Salt Rain Read Online Free

her fingers. No-one was brave like Mae. Allie was terrified whenever Mae took her out into the middle of the dark harbour. She used to stay in the rocking dinghy, hands gripping the thin tin sides while Mae somersaulted and dived, her white legs disappearing under the glinting waves.
    She looked up at Julia. ‘Why didn’t you leave?’
    Julia rolled up a sleeve on her faded blue shirt before she spoke. ‘There’s nothing special about leaving somewhere.’
    ‘She says that brave is just a choice you make and some people don’t make it.’
    Julia nodded. ‘Yeah? Perhaps. And maybe the bravest choices just don’t look that way.’ She turned back to her digging.
    Allie stared at her aunt’s back, then snapped the leaf off and took a handful of the red soil. She closed her fist tight and the sticky clay squeezed out between her fingers. Her mother’s childish sandal might have pressed for a moment on this very piece of earth as she ran down the paddock in her school dress. Allie imagined Mae running, the cotton of her dress straining against the warm air, the sun stinging her arms, and him too, of course he would have been there, the First Love. Mae and the First Love, both of them descending through the thick summer air to the creek.
    ‘Where’s the First Love?’
    ‘Huh?’ Julia kept digging. ‘What’s the first love?’
    ‘Mum’s First Love. The boy she loved.’
    ‘Do you mean Saul Philips?’ Julia turned to her, frowning.
    ‘Saul,’ Allie repeated. It wasn’t right somehow. Why did Mae never tell her his name?
    ‘Why do you ask?’
    ‘Where is he?’
    Julia’s wet boot slipped off the shovel. ‘Shit!’ She stood up and rubbed her hands on the seat of her overalls. ‘I don’t keep track of him. He’s probably at his house or over at his father’s place, working.’
    So the First Love was still in the valley, his cells still holding traces of their first kiss down by the creek, where the cicadas had been so loud around them that they couldn’t talk. Mae had told Allie her surprise at the heat of his tongue in her mouth and how a rash had spread over his chest and neck as they walked home that first day, great blotches rising red on his skin, that his father had called heat rash and treated with calamine lotion.
    ‘Where does he live?’
    Julia’s brow furrowed. ‘Up the end of the valley, on the back section of his dad’s property.’ She picked up another sapling.
    ‘Where up the end of the valley?’
    ‘Why are you so interested? That was all years ago, you know.’
    ‘He makes those wire things, right?’
    Julia turned back to Allie and raised her eyebrows. ‘How do you know about them? Have you met him?’
    ‘No. Mae told me.’
    ‘Oh. Well, yes. He does still make them.’ Julia looked at Allie for a long moment, then bent down to plant the tree.

chapter two
    After dinner, Julia sat at the kitchen table writing out the day’s plantings in her diary. Red cedar, quandong, white lilly pilly, native tamarind. She liked to imagine the forest slowly enfolding the farm while she slept, the mottled trunks swelling with sap and vines snaking in the windows.
    It was still light outside, the only sounds her pencil whispering across the paper and insects flying into the window panes. Allie was in one of the cane chairs on the verandah, her arms wrapped around her knees, looking out at the forest. When Julia got to Sydney she had reached for Allie, wanting to wrap that small body up and protect her from what she guessed was coming, but the girl had pushed her away, surprisingly fierce. On the train down to the city Julia had stupidly imagined her as the eight-year-old she had met years before at the farm, but when Julia walked in the open front door of the tiny terrace house, Allie was lying on the couch in the bare living room, her eyes shut, arms flung above her head, a young woman with long dark hair and a face frighteningly like Mae’s. The same beautiful face.
    Julia spread out her