The Grass Castle
Page 1
PHOTO: JONQUIL MACKEY
Karen Viggers is a writer, veterinarian, mother and wife. She was born in Melbourne and grew up in the Dandenong Ranges riding horses and writing stories. After finishing her veterinary degree Karen developed an interest in Australian native wildlife and has worked with many different species, including kangaroos. She loves landscapes—especially wild places in the mountains and on the coast—and she loves to escape with her family whenever she can.
Karen lives in Canberra with her husband and two children. She is the author of two published novels: The Lightkeeper’s Wife (2011) and The Stranding (2008). You can find out more about Karen and her books at www.karenviggers.com.
Also by Karen Viggers
The Stranding
The Lightkeeper’s Wife
The GRASS
CASTLE
KAREN VIGGERS
Published by Allen & Unwin in 2014
Copyright © Karen Viggers 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
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Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available
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ISBN 978 1 74331 772 3
eISBN 978 1 74343 491 8
Internal design by Lisa White
Set in 13/17 pt Adobe Garamond Pro by Bookhouse, Sydney
For my parents
Jim and Diana Viggers
Here, everything moves,
Mists, weather and people move
confusedly over the mountains
only the monoliths stay
peeling their onion-skin faces back
a thumb’s width in a century.
—Where the Body Lay
MARK O’CONNOR
That the clouds should change so swiftly,
you and I so slowly,
and the mountains least of all.
—Skiers
MARK O’CONNOR
From
The Olive Tree: Collected Poems
MARK O’CONNOR
CONTENTS
PART I
1
2
3
4
5
6
PART II
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
PART III
21
22
23
24
25
26
PART IV
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
PART V
37
38
39
40
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PART I
1
Night spreads its thick blanket over the valley. There is no moon, no light. Abby is alone in the car park, staring into darkness. She sees a wink of tail-lights somewhere along the road: two red fireflies flickering briefly in the bush. She hears the distant rumble of a car engine going too fast, now slowing for a corner. Then it is quiet. The national park is all around her—she can feel it. The soft hoot of a boobook owl somewhere in the distance. The muffled coughs of kangaroos. Higher up, against the sky, invisible granite crags hunch their stony shoulders. They are watching, always watching.
At the back of the four-wheel drive, she turns on a light and loads the last of her gear: her backpack, the esky. The journalist is gone and she’s not sure what to think; whether she should think at all. Probably not, none of it means anything. He’s a reporter and he was doing his job. That is the extent of it. She must take this afternoon for what it was and surf on, skimming surfaces, landing lightly. It’s the easiest way.
She’s been in the valley since morning, following her kangaroos through their monotonous herbivore day. Early, she tracked her radio-collared animals and watched them bounce among their colleagues before settling to graze. Kangaroos don’t do much, it seems. They sleep, graze, recline, hassle each other. But their movements are points on a map which tells her what their lives are made from: how the range of each animal overlaps, and how this changes when the grass grows . . . or doesn’t grow, as in this drought. Her work doesn’t sound like much, but it forms the shape of her career. She’s a researcher in training—paid almost nothing to wander among kangaroos, taking measurements that might help explain an ecosystem.
The lack of money doesn’t matter, or so she tells herself. Hopefully she will be paid more once she’s established her career. What matters is that she is doing something she cares about, something meaningful, and that she is making a contribution to saving this beautiful, complicated world. Equally important is that she is outdoors, not cooped up in some dreary office bathed in fluorescent light and surrounded by people staring like zombies at computer screens . . . although she does her share of screen-staring too, when she’s entering data or tussling with the strange and slippery discipline of writing up her research.
Working here returns her to her childhood. It reminds her of horse-riding through the bush with her mother, when often a kangaroo would appear suddenly on the track, startling the horses. Abby was always impressed by the kangaroo’s power as it surged away. She loves the way kangaroos move, the elegant efficiency of it. Where else on this planet can you see animals bound so gracefully with a muscular tail for counterbalance? She likes to watch how they interact, the liaisons that form in the mob: bands of mothers with young at foot. Did her own mother tend to her with such vigilance? Surely she must have felt her mother’s attentive hands stroking her hair. But she can’t remember. Ten years since her mother died and she still misses her. There’s a wall in her mind she can’t look behind, places she can’t go for fear of memories.
She switches off the light and slams the back door of the vehicle, pauses and listens to the quiet of the night, the rustle of air moving in the grass. Usually she goes straight home after work, but today the journalist came for the interview, so she stayed late. They talked, and now he is gone, driving back to town in his fancy sports car. The park is empty: just her, the kangaroos, and the wind.
She clambers into the vehicle, starts the engine and puts it in gear. She’s comfortable behind the wheel. Working here day and night, her body knows the road. She can drive almost without thinking.
She comes to the corner where perhaps she saw the journalist’s tail-lights blinking several minutes ago, and she brakes reflexively—it’s a sharper curve than you might think. The four-wheel drive slows smoothly, swings the turn, wheels gripping. Then she sees lights ahead and her heart lurches. It must be him, the journalist. And something must have happened. She knows already what it is.
Th
e WRX is angled across the road, headlights flaring. She pulls up on the roadside and drags on the handbrake. The journalist is standing in front of his car looking down, and he’s folding his hands over and over. She slides out, her boots crunching on tarmac as she walks around the car.
A kangaroo is splayed on the road: its body crumpled, head erect, nostrils wide, ears quivering. The hind legs are skewed, dark clots of blood on its furry coat, a black pool expanding around it like oil. Abby sees the exaggerated lift and fall of the kangaroo’s chest, hears the laboured suck of its breathing. She sees the soft pale underside of the animal’s exposed belly, notices the pouch. ‘Can you turn off your headlights?’ she says quietly.
The bush hisses and sighs and the journalist looks at her, not understanding.
‘Your lights,’ she says. ‘They’re too close and bright. She’s frightened.’
He jerks with delayed comprehension then strides to his car and reaches inside. The road falls to sudden darkness and Abby swallows the beat of panic in her chest. She knows how this must end.
‘Perhaps you could leave your parkers on,’ she suggests.
There’s a faint click and the dim glow of parking lights softens the curtain of night. Cameron, the journalist, is staring at her, eyes and hair wild. He expects something of her—something she knows she can’t deliver.
‘You think it’s a girl?’ he asks, voice gravelly.
Not a girl, she says to herself. A female. Aloud she states: ‘She has a pouch.’
‘I hope I haven’t killed her baby,’ he says.
Pouch-young, she wants to say. It’s called a pouch-young. Even now, with this before her, she can’t suppress her inner scientist. She gazes up and finds a faint sliver of moon edging above the ridge. Then she looks at Cameron, still watching her, his face pinched.
‘Will she be all right?’ he asks.
The loaded question. She had known it would come as surely as she’d known what had happened when she saw his headlights on the road. Placing a hand on the bonnet of his car, she tucks her emotions inside. She’ll have to explain it to him as kindly as possible.
Cameron had come to her via her PhD supervisor, Quentin Dexter—an ecologist with an international reputation for scientific excellence. Quentin had handballed Cameron’s phone call on to Abby so she could do a soft-touch kangaroo story. Thanks, she’d thought at the time. Soft-touch wasn’t a term she would use to describe her research. She’d tried to worm out of it; she’d never had direct contact with the media before and she was afraid she would say the wrong thing. But Quentin insisted this was part of being a scientist. He said she should get used to it if she wanted an academic career.
Cameron suggested they meet in Abby’s office or at a café on campus to go through a few questions. Then he would hunt down some kangaroo shots from the wildlife archives and write his article for the Wednesday environmental supplement . . . if they could just fix a time? But Abby knew the university wasn’t right. It had pretty spreading grounds, carefully cultivated and manicured. But it was a bit like a museum—especially when the students were on holidays and the grounds were empty—and it seemed unlikely anything of consequence could happen there. Even the cockatoos, screeching regularly overhead, seemed to be laughing.
No, if they had to do this interview, Cameron should come to her valley where she could explain her work more clearly and he could get a feel for the place. In the morning she’d be busy, and later in the day the kangaroos would retreat to the wooded slopes. So late afternoon would be best. The kangaroos would be grazing, and the journalist could see them doing their thing.
She waited for him in the car park, but he was late, and she passed time tidying her gear, brushing grass seeds from the back of the work vehicle, checking her notebooks, watching the weather. By the time he arrived, she had almost given up. When his blue WRX came rushing too fast across the tarmac, she knew she wasn’t going to like him. He was tardy, flashy and impatient. He would want to finish the job and get back to his office. She watched him unfold from his sports car, rising to ridiculous heights above her. Let him try to patronise her and the interview would be over before it began. He reached into his car to tug out a black leather shoulder bag, before turning to meet her.
‘I’m Abby Hunter,’ she said, extending her hand.
‘Cameron Barlow.’
‘You’re late,’ she said.
He smiled without hint of apology. ‘Yes, I know. It’s genetic. Hope you had something to do.’
‘My work truck has never been cleaner.’
He was undeniably attractive, with tousled black hair that needed a cut, and he wore a hint of arrogance—something in the tilt of his head, or maybe it was the way his lips twitched as he looked down at her. His beige trousers and light suede coat were office-smart beside her work uniform of jeans, thermals and saggy woollen jumper. She felt small beside him, and he peered around the valley with an undisguised assessing stare that annoyed her. What did he see here, she wondered. Not the beauty of it, that was certain. Even she, with her upbringing in the Victorian mountains, had taken some time to warm to the different grandeur of this place, to love its tawny colours, the scabby peaks, the harsh blue skies—absent today.
‘Dry, isn’t it?’ he said, offhand. ‘Pity we couldn’t have arranged some green grass.’
‘It’s a drought,’ she said.
‘Green would have been good for the photos, but no matter.’ He shrugged and peered about. ‘Where are the kangaroos?’
‘You didn’t see any?’ She couldn’t conceal her surprise. From the park gates the road ran alongside open meadows where grass grew in frost hollows even in the driest of seasons. Kangaroos were always there, grazing or sleeping. He must have passed dozens without noticing.
‘I was concentrating on the road,’ he said, smiling blandly. ‘I don’t get to navigate such lovely twists and curves very often.’ He glanced at his shiny blue car. ‘The beast took control, I’m afraid.’
The beast—he said it in such a tender way she wondered if he was referring to himself or to his sports car. Perhaps he hadn’t even noticed the trees and the valley—it seemed all he’d appreciated was the road. ‘You’ll see plenty of kangaroos,’ she said, pointing up the valley. ‘But we’ll have to walk. There’s not much to see in the car park.’
His eyes and nose crinkled and he looked down at his shoes—nice leather lace-ups with polished toes.
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘It’s too dry for mud. And there’s a track. We’ll wander along and find some kangaroos for you.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I want to see them move.’
She felt reluctance in him as she led him from the car park along the old four-wheel drive track that ran among tussock grass and the dug-out furrows of a rabbit warren, recently ripped. Perhaps he seriously didn’t want to be here and she’d made a mistake inviting him. It was obvious he didn’t get out of his office too often, at least not to places where his hair might get ruffled and his shoes dirty. For a moment she was tempted to lead him the long way, skirting round the edge of the valley and up the steeper, rougher hills, so she could see him puff and struggle in those inappropriate shoes. But, glancing more carefully at his physique, she noted he looked fit—no soft city belly or double chins. Maybe he was worried about the time; he kept glancing at his watch. She hadn’t any idea of his other commitments, and perhaps it was a bit much to force him to come all the way out here simply to feel the atmosphere . . . her purist values running amok. She grappled with a flash of guilt, but was over it almost immediately. He’d manage. And the fresh air would be good for him.
As they walked up the valley, the interview looming, she felt a clutch of shyness, and was suddenly tongue-tied. What should she say to impress a journalist? What would he want to know? She waited nervously while he paused to stoop over his shoulder bag. When he straightened he had a small digital recording unit in his hand.
He nodded at her encouragingly and smiled. ‘Mind if I poi
nt this at you while we talk?’
Her shyness ratcheted up a level. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘My voice sounds horrible in recordings.’
‘Don’t worry.’ He flashed a reassuring grin. ‘It’s purely for reference in case I forget things. And I find it easier than paper and pen. Plus, I like to see where I’m putting my feet.’ He grimaced at the terrain as if she was dragging him across a glacier.
‘Next time, wear your hiking boots,’ she said. And he raised his eyebrows at her.
They wandered up the valley beneath the scattered bellies of wind-shuffled clouds. As they walked he began to prod her with light conversation, slipping in questions along with self-deprecating jokes. She discovered he knew a few things about kangaroos—not much, but enough to lift him above the average level of ignorance. He was good at getting her to talk, an attentive listener, and soon her shyness faded and she found herself sprouting information, facts she thought he’d find interesting, threads unfurling spontaneously as he unknotted her with his genuine interest.
She told him about droughts, and how kangaroos were adapted for breeding. A female could have two young at the same time, she said, a young in the pouch and a fertilised embryo waiting in the uterus. When the pouch was vacated, the embryo would develop to become the next pouch-young. It was an ingenious survival mechanism. In hard times, a starving mother could ditch her young, saving energy and increasing her chances of making it through the drought. When conditions improved, she didn’t need to find a mate because she was already pregnant; the previously fertilised embryo would grow into new young, ready to take advantage of the fresh grass. When a suitable male came along, the mother could mate again, and soon another embryo would be waiting.
‘It’s lucky humans can’t do that,’ Cameron said. ‘Imagine the number of unplanned babies and custody battles.’
Abby smiled. ‘Humans aren’t so different,’ she said. ‘We have our alpha males, and devious usurpers mating on the sly.’
He arched an eyebrow at her. ‘Don’t you call that cuckolding? Having an affair?’