Anchor Point

by Alice Robinson

  As she slowly pushed into the house, familiar as dropping off to sleep, she expected, despite herself, to see Bruce seated at the table. His grey moccasins were side-by-side, waiting for him to step into. She looked down into their worn soles. The wool was flattened by years, by the weight of him. She sank down, touched one slipper the way a dead pet might be touched – gently, with some misgiving. She slipped a hand inside, felt the indents from his toes, the ghost of his shape.

  The kitchen floorboards were dusty, dark with grime. By the fridge, the place where Laura had stood on her sixteenth birthday, modelling the unfashionable jeans Bruce could not afford. She remembered Kath, cradling Vik in her arms. Sad circuit of the table. Both of them in tears.

  Some aspects of the house showed Bruce’s fastidious lifelong ways. But unsettling clues revealed his decline. On the sink: a bowl meticulously rinsed and drained. But flies gathered on the rim of the pot, a garden for porridge-mould. Clothes hung from the Hills Hoist, pegged evenly across, stiff with sweat. Books and papers were strewn over the kitchen table; piles of clothes discarded in the hall. The rifle, freshly polished, waited to be stored away. Three buckets of greywater sat forgotten by the door. Laura could not bring herself to look out onto the parched veggie patch.

  ‘In the city, they’re vulnerable as,’ Bruce had said, once.

  ‘Why?’ Laura looked up from the tomatoes, punnets of small plants.

  ‘My old man, he kept us alive,’ Bruce said. ‘Times were hard. Other people starved. You grow your own food, love, that’s security. You’ll be right if you’ve got a place to grow free food.’

  Through the door of Bruce’s bedroom, Laura stepped into his smell. The Palmolive soap and straw-bale, the outdoors-sweat. There was something bitter beneath the print of clothes and hair on air. Laura pulled back his winter bedding, covering nose with hand. At the heart of the sheets, the yellow stain, still wet. She recoiled.

  The window was warped. Straining, Laura scraped it up. A flood of fresh dry air rolled in. Like an old man herself, Laura pressed heavily on the sill. Wind blew across the valley, oven-hot. He had never once asked her for help. She leaned out into the heat. She closed her eyes.

  The days broke into a familiar pattern as Laura waited for Bruce to be discharged. To-do lists, long and complex as algebra, were continuously updated as she worked around the yard. Day by day she grew into the skin of farm jobs. Muscle memory remained; her city body fell away.

  The plan to move back to the farm formed the day Vik and Michael arrived. Laura luxuriated in the thought as it came to her, suppressing her fear and astonishment: what it would mean for her life if she had the mettle to do it. Am I planning to leave Luc? she wondered fleetingly, before telling herself she wasn’t leaving him at all; it wouldn’t mean that. This wasn’t about him. It was a matter of inheritance, of doing the right thing. She still loved Luc. Didn’t she?

  In the privacy of her own mind, she was frightened by the speed with which she could brush off her life in Sydney, like it was nothing, like she had never even left Kyree. But Laura counselled herself that the farm was important. It would kill Bruce if he had to move. She thought of Kath, of the way she had looked striding off up the hill carrying the knapsack that last day. Bruce was alone. Since there was no one else, Laura had a duty, the eldest daughter, to care for him and the farm.

  She felt a deeper, more uncomfortable truth: that the thought of returning to the farm brought relief. She had tried hard to forge her own future, to do her own thing. But she had never felt entirely comfortable in the life she had made. There was something safe and known and easy in the prospect of returning for good. It seemed a kind of penance.

  Laura walked the boundary fence line, considering repairs. What she couldn’t acknowledge was that she didn’t even have to make the choice; that she could allow herself to be pulled back by responsibility to Bruce. It was too painful to consider that this act of cowardice, scurrying home, might be rewritten as selflessness – she knew it wasn’t.

  Vik and Michael arrived in a caravan of baby paraphernalia. It was clear he was enjoying fatherhood, bouncing the baby, singing made-up songs.

  ‘So many words rhyme with Cait!’ he declared, bounding up the steps with the baby in his arms. He smacked lips to Laura’s cheek, crowing, ‘Here’s your lovely aunt, Caity-the-greaty!’ making his daughter squeal. Despite the grim conditions, the circumstances of the trip, he was glad for the holiday from work, he told Laura, a rest from broken things.

  In contrast, Vik couldn’t have been more subdued. It hurt Laura to observe her sister, pinched and pale and tense. She stalked into the house behind her laptop, an armload of files, barely making eye contact. ‘I’ve got them,’ she said tersely, when Laura offered to help, and then, ‘Already?’ when Michael suggested that Cait needed feeding.

  Laura had spent days scrubbing. The kitchen was sharp with Pine O Cleen. She ushered them in, pressing a hand to Vik’s sticky back, trying to offer some comfort. It seemed to work; Vik softened beneath her touch, begrudgingly passing the files to Laura and falling into a chair. Laura hefted the papers onto the bench. ‘Cup of tea?’ she said brightly, turning.

  ‘She’s insatiable.’ Vik sighed. ‘I’m up half the night! You’ve no idea how much work I have to do. I can’t think.’

  Cait lay in the prow of Michael’s arms, mouth an anemone, a small pink O. The sudden wash of love Laura felt made her clutch for something to hold on to. She wanted to tell Vik that her work, whatever it was, could wait. Look at what you have here! she longed to shout. This beautiful child.

  But then, in the next moment, Laura could see she didn’t need to. Gazing at her little daughter, Vik’s expression was naked, adoring. Whatever she was feeling about her new role in life, she clearly loved the child in a way that was physically challenging, difficult to cope with, frightening as falling in love. Watching Vik watch Cait, Laura saw how precarious, dangerous even, parenthood was. There was her capable sister, made vulnerable and miserable and awed. To love someone that much, to love them in a way that demanded the subjugation of oneself – it seemed against the natural order of things: self-preservation.

  Laura turned and leaned heavily on the bench, hiding her face. She felt hit over the head, suddenly recalling Kath’s sleeplessness, the devotion she had lavished on her art by retreating to the studio at night, emerging in the morning only because she had to, hands brown with dried clay. Laura still nurtured the anger she’d felt as a child, coming into the kitchen to find Kath bristling with resentment, tired, distracted, longing for quiet. Kath’s devotion to her work had felt like neglect, something painfully shameful, an aberration Laura needed to protect herself against. But watching Vik obsessively check her messages over the baby’s shoulder, muttering about meetings and deadlines although she was on leave from work, Laura wondered for the first time if she had ever understood the full complexity of her mother’s situation.

  The idea, in its charity, was so shocking that she immediately bent herself to the intricacies of brewing tea, just to get away from it. Hands trembling, she followed the steps that Bruce had taught her, numbing herself with dutiful metering of water, milk and leaves.

  The day passed, bringing another hot evening. Beer bottles ran with sweat. The three of them sat splayed around the table, panting like dogs. Cait slept. The debris of the dinner was spread out before them, picked through. Every action happened in slow motion, dragged by heat.

  ‘What are you working on?’ Michael said. He motioned at the spectrum of coloured pencils and papers on the sideboard by the door, his hand a listless flag.

  Laura was slumped in her chair, using a magazine to shift the air across her face, like being breathed on, but she got up and went to the sideboard, feeling the hot ember of excitement: her idea.

  Though she didn’t fully ascribe to all the radical things Luc thought, and fought for, she had spent enough time in the last decade at rallies and talking in bars to know that there were better ways of doing t
hings at the farm, ways that would cost less and last longer. Ways that would protect the place. Not harm it. The old Bruce would have resisted such changes; they just weren’t the way things were done. Laura felt a stab of remorse at that. More guilt. But she wasn’t entirely the same daughter who had left all those years before. She couldn’t erase what she knew.

  If the work was hers to do, surely that gave her some right to choose how it should be done.

  At the table, she cleared space for her papers with a slow sweep of arm. Vik craned to see. Laura caught the realisation in her sister’s face as her chair shrieked back across the floor. If only Vik could hear her out, understand the truth of what Luc had said, she would know that the plan was a good one, necessary and important. But even as she talked, Laura sensed that she was being unfair to her sister, whose relationship to the farm was complicated; she had always struggled to stake a claim to the place. Between Bruce and Laura, the loss of Kath, who could blame her?

  ‘All this here’s cleared land,’ Laura pressed on, shuffling the first illustration. Her forefinger traced the areas shaded red. The whole map, stained with crimson strokes. ‘I want to start replanting. Rehabilitate the place. Be good as new in a few decades’ time.’

  Vik was standing now. She clutched her hands, a beating heart of fingers. There were other maps, spanning years, and Laura anxiously fanned them out. Each was identical in design, coloured according to her plans. In time, the red would be but a memory, overgrown by Derwent green. She would be forty before she knew it; eighty would arrive just as fast. She might not live to see it come off. But Cait would. There was something magical about that, Laura thought. An investment.

  Michael touched the small black square, reproduced on each page. ‘This is the house?’

  Vik took the last map. Laura observed her reading its terrain. It was the dense, closely treed landscape of their childhood, rendered in 2D. The land before Kath disappeared. Vik still hadn’t spoken, so Laura filled up the gaping silence by explaining that she had gotten advice. The land was stuffed; they’d stuffed it. But she had connections, people who could help. The valley could recover with a bit of sweat and TLC.

  ‘Great, Lor,’ Michael said kindly. ‘Sounds like a plan.’ A kookaburra called out beyond the house. The laugh echoed across the drought-stroked paddocks.

  ‘Well?’ Laura said impatiently, turning a beer warm in her hands. ‘What do you reckon, Vik?’

  ‘Lot of work,’ Vik said tersely, but it wasn’t what she meant.

  Laura didn’t bother replying, but tossed in her chair, waiting. She thought of those other maps, roughly drawn by Bruce. Could Vik recall that time as poignantly as she could? They rarely spoke about it. It seemed so long ago, but even the merest suggestion of it made Laura’s throat constrict. That much younger, who knew how her sister had understood what was happening? How it made her feel now?

  ‘So, what?’ Vik said, eventually. ‘You’re moving out here all of a sudden?’ Laura looked away, but having got a rise, Vik persisted. ‘What about Luc? He want to live here, then?’ Michael put a hand on Vik’s arm, baffled, but she went on, ‘You’ve got a life in Sydney. What does Luc think about all this?’

  Laura spoke carefully, controlling her anger, as though Vik were still a child. ‘I don’t want to live in Sydney, Vik. Dad needs me.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘I’m not asking you to stay. Jesus, I wouldn’t expect that. I just want you to agree to let me stay here and look after Dad, fix the place up.’

  Vik huffed, scowling. She crossed her arms. Laura almost laughed at the comical expression on Michael’s face; he was obviously mystified by the tension. He pushed back his chair and stood up, muttering something about Cait.

  Alone together, Vik and Laura sat in silence for a while. But watching the angry set of Vik’s jaw, the way she stared fixedly at the wall, Laura felt the fight go out of her.

  ‘Look,’ she said, sighing. ‘I shouldn’t have sprung it all on you like that.’ She explained that she should have approached Vik with her ideas for rehabilitation more thoughtfully. The decision about what to do next should have been theirs to make together. After all, they would inherit the place jointly; half of it was Vik’s.

  The words seemed to loosen something in Vik, because she met Laura’s gaze. Laura was surprised to find her eyes full of tears. ‘I just thought, I don’t know.’ She roughly wiped them. ‘I just assumed that we’d sell when Dad wasn’t well enough to stay on his own. I know what this place has meant, don’t get me wrong. But the idea, that we could finally be free of it!’

  Laura saw that for Vik the farm would always be something to escape from. What had happened there was just too tightly braided together with dark feelings: grief, anger and fear. She was sorry for that. She felt her regret like a yoke that would never lift. She took Vik’s hand across the table. They remained connected this way for a moment in the gloom.

  The farm was important, Laura explained softly. Not only Bruce’s home – his life’s work – but in terms of his condition. When Vik protested, Laura’s voice rose. ‘This is our home. Understand?’ Vik fell silent. Laura’s voice dropped. ‘I need to do this,’ she said, wincing at the sound of herself, begging. It might have been the most intimate thing she had ever said. But she had never needed anything before. At least, nothing that her sister could provide.

  Listening, Vik nodded slowly. Laura exhaled, unclenching her fists. So Vik understood, then. She knew how she felt. Laura recalled the land as it had been long before they carved the farm out of hills. She would grow more trees, like turning back a clock. Put things right.

  Michael brought the baby in, passed her to Vik. She stood rocking the child, perhaps a little too vigorously. ‘We can reassess any time you like,’ she said quietly, turning from the window. ‘You ever want to leave …’

  Hot buttery light fell across the floor, the day dying. Vik’s long wheat hair: sheaves of gold. Even her posture was Kath’s. With a jolt of recognition, Laura’s hand found her throat.

  Laura walked through dust, absorbed by the cool interior of the shed. New posts, rolls of plastic hosing, roofing tin in sheets and bundles of wooden stakes were stacked along one wall. She used a rusty Stanley knife to cut through the tough black string binding the lucerne together. They had once lived in a square of cleared land ringed by bush. Now, as then, they kept mainly to the house. Red rolling acres hemmed them in as the impenetrable trees had done. The house a raft they clung to in the midst of a big, dead sea.

  Every evening Laura took Luc’s call, whispering for privacy in her childhood room. She understood his point. She had, as he said, made the decision to stay in Kyree without his input or consent. He felt locked out. She felt, palpably, his hurt. Their conversation was at times cold and silvery as the Harbour at night, their words salty, their silences deep. Other nights the argument crashed and roared, orchestral. Laura ached to hold Luc in her arms. They cried together. She pressed the plastic receiver to her cheek as though it might become his hand. He didn’t understand what she had to make up for, her penitence, and could not ever know. She wished he would come down to Kyree, and she didn’t. She said she was not leaving him; he was still loved. She just needed time. She said, ‘Please. Don’t come. Not yet.’

  She went around the house, arms full of grass. The veggie garden was a brown square, the chook shed empty. Sheep skittered as she approached. One had exposed skull at its brow: a neighbour’s dog, a barbed-wire fence. Once wounded, the sheep’s skin did not knit back. The bone showed, grey as wool.

  ‘Bloody mongrel,’ Bruce had said on the phone months before. ‘Saw him chasin’ the poor bugger and everything, right into the fence. Still, heard he got bit last week. Fifth dog in the district, they reckon. Heaps more snakes this season, up ’round houses. Heaps more dogs dead.’

  Inside, Vik was pacing up and down. Phone to ear, she held the baby like a purse. Michael had gone back to Melbourne the night before. There was only so long anyone could be
expected to wait for a broken teapot or vase to be repaired. ‘Gotta get back to picking up the pieces!’ he had joked, dropping his bag into the boot of the car.

  Laura spread hay beneath the bare clothesline. Sheep nuzzled dirt. Pungent grassiness of sheep dung, glossy liquorice, steeped the air. She waved a fly away. Watched her sister through the flyscreen. Vik’s voice got louder, receded, got louder, as she strode up and back along the hall. A one-sided conversation. ‘No,’ Vik said. ‘That’s not acceptable. No. They’ll have to redo the plans. Well, tell them it’s non-negotiable. Well tell them to email me. Well tell …’ The door swung open. Vik stood on the back step squinting, legs planted, mouth made of fierce lines. She barked into her phone. The baby dangled, gurgling. Observing, Laura felt the sudden urge to get away. ‘This is important,’ Vik shrilled. ‘Understand?’ Laura listened, cringing.

  When the sheep were fed, she crunched across the drive. She stepped over the baggy fence, into the first paddock. The sun rose. She turned her collar up. Her calves moaned against the incline of the hill. At the gully, she looked down into the ravine forged by the creek. Deeper than she remembered – the soil had been worn away by the years.

  She thought of the water that had supposedly washed Kath away. With the sun beating down on the dust, it was hard to believe the flood had happened at all. Luc talked about erosion. His bad moods were made of melting ice, factory smoke, rainforest chips and pests.

  Without roots to sew soil, the fabric of the earth had torn. A tree had fallen down across Bruce’s fence. Gully fence went into Laura’s book of jobs, neat grey letters.

  An ambulance was winding up the drive. Laura turned to watch the small white square. As greeting, the siren coughed, allowing a red-blue flash, a short wail. She started running back down the hill. The dam was a crater. No yabbies now. The ambulance parked inside the yard. Vik stepped down into the sun. She was too far away to be made out, anonymous in a long dark skirt. She bounced the baby in her arms. It was not a soothing action, but anxious.