Anchor Point (26 page)

Vik said, ‘She wants to see us together.'

Laura shrugged mutely, alone in the house.
Too little
, she thought,
too late
. Even so, she was already jealous of the time her mother and sister would share, knowing that where Katja was concerned, she would always feel many things at once.

She had been seeing her mother each day while she was in Kyree. They met at the pub, because Laura had asked her not to come out to the farm again. Katja tried and failed to suppress her disappointment. They sat outside under the awning where they could smoke. It was too hot for flies. Frothy pots of beer, Laura's shout, warmed between them. She waved and smiled at blokes she knew, had known all her life. Watched them eyeing Katja over the rims of their drinks: the rainbow silk scarves, the purple cheesecloth dress. But no one approached or asked questions, for which Laura was grateful. It would all come out in time. Kyree had grown, but for the real locals, folks who'd lived there for years, generations, it was still small enough.

‘Viktoria called me,' Katja told her, a little smug. ‘She's bought me a ticket to Melbourne. To stay with her. An apartment in the city!'

Laura put her glass down carefully, controlling the lurch in her gut. ‘Good,' she said simply.

The day Katja left for Melbourne, Laura spoke to her on the phone, polite but distant. Exhausted by the effort of dredging up the past, she could do no more talking. There had been little time to think about Bruce, to mourn, to get used to the silence of an empty house at night. Too much change, too fast. She felt bruised by the tectonic shift in events, sensing that she needed time to find a way to understand what had happened. A way to live.

Whatever they had been to one another, whatever they were now, it was obvious that it would all take time to sort out. Perhaps more time than any of them had. So many years had passed, so much hurt. To reach some way of relating seemed a task of too much magnitude.

‘About the farm,' Katja tried on the phone, ‘the money –'

But Laura cut her off, blood rising. ‘Please, don't. Let's just say goodbye.' She had studiously avoided the issue since Katja explained the timing of her sudden appearance. She had let her mother stick around town for a week, had endured those meetings, all those warm beers. Waiting. For what? Laura hated the part of her that knew the answer, remembering how fast she had run across the yard with open arms.

‘I got the sense it upset you,' Katja said. ‘What I said.'

Laura sighed heavily. ‘There's no money. It's not like we're selling.' Even as she spoke, looking out over moonscape, the farm, she wondered desolately if it were true. What were Katja's rights if they did? She needed money, she'd said; they never divorced. That counted for something, didn't it? Katja launched in again about how Bruce had kept them apart, all his failings, before tentatively broaching the idea of some kind of remuneration, a settlement. But Laura's response came firm and fast, a slap: she would rather give the place away than have her mother get a cent.

Laura wasn't sure how long the newspaper had been open on her lap when Vik arrived in a storm of dust. Her sister stepped from the car looking expensively rumpled, sunglasses on head.

‘What's this?' Laura called, grinning. Getting to her feet, she was surprised by a swell of feeling, the unexpectedness of Vik striding across the yard with her bags, head bent against the heat.

‘Yeah, yeah. I'm later than I said I'd be,' Vik muttered. ‘Sorry. Couldn't get away.'

They embraced. Laura felt herself frown, repeating, ‘Later than you said?'

But Vik was pulling away and hurrying into the house. Laura followed her inside, quashing confusion, her misgivings, setting the kettle to boil.

Vik sat where Katja had sat weeks before.

Laura said, ‘How was it?'

‘I need a few minutes first, you know, without thinking about it.' Vik dabbed at her pristine face, blotting sweat. ‘As if that's possible!'

Laura knew what she meant. She recalled with fresh shock that there were no more secrets between them. All those years, Laura had feared Vik's anger – and Vik
had
been angry, rightly so. Listening to Vik's questions, her voice so full of longing to understand why Laura acted as she had, Laura saw that her sister was stronger, more capable, than she had ever allowed herself to believe. How much she liked the woman Vik had become.

Vik shook her head. ‘I just don't know what to think about her.'

Laura sat back, trying to get used to the fact all over again. Vik
knew
. She wanted to say something then, to give comfort or receive it. Vik was already pushing back her chair.

By unspoken agreement, they went outside. It felt right to Laura – the right place to say what needed to be said. They set out slowly across the paddocks, fording uphill through the heat. It had also seemed right to meet in person, after everything, to talk. But for now they were silent, working legs and lungs. Laura let Vik lead the way.

‘God,' Vik said, staring down, mouth open in disbelief. ‘She's awful!'

Laura instantly felt a weight lift away that she hadn't known she carried, and before she knew it they were sobbing and laughing, hanging on to each other. Vik lowered herself down and Laura gratefully leaned into her sister. Before them yawned the crevasse, the place that had seemed to swallow their mother all those years ago. Laura took Vik's damp palm. Suddenly, she didn't care what issues needed covering. What aspects of Katja's return needed to be aired. Everything important to her was as it should be: there in that moment, with Vik's delicate fingers pressed into her hand. Despite the earth crumbling down into the gully as she watched; the baking sun; their old man's clothes, still hanging patiently in the bedroom wardrobe, not yet packed away; despite the unresolved issue of Katja's request, her longing to be part of their lives, for a price, Laura felt that she had never been more content, perhaps never would be again.

‘I'm sorry,' she said, unsure what else she could say, but Vik took her arm fiercely.

‘Listen, you didn't make her do it. It wasn't your fault.' It was the first time Vik had said such a thing.

As they walked, Vik described the time Katja had spent with her in Melbourne, filling in details she had neglected on the phone. ‘A week was enough. For now.' She explained how impressed Katja had been by their success, the apartment, and simultaneously suspicious. ‘Kept commenting on everything, how much it all cost,' Vik said. ‘Telling me about all these “natural” products' – her fingers sliced the air, angry little quotation marks – ‘stuff I should buy to supposedly keep us healthy. I mean, really!' Fuelled by anger, she was almost running down the hill. ‘You should have heard her giving her critique of the pieces in Michael's shop.'

‘She go on about the crystals? All that?'

Vik snorted, tossing her head. When she spoke, Laura was reminded of all the moments she had spent spread across her sister's bed, killing herself laughing. How eerie it was to hear Katja's voice emerging from Vik's mouth, ‘You should wear purple to guard against all these negative vibrations, Viktoria …'

There were mornings in the month after Vik's visit when Laura woke up so completely exhausted that she didn't know where in time she was. The little notebooks had been more than the chronic adherence to organisation that Vik liked to tease her for; they were her attempt to hold things down, make them stick. In her deep self, whatever part of her it was that made her animate and unique, she felt herself going the way of Bruce. In a way, she had felt it creeping up for years. It was slight now, just a dropped stitch. But it would rip eventually.

Even so, she couldn't quite believe it, despite the strange sense of slippage inside her head. She wasn't fifty yet – had just seen her father die a long, slow, fractured death. Sliding down inside himself, a man trapped in a glass jar against the sides of which he uselessly scrabbled.

Some mornings, when Laura woke, she believed she was a teenager again. Sometimes she was a child. She craned to hear Bruce moving about in the kitchen, to hear Vik's breath across the room from her bed. Sometimes she groped over the sheet for Luc's reassuring form, catching fistfuls of air. It was not always frightening. There was the sense of being caught in the static between radio stations. If she waited long enough, her mind would tune in.

But once she became aware of herself, of the now, it was hard to get up. The present was the worst of all possible times. How old she felt. How lonely. Not even a view to cheer and bring comfort; the valley a bowl of sand. Each early morning as Laura worked things out fresh, feeling the difficulties of her real life, the sun seemed to rise over the valley like it had never set. It gradually grew light, but the heat from the day before, the day before, the day before, sat trapped below the renewed rays, deeply embedded in dry earth.

One afternoon, the voice of a man rang out on the front porch. Laura drew her hands from tepid dishwater, dried them on a frayed tea towel, and wondered how long she had been washing her single mug and bowl. This would have been unthinkable during daylight hours before, back when Bruce was around. But the work had dried up. There was so little left alive; there were few outdoor tasks remaining.

Vik offered to come back again to help, but Laura put her off. What could Vik do? When the last of the new chooks died, Laura had left the pen empty. The conditions were all wrong for birds; they had stopped laying and she couldn't feed animals that didn't pay. The veggie garden was a fenced square of dirt.

‘Hello? Anyone home?' Knuckles rapped on wood.

Laura smoothed the front of her shirt, which had belonged to Bruce and had worn soft as moth wing over the years. She felt the heat of the day coming through the front door, touching the wood with her hand, the way she had been trained, to test in case of fire.

Opening the front door, she leaned out, as if into an oven. The land beyond the house came slowly into focus, a flattened panorama of horizontal shapes, brown rectangle on brown rectangle on white rectangle: the sky. A man stood with one foot on the bottom step. He grinned, teeth rounded like white seashells.

‘Yes?' Laura said, squinting.

‘It's me, Joseph,' he said. Then, shyly, ‘Ya muppet.'

‘Joseph?'

‘Been a while,' he said.

Inside, Laura said, ‘Tea?'

There was something about the way Joseph stood silently, his hat going over and over his knuckles like a wheel. It made Laura think that for all his fancy clothes and cars, he hadn't really changed. How like his father he was. There was something measured and poised about his gaze, as though he could see beyond her skin; she wasn't fooling him.

Joseph took the mug she offered. Laura noticed, shamefully, the round circle pressed in dust on the table where it had been.

She said, ‘You living in town?'

‘Yeah.' He caught her checking his left hand. ‘Just me,' he said, and winked.

They drank in familiar silence, and Laura felt her head clear.

‘Got a favour to ask,' Joseph said.

Those warm brown eyes: how many times had she looked into them and laughed? But where the boy had been – her closest friend, her brother – there was this man. For the hundredth time, she wondered why she had let their separation go on so long, but she was also glad, since the surprise of him gave such pleasure. Sitting there, sweating, drinking lukewarm Bushells, Laura felt a tiny wash of hope. Here was Joseph.

She half-listened as he explained that he had come back to Kyree for his old dad, who had always missed the place. She couldn't stop staring at the shape of his hands, so much larger than she remembered: his wrists, once bony, grown thick. Joseph was saying that he'd bought the Jolley place a year back, when property was still cheap. The entire valley formed their ancestral place, he reminded her. She watched his lips form words. He had never tried to kiss her. Not once in all those years. A wave of sorrow bore her up. She felt dried up. Her lips had been worth kissing, once.

Joseph explained that the whole district had been theirs, back when. He sounded careful to keep accusation from his tone. His neutrality was well-honed, slick. He'd been lucky to buy in when he did. What with the subdivision, things were on the rise.

Laura brought herself 'round to his words. ‘What are you saying, Joe?'

‘Give us a minute to explain,' he said, putting up a hand as though to ease her down manually. ‘Laura.'

She flinched: her real name, made with his mouth.

Joseph took a deep breath. ‘We just want to know if you're 'right with us lot coming through here from time to time,' he said. ‘Would mean a lot to my old man, to be able to come onto the place. 'Specially now, what with Peterson's gone and done.'

Laura gave Joseph a long, hard stare. She eased back down into her chair.