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rested her cheek against the cool plaster walls of the bedroom and trailed her fingers along the stainless steel of the kitchen sink. She stood at the bathroom mirror, close, so her breath fogged the glass, while she searched for Mae in her own wide-set eyes and small nose. She hurried to her bedroom and pulled out the musty cotton sundresses that had hung in the wardrobe since Mae left. She tried them on one after another, dropping them to the floor. Green spots and blue flowers and light pink with blue piping. The thin material hung loosely, her small breasts lost in the bodice. Through the fabric, she cupped the rounded shape of her breasts, her hands warm and tender, the same way that the First Love had touched Mae.
    Outside, she lifted her face to the rain. This very drop may have once slid down Mae’s cheek, the clouds trapped inside the valley walls year after year, the same drops of rain falling back into the valley. It was salty on her tongue, like tears, like blood, and for a moment she could taste her mother. Then there was nothing but the ceaseless rain, running down her body, soaking the soil, filling the creeks.
    The First Love would hold the strongest traces of her mother. His skin would still carry her touch. Their afternoons by the creek must be held somewhere in his body.
    Allie went inside and put on one of her mother’s dresses, looping the belt tight. She walked down the muddy driveway and along the gravel road that followed the curves of the meandering creek. She would walk until she found him.
    A car came around the corner and she stepped off the road into the dense bush, sinking deep into the dark leaf litter as she gripped the slippery tree trunks and vines and pulled herself up the steep hill. The soaking rain entered her nose and eyes and glued her stringy hair to her cheeks. Everything was wet, and as she climbed, she surrendered herself to the blood-warm air and rain.
    She found a forestry road cutting a clay swathe through the trees and then narrow animal tracks that led through a wall of prickly lantana to an abandoned banana plantation. The banana palms leaned down the hill, small overripe fruit hanging in heavy bunches and purple flowers dripping pollen. She pressed her cheek hard against a shining rain-slick trunk, like Mae would when they hid in the Botanic Gardens at night. In the dark, after the park rangers had gone, Mae would run across the springy grass to one of the huge fig trees and climb its buttress roots. Later, Allie would lean back against her mother, wrapped in the coat that Mae turned fur-side in, and she would reach up to trace the indentations that the tree had left on her mother’s cheek.
    Through the tattered banana leaves she could see down to the emerald green paddocks dotted with tin roofs. If she were Mae, she would know which was his. Mae would walk down the hill and straight into his waiting house.
    The last letterbox at the end of the valley had ‘Philips’ painted across it in uneven black letters. Saul Philips. The dogs started barking before she had reached the first bend in the driveway so she slipped into the bush and slowly approached the white weatherboard house with its neat mown lawn and dripping Hills Hoist. The dogs strained at the end of their chains, tails and hackles stiff, and a peacock with a drooping tail peered down at her from the roof of a tin shed.
    A woman with short grey hair came out onto the verandah and called the dogs back to their kennel. She reached up to a shirt hanging on the line strung under the verandah roof and pressed it to her cheek before slowly unpegging the clothes and folding them onto a chair.
    Allie backed away through the bushes and found a well-worn path leading around the base of a steep rocky bluff. It led her over a small side creek where she stepped from boulder to boulder, the water tumbling under her, reeds pulled straight by the current.
    The timber cabin was in the middle of a small clearing, its wood dark