Anchor Point

by Alice Robinson

‘Blackie!’ Laura screamed, feeling cold drops dampen her back. She should have used the leash.

  Turning, the dog studied Laura, front paw raised. The roos melted into bush.

  ‘C’mon, Blackie,’ Vik called in her high voice, clapping. ‘Nearly home now!’

  Before she could stop herself, Laura said, ‘You’ve got to discipline him, der-brain.’ The dog slowly put his paw down, took one small step away from them. She dropped her voice to a growl, imitating Bruce: ‘Blackie.’ The word was all menace. The old kelpie turned and crawled reluctantly towards them, shamefaced. It was a rule: no chasing. Bruce said once dogs got a taste for blood, that was it.

  Kath wasn’t there when they got home. Unnerved by the empty house and darkened studio, they stood awkwardly by the kitchen table, not touching, but close enough that Laura could smell Vik’s dry breath. The weight of water on the house compressed her chest, like the feeling she got at the bottom of the dam, kicking skyward for sunlight. With all the certainty she could muster, Laura told Vik their parents would be home soon.

  ‘I know that,’ Vik said, bottom lip trembling.

  Laura pulled out a kitchen chair, wishing that she were alone.

  ‘We should get changed,’ she said softly, though neither of them moved.

  Kath wasn’t back half an hour later when Bruce came jogging over from the shed. Standing on the verandah to peel back his sodden coat, he shouted through the door. The road into town was flooding, local radio said. He was still talking as he chocked the front door with his shoulder and slid inside. He nursed a waterlogged bouquet of native flowers in one arm. The wet coat dangled from his hand like skins.

  ‘Which turkey decided building on a floodplain was the go?’ he muttered. They didn’t answer. Laura couldn’t look at the flowers. She knew Bruce didn’t approve of cut blooms. Whatever it had cost him to search them out, whatever had made him think he needed to, in that moment it was more than Laura had the space in her heart to feel.

  ‘What is it?’ Bruce said, and then, ‘You’re soaked.’ He glanced around the room. Laura followed his gaze, though she knew the room by heart. The wind in the trees, like wailing. ‘Your mother in her studio?’

  When neither answered, Bruce padded over, crouched down, gave each girl a kiss. The warmth of his lips made cracks in Laura’s icy skin.

  Laura started, ‘Mum’s not …’ She reached for Bruce’s shoulder, longing to touch the knot of muscle there, to feel the shape of his body through the heavy homemade wool. The hall phone rang. Her fingers closed on air.

  ‘That you, Kath, love?’

  The flowers were bleeding water on the floor. Vik reached up and took the hem of Laura’s coat. Receiver to ear, Bruce listened.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said.

  Laura felt his eyes lick across her head. A minute went by. His palm on the wall, fingers spread. He made a noise like he couldn’t suck air. It was the sound of the stove when you lit it, oxygen rushing in to make fire.

  Bruce set the receiver down carefully. He came back into the kitchen as though learning how to walk. ‘That was Mrs Jolley,’ he said. ‘Ringing to check on us lot. Flash flood at the creek, she reckons. Got some of their stock. Reckons roads in town’ll be well and truly closed. Lucky I wasn’t at work, she said.’ He dragged his gaze to meet Laura’s. ‘Where’d you say Mum went?’

  Before she was even halfway through telling him, Bruce disappeared into the storm, bolting back up the hill. Slamming the door on the rain, Laura turned away. She took care to set the fire perfectly, just how she had been shown. Bruce said there was a right way to do things, and then there was the way most people did them.

  Vik sat at the kitchen table, snot bubbling, her cries muffled by the pound of rain on roof.

  ‘Shush,’ said Laura.

  She could hear Bruce’s faint voice outside. ‘Kath … Kath … Kath.’ It was ghostly. The sound seemed to leak from the bush itself, croaking, creeping, no longer a word, but a crow-like caw.

  Through the window Laura saw Bruce’s torchlight flickering up on the hill. Its circle of light a pale grain of sand in the night. Laura resisted the urge to get up, climb onto a chair and draw the bolt across the door. She knelt on the brick hearth at the stove and steadied herself.

  Vik’s sobs ricocheted, mixed in with hiccups. She was still wearing her damp winter coat. ‘Where,’ racking intake of breath, ‘is,’ the gurgling noise, ‘Mutti?’ Vik screwed her eyes shut, gearing up.

  ‘Kath? Kath? Kath?’ Bruce cried in the distance.

  Laura turned resolutely back to the stove, teeth meshed. She tipped the ash into bags for the garden beds, firmly tying off the ends. Ash is good for flowers, Bruce told them; dead stuff makes things grow. The first match fizzed; the second snapped. Laura tasted sulphur on her fingers. She bit down and tasted rust.

  Above them, a single bulb swung gently from a cord, casting a shifting pool of light onto Vik. Laura listened to the crack and pop of burning seed pods. Her knees were numb from kneeling so long on the bricks, and her body ached, the shadow of adult pains to come. The windows were blind; she saw her pinched face reflected in the dark glass. She stood, letting the stove warm the backs of her legs. She was hungry. The yabbies were still alive, shifting aimlessly in the plastic bucket set down on the table. Laura stared at her little sister, felt the rattle of her empty gut. Listened to the scratch of yabby claw, growing fainter.

  Outside, Bruce’s voice was still breaking over the same word. Blackie’s barks syncopated with the cries, getting further away as they went uphill. A gust of wind rose up; the house shifted. Laura stepped away from the stove. She went to Vik. It was clear to her, then.

  ‘Come on.’ Laura pulled her sister by the elbow. Vik didn’t resist. She slid down from the chair, allowed herself to be led to their bedroom. Laura put her arm over her slippery waterproof shoulder. Vik leaned in. Around her mouth, snot had dried like salt. Laura recalled the area behind her school. Where trees were felled to make the oval, salt had bled out and turned the earth white.

  They crossed the braided red rug to the bed. Vik kept working her thumb between her lips like she wanted to suck it down to bone. Her jeans were soaked through, the once-white socks stained brown as dry blood with dam water.

  ‘Your feet are all wet,’ Laura said. ‘Are you still cold?’

  ‘They’re not,’ Vik wailed. Her thumb-pad was a raisin of flesh. ‘I’m not cold.’ Her voice was all high and tight, as though the years had wound back and she was a baby again. Laura hurried with Vik’s clothes, fumbling, as if by moving faster she could peel away the despair on Vik’s face.

  The coat formed a synthetic puddle on the floor. Vik turned away and crawled beneath her doona, a sick dog crawling underneath a house to die.

  Laura wanted to slap the exposed crescent of Vik’s cheek. ‘He’ll find her,’ she said, instead. ‘Alright?’ She removed Vik’s glasses and set them on the table by the bed, then leaned down and kissed Vik’s face. Not because she wanted to, but because that had to happen next. ‘Alright, Vik?’ she choked out. ‘Am I right?’

  The only sound in the room was Vik’s heavy breath.

  Out in the hall, Laura hesitated. She crossed over to her parents’ room. The doorknob was made of tin, cold stinging Laura’s palm. She eased the door open with her shoulder, not realising that the weak wave of scent spilling out – Kath’s potpourri, her hair – once released, would be forever lost.

  Inside the light was soft, violet, coming weakly through a tasselled purple shade.

  ‘Mutti?’

  Laura glanced around, holding her breath. The room looked the same as usual, but felt sinister as a result. There was the unmade bed, the squat wooden dresser spotted with dead flies. On the floor, the paisley rug, familiarly askew. Laura went around her parents’ bed, trailing her fingers across the blanket.

  That was when she saw it, the note. Just like that. There on Bruce’s bedside table, near a glass of water filmed with dust. Laura tiptoed, barely breathing,
as though her parents were asleep in the room.

  The note was neatly creased, a small white square. Laura’s stomach contracted. She touched the scab at her eyebrow, picking. She hesitated, thought about running, about climbing into bed and pulling the covers up around her chin. She could shut her eyes and wait for tomorrow, a day to replace this one with something fresh and clean.

  Bruce cried, ‘Kath!’ His voice made miniature, coming across the paddocks.

  Laura unfolded the note. She stared at her mother’s handwriting. The words were knots. Something beyond the thought of her sister’s grief-swollen face prevented Laura from taking the note in to show Vik, her first instinct. It was the way the ink had run in places, leaving little round watermarks across words. Whatever Kath had written, it felt somehow private, shameful, belonging to the half-dark of her parents’ space.

  She recalled Kath’s red-rimmed eyes from that morning, the fissure of a frown in her face, and sat heavily on the bed, note spread on trembling knees. The focus she poured through her eyes, like sun through a magnifying glass, was enough to ignite. She stared and stared and stared, trying to make sense of Kath’s words. Even as she worked to make out the message, blindly stumbling through the blackness to each familiar burst of light, Laura felt the discomfort of her growing understanding. Carried inside her to the kitchen, it was tumorous, a bulb of disease.

  Bruce’s scrap of torchlight came down the hill. He was no longer calling out. Though she couldn’t think clearly, couldn’t understand it, this frightened Laura. She couldn’t bear it, what that might mean.

  She held the note. Such a tiny square. She heard the garden gate squeal back, the clang of chain on post. Bruce commanding Blackie through. She knew the routine so well she did not need to be there to see it: Bruce carefully latching the gate behind him, the hesitation of the dog, watching. They would cross Kath’s scabby lawn together.

  Laura listened for the rat-a-tat-tat of Blackie’s toenails on the verandah boards, the thud of Bruce’s boots dropping by the door. She heard that he took no time to set the boots on their soles – as he instructed them all to do, lest snakes and spiders crawl in. This small carelessness rocked her. The flyscreen door moaned open. Bruce steadied himself on the doorknob while he stepped into his slippers one by one.

  Laura caught a flash of her mother’s purple face, how angry Kath had become when she saw the shattered urn. She still felt the livid burn of Kath’s hand on her cheek.

  Springing forward, Laura yanked open the stove. She didn’t look at the note before dropping it into the fire. For a second the square of paper sat, whole and perfect, in the bed of white-hot coals. She tried to grab it out; it burst into flames. Tucking her hands inside her armpits, Laura hid them away, like folded wings.

  ‘Love?’ Bruce was in the doorway. His eyes flickered shut. ‘Oh, Lor. I thought, maybe …’

  He turned slowly and closed the door.

  ‘It’s just me,’ Laura whispered. And she knew it. Bruce’s arms hung by his sides as though dislocated. His hair looked painted on. Two muddy lesions stained his knees. He inclined his head towards the fire, forced the brittle imitation of a smile. Laura opened her mouth.

  ‘Creek’s raging,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t get close.’ He wiped a hand across his face. The way he sank into a kitchen chair and hunched over, legs loosely splayed, a frightening curve to his neck where his chin fell down against his chest – it made him look boneless. Services were all tied up with the flood, Bruce said. No one could get through that night, but maybe at dawn. They would get help.

  Laura went and put a timid hand on Bruce’s cold, weather-worn cheek. There would be none of Kath’s oats, like milky ash, in the morning. They leaned into each other. She absorbed the night cold leaking from his clothes and skin.

  Officer Lindsay from town asked the same questions again and again. With hair scraped back so tight it distorted the shape of her eyes, she perched in their lounge room while two men in uniform waited impatiently outside. Laura would have rather talked to them. The nib of Lindsay’s pen scratched against the pad like chook claws in dirt.

  Vik sat on Bruce’s knee. The two of them, sodden with grief. Their faces were misshapen, swollen and muddied. Laura sat beside them on the couch, flinching every time the officer asked Bruce to relax, to let them do their job. They would take care of it, she said, just as soon as they had all the facts.

  Laura told her story as well as she could, swallowing hard on the truth. Yes, Kath always got her clay from the creek. No, they hadn’t seen her come back down the hill past the dam. Yes, the three of them had been at the dam all afternoon, until the storm threatened and Bruce had sent them on ahead while he finished up work. They had been back at the house by the time the flood occurred; they didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything, didn’t know anything. Officer Lindsay wrote it all down, sweeping up detail with a speed Laura hated.

  ‘Did Mum seem particularly sad or angry or upset when she left the house?’

  Laura thought of the blow, her bruised eye. The bedroom door slamming. Firmly, she shook her head.

  ‘Crikey!’ Bruce croaked, swivelling wildly from Laura to the officer and back. He lurched forward, almost turning Vik from his knee. ‘My wife’s been God-knows-what in the flood and you’re sitting here asking these questions!’

  Laura sensed that the officer was looking for holes in their story. Could she think that Bruce would hurt Kath? But Laura had turned the only real proof of his innocence to ash. There was just her word now, which itself might raise further suspicion. How could she ever tell?

  ‘So Mum was going off to get clay yesterday morning?’ Officer Lindsay asked again.

  Vik recoiled every time the officer called Kath Mum, forming the word Mutti with her lips – a silent protest. Laura wanted to punch the word off Vik’s face. She looked the officer dead in the eyes. She remembered the way Kath’s note had burned.

  ‘Yes,’ she said decisively.

  At times, Bruce rolled in his chair, tense with impatience. ‘We’ve been over this!’ Other times, he sat silent, wet face buried in Vik’s hair, her neck: a child with a doll. Laura couldn’t say which of them it hurt more to watch.

  Whispered on the verandah, in corners, not meant for little pitchers with big ears: the idea that the longer the search went on, the less likely they were to find anything good. Laura said nothing. She kept her head down and tried to keep things running: the laundry, the fire, the chooks. She did what she knew best.

  All the while, somewhere outside, rushing through and banging doors and gulping water from the tap, Bruce searched. He left the house with Blackie every morning at sunrise, clutching maps and ropes and torch. At first the cops went too, then volunteers. Once floodwaters receded, it seemed the whole town was up in the hills behind the house, combing the banks of the creek, the rocky outcrops and shallow caves, the trees.

  ‘You’d think she woulda washed up by now,’ Laura overheard one officer say to another at the end of the first week. The men stood on the verandah in waterproof pants, warming hands on mugs, looking out over the yard. Sheets of rain were drawn about the house, enclosing. Laura crouched around the corner, the eggs in her hands cooling. Rain ran down her back.

  ‘Sometimes they do. Sometimes don’t.’

  One evening a man with skin like tar came out from town to help. Among the volunteers, his name, Donald, caused more whispers than Kath’s. Laura overheard the post-office lady say he was a tracker. Donald looked up at the darkening hills the way that Bruce had looked at her mother sometimes, when things were good. Off-duty police, volunteers, formed a circle on the porch, demarcated by tobacco smoke.

  Donald stood in the wet grass beyond the pool of light cast by the house. ‘Difficult,’ he said, hat in hand. ‘Whatever tracks there were’ll be washed away by now.’

  ‘Dogs’ve already made that crystal, mate,’ a volunteer said.

  Laura saw the whites of Donald’s eyes flash as he blinked. No one offered him a
beer. The constable flapped his maps. Donald turned his face away. A stranger ushered Laura and Vik inside.

  Next morning the rain had eased and Donald was back, standing a little apart from the group. Men stood staring at compasses and marking maps, coiling ropes and pulling waterproof pants over jeans. They held dogs by their collars, ground cigarettes with boots, and unpacked saws, chains and torches from the trays of utes.

  Laura helped Vik get dressed, eat toast. The weight of her sister’s needs, a milkmaid’s yoke. She had heard Bruce pacing the kitchen overnight, when darkness barred him from searching. She lay there, tamped down by the weight of her winter quilt, listening. Then she opened her eyes as wide as they would go, but the room was so dark they might as well have been closed.

  She called softly, ‘Dad?’

  His footsteps faltered, then resumed. How thin her voice sounded in the absolute dark of the room. Vik stirred, rustling. Laura imagined getting up to stroke her sister’s shoulder through the sheet. She imagined Bruce’s big, empty bed, sheets still line-stiff, not yet softened by body heat. One pillow was imprinted with the shape of his head, the other smooth.

  Bruce was gone when they rose, but his scent lingered in the kitchen. The way the oily, musk smell of sheep had lingered in Granddad’s big shearing sheds, so Bruce said, though they stood empty most of the year. The animals’ fear at shearing: burned like a brand into wood.

  With the search party gone for the morning, a group of blue-haired strangers from the local CWA turned up with bags of knitting and tea towel-covered cakes for morning tea. They were in the house like termites before Laura had time to think what to say. Boiling water and rinsing cups, they settled into the furniture with needles and tongues clicking, gossiping about Kath like they’d known her. Vik approached the one who was softest looking, all pastel-pink mohair, pillowy breasts. The sweet face of a stuffed animal. For a second, Vik appraised the woman, sucking her thumb. Then she folded, pressing herself into the cleft where the woman’s leg met the couch. The longing on her sister’s face made Laura’s stomach turn. She was desperate not to see it.