Anchor Point

by Alice Robinson

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

When her mother disappears into the bush, ten-year-old Laura makes an impulsive decision that will haunt her for decades. Despite her angerand grief, she sets about running the house, taking care of her younger sister, and helping her father clear their wild acreage to carve out a farm.But gradually they realise that while they may own the land, they cannot tame it – nor can they escape their past.Anchor Point is an eloquent and arresting Australian novel no reader will easily forget.

Release date: March 1, 2015

Publisher: Affirm Press

Print pages: 272

Sample

Part One

Kath stayed in the studio through dinner. Laura forked up meat and potatoes for the rest of them, a bag of frozen peas pressed to her eye. When Kath eventually slunk in, tiptoeing, red-eyed, smelling of smoke, Laura thought how loud a person sounds when they are trying to be quiet. She shared a glance with her father across the couch.

‘Mutti?’ little Vik called from the bedroom where she was meant to be asleep.

Laura grit her teeth against the yearning in her sister’s voice, a pinch deep in her chest. But she was beyond expecting Kath to respond. She could hear her mother filling up the kettle, opening the fridge and rifling through. Vik started to cry. She was only just five.

‘I’ll go,’ Laura said quietly, heaving up. She went down the hall to the bedroom.

When she appeared in the doorway, Vik howled harder. ‘I want Mutti!’

Calmly, Laura gathered the blankets in her arms. It was all she could do to lift them, she felt that tired. In the gloom, rubbing her sister’s back, she tried to block out their parents’ voices. But they came anyway, detonating down the hall.

‘I’m busting a bloody gut out there!’ she heard Bruce shout. ‘You come in, messed up. Thinking what?’

Kath’s response was shrill, garbled. Bruce came in over the top, forcing Kath’s voice higher still. The words made Laura feel strangled; she couldn’t breathe. Bruce went on about the dinner Kath hadn’t made, the dishes she hadn’t washed. Laura tried to barricade herself in the bed, pressing into the mattress, eyes squeezed tightly shut, face buried in Vik’s hair. The bruise over her eye throbbed against the pillow. Laura waited for Bruce to say something about how Kath had hurt her, but he went on.

Laura whispered, ‘It’s alright, Viko. Don’t worry, okay?’ The little girl pushed herself deeper into Laura’s arms. Squeezing her sister’s familiar shape, Laura felt grateful, despite the raging fight, that there was someone for her to hold.

‘Back off,’ Kath was hissing. ‘The sacrifices I’ve made. You have no idea – your tiny mind.’

They were growing louder, scuffling together. Laura winced, hearing the thud of feet on lino as Kath pursued Bruce along the hall, berating. Laura ran the pad of her thumb over her calluses, hands rough from stacking wood the weekend before while Bruce logged gums. Bruce said there were lots of ways to be clever; she was lucky to be good with her hands. But not good enough: she hadn’t been able to hold Kath’s fresh-fired urn, dropped and smashed to smithereens on the studio floor, sparking this latest fight.

‘Forget it,’ Bruce yelled, sounding close enough to touch. ‘Talking to a brick wall.’

‘Oh, that’s right,’ Kath screamed. ‘Walk away, you bastard.’

They were in their bedroom now, fiercely opening and closing cupboard doors. Then, as though suddenly recalling their sleeping children, their voices dropped menacingly. Laura slid down off the bed. Vik mewed, but didn’t cry out.

Outside her parents’ bedroom, Laura stood in the pale light spilling into the hall. She didn’t know what she needed to see.

‘All I ask is that you tidy up now and then,’ Bruce was saying, speaking in a low voice now, slumped against the wall. Coveralls unrolled to the waist, he looked in the process of shedding skin. He stared at his hands on his thighs. ‘A bit of housework, love. That’s all I ask.’ He let out a breath.

Watching from the door, Laura saw the straightening of her mother’s spine. The way Kath loomed. ‘I work.’ She clenched and unclenched her angry fists. ‘You understand nothing of me. In ten years!’

She turned from Bruce. Laura registered the pain in her expression.

‘Did you ever love me?’ Bruce whispered.

Kath’s eyes, full as the dam in winter, found Laura’s face. The bedroom door hit its frame so hard that Laura felt it in her teeth.

Kath came to her an hour later. Fresh from the shower, her face looked different without makeup; she seemed younger somehow, naked. The long blonde hair was damp, turned dark with water. It hung in tendrils as she leaned over Laura’s bed, sharply floral. Laura loved her mother best like this: scrubbed clean, a raw version of herself. She took the edge of Kath’s silk kimono gingerly, rolling onto her back. Though the room was dark, a wedge of light made a halo of Kath’s head.

‘Are you asleep?’ Kath said unnecessarily. Laura shook her head. Her mother sighed, touching Laura’s face, stroking her hair. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said softly. ‘I love you very much. I shouldn’t have, you know, hit you.’

They sat in silence for a moment.

‘My dear, big girl,’ Kath went on in German, making Laura quiver. ‘My good helper. No one in the whole world loves you more than I do.’ Her hand kept time on Laura’s forehead; the soft skin of her palm, like suede.

Though Laura didn’t want to sleep, to miss a moment, her lids drooped together, lulled by touch.

‘You don’t mind helping, do you?’ Kath was saying, voice soothing.

Laura felt herself heavy, sinking down into the bed.

‘Shh,’ Kath continued, stroking. ‘Quiet.’

Kath was up early next morning when Laura scuttled down the hall to the toilet in her gown. The sky was greying towards dawn. Across the dark stretch of grass behind the house, the studio windows were lit. In the big bedroom, Bruce was already pulling on the clothes he wore to kill pigs. Laura could hear the rustle of cloth against skin as he dressed. She paused in the hallway, shivering. Dread like cold had seeped into her skin. Had Kath lit the stove? Bruce would expect breakfast before work.

Once, sitting at the kitchen table, face lit by candles they never used again, Kath had taken Bruce’s hand. One rough and weathered, the other cheaply bejewelled. Laura had watched the way her parents’ fingers clasped with hesitant tenderness across the scarred tabletop. The way a cow will nuzzle her grown heifer calf – taken at birth – when it rejoins the milking herd.

Kath had started talking about her work. She spoke quietly, and the family were quiet listening. There were moments when her work couldn’t be abandoned, she said, moments when she was in the work so deeply and completely that she stopped needing to breathe. The stench of the Strasburg Kath bought for lack of choice filled Laura’s nose. The look on Bruce’s face: a tug of war. Part of it was pride, and part of it was something Laura couldn’t name, until she saw the look again when he killed the chook with maggots beneath its wing: revulsion.

Bruce had untangled his hand from Kath’s to pick up his fork. For a moment Kath’s hand lay belly-up on the table, fingers pawing gently at air, before it dropped out of sight into her lap. Laura saw the same puzzled, bereft expression on both her parents’ faces – as though each had misplaced something they couldn’t remember putting down.

After that night, whenever the stove went unlit, Kath said that she ‘forgot’. Laura longed for her mother to say more about her art. She kept one ear cocked towards her parents’ arguments just in case. But Kath stayed silent.

Laura tripped lightly over the cold boards into the kitchen. As strongly as she longed for Kath to talk about the pots she made, she wanted just as much for there to come a morning when she might find Kath smiling, scrambling eggs. But the kitchen was cool and dark. Last night’s dishes remained on the draining board where Laura had left them. The stove was only lukewarm, the coals from last night’s fire white in the grate. Bruce came into the kitchen with his boots in his hand. Laura got down on hands and knees to set the fire again.

‘Don’t,’ he said sharply. ‘Not your job.’

She stood, dragged her chair over to the kitchen bench and clambered up. On the wooden seat were two dark stains from contact with her feet.

‘Toast, Dad?’ she asked.

Bruce muttered under his breath. He sat down carefully, each movement made too neat. ‘Thanks, love.’ He gave a tight smile. Laura knew that the static of his contained rage was not meant for her.

Breathless, Kath came jingling into the kitchen, her skirt hemmed with bells. There were violet half-moons beneath her eyes and her fingers were chalky with clay. Laura recalled the late-night visit, Kath’s hand in her hair. But her mother barely looked at her.

‘I’ll do that,’ Kath snapped, taking the breadknife from Laura’s hand. ‘Go. Wake Vik.’

Laura flinched back, hugging herself. The shame of the rejection felt physical. Bruce stomped across the room to pack the canvas bag he took to the abattoir: lunchbox, newspaper, wallet. He sighed heavily as he went about his work. The knot in Kath’s jaw tightened. The toaster hummed. Laura picked her way across the room, moving backwards, eyes trained on her parents the way Bruce had taught her to respond should she come upon a snake. When Bruce withdrew the remains of yesterday’s lunch from the box, she retreated to the door.

‘Fuck’s sake!’ Bruce cried, brandishing the apple core, scalloped by teeth.

At the bedroom, Laura dithered in the doorway, reluctant to wake Vik. But the little girl rolled over and sat up. ‘What’s happening?’

‘Shh.’

They listened together in the gloom, side-by-side. Bruce’s voice, jagged with frustration, came rumbling through the wall. He outlined again the jobs he expected Kath to do. ‘I do my bit, why can’t you do yours?’

Laura couldn’t make out what Kath said, but the tone was dangerous.

Bruce’s voice rose. ‘You call that work?’

Laura felt the pressure of her sister’s body against her shoulder, aware of how little she would need to move for Vik to fall over.

Kath was screaming. Thudding, a fist hit the tabletop. Bruce appeared in the bedroom doorway carrying his bag and boots. His smile was brittle. Laura drew in the grassy scent of him as he kissed her cheek.

‘Bye, love.’

‘Dad?’ Laura said. The weekend loomed ominously, two whole days, both parents at home. She looked into Bruce’s eyes, searching. His fingers brushed her hair.

‘Be good for your mum, you hear?’

‘You don’t need to do that, Mutti,’ Laura said tentatively. ‘Blackie won’t run away.’

‘Kangaroos drown dogs,’ Kath said. ‘In dams.’ She clipped one end of the lead to Blackie’s collar, took up Laura’s wrist and looped the other end around. Something was stuck in her mother’s throat, Laura saw. The way Kath kept swallowing. Her eyes were red and swollen. Laura wiped her nose on her sleeve, bit back words. Their mother was most happy when they did as they were told. She liked them then, would sometimes kiss a cheek, braid their hair, offer a sliver of apple on the sharp blade of her palette knife from her studio door. Kath called it ‘keeping piss and quiet’.

Overhead, grey clouds gathered. The air, damp fabric, was thick. Bruce’s chainsaw reverberated defiantly across the valley. ‘Can’t believe its gonna rain, today of all days. A Saturday!’ he’d lamented earlier. ‘Stuck at work all week, sun shining. Now this.’

They went through the rough gate that dammed the yard against a tide of trees. Magpies cried like water running over rocks. Blackie pulled Laura, leash taut. Gumboots sucked at calves as they plodded up the scrubby slope behind the house. Kath’s fringed suede moccasins – ‘indoor shoes’, Bruce called them – were near-silent in the grass. Beyond the ridge, at the bottom of the hill, lay their big dam. On the other side of the far slope were the gully and the creek, surprisingly deep. Bruce wouldn’t let them swim there; he said the current was faster than it looked. Kath often came back from digging for clay with wet feet. ‘Careful, love,’ Bruce would say, ‘or you’ll get swept away!’

The creek ran between hills. Beyond that the ranges continued, concertinaing the land. Laura knew that over the hills lay Bindara, where Bruce went to work. It was as close to the big smoke as anyone got around here. Melbourne, distant as heaven, was away on the coast. Kyree lay in the other direction. Built on the plains, the town was a petrol station, a post office, a pub. Stock and station agent, a general store. The school. There were two churches; two more than anyone needed, Bruce told them. Laura had never been to Bindara. She had never been to Melbourne. She tried to conjure up the country Kath came from, which lay across oceans, themselves impossible to conceive. She looked into the sky and imagined it as white-tipped water, far as the eye could see.

Kath carried Bruce’s knapsack over her raincoat. It was lumpy, and strained at the straps. All over, the ground was littered with sticks and leaves; each step a muffled crunch. Kath used a long stem of kangaroo-paw to flick flies – persistent despite the cold – from her lips. Everything smelled of damp bark: cool, earthy.

At the apex of the first hill, Kath paused among trees, turned, faced the view. She brought a hand to her brow, shading against the light. They looked back the way they had come through a mesh of branches. Squares of toil made a patchwork of the land. A bare, khaki paddock encircled the house – Kath’s lawn. Laura flinched to recall its seeding: a fight. Bruce had gone out early the next morning to sow lawn seed. His amends: practical, earthy, done with hands. The grass required constant watering. Laura took their bathwater out in buckets, but it was not enough.

Kath put a hand on each of her daughters’ shoulders. They looked down on Posey’s champagne-coloured paddock. The horse rode the grass as though floating. Given as payment for one of Bruce’s jobs, she was a tired old nag, fond of nipping mounting riders, but Laura loved her dearly.

Peterson’s farm was an expanse of hessian squares. The road – a dirt crack in the landscape – separated his land from their own. Even so, it was clear which land was which. The cattle farm was brown, worn like old cloth, empty but for the crosshatch of fence line and the cattle; flecked with piles of dung. Their own land was still mostly silver-green and mauve. A living tapestry of leaves.

Laura caught sight of Bruce, a way off cutting wood, his coat strewn by his thermos on the banks of the dam. She raised an arm in greeting, but he didn’t see.

‘Girls?’ Kath’s voice came softly. She ran her hand up the back of Laura’s neck, stroked her hair once, twice. If only time would stop. Laura felt terrified she might do something to trample the moment, to make her mother move away. There was bitterness too, that the touch was shared, divided. That Vik got half.

Kath was already shrugging them off. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘No time for dilly-dally. I go for clay. You catch yabbies. Help your father.’

Laura pulled back, lips pinched. She stared at Vik, slit-eyed. Across the valley, rain fell on the horizon.

Kath lifted a hand to her face, wiped her fingers on her leg. She said over her shoulder, ‘Take care, darlings.’

‘Gonna catch some big yabbies for you, Mutti!’ Vik called.

But with her coat tight around her and the bag on her back, Kath was striding away.

Night was closing in when Vik and Laura left Bruce and walked together back down the hill. He would be a minute, he mouthed from behind the chainsaw, waving them on. Thunder pealed; a blade of lightning cut across the sky. Vik was shivering. Her feet were cold, she said. Dam water lapped over the lip of her bucket, into her boots.

‘Keep up,’ Laura barked, striding.

‘You sound like Mutti.’ Vik frowned.

Laura shuddered, slowed and took Vik’s cold hand, gently squeezing the small fingers. When she spoke, she made her voice kind. ‘Still gotta put the chooks away, yeah? Before dinner. Gonna help?’

The quick warmth of Vik’s smile jabbed Laura. How eager Vik was to inhabit the miserly space she had made.

‘Chickens go home on their own, Dad reckons,’ Vik prattled. ‘It’s called roosting. And they do, don’t they? The chooks? They go in on their own and we just come ’round behind them and shut the door?’

How trustingly Vik allowed herself to be led down the hill, barely seeming to register the journey, staring up into Laura’s face as she talked, never doubting the care with which her sister would listen. Laura felt swelled by Vik’s esteem – made large and kind and capable.

The sky was smoky with the coming storm. It began to rain. A family of roos grazed on the ridge. They scattered like seeds in wind at the dog’s approach, and darted away. The dog took off.

‘Blackie!’ Laura screamed, feeling cold drops dampen her back. She should have used the leash.

Turning, the dog studied Laura, front paw raised. The roos melted into bush.

‘C’mon, Blackie,’ Vik called in her high voice, clapping. ‘Nearly home now!’

Before she could stop herself, Laura said, ‘You’ve got to discipline him, der-brain.’ The dog slowly put his paw down, took one small step away from them. She dropped her voice to a growl, imitating Bruce: ‘Blackie.’ The word was all menace. The old kelpie turned and crawled reluctantly towards them, shamefaced. It was a rule: no chasing. Bruce said once dogs got a taste for blood, that was it.

Kath wasn’t there when they got home. Unnerved by the empty house and darkened studio, they stood awkwardly by the kitchen table, not touching, but close enough that Laura could smell Vik’s dry breath. The weight of water on the house compressed her chest, like the feeling she got at the bottom of the dam, kicking skyward for sunlight. With all the certainty she could muster, Laura told Vik their parents would be home soon.

‘I know that,’ Vik said, bottom lip trembling.

Laura pulled out a kitchen chair, wishing that she were alone.

‘We should get changed,’ she said softly, though neither of them moved.

Kath wasn’t back half an hour later when Bruce came jogging over from the shed. Standing on the verandah to peel back his sodden coat, he shouted through the door. The road into town was flooding, local radio said. He was still talking as he chocked the front door with his shoulder and slid inside. He nursed a waterlogged bouquet of native flowers in one arm. The wet coat dangled from his hand like skins.

‘Which turkey decided building on a floodplain was the go?’ he muttered. They didn’t answer. Laura couldn’t look at the flowers. She knew Bruce didn’t approve of cut blooms. Whatever it had cost him to search them out, whatever had made him think he needed to, in that moment it was more than Laura had the space in her heart to feel.

‘What is it?’ Bruce said, and then, ‘You’re soaked.’ He glanced around the room. Laura followed his gaze, though she knew the room by heart. The wind in the trees, like wailing. ‘Your mother in her studio?’

When neither answered, Bruce padded over, crouched down, gave each girl a kiss. The warmth of his lips made cracks in Laura’s icy skin.

Laura started, ‘Mum’s not …’ She reached for Bruce’s shoulder, longing to touch the knot of muscle there, to feel the shape of his body through the heavy homemade wool. The hall phone rang. Her fingers closed on air.

‘That you, Kath, love?’

The flowers were bleeding water on the floor. Vik reached up and took the hem of Laura’s coat. Receiver to ear, Bruce listened.

‘Jesus,’ he said.

Laura felt his eyes lick across her head. A minute went by. His palm on the wall, fingers spread. He made a noise like he couldn’t suck air. It was the sound of the stove when you lit it, oxygen rushing in to make fire.

Bruce set the receiver down carefully. He came back into the kitchen as though learning how to walk. ‘That was Mrs Jolley,’ he said. ‘Ringing to check on us lot. Flash flood at the creek, she reckons. Got some of their stock. Reckons roads in town’ll be well and truly closed. Lucky I wasn’t at work, she said.’ He dragged his gaze to meet Laura’s. ‘Where’d you say Mum went?’

Before she was even halfway through telling him, Bruce disappeared into the storm, bolting back up the hill. Slamming the door on the rain, Laura turned away. She took care to set the fire perfectly, just how she had been shown. Bruce said there was a right way to do things, and then there was the way most people did them.

Vik sat at the kitchen table, snot bubbling, her cries muffled by the po. . .