Anchor Point (15 page)

Bruce gave Luc a firm nod, as though to say,
You done
?

‘Well!' Laura said, casting about. ‘Who's for a cuppa?'

‘Bloody council's been around,' Bruce said. ‘Reckons we're not allowed to burn off this year! Outrageous. Some parrot or other needs protecting. A bird!'

Laura dived between the two men, collecting their bowls.

But Luc leaned around her. She felt the blade of his gaze slice past. ‘The swift parrot, you mean?' he said.

Laura stepped back from the heat of their words, hands busy with dishes. The debate, a train departing, left her in its wake. Luc was used to arguing, winning. She could see his equilibrium returning, now that Bruce was fighting back. But Luc wasn't used to pitting himself against the likes of Bruce, who did not want to be won over; whose views, steeped in experience, were fixed. Laura hadn't seen her father so angry since – she tried to remember and felt her father's quick slap again.

‘You can go on about endangered whatnot and protecting habitats and that all you like,' Bruce said. ‘But we had ten homes burn to the ground over in Bindara East last summer.' His eyes were hard, two cat's-eye marbles. ‘Fire came through state forest – all gone now. Who gives a toss if a few parrots miss a few trees? Choice is that, or else lose the entire joint!' Bruce glowered, muttering, ‘Know which I'd choose.'

Luc kept his mouth shut the rest of the trip, passing time reading in Laura's room. She knew it was for her sake; it wasn't in Luc's nature to bite his tongue. The gesture touched her. She understood what it cost. It troubled her that he was having an unpleasant time, but she couldn't very well sit around inside when there was so much needed doing. Luc said he understood, but he seemed subdued, paler, a man in shock. He wasn't about to up and volunteer to help with the jobs, and she didn't want him to, couldn't imagine anything worse than having to instruct him in front of Bruce. Or, worse, watch Bruce tell him what to do. So the weekend passed tensely; they didn't see each other much. What had she expected?

They took time to go for long walks together in the evenings, holding hands – her concession. ‘Borrow some boots if you like,' Bruce said to Luc. But he wore his sneakers; it hadn't rained much.

They walked the hills where the search had taken place all those years before. She told Luc as much as she could about her life with Bruce and Vik, doing her best to explain things. She briefly mentioned the aftermath of her mother's loss, disappointed by his piqued interest.

‘I'd rather not talk about that, though,' she said quickly. ‘Is that okay?'

Luc blushed, squeezing her hand. ‘Of course! Sorry.' He cupped her chin and kissed her, standing in the tall grass. ‘I just had no idea. What you went through.'

Laura looked up into his lovely, symmetrical face. She felt cold in the knowledge that she didn't deserve him, his pity or understanding, even though such an idea went against everything she'd seen on the farm. There was no karma, no reason or cause and effect. Animals got sick, were run over, died. The strong killed the weak. Then the next day dawned fresh. But it made no difference to her mounting shame. By remaining silent about what she had done, she was accepting Luc's kindness under false pretences, as she had all her life whenever sympathy was offered.

Leading Luc back down the hill, past the low dam, the lights from the house like stars against the darkening paddocks, Laura wondered if it was true – about karma. Was there really no trickle-on, as she'd long assumed, from one thing to the next? She thought of the way the veggies grew after careful tending: slugs picked and fed to chooks, manure laid, weeds pulled; she thought of sheep kept free of flies, the terrible wounds inflicted around tender tails if they weren't taken care of. She thought of the gully, growing deeper every year without bush to hold banks in place. It cut across the property, a gash in the land.

‘Thanks for having us this weekend,' Laura said, buttering toast. ‘It was – fun.'

Luc quietly skolled coffee, lips a tight white line.

Only Bruce seemed positively cheerful, loading his plate with eggs. ‘No worries, love,' he said. ‘You'll be back soon. Coupla visits planned, I hear?'

‘'Course. Can't get rid of me that easy!'

Bruce nodded, forking the food up. He glanced from Laura to Luc, chewing. ‘Shame though, you've got to buzz off so quickly this time,' he said, suppressing a smile. ‘I hear Joseph has come home.'

‘To best friends,
'
Luc
said, raising a beer across their hard-rubbish coffee table. ‘To love.'

‘I never thought we'd make ten years.' Laura laughed. Too many tea candles flickered throughout the room – Luc's idea of romance. Flame reflected in the darkened windows.

Still living like students
, Laura thought,
in our mid-thirties!
But she didn't really care. Though the suburb was gentrifying, their rent remained cheap.

‘What? Thought you always wanted to marry a man with grubby feet?'

Laura shook herself, bringing a beer to her lips. ‘You proposing?'

Luc snorted, frothing beer. Laura matched his grin. Rain hammered the roof.

‘What about your old man?' Luc said, aiming for flippancy, falling short. ‘I'd have to go up bush to ask for your hand, don't you reckon? Can't marry a man's daughter without asking his permission face to face!'

Laura's smile dropped. She crossed her arms over her chest. ‘Please don't,' she said. ‘Not tonight.'

Luc's arm, a warm and heavy stole, lifted off her neck. He stared into the rain. Luc didn't need to say what he was thinking; she saw it in his face. Their fight, so well-worn it felt as threadbare as the furniture they'd accumulated over the years – picked up off streets, bought in op shops, inherited from friends. There was a futon for guests, Vik and Michael mainly, but they rarely stayed anymore.

‘I just adore this hotel,' Vik had confided just the previous week, during her most recent visit to Sydney. She was celebrating yet another promotion, standing in the window of her expensive harbour-view room. ‘Don't you?'

Laura had kept her face neutral, but Vik didn't seem to notice, cupping the growing mound of her stomach contentedly. Just looking at her sister's glowing face irritated Laura, shamefully. She wanted to be happy for Vik; she did. But it troubled her to consider the kind of mother Vik would become in just a matter of months. On a deeper level, a place inside herself she hated to address, Laura reasoned that Vik's pregnancy was hard for her because it set them apart; worse, it put Vik ahead. Laura was used to being the big sister, the one who understood how things worked. Now Vik was entering a phase of life she had no experience of, which was difficult to accept. Perhaps it shouldn't have mattered; she had never really wanted children. But Laura knew the past was mouldering her relationships.

On the surface, Luc was understanding about where Laura had come from and what she'd had to do. But at the pub, after a few, he liked to lean across conspiratorially to those new to their group. ‘Don't cross our little Laura!' He would wink. ‘Looks innocent enough, but you should see her with a chainsaw!'

Luc was just disappointed, Laura knew. For all his organising and picketing and long late-night discussions, he had made so little impact. The world didn't seem to take notice. Nothing changed. Though he longed to come up with a new approach to campaigning, he just couldn't find a way to do things differently to the way they had always been done.

It made Laura sad to recall Luc's hopefulness when they'd first met. He had been so certain that the future could be better, saved. But he had started no revolution. Still he tried and failed to protect precious things that had no way of protecting themselves – waving banners, chanting, sitting in. Each time another mine was sunk, a forest cleared, Luc came home wrung out, exhausted with the effort of maintaining hope.

‘Next time,' Laura had said once, pressing her lips to Luc's forehead, tasting the grime of all those days spent camped out, blocking trucks from old growth. ‘You guys did everything you could.'

He slumped back against the couch. The police had come and cleared his people out. They were all in cahoots, Luc explained. Small town. The cops and loggers, hard to tell who was who, down the pub. ‘Fucking hippies,' one officer had spat, dragging Luc across the ground. ‘Get a fucking job, why don't you? Wasting taxpayers' money!' Luc had heard worse over the years, but he was still angry as he recounted the words to Laura. Once he might have laughed off the small-mindedness, giving as good back. But his resilience had thinned, and bitterness had grown quietly within him, like winter setting in.

That his failures kept pace with Laura's achievements made them worse. Impressed by her skill with plants, her dedication to their business, Gino and Mariangela had allowed her to take on more of the work. Three years ago she'd looked up to find that she was running the nursery.

‘We're tired,' Gino told her. ‘And you do such a good job!'

Though she loved the exotic varieties they stocked, Luc convinced her to start selling natives. To her surprise, Laura found she enjoyed nurturing the familiar plants, some of which she knew by sight only because she'd helped clear them. Unlike finicky tropical flowers, the natives were hardy. They required little from her, flourishing on their own. Perhaps for that reason, it seemed native gardens were in vogue. Sales picked up.

Laura pressed tubes of spindly wattle and banksia into the hands of her customers, promising that each would bloom with little effort from them. She could picture the city come late winter, fragrant with colour: the landscape of her childhood, superimposed.

‘You done good there,' Laura overheard Gino saying to his son one evening. Startled, she realised that the old man meant her. His parents called her
figlia
: daughter. Though she knew they just meant to be kind, it gave a little jab. She had told them that her mother died when she was a child, and watched their faces contort around sympathetic expressions that it seemed cruel to have them make. She thought of Bruce, alone on the farm. All those kilometres, just to swap one family for another? Sitting in Mariangela's kitchen, Laura fought the impulse to press her face to the woman's breast, to allow herself to be rocked. The compulsion made her feel dirty, a little scared. Though she could hardly bear to articulate the thought to herself, never out loud, she felt the wound of Kath's departure inside her, a maiming.

‘My mum means well, but she's so annoying!' Luc often complained when Mariangela was out of earshot, rolling his eyes over another plate of something warm offered up between meals. Laura laughed with him, hiding trembling hands. That he had no idea how lucky he was made him seem all the more blessed. She couldn't decide if being with his family afforded her a piece of their joy, or made her missing parts more painful.

Some of the young girls who hung around with Luc's mates, perpetual students with firm beliefs and plenty of time to devote themselves to his causes, wondered what a man like Luc saw in a woman like Laura. No doubt they thought themselves better candidates, with their ethics and long limbs. Laura knew the way they saw her: dirt-streaked, giving orders. She didn't have time in her day for idealistic thinking, for the future. She wished she could tell the girls to get lost, but Luc needed all the help he could get just to make his protests happen.

‘Don't be crazy,' Luc said, when she told him what she thought was said behind their backs. ‘Isn't it obvious? You succeed at everything you do.'

Laura ignored the edge in his tone. ‘But look at you,' she persisted. ‘And look at me.'

As soon as the words were out, Laura regretted them. It troubled her that Luc needed no clarification of what she meant. He might have at least pretended the two of them matched, that she possessed some of his extraordinary beauty. But the firmness with which he pulled her to him, the way he pressed his lips to her hair, reminded her that she was lucky.

‘I'd be nothing without you,' Luc said.

Laura accepted his kisses uncertainly. Should she believe him? Did she want to?

Though she lived surrounded by people, managing a number of staff, it was clear to her that she would never have many close friends beyond Luc and her sister. Early on, she had tried to connect with Luc's friends over drinks and at dinners where they cooked big pots of dhal. But there was too much she couldn't share of herself, couldn't begin to articulate, even if she wanted to. More often than not, she found herself standing over the stove on her own. She had no frame of reference for dealing with women her own age; it just wasn't what she was used to. That she had wound up with Luc probably had more to do with him, his force of personality and the way he scooped people up, than it did with any special qualities of her own.

It concerned Laura that Vik seemed to be in the same position – speaking of colleagues and acquaintances, never of friends – though selfishly, she welcomed the closeness between them. From the outside, it was clear that by getting serious with Michael so quickly, escaping the shock of her first few months in Melbourne by attaching herself to an older man, Vik had circumnavigated her own youth. But then, she had never been very good at doing what she didn't want to do. Before her classmates were out of college rooms, Vik had the promise of a diamond and a beautiful home. Her looks, coupled with her hard-won intelligence, meant that by the time she was twenty, Vik gave off a glamorous untouchability that would intimidate even the most confident of girls.

By the time she was in her late twenties, already a senior surveyor, it hadn't become any easier for her. Of course Laura knew Vik's geeky sweetness intimately. But even she found it hard, sometimes, to relate to the woman her sister had outwardly become: so very polished, resourced, smart. There was something about Vik's neat collars, her expensive suits and shiny hair, that made her seem more glossy magazine than flesh-and-blood woman. But then, she still asked Laura for recipes and lost them, and needed help determining which cycle to set the washing on. The plants Laura shipped down died quickly in Vik's home, neglected on windowsills. When Vik came to Sydney and stopped by, she always fell onto Laura's old couch with a sigh, after raiding the fridge.

As they took on more responsibility for the nursery, Luc convinced Gino to lease the old fish'n'chip next door. A vegan restaurant could fund protests, he hoped – suddenly Luc had swept everyone up in his vision again.

Laura put her foot down: she would do some cooking, but not all. She did her best to prepare vegetarian meals for Luc, but the game she'd butchered on the farm was never far from her thoughts, those thousands of skins removed.

Swallowing her in a hug, Luc agreed. He wrangled a write-up from some journo, an old friend from his days in animal lib, who made a big deal about their causes and the part-time refugee chef. Though it was a far cry from the revolutionary model Luc had once talked about, his ‘whole new framework', their new business – a combination of plants and food and politics – was refreshing, the review said. It was published in a weekend paper.

Vik phoned to say how great Laura looked in the photo, caught shelling peas and smiling in the Nursery Restaurant kitchen. Perhaps not surprisingly, the story didn't run in the country editions. But Luc clipped the article and sent it off to Bruce. That was typical. Luc was nothing if not kind, Laura thought. Whenever they fought, she recast his actions as mean little diplomacies, cunningly curated evidence that he was a
good guy
. You couldn't fight against such behaviour, Laura learned. She loved him, but she knew him too well. There was an edge to Luc's goodness, against which cut the motives that drove him.

In dark periods, like the one that she was now sunk into, Laura wondered what Luc saw that made him love her. What opportunity, what resource? He had planned and coordinated her – set her up in the nursery, then the restaurant. She had done well at both, juggling timetables of staff. The work suited her: outdoor labour, some cooking. Jobs so familiar she might have been home.

But recently, Luc's feeling of failure had descended on their shared life like sleet. Buffeted by his moods, Laura struggled to manage her impatience. While she ached for him, part of her wished he would simply cheer up. Luc was happy for her, after all, toasting her successes. Only, the better she did – growing their businesses – the more apparent it became that he was stuck. Perhaps it was a new feeling for him, Laura thought. Being well-practised, the disappointment should have by rights been hers.

It troubled Luc, how little she really cared about causes. Practical solutions were one thing, but the politics just didn't interest her and she'd long stopped pretending otherwise. She advocated growing native plants because they coped well with extreme weather, not due to any radical standpoint on the environment. She was open to the conversations Luc and his friends had about green technologies and sustainable living because some of their ideas made sense. If there were cheaper, cleaner ways of growing food and heating houses and getting around, then she was interested. Life was tough enough. Why make it harder, if solutions could be found?

Her stance had once enamoured Luc. But Laura now saw what she should have always known: he had thought she'd come around, that he could change her. That she remained engrossed in ratios of potting mix to soil, that she preferred the company of seedlings to the meetings he held, had lost its charm.

‘World's going to shit,' he said one night, shoving back from his half-eaten meal. ‘And all you can say is,
Mmm
?'

Though Bruce insisted that he was fine on his own, Laura had once hoped to get back each year during fire season, just to know that he wouldn't be alone if the place went up. She wanted to lend a hand with the other big jobs too – shearing, lambing, dipping sheep – but as time went on and her responsibilities increased, she found it harder and harder to get back. Even when she managed to string a few days together to make her trip worthwhile, it felt too quick. Bruce listened to her excuses, so understanding. Laura felt some precious part of her chip off.

Sometimes Luc came with her to Kyree, spending hot days on the phone in the warm breeze from the fan, reading, making plans. He tended to visit when Vik came too, with or without Michael; Laura learned to appreciate the way the three of them entertained each other on the verandah while she went about her day. But most of the time Luc stayed behind in Sydney; there was too much to do, he said. Laura left it alone. Though she never said as much, and missed him desperately when she was gone, she simply had a better time on the farm without him there, free to get on with what needed doing.