Anchor Point (24 page)

Laura was still washing up two days later. Their party had worn on long into the night, and Vik and Michael had been too hung-over to be of much use before they got in their car to leave. As she vacuumed and mopped, Laura recalled Vik, drunk in the staggering way of the infirm. She had stood in the kitchen at 3am, declaring that the house had seen too many deaths; she would allow no more and none of them could make her. They had all found this funny, for some reason, at the time. Now it made Laura sad. Her sorrow amplified through the empty house.

She took a break in the afternoon. It didn't seem worth it, dirtying just one plate, so she ate lunch standing up in the shade of the verandah.

Leaning heavily against the house, staring across paddocks, bringing the sandwich to her mouth but barely tasting it, and thinking she could just about make out Bruce's headstone away up the hill, Laura didn't see the old woman coming until she was almost in the yard. The woman evolved out of the glare slowly with the sun behind her, at first a silhouette. Laura squinted, trying to make out who it was: another mourner, probably, come to give their condolences.

Unhurried, the woman neared the house. Her eyes darted, taking it all in. Hands smoothed the elaborately embroidered skirt of her dress. Hemmed with bells, it tinkled.

Laura made out a dusty taxi, idling down by the gate. As she watched, the driver cut the engine. He opened the door, stretched out his legs, flicked a lighter, inhaled smoke.

The woman carried a suede bag. Her neck was draped with beads, a rattling breastplate. Long earrings dangled from her lobes, catching the sun as she crossed the yard. Grey hair, parted in the middle, fell down her back to her waist. She wore it like a cape. She did not falter. It was as if she knew where to go. Picking her way across the yard, the woman lifted her skirts to keep them out of the dirt. Her fingers were plated with silver rings.

She raised her face to the house. Still, Laura might not have known her mother straight away. Except for her gait, which was so much Vik's that for one irrational moment Laura thought it was her sister. Kath raised a hand, a tentative greeting. Laura made a low sound at the back of her throat: a growl. Half-chewed sandwich in one hand, she stood frozen. Her mind stumbled, flailed.

She remembered the way Kath's letters had dried up for good. The pain of that abandonment, somehow worse than the original disappearance, had worn a groove in Laura's chest. She felt herself cleaved by Kath's departure, and every day that came after. Fresh anger welled, taking her breath with its heat. Part of her wanted to rush down into the yard and rip into Kath's face with her nails. But she was taken aback when that emotion was overridden by a sudden, intense desire to touch Kath and be touched. To hold her mother in her hands. It was a primal thing, like thirst, made stronger by Bruce's absence. To be embraced.

My mother!
Years of suppressed longing picked her up and carried her. She flew down the steps, unthinking. Kath stopped to watch Laura's progress. She looked faintly alarmed. Laura didn't have time to register fully the surprise on her mother's face.

‘Mutti?' she gasped. ‘Mum?' Her voice cracked.

Kath stopped, her face a reel of expressions flicking fast: surprise, confusion, shock. The women gaped at each other. Laura didn't know what to make of the way Kath stared and stared. Perhaps she was staring too.

It was strange to see her mother grown old. The woman Laura had known was still there if one knew where to look: buried in the enviable bone structure, the startlingly blue eyes. But how much beauty is embedded in the surface of the face, in youth. The creamy, flawless skin Kath had possessed, and Vik had inherited, was degraded, deeply lined. Furrows were ploughed around the mouth, corrugating Kath's forehead. Skin hung from her jowls as though her whole face had suffered a landslide and settled further down her skull. Her eyelids had sagged, her lips thinned, and her once slender body had given way to a scrawniness that suggested frailty, illness – despite a tan so deep and dark, the skin looked cured. However she had been living, she'd clearly done it tough.

Kath brought a loose fist to her mouth and hacked into it. The cough rattled wetly, making the cavern of her chest seem larger than was natural, hollowed by smoke. Only the clothes were familiar to Laura, the same hippy stuff she had favoured all those years ago, though they no longer seemed exotic, adding to the air of neglect.

Taking all this in, Laura felt the burn of salt water in her throat. She tried again – would hate herself for it later, her tentative hopefulness. The way she allowed herself to be softened. ‘
Mutti
?'

With some effort, Kath seemed to zip herself up, squaring. It was a mannerism Laura remembered, and she shuffled back a step or two. Kath's face looked haunted. She turned the rings on her bony fingers and whispered, ‘Vik?'

Later, Laura sat across from her mother, elbows resting on the surface of the table she had wiped and wiped and wiped for years – a lifetime. She felt strangely self-conscious making tea in the same kitchen, with the same pot and mugs that had once belonged to Kath. Except the woman wasn't Kath, or even Katherine, as Laura had assumed, remembering the pots, her art, signed with
KM
. When she wasn't able to find her mother online, she had been so determined to protect Bruce from his grief that she had never tried to confirm her mother's name with him. It was
Katja
. She put Laura straight first thing. ‘Kath' was just what Bruce had called her, she said, so everyone in town did too.

‘You know.' Katja sniffed. ‘Australians – they like every name to be easy …'

I tried to find you
, Laura thought, only a little troubled by how lacklustre her searching had been. Perhaps the name wouldn't have mattered much anyway: Katja didn't use the internet; she had no landline or TV.

Laura understood that the whole world was just the sum of what people told one another, then recalled. What horribly tenuous purchase this was, she thought, when people went missing, forgot things, died. How small a thing: a name. Kath had gone into the scrub in the hills; Katja had come out.

‘Mind if I smoke?' Katja asked, already drawing a tin of rolled cigarettes from her bag. Her hands shook in a way that was troubling to watch.

Laura shrugged, placing her own smokes on the table. When they lit up, passing the lighter between them, Laura saw that they held their cigarettes the same way, pinched between finger and thumb.

‘You're keeping well, then?' Katja said, inhaling. Her accent was faint. The nasal twang of rural Australia had seeped in, blotting her past.

‘Not bad,' Laura replied. She felt oddly saddened by the change in her mother's voice, finally certain that the woman she had known and lost, had remembered all those years, was gone. At the same time, she was curiously relieved. Her memory of that younger, harsher woman was mostly negative, coloured by bitterness and grief: too many loads of washing done and doses of cough syrup spooned into Vik's mouth late at night. But who was to say this Katja was any better? Laura wondered at her ability to contain such conflicting emotions, remembering that storms are made from hot and cold fronts meeting.

They discussed the weather for a time then lapsed into silence, sipping their drinks. It was achingly unreal. To be drinking tea with her mother as though nothing had happened, no time had passed. Laura couldn't stop from flicking her eyes to the empty chair at Bruce's place. Thank God Vik was gone. She didn't think she could have stood to watch that scene unfold – to have to sit by, nodding and smiling, while the big reconciliation Vik had longed for took place. Or failed to.

‘It's very changed,' Katja said. ‘This place here, and Kyree town.'

Laura flinched, fumbling her mug. What could she say? She didn't want to get into it, what had happened to the joint. Couldn't stand to hash over that history, reliving the environmental work. Her failures. But she wasn't quite ready to ask the big questions she needed answers to, either. For something to say, Laura shyly asked Katja about her art.

Her mother sniffed, mouth twisted ruefully. ‘Remember that, do you?' She sucked bitterly on her smoke. Laura could smell something in it. Was that dope? It was faint, hard to detect through the tobacco, but she knew the scent well from Sydney, Luc's greenie friends. Could recall it all the way back to her childhood – the smell of her mother's studio. ‘I still make work,' Katja said. She described a series of paintings she was doing, or had done: animals and auras. ‘I work intuitively, you know. Pottery is very healing, very restorative. Painting too. I run a class for tourists, sometimes, up north where I've been …' She left the sentence hanging.

But I don't know you
, Laura wanted to say.
I don't know what comes next
.

Katja hacked again, growing red in the face. ‘Wasn't the plan, 'course. I had talent.' Laura smiled weakly; that part of Katja's life had been secret, off-limits to them. Her mother's voice rose. ‘I could've been something, given the chance …'

Couldn't everyone?
It was hard to know what was worse. The idea that Katja had run off and left them to make something of herself. Or that she'd thrown it all away, her children, their childhoods. For nothing.

Laura pushed back her chair and stood up. Wanting to get as far away from her mother as she could. Fought the craving to slap Katja hard.

‘Why did you come back?' she said instead, squeezing the handle of her mug so hard she thought it might break in her fist. ‘I mean, you left. We never heard from you. We got over it.'

Katja cleared her throat. ‘I did write, you know …' She explained that she had needed to get away, was leaving Bruce and the farm, not Laura and Vik. Never them.

Laura couldn't help herself, sighing loudly, impatiently, feeling her incredulousness clear on her face. Katja sat forward then, eyeballing. Laura was reminded of the old Kath, the passion with which she had spoken about her art, just that once. The power behind her awful brawls with Bruce.

‘Listen,' Katja said, ‘you've got to hear me on this, Laura. Our … separation … was only ever meant to be temporary. I'm not saying I deserve forgiveness. That's your journey. I've made mistakes. But I wanted you. I did. I always … loved you.'

This was the most she had said, perhaps ever. Laura's hands were shaking. She sat down quickly.

It wasn't the done thing in Kyree then, Katja went on, leaving a marriage. But life on the farm was unbearable. Stifling. No culture, no people, nothing. ‘I'm an
artist
, you understand?' she said. ‘Not a farmer. Bruce knew it when we married. But we were young, stupid. In love even, for a while, if you can believe it. But we had no idea what was coming. What we would do to each other. We were just too different. I suppose …' Katja broke off again and sighed. Her silver earrings, like raindrops. ‘I wasn't long in Australia when we met, and he'd just bought the land. He was so happy, he swept me up in the adventure. But this place! Then I got pregnant.'

Katja tried to stick it out, for years, growing angry – not herself. She said it got to where she wasn't able to be a good mother, or wife. ‘The very idea of those things was a problem for me. That they were something I had to be!' Laura held hot smoke in her lungs. ‘Just getting up in the morning used all my strength. I couldn't face it. In the end, it was leave, or let it kill me.' Katja paused, then added, ‘That's it.' She delivered the line with nonchalance.

It was only later that Laura allowed herself to feel the full, ghastly punch of the words. The weight of her mother's absence had hung heavy across her entire life, across all their lives. Wasn't it the job of parents to love and protect their children, no matter what? Laura had never left Vik.

‘There was someone else,' Laura said quietly, not knowing why she was bringing that up, of all things. ‘Wasn't there?'

Katja bowed her head, lighting a fresh smoke from the butt. She nodded without meeting Laura's eye. ‘You knew?'

‘I've wondered.'

‘Bruce know?'

Laura shook her head uncertainly. She felt too far out from shore. The water of their conversation, too deep. ‘Who was it?'

Katja looked away, face twisted horribly around the blade of some old pain. ‘Not who I thought he was, that's for damn sure.'

Laura saw that her mother had made a choice. Part of her even understood it. Looking through the kitchen window at heat-beaten dust, she could imagine the allure, the desire. Someone who promised to take you away from it all: the dishes and laundry and flies. Perhaps in the heat of passion, you would consider leaving your kids. But imagining and doing were two different things. The choice was still monstrous. From the look of her, Katja had suffered for it. Enough?

It was clearly still painful for her to admit to it, but Katja explained, haltingly, that the man had left her a month or two after they got to the coast, hitching all the way. ‘I thought of coming home, but …'

‘Bruce looked for you, you know,' Laura said harshly. ‘He loved you.'

‘He never got in touch!' Katja snorted. ‘Loved me?' She looked around the room and took a deep breath, lungs rattling with phlegm. ‘He was angry, I guess. I kept his name. Thought you might try to find me.'

Again, Laura experienced the unsettling sense that she was being blamed for something, and reminded herself of the paltry effort Katja had made to remain in their lives.

‘I've lived with it, what I did. I'm not asking for your forgiveness,' Katja repeated, twisting her rings.

Laura looked at her mother's face. How could she explain what ‘living with it' had meant to them? The police search, starting school and graduating, school plays and netball games; Vik's degree, her wedding and the birth of her child. Those big events that make life what it is, all done without a mother. How to explain the small, daily events, those that go unreported, uncelebrated, unmarked? What it felt like to ride the Kyree bus in winter, wind whistling through window cracks; to go into parent–teacher interviews with only one hand held? Crying in the bathroom over some fresh schoolyard taunt; Bruce up the hill, dragging a drowned sheep from the dam, and nothing they could do to help any of it? How to explain the backbreaking work of clearing that was too much, an obscene task for one man and two little girls?