Salt Rain Read online

  He pulled on his boots and stepped out into the half-light. He knew every turn and rise in the path he had cut to his father’s house. At the dairy, he walked slowly through the gathering cows, their big warm bodies swaying heavily out of his way.

  ‘Hi Dad,’ he called.

  ‘Son. How’d you sleep?’ His father limped across the shed and let another cow into a stall.

  They worked in silence, the rhythmic sound of the milking machine filling the room. When they finished, they stood in the doorway and looked out at the soft morning light.

  His father knocked a clod of mud from his boot. ‘Isn’t the girl the spitting image of her mother? Clarry had told me, but still, I was surprised. God, she used to really unwire your brain, that Mae. I remember how you used to be.’

  ‘Is that so?’ It had taken him a moment to recover every time he caught sight of the girl sitting at the front of the church. She had the same long dark hair and wide mouth as Mae, even the precise curve of cheek.

  His father laughed. ‘She gave you such a hard time. I just hope the daughter’s not too much like her mother.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know…you wouldn’t want the girl to do to some boy what her mother did to you. I imagine folks will be watching for it. I know they will be.’

  ‘Since when are you so up on the valley gossip?’ He shook his head, and his voice rose, ‘You know, what she did is my business. Mine and hers. Nothing to do with you, Dad, and nothing to do with the girl.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, you forget that I was there,’ his father snorted and walked down to the house.

  Saul leaned back against the wall of the dairy, surprised at the heat of his old shame. He had just turned sixteen when his father had stopped him, there in the yard, at the same time of day, as they started to walk back to the house for breakfast.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for you to say something to me. But…’ His father had shaken his head. ‘You’re an idiot. You’re a bloody idiot, you know. It’s obvious to the whole valley that she’s carrying!’

  ‘What?’ Saul, wary of his father’s raised hand, hadn’t understood.

  ‘What do you think you were doing, then? Why the hell didn’t you take precautions? What kind of fool are you?’

  ‘What? Who’s carrying…?’ Then an icy chill had trickled into Saul’s body and he knew what his father meant. He saw it. How her dress had caught on the small mound of her stomach down at the creek the day before, how the fabric shifted over it. Her taut breasts under his tongue.

  ‘Who’s carrying?’ his father laughed and shook his head incredulously. ‘Are you serious? I thought you were smarter than that Saul. A lot bloody smarter.’

  Somehow he had found himself swinging at his father, who was strangely soft and yielding. His fists disappeared somewhere into his father’s body, then the two of them were on the ground, wrestling, and he heard a voice, high and whining, ‘But we never did it. Mae, oh Mae, oh Mae.’ His fist hit the ground over and over, skin and bone jarring on the compacted dirt, then his father was gone and Saul was left lying on the ground by the shed, his eyes wide to the clear morning sky.

  In the afternoon he had waited for her in the shade of the mango tree. She came through the gate flushed with heat, her smile fading when she saw him. ‘What happened to your face?’

  He turned and ran down the hill, the air around him vibrating with the sound of cicadas, and as he ran he tried to forget, for a moment, what his father had told him.

  At the creek she came to stand in front of him, all shining hair and school dress, and took his hands. ‘What happened, Saul?’

  ‘I had a fist-fight with my father.’ He looked down at their hands and then to the cotton dress over her belly. He spat out the words, ‘Were you just going to wait until I figured it out? Why did I have to hear it from my father, like some cheap valley gossip? How could you let me be the last to know?’

  When she spoke he could barely hear her over the creek. ‘I love you. I love you, Saul.’ Those words that he had waited to hear, that he had whispered in her name, holding his hand over his mouth to take them back into himself. ‘It was…someone…at the Show. Just someone at the Show, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Who?’

  She shut her eyes and whispered, he had to lean close to hear, ‘A showman, the man who took people up in his hot-air balloon…remember you were away in Brisbane…’

  The balloon man. One of those men who go around with the fairs, one of those hard-faced men. While Saul had been in Brisbane at his uncle’s funeral, Mae had spread her legs for another man.

  ‘How could you? How could you give some…stranger what you promised me?’ He gripped her shoulders and pressed his mouth hard onto hers. There was the familiar slide of their lips together and breath ragged into each other’s mouth. And then he was pulling her down onto the ground. He could go there too, like the dirty balloon man. The heat ran through him, snaking to his groin. He felt her firm belly under him as he fumbled with his fly and pulled at her underpants.

  Then he looked down at her. Her eyes were shut and she was slowly shaking her head from side to side, grass in her hair and tears sliding down her cheeks. And all he wanted was to cradle her to him, to feel her skin sliding over her fragile bones and the press of her breasts against his chest. He levered himself off and knelt on the grass, his body trembling.

  She got up, brushed the grass from her clothes and walked away, that body he knew so well, her golden legs moving under her school dress and her long dark hair down her back. He called after her, but knew she was too far away to hear, ‘I hate you Mae. Do you hear me? I hate you for this.’ He wanted to punch the balloon man. He wanted his fist to break on the bones of the man’s face. Then she was gone and he was alone by the creek, his belt undone, his cock shrivelling and he thought the sound of the water would send him mad.

  That night he had carried his mattress out into the garden and stretched naked and sweating under an old mosquito net tied to a branch. He woke to the raindrops stroking his cheek like gentle fingers and lay listening to the drops tapping on leaves until the water collected in his navel and the corners of his eyes. He got up and jogged across the grass with the mattress balanced on his head and sat on the verandah in the dark, listening to the rain and waiting for his father.

  A light went on inside and there were footsteps through the house. Every morning since he could remember, he had woken to his father silhouetted in the golden light from the kitchen, a big broad-shouldered shape filling his bedroom doorway.

  His father pushed open the screen door onto the verandah. ‘Been raining long?’

  He shook his head and stood up, avoiding his father’s eyes. They walked down to the dairy in silence, the dog at their heels, his father shining a torch for snakes on the path. While his father started the milking machine, Saul walked slowly around the dark paddock, letting the dog bring in the last sleepy cows. In their stalls, the cows nosed the barley, their udders hanging full and tight. His father passed him a sterilised bucket and he walked up to the end stall to milk by hand the one cow frightened by the machine. Neither man mentioned Mae nor the darkening bruise on Saul’s face but he couldn’t help thinking about her, about where she would be moment by moment, helping her own father with the milking. He leaned his forehead against the cow’s warm flank and tugged at the leathery udder, shooting stream after stream of milk into the foaming bucket. He tried to set his mind on the rhythm of the milking, but still she came to him, and finally he let himself picture her long slim hands on the cow’s teats, her smile as she turned to look at him and spray the warm milk up into his mouth. He remembered her cool wet lips slipping under his and the resistance of her breast against his palm. His hands loosed from the cow and he pressed his face into its side to muffle the sound that came from him.

  chapter eight

  She dreamt that Mae was rowing them up the harbour, oars splashing the oily water, the small dinghy weaving its way into the darkness, t
he tide slowly drawing them towards the Heads. Allie was sitting on the wooden plank seat, looking back to shore, her fear growing with every stroke. Then the drumming on the roof woke her from the dream and she lay, her eyes wide open to the dark, the sound of the rain pressing her down into the mattress. Even though it took hours, Mae loved to row way out towards the mouth of the harbour where the swell was highest and the black water heaved under their little boat. Mae would slither from her clothes and into the water, her skin gleaming in the faint moonlight. Like a slippery fish, she would dive under the dinghy, bumping against it, her pale form blurry underwater.

  ‘Come in sweetheart, come in with me,’ she would call up to where Allie sat clutching the tin sides of the dinghy. Allie knew there were sharks gliding out there, the faint splashes she could hear, their fins slicing the surface.

  ‘Silly. They have nets out there to stop the sharks.’ Mae bobbed up and down and waved her arm towards the lights at the harbour entrance. ‘They have nets. Come on. Be adventurous, Allie. It’s a midnight swim.’

  The last time they went out together, Allie finally slid into the briny water, fear speeding through her as she swam to her mother. Their limbs glided together like warm silk and she clung to Mae’s strong body as the swell lifted them then rolled away into the darkness. Mae pulled away from her and dove straight down, her white feet the last to slip under. Allie felt strangely peaceful, floating alone in the middle of the harbour with nothing but the glinting waves and the small dinghy. In the distance a ferry rumbled its way back to the Quay, its lights spilling onto the dark water. She had no doubt that Mae would reappear, breathless and exultant.

  ‘It’s like flying!’ her mother cried as she burst to the surface. ‘Swimming underwater is like gliding through the air, your hair streaming back, the world way below.’

  Waves came from the darkness and jostled them. ‘How deep is it here, Mum?’

  ‘Deep.’

  ‘How deep?’

  ‘Oh…’ Mae floated on her back, dark nipples pointed, ‘maybe a mile or two deep.’

  Allie clawed her way through the water to the flimsy dinghy, the depths pulling at her frantic legs.

  The rain was singing in the downpipes and falling in thick cords from the gutters. As the weak dawn light entered the house, Allie went to the back door and stood looking out. The dirt would be heavy on Mae’s coffin now, the rain percolating down through the mud to make a sticky red seal on the lacquered wood.

  She walked down the back steps and into the forest. Her dress was soon pasted to her thighs and the rain ran in runnels between her breasts and down the back of her neck.

  As she entered Saul’s clearing, a group of black-faced wallabies thumped a warning with their back feet and bounded away into the gloom of the forest.

  Through the window she could see that his bed was empty, the sheet crumpled to one side. On the verandah table there was an empty coffee mug and a shirt hanging over the back of a chair. She touched her wet hand to the soft cotton of the shirt. She wanted to see the curl of his ear again and the way the corners of his mouth pulled down for a moment before he smiled.

  ‘Is that you Allie?’ He was behind her, at the foot of the stairs in a hooded yellow raincoat, his hand lifted to shield his face from the rain. ‘What are you doing here?’

  She took a step towards him.

  He looked at the shirt in her hand. ‘It’s early to be paying a visit. I’ve only just finished milking.’

  ‘I was just walking. Mum told me about the paths that you and she had.’

  ‘Oh. A lot of them are overgrown now.’ He started up the stairs, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Just go in,’ he gestured towards the door as he hung his raincoat on a hook. ‘It’s not locked.’ He followed close behind her as she walked inside. ‘So, how are you coping with the rain? It’s been pretty full-on, even for this time of the year.’

  At last she was inside his house, in the dim spicy atmosphere, a row of plants along the windowsill, a glowing red leadlight window and a forest of wire sculptures hanging on twine from the high-pitched ceiling.

  He struck a match and lit the gas stove. ‘It’s the wettest it’s been in years. It’s a real early wet this year. My dad reckons we’re heading for one of the big floods.’

  ‘I don’t mind the rain,’ she said. She wanted to explain that the rain, falling day after day, had come to soothe and contain her, that the clouds resting on the steep valley walls held her fast. She made her voice stronger. ‘I do… I like the rain, now.’

  ‘Like your mother.’ He passed her a towel from a pile of folded washing.

  She sat on a chair and pressed her face into the rough towel. Like Mae, she knew the smell of him and the way he slept, his body flung down onto the mattress, the tender white skin of his inner arm exposed.

  ‘How did you sleep last night?’ He stood at the kitchen bench and spooned tea-leaves into the pot.

  ‘I think I heard a baby crying in the night.’ She had lain awake for hours listening to the faint mewling outside, afraid of what she might find if she went to look for it.

  He paused as he poured boiling water into the teapot then looked at her. ‘Might have been a plover. They squawk around in the night.’

  ‘A plover.’

  ‘Or foxes. They can make strange noises. You know, I was surprised that Mae told you about the first time we kissed.’

  ‘Why? Why wouldn’t she tell me?’

  ‘Milk?’ He held up a big glass jug of milk, a layer of yellow cream on the top.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Come out onto the verandah.’ He carried the tray of tea things. ‘I guess I didn’t imagine she would even think about it…’

  ‘She told me lots, like how you danced with her that first time up at the hall, how she felt the muscles of your back under your shirt and how you smelt like soap.’ She spoke slowly, watching the smile flicker at the corners of his mouth. She could read him just like she could read Mae.

  He nodded. ‘She left early, I remember. Her Dad came to pick her up and she was wearing a green dress with no sleeves.’ He smiled and touched his upper arm, ‘I could just see under her arms and the wisps of hair there. Her mum wouldn’t let her shave.’ His dog ran out of the bushes and up the steps to flop at his feet, its coat wet and sticky with grass seeds. ‘Does it help to talk about her? I used to want to talk about Mum but Dad just couldn’t do it. It was too hard for him.’

  He passed her a cup of tea, his fingers big on the delicate saucer. Fingers that had touched the warm flesh of Mae’s pregnant belly, only a thin sheath of skin between him and Allie’s curled body.

  She inhaled the steam from her cup. ‘What did it feel like, her stomach, when she was pregnant?’

  ‘Oh…’ He paused. ‘Firm…and kind of hard.’

  ‘So you touched it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Was she happy to be having me?’

  ‘Was she happy? Oh yes. Yes, she was happy.’ He smiled at her then rubbed a foot across his dog’s belly and looked out to the forest where the misty clouds moved down the valley, snagging on the tallest trees.

  Allie wanted all his memories of Mae. She wanted to know her mother paddling in the waterhole during a storm, her bright face floating above the rain-pocked water, limbs trailing greenly behind her. She wanted to see red mud squeezing between Mae’s toes down by the creek, where she first took his hand under her school dress and held it against the swell of her breast.

  She sat forward. ‘Did you ever meet the balloon man? Did anyone actually meet him?’

  ‘The balloon man again…yeah, he came to a few Shows. I met him.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She was suddenly conscious of the way her wet dress stuck to her body and crossed her arms over her chest. ‘Did you see them together?’

  ‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘I was away… I didn’t find out until later. She di
dn’t tell me until quite a bit later.’ He sat back in his chair and lifted his feet up onto a stool.

  ‘But no-one saw them together, did they?’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘What do you mean?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘People saw them together, Allie. Lots of people.’

  When she was little she imagined the balloon floating high above the crowd at the Showground, tethered to the ground with thick ropes, Mae and a dark-haired man held in the sway of the creaking wicker basket, the great canopy billowing above them and the town’s streets laid out below, the river like a green ribbon tossed on the ground. For a while Mae used to talk about the balloon man a lot, but in that offhand kind of way that Allie had learned meant that she was just trying a story out. Then she simply stopped talking about him.

  He put his tea down, with a slight frown. ‘What gives you this idea that they weren’t really together? Did she say something?’

  ‘No. Not in so many words.’ She watched his face carefully.

  ‘So, what did she say?’

  ‘That she went out with him for a little while.’

  He nodded. ‘Well, there you go.’

  ‘But you were going out with her at the same time. She told me that, too.’

  He looked at her a long moment. ‘Well, I guess that’s also right…’

  She waited for him to say more. The rain suddenly stopped, leaving drifts of cool air and startled calls from birds in the forest. He was silent, looking down at his hands.

  The weave of the cane chair was hard under her thighs and the tea bitter on her tongue. ‘We were waiting for you to come and find us, you know.’

  ‘That’s what you said to me yesterday, isn’t it?’ He sighed. ‘Was she really waiting for me?’

  She nodded slowly.

  His voice was quiet. ‘When was this?’