Anchor Point

by Alice Robinson

  The sunscreen smelled of Bondi beach in summer, all those years ago. She cursed herself. Now she would have to work with that scent in her nose. It was a smell of ice-cream and fighting and fish’n’chips, of sex and cask wine and dope. She dismissed Michael and dug the shovel in.

  She ‘put her back into it’, as Bruce would have said.

  It was early evening by the time the grave was deep enough. Laura attempted to climb out. Loose dirt rained down. The hole was deeper than she was tall. She stood panting, hands on hips, appraising the walls. She would have to dig herself a ladder now. Her predicament was the sort of joke Bruce would love: a job done without planning, undone.

  Laura sat down hard on the floor of the trench. How many times would she have to go through this? This sudden realisation? Her tears were dry; she cried in throat and body, shaking. She felt the loss of her father in her gut, a real, cold, clamping pain. This was despair, she thought, to have hope for the future sucked away. She cried for Bruce, who had stopped knowing who she was long ago. Had stopped knowing himself. The last year was the worst. No rain, just the endless cycle of physical care. She cried for her loneliness, for so long without Luc – or anyone.

  ‘Come with me,’ Luc had said desperately, suddenly clutching at her, leaving for Sydney all those years ago. ‘You don’t have to give away your life. We’ll get nurses, come back on holidays, weekends. We’ll manage this together.’

  Her disdain caught her by surprise. Her life, her whole life, was contained in each patch of dirt, each stump. She had grown from the place. What was Luc thinking? She couldn’t switch that off. Every square of grass was steeped in her own history, and in Bruce. But there was no breathing space within which Luc could form his own connection. She had the place. It had her.

  ‘Lor?’

  Laura heaved herself up, hand at brow against the glare. A girl stood on the edge of the grave, a silhouette. Laura’s lips ran with cracks. ‘Viko?’ she croaked. ‘That you?’

  The girl knelt. She leaned over the hole. Her face came into focus, cast in gloom.

  ‘It’s me,’ Cait said. ‘Can’t get good reception here. I’m bored.’ Cait possessed the perfect skin of a baby. It troubled Laura to see that her niece didn’t wear a hat. How much we take for granted, she thought. That things will never change.

  Cait stretched a hand down to Laura, who in turn reached up to touch the delicate finger-fronds. Blood pounded Laura’s ears. She was queasy with heat.

  Flicking her hair, Cait said, ‘You’ve been gone for ages.’

  ‘Vik know you’re out here?’

  Cait’s face disappeared. Laura took up the shovel and cut into the wall, carving a ladder to the surface. She was nothing if not resourceful. At the top, she sat for a moment on the edge, feet dangling into the grave as though bathing them in water, catching her breath. She was sure she looked a right fright, face smeared with tears and dirt, showered in the day’s thick sweat. She took Cait’s soft, white hand when it was offered, allowed the girl to help her to her feet.

  ‘You’re bleeding,’ Cait said, worried.

  Laura felt like a horse about to be made glue. She stared at her palms, the burst blisters. ‘Ah, I’ve had worse,’ she said, shrugging. She picked up the shovel. Her weariness seemed timeless, set into her bones.

  They started down the hill together. The dam was a mosaic of tessellated clay. Laura glanced at her niece, taking in the pretty heart-shaped face. She had Michael’s eyes, his wild hair: Cait’s too would turn white one day. And when Cait smiled, Kath was there – ‘clear as day’, as Bruce would say – in the crooked eye tooth.

  People are not lost, Laura thought sadly. But passed on.

  She was glad for the girl’s touch, her energy. Without it, she might not have had the motivation to get back down the hill, particularly to a house full of people.

  When the farm came into view, Laura took it at a glance, too tired to admire her own work: the fences she had removed to allow native animals to pass through, the huge vegetable garden, the orchard planted inside a cage to keep birds out, the solar panels. Some of the saplings were still alive; many had perished. But the paddocks and hills remained dotted with posts and guards, mapping Laura’s best intentions, months spent with hands in dirt.

  Across the road, the old Peterson farm was scarred and crossed with fresh-poured streets: a new estate, Peterson Meadows. Not all the quarter-acre blocks were sold; the estate was pocked with squares of razed and measured land. Yet even those blocks with complete houses were bare, buildings square in the centre of their lots, everything so new, so harshly without vegetation that it looked industrial. Beyond the estate, the Jolley farm had ‘sold for a song’, as Bruce liked to say. No doubt that too would be developed, the whole place made suburban. It was hard to remember that cows had ever dotted green and rolling paddocks where squares of brick now stood. Even harder to conjure up the vast expanse of bush that had flourished before that.

  ‘It’s so hot,’ Cait complained, squinting. ‘Can’t believe this town still doesn’t have a pool.’

  Laura snorted. ‘Pool? Alright for some.’ Cait flinched, turning her face away. It hurt Laura to hear herself. She didn’t mean to come off so gruff. ‘Used to swim in the dam when we were kids,’ she tried again, softening, pretending not to notice Cait wrinkling her nose. She took some pleasure from shocking her niece, the way Cait was forced to re-evaluate things when she came to Kyree. ‘Anyway,’ Laura went on, ‘when I was little, this whole place was lush and green. Wasn’t so hot. Would you believe it?’

  Cait didn’t even look around. She just stared straight into Laura’s face. Frowning, she shook her head. Laura wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. She saw that the land would always be this way for Cait, growing from drought dirt.

  As they arrived at the garden gate, though there was no gate anymore, Vik burst through the flyscreen door. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ she screeched. ‘Cait, I was worried sick. Anything could have happened!’

  Her face was inflamed by the week’s tears. She brandished one of Bruce’s handkerchiefs, scrunched up in her hand. She kept blotting her nose and eyes, though both were now dry. Cait shrank back, but Vik grabbed at her. It chilled Laura, the echo of that other mother in her sister’s looming rage. However much they were themselves, shaped by their own decisions, they were also, so innately, the products of Kath and Bruce.

  Vik was still going on. Laura couldn’t watch. Touching her daughter’s skin, Vik seemed desperate to check that the girl was real. ‘Don’t do that again, Cait. You understand? You never go anywhere without telling me. Especially here.’

  ‘Relax, Mum.’ Cait rolled her eyes, but her cheeks were flushed. ‘God. I’m not a baby.’

  Vik was trembling, rage mounting in the mottling of her neck.

  ‘Viko,’ Laura said gently, touching her sister’s back. ‘C’mon, she won’t do it again – will you, Cait?’

  Pursing her lips and frowning, Vik seemed old then. Laura shivered: how old did that make her? She had only been a kid, just ten, when Kath went missing – she corrected herself – when Kath left. Cait was the same age, though she seemed vastly more mature at times, with her knowledge of makeup and music and fashion, and sometimes so much younger, unencumbered by the responsibilities and chores Laura had shouldered.

  There wasn’t one day that Laura did not think about the letter, about what, in that instant, she had done. She was just a kid! How could she have known the way that one swift action would press down for years, through generations, to Cait? If there was anything Laura wished, it was for Cait to go unscathed. But Cait’s mother had been a little girl who lost her own mother in the bush. It was Laura’s fault, and Cait had suffered for it. She had grown up with Vik’s unconscious fear, her desire for perfection and her cellular anger, the anxiety she experienced when alone.

  ‘I wasn’t doing anything!’ Cait muttered, arms crossed tightly. ‘God, Mum.’

  I know where you get that attitude from,
Laura thought wryly.

  ‘Come inside,’ Vik said wearily. She hesitated a moment, on the verge of saying something more.

  Michael came onto the verandah, calling to Cait. ‘Beenden wir das Spiel?’ he said. ‘Chess board’s still out.’

  Cait broke into a smile, bounded up the steps and took her father’s arm, exclaiming that she would have his queen in a move or two. Laura felt the hair go up on her neck. It wasn’t Michael’s German – she had heard him use the language often enough – but that Cait was able to answer him so fluently, chatting away. Not for the first time, Laura wished she could turn off that part of her brain, what little understanding she had left. It hurt to comprehend those words. German speech, with its particular patterning, rendered the world in such a way as to make Laura feel she was being thrust back in time. The world in German was Kath’s world. Laura wanted no part of it.

  Regardless, she found herself calling to her niece in the language, clumsily conjugating, ‘When did you get so good?’

  ‘Mum makes me go to Saturday school,’ Cait responded quickly, grimacing, flouncing past her mother into the house.

  Vik had turned in the doorway, watching the three of them. Painfully locked out of their conversation, she wore a tight, polite little smile on her face. How unfair it was, Laura thought, that Vik had tried so hard to acquire Kath’s language, taking evening classes, listening to tapes, marrying Michael; she even cooked German food. But for all her brains, she couldn’t get the grammar, the vocab, to stick. Vik was so used to relying on her intellect; Laura understood that her sister’s failure infuriated her. Horrible to want something badly but never get it. And here Laura was, carrying the knowledge around unwillingly, like a strand of DNA.

  Michael brushed Vik’s cheek tenderly as he followed Cait inside. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said quickly in German, coughed, and repeated in English. ‘Sweetheart, it’s just a phase.’

  Laura walked away towards the shed. The shovel went against its shadow on the wall. Though Bruce would never see its absence, he had trained her well.

  They had fought a bureaucratic war to allow for Bruce’s burial on his land: his wish. Vik had used her influence in the city to get the paperwork signed. Laura didn’t ask any questions. Standing graveside on the hill, waves of dry grass like rippling straw, looking down on the house – a view so familiar it was pure comfort – Laura was surprised by a sense of wellbeing. It had been worth it; they were doing the right thing. It was the right place for him to be.

  When it came her turn to speak, Laura steeled herself to face the scattered crowd. It was so inhumanly quiet then, as though the volume had gone down on the world. She became aware of her place on the hill, of the rustle of hot wind in the fabric of her dress, the pale blue sky: the colour of Bruce’s eyes. The smell of hot dirt was pungent, chalky. She had changed the face of the place in those last years, but Bruce was still everywhere she looked. Laura folded her speech away and drew breath. She spoke about the loss of Cairnlea, of Bruce’s lifelong drive to set things straight. She told them how much Bruce had taught her. What a good father he had been.

  ‘He wasn’t always easy, and he worked bloody hard. But he built this place up for us. He gave us a good home. Can’t ask for more than that.’

  She spoke as well and purely as she could. It was only much later over wine – such bleak and dutiful drinking – when Vik slurred, ‘You never mentioned Mum!’ that Laura saw Kath had no place in her speech. She was her father’s daughter, and everything had been about the farm.

  Laura watched the men lower Bruce’s coffin into the earth. She had wanted to do it herself, with Vik, but was glad now. She didn’t think she had the strength. Cait stepped up to the lectern and began to sing. Her voice was high and clear. Laura was reminded of something she had been told: in the act of singing, the delicate vocal cords that allow for such sweet sound destroy themselves.

  There was a hand at the hot small of her back. It was Luc. She would know his touch anywhere. His arrival made ripples in the crowd, low murmurs. Laura glanced around, slit-eyed.

  The coffin hit dirt, settled. Laura felt the thud of it in her chest. Luc bent down and kissed her cheek. The hair at his temples was greying. He wore a sombre suit, a tie. Laura saw her face in his shoes. The idiocy of the moment, that there was space in her grief-crammed brain to notice the quality of his pinstripe. To catch the gold in his tooth when he smiled. Weight had gathered beneath his chin, at his waist. His face was deeply lined. If anything, the changes brought by age had just made the fact of his beauty all the more astonishing.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he whispered. ‘And you look great.’

  Laura took his arm; she needed something to hold on to. He held a huge golf umbrella above their heads. The shade it cast, like cool water. He slipped his arm around her waist to hold her up. Her handkerchief was balled with salt. She caught a breath of Bruce, so tangible and real she almost doubled over. The way he smoothed his hair with the flat of his hand when he came indoors, after removing his hat. The detail was so insignificant but so precisely him, so precious. She would never witness it again. They rocked together in the umbrella’s purple shade. Luc’s lapel grew wet. Cait came to the end of her ballad.

  Then Laura saw the man over the girl’s shoulder. A few of the other mourners, old blokes from town, were shooting him dirty looks. But he grinned when he caught Laura’s eye, and mouthed something that made him smile wider. She read his lips clearly: Fuck-knuckle.

  Joe, Laura realised with a jolt.

  She gulped air. Beside her old friend, a wrinkled, grey-haired man tottered unsteadily; Laura recognised Donald’s self-possession in that frame. But – how long had it been? She tried to think when exactly he had moved away to be closer to Joseph, but couldn’t quite recall.

  ‘We’re orphans, Lor,’ Vik was saying. Doubled over, it seemed all she could manage.

  Laura dragged her eyes from her friend. Before she had a chance to do anything, Michael was there to net Vik in his arms. Cait joined the embrace, seeming to forget her pre-teen need for carefully cultivated distance. Laura felt weightless and dry, a brittle leaf, watching the knot of family tied around her sister. She turned back to the crowd, cleared her throat. Two grey kangaroos bounded down the slope. Ridges of ribs and spines moved beneath dull pelts.

  ‘At least they’re buried together.’ Vik sobbed into Michael’s neck. ‘At least they’re in the same place!’

  Laura heard a rushing sound. She saw the sky tilt.

  Laura lay on top of the quilt in her darkened bedroom. She felt relieved for the dim solitude, for the damp cloth on her head, already bruising at the eye where, in fainting, she had struck the stone dirt. Bruce’s wake had spilled over from the kitchen and verandah into the yard. It reached Laura as the lapping rise-and-fall of muted voices through the wall. She felt guilty for leaving Michael and Vik to the task of entertaining, but had nothing left to offer.

  She wondered, too, if Joseph was still out there. So much time had passed. So many hard days. What could she say to him? Where would she start? In the dark through the party, she would miss finding out. Part of her was relieved.

  There was a soft knock at the door. Luc opened it a crack, peered in. Sounds of the wake sharpened. He slid into the room. Sitting on the edge of Laura’s bed, he put his hand in the saddle of her hip. They talked in hushed tones. Laura was aware of how easy it still was between them, and underneath that, how much it all still hurt. At every moment she could just about taste the other life she might have had.

  ‘It was a good funeral,’ Luc said.

  ‘How are you, Luc?’ she said. ‘Really?’

  She sensed the answer. It was obvious from the infrequent phone conversations they had snatched in the past year, between his meetings and her emptying pans of piss. Luc was storming politics with all the passion and every ounce of the charisma he had once used to fuel their green protests. Young people loved him. He used their mediums, their words, to get them to care.

>   ‘You know, busy,’ he said cautiously.

  Laura nodded, and briefly closed her eyes. Glad as she was for him, his success was difficult for her to manage, even more so under pressure of Bruce’s death. She felt Luc shifting on the bed, the unexpected brush of lips on her forehead.

  Luc’s face was inches above her own. He was smiling, sadly. ‘Listen, I know this isn’t a good time, honestly I do. But if I don’t tell you myself, you’ll hear about it eventually from someone else. And that would be worse.’

  He was close enough for her to see the delicate lines feathering his mouth. She made a small sound, a moan.

  ‘I’m getting married,’ he said. ‘Apparently it’s not true, you know, about old dogs and new tricks.’

  It was dark when Laura emerged from her room. She judged by the quiet that most guests were gone and staggered into the kitchen, disoriented, thick and slow. Propped on the old sideboard along with shop-bought flowers, so many sympathy cards. Laura hesitated, rubbing her eyes. Time was evaporative; she couldn’t get a grip.

  Luc was at the table drinking with Michael and Vik. All swayed like reeds in water. Three sets of purple teeth. Laura wasn’t surprised that Luc was still there, only that his schedule allowed it. After so long together, he was family, she supposed. More than, for he had been chosen. Laura counted the empty cleanskins by the door.

  Luc called out, raucous, glassy-eyed. ‘Hey, Lor!’

  Vik raised a sloppy glass. Bloody wine splashed. Laura was disconcerted by her sister’s drunkenness. It was odd to see Vik so smeared-looking, loosened by alcohol. Laura’s eyes travelled across the table littered with corks and butts; her pouch of tobacco was strewn, half-smoked. She realised, then, that Bruce’s death had slammed Vik like a wave. ‘We’re orphans,’ Vik had said. Laura felt the freshly aligned weight of her responsibility settle on her back.

  ‘Your old buddy just left,’ Luc said. ‘Guess he gave up waiting!’ He laughed nastily. It was a new laugh, one Laura hadn’t heard. ‘Haw haw haw.’ She noticed a dark stain on the lapel of the beautiful suit. It was ruined.