She stood on the edge of the cliff, where gusts of wind blew the water mist back and the rain pelted her until everything was water, running down her face, gluing her eyelashes together and sliding between her lips.
The water slipped over the edge so easily, it glided like glass over the lip of rock. She was sure that Mae had stood there and wondered what it would be like to take a step, an everyday step out into the air.
How long had her mother waited at Allie’s door before she went down to the harbour that night? How long had she stood there, in the dark hallway, listening to her breathe, like she did when Allie was a baby? In the morning Allie had woken to the banging on the front door and from her bed saw Tom coming down the stairs, buttoning his pants. He had opened the door and there was the rumbling of male voices. She remembered Tom’s singlet was nubbly on her skin where he crushed her against him and she noticed that his wrist was pale where his watch normally sat. He shuddered against her and she didn’t realise until later that he was crying. The fisherman standing at the front door beside the policeman had smiled at her, a fleeting smile until he looked away and smoothed his pants. She had fixed her eyes over the man’s head, on the patch of sky framed in the doorway, an early morning pale blue. She had thought that if the sun was coming up as usual, everything would be okay. She had convinced herself that things must be all right if the sun was shining over the whole wide city.
Allie found the path back down from the escarpment and started running, barely staying upright, her feet sinking into the leaf litter. It was as if she were just staying ahead of a chasm opening in the ground behind her. At the bottom of the valley she followed the small flooded creek towards Saul’s place, and stepped from rock to deep silty mud, struggling through sodden banks of reeds. The curves in the creek were flooded over, the water flowing swift and brown, fence posts and tree trunks slicing the satiny surface. She shut her eyes to the rain. Rain and mud. That’s all there was in the end. Ashes to dust to dirt to mud. Mae was everywhere. She was the red mud being washed down into the swollen creek, her mother slipping through her fingers again.
She lay on his back verandah and waited. When she heard his car pulling up and the front door banging shut, she stood up and let her feet take her to him. He gave her a dry T-shirt and shorts and pulled the sticky black leeches from her ankles. He washed her scratches, the cotton wool and warm water like balm on her skin, bloody water trickling down her leg into a bowl. He carefully stretched a Band-Aid over the cut on her calf.
Lightning and thunder rolled around the valley and there was the seamless sound of the rain, on and on, filling every crevice in the room, stopping every thought before it began. His hair was soaking wet and she could see through the strands of black to his pale scalp. One curling slick of hair brushed his ear, a drop of water quivering at its tip.
When she leaned forward and kissed him, he pulled back for a second, then there was the soft muscle of his lips moving against hers, his whiskers scratching her chin and his hand cupping the side of her head.
chapter eighteen
Julia sat on the couch in the dim light of her living room, for the first time afraid that the thin layer of roofing tin between her and the rain would not be enough.
Allie had been gone for hours. Julia had woken to an empty house, her own bed neatly made, Allie’s not slept in. She had walked down the road in the rain and stood by the side of the raging creek. It was just passable and she could see the tracks of Saul’s tyres in the mud on the other side.
She hated how her words had spilled over Saul last night, looking for some absolution that could never be given, least of all by him. The night that Mae telephoned her, Julia had hung up the phone and gone back to bed and simply waited. It seemed she had spent years of her life lying in bed, waiting. Waiting for Mae to sneak back in from Saul’s, waiting for the baby to come, waiting for Mae to contact her, waiting for her father to die. Waiting for the forest to consume her.
There was a loud noise at the verandah door. A pigeon was fluttering wildly against the glass, panicking in the storm. She went out onto the verandah and shooed the bird back out into the wind and rain. After her father died, Neal would come to the door at dusk. He would appear without a sound, used to moving silently after years of living in the forest, and he would wipe his feet and knock, an incongruous sight with his long beard and hand raised, tapping formally on the door. She missed the sense that he was just out there in the forest, only a ten-minute walk away. He showed her the cave the first time they made love. She had followed him in silence along the forest track, just the crackling of the heated bush around them and small birds flitting though the undergrowth. They climbed hundreds of metres up a steep slope to the cave, where snakes had left their sinuous trails on the sandy floor and swallows peered from small mud nests. They sat and looked out at the sea of trees below. The dark rainforest and bright green camphors. For hours it seemed they sat there, the sounds of birds and distant farm machinery rising from the valley. He had unbuttoned her shirt as if he had never seen buttons, as if he were figuring out how to work them. His body over hers had been so big, his broad square shoulders and muscular arms. The sand shifted under her and the breeze coming up from the valley brushed against her bare skin.
She grabbed her raincoat from its hook and hurried down the steps into the house paddock. Two days ago she had planted a silky oak right into the faint furrow where her father’s tractor had rolled. Her mother had got there first and dragged him across to the house, leaving a trail of blood in the grass and dirt. Julia remembered standing on the verandah looking down at him while her mother called up to her and Mae to help carry him to the car. He had looked like a snail crushed on the cement path, broken and oozing juice.
She stood in the paddock and turned in a slow circle, listening. The roaring of the creek echoed around the valley as if it were flowing right by the house. There was something frighteningly relentless about the way the creek was rising this time, the water stronger and rougher than it had been for years.
Two nights before Allie was born, Julia and Mae had lain in their beds, listening to the boulders crashing down at the creek. Mae was curled on her side and had lifted her nightdress so Julia could lay her hand on the taut warm skin and feel the shape of the baby underneath. That warmth, that quickening, was Allie.
Julia hadn’t touched Mae’s belly before, horrified by the way it had stretched and stretched until it seemed her skin would split. Everything at home seemed normal, the milking went on every day and preparations for Christmas had started but in the midst of it all there was Mae’s belly swelling grotesquely, ignored by everyone.
When Mae’s contractions started in the middle of the night, her mother came into their room and sat on Mae’s bed. ‘It’s okay. This is normal, sweetheart.’
Mae’s face was pale. ‘But how am I going to get to the hospital?’
‘The flood waters are going down. You won’t have the baby yet, that’s quite a few hours off, I’d say. Just try and get some rest.’
Mae had walked around the house through the night. She wouldn’t sit. She wouldn’t take the cups of tea her mother offered. Dawn came and their father called Julia out to the bottom paddocks to help move the cattle up to the higher ground. She hated it, slipping in the mud and manure, cows’ tails flicking her with watery shit.
Mae’s contractions came and went all morning and she drifted in and out of sleep. After lunch their mother sent Julia down to the creek to check the water level, even though they all knew that with the rain so heavy there was no way it would have dropped.
Julia woke the second night to Mae screaming, ‘Get me the doctor!’ Mae and her mother were in the kitchen, the lights blazing on Mae where she leaned her elbows on the table, retching. Her mother was calmly stroking Mae’s back until Mae started sobbing that something was wrong with the baby. ‘It’s dying, I can feel it. It’s dying. It’s not going to come out.’
Her mother looked up at Julia. ‘Go a
nd get your raincoat, quick.’
Julia was pulling her coat down when her father came in from checking on the cattle. He saw Mae curled on the floor and walked right into the house in his gumboots, red mud on the lino. He bent down and picked her up. ‘Right, I’m driving her in.’
‘You won’t get over the town bridge. Don’t even try.’ Her mother took hold of his elbow but he brushed her off and carried Mae through the rain to the truck.
Julia and her mother stood on the verandah watching the tail-lights disappear. Her mother’s voice was flat. ‘Go to bed Julia. Get some sleep.’
Julia was standing by the little silky oak sapling when she heard the tree fall. It began like a distant gunshot, piercing the sound of the rain and the creek. Then came the long dull roaring of the tree ripping through the forest canopy, tearing down other trees and vines. On her walks Julia had seen the massive trees lying in the forest, shattered limbs all around and a bright gaping hole in the canopy above.
Petal came running up the dark paddock not even two minutes later, barefoot and eyes wild. She grabbed hold of Julia’s arm, her hands cold. ‘A tree smashed my van, a great fucking trunk right through the middle of it.’
Julia looked across to the wall of forest and felt a wash of fear.
‘I pissed myself. I nearly died. And now everything is getting soaked, all my clothes and books.’
She followed Petal to the van. Lightning showed flashes of metal folded and crumpled under the pale tree trunk.
Petal pulled on Julia’s arm, ‘Come and help me get my stuff.’
Julia shook her head. ‘Not now. Not in a storm. Not after a tree has fallen.’ She could hear how high and thin her voice was. ‘There are others it will have destabilised. They could fall too.’ She started walking back to the house, wishing she were already safely inside.
‘Nooo Julia. Come and help me!’ Petal was right behind her.
Julia climbed the stairs and went straight into the bathroom. ‘I’m running you a bath,’ she called to Petal. She had to strike the match three times before it took and as she held the tiny flame to the woodchips in the heater, she remembered Mae striking match after match in their cubby hole at the top shed, letting the flame go right down to her finger and thumb, the smell of burning flesh in the air.
chapter nineteen
The moment that his skin touched hers, it was as if she knew it already, like she was recalling it from some other time, the air moving by her skin as he carried her down the hallway, the sheets soft under her, his lips on her, in her. She tasted him and already knew the warm saltiness. At last she was inside the experience she had been outside of for so long. She could taste his tongue, like rain, like blood, inside her head. He was inside her.
She kept her eyes shut, to better feel every fold of the sheet he had spread over her and to hear the faint sounds of him moving through the house, turning a tap on, clinking a glass, speaking to his dog. There was still the trace of his hands on her body, where his fingers had pressed into her, where his hair had brushed her shoulder. She could taste his warm breath and smell him. She pulled the sheet over her shoulder against the rain spitting in through the open window. The breeze moved across her skin like cool water. The currents must have been so gentle, cradling the little Islander girl as she floated out to sea, the fish all around her, the tiny phosphorescent fish swimming in the tangle of her long hair as if it were seaweed, brushing against her with their silken scales. The sailor had cradled the little girl on his lap all the way back to the Navy ship, holding her tight against him, in case she was a dream.
She woke to Saul sitting on the bed beside her. He was dressed in his work clothes and had his raincoat in his hand. ‘Hey, Allie. I’ve got to go up to Dad’s. You’d better get home. There’s a huge bank of clouds coming down the valley. Take care crossing Little Banana Creek.’ He smiled and rested his hand on her hip for a moment and then he was gone before she was awake enough to find words. She curled back into his soft bed, waiting for the storm. It came in a rattling blast of wind, then she dressed and moved out into it, lifting her face to the stinging rain.
The boulders at the little creek were already underwater. There was no way across so she turned and pushed back through the dripping bush to the road.
Halfway home Julia’s car appeared in the distance. Allie stood and waited for her.
Julia leaned over to open the door. ‘Get in. I didn’t know where you were.’ She carefully turned the car around on the narrow road. ‘What are you wearing’?
‘Saul’s clothes. Mine are at his place.’
‘Really.’ Julia’s voice was dry. ‘You don’t know how crazy it is to go out in a storm like this. And Saul obviously didn’t bother to tell you. Petal’s van is smashed by a tree.’
‘Is she okay?’
‘Yeah. She’s at home, making dinner.’
Allie looked up at the silvery gums along the road. She couldn’t imagine them crashing down. They were still and serene in the grey light, as unchanging as the falling rain.
Julia slowly steered the car into the muddy water rushing over the causeway. It looked deep to Allie and she felt the water pulling at the car as Julia drove across, the engine churning, a deep wake behind them.
Petal’s clothes were strung around the house, bright lace hanging from the rope across the living room, satiny slips and skirts on the back of dining chairs. She called to Allie from the kitchen, ‘I rescued some stuff, even though Miss Julia, the logger’s granddaughter, forbade me.’
Allie and Petal ate scrambled eggs on their laps in the bedroom, a candle on the floor between them, while Julia was outside with a torch, throwing bricks onto the tin roof of the potting shed and wrestling plastic guards around the trees she had planted that day.
Allie put her plate down and curled onto the hard mattress, her body aching. Mae had said that the young American sailor wept as he made love to her. Allie could imagine crying while Saul moved over her, the heat of his breath on her cheek.
Petal lay back and put her legs up the wall. ‘You know, after the tree fell, it groaned, this…sound came from inside it. Julia says they feel pain, that all plants hurt when we kill them. It was like a huge body, a massive fucking corpse lying on top of my poor van.’ She slid her legs down the plaster and rolled over to face Allie. ‘You were at Saul’s all day, huh?’
‘No, I went up to the waterfall first.’ He might be back at his house by now, standing in his room, looking for the imprint of her body on the sheets. She reached under the bed for the wire face and lay back, tracing the lines of the mouth.
‘That’s one of Saul’s!’
‘Yeah.’ The wire was smooth under her finger.
‘She doesn’t like you seeing him, you know. She was steaming around the house before she went to get you. Why does it rile her up so bad?’
‘She’s jealous.’
Petal raised her eyebrows, ‘Jealous? Is this another one of your theories?’
Allie shrugged her shoulders. ‘Tell me how you felt after the first time you had sex, with your brother’s friend.’
Petal let out a long breath, ‘Ohhhh…’ She raised herself up onto one arm. ‘Bloody hell…is that what’s been going on? You and Saul?’
‘That’s not what I meant!’
‘So what did he say to get to you, the crafty devil?’
‘It’s not like that. You don’t understand.’ She rolled over, her back to Petal. She wished she were in his bed, not here with the windows rattling in their frames and branches worrying the roof. She wished that he had kissed her goodbye.
Petal came to kneel beside her bed and the candle threw her wavering shadow onto the wall. ‘Hey, don’t pout. It’s fine by me. Why should I have a problem with it? I wouldn’t tell anyone else about it, though, if I were you. You know what the valley’s like. They won’t think well of you or him for it. By the way, I found out a bit more for you. His wife’s name is Freya. Danish name. But they’re well and truly over. Just though
t you’d like to know.’ She walked out, quietly pulling the door closed behind her.
chapter twenty
Saul leaned against the cow’s warm flank. All afternoon he had a worming feeling in his guts whenever he remembered being with her. In the seconds before he came, he’d had a moment of clarity. He had seen her beneath him, and seen in her pale slender body every way she was not like Mae. Oh Christ what was he doing? Even as he tried to push himself off her, his body had surged forward and he clumsily pulled out, spilling into his hand, onto the sheets, onto her skin. He had wanted to get up, to lurch away from the bed, but there he was, leaning on one hand, suspended in shame and disbelief. Had he really pushed his cock into Mae’s baby? Oh God.
He turned the dairy lights on and shovelled cow pats out into the dark rain then hosed down the concrete floor. He focused on the sensation of his muscles sliding over his bones, the sensation of honest work, of doing the right thing. He pulled the hood of his raincoat over his head and jogged down to the house. On the verandah he could smell dinner. Iris had come up through the rain to tell him she was keeping a plate warm for him. He called in the door, ‘I’m off. I’m not hungry, thanks anyway. See you tomorrow!’ He ran down the stairs before they could urge him in.
Walking away from the golden light of the farmhouse into the darkening bush, he couldn’t help sinking into that part of him that wanted to remember the feel of Allie’s body. And Mae’s body. Their flesh, their softness, their hair. He leaned against a tree and masturbated into the darkness, feeling sick.
At his house there were car headlights shining across the lawn and a figure standing on the verandah. It couldn’t be Allie, she didn’t drive. He stood in the dark of the forest path, trying to see who it was. He didn’t want a visitor, but started crossing the clearing, his torch lighting the way.
Salt Rain Page 13
