Anchor Point

by Alice Robinson

  The image was familiar; Laura skidded still to watch. There on the edge of the shimmering brown valley was the corrugated house, the tank stand. Dominating, as ocean is to beach, the rich blue sky made up the scene. A paramedic got out of the cab, went ’round to open up the doors. Vik stood straight, as though it was her posture that held back encroaching trouble.

  When the police had closed down the official search for Kath, Laura and Bruce had stood right where the ambulance was now parked. On that day, rain had rushed over gutters, soaking the walls of the house. Bruce had held Vik, as Vik now held Cait. Vik’s red face, pressed into the crook of his neck, the mud from her boots on his back. ‘I want my mutti!’ she sobbed.

  Bruce held her like he had forgotten she was there. His hand turned unconscious circles on her vinyl back. Laura sucked her knuckles, tasted dirt. Coatless, Bruce shivered. The weight of Vik’s body forced his posture back into his heels. Laura watched the play of muscles beneath his see-through shirt. He called to the constable, ‘Wait!’ His voice gurgled. ‘Just, please. Wait.’ He transferred Vik to his hip.

  The constable loaded the big wet rope into the van. He did not turn around. A young officer, new to the job, flicked Bruce a pitying smile. The German shepherd he restrained pawed at mud, growling.

  ‘She’s still out there,’ Bruce called. ‘For Christ’s sake!’

  The constable faced them, sombre. The muscles in his jaw strained against his feeling. ‘We’ll be going now,’ he said. ‘I’m … sorry.’

  The caravan of vans and cars was already winding away down the drive. Laura watched her father watch them go. They were on their own. She was not ashamed of the relief she felt – that came later. Vik’s sobs were all-consuming.

  ‘Cup of tea, Dad?’ Laura said.

  Bruce stood slackly.

  ‘Dad? Tea?’

  Now, down in the yard, Bruce stared about him, red eyes watering. Vik had him ’round the waist. They swayed together.

  Laura stepped over the paddock fence. ‘Cooee,’ she called. ‘You ’right?’

  Bruce licked and licked his lips. The medic unfurled a wheelchair. Laura saw liver spots like splattered mud on her father’s face and hands. He gripped his knees. Vik hung back, directing the medic as he helped Bruce sit.

  ‘Hello, love!’ Bruce said to Laura as she came into the shade.

  Vik’s voice, now drilling the medic for facts, was harsh as a cockatoo screech.

  ‘Hi Dad,’ Laura said softly. ‘You ’right?’ She touched Bruce’s hand.

  ‘Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes!’ he said. He spoke thickly, as though he held soup in his mouth. Laura kissed his tissue-paper cheek, took the handles of his chair.

  ‘Dad,’ Vik was saying. ‘It’s me. Viktoria. Your daughter?’

  ‘Who?’

  Laura felt the blade of Bruce’s shoulder, sharp through his skin. ‘That’s Viko, Dad,’ she said. ‘Your youngest girl. You’re home now.’

  ‘Kath, love. This some kind of …’ He shook his head.

  Laura straightened, catching Vik’s eye. There was nowhere to hide in her sister’s face.

  ‘Let’s get you inside,’ Laura mumbled.

  They went between the house and the shed, past the newly painted pickets lining the boundary of the yard. Vik walked ahead to open the back door. Sheep milled. Bruce broke off his garbled speech. The back of his neck, visible above the hospital-pressed collar of his shirt, was deeply lined and pink. He stiffened. Laura felt it through the handles of the chair. On the clothesline, Vik’s washing, white flags of many nappies, hung crackling in the heat. Bruce tilted back his head. The branches of the gum stretched like silver skeletons against the sky. Vik turned, waiting at the door.

  Bruce called, ‘Remember when Lor fell? Copying what’s-his-name, that bloody monkey!’ He laughed, pointing up into the bough. ‘Never seen so much, so much …’

  ‘Blood?’ Laura said. She chuckled.

  Vik lay her cheek against Cait’s crown. Her tears seeped into the baby’s hair, soft and fine as embroidery silk.

  ‘Year of the fires?’ Bruce said.

  Laura bit her lip. ‘That’s right, Dad.’

  ‘Show us your scar, then!’

  Laura came around the chair. It was him. She could see her old man there, looking out through the degraded face. Breath caught in her chest. His eyebrows went up as if to say, Well? What are you waiting for? She lifted her hair with both hands. She bent over his legs the way she might bend over the sink to rinse shampoo.

  Bruce found the place at the base of her skull, the crescent scar, where doctors sewed her up. ‘Still there!’ he said.

  Vik laughed through her tears. Laura grinned.

  Bruce turned his face up to the tree. ‘Been meaning to chop it down,’ he said. ‘Get ’round to it, one of these days.’

  Two rosellas soared in place of clouds. Bruce watched, staring up into the sun. Their feathers pierced by light. Laura saw that she had been right: his memory was stored in the land.

  ‘Lor?’ Vik’s voice trembled. ‘He’ll burn, you stay out much longer.’

  Laura went to Vik. Held her.

  Inside, Laura helped Bruce from one chair to the next. He ran his hand over the kitchen tabletop, feeling the marks and burns as braille. ‘Thanks a mill’,’ he said. ‘Better not stay, but. Mum’ll be expecting me for …’

  ‘Dad?’ Vik said. She sounded scared.

  Bruce said, ‘Well, that’s that then. Time for me to take my leave of youse.’

  Laura knelt down. They were eye to eye. She held his hand. She spoke in a low voice, the way she spoke to the sheep to calm them in their pen, the way she had observed Bruce speak to the sheep, the horse, the chooks, the dogs, a million times. He calmed. His hands caressed each other in his lap.

  ‘How ’bout a nice cup of tea?’ Laura said quietly. ‘Yeah, Dad? A nice hot cuppa?’

  They sat in the shade of the verandah, like sitting in a tepid bath. Better than being indoors, though, among the drone of flies. Laura was sick of the heat – no dam to cool off in. Sweat gathered in the creases of elbows, at wrists, behind ears, and itched. Her ankles were two ripe fruits. At least on the verandah there was the view across the valley. The sense of space, a physical illusion, diminished the closeness of the heat. And Bruce enjoyed being outside, harsh as sunburn though it was. He was more himself in the open air.

  ‘Coupla young ones there,’ he said. A trio of grey-black magpies swooped down to the yard fence. He frowned. ‘Bit late in the season, isn’t it? For hatchlings?’

  ‘Is it?’ Laura said, distractedly. She worked the spoon of porridge towards his mouth.

  Bruce was straining forward in his chair, squinting from birds to sun. ‘Rousing up’, as he might have called it, once. ‘Usually come out in spring,’ he said. ‘Am I right?’

  ‘Look, it’s alright, Dad,’ Laura said. ‘Don’t worry, okay? It is spring. Eat up now, c’mon.’

  There was a flicker of something in the lined face, like the twitch of a curtain. But he opened his mouth obediently, allowed her to spoon his breakfast in.

  ‘Geez I’m glad to see you, love.’ Bruce reached for Laura, stroked her cheek. They held each other’s gaze. She experienced the unsettling sensation that neither of them were who they appeared to be. He looked away, squinting.

  Laura said, ‘You ’right?’ She took his hand.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I said, you okay, Dad?’

  He shrugged, like slipping off a coat. ‘Sometimes I get this feeling. Was just yesterday, and you were a little girl.’

  How can I leave? Laura thought. How can I stay?

  The last magpie launched, a dark blur.

  ‘Bit late in the season for young maggies,’ Bruce said. ‘Wouldn’t you say, love?’

  After breakfast, Bruce and Vik ‘took exercise’ along the drive, as the doctors said he should.

  ‘By jingo, whaddya think I am? A bloody … thing of the manor?’ Bruce laughed.
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  Vik pushed Cait in the pram. Laura watched them from the house, a strange sight. The woman in faded jeans and broad straw hat, the shuffling, stooped old man, and the pram chocked by stones and dirt. Dwarfed by the sepia sprawl, the rolling burnished hills, they promenaded down the drive. The hills belonged to the nightmares Laura suffered, in which she ran through trees, looking for something that she could not name, and could never quite uncover.

  In another future, Kath might have been there to care for Bruce. But it was just the three of them, and Vik was leaving again. Laura thought of her life in the city, seeming distant as the past. As she watched Bruce groping for Vik’s arm, she knew that part of her life was over.

  Stumbling, Bruce gave a quick, cut cry. Laura watched him go down. She pelted along the drive. Vik crouched, hands at his shoulders and face.

  Bruce murmured, ‘Dunno what …’ He rocked, a turtle on its back. The whites of his eyes looked green.

  ‘Easy, Dad,’ Laura panted, throwing herself down.

  Vik worked the baby’s muslin wrap beneath his head. They hovered, stroking. Bruce’s fingers roamed the air.

  ‘Gonna have quite a bruise there, Dad,’ Laura said.

  Vik seemed transfixed by Bruce’s face. He wore the expression of a man in a blind taste-test, encountering a familiar but elusive flavour.

  ‘Dad?’ Vik said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Storm’s coming.’

  Vik and Laura stared at each other across Bruce’s form. Vik rolled up her eyes to plug the tears. Laura stroked his rumpled brow. Her voice was winter-sad, still and blue and quiet. ‘Oh, Dad,’ she said. ‘It hasn’t rained in years.’

  They slid their hands under Bruce’s shoulders, sharing the weight. Laura felt the knot of muscle in his back, a cord not yet frayed by illness or old age. They hefted him unsteadily onto his feet.

  ‘Head hurts something shocking,’ Bruce said. ‘What’s for lunch?’

  They spent the afternoon on the verandah playing cards. Bruce reclined, while beside him Cait lay cooing in her pram. Despite the sweetness of the scene, Laura felt unaccountably bereft. Something in the innocence of the game she played with Vik, the quiet domesticity of their closeness, the lack of need for conversation: it made her chest hurt. She wanted to stop time, to preserve the bittersweet feeling of being somehow whole.

  A magpie scrolled across the sky. Michael was on his way. Vik would be gone in a matter of hours.

  Laura slapped down her cards. ‘Twenty-one!’

  Before Vik could reveal her hand, a peal of thunder broke and rolled across the valley. Laura gasped, clapping hand to mouth. She saw her shock reflected in her sister’s face. Bruce looked at them and laughed. Thunder reverberated between hills, washing back and forth like eddies over rocks. It was the sound of their childhood, a long-forgotten voice. Then, it belonged to heartbreak; now it was miraculous.

  Laura leapt to her feet. Cards scattered across the boards. She craned past the verandah rail, arm outstretched. When her palm came back wet, she vaulted over the railing, a move perfected years ago. Squatting in the yard, she turned her face up to the sky and opened her mouth.

  ‘Can you taste it?’ Vik said.

  So naked was her sister’s hope that Laura was grateful when the rain fell harder and forced her gaze away.

  Later, Vik came to stand by Laura at the kitchen window. The sisters watched without touching. A piece of earth broke off and slipped down the face of the western hilly slope. Laura’s shoulders shook. The ground was hard as glass; rain did not soak, it ran. Floodwater where before had been dust. Water rushed across the yard, wearing deep grooves, a liquid plough. Water swirled along the drive. Water arched over the gutters. Water came in below the back door. Water drowning her seedlings – it washed topsoil away. Water, it seemed to Laura, like anger.

  It was still hot. The heat brought violence to the storm. Laura’s arms bristled with static. She could only remember one other time when it had rained like this. The valley, a bowl brimming with light and rain. Laura wondered what her sister recalled of that other wet night.

  ‘At least nothing will burn,’ Vik said. ‘If lightning strikes.’

  She chewed at red-raw knuckles. Laura slid her arm around Vik’s waist. In the room, the sad percussion of water on water in buckets, bowls and pans. It grew dark. Strobes of lightning flicked across the velvet sky. The valley lit up.

  In the wake of Vik’s departure, Laura established a routine, not so different from the shape of the days when she was young; farm work was a natural scaffold for time. Daily meals, girders for their waking hours. She rose early and went to bed late.

  Sometimes she barely slept at all. Sometimes Bruce woke at three in the morning asking for dinner. Sometimes at noon he tried to light the stove. Laura coped the way that he had taught her: by aligning time to jobs and lashing Bruce to the mast that they formed. Head down, she laboured, sticking close to the house. If he called out, she came running.

  Laura made progress, never veering from her own strict schedule. The reality of Bruce’s condition served only to strengthen their timetable. Managing the condition contained, in itself, a meter: pills, afternoon naps, bath-time, bed. Their lives ran like clockwork in the management of Bruce’s health, which was on a slow and steady slide downhill, and in the repair of the land, which at rock bottom might still come back, alive.

  ‘Need a hand, love?’ Bruce said eagerly, at the beginning of each day.

  ‘Nah, you sit tight.’

  Laura set the radio on the verandah rail and turned the sound right up. The newsreader spoke of water pumped up from rural rivers into town. It didn’t matter which day.

  ‘I’ll be just over there,’ she said. ‘Need anything, give me a shout.’

  Bruce cocked his head, listening to the news report. ‘Strange,’ he said, ‘why hasn’t Father mentioned the drought?’

  In the early evening, Laura stepped from the bright shallows of the yard into the pool of shade. She pulled off her gardening gloves. ‘You ’right, Dad?’ She touched Bruce’s shoulder. He started, smiled, shifting the blanket on his knee. The sound of new chooks clucking, gentle castanets, could be heard behind the house.

  ‘I can’t see the sheep,’ Bruce said. ‘Buggers better not be loose!’ He pursed his lips.

  Across the drive, in the paddock, lines of saplings stretched from fence to fence. Laura was onto her second notebook, catalogues of work.

  When the dinner was made and served, Laura carried bowls of pasta back out onto the porch. The sky was harsh with stars. Jazz played, scales running against insect song.

  ‘Been eaten alive yet?’ she said. ‘Dad?’

  The couch was bare but for the flaccid blanket. Her cry sounded feeble, muffled by the encroaching night – it did not echo, but died. She scanned paddocks for a human shape, the valley all shadow.

  For blind minutes, Laura called out. She checked the machinery shed. Her socks were wild with burs. Light leaked beneath the roller door. She crunched it up manually.

  Bruce turned from the tractor, grease gun held aloft. ‘Hello, love!’ he said, grinning. ‘There y’are. How’s the pottery coming?’

  She gaped. His whiskers sanded back her cheek. Then he bent to his work, applying gun to wheel. The grease was sticky, like coagulated blood. She watched. She didn’t know what to say; he was okay. He worked over each nipple, lubricating with the gun. The task unfolded as it had a million times before. It seemed he followed silent instructions, stored in his muscles.

  Why these? Laura thought. And not others?

  She drew a hand across her face, smearing the corners of her mouth. It was Bruce’s gesture, passed along with chin and eyes. Like honey, the old grease seeped out from the joint as the fresh grease piped in. Laura watched him lean in to polish, lovingly, with a square of rag.

  ‘Dinner’s ready,’ she said, as evenly as she could.

  He allowed himself to be led back to the house. It was deep-water black. The windows were lit, bri
ght yellow squares. Laura held Bruce’s elbow. Something scuttled in the dirt, croaking. They leaned into each other. Together, they felt their way across the yard.

  All through dinner, they chatted like old friends. Bruce kept calling her Viktoria, but was cheerful. The strange, contorted faces, his uncertainty and fear, had melted. He was himself. Laura fought the impulse to lean across, touch his hand, make light of the memory loss. She told a story about the sheep; he laughed, snorting into his mug.

  The shower took too long to get warm, so Laura had it cold. The tap went off while she scrubbed her skin pink with a bald face washer she’d used since she was a little girl. Bathing was a fractured thing. Not a pleasure, another job.

  In fresh clean clothes she padded down the hall. He was there. Just like that. He was there, sitting at the kitchen table, rolling a cigarette from her tobacco-pouch. Her pulse beat fast as fly-wing. ‘Luc?’

  She had forgotten the solidity and bulk of him. He encased her. Laura felt something fall away. She sank into his chest, holding tufts of his shirt in her fists.

  ‘How’s Bruce?’ Luc said into her hair.

  Laura pulled back, smearing her face on her sleeve, stunned by the flesh-and-blood reality of him standing in the room, by the care with which he asked the question, his earnest expression, the gentleness with which he clasped her upper arms.

  ‘He’s sleeping,’ Laura said, shakily. She kissed and kissed his face and hands.

  ‘Can we talk?’ Luc said.

  Loud as lawnmowers, the drone of insects filled her ears. Laura flicked the porch light on. They stepped out into the hay-dry night. She shut the door carefully behind them. For a moment they stood in silence, Luc leaning against the balustrade, pulling meditatively on the smoke.

  Laura hugged herself. She sensed that despite his kindness and his calm, the cigarette stood in for his true feelings. He drew grey smoke into his lungs. He was a good man; he hadn’t come all this way just for a fight. But Laura knew he had every right to be angry. She had left Sydney months ago. The word disappeared came to mind, but Laura shrugged it off.