Anchor Point (10 page)

Laura knew she would find a way to scrub and arrange her face before Vik got back. There would be time to cook something celebratory: Vik's favourite rabbit stew. She would set the table the way they did at Christmas, paper napkins edged with paper lace. When Vik walked in, Laura's arms, firm as packed sand, would be thrown around her neck, recognition of the hours Vik had sat writing at her desk. Laura would allow herself to feel a thimbleful of pride, for all the years she had cut Vik's hair and ironed her clothes and tucked her in to bed. That Vik had made it – more than made it, done well – seemed to Laura an acknowledgement: she had done something right. But for the moment, like a snake-bit dog, she needed somewhere private to grapple with her wounds.

The blackened shell of their dead ute was parked on bricks at the far side of the yard, dry needles littering the roof and bonnet – her spot. In the decrepit cab it was easy to believe that she was going places.

Her abilities were with chainsaw, with shovel and with wrench. At least, that was what she had always told herself. She thought of Bruce, the look on his face when she cracked the lid of a pot on the stove, releasing tendrils of steam. She remembered Vik sobbing, the quiet routine of her tears in the months after Kath left, with no expectation of relief. Laura understood: whether the life she had made was shaped by her failures in some areas or abilities in others, what she had was all that she could ask for. And since she had no better ideas, it was all that she deserved.

Laura picked at the flecks of white paint on her hands. A crow flapped down, green-black and glossy. By the road, sheep nosed threadbare pasture. She threw her head back, brought her clenched fist down hard on the split foam seat. It felt good to pummel something. Her fist went in deep. Then she flicked open the glove box and pulled out her smokes. Lit one, drew the acrid smoke into her lungs. There was a dip in the back of the driver's seat, worn by the weight of Bruce. It fit Laura perfectly. ‘Fuck!' she said. Dangling the cigarette out the driver's window, she practised the posture of truck drivers, and women smokers with kids.

‘Ease up, love.'

Laura almost dropped the smoke in the grass. Bruce stepped up to the window, leaned in. He touched her forearm with his thumb, stroking her skin lightly, like polishing away a spot.

‘Got another one of those?'

Laura flinched, despite herself. Bruce's gaze was steady, eyes smiling. He gave the driver-side door two firm pats and went around the ute. He had to lean back to get the passenger side open.

‘What a bloody rust bucket,' he said, climbing in.

They stared down at the scorched land. Laura passed the pack. She didn't know whether to watch Bruce smoke or look away. She dealt with it by perfecting the arc of cigarette to lips. Flowing in from outside, air hot as breath.

‘So your sister …' Bruce broke off, tapped a long grub of ash to the floor.

‘Yeah,' Laura said. ‘I know.'

‘Smart cookie, that Vik.'

Laura blinked to keep from rolling her eyes. If there were a soundtrack to her life, the chorus would be ‘Your sister's real smart!'

‘Lucky her,' she said dully.

Bruce pinched his smoke out between forefinger and thumb. ‘Know what, but?
You're
a clever one. Always thought that.'

Laura's grim smile was clamped in place to hold back tears. Her hand lay between them on the seat. Bruce took it, and gave a gentle squeeze.

‘Listen, love. Been thinking and that.' He cleared his throat. ‘This city thing is something you should maybe think about.'

Laura's hand flew to clasp the small key on a chain around her neck. ‘Think about?'

‘Yeah,' he said. ‘Might've been a wrong kind of, you know. A wrong thing I didn't say this sooner.'

Laura stared at his weatherworn face, that familiar terrain. His nose was discoloured by a lifetime of outdoor work. Like small red threads, broken capillaries were stitched across his cheeks. His hair was greying. It was far greyer in reality, Laura realised, than it was in her mind.

‘You can't do everything here on your own, Dad!'

Bruce tightened his grip on her hand. He brushed at a fly. ‘Nah, listen. Gotta be a few young blokes 'round here looking for work, this time of year.'

The idea! That she could just pack up and leave. ‘But,' Laura said, more to herself than to Bruce, ‘but what would I
do
?'

Bruce grinned broadly. Excited, he jiggled on the seat. ‘Occurs to me,' he said breathlessly, ‘that we could use some new ideas for how to take care of the joint.'

He dug into the back pocket of his jeans and tweezed out a crumpled paper. Laura recognised his expression; she saw it every year. Unwrapping, she would steel herself, working to summon the right amount of gratitude for each birthday gift got slightly wrong. She took the paper and smoothed the pamphlet out.
Diploma of Agriculture
, she mouthed. She shivered, dropped the paper and pressed her hands into her armpits. She felt like she was bleeding – every warm ounce of possibility was pumping out.

Laura saw that she would go only to come back. Since she had never intended to leave, what did it matter? Bruce was still grinning. She dragged her eyes to his face. It was her fault. She had made her life what it was. She remembered that time when Kath's fingers had sought Bruce's across the table; their hands had locked together, a tongue-in-groove joint.

‘Says they teach all about drought and that,' Bruce said.

Laura couldn't bear the hopeful pleasure with which he scooped the pamphlet up. She let him talk on. She could do the course in Melbourne, he said. Be close to Vik. And – he winked – to Joseph. It was, Laura saw, already worked out. With the mention of that far-off city, Kath's letters, never far below the surface, rose sharply up through Laura's mind. Who knew where their mother was now – if she was even alive. The thought of running into her on the street, confronting the physical reality of her, was horrifying.

As Laura leaned her head against the rim of the driver-side window, her body was curiously numb. The last few years had been tough. Little rainfall, the sinking price of stock. She hated culling starved sheep, the way they twitched, tangled in the ditch. Worse, the workload never lightened. Tough times or not, things needed doing. They worked as hard as ever, but at a loss.

‘So,' Bruce said in the ute. ‘Whatcha reckon, love?'

Laura squared herself in her seat. She lifted her chin, though it felt anchored.

‘Good one, Dad,' she said.

His arm wrapped her shoulders. The ancient upholstery crackled. Laura lay her head against his neck. He stroked her hair, settled back against the seat and sighed.

Laura helped Vik pack the ute. They carried luggage across the baking yard. Laura piled the boxes in the tray as though building a funeral pyre.

‘Dad said you're thinking of studying in Sydney,' Vik ventured, nervously adjusting her glasses, ‘not Melbourne?'

Laura pursed her lips, avoiding Vik's eye. She drew an elastic cord across the suitcases, snagging the hook on the lip of the tray, and tested it with her weight. ‘Nothing's been decided.'

Vik frowned. Laura turned her back. She leaned in through the ute's open window, snapped open the glove box. The present didn't look like much, wrapped in old Christmas paper. Vik almost dropped the package when Laura thrust it into her hands.

‘What's this?' she asked.

Laura shrugged.

Vik tore the paper clumsily. The wad of elastic band-bound notes whispered as she fanned them with her thumb. ‘But, Lor! It's too much!'

‘Not to worry,' Laura said casually. ‘Use it, you know. For your study.'

Vik gaped. Her cheeks were pink. Laura took the wad back and threw herself into the task of wedging it deep inside Vik's case, shrugging off protests. Vik seemed on the brink of tears. Laura knew what her sister was thinking, because she would have thought the same thing herself: how long Laura must have been saving, going without. She recalled their blue school uniforms, patched year after year; Bruce's painful teeth, browned for lack of care. She thought of the school excursions they had missed to save admission fees, the broken furniture she had carefully repaired. Even Vik would know what such a sum meant to the farm.

‘It came from Dad, really,' Laura said. Unbelievably, she hadn't thought to prepare an excuse for the origin of the funds, thinking only of passing them on, finally. ‘Dad sold Mutti's pots, years ago, and put the money away.' Laura could hardly believe her horrible audacity, the ease with which the lies rolled out. But what did Vik know? Laura had done the shopping and bill-paying and banking for years, squirrelling supermarket coupons. ‘Don't mention this to Dad, okay?' she went on. ‘You know what he's like. It will only upset him, you bring it up.'

Vik fumbled with Laura's elbow. Her eyes were full of tears. But she nodded, biting her lip. ‘So we do have something of hers, after all,' she said quietly.

Laura suppressed a sigh, relief and exasperation, like bile. Vik would believe the story because it suited her. It was what she wanted to hear.

Later, when Vik was gone, driven by Bruce to the fancy college in the city, Laura walked listlessly through the empty house and went to strip her sister's bed. But the task somehow exhausted her, and she sank down onto the bare mattress, cradling the laundry in her arms. She pressed her face into white cotton and breathed in Vik's smell, crushed by the fact of her departure.

She wished then, in the way another person might long for salvation, that she had set the money down as Vik was leaving. She might have put her arms around her sister. She might have found something meaningful to say, a way to explain how much Vik would be missed. Instead, she had busied herself at the ute with the last bits of luggage, working the straps around Vik's belongings, securing them down.

‘Funny year,' Bruce said, surfacing through the clatter of knives on porcelain. He put a piece of lamb in his mouth and chewed, precise as threading a needle. Laura fiddled the potatoes on her plate. It was too hot for roast, but it was Sunday, and it was lunch.

‘Heard Peterson's shipping water in. He can afford it, but.'

The phone rang. Bruce heaved up. Laura observed him answering: the expectant, ‘Yes?'

Other people, she understood, could answer the telephone mildly, distractedly, like they had better things to do. Not so here, where any call might still be a lead, some information, the long-awaited granting of an
end
. Laura had lived with Bruce's hope for so long, she almost believed in it herself. Except she didn't. Buried deep inside was the knowledge that no one would discover her mother and call, unless it was – a terrible thought – Kath herself.

‘Oh … no worries, love. How are you?' It was Vik. Bruce listened, and Laura watched his hot lunch cool. A quarter of an hour passed before he said goodbye and sat back down. ‘Wants you to phone her back,' he said. ‘Had a lecture to go to.'

Laura gave a small, frustrated smile. Only a few months gone and Vik didn't seem to rate the amount of work there was to do around the place. Laura couldn't really spare the time, the hours Vik wanted to spend chatting, but it also secretly pleased her. To be needed.

Bruce picked up his knife and fork, resumed eating. It was a little bit strange, they agreed warily. Each skirted their discomfort. Neither wanted to be in the conversation; neither wanted to let it go. Strange, Laura hazarded, that Vik was calling every day.

‘I really miss you,' Vik had said sadly, a couple of days before, sounding thoroughly shocked. Laura wondered, for the first time, if she had done her sister a disservice. By protecting, taking care, had she set Vik up to flourish, or fail?

Though the days were getting shorter, temperatures were high. It still hadn't rained. Days of total fire ban had become intrinsic to the structure of time, like morning, noon and night. Still feeding the sheep by hand, Bruce sat hunched over his ledger in the evenings, blotting brow-sweat. Their paddocks were rough and dry. Laura wondered where the topsoil went when it blew away. Probably down to Melbourne. It would be swept into little pans with little brooms, and thrown out.

Only that morning she had come upon Bruce leaning up against the shearing shed. He looked odd, but she couldn't work out why. Then she realised: she never saw him standing still. His arms were folded. He might have appeared nonchalant from a distance, a man on a work break – if he took them. Another sheep was badly flyblown, the third that week. Bruce's arms seemed crossed to hold in spilling intestines, like those of a man shot in the gut. He gazed out at the view. Worn paddocks rolled down into the dusty valley, dirt waves washing into a brown pool. A twig cracked and he turned, running a sleeve across his face.

‘Listen,' Laura said, ‘you reckon this study thing's such a good idea? Maybe I should, you know, think about staying.'