Anchor Point (7 page)

She expressed fear: that this was to be their lives. This year, and each one after, they would do the work, and still there would be more trees to ring and fell; it would go on forever. In any case, she muttered, was the farm a good idea?

The slap came quick and fast and entirely unexpected. It wasn't hard, but she yelped. Bruce had never hit before and never did again. Laura held the sting in place with hand on cheek, as though to cover up what he had done.

The truth was, Laura had enjoyed some parts of the clearing, as the farm in Bruce's head began to grow in place of the bush. Chopping down, uprooting: it made the place look clean. It was a small mercy to be free of sap and splitting logs, though their lives were now reduced to the taut wires, the big spool and endless, evenly spaced posts. The men went home on Friday night; they worked all weekend. Their lives, framed by the act of cordoning off, segmenting. Laura endured dreams of tools, while Vik had nightmares – she got it into her head that the fencing would go on forever. Though it made her feel dirty somehow, Laura said nothing to calm her sister's fears.

Up on the hill above the dam, Bruce leaned into the tray of the ute and hefted the massive spool of fencing wire onto its side. He squinted, appraising the land. Laura eyed the huge pile of arsenic-dipped posts in the tray, too-big worker's gloves dangling from skinny wrists. Her fingers pressed the void of Bruce's handspan. The gloves smelled of engine oil and soil. An ill-fitting second skin, they made her clumsy. A year on, they fit more closely than they had at the beginning. Perhaps that was some kind of birthday present, Laura thought ruefully when she stared at her twelve-year-old hands, roughly calloused, seeming so much older than the rest of her.

Their work had revealed something: with enough time and sweat it was possible to change the face of the land. Though its essential shape – slopes and valleys – remained, it looked vastly different from the place Kath had left behind. When Laura went through town on the way to school, she stared down at the neat dirt streets and quarter-acre blocks. Mostly she looked at the fences: picket, paling and wire. Before, it had never occurred to her that she might think of them as anything but intrinsic, even natural. Now she saw them for what they were: the consequence of human will. Of gruelling hard work.

Bruce's checked shirt was dark beneath the arms, two wet crescents. He pressed his head into his forearm, blotting sweat. ‘Right,' he said. ‘Come on then.'

Vik sneezed, then moaned involuntarily with hay fever. Behind the glass her eyes were an albino rabbit's – red, wet and rheumy. Twin slugs of snot lay on her upper lip.

‘Ready, Dad,' Laura said. She forced a smile. The air was sweet with sun-warmed grass and pollen. Vik wheezed. Bruce unfolded a wrinkled grey map from his pocket, smoothed it on the bonnet of the ute. Laura looked at it again. It showed in broken lines where the fences should be built. The design was based, Bruce had said, on the sheep farm his father once owned and lost.

‘Never lived there myself,' Bruce told Laura. ‘I was born just after they moved up to the “shitty”,' he said with a little smile. ‘My old man talked about Cairnlea, though. Told me all about it from when I was a young bloke. Talked about it so much I reckon I could draw the place if I wanted to, clear as anything.'

And he had.

‘Here's what we're gonna do,' Bruce said on the hill, as Vik and Laura climbed into the tray of the ute. He pointed to the image of the farm divided into squares by a neat greylead grid; he pointed down the slope. ‘This paddock'll run from here to that stump over there. See it?'

Nodding, Laura squinted at the dead tree, a dot on the opposite ridge.

‘Right,' Bruce said. ‘So from there, we fence down to the road and along to the drive.'

‘That's a fair way,' Laura said mildly.

Bruce grinned, chewing on a stalk of grass. ‘You remember what to do?' he said, rubbing his hands together.

Laura ground her teeth. ‘Yes, Dad,' she said. ‘'Course.'

Bruce took the stalk out of his mouth, spat pith and went on to explain the task again. Once the position of the fence had been marked, he would drive along the line while Vik and Laura stood in the tray and dropped posts off the back of the ute. Then there were holes to dig, posts to plant, wires to string and strain. Each paddock they completed was a record of their days: months measured in acres and wires.

‘My eyes hurt,' Vik whispered. It was hard to tell if the forming tears were of frustration, or if it was the grass.

Bruce looked up, appraising. Laura hated the expression he wore, horribly devoid of warmth. ‘Who's complaining?' He went around to the driver-side door and pulled it open without a backward glance. The ute lurched.

Vik's face crumpled. She got to her knees in the tray, groaning up like an old woman resigned to certain death. Sneezing pink mist into her hand, she didn't look at Laura, whose chest was tight as tape.

‘I'll see if you can stop,' Laura said quietly. ‘I'll ask him.'

‘No,' Vik said, fearful. ‘Don't!'

But Laura banged on the roof of the cab: their signal. Bruce rolled his window down.

‘Vik's not well, Dad. Her hayfever's real bad.'

Sighing, ute idling in neutral, Bruce heaved out of the cab and stood to look at Vik. Laura watched him weighing up. ‘Not fit for work? Best get yourself back to the house.'

He lifted Vik down as if she were a doll, set her in the grass. The engine coughed. Vik's eyes, pinched with tears, found Laura's face and narrowed.

Sorry
, Laura mouthed, stomach sinking. It was a long walk home across paddocks, and while Vik had covered this distance a thousand times, Laura felt bad imagining the little girl trudging home alone and unwell. She hoped Vik would have the sense to put herself to bed when she got back, to brew tea: jobs Laura normally took care of. But there was no time to give instructions before the ute moved off again.

Laura called urgently, ‘Bye!' but Vik didn't respond. She watched her sister recede.

Warm air whistled across the ridge. Laura thought she heard something, a sound resonating just below the regular range of speech, like a voice carried a great distance; words whipped into tones by wind. She turned, stared down at the house, out along the delicate twine of road, straining to make it out again. All was quiet. Laura remembered then, clear as if her mother was with them, Kath singing a German lullaby. Vik a pink-faced baby, clamped at her breast. Steam of drying nappies hanging by the stove dampened Laura's skin.

This happened a lot, Laura having visions. A memory would slice through, so sudden and unexpected that spit would fill her mouth. While standing in the shed, Laura saw Kath hunched over her wheel, clearly framed in the studio window, obscured by dust, hem hiked and knotted above the knee. On the bus – Vik's first day of school – Laura caught a flicker of rosewater, an eddy of scent, and she saw her mother's mouth: the creases that formed when Kath smiled, quotation marks in her flesh, and the crooked eyeteeth crossed like fingers. She could almost smell her mother's particular scent. Down in the gully, floating her bark boat and trying to sink Vik's, Laura had caught sight of her reflection. Recoiling from the image of Kath's face, she fell gasping on the bank. Her boat, carried into the stream, went under.

The following day, a Sunday, Bruce hauled Laura up over the gutter and set her down on the roof.

‘Take a break from fencing you reckon, love?' he had said over breakfast, lip curled, an unfamiliar sneer. ‘While the precious invalid recovers?'

The roof was corrugated, like desert sand shaped by wind. Laura looked out at the crisp view. Wisps of mist clung to the trees, draped over boughs. Dissecting the valley, the twist of dirt drive wound down towards the road.

Laura noticed for the first time how the garden had sprouted in new ways. Kath's lawn was long dead, but native grasses had crept in through the shabby palings that separated the bush from the yard; it was harder to tell now which was which. Laura sensed that it was only a matter of time before their house itself was engulfed.

Bruce stared hard at the landscape, as though calculating a sum. Laura could tell he was looking at the place in the distance, felt rather than known, where he believed Kath had gone in and disappeared. He glanced down at Laura with an expression that was part surprise, part something she couldn't name. His uncomprehending gaze was focused on the knot of hands between them, her small white fingers entangled with his, big-knuckled and brown. He smiled cautiously, and for a second some outer layer of his face, a mask that had long been deforming his features, cracked away. Laura caught a glimpse of her real father, before his smile faded and the haunted weariness fell back down around his eyes.

Bruce eased himself into a squat. He had to reach out over the precipice of the verandah to remove the leaves from the gutters; an important job, he said, so that rain would run cleanly down the pipes into their tank. The spring-cool breeze brought up the sugared scent of growing things.

‘Ah, bugger it,' Bruce said, clicking his tongue with displeasure.

‘What's wrong?'

‘Birds, love. In the eaves.'

He brought his hands to his hips. Laura waited. Down on the ground, Blackie lay in a pool of pale sunlight, looking up.

‘Bloody swallows. Can tell by the nest, 'cause it's made of cl …' He coughed. ‘Made of
mud
.' He put the pad of his thumb to his mouth, wiping.

They climbed down, moved the ladder, and climbed back up to get a better look. Laura went first. She came face to face with the clay-cup nest. Close enough to catch the sharp animal musk, to notice soft brown feathers worked into the design, to observe how the structure was made up of tiny beakfuls of clay. Bruce stood with his chin at her shoulder. She braced herself against his chest.

‘Why is it a bugger, Dad? About the birds?'

The chirps were louder now, and betrayed slight variations in pitch; there was more than one bird inside the nest.

Laura thought,
So birds have their own voices too
.

‘Swallows come back,' Bruce said.

Her nails were white on the rung.

‘Year after year, they'll just keep returning.'

She wanted nothing more than that they might just remain talking, back against front.

‘Problem is,' Bruce continued, ‘birds don't come back if they smell people. It's a safety thing, I guess. It wouldn't have mattered, you see. Except for now we've gone and put our smell up here. Accident of course, but the mother bird will sense it. She might abandon the nest once she gets a whiff of us.'

All of a sudden Laura's knees turned to rubber. She had to hook her arm around the rung and hug it in. ‘I'm getting down,' she said. ‘Dad, we've got to get down.'

But Bruce's body blocked the way. ‘No point worrying now, love,' he said gently, touching her hair. ‘Damage done. If we leave these birds here, chances are the mother'll desert them. 'Course,' he went on more cheerfully, ‘swallows aren't native. No point worrying ourselves too much, I suppose.'

That night, Laura lay in the dark listening to the cheeps of four blind swallow chicks. Bruce had said to feed them breadcrumbs soaked in milk. But no matter how much soggy bread she dropped into their open mouths, it never seemed to be enough. They looked like tiny plucked chickens, their skin so thin and translucent she could just about make out the shape of their hearts through their chests. Laura had set up the straw-lined shoebox in which they now floundered, beaks upturned, gaping.

Vik called across their darkened room, ‘You awake?'

‘No.'

‘But, Lor, what was that song Mutti used to sing us?' Vik hummed the first few lines.

‘Leave it, alright? You're so annoying.' Laura spoke thickly, breathing through her mouth. She put a hand to the corner of her pillow, squeezing. The birds called out.

‘Are you – are you crying?' Vik said. ‘What's wrong?'

‘Shut up. I said leave it.' Laura rolled away. The birds rustled in their box. Their eyes were still sealed closed. They had no way of knowing where they were; she hoped that they believed themselves to be at home. She tried for a moment to conjure her mother's face, to see Kath standing in the room. But all she could see was the outline of a woman. The harder she tried, the darker became the shadows obscuring her mother's face.

Kath's notes had kept coming, though Laura resisted the urge to read what her mother wrote too closely. Each
Liebe
felt like a poisonous little dart sent to hurt her. After she discovered that the envelopes contained cash, she had made sure to open them carefully, burning the rest of the evidence. Deja vu, like fatigue, overcame her every time she opened the door of the oven and thrust a letter in.

Watching Kath's handwriting go up, Laura understood how her life would unfold: caged by mail. She would receive Kath's letters, would burn them. Nothing would ever change.

But the notes had grown shorter, drying up. Six months in, they had already become one-liners. Kath made dutiful contact, but when she got no response, it seemed to suit. It suited Laura too, keeping her secret.

As the notes shrivelled, the cash continued to arrive. It hurt Laura to count it, knowing how badly they needed each dollar. Bruce trusted her now to buy groceries and pay bills from the allowance he had once supplied to Kath, but money was tight. It wasn't easy to spend extra without raising suspicion, not in a district mortgaged up the wazoo. When Vik needed a new winter coat, Laura pulled a woollen jumper from her own drawer, knowing full well that there was enough of Kath's money saved to dress them both in shop-bought clothes. But then the tank started leaking, the toilet backed up, the tyres on the ute grew bald. Laura mutely observed the deepening lines in Bruce's face. She racked her brains to think of a convincing story that would allow her to use what she'd saved. In the end she spent what Bruce gave her each week on the household, then siphoned off a little of Kath's money to hand back as change.