Anchor Point (18 page)

She could hear the television blaring.

‘Relax,' Luc always said, though one day he hesitated.

‘What?'

‘He's dismantled the bloody washing machine,' Luc said cheerfully. ‘Reckons it's not working properly.'

Laura listened but there was only mild annoyance in Luc's tone. That was like Bruce, she thought. He would want to keep busy, help out. The washing machine was a problem – Luc kept promising to do something about it, but never seemed to have time. It heartened Laura to think that the machine might get fixed.

Laura's routine engulfed her in the weeks after Bruce's visit. Struggling to manage, she barely thought about him. The lull at the cafe between lunch and dinner was her favourite time. She went through the restaurant: dim, gleaming, still as a theatre tableau, through to the nursery office. There were rosters to write, stock to order, menus to plan. She was slouched down in a chair when the phone rang.

‘That you, Laura? Donald here. I need to talk to you, love.'

Listening, Laura covered her mouth with her hands. Her cry clamped off. She groped for the arm of the couch. The phone clattered. Laura's stomach, drum-skin tight. She found Luc.

‘I've got to go home,' she said.

‘I'll come.' He scooped up his things.

Laura cocked her head. She laughed. Strangled, the sound was of another throat. ‘No.
Home
. Kyree. Dad's sick. He's had some kind of fall.' She edged around Donald's phone call, his words a knot of exposed nerves. ‘Alzheimer's, they said … One of them memory things … Couldn't look after the place no more, turns out … Thought it was getting the better of him, what with the drought … Should've stepped in sooner, but was up in town with Joe … Nurse said he needs looking after … Had to take care of the sheep. Not in good shape, poor buggers … You and little Vik, you girls'll want to come home.'

Luc quietly held Laura. She sat with her head against his chest, heart beating in her cheek. Donald had insisted: Bruce had been sick for some time. Her failure to see it was like vertigo. Falling from solid ground, while standing still.

The sun was already up and glaring when the train pulled in, a jewel being fed on a chain, to Kyree. Laura went straight to the new hospital from Kyree Station.

She peered through the ward door – wished she hadn't. Her father's eyes were sunken, shut in sleep. She clocked the cast on his arm. He was a strange, worn version of himself made of liver-spots and bone. In the hallway a specialist, his voice medical, cold and precise, outlined Bruce's condition. Laura tried hard to absorb the details, but was overwhelmed.

‘There are options,' the doctor was saying. ‘Homes.'

Laura said, ‘He already has a home.'

The doctor coughed. Laura excused herself and left.

Out on Main Street, she turned left without thinking and went along a footpath radiating heat. Her body knew the way. Back when she was a kid, long brown grass had grown and then been eaten to the roots in vacant lots. Agisted townie horses, tired old nags, had endured the cruel attention of bored rural boys. The school bus, always late, offered no protection on long hot afternoons.

But the horses were long gone, the lots razed. In their place: charcoal chicken, a fish'n'chip shop, a pizza joint. Newly laid suburban roads crosshatched Main Street. New estate houses, like Lego blocks, made of brick veneer. The town had seeped across the land, a human grid.

Out on the highway, Laura crunched along the verge. The road rolled out, shimmering. She felt crushed by heat, by the vast, bleak desert that was the farms beyond town. She knew the weather had been hard. But she had not pictured this. What trees were still standing were now mostly dead. The paddocks, worn down to dirt by wind and stock, sapped.

At the crossroads by the letterbox, a rusty old ute skidded a little in the shale at road's edge. Donald leaned out, elbow on sill. He seemed softened by age. Laura recognised the elderly man Joseph would become.

‘Bloody hot to be walkin',' Donald said. He had more gaps than teeth. The landscape swam, ripples of gold. Laura staggered over, climbed in. ‘Need a hat on, love.' He shoved the ute into gear, grinding. There was an old dog in the tray, scrabbling to keep still. Donald spoke about finding Bruce. He was careful with words, taking time over the selection, choosing just the right ones. ‘What with all you kids in the big smoke, thought I'd drop in. Started playing cards, downing a coldie now and then. Just a coupla old codgers, us. What else?' He tutted. ‘This bloody drought!'

It had taken a few months for Donald to work out that something wasn't right with her old man. Bruce sometimes seemed to forget that Donald was coming, or was confused about their plans. Some days it was all Donald could do to stop Bruce from heading up the creek, searching.

‘Got real angry, too,' Donald said. ‘I wouldn't help. Was when I came back I saw how crook he got. Joe had your number, lucky.'

She could hardly believe the state of the place. Never had she perceived so acutely the day-to-day maintenance required to keep it in good shape. There every day, you did what needed doing according to seasons and stock and the weather, and you barely noticed the difference you made.
It's hard yakka
, Laura thought,
but that's what it is to keep a place running
.

The last few years, Bruce had avoided hiring hands when he could get away with doing things himself – what with the drought, so little money coming in. Of course, one or two people working all day can never really improve things much. The landscape was wearing back to rock. Every day, great clouds of dust and dirt blew away across the valley. Hardly anything but weeds would grow. The valley like the moon, a monotonous surface. All those hours of work, they had merely been holding the place steady, preventing decline. Laura saw all of this in a blink. The farm had only been left to its own devices for a few months, but it might have been decades.

They turned off the sealed road and into the drive. The paddock fence was slack. When had that happened? Laura started crying. ‘Oi!' Bruce had used to shout. ‘Use the bloomin' gate! You'll stretch the bloody wire climbing over like that!'

A couple of skinny wethers milled, snuffling dirt around the house.

Donald said, ‘'Fraid there's not much left of the stock.'

Three of Bruce's decorative pines were dead, their corpses littered along the drive. Laura remembered planting them as saplings, Bruce pressing her small hands into soil.

The house looked long-abandoned, falling into the dry earth. Paint worn away by weather. Verandah sagging. Foundations shifted like rheumatic joints, as though it hurt the wooden skeleton to stay still. Lopsided, the house gave the impression that after sliding into disrepair for years, soon it would slip all the way into dust. With only so many hours in the day, so many pairs of hands, Bruce had concentrated on the animals, the land. Laura understood. She would have done the same.

Even so, each time she'd come home to visit, she had been given a sharp shock. She did her best to help out, pressing her uncertainty down: that familiar, darkened mulch. Back with Luc, when she thought of the farm, she remembered it the way it had been when she and it were young. In Sydney, whatever concerns she had about how Bruce and the farm were faring became tiny, blanched scraps of image, fluttering faintly. Consumed by bulk-ordered lentils and rostering staff, her days flashed by. Stacking the commercial dishwasher, load after load, she had little time to dwell on anything else.
I'm needed here in Sydney
, she had told herself, unhooking from responsibility.
What more can I possibly do
? Now guilt threatened to overwhelm her.

As she slowly pushed into the house, familiar as dropping off to sleep, she expected, despite herself, to see Bruce seated at the table. His grey moccasins were side-by-side, waiting for him to step into. She looked down into their worn soles. The wool was flattened by years, by the weight of him. She sank down, touched one slipper the way a dead pet might be touched – gently, with some misgiving. She slipped a hand inside, felt the indents from his toes, the ghost of his shape.

The kitchen floorboards were dusty, dark with grime. By the fridge, the place where Laura had stood on her sixteenth birthday, modelling the unfashionable jeans Bruce could not afford. She remembered Kath, cradling Vik in her arms. Sad circuit of the table. Both of them in tears.

Some aspects of the house showed Bruce's fastidious lifelong ways. But unsettling clues revealed his decline. On the sink: a bowl meticulously rinsed and drained. But flies gathered on the rim of the pot, a garden for porridge-mould. Clothes hung from the Hills Hoist, pegged evenly across, stiff with sweat. Books and papers were strewn over the kitchen table; piles of clothes discarded in the hall. The rifle, freshly polished, waited to be stored away. Three buckets of greywater sat forgotten by the door. Laura could not bring herself to look out onto the parched veggie patch.

‘In the city, they're vulnerable as,' Bruce had said, once.

‘Why?' Laura looked up from the tomatoes, punnets of small plants.

‘My old man, he kept us alive,' Bruce said. ‘Times were hard. Other people starved. You grow your own food, love, that's security. You'll be right if you've got a place to grow free food.'

Through the door of Bruce's bedroom, Laura stepped into his smell. The Palmolive soap and straw-bale, the outdoors-sweat. There was something bitter beneath the print of clothes and hair on air. Laura pulled back his winter bedding, covering nose with hand. At the heart of the sheets, the yellow stain, still wet. She recoiled.

The window was warped. Straining, Laura scraped it up. A flood of fresh dry air rolled in. Like an old man herself, Laura pressed heavily on the sill. Wind blew across the valley, oven-hot. He had never once asked her for help. She leaned out into the heat. She closed her eyes.

The days broke into a familiar pattern as Laura waited for Bruce to be discharged. To-do lists, long and complex as algebra, were continuously updated as she worked around the yard. Day by day she grew into the skin of farm jobs. Muscle memory remained; her city body fell away.

The plan to move back to the farm formed the day Vik and Michael arrived. Laura luxuriated in the thought as it came to her, suppressing her fear and astonishment: what it would mean for her life if she had the mettle to do it.
Am I planning to leave Luc
? she wondered fleetingly, before telling herself she wasn't leaving him at all; it wouldn't mean that. This wasn't about him. It was a matter of inheritance, of doing the right thing. She still loved Luc. Didn't she?

In the privacy of her own mind, she was frightened by the speed with which she could brush off her life in Sydney, like it was nothing, like she had never even left Kyree. But Laura counselled herself that the farm was important. It would kill Bruce if he had to move. She thought of Kath, of the way she had looked striding off up the hill carrying the knapsack that last day. Bruce was alone. Since there was no one else, Laura had a duty, the eldest daughter, to care for him and the farm.

She felt a deeper, more uncomfortable truth: that the thought of returning to the farm brought relief. She had tried hard to forge her own future, to do her own thing. But she had never felt entirely comfortable in the life she had made. There was something safe and known and easy in the prospect of returning for good. It seemed a kind of penance.

Laura walked the boundary fence line, considering repairs. What she couldn't acknowledge was that she didn't even have to make the choice; that she could allow herself to be pulled back by responsibility to Bruce. It was too painful to consider that this act of cowardice, scurrying home, might be rewritten as selflessness – she knew it wasn't.

Vik and Michael arrived in a caravan of baby paraphernalia. It was clear he was enjoying fatherhood, bouncing the baby, singing made-up songs.

‘So many words rhyme with Cait!' he declared, bounding up the steps with the baby in his arms. He smacked lips to Laura's cheek, crowing, ‘Here's your lovely aunt, Caity-the-greaty!' making his daughter squeal. Despite the grim conditions, the circumstances of the trip, he was glad for the holiday from work, he told Laura, a rest from broken things.

In contrast, Vik couldn't have been more subdued. It hurt Laura to observe her sister, pinched and pale and tense. She stalked into the house behind her laptop, an armload of files, barely making eye contact. ‘I've got them,' she said tersely, when Laura offered to help, and then, ‘Already?' when Michael suggested that Cait needed feeding.

Laura had spent days scrubbing. The kitchen was sharp with Pine O Cleen. She ushered them in, pressing a hand to Vik's sticky back, trying to offer some comfort. It seemed to work; Vik softened beneath her touch, begrudgingly passing the files to Laura and falling into a chair. Laura hefted the papers onto the bench. ‘Cup of tea?' she said brightly, turning.