Anchor Point (6 page)

Laura shook her head.

‘We can find Mutti!' Vik broke in. She wriggled around to meet Bruce's eye. ‘She's not in the creek, is she? And we can't find her in the trees, can we, Dad? Now we can't. But if we cut them down …'

Bruce brought a hand to his temple. It hovered there; he dropped it.

Laura said, ‘It's not for her, dickhead.'

Vik's expression collapsed. She was on the floor, under the table and out the other side before Bruce blinked. Laura felt cold. The bedroom door slammed, making the walls shiver.

Bruce looked down the hall.

‘Don't worry, Dad. Please.'

He turned towards her slowly, a weathervane moving in wind. Something was gone from behind his eyes, ripped away. Laura made her mouth wide. If she could just get her face to be happy, if it could just fill up the room, she thought that she could save them from whatever happened next. She smiled, smiled, smiled: like staring down the barrel of a gun. Searching, she glanced around … for what? Bruce's map was on the table; she took it up, smoothed it out.

‘So, Dad?' she said, brightly.

They were starting anew. She tapped the map enthusiastically with the flat of her hand. Underneath, among the other papers, she caught sight of a more official-looking title, a printed survey for a property she didn't recognise. It wasn't their place. The papers looked old, but were annotated in Bruce's hand.
Cairnlea
, he had scrawled in the margin:
12 paddocks, 1 shearing shed, 1 dam
.

‘What were you saying?' Laura said. Her cheeks ached.

Bruce stared blankly at his drawing, cleared his throat. ‘Sheep farm.'

Laura smiled and smiled. ‘That's great!'

Laura watched as Bruce and Donald unchained an old ute from the back of Trent Skinner's truck. Skinner stood by, rocking back and forth on his heels. He was a hard man to work for. ‘Tight as a shark's arse,' Donald had told Bruce.

Skinner dangled a cigarette from fingers stained the colour of urine. ‘Good ute or what?' he said. He patted the piebald bonnet twice. Laura nodded uncertainly. Skinner seemed to find this funny and cackled, a damp throaty laugh soon smothered by gasps. His face darkened to plum; his eyes bulged. Then he gagged, hacked and spat a glob before lighting another smoke.

Donald went about neatly rolling up the chain that had connected the two vehicles.

‘Make sure and wind it nice and tight there,' Skinner instructed.

He stooped, inhaling deeply, eyes roaming around the yard. One hill was balding, a patch the shape of Australia, shorn of trees; behind the house was a big pile of wood, just starting to dry out.

‘Well,' Bruce said, ‘thanks again, mate.'

He thrust a hand at Skinner's chest. They shook. Bruce pulled an envelope from his pocket. Donald hung back. He was not openly watching; his eyes were on the trees.

‘S'all there,' Bruce said to Skinner. ‘What we agreed, and our arrangement stands.'

‘No wuckers.'

Laura heard the throaty screech of cockatoos. Donald turned his eyes up to watch. Skinner worked a finger through a hole in his beanie, scratched his scalp, asked Bruce if there was anything else he could have Donald do.

‘Nah, mate, thanks. We'll manage, won't we, love?' Bruce smiled at Laura. She tried to smile back, but this new version of her father was unnerving. While she was glad beyond words that the search was finally over – that Bruce had returned himself to them – he was changed, impatient: slightly manic. There was something about his company that felt dangerous; the feverish activity that had rushed in to fill the place of his grief was unsettling to watch.

Vik came down off the porch, dragging a skipping rope. ‘Can you teach me some of your tracker tricks?' she said to Donald.

Laura felt the shift in tone between the men, a current sent through air. Skinner snorted. Bruce laid a heavy hand along Vik's back. Donald winked.

After lunch, they began bleeding the brakes. Laura hauled herself into the cab, sat where Bruce instructed, working the pedal up and down. She was too short to reach from the seat, so she slouched, half-standing behind the wheel. ‘Are they working yet? The brakes?'

Bruce was lying on a scrap of old carpet beneath the ute. His muffled voice came up through the body. ‘Nearly.'

But Laura was distracted by the distinctive clop of hooves. It was not the casual syncopation of a free animal, the gait of a horse gotten loose from its pen, Laura could tell. It was the clipped pace of a horse urged on from above by the sharp jab of heel in rib. She looked around in a panic, scrabbled with the door handle. Bruce shimmied on the carpet, trying to work his way out.

‘Hang on, love,' he called. ‘Just a tick.' Tools clattered to the floor. Laura slipped down from the cab. Against the glare, she made out the sight of her old horse approaching, slowing to a trot. She knew the shape and sway of Posey's rump, the stutter in her stride – the ghost of an old knee injury. ‘Make her pick her feet up,' Bruce always said. ‘She's walking like a donkey. She's takin' you for a ride.' But Laura didn't like to dig her heels in, the way Bruce said she should.

‘Posey! Posey girl!'

The horse didn't flinch, walked past, ears rotating against flies. Was she deaf? Laura drew a fist across her face, smearing snot. Her world had broken down to strobes of colour, and lurching blurts of sound: the glossy caramel of the rider's legs, hot snort of horse breath, a whinny. A brilliant wedge of sun came streaming down between clouds. It fell, a spotlight, squarely across the drive. The rider and the horse rode through it.

‘Stop!' Laura yelled.

The rider turned on the horse's bare back. Laura locked eyes with Joseph. He raised an uncertain hand in greeting, even as the horse walked him away. He struggled to smile, disfigured by emotion. Laura felt cold. Arrested by the look on his face, she skidded and stood, watching her friend ride her horse as though it hurt him. Joseph's blanched knuckles, like bones against the sweat-darkened leather of the reins. His other hand was knotted in Posey's mane. Laura recalled the envelope Bruce had handed Skinner for the ute. The word he'd used: ‘arrangement'.

‘She's mine!' Laura cried out. ‘Joseph!'

She threw herself along the drive then, stumbling. Rain had worn rivulets in the dirt to trip her up. She'd seen Skinner's stock. Didn't give a toss. A horse like Posey, no good for shows or racing, not even good to ride, wouldn't get special treatment in a place like that. What good was she to him? Laura felt a rush of air on the back of her coat – Bruce swiping for her shoulder and missing. Gravel crunched. He caught her, held her arm above the elbow like a cuff.

Laura cried, ‘Get
off
.'

‘Sorry,' Joseph's voice cracked. ‘Dad sent me back for her.'

‘She's mine, but! Not Skinner's!'

‘S'alright, son,' Bruce firmly called. ‘You go on. Blokes'll be waiting.'

He loomed down over Laura, fingers firm. The chest of his coveralls was splattered with engine oil. Laura stared after Joseph and the horse, growing smaller all the while. She tried to drag the dead weight of Bruce along the drive. He stood firm. A sound tore out of her. She strained for the horse; Posey kept walking, rhythmically bobbing her head, as if nothing was going on.

Laura turned on Bruce, flailing. ‘You!' Her arms windmilled his gut. ‘You sold her!'

Bruce squatted until they were the same height. He pulled her in hand over hand, like reeling in a fish. ‘It's oh-kay,' he whispered in the lilting voice he used to get the bridle on the horse. He stroked her hair. She struggled, then went limp. They swayed together, rocking.

‘Skinner's not gonna look after her properly.' Laura sobbed. ‘Posey!' The word came out all mangled.

Bruce smiled sadly. She watched him look out over their place, from the house to the shed, the trees to the low, cold sky. ‘Funds came up a bit short, love. Had to trade her.' A muscle tightened in his jaw. He sighed. ‘How else we gonna get ourselves a ute?'

The months broke across the year in alternating tasks: clearing, fencing, cutting wood. When the bully Blake Davies challenged Laura to an arm-wrestle at lunchtime, he got what he deserved. His fist hit the table hard enough to bruise. Everyone laughed. Blake's face went dark.

The next day, Joseph wasn't at school. Laura knew she and Joseph couldn't shadow each other every second – she had too much work to do – but she still felt guilty. She had made no easy target: Joseph was the next best thing. Blake's cricket bat had found her friend's face, splintering. The injustice of it burned. Every time Laura looked at the rough nubs where Joseph's two front teeth had been, she hated a little more hotly.

Her angry loathing went beyond the bully; beyond a school that did nothing to punish; beyond a town that didn't care. It found its anchor in the grind of her daily experience: 5am wake-ups, endless lists of jobs. It wasn't the work that she minded, not really, though her exhaustion was crushing and she felt doused in jealousy, cold and chemical as petrol, every time she overheard townie kids talking up the free time they enjoyed after school. What made Laura livid, the target she found for her rage, was simple. The soups she stirred, the sheets she changed, the fires lit and socks paired and windows washed were meant for someone else. But Kath wasn't there.

Laura knew how to break a rabbit's neck in one swift move; Bruce had taught her well. Blake Davies cried like a girl when she cracked his little finger.

‘Leave me and Joe alone,' she snarled. The sound of the bone, like kindling snapped across the knee.

Laura was strong and capable, good with hammer as with axe. Bruce was bent to his dream, driven as a man recently converted to God. Their workers' sweat wore rivulets in skin. Truck after truck loaded with logs rumbled away down the drive. They rose early and stopped working after dark. They made small gains, day by day. Even so, Laura feared that the task was simply bigger than they were.

After a couple of weeks, when he could barely stand for the ache in his back, Bruce had relented and hired more men. The trees came down. Laura liked the smokos, the way the fellas leaned up against the fallen trunks, or squatted on their haunches like rabbits, sipping thermos tea. She laughed when the men laughed, although their foreign jokes, braids of language, were mysteries to her. Still, it felt good to smile.

She kept listening for German, but none of the men spoke it. Laura wondered if she would hear those words again. She could feel her knowledge dimming with disuse, whole strands of thought gone dark. The words she remembered, shafts of light, revealing cracks.

Each night, Laura sat slumped at the kitchen table opposite Bruce and Vik. They were too tired to talk, hardly lifting their forks, muffled by ever-present sadness. But during the day, Bruce's workers kept silence at bay with their rapid-fire banter, liquid and rolling. As they cleared each acre, Laura sensed the land growing quiet. There were fewer birds. The cockies passed overhead and kept going, heading for the far hills, still forested.

‘Good to go, I reckon,' Bruce eventually said, when a sizeable patch of the foothill was bare. But the work did not end there – would not end, in any case, until all the hills were clear, the paddocks fenced, the sheep brought in. Then they would have a farm to run. ‘You know how it is,' Bruce said gleefully. ‘Always another bloomin' job to do!'

One morning Laura walked with Joseph along the part of the creek that ran down behind town, looking for a good spot to catch tadpoles. She smelled smoke; she stiffened.

Joseph happily called out, ‘Hey, Aunty!'

Laura saw them then, the group gathered at the water's edge, fanning flames. A small campfire burned languidly. Clutching bottles of Coke, sitting cross-legged and squatting and perched on the esky with elbows on knees, they were laughing, probably at some joke. Laura fixed on the woman prodding the fire with a blackened stick. Her head was thrown back as she chortled. The mirth on her face was so absolute that Laura came to a stop. How long it had been since she'd seen a smile that big.

On the way home, she asked Joseph what had made them laugh.

His eyes did their trick, sliding away from her face. He examined dirt.

‘Nothin',' he said, but she pressed him until he grinned, sheepish. His smile, Laura knew, was another kind of
no
, just like his downcast gaze. ‘It's just. This thing of your dad's. The farm.' Joseph jiggled as though his skin hurt. Laura's face felt hot. When he spoke again, his words rushed out. ‘Foolish thing to do with that place, my uncle says.'

Laura was shocked into striding ahead, as though she could walk the comment off. It was only later, while stirring soup for lunch, that she allowed the thought:
Why
?

That afternoon she stood with Bruce on the hill behind the house, breathing hard, staring up at the hole he had punched through the dense trees. The fallen bodies of three big gums, crashed down through growth, had left a clear view of the sky. A day's work in felling, more in cutting and carting wood, still more in burning back the stumps.