Anchor Point (5 page)

Sitting next to her, Joseph had his hand up, again. They were flanked on either side by the other untouchables in Grades Three to Six. It didn't seem fair that her friend was consigned to the back row with her by the unspoken agreement of the others. He had started further behind in his schoolwork than Laura, but it quickly became clear that Joseph was smart, smarter even than the best of Grade Six who sat right in front of the teacher. It wasn't only school; Joseph knew all kinds of things that had no place in a classroom. Laura badly wanted to learn what he had to teach: how to cook meat in earth, where to find water, what plants made good meals if you got desperate out in the bush.

‘How come you know this stuff?' she asked every time he let slip some interesting piece of information about rainfall or catching snakes and eels.

But Joseph just smiled and shrugged, as if to say,
Doesn't everyone
?

Donald was good with livestock, especially horses. They had followed the work to stations, farms. They'd been up country, wherever that was. ‘Living rough,' was how the ladies put it. ‘No place for a child! Even an …'

But Joseph's stories, when he told them, were filled with friends and family from all over the state: the people he'd met, the places he'd seen. Laura hung on every word, thinking how great that life sounded. He eventually told her that his mother, Lorraine, had lived in Kyree till she died in the back of the pub the summer before Kath disappeared. Donald had brought Joseph home to say goodbye. Shuddering, Laura remembered the police laughing about that death during the search for Kath. Though she couldn't have explained it, she knew some people were worth more than others in town.

Laura thought there might be other kids, brothers and sisters, but it was hard to tell who was who. Joseph's attempts to explain his family tree made her family seem somehow malformed, containing too few people to be properly considered anything at all. She was grateful to him for never asking much about Kath, and returned the favour. Their bond knit, a ligament.

‘What does
x
equal?' Miss Gray looked out over the classroom, wide-eyed with encouragement. ‘Anyone?' she asked brightly. ‘Laura?'

Laura took the pencil from her mouth.

‘The
x
, Laura? Any ideas?'

Laura looked at the board. The numbers were meaningless, just a pattern of shapes. She shrugged, blushing. How would any of this help with heaving washing to the line? Would it make the fire light itself each morning?

‘Dunno.'

Miss Gray didn't get angry, as Laura expected – even hoped – she might. Instead, the teacher smiled. It was a sad, patient, tender smile. Encouraging. Like there were things beyond Laura's comprehension that one day, if she was lucky, she would eventually understand.

Vik was waiting for her on the verge, chucking rocks, when the school bus dropped Laura off. They walked to the postbox together, the little girl chattering, starved for speech. Collecting the mail from the main intersection near the house had been Laura's job since Bruce gave her the postbox key on her seventh birthday, going on about responsibility, delivery times and bills.

‘It's the only one,' he had said finally, knotting the key on a string around her neck. ‘I'm trusting you not to lose it!'

Laura wore the key proudly at first, displayed over her clothes. But she grew older and came to understand that it was not a special object of precious metal, as its importance implied, but a cheap, tinny padlock key. The string grew grey, frayed, was replaced. Laura mostly forgot she was wearing it. Collecting the post became just one more daily task. Still, she did not remove the key, even to bathe; against her chest, it was a small but solid measure of her father's esteem.

Laura found their box in the row of rusty old tins, reeled the small key up over her collar and worked it in the padlock. The main road rolled away, flat, in both directions.

In the distance, the dirt shimmered, narrowing to a point where it disappeared into the horizon altogether. The straight brown road and valley were bare compared to the mess of trees around their house. Once, Laura had thought she'd seen the tiny speck of a person coming towards them. She choked on her breath, almost called out, and squatted in the gravel. But it was nothing, she quickly realised, straining to see. No one there. It was just a trick of the land, of the light.

Laura let Vik carry the mail – more sympathy cards, she guessed – as they walked home on the grass beside the road. In the gravel shoulder were dead things. Snakes, birds, kangaroos. Laura held her breath as they passed a flyblown body. Eventually, the carcass would wear away, under pressure from the weather and the flies; each afternoon, a little more decay. Sometimes they passed the dislocated body of a snake, killed by Bruce for being too close to the house, the limp carcass draped over the flabby wire of their boundary fence.

‘Why do you put them on the wire?' she had asked once.

Bruce shrugged. ‘Sends a message.'

Laura dumped her schoolbag, swollen with homework, on the kitchen floor.

‘That you, Lor?' Bruce called from the back door. ‘Got some seedlings here – veggies and that to put in if you've got a tick. Mrs Burton down in town gave 'em to me for that chook shed I helped her with a while back.'

Laura shuffled through the house in her school clothes. She planned to mention the work she had from school, how the dinner still needed to be picked and cooked, the chooks locked up, the fire set. But when she came to the screen and gazed out, she found Bruce sitting, hunched on the back step. He looked up at her as she reached the door, face dappled by the shadow of the big gum near the line. Laura was struck by his expression. He seemed like he'd just woken up from a dream, posture splayed and unsteady.

‘I'll just get changed,' Laura said evenly, going back into the house.

She did the planting as quickly as she could, then hurried to wash up. Vik had deposited the unopened letters on the sideboard, adding them to a teetering pile. They fell in a cascade of coloured paper as Laura rushed past. Envelopes scattered like leaves over the gritty boards. She knelt down, huffing. ‘Turn the bloody light on, would you?' she said to Vik. ‘Help me get these up, come on.'

Seeing the cards spread across the floor, Laura felt she was looking at Kath's disappearance through a telescope – fully understanding how wide-ranging its effects had become. It was not contained within their little family at all, but known and understood by a vast array of people in all kinds of places. What happened to them, she saw, had somehow gotten loose in the world. It was bigger than their house or their land, and real.

Laura put her hand on the nearest envelope, pale pearly pink, and hesitated. Vik sank beside her, each girl on hands and knees. Fanned out, envelopes of understanding and best wishes. Vik picked up a green one, not much bigger than her hand. She turned it over, then back. Laura thought of that other note, made smoke. How easy it would be to tell Vik everything. She screwed one set of knuckles into the palm of her hand.

‘Pick them up,' Laura said.

Vik shifted on the bones in her knees. She slid a nail beneath the green flap.

‘Vik? Did you hear what I said?' Laura put down the card she was holding, brushing an envelope of paper so creamy and thick it might have been cloth. She said, ‘Did you collect kindling today, Vik? Like I asked?'

Vik stared studiously at the envelope in her hand.

Laura felt the quick bile of her anger in her throat. ‘Do I have to do everything 'round here?'

Vik's expression was watchfully defiant. Laura got an inkling: she could make all the sandwiches in the world for Vik, but it would never put her in charge. The sisters stared at each other, sizing up. How like Kath Vik seemed in that quiet instant.

Laura tore the envelope open. Vik giggled, a sound close to tears.

They began to open, unseal. Cards spilt. Pictures of doves and flowers and green landscapes – not like the real world, Laura thought, but like gardens in picture books. Some of the cards bore words made of letters that curled around one another, or else looped back. Sometimes the words looked scratchy; in others, the messages read like tangled balls of string. What Laura couldn't read, she made up. Vik's careful expression betrayed her insight only fractionally. Laura pretended not to see. Her sister's charity scoured.

Laura opened a card from Miss Gray and the kids at school. It had two red-breasted robins on the front. ‘Sorry for your loss,' she read.

‘She
is
lost, isn't she, Lor? Mutti,' Vik said. ‘But we might find her again, right, Lor? People find lost things again, don't they?'

‘Maybe,' Laura said. ‘I don't know. Actually, no. I don't think they do.'

Laura wanted to lie down, but knew this was impossible. She felt like she might scream. Staring out through the kitchen window, she soothed her eyes on the sleet-coloured sky. It looked like rain. There was washing on the line.

‘Do another one,' Vik said eagerly.

The scream rose up, but Laura's eyes caught on the curl of Vik's shoulders, the way her finger was twisting in her hair: Vik was just a baby. Laura sighed, then clenched her jaw. She felt as though she was hauling her sister up from the bottom of a well.

‘
Lor
.' The thumb came out. ‘
Please
do another one.
Please
.'

The anxiety in Vik's voice was unnerving. Her face grew red. She had learned a few things from Kath, Laura saw, observing her sister's mottled cheeks, the constricted throat.

Laura found another envelope and ripped it open. Inside was not a card, but a piece of paper. She looked down, was almost sick. She would know that handwriting anywhere. It had burned her, scarred.

The postmark revealed that the letter had been there for weeks. Bruce had never once looked at the cards, but he easily could have. Laura brought a hand to her throat, touching the string that kept the postbox key safe. She knew she would never again bring the mail back to the house without sorting it first.

‘Read it,' Vik said. She was poised for wailing, but some-thing in Laura's face stopped her. She levered up to hands and knees, crawled over. Her thumb left a chain of damp ovals on the floor.

With Vik's eyes on her face, Laura hastily scrunched the letter in her hand without another look at her mother's writing. It wasn't over. She should have known that the first letter was just that. There would be more. It would go on forever.

‘It's nothing,' she rasped, Vik's breath on her cheek. ‘Get
off
, will you?' She pushed her sister away. ‘It's just a
bill
, okay?'

There had been plenty of bills lately. Bruce said they were being bled dry. Laura crumpled the note into the heart of a torn envelope, the way she might wrap newspaper around something rotten before chucking it in the bin. She raked the scattered cards towards her with both hands. Leaves of misery.

‘Don't just sit there,' Laura said. She tried to make her voice sound adult. ‘Gonna help me clean up, or what?' Kath's note was a blood-blister that Vik was pressing down to burst.

Vik struck out at Laura with one bare foot, leaning back on her palms to get leverage. Laura turned, engulfed by the flood and rush of blood in her veins. She grabbed the small white foot and screwed her nails in.

‘You little bitch,' she hissed. It was a word she had heard, but had never said out loud. Vik screamed, flailing, and shook Laura off.

Next morning, Bruce pushed back his chair. He glanced from girl to girl, fingering the sheaf of papers by his egg-smeared plate. The sweet scent of wattle-blossom flowed in through the flyscreen. Outside, the hills were lavishly embroidered with yellow and white flowers. It was quiet in the room, except for the tick of the kitchen clock. Laura knew from the earnest blush in Bruce's cheeks that this was important.

‘Listen.' Bruce rubbed his palms along his sinewy thighs.

Laura slipped the noose of Kath's apron over her head. She went to Bruce, clasping his soft, wrinkled nape. Below the collar, his brown and freckled neck was divided from a blue-white torso, as though his head and body belonged to two different men. In the line between the dark and light were the contours of nearly forty summers spent outdoors.

‘We've got to get on, I reckon. It's time,' Bruce said. ‘Been talking to some of the blokes from town.'

Laura stiffened in surprise; Vik chewed on her finger.

‘The price of wool's up. And we get plenty of rain here, see. Everyone wants a piece of the place, they tell me, now things are looking up. I reckon there's money to be made.' He laughed quickly, then sobered, gesturing at the papers on the table. ‘Have a look at this, will you?'

Laura and Vik both lunged; Laura got there first. She held the hand-drawn map, turning it this way and that.

‘It's our place,' Vik said.

‘Here's the thing.' Bruce leaned over Laura's shoulder, pointing at the vast expanse of crayon green. ‘All this is just wild scrub.' He moved his finger across the few red squares. ‘And this is the clear land we have now.'

Laura saw with a shock how small they were – how little Bruce had managed to clear up till then. She touched the pinprick of black ink that was their house.

Bruce was leaning forward excitedly now. He surveyed the map as though looking at a living view. ‘So here's what. All this green here, it's got to go.'

‘Go?' Laura said.

‘Exactly. Been the plan all along, 'course. We just gotta make it happen. We're gonna clear it. Two hundred acres. Get men in to help us. We're gonna clear the lot.'

Bruce sat back contentedly. Vik leaned forward. Laura traced the line of tension down her sister's back.

‘You know what we'll have then?' Bruce said.