Anchor Point

by Alice Robinson

  ‘Vik!’ she hissed. ‘Don’t.’

  Laura scrabbled with Vik’s elbow, yanking her away. The little girl peeled back, mewing. The sound was soft and terrible. So resigned.

  ‘No harm done, love,’ the woman said kindly to Laura, leaning down to hook Vik under the arms. Laura caught sight of a tiny white cardigan, half-formed on plastic needles. Vik settled in the woman’s vast lap. Impassive, she gazed down. Laura was chilled by Vik’s face: the shadowy, magnified eyes and mouth misshapen by rhythmic, brainless sucking. It was obvious from Vik’s blank expression that she felt no joy at the embrace. Exhausted by misery, she had simply searched for and found a warm place to be numb.

  ‘C’mon,’ the woman said to Laura, patting the couch beside her. ‘There’s room for one more.’

  How easy it would be, after weeks of effort, to surrender. To sink into all that flesh.

  The backyard felt expansive after the stuffy closeness of the crowded house. Laura trailed across the mud to the Hills Hoist. She drew a deep breath, feeling the cold in her lungs like water. Beyond the boundary of the yard, the bush glistened with fallen rain. Laura listened to the sound of all those drips rolling, thousands at a time, from the canopy into the deep litter of the forest floor. She thought momentarily of her mother, of where Kath might be.

  Straight away she pushed the thought down into her internal detritus, smothering. A sob escaped, but she clamped it off, leaning her forehead against the cold pole at the centre of the clothesline. How vigilant she had to be.

  ‘Oi!’ a voice said. ‘Hello!’

  Laura glanced around the empty yard. She turned and looked up into the huge gum by the back door, its branches sprawled above the line and the house. A boy lay on a lower branch. The way he lay relaxed along the bough reminded her of a fat lizard sunning on a rock.

  Bruce kept threatening to chop the tree down; he complained every time he climbed up onto the roof to scoop leaves from gutters, and when birds bombed brooches of shit onto their clean clothes. But the tree gave the house shade in summer and so far it had stayed.

  Laura returned the boy’s greeting out of surprise more than friendliness. She was wary of kids her age. He grinned, and she was struck by how white his teeth looked against his dark skin.

  ‘Who are you?’ she said.

  He gestured vaguely towards the bush, the direction the search party had gone, seeming to feel no need to say more. They listened for a moment to the desperate sound of the distant search.

  ‘Is Donald your dad?’

  The grin widened. ‘Wanna come up?’ he said.

  Laura stood back, appraising the trunk of the tree. There was a big dark arch, a scar in the bark. She had told Vik it was the door to a magic kingdom, and the little girl believed it. Though Laura was a good climber, the scar was taller than her. She couldn’t see a way to climb beyond it to the branch. ‘Nah, can’t be bothered.’

  The boy landed with a squelch on all fours. Laura retreated to the back door and sat down on the step, pulling knees to chest. He trailed behind. They were protected there beneath the shallow eaves, sharing heat along their sides where hips and shoulders met.

  ‘Heard about your mum,’ he said.

  Laura searched for something to shield against the flare of pain that came every time someone mentioned Kath. They sat in silence for a moment, watching grey clouds slide across the sky. Guessing that they were about the same age, Laura asked why she hadn’t seen him around. ‘Doncha go to school?’

  He shrugged, plucking the knee of his jeans. ‘Got to now, they reckon.’

  ‘Who reckons?’

  He shrugged again, still smiling. Something about the way his eyes slid from her face made her think he knew, but wasn’t telling. Laura waited, but he said no more. He wasn’t like the other kids. He didn’t jostle or joke. He didn’t poke fun, call names or play tricks. He seemed happy with silence in a way that reminded Laura of Bruce. At the same time, there was a watchfulness about him, as if he was carrying on whole conversations in his head. For all his grinning, his friendliness, Laura detected sadness in the air around him. She recognised it – it matched her own.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Laura asked. He told her: Joseph. Laura said the word to herself, enjoying the sound across her tongue.

  ‘You got one of them canoe trees there,’ Joseph said quietly, pointing at the big gum. ‘Special, that one.’

  Laura looked where he pointed. It was just a tree. She said so. The expression on his face suggested Laura was the punchline of some private joke. He said people used the bark to make all kinds of things: canoes, baskets, huts. The scars left behind marked where things had happened, where events took place.

  ‘They were here,’ he said. ‘Trees are proof.’

  Laura didn’t like to think of other people living on their land. She thought instead about all the ringbarked trees Bruce hoped to kill. Most would die, but some would surely recover. Those trees would continue to grow, bearing their concentric scars, the place on the trunk where Bruce had cut back bark, removing a circle of flesh. Was that how they would all be remembered, one day down the track? The events of their lives – the family, Kath – immortalised by a horizontal line in a trunk? A wound that had failed to kill?

  It took a long time for Laura to fall asleep that night. When she woke it was still dark. For a split second she was unaware of her own real life. She heard a noise and opened her eyes, sensed the weight of the blankets, the comfort of old flannel sheets soft with sleep and laundry soap. She lay there for a beat, blissfully happy, calm and safe. But it only lasted a second. Then everything rushed in, winding, as it always did when she remembered. She wasn’t conscious of crying, just of having wet cheeks. The sound came again, something moving across the yard. She pushed back the covers. The floor was ice. She padded on tiptoes, feeling her way across the room to the window and pulling back the heavy drapes.

  ‘Lor?’ Vik called. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Stay there,’ Laura said. ‘It’s cold.’ But Vik was already out of bed, fumbling for her glasses. Laura shifted slightly, allowing Vik space to squeeze in beside her, able to smell her sister’s long loose hair, old flowers and oil. It seemed alive, breathing down Vik’s back.

  The light was on in Kath’s studio across the yard. It came spilling out the door like yellow water, bathing Bruce. A pile of boxes sat stacked against the wall. Inside, Kath’s shelves were nearly bare. Bruce put down the vase he was carrying, drew one arm across his forehead, wiping sweat. His elbow made a dark triangle against the glowing square of the studio window. The night garden, geometry of shades.

  Bruce set down the pot he held. Newspaper, a grey wing, flapped open. The shriek of masking tape set Laura’s teeth on edge. Bruce wrapped the vase, shoulders shaking. Tears showed in the sheen of his skin, the play of light across the slick surface of his face. He handled the ceramic piece with care, like swaddling a child. He laid it in a box. Laura dropped Vik to her feet. The curtain fell over the glass.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ Vik said, turning to press her face into Laura’s chest so that her voice came muffled. ‘They’re Mutti’s things.’

  Laura knew she should try to explain everything to Vik, but she didn’t understand it herself. She said nothing, just shuffled her sister across the room, offering the place beside her in bed. It seemed a tiny comfort, but Vik climbed up gratefully, claiming a share of the pillow.

  ‘Lor,’ Vik said into Laura’s shoulder when they were both settled, ‘he’s taking Mutti’s things away.’

  ‘I know.’ Laura pulled the blankets up across Vik’s back to block the draft. She was dismayed by the tone of her voice. The words so heavy and bleak. Final. It was dark in the room, but Laura stroked her sister’s head and face by touch, soft and rhythmic, soothing.

  Laura busied herself. Weeks passed. The hole in their lives filmed over. She plugged it with her own body, and was relieved when the absence seemed diminished.

  ‘Here y’are, Mutti,�
� Vik said to Laura one afternoon, coming into the kitchen, distracted, a skinned rabbit held aloft by the ears. Laura gasped involuntarily, turning from the stove. She saw the realisation dawn on her sister’s face, the horror. The air congealed, thick with feeling. Laura started forward, wiping her hands on her shirt. The rabbit dropped with a thud to the floor. The screen door slammed.

  In the evenings, Laura ladled soup and lit the fire and arranged her face in shapes that felt pleasant and encouraging, bending herself to the task of ‘making things better’. And they were better, she told herself. She knew she could not speak the thought out loud without appearing strange to the doe-eyed women in town, who still stopped her now and then, patting her head. Standing in early morning shadow, cutting bread into neat triangles, she wished that Vik and Bruce would believe that they were better off without Kath.

  Still, she felt bone-weary. Back before Kath’s disappearance, when she was still in school, the isolation of the farm, her lack of friends, had contained her, for better or worse. The certainty of her place in the landscape had told her where she belonged. Likewise, the impossibly small group of people, her immediate family, whom she had believed to be permanent fixtures, had clamped her to the spot. Laura had lived happily enough within these boundaries. At times she had longed for someone else to talk to, play with. But although it was beyond her to conceive a time when this might happen, when her life might involve something other than a tally of chores and the lumbering Kyree school bus, she had sensed in some deep part of her that the future was a place of possibility.

  But now that was gone. Though she couldn’t have explained the shift to herself, Laura had brought a claustro-phobic loneliness down on her existence. Whatever had set her apart from the other kids in town, whatever made them tease her and leave her out, Kath’s disappearance made it worse. Some people whispered when she passed, as though her troubles were catching.

  Far worse, Laura suspected in an inarticulate way that the secret she carried would always set her apart. Even if others wanted to get close, she wouldn’t be able to let them, just in case. She was separate now, even from her own sister, the secret silently dividing. Before, Laura had accepted the expanse of their land as a place to live. Now it felt like the only place: a prison of mute trees.

  Neither Bruce nor Vik could quite believe in Kath’s death. The search party dwindled until there was just one voice calling out. Bruce’s determination made him appear unhinged to those in town. He found a silver whistle – the kind they used at Laura’s school in sports. She could hear it crying shrilly in the hills, a demented, desperate bird. He still thought he would uncover Kath, or her body; that while the bush had swallowed her, it would one day spit her back. For Laura, the further they travelled from the night of Kath’s disappearance, the easier it was to tell herself that Kath may as well be dead.

  Vik clung ferociously to hope. Whole weeks went by in which she prefaced every sentence with, ‘When we find Mutti … ’. Laura stopped counting how often the little girl woke in the night with wet sheets. Just got grimly up, hardly cracking open her lids. She stripped the bed in the moonlight, sponging Vik down, exhaustion like brain damage. Vik was only little, she reminded herself. She took the blame squarely, most of the time. But sometimes at that awful hour, 3am – when Laura knew she would be getting up to make breakfast in what felt like minutes – as she dragged the damp bedclothes to the laundry, another load to do, she wanted to howl at the unfairness.

  Afterwards, they would crawl into bed together, passing the few remaining hours of darkness entwined. Though Laura often longed to have the bed to herself, she also took comfort from the small body pressed up against her back. How necessary she felt with her sister clinging to her.

  Eventually, someone floated the idea of a memorial service. Laura knew then, for certain, that they all thought Kath was dead. Her relief made her feel faint, a sound like bubbles blown through water in her ears.

  ‘You want to do something here, then?’ Donald said in a low voice to Bruce, when the idea was raised. ‘Could be a celebration, you know, of her life. A party.’

  Laura busied herself with the dishes, ear cocked. She passed wet plates to Joseph. Bruce sagged against the bench, absently clutching one of Donald’s cold beers. The men were friends, Laura supposed. Though they didn’t speak much, Donald turned up every week from the other side of town – the ‘wrong side of the tracks’, Bruce called it fondly – where the tracker lived with Joseph and some folks Laura thought might be their family. It wasn’t clear how they were all related; the number of adults and kids appeared to change every time Joseph spoke about home. How lively it seemed over there in his stories, so different from her own, grim little unit.

  But she had overheard a police officer say unkindly that Joseph’s mother was dead of drink. The tragedy gave them something in common, beyond the binding fact that the town wanted nothing much to do with either of them. They were related. Tied by loss.

  ‘It’d be a nice shindig, you held it here,’ Donald repeated.

  ‘No,’ Bruce said firmly. ‘Not here.’

  Laura turned in surprise, dripping water on the floor. She felt Joseph’s gaze on her, as though the information he needed was broadcast on her face.

  ‘Kath would’ve wanted something proper,’ Bruce went on, oblivious. ‘Something nice.’

  Joseph took the plate before Laura dropped it. He dried it carefully, dark eyes fixed on her face.

  In front of the church, Laura stood between Vik and Bruce, squaring her shoulders. Vik gripped Laura’s hand. Once, Bruce had told Laura that triangles were the best shape for building. The sturdiest fence posts were braced three ways: ‘triangulation’. Taking Bruce’s arm, guiding him up the church steps like she was leading a blind man, Vik hanging off her, wanting to stand so close that Laura was tripping: it was hard to see how the three of them added up to something strong.

  Laura had done her best to dress each of them for the service. She had aired Bruce’s wedding suit, barely worn, and scrounged two good-enough dresses. Her own dress was navy. It pinched beneath her arms. On the back of Vik’s skirt was a burn where the iron had sat too long. But how was a family meant to look, after one of them had died? Laura wished there was a picture she could copy, some instructions for how to behave. Her relief that the ordeal was ending encased her like skin. Inside it, she was giddy.

  It seemed the whole of Kyree turned up for the service, come to gawk. The church hall hummed with conversation. Listening, Laura found she could make out individual voices against the low rumble of the crowd, the eyes of the town at her back like heat. She lowered her head, searching for a way to hold her body that broadcast sorrow, trying on Bruce’s rubbery slouch, then Vik’s taut anxiety.

  When the organ wheezed into life, she was glad. Deep vibrations filled the space. Beneath the music, the room fell still. When the crowd stood, Laura stood with them, dragging her family up. All through the service, Bruce kept wiping his eyes on his shirt cuff, turning the fabric translucent. Vik rocked herself in the pew, clenching a fistful of Laura’s skirt. Laura couldn’t look at either one, at the way they watched the priest, praying over nothing. She recalled how Kath’s note had burned. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Amen. It couldn’t be undone.

  Laura’s eleventh birthday came and went unobserved. She let it slide without comment, fingers like prunes in dishwater. She understood now that Kath’s memorial had been more for her and Vik, for the town, than to provide Bruce with an ending. If anything, the service gave him a cover: the opportunity to continue searching without anyone keeping watch.

  The apple trees were blossoming, though the early mornings remained dim. The year was almost done. Laura’s teacher phoned Bruce. He listened quietly, letting the wall hold him up, then told Laura wearily it was time to return to school, to finish out the year. There was no point arguing, she knew well enough; that wasn’t the way Bruce did things. As she helped Vik into the bath after dinner, she explained what was happeni
ng as best she could. Listening, Vik jerked so violently that she smacked her head on the tiles. Howls ricocheted through steam. Laura wanted to cover her ears, but she leaned into the tub, taking Vik’s slick body in her arms.

  ‘I want to come too,’ Vik wailed, gripping Laura’s shoulders. Her eyes were wide with panic.

  Laura smoothed Vik’s damp hair, taking up the washcloth. When she spoke, her voice sounded adult, calm. ‘You’ll start Prep soon, in the new year.’

  Vik shut down, defeated. She closed her eyes, mutely allowing her face to be scrubbed. Laura understood. For months they had stood together watching Bruce set out in the morning, just to see him drag himself back in the dark, exhausted and hardly registering what they said.

  Even with Kath around, Vik had been left to amuse herself while Laura was at school. Bruce headed off on the early bus and came home late in blood-soaked clothes. But Kath had always allowed Vik into the studio if she brought a picture book to look at and stayed quiet. That minimal contact was worth something, Laura guessed. Worth everything. She had sometimes found her mother and sister together of an afternoon, bent to their separate tasks. Peering around the door with her schoolbag in hand, cautiously calling hello, Laura had always hoped Kath might invite her in as well, instead of shooing them both out into the grey sunlight, complaining of noise.

  Sponging Vik’s familiar skin, Laura tried not to show fear – her sister was sensitive as a foal – but she worried about how it would be for Vik when she wasn’t there to help fill the long, silent daylight hours without Kath, only the whispering trees for solace.

  On Monday, Laura made sandwiches and left them on the bench so that Bruce and Vik would have lunch. How young the other kids looked to her now. She felt arthritic, bent by events. Though she had fallen behind, her teacher told her that it was ‘absolutely understandable’ and ‘not a problem, under the circumstances’. Laura would ‘catch up’ and ‘should take things at her own pace’, Miss Gray said. The skin on the back of Laura’s hand was raw with kind strokes.