and grandmother, but Mae said that they’d send them out of the kitchen onto the verandah and do it completely on their own.’

‘Why do you call your mother Mae?’

Allie put the shortbread down. ‘She prefers it.’

Julia spoke from the laundry door. ‘She talked to you about our fruitcakes?’

Allie shrugged her shoulders. She had always felt whispers of jealousy when Mae talked about Julia. ‘Little Julia’ she sometimes called her, even though Julia was taller than Mae and only two years younger.

‘Why don’t you enter anything in the Show now, Julia?’ Petal picked up another shortbread.

Julia laughed as she dropped a basket of rough-skinned bush lemons onto the table. ‘You think the judges pick the best cake, Petal? I was just formalising it by doing it randomly. My system was a lot fairer. The year that Mae and I won, Grandma must have been owed a favour.’

‘Mae said you won heaps of times,’ said Allie. ‘She got first and you got second.’

Julia chewed on her bottom lip and tipped the lemons out. ‘Well, it was a while ago…’

‘It’s good you’re staying longer, Allie,’ Petal said. ‘They say you’re not a real valley person until you’ve endured a wet season.’

‘Who told you I’m staying longer?’ Allie glared at her aunt.

Julia shook her head, her voice quiet, ‘Don’t, Allie…don’t…’

‘And how will you stop me, Julia? You have no right.’

Julia walked across to the kitchen sink and filled the kettle with water. ‘She’s a real valley person, Petal. She was born in a flood. If you like, Allie, we can go down to Sydney together in a few weeks. For a visit.’ She turned the oven on. ‘I’m making a lemon meringue pie. Do you want to squeeze the lemons?’

‘You can’t stop me!’ Allie pushed past Petal and out onto the verandah. The next day, she would be down at the train station, buying her ticket home. Tom had given her fifty dollars on the day that Mae disappeared. He had discreetly pressed it into her hand in the kitchen before leaving her with the policeman.

Petal came and found her where she stood under the mango tree, rain dripping around her. ‘So, are you coming for a swim?’

‘I don’t have my swimmers.’

Petal smiled and squeezed Allie’s arm. ‘Who said anything about swimmers?’

Inside the forest, it was cool and dark. She followed close behind Petal, along the narrow path layered thick with wet decaying leaves. There was the same dank earthiness she had smelt down at the creek and rain dripped on them from the high canopy of trees and looping vines. Birds fluttered through the branches as they passed. They came out onto a big boulder at the edge of a creek and Petal rolled up her towel and tucked it under a small rock overhang. ‘What’s going on with you and Julia?’

‘She’s just got something against my mum. She wants me to stay here. I guess she’s lonely.’

‘You reckon she’s lonely?’ Petal shucked off her dress and dived in. Her body was tanned and firm, different to Mae’s soft voluptuousness. Allie counted out loud as Petal swam underwater to the far end of the waterhole. It was her job to time Mae as she swam the length of the local baths in one breath, her body an arrow, hair billowing with each surge forward.

Petal surfaced at the far end and tipped her head back under the small waterfall, where the water rushed over a lip of rock before slowing and spreading into the wide pool, the surface marked with raindrops.

Allie took off her dress and jumped from the rock. The chill of the water took the day’s heat from her in a second. She breathed out, sinking slowly, eyes open to the greenish water. There was no earthly pull on her body, just a slow drifting down, a stream of bubbles trailing to the surface. She couldn’t help picturing Mae underwater, her hair waving in the harbour currents, the shadow of the dinghy far above. Suddenly her heart was pounding and there was no air left in her lungs and she jabbed her feet deep into fine oozing silt to find the bottom and push to the surface.

She looked around for Petal, who called, ‘Come over here. You can see the pointy mountain behind Julia’s place. Hermit’s Bluff. Some guy lives up there in a shack. Almost never comes into town. I can’t get her to admit it but someone told me that Julia has a thing going with him.’

From where Allie floated on her back, her heart still beating hard, the tree trunks seemed to lean over the creek, tilting at precarious angles, crowding out the small window of sky overhead. The light was fading and the forest path they came along had disappeared into shadow. She paddled over to Petal. ‘Saul Philips was my mother’s first love.’

‘Oh really?’ Petal raised her eyebrows.

‘So he lives at the end of the valley?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Where exactly? Tell me where he lives.’

‘On his father’s place…well, beyond his father’s house, further along the creek. In a little cabin.’

‘And is he married?’ He couldn’t be. She had always imagined him waiting too.

‘No. Not married. At least not at the moment. I don’t know people’s history. I’ve only been here a little while.’ She reached over and stroked Allie’s shoulder underwater, ‘Doesn’t this water make your skin feel soft?’ She touched her own arm, ‘So is your mother coming up too?’

‘No. I’m going back. She’s at home, or will be soon.’ She followed Petal up onto the big rock that was warm and slick with rain. Perhaps this was Mae’s kissing rock.

Petal sat up and started plaiting her hair. ‘You’re an outsider until you’ve been here at least thirty years, or so everyone keeps telling me.’

‘I was born here. Well, in town.’

‘Yes, but you went away. So I don’t know what that makes you. Julia would know about Saul, wouldn’t she? Ask her. And tell me what you find out.’

‘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?’