The Grass Castle Read Free Page B

almost hear snatches of conversation swirling in the stone fireplace and mumbling under the eaves. Beneath the peeling wallpaper that lined the hut were sheets of yellowed newsprint from another era. She pictured shadow-people snuggling against the colder wetter weather of those times. She thought of snow in winter. The smell of burning wood, sodden timber, woollen clothes drying on nails. The snort of a horse in the yards.
    On calmer days, she sat outside on the grass, boiling water to make tea, and she imagined men in dirty trousers working the land, felling and ringbarking trees. There wouldn’t have been fences, and cattle would have roamed the valley and slopes, crashing through undergrowth, stripping bark from trees with their muscular tongues. She liked to think of the settlers, and she wished she knew more of their history, how they had changed the land, inadvertently paving the way for the mobs of kangaroos she was now studying.
    But today she was distracted by Cameron’s presence. She was excited to have another human being sharing her valley, someone who seemed interested in her and her kangaroos. On the rattly boards of the veranda she dug into her backpack, pulling out the roast chicken, the crispy bread rolls and Cameron’s bottle of wine.
    He watched her lay out the food on plastic plates. ‘Do you do this often?’ he laughed. ‘Seems I’m in the wrong job.’
    She gave him a withering look and ferreted the thermos cups from her pack, plonking them unceremoniously on the deck. ‘Only the best for this scientist,’ she said. Then she held up the wine. ‘It has a cork,’ she said, dismayed. ‘And I don’t have a corkscrew. I thought corks went out with the ark.’
    ‘I have one.’ Cameron jingled his car keys at her, displaying a sheathed silver corkscrew. ‘Sign of a true wino,’ he said. ‘Always prepared.’ He detached the corkscrew and handed it to her.
    She made a mess of the cork, embarrassing herself, until Cameron reached over with a casual arm and took the bottle from her. With fingers long and fine as a pianist’s, he eased out the broken cork remnants and poured generous portions of wine into the thermos lids, passing one to her. ‘It’s a pity to drink out of plastic, but hey,’ he bumped his cup against hers, ‘who am I to complain?’
    She drank, flushed with a strange jittery sense of anticipation, while the mountains watched on.
    They sat on the porch, looking across the valley towards the shadowy ridge. ‘Peaceful here, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I didn’t know all this was so close to the city.’
    Abby loved the emptiness, the ravens cruising overhead. ‘Hardly anyone comes here,’ she said, ‘just a few bushwalkers; sometimes some rock climbers up on the ridge. Mostly I have the place to myself.’
    ‘You don’t get lonely?’
    ‘No. I have things to do. Work’s busy. It’s not all about picnics and wine.’
    There was a short silence during which they both sipped from their cups and reached for food; then, just as Abby was beginning to feel awkward, Cameron broke the quiet. ‘Is your family from round here?’ he asked.
    This shift in topic wasn’t quite what Abby desired, but she had to go with it. ‘They’re in Victoria. Mansfield.’
    ‘Hey, I love Mansfield,’ he said, smiling enthusiastically. ‘We used to ski Mount Buller in my teens. Was it a good place to grow up?’
    ‘It’s a typical country town,’ she said. ‘It has a nice feel to it, and it is beautiful country: the mountains and the bush, the rivers. But it’s a small place—people living in each other’s pockets.’
    He laughed: a musical tone that floated under the eaves. ‘Isn’t that what you call community?’
    She thought of her father living on the farm with his pushy, possessive new wife. ‘Being nosey is the same wherever you are. And it’s not my definition of community.’
    ‘Canberra then?’ His eyebrows lifted slightly. ‘Is that your idea of community?’
    She