Salt Rain by Sarah Armstrong Read Free Book Online Page A

always quiet, just the tin roof creaking in the heat and the currawongs crying out as they flew overhead.
    She walked slowly across the clearing towards his open bedroom window, the lawn silvery with moonlight. The wire shapes hanging on the verandah moved in the darkness and an owl flew out of the forest, its wing-beats loud and close. She reached his window and leaned on the sill, the wood hard against her ribs. There he was at last, one arm stretching across the bed towards her, fingertips half-curled as if beckoning. She stood perfectly still, only her eyes moving, tracing the way his limbs had fallen in the night, following the arrow of dark hairs down to the sheet twisted around his waist. His face was turned away from her and she willed him to sigh and shift in his sleep and turn towards her so she could see his face, so she could recognise something of herself in him, some small sign. She imagined Mae sleeping beside him, her creamy body curved around his, their bellies rising and falling together. Allie sank to her knees in the damp grass under his window and matched her breath to his, the cool air streaming down her throat.

chapter five
    Julia followed her niece at a distance, her torch lighting the unfamiliar narrow path through the forest. As they approached Little Banana Creek, she realised Allie was going to Saul’s place and she stopped, her feet suddenly heavy, the same churning in her gut as when Mae used to run into the house and dump her school bag before slipping out the back door to meet him.
    She continued over the creek and in the moonlight could see Allie standing at his window. She wanted to grab the girl away and shake her. Shake her then rock her. Rock her in her arms like her own mother used to do. Like she saw Saul do to Mae one day down by the river. She had hidden in the bushes and watched them, a kind of agony to see Mae’s face shining under his touch.
    An old helplessness that she hadn’t felt in years rose in her and she rested her face into her hands and pressed her fingers hard onto her eyelids. She was no better than her father when he used to sneak around after Mae and Saul. She was no better than her father in lots of ways.
    Since Allie had come to the farm, scraps of old memories had been rising in her. The yellow lace dress Mae was wearing the day she left, her hair pinned high as if she were going to a dance. Mae had run out into the rain, heaved her suitcase into the tray of the ute and settled the baby onto the passenger seat. ‘Say goodbye to Mum,’ she had said as she tucked the blankets around the baby’s face. ‘And will you tell Saul? Promise you’ll tell him goodbye for me?’ Her skin showed pink through the wet dress as she tied the tarp over her bags. ‘Julia, will you tell him that I’m sorry? Hey, don’t look so glum…it’ll all be okay. You can come later and we’ll live together, eh? You can help look after the baby.’
    Julia remembered standing under the jacaranda tree looking down the driveway, long after the red tail-lights had disappeared, long after Mae would have reached town and the train station and left the ute there, keys in the ignition, long after she would have boarded the train and settled into a compartment and slid away into the night. Julia had waited outside for hours, a fluttering in her chest like a panicked bird.
    Allie was walking back across the clearing towards her, Saul’s house still dark behind her. Julia tried to think of what she should say but she knew she had little of her mother’s sensitivity. She was blunt like her father. Blunted.
    She waited for Allie to see her where she sat beside the path, but the girl passed by, just an arm’s length away and disappeared into the dark of the forest. Anyway, this was not the right day. Julia leaned back against a tree and tried not to think of the Hanley brothers waking soon and, after their breakfast, walking over to the cemetery to dig Mae’s grave. The ropes that they slung