The Grass Castle (22 page)

Matt’s digs are on the other side of town, a run-down old house on a friend’s property. They drive along a dirt road and then onto an uneven farm track. The WRX scrapes along, nudging through the long grass.

The house is a dilapidated white fibro with a rusty tin roof. Unkempt scraggly rosebushes grow out the front, remnants of a previous era when this was the farm-manager’s residence and a wife tended the garden. Cameron pulls up and they clamber from the car.

It’s unbearably quiet, like a cemetery. The dull thud of their car doors closing echoes in the empty carport. Abby remembers visiting here in happier times. Card games with Matt and his mates that stretched way into the night: five hundred and euchre. Clusters of empty beer bottles on the table. Fat steaks on the barbecue; Matt expertly testing them with his favourite pair of tongs.

Out of habit, she goes to the door and knocks. The only sound is the wind rolling under the eaves, a cow bellowing somewhere across the paddock. The house is silent. The windows smeared with dust. All she feels is emptiness.

She turns the door handle and they go inside—no locks around here. It is deathly quiet. The fridge hums and several floorboards creak beneath their feet. Cameron follows her through the rooms. It’s sad and subdued. There’s not much of anything here: an empty Coke can on the kitchen table, a breadboard with a few dried out crumbs, brown-stained coffee cups on the bench, a bread knife in the sink, dead flies on the window sill, feet up.

The bed is as if Matt has just stepped from it and gone outside for a pee. Abby can see the indentation in the pillow where his head last lay. It’s eerie. More than a week since Matt slept here.

She reads the note on the kitchen bench.
Gone bush. Don’t try to find me.
That’s it. Nothing more. What can she tell from that? Gone for a holiday? Or a need to escape, feeling down, can’t cope, tussling with negative feelings, going to take my life?

She has no idea what the note means, can’t read between the lines. She is the one closest to him and yet she doesn’t understand. If she’d been calling like she promised, she might have had some inkling, some clue of what was going on in his head.

Cameron puts his arm around her and she leans against him, feeling exhausted in the circle of his support. But there is no consolation to be had. She has to start looking for Matt. And what will she do if she finds him?

They go home via the police station. The police record Matt’s absence, but they seem unconcerned. The note, they say, suggests he is coming back. Perhaps he needs some space for a while.

Abby is frustrated by their casual attitude. One of the policemen is a mate of Matt’s. When she says there’s a possibility Matt might have been suicidal, he laughs.

‘Not Matt,’ he says. ‘He’s a rock. He’ll be fine.’

What would they know? Abby thinks, and her guilt threatens to engulf her. None of this would be necessary if she’d kept her word. She’d have known Matt was heading downhill, she’d have heard something in his voice.

The following morning, Abby takes her father’s four-wheel drive ute and starts a search. She has packed food and camping gear for an overnight stay in the mountains, which will allow her to cover more territory, although she knows she can’t check everywhere. Cameron sits patiently in the passenger seat and endures her silence as they head towards the High Country, spinning first across the green river flats dotted with spreading gums and cattle and patches of remnant bush, then climbing up through the foothills into the forest.

The route winds through stringy-bark country, scrubby and stony, giving way to tall wet forest laced with the fragrant tang of peppermint and musk. Here the road narrows and roughens into gravel. Eventually the forest opens into a wide grassy clearing at Sheepyard Flat, almost park-like, with white-trunked trees. It’s deserted—no battered Nissan, no Matt. Abby suppresses a tug of disappointment.

She feels close to Matt here. He’s always loved this part of the bush. It’s not particularly remote, but the Howqua River is nearby and good for trout-fishing. Their father used to bring them here for weekends away from home when their mother was ill. Gran would stay and tend to Grace while the rest of the family escaped. Fishing and campfires were a good cure: the lines of strain would ease from their father’s mouth, Matt’s silly honking laugh would re-emerge, and Abby would remember how to smile. They concocted ghost stories, played charades, cooked potatoes wrapped in alfoil in the fire.

She pulls up outside Fry’s Hut so Cameron can take a look inside. It’s beautifully built—one of her favourites—with a lovely deep veranda, a classic tin roof and chimney, chunky horizontal slabs for walls, and small divided windows. These days, lots of people camp here, especially weekends. The place smells of moisture and soot and ashes and dust. Weekdays, it’s quiet: a hangout for bush rats and marsupial mice and magpies digging up grubs.

They leave the hut and walk down to the river. The water rolls by, chattering over rocks. Abby watches the current swirling and eddying. It swells along the shore then spirals out midstream to gather around protruding stones like a translucent scarf.

‘Matt likes to fish here,’ she says. ‘He’s a fly-fisherman—not bad at it. Ties his own flies.’ She thinks of Matt sitting at the kitchen table in his house, chewing his lip as he works the delicate convolutions of completing a new fly. His instruments are laid out carefully on the table, the hook clamped in the fly-tying vice. His blunt-nailed fingers are surprisingly deft at spinning the thread around the body of the fly to perfect the taper. ‘You ever tried fly-fishing?’ she asks Cameron.

He gazes upstream where light glimmers on the water like silver tinsel. ‘I’d like to,’ he says. ‘But I guess I’d be bad at it like most outdoors things.’

‘When Matt gets back I’ll get him to take you. He’s a good teacher.’

From Sheepyard Flat they head up into the mountains proper. At Matt’s secret fishing haunts, Abby pulls up and checks the river. No Nissan, no Matt. They venture onto rough tracks where four-wheel drive is necessary, and the bush whips past, damp and tangy—the lemony fragrance of eucalypts, the dense smell of rotting wood. Abby almost smiles when Cameron snaps in his seatbelt and grasps the dashboard as the ute grinds over wash-outs.

‘This is not easy driving,’ he says. ‘You’re good at it.’

The track weaves higher into snow gum country. A crowd of slender trunks reaches towards the road like eager Tour de France fans waving their arms.

‘It’s beautiful here under snow,’ Abby says nostalgically, thinking of skiing up here with Matt. ‘All the trunks and leaves crusted with ice. It’s nice to put on skis and stride along the track. You go into a kind of trance. Just you and the bush. It’s hard to describe.’

‘I like downhill skiing,’ Cameron says.

‘Me too, but this kind of skiing is good too. You dissolve into the landscape and feel the air. No hurry. You listen to the wind in the branches, leaves clanking with their load of snow. And the colours in the trunks—all the silvers and greys and reds and greens. There’s nobody here. Just you and a few birds. Nothing else.’

Matt loves it too—surely he wouldn’t leave all that behind, his love of the bush and the snow, the feeling of carving turns downhill in fresh powder.

She hopes to find Matt’s Nissan in the car park at the start of the Bluff hiking trail, but the parking area is empty and the snow gums huddle silently around the clearing, holding their secrets close.

‘Should we go up?’ she asks Cameron. ‘It’s Matt’s favourite place.’

‘I don’t mind,’ he says. ‘Do we have time?’

She checks her watch. ‘If we climb quickly and come straight down again we could do it. We’ve got lots of country to cover, but it doesn’t matter if we set up camp in the dark. We should take a look up there anyway, even though his car’s not here. Just in case.’

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Let’s go.’

Abby stuffs a few things in a backpack which Cameron insists on carrying, and they take to the trail. It’s steep, and they puff their way uphill, blowing like draught horses. Cameron has a long stride, but Abby is driven. She wants to get up there—to Matt’s country. She knows it’s insensitive, but she leaves Cameron behind.

It’s hard work, thrusting up the track, but she submerges her mind into the rhythm of breathing and walking. This is how she manages with a heavy pack on multi-day walks with Matt. You breathe and stride, pushing one leg through and then the other, feeling the way through your feet, moving like a machine, not thinking. Distance reels out slowly beneath your boots, the clean air tears deep in your lungs and sweat runs down your back, no matter how cold the weather might be.

She feels Matt with her as she ascends the trail. She sees the shape of his back, burdened with his own loaded pack, the yak in him emerging as he pulls ahead of her and skates to the top with the clouds. Eventually, as she climbs, the forest breaks open to a grassy plain studded with rocks. The craggy face of the mountain juts against the sky, and in the distance, purple peaks ripple along the horizon. Abby feels the cold wind on her damp skin. A few more weeks and snow will begin to fall here. Winter is on its way; Matt’s favourite season.

Soon Cameron arrives and stands behind her, panting. He coils his arms around her, pulls her against him. ‘I see what you mean,’ he says. ‘The view is amazing. No wonder Matt likes it here.’

She feels his lips pressing into her hair and closes her eyes. The High Plains are infinite and she can’t bear to look out there across the folds of the landscape, the steep topographical lines that cluster close on a map, the vast wide valleys, the stretch of trees and bush and heath. Matt could be anywhere. How will she ever find him?

They scoff a few handfuls of nuts and chocolate and gulp water before the descent. All the way down Abby is wondering if he’s thrown himself from a cliff.

Back in the car, they pass the Bluff Hut, which is all new corrugated iron, rebuilt after a bushfire razed the old building. Abby doesn’t like the new hut—as much as it attempts to mimic its predecessor, it isn’t the same. She took shelter here in bad weather one time with Matt. In a blizzard, they hunkered down inside the old hut, stoking a fire that shed no heat, curling up in sleeping-bags dampened by moisture. She remembers waking to a fresh white world and hummocks of powdery glittering snow, the squeaky dry crystals crunching and compressing beneath their boots. They made snowballs and tossed them to splatter against each other and the walls of the hut. Then they packed their gear and skied higher, finding clean unmarked slopes to sign with the sweeping curves of their skis.

They both discovered the High Country through their father’s passion. He introduced them to the landscape and wrote the names of the peaks into their hearts. After their mother’s death, he stopped coming up here, and Matt and Abby began to come alone. There grew between them a strong sibling bond—nothing weird about it, no matter what some townspeople said, but a straight and solid spiritual connection. She and Matt were simply comfortable up there together. They liked to test themselves against the weather, and they felt equipped and competent to deal with most conditions. One time they were holed up in a tent for two entire days. They slept, talked, ate, sat in silence, not needing words. Sometimes they brought friends with them too: Abby tagging along with Matt and his mates. The guys would start out guffawing at a girl trying to keep up with the men, but Abby kept pace with the best of them. She was a bush girl too, at home in the mountains, and no embarrassment to her brother.

As she drives across the slowly transforming terrain beneath the shifting shapes of clouds, Abby realises Matt is all over this country. He’s wherever she looks, everything coloured by memories. He’s in the peaks, the convoluted trails, the huts.

All day, she and Cameron grind up and down tracks, ticking off places Matt might have gone: Mount Magdala, McAllister Springs, Mount Howitt. Abby’s eyes are constantly searching for her brother’s frame—the tall lean hungry look of him, the shaggy hair, the loose shirts, his battered hat. She scans the tracks for his car, checks pull-outs in case he’s parked off the road. She sits by streams and watches the current, keeps hoping perhaps Matt is at some other stream, wading up a distant river in a remote part of the park.