Anchor Point (3 page)

Laura went and put a timid hand on Bruce's cold, weather-worn cheek. There would be none of Kath's oats, like milky ash, in the morning. They leaned into each other. She absorbed the night cold leaking from his clothes and skin.

Officer Lindsay from town asked the same questions again and again. With hair scraped back so tight it distorted the shape of her eyes, she perched in their lounge room while two men in uniform waited impatiently outside. Laura would have rather talked to them. The nib of Lindsay's pen scratched against the pad like chook claws in dirt.

Vik sat on Bruce's knee. The two of them, sodden with grief. Their faces were misshapen, swollen and muddied. Laura sat beside them on the couch, flinching every time the officer asked Bruce to relax, to let them do their job. They would take care of it, she said, just as soon as they had all the facts.

Laura told her story as well as she could, swallowing hard on the truth. Yes, Kath always got her clay from the creek. No, they hadn't seen her come back down the hill past the dam. Yes, the three of them had been at the dam all afternoon, until the storm threatened and Bruce had sent them on ahead while he finished up work. They had been back at the house by the time the flood occurred; they didn't see anything, didn't hear anything, didn't know anything. Officer Lindsay wrote it all down, sweeping up detail with a speed Laura hated.

‘Did Mum seem particularly sad or angry or upset when she left the house?'

Laura thought of the blow, her bruised eye. The bedroom door slamming. Firmly, she shook her head.

‘Crikey!' Bruce croaked, swivelling wildly from Laura to the officer and back. He lurched forward, almost turning Vik from his knee. ‘My wife's been God-knows-what in the flood and you're sitting here asking these questions!'

Laura sensed that the officer was looking for holes in their story. Could she think that Bruce would hurt Kath? But Laura had turned the only real proof of his innocence to ash. There was just her word now, which itself might raise further suspicion. How could she ever tell?

‘So Mum was going off to get clay yesterday morning?' Officer Lindsay asked again.

Vik recoiled every time the officer called Kath
Mum
, forming the word
Mutti
with her lips – a silent protest. Laura wanted to punch the word off Vik's face. She looked the officer dead in the eyes. She remembered the way Kath's note had burned.

‘Yes,' she said decisively.

At times, Bruce rolled in his chair, tense with impatience. ‘We've been over this!' Other times, he sat silent, wet face buried in Vik's hair, her neck: a child with a doll. Laura couldn't say which of them it hurt more to watch.

Whispered on the verandah, in corners, not meant for little pitchers with big ears: the idea that the longer the search went on, the less likely they were to find anything
good
. Laura said nothing. She kept her head down and tried to keep things running: the laundry, the fire, the chooks. She did what she knew best.

All the while, somewhere outside, rushing through and banging doors and gulping water from the tap, Bruce searched. He left the house with Blackie every morning at sunrise, clutching maps and ropes and torch. At first the cops went too, then volunteers. Once floodwaters receded, it seemed the whole town was up in the hills behind the house, combing the banks of the creek, the rocky outcrops and shallow caves, the trees.

‘You'd think she woulda washed up by now,' Laura overheard one officer say to another at the end of the first week. The men stood on the verandah in waterproof pants, warming hands on mugs, looking out over the yard. Sheets of rain were drawn about the house, enclosing. Laura crouched around the corner, the eggs in her hands cooling. Rain ran down her back.

‘Sometimes they do. Sometimes don't.'

One evening a man with skin like tar came out from town to help. Among the volunteers, his name, Donald, caused more whispers than Kath's. Laura overheard the post-office lady say he was a tracker. Donald looked up at the darkening hills the way that Bruce had looked at her mother sometimes, when things were good. Off-duty police, volunteers, formed a circle on the porch, demarcated by tobacco smoke.

Donald stood in the wet grass beyond the pool of light cast by the house. ‘Difficult,' he said, hat in hand. ‘Whatever tracks there were'll be washed away by now.'

‘Dogs've already made that crystal, mate,' a volunteer said.

Laura saw the whites of Donald's eyes flash as he blinked. No one offered him a beer. The constable flapped his maps. Donald turned his face away. A stranger ushered Laura and Vik inside.

Next morning the rain had eased and Donald was back, standing a little apart from the group. Men stood staring at compasses and marking maps, coiling ropes and pulling waterproof pants over jeans. They held dogs by their collars, ground cigarettes with boots, and unpacked saws, chains and torches from the trays of utes.

Laura helped Vik get dressed, eat toast. The weight of her sister's needs, a milkmaid's yoke. She had heard Bruce pacing the kitchen overnight, when darkness barred him from searching. She lay there, tamped down by the weight of her winter quilt, listening. Then she opened her eyes as wide as they would go, but the room was so dark they might as well have been closed.

She called softly, ‘Dad?'

His footsteps faltered, then resumed. How thin her voice sounded in the absolute dark of the room. Vik stirred, rustling. Laura imagined getting up to stroke her sister's shoulder through the sheet. She imagined Bruce's big, empty bed, sheets still line-stiff, not yet softened by body heat. One pillow was imprinted with the shape of his head, the other smooth.

Bruce was gone when they rose, but his scent lingered in the kitchen. The way the oily, musk smell of sheep had lingered in Granddad's big shearing sheds, so Bruce said, though they stood empty most of the year. The animals' fear at shearing: burned like a brand into wood.

With the search party gone for the morning, a group of blue-haired strangers from the local CWA turned up with bags of knitting and tea towel-covered cakes for morning tea. They were in the house like termites before Laura had time to think what to say. Boiling water and rinsing cups, they settled into the furniture with needles and tongues clicking, gossiping about Kath like they'd known her. Vik approached the one who was softest looking, all pastel-pink mohair, pillowy breasts. The sweet face of a stuffed animal. For a second, Vik appraised the woman, sucking her thumb. Then she folded, pressing herself into the cleft where the woman's leg met the couch. The longing on her sister's face made Laura's stomach turn. She was desperate not to see it.

‘
Vik
!' she hissed. ‘Don't.'

Laura scrabbled with Vik's elbow, yanking her away. The little girl peeled back, mewing. The sound was soft and terrible. So resigned.

‘No harm done, love,' the woman said kindly to Laura, leaning down to hook Vik under the arms. Laura caught sight of a tiny white cardigan, half-formed on plastic needles. Vik settled in the woman's vast lap. Impassive, she gazed down. Laura was chilled by Vik's face: the shadowy, magnified eyes and mouth misshapen by rhythmic, brainless sucking. It was obvious from Vik's blank expression that she felt no joy at the embrace. Exhausted by misery, she had simply searched for and found a warm place to be numb.

‘C'mon,' the woman said to Laura, patting the couch beside her. ‘There's room for one more.'

How easy it would be, after weeks of effort, to surrender. To sink into all that flesh.

The backyard felt expansive after the stuffy closeness of the crowded house. Laura trailed across the mud to the Hills Hoist. She drew a deep breath, feeling the cold in her lungs like water. Beyond the boundary of the yard, the bush glistened with fallen rain. Laura listened to the sound of all those drips rolling, thousands at a time, from the canopy into the deep litter of the forest floor. She thought momentarily of her mother, of where Kath might be.

Straight away she pushed the thought down into her internal detritus, smothering. A sob escaped, but she clamped it off, leaning her forehead against the cold pole at the centre of the clothesline. How vigilant she had to be.

‘Oi!' a voice said. ‘Hello!'

Laura glanced around the empty yard. She turned and looked up into the huge gum by the back door, its branches sprawled above the line and the house. A boy lay on a lower branch. The way he lay relaxed along the bough reminded her of a fat lizard sunning on a rock.

Bruce kept threatening to chop the tree down; he complained every time he climbed up onto the roof to scoop leaves from gutters, and when birds bombed brooches of shit onto their clean clothes. But the tree gave the house shade in summer and so far it had stayed.

Laura returned the boy's greeting out of surprise more than friendliness. She was wary of kids her age. He grinned, and she was struck by how white his teeth looked against his dark skin.

‘Who are you?' she said.

He gestured vaguely towards the bush, the direction the search party had gone, seeming to feel no need to say more. They listened for a moment to the desperate sound of the distant search.

‘Is Donald your dad?'

The grin widened. ‘Wanna come up?' he said.

Laura stood back, appraising the trunk of the tree. There was a big dark arch, a scar in the bark. She had told Vik it was the door to a magic kingdom, and the little girl believed it. Though Laura was a good climber, the scar was taller than her. She couldn't see a way to climb beyond it to the branch. ‘Nah, can't be bothered.'

The boy landed with a squelch on all fours. Laura retreated to the back door and sat down on the step, pulling knees to chest. He trailed behind. They were protected there beneath the shallow eaves, sharing heat along their sides where hips and shoulders met.

‘Heard about your mum,' he said.

Laura searched for something to shield against the flare of pain that came every time someone mentioned Kath. They sat in silence for a moment, watching grey clouds slide across the sky. Guessing that they were about the same age, Laura asked why she hadn't seen him around. ‘Doncha go to school?'

He shrugged, plucking the knee of his jeans. ‘Got to now, they reckon.'

‘Who reckons?'

He shrugged again, still smiling. Something about the way his eyes slid from her face made her think he knew, but wasn't telling. Laura waited, but he said no more. He wasn't like the other kids. He didn't jostle or joke. He didn't poke fun, call names or play tricks. He seemed happy with silence in a way that reminded Laura of Bruce. At the same time, there was a watchfulness about him, as if he was carrying on whole conversations in his head. For all his grinning, his friendliness, Laura detected sadness in the air around him. She recognised it – it matched her own.

‘What's your name?' Laura asked. He told her: Joseph. Laura said the word to herself, enjoying the sound across her tongue.

‘You got one of them canoe trees there,' Joseph said quietly, pointing at the big gum. ‘Special, that one.'

Laura looked where he pointed. It was just a tree. She said so. The expression on his face suggested Laura was the punchline of some private joke. He said people used the bark to make all kinds of things: canoes, baskets, huts. The scars left behind marked where things had happened, where events took place.

‘They were here,' he said. ‘Trees are proof.'

Laura didn't like to think of other people living on their land. She thought instead about all the ringbarked trees Bruce hoped to kill. Most would die, but some would surely recover. Those trees would continue to grow, bearing their concentric scars, the place on the trunk where Bruce had cut back bark, removing a circle of flesh. Was that how they would all be remembered, one day down the track? The events of their lives – the family, Kath – immortalised by a horizontal line in a trunk? A wound that had failed to kill?

It took a long time for Laura to fall asleep that night. When she woke it was still dark. For a split second she was unaware of her own real life. She heard a noise and opened her eyes, sensed the weight of the blankets, the comfort of old flannel sheets soft with sleep and laundry soap. She lay there for a beat, blissfully happy, calm and safe. But it only lasted a second. Then everything rushed in, winding, as it always did when she remembered. She wasn't conscious of crying, just of having wet cheeks. The sound came again, something moving across the yard. She pushed back the covers. The floor was ice. She padded on tiptoes, feeling her way across the room to the window and pulling back the heavy drapes.

‘Lor?' Vik called. ‘What's happening?'

‘Stay there,' Laura said. ‘It's cold.' But Vik was already out of bed, fumbling for her glasses. Laura shifted slightly, allowing Vik space to squeeze in beside her, able to smell her sister's long loose hair, old flowers and oil. It seemed alive, breathing down Vik's back.