Anchor Point (27 page)

They spoke for an hour. He told her that his family knew the watercourse, the creek where the dry gully was now. He paused, thinking, then said they knew it well, and always.

Turning the words over and over, Laura couldn't stop the jab of jealousy. Now they wanted access to the whole creek, not just the part that ran between fences on their block.

‘What's that you're always on about?' Laura said. ‘Mining and that? Jesus, Joe.'

‘I can explain. If that's what you really want to talk about.'

She measured him with her eyes for a moment, then looked away. What did it matter what his politics were? The land belonged to her and Vik. She thought how mixed up they all were. There was what they believed and what they did, the stories they told. So many truths contained in skin, concentric rings. Laura imagined herself a log, sawn open. How many layers?

She remembered the way Joseph had stood on the farmhouse roof fighting the bushfire. Streaks of soot like dried blood on his face. They couldn't have saved the place without his help. How much she owed him. In another life, other choices, it might all have been his – this patch of dirt. Laura allowed herself a fraction of a second to imagine it, the two of them growing old together. She recalled the look on Luc's face when he first noticed the big tree out the back.

‘'Course,' Laura said, and the smoke from that long-ago fire seemed to sharpen in her lungs. ‘You can use the place any time you like.'

Joseph's shoulders dropped. Laura watched them fall. In fact, everything about his body appeared to soften, relax. A familiar looseness came into his limbs, the set of his jaw. Laura glowed with the thought that she had done it.

Joseph explained how much it meant, the access she had granted. Said he had known she wouldn't give a toss if he came 'round, but it meant something that the others could come too. They wouldn't come over often, he added.

‘Land's pretty stuffed,' Laura said. ‘Been livestock over the road for, I dunno, fifty, a hundred years at least before Peterson's subdivision.'

Joseph winced and said, ‘I've seen it.'

‘Remember when it was all bush on this side, too?' Laura leaned forward. There was something she wanted him to understand, something she had never been able to articulate before. Her voice came fast and rasping. ‘My old man, he bought this land, worked it. I've tried to, you know, repair some of the damage.'

They turned together to look out of the kitchen window. Hills of grit. Laura found she suddenly had nothing more to say. The words had fallen away, quick as that. She sat back, despair washing over her. She said, ‘It's in me, somehow. This place.'

They sat together for a moment in silence before Joseph made his leave. There were articles to write, clients to see, meetings to run. Laura's head spun with the purposefulness of his life, dizzying, just barely glimpsed through the list of appointments he reeled off. How little she knew of him now. She was borne along by his genuine happiness, the rush of parting goodbyes. Swept up. If only they had kept in touch, Laura thought, things might now be different. But what might have been seemed long gone, with the rain.

Joseph leaned out the car window, engine running, elbow on sill. ‘Keep in touch, douchebag,' he said softly. ‘Missed you.'

Though she smiled, Laura felt stricken. More than anything she longed for time to wind back, just to stave off his departure. He was already waving, pulling away.

‘Wait!' she called, thinking of Katja. ‘Forgot to tell you!'

But he was too far away to hear her, windows wound up and dust settling in his wake. It wasn't until she could no longer hear the car that she felt just how quiet the farm was. She was alone. She strained to catch the sound of birdcall and rustling leaves.

Laura phoned to give Vik the details of her trip to Melbourne. She lied and said the ute was in the shop, that she liked catching the train. In fact, she was just too nervous now to drive such long distances. Her doctor insisted that it would be a while before the symptoms of the disease would be fully felt, but she knew her own mind. Familiar journeys sometimes went blank – the route from shed to house made mysterious, as if she were a stranger to the place. If she took a wrong turn, walked for an hour away from the house, she would never be far from a good clear view of the valley, which could guide her home.

‘You'll pick me up?' Laura said. She tried not to sound too eager. She wanted to tell Vik in person about her condition. A drought project, for when all other jobs had withered. Vik wouldn't understand why she wanted to sell the farm all of a sudden, not without the full, tragic story – the cloud-cover amassing in her mind. She had to let the farm go, couldn't save it any more than she could save herself. If she didn't get out now, it would finish her.

Vik came to the station. It took a moment for her face to emerge from the jostling crowd. Laura thought she felt the first fronds of panic, but it was Vik's hand on her arm. She almost cried with relief. Her sister was well into a story, words rushing, as if they had been talking for some time. Laura tried to find a second of stillness to draw in the familiar face. They embraced. Vik looked cool and put-together in her white linen suit. She did not stop talking. Laura, boots tanned with copper dust, felt smeared.

Vik ushered her through underground terraces to the car. Laura carried her own bags. The apartment was only streets away. Still, as Vik said, the car was air-conditioned, and it was far too hot to walk. They strode through the blistering wind with their heads down. Laura held on to Vik, eyes partially closed against the grit and glare.

The streets were almost deserted, footpaths glittering, sticky in heat. The city looked turned to glass. Laura didn't remember it being so big and bright and high. It had been years since she'd come down to Melbourne; that was progress for you. The sunlight was made piercing by the millions of mirrors against which it bounced.

‘That was probably the last train, Lor. You were lucky. It's all over the news,' Vik was saying. ‘The fires. And they're getting closer.'

They shared a quick look. Bushfire was ripping through Victoria. Laura knew that Vik was remembering, as she was, the heat on her face from the flames they'd once fought.

On the outskirts of the city the front was already kilometres long, fed to atomic proportions by the extreme heat, the dry land. A brutal wind was blowing, as if the fire was drawing breath. The whole state was on high alert. Laura, surprising even herself, wasn't worried about the farm. The new estates on Peterson's place would be well protected by the CFA. And if the fire did sweep through, well. She had nothing left to lose.

Vik's apartment was cool and quiet, as though belonging to a wholly separate atmosphere. Vik showed Laura how to control the temperature in the guest room, a pattern of buttons and processes. Laura smiled, nodded, said she understood. The room was neat and bright, like Vik.

‘Thank you,' Laura said, dropping her case, turning abruptly to face Vik.

She took her sister in her arms, that familiar shape. In fact, it was Vik – statuesque, gym-strong – who held her. Laura lay a cheek on Vik's shoulder, sucking back tears. The relief, a flood. Finally handing herself over to her sister's care.

‘What's this then?' Vik said, bemused, covering her alarm. After a moment, her arms winched tight around Laura's waist.

Laura told her. It came out just like that. ‘Viko,' she said. ‘I'm sick.'

Golden flame flickered distant on the horizon. Laura sat on the couch nursing a cup of tea, feeling as though she had front-row seats to the end of the world. The view from the thirty-third floor was phenomenal.

It was almost possible to forget that the fire was real, to see it as the impressive light show it appeared to be from their vantage point, well out of harm's way. From the tower, it looked like the whole world was burning. The line of fire stretched from left to right as far as the eye could see. It was only centimetres high to Vik and Laura, but advancing.

They had been talking quietly for some time. When Vik recovered well enough, she went straight into manager mode, as Laura knew she would, wanting to map the whole thing out. She fired questions, steely-eyed. Laura listed her symptoms, unfolding the report she had received from the doctor, the two deft words of her sentence: early onset.

She knew her struggle to express the rest was information enough for Vik. In any case, they were both familiar with the disease. Vik used the word
haunted
. Laura joked that she couldn't believe how much like Bruce she was: to get sick like him, on top of the rest!

‘What about you?' Laura said tentatively. ‘You been tested for the Alzheimer's gene? Do you have it?'

Vik inclined her head a fraction, eyes downcast. Laura caught the meaning. Relief surged like adrenalin. She scooped Vik's hand, squeezing. ‘Thank God!' she cried. ‘But that's great, Viko! So then Cait's also …' But she couldn't think of the word.

Laura admitted that she couldn't go on at the farm.

‘Can we sell?' Vik said. ‘After all that's happened?'

There was sweat on her brow. It had grown warm in the room, as though the heat from the flames – out in the gilded suburbs beyond the bounds of the city – was reaching them on air.

Laura said, ‘We'll work it out. But listen, Vik. About Kath. Katja, I mean. She wants …'

Vik straightened, showing her full, regal height. She took Laura's shoulder, efficient and grim-faced. ‘Don't worry about that. Thinks she can come sniffing around!' Vik snorted; her face was stony with resolve. ‘After everything. Like she deserves it!'

Laura couldn't help it. Sobs rose and broke without warning, a monsoon. Vik looked startled and jumped back, but Laura couldn't explain through her tears. It was just that this was the first time she had really felt that her sister was on her side. The first time Katja wasn't there in some ghostly way, impossible to compete with, holding them apart.

Vik's home phone snapped the moment. It rang, one short, sharp peal.

‘Strange,' she said. ‘Must have been cut off – they'll call back.'

But even as Laura was responding, Vik was rushing to the wall, jabbing at the temperature control. Laura sat forward. Something was happening; she could not grip on to what it was. The way Vik looked at her. The same as when, after a long day's search, Bruce had come back inside the house, alone.

‘What is it?' Laura said. She rose up stiffly from the couch.

‘Fire must've cut through the phone lines,' Vik said. ‘Power too. Can you feel how hot it is in here?'

They went back into the lounge to stand agitatedly at the windows, staring out. Vik touched the glass with back of hand. She winced. Laura copied; the glass was faintly warm. She could feel the heat of Vik's skin, the beat of her fear. Three helicopters in formation flew north towards the flames.

‘Whole city's out,' Vik said. ‘See? But don't worry – buildings like these have their own generators. It'll soon crank up, I expect.'

Laura looked where Vik pointed. She saw what she hadn't seen before. In office buildings, no lights were lit behind glinting glass. Chaotic roads were jammed to a halt. Traffic lights gone blind. A white ambulance, small as a pearl, raced towards a smash. Threaded on a string of stationary cars, it ground to a halt at the first cross of streets. Some people were edging their cars out into intersections, only to turn into the next long queue.

Laura could see what they could not – that it was hopeless. She traced road into road until the pattern of cars blurred with distance and the haze of smoke. The city, fallen into uncanny stillness. Jammed by the failure of its own clockwork. Without electricity, Laura saw that it had stopped being a city at all. It had become a vast, hot stretch of concrete.

The apartment was warming up. Without power, no water could be pumped up to them, or down. They had no fresh air, for none of the grand windows opened. It was forty degrees outside, maybe more. Without conditioned air, the tower, a glass tube, would quickly equalise. But there was nowhere else to go.

Laura couldn't quite read the look on her sister's face. There was some internal conflict taking place. Vik inhaled deeply, squaring shoulders. Her eyes strayed to Laura's scrawled notes, scattered by the couch. Laura wanted to tell Vik something then. It was a snake in the grass and she was behind it, snatching the tail as it whipped and disappeared. She needed a moment to focus the thought, to dig it out of the dark burrow it had coiled up in. But Vik was shaking herself, grinning artificially. Whatever struggle had gone on, the manager in Vik had won.

‘C'mon,' she said, bustling. ‘I'll make tea. Think there's still water in the kettle.'

Laura was swept along by her sister's vigour, ushered enthusiastically back to the couch. Installed on a wad of cream cushions, Laura was urged by Vik to rest. Laura watched her sister zag around the kitchen, a lightning bolt, all energy with little domestic application, which was her way. Of course no water could be boiled, so they had the tea lukewarm. Vik worked as if it were any other day, clattering cups, spilling sugar, humming under her breath. She kept her back to the windows, fixed on the task. Whatever happened next, Laura felt that Vik would survive it. She lay back against the pristine couch, feeling bone-tired, the way she had felt after gruelling days of clearing work. Vik fixed the drinks as Laura had trained her: pouring water, measuring leaves. The farm might be lost, but there was something Laura had done well.

Vik knows how to make a good cup of tea
, Laura thought.
Because of me
.

The city had darkened and was mired in smoke. Laura's tongue felt swollen, gluey with thirst. She sat up slowly. The sun, muffled by haze, was being snuffed out. Usually a landscape of merrily twinkling lights, Melbourne was plunged into deep and layered gloom.