Salt Rain by Sarah Armstrong Read Free Book Online

with rain, the roof a patchwork of second-hand tin. She moved quietly through the bush at the edge of the clearing and squatted in under a tangle of lantana near the house. Hanging from the verandah beam were his wire shapes. A dog with nails for teeth, a unicorn, and faces, turning slowly in the breeze, dripping with rain. There was a pair of his muddy leather boots by the door and a haphazard stack of firewood. She settled in the damp gloom under the lantana and waited for him to show himself to her.
    Finally, in the fading light, after what seemed like hours, she walked up the wooden stairs and went straight to the wire face hanging from the corner of the verandah. She stroked the thin strips of metal curling into cupid’s bow lips and long wild hair. They were her mother’s almond-shaped eyes. My eyes, she thought and caressed the hard grey wire. She unhooked it from the nail and hurried across the lawn.
    Of course it was her mother. All the face needed was the crooked eye tooth that Allie and Mae shared. ‘Our vampire tooth,’ Mae used to call it. Mae would let her sleep in the big bed on the nights that Tom didn’t come and before she turned off the light, she reached for Allie, ‘Good night, little vampire.’ Allie would arch her neck for her mother to press the tooth into her skin. ‘You’re marked now.’ Mae pushed her cool finger into the faint mark her tooth left. ‘You’re mine.’
    If Tom went in the middle of the night, Allie would wake in her downstairs bed to the sound of his car engine booming around the narrow street and she would wait for Mae to come down and collect her. When she was little, Mae used to carry her up the stairs, her sleepy limbs knocking the banister and brushing against the cool plaster wall. The sheets smelt of cigarettes, perfume and sweat and her mother’s naked body was warm and soft.
    In the mornings, she watched Mae’s pale sleeping face and looked for the flicker of a pulse at her neck, a sign that the heart was still urging the blood around her mother’s body. She wondered how much blood vampires needed. A bowlful? Or just the puddle under the raw hunk of meat waiting to be cooked for the Sunday roast?
    Sometimes Mae cooked Tom a roast with potatoes and carrots and onions, like she said her own mother and grandmother used to. While she carved, she would tell them how every Sunday her family went to eat with her grandparents and four uncles, all of them around the long dining table that her Pa built from a huge red cedar tree, the whole tabletop one piece of wood. They would arrive back from church to the smell of the slow-cooking lamb, a rich, sweet smell, the house hot from the wood stove that burned even in summer. Mae helped set the long table with a white tablecloth and was sent out to pick mint for the mint sauce, while her mother stirred the gravy, an apron over her good Sunday dress. The uncles watched Mae from the verandah, and flapped their white shirtfronts at the breeze before coming to sit at the table, all of them in a row along one side.
    One day before Tom came to Sunday lunch, Allie found her mother crying on the steps of their tiny backyard, the smell of roasting meat strong in the air, an oven mitt dangling from her hands. ‘We should have mint growing,’ she wept. ‘It’s no good without mint sauce.’
    Julia’s room was quiet and dark when Allie left the house. The forest at night was even blacker than she had imagined. The bush pressed in on her and she stumbled on the narrow, rocky path. Small animals blundered away through the undergrowth and she listened for the feral dogs that Julia said ran in packs in the hills. She imagined them silently tracking her through the bush, muzzles lifted to catch her scent.
    He was never home during the day. She had waited and waited in her place under the lantana but he didn’t come. There had been signs of him—a window propped open and shirts strung on the verandah clothesline—but the house was