Anchor Point (21 page)

Laura made progress, never veering from her own strict schedule. The reality of Bruce's condition served only to strengthen their timetable. Managing the condition contained, in itself, a meter: pills, afternoon naps, bath-time, bed. Their lives ran like clockwork in the management of Bruce's health, which was on a slow and steady slide downhill, and in the repair of the land, which at rock bottom might still come back, alive.

‘Need a hand, love?' Bruce said eagerly, at the beginning of each day.

‘Nah, you sit tight.'

Laura set the radio on the verandah rail and turned the sound right up. The newsreader spoke of water pumped up from rural rivers into town. It didn't matter which day.

‘I'll be just over there,' she said. ‘Need anything, give me a shout.'

Bruce cocked his head, listening to the news report. ‘Strange,' he said, ‘why hasn't Father mentioned the drought?'

In the early evening, Laura stepped from the bright shallows of the yard into the pool of shade. She pulled off her gardening gloves. ‘You 'right, Dad?' She touched Bruce's shoulder. He started, smiled, shifting the blanket on his knee. The sound of new chooks clucking, gentle castanets, could be heard behind the house.

‘I can't see the sheep,' Bruce said. ‘Buggers better not be loose!' He pursed his lips.

Across the drive, in the paddock, lines of saplings stretched from fence to fence. Laura was onto her second notebook, catalogues of work.

When the dinner was made and served, Laura carried bowls of pasta back out onto the porch. The sky was harsh with stars. Jazz played, scales running against insect song.

‘Been eaten alive yet?' she said. ‘Dad?'

The couch was bare but for the flaccid blanket. Her cry sounded feeble, muffled by the encroaching night – it did not echo, but died. She scanned paddocks for a human shape, the valley all shadow.

For blind minutes, Laura called out. She checked the machinery shed. Her socks were wild with burs. Light leaked beneath the roller door. She crunched it up manually.

Bruce turned from the tractor, grease gun held aloft. ‘Hello, love!' he said, grinning. ‘There y'are. How's the pottery coming?'

She gaped. His whiskers sanded back her cheek. Then he bent to his work, applying gun to wheel. The grease was sticky, like coagulated blood. She watched. She didn't know what to say; he was okay. He worked over each nipple, lubricating with the gun. The task unfolded as it had a million times before. It seemed he followed silent instructions, stored in his muscles.

Why these?
Laura thought.
And not others?

She drew a hand across her face, smearing the corners of her mouth. It was Bruce's gesture, passed along with chin and eyes. Like honey, the old grease seeped out from the joint as the fresh grease piped in. Laura watched him lean in to polish, lovingly, with a square of rag.

‘Dinner's ready,' she said, as evenly as she could.

He allowed himself to be led back to the house. It was deep-water black. The windows were lit, bright yellow squares. Laura held Bruce's elbow. Something scuttled in the dirt, croaking. They leaned into each other. Together, they felt their way across the yard.

All through dinner, they chatted like old friends. Bruce kept calling her Viktoria, but was cheerful. The strange, contorted faces, his uncertainty and fear, had melted. He was himself. Laura fought the impulse to lean across, touch his hand, make light of the memory loss. She told a story about the sheep; he laughed, snorting into his mug.

The shower took too long to get warm, so Laura had it cold. The tap went off while she scrubbed her skin pink with a bald face washer she'd used since she was a little girl. Bathing was a fractured thing. Not a pleasure, another job.

In fresh clean clothes she padded down the hall. He was there. Just like that. He was there, sitting at the kitchen table, rolling a cigarette from her tobacco-pouch. Her pulse beat fast as fly-wing. ‘Luc?'

She had forgotten the solidity and bulk of him. He encased her. Laura felt something fall away. She sank into his chest, holding tufts of his shirt in her fists.

‘How's Bruce?' Luc said into her hair.

Laura pulled back, smearing her face on her sleeve, stunned by the flesh-and-blood reality of him standing in the room, by the care with which he asked the question, his earnest expression, the gentleness with which he clasped her upper arms.

‘He's sleeping,' Laura said, shakily. She kissed and kissed his face and hands.

‘Can we talk?' Luc said.

Loud as lawnmowers, the drone of insects filled her ears. Laura flicked the porch light on. They stepped out into the hay-dry night. She shut the door carefully behind them. For a moment they stood in silence, Luc leaning against the balustrade, pulling meditatively on the smoke.

Laura hugged herself. She sensed that despite his kindness and his calm, the cigarette stood in for his true feelings. He drew grey smoke into his lungs. He was a good man; he hadn't come all this way just for a fight. But Laura knew he had every right to be angry. She had left Sydney months ago. The word
disappeared
came to mind, but Laura shrugged it off.

‘Didn't hear you arrive,' she said to break the silence.

Her hands were pinched together. Luc's jeans were low-slung. The seam of his stomach-muscle, the twin pricks of his hipbones, stood out beneath the fabric of his shirt. He inclined his head towards the bike leaning against the wall. ‘Rode out from the station.'

‘Look,' she said, ‘say what you have to say.'

‘And what's that?'

She saw now. He would use his gentlemanly restraint, the guise of empathy, to make her suffer. ‘Dunno where to start,' she mumbled.

‘Be good to know what you're planning, for starters. Since I'm meant to be, you know, your
partner
.' Luc spat the word, revealing his hurt. Laura wanted to take him in her arms, but he glowered.

They were away. Laura cried, raw-eyed. The argument went 'round and 'round. There were only so many lines.

‘It's taken me a while to figure things out!' she lied.

‘So that's it?' he snapped. ‘Between us?'

‘Of course not!'

But she was lying again. How could it work? Luc's world was in Sydney; she was Bruce's nurse. Laura felt the life they had made together turn to powder beneath the pestle of her duty to Bruce. To the farm.

Luc had turned away. He stared out at land brutalised by Laura's own hand.

She grappled with his arm. ‘Luc … '

He shook her off. ‘You've fucked the businesses too, then,' he said. ‘All our plans.'

Laura felt skinned. She lowered her face into her hands. But a tiny part of her felt it like cold water: relief. ‘All
our
plans?'

Over months, making Bruce's meals, hearing Luc's patience wane, Laura had tried to work out what was going on, why she was leaving Sydney – she couldn't yet admit that she might be leaving Luc. She wanted him. More than anything, she wanted to be his. But there was so much in Kyree to make up for. She caught a flash of her mother, those velvet skirts. Though Laura did all she could to avoid thinking of it, the search and the memorial service were clear in her mind. She had already lived through months of her father's loneliness. She knew her limits.

Even so, she felt drawn and quartered by these men, their ideas for her, their needs. Her own ineffectuality – decades of obedience, doing what she was told and doing it well – was so painful to the touch that she could hardly even finger the edges of it. It was easier to feel herself hard done by, worn out. Torn.

In the early hours of the morning, her argument with Luc shifted gear. Something had cracked, not broken. They were exhausted. Nothing more, or new, could be said. They crawled together into Laura's bed. She pressed her cheek against Luc's chest.

‘I'll come here, then,' Luc said, tiredly. ‘Summer holidays are coming up. I'll stay.'

Laura knew how much it cost Luc to think of putting his life on hold. Lying in the dark, she felt a frisson of hope. She allowed herself to consider that things would change this time. The problems they'd had in the past, differences of opinion between Bruce and Luc, could be avoided, couldn't they? Under these exceptional circumstances?

How much do I have to sacrifice?
she asked herself, pulling Luc's arm over her like a shield.
Can't I have something for myself?
But as he slept, loosening his grip on her, Laura sensed how inadequate her flimsy, unconvincing entitlement was, how little it could protect her from herself.

Luc moved his books down from Sydney and settled in. But almost immediately it began to trouble her, the way he leaned across the table, talking at her, outlining his plans. It was as though they were already alone and the farm was his. Luc helped Laura bathe and dress Bruce. She couldn't fault him there. But his attitude unsettled her: the gusto with which he spoke about ‘fixing' Bruce's ‘mistakes'. She was not surprised to find that Luc slept late, and rarely ventured outside.

He got on the phone to his mother and ordered bags of seed for Laura to plant. He phoned a friend who worked at Landcare to ask about the gully, about irrigation, about birds. The notes he made spanned pages. Elaborate plans were sent down from Sydney, showing the structure of biodynamic farms. They would get solar panels, Luc said, and insulate the roof. Part of Laura was grateful; she could not have managed such in-depth research herself, on top of everything. But her deja vu was crippling. Unnerving little flashes, confusing when in time she was.

Peripheral, never consulted, Bruce might have been a ghost. Laura remembered the barely concealed scorn on his face at Luc's first introduction. As Luc waxed lyrical on wind turbines and mulch, she saw it flicker again across her father's face. A flame flaring, fluttering, dying out.

On the rare occasions that Luc did come outside to help her, Laura had to walk off to the shed to stop herself from lecturing – Luc's word – on the way simple tasks should be done. Other times, she fumbled the axe on purpose. She held her tongue, when she remembered, as they walked across the hills; on seeing birds and fledgling plants she recognised, she pretended not to. It was hard work keeping quiet. The observations she made on wind and weather came naturally as breath.

All that ‘good training' from Bruce had given her the hands of an outdoor worker, the same as his. But Luc, she knew, was a city man. Her connection to the place, which Luc could never have, allowed it. Laura felt the ache it caused, Luc's frustration.

She still held out hope that they might survive together, that the farm would grow the way they'd planned. Sometimes she stopped to watch Luc when he ventured out, shirtless, into the veggie garden. His skin quickly turned molasses; he did not seem to burn. She imagined again the children they would have together. In summer, they would go swimming in the dam.

Laura set Bruce to digging furrows in the new vegetable garden, which was many times the size of the old one, and laid out according to Luc's plans. Bruce had been up for hours, and Laura with him; their porridge cooked and eaten, bowls washed, chooks fed. Lunch loomed, another item to complete. Bruce had wanted to chop wood; the dead pines still needed to be cut and stacked, but Laura worried about him managing a blade. No matter what the job, it was hard for him to focus. He would start well enough, but there would come a point at which, as Laura worked alongside, she could see that the purpose of the task eluded him. His work would slow, then stop. He would stare at the tool he held as if it might animate and articulate its use.

Occasionally he got scared. Laura left him for a moment sweeping the shed, and came back to find him howling, certain he was imprisoned and would not be released. At other times, he worked not on the task she assigned him but one completed long ago.

As they dug holes for Luc's saplings, sent down from Sydney in damp hessian sacks, Bruce tried uprooting those already planted, condemned to relive the clearing work he'd done. Despite the difficulties he faced on certain days, there were others, the majority, when doing jobs seemed to prop Bruce up. Even when he couldn't make sense of why and what he was digging for, the act of working the blade into the earth still offered some respite.

Summer came to a close, but the heat endured. As Luc prepared for the coming semester, he withdrew into Laura's room, his study, where he sat for hours in the current of warm air turned by the fan. His interest in the farm was waning. She had encouraged it, she knew, but the fact of it still ached. The radiance of his attention was weakening, leaving her cold. Years ago, she might have been devastated.

When their paths did cross in the evenings, Laura tried to engage with the things he was reading, to seem interested, but she was so exhausted by the time the light dimmed and she came indoors that it was hard to think of questions, her mind numbed with dirt and manure. Then there was the dinner still to make. There was Bruce.

This is what dying feels like
, Laura thought.
Slowly letting go
.

Sitting across the table from Luc while he picked at his food, she could see the way his eyes strayed to the half-read book he had placed on the bench. Starving, body aching, Laura shovelled her dinner in. The table marked a seemingly insurmountable distance between them.

It was a different story at night. Though they went to sleep with their backs to each other, Laura woke with her hands on Luc. Their skins, molten. She knew she was trying to grasp something that was already gone. The way they came together across the damp sheets, pressing desperately, brought tears. Still she tried, gripping Luc's arms, his back, wanting every part of him. His mouth was hard and wet on hers. Words they couldn't say passed silently. Laura thought of insects mating, only to die.

One night, when Donald was keeping Bruce company, cups of tea steaming on the verandah balustrade, Laura knew she could not put off the conversation with Luc any longer. One way or another, they had to decide what they were doing. How they would go on. She left the dishes on the rack and came into her bedroom, drying her hands on her shirt.