The Grass Castle

by Karen Viggers

  Abby wonders if she should scramble from her stupor to assist, but she sits tight while Kevin slings in five more animals. She is trying to shut out the awful clunk of bone on metal, trying not to see the limbs waving in the rear-view mirror as the vehicle advances across the hill.

  At the next carcass, Kevin leans in and suggests Abby do the pouch-checking. She retrieves the head torch from her backpack, slips it on over her beanie and jumps out into the night.

  ‘Just do a hand-swipe,’ Kevin says. ‘Shove your hand in and have a feel around. You’ll find any passengers pretty quick. If you can’t pull the joey off, just cut the teat. Got a pocket-knife?’

  Abby nods, sickened.

  ‘Here’s a bag.’ He tosses her a soft black pouch.

  She turns her torch on and starts wandering among the battlefield of slumped bodies. Kevin has dropped ten from this mob. She bends over the nearest dead animal and lifts a hind leg. This one has testicles; a young adult male. Abby ought to have known by the muscular forearms and the strong hooky claws. She lets the leg fall and brushes the dense grey coat with her hand, afraid to look at the head in case it has been blown away. The kangaroo is warm and its fur is damp with beginning dew. The rusty smell of blood is everywhere, laced with the sour smell of death. She waves to Kevin to let him know it’s okay to pick up the carcass then she moves on to the next skewed hump, a female collapsed in a twist. This time there is no avoiding a full view of the head and the dark meaty hole ripped in the cranium. Abby’s head throbs and long-buried visions press up from somewhere deep within. Suppressing a choking sensation, she steels herself to check the pouch.

  The opening is soft and slack, reminding her of the roadside kangaroo she killed for Cameron months ago. This pouch sags open, gaping at the top and she kneels to insert her hand. It’s damp inside with the musky brownish lubricant that coats the young to keep its fragile skin moist. She feels a warm mound squirm against her hand, a gawky limb pushing her away. Cupping her hand around it, she eases the pouch open further. A small pinky writhes against her fingers: a bundle of gangly legs and a little wizened head. Dark flaps for ears. Eyelids purplish—glued shut. A prickle of whiskers pierces the skin around the muzzle.

  Gently she wraps her hand around the soft abdomen, trying to draw the joey out, but it’s so young that it holds firm, its mouth almost fused to the nipple. She grips the long, strap-like teat between her fingers and attempts to drag the joey out, but it suctions tightly. For a moment she considers calling for help, then she realises she will have to do this alone. She’ll have to cut the nipple. Groping her pocket-knife from inside her jeans, she withdraws both hands to open the blade then carefully reaches back inside the pouch. She feels for the swollen bulge of mammary tissue, locates the nipple and severs it. The joey falls into her hand and she draws it out, slides it into the cloth pouch.

  Over by the vehicle the men are watching. She can see Pete behind the wheel, Kevin standing by, hands on hips, sucking on a cigarette. ‘I found a pouch-young,’ she calls, yelling the bleeding obvious, her voice echoing into nothing. ‘I had to cut the nipple.’

  Pete waves and Kevin chucks his stub on the ground, grinding it with his toe. They are not interested. Of course they’re not. They do this for a job. Kevin climbs into the truck and Pete drives across to fetch the carcass.

  ‘What should we do with it?’ Abby asks as they draw alongside.

  Kevin shrugs, his blue eyes meeting hers then dodging away. ‘Stick it in your jacket to keep it warm. Would have been better to kill them as we go, but this is what they want so we have to do it. We’ve got a few more bodies to pick up yet.’

  Abby loosens her coat and slides the pouch under her jumper. She can feel the small angular body writhing. The joey settles, snuggling into warmth. Abby strides across the slope to the next body, trying to look competent and unrattled, but she is shaken. Will this joey be large enough to hand-raise? Or will it receive the injection and be thrown into the pit—a tiny soft rag-doll among the hummocks of fur?

  She mustn’t think about it, mustn’t think at all. There is nothing yet that hasn’t been humane. Kevin is distant and emotionally uninvolved—of course he is: this is how he makes his living. It’s tough and unpleasant, but no worse than a job in a knackery. While humans want to eat meat, animals must die. So why should it seem worse with kangaroos? Does it matter if death arrives by shooting? There are no yards, no transport, no milling among other hungry, thirsty, frightened animals at an abattoir. Maybe this is more humane than it is for domestic livestock. One moment a kangaroo is hopping free, the next moment it is dead, life over without knowledge or pain.

  But how does she know there is no pain? Wouldn’t there be a flashing moment of infinite, spectacular agony as the bullet strikes? Or is the impact so horrifically intense that pain is over before it begins? God knows, the bullet inflicts enough damage. Surely it is better than dying slowly.

  She bends at the next humped body and pauses before she grasps the hind leg and lifts it. It’s a male again, thank goodness. Not that she wishes death on males—it’s just that she doesn’t want to find more young, doesn’t want to cut more nipples.

  The next animal, slumped beneath the silver arms of a dead tree, is a female. There’s a young in the pouch, a tiny wet nugget of matchstick arms and a soft domed head. It can’t be long born—perhaps a week or two—and it’s too small to hand-raise. She can’t put it in with the larger joey or it might be torn by a jerking toe. While Kevin and Pete fling the carcass onto the trailer, she finds another bag on the front seat and slips the tiny joey inside. Then she tucks it inside her bra, closer to her warmth and her beating heart.

  The next animal is female too, but its pouch is empty with no mammary development. ‘Fewer pouch-young in the drought,’ Kevin says, cigarette dangling from his lip as he and Pete toss the body onto the trailer. ‘That’s what we’ve been seeing on our regular shoots. Sometimes the odd late young or the odd kidney bean. But lots of empty pouches. Usually all the females have young. But it’s a cruel drought. Too many hungry mouths. Makes my job easier. Doesn’t feel so bad, knowing they’re starving.’

  So he has a conscience after all, Abby thinks.

  ‘I like kangaroos,’ he says, finishing his cigarette and lighting another. ‘I love watching them jump. Bloody impossible, the way they move.’

  ‘Why do you do it then?’ she asks.

  ‘Pays good money. And I’m okay with not much sleep. My wife works during the day while I mind the kids. Works out fine.’

  The men have started to relax with her. As they work their way across the slope, pouch-checking and picking up bodies, they talk about their home lives: how many kids they have, what sports the kids play, what TV shows they are missing tonight. Despite the low grinding feeling in her guts, Abby finds herself laughing once or twice. She hadn’t thought she would relate to the shooters, but they are ordinary country folk, like her.

  After several episodes of shooting and picking up carcasses they head for the pit, the trailer laden with the angular shapes of deceased kangaroos. They are dead, Abby tells herself, so it doesn’t matter how they are transported. She’s trying to make herself feel better, but it isn’t working. Inside her jacket, the larger young still wriggles occasionally and her count of tiny fleshy babies has risen to six.

  As the truck lurches across the hill, the weight of the trailer slows them down. It no longer rattles, burdened as it is with the awkward tangle of bodies. Pete and Kevin are quiet, apparently sensing her distaste. She has nothing to say. The killing has been executed with dutiful care, delivering instant death. There have been no bad shots by Kevin, though at some stage he must miss. Given his steadiness and attention to detail, Abby knows he’ll be quick to finish an inaccurate shot. He’ll follow up fast with a terminator, blowing a head away if necessary to end an animal’s pain. It ought to be enough.

  Why then is she feeling so sick? What sort of objective scientist is she? But she knows what it is that is bo
thering her and she works desperately not to give in to it, wonders how long she can suppress the insistent tug of her past.

  At the pit she slips out of the truck and Pete backs the trailer to the lip with uncanny accuracy—the skill of experience. Kevin swings the tailgate open and the two men start to haul the pile of bodies out. It is a large pit. Nearby, an enormous yellow excavator looms in the shadows, ready to over-fill at the end of the night.

  Abby looks around for the vet so she can deliver her warm cargo of pouch-young. He is leaning, arms crossed, against the bonnet of his white station wagon, a tool box of veterinary equipment on the ground beside him. ‘How many?’ he asks, brow crinkling into a dozen horizontal lines as she approaches him.

  ‘A few,’ Abby says. ‘Most of them are too small.’

  He takes the first black bag and peers inside, shaking his head. ‘We’re seeing quite a few small ones but not many young overall.’ He sets the pouch on the front seat of his car. ‘What else have you got?’

  She digs into the depths of her jacket and draws out the bag containing the larger joey. ‘I think this one will be okay to rear,’ she says.

  He glances at her. ‘Not emotionally involved, are we?’

  ‘It’s hard not to be.’

  ‘Remember what you’re here for,’ he says.

  ‘I’m holding it together so far.’

  ‘Good. The guys are stressed enough, having observers along. They don’t need more pressure. This is a grim necessity.’ He opens the bag and examines the larger joey. ‘This one will be fine. A bit borderline perhaps, but we have to give the wildlife carers something or they’ll think we’re cheating them.’ He tucks the joey inside another pouch and sits it in a box with a hot-water bottle. ‘You should have something warm to drink,’ he says, observing her with clinical intensity. ‘You look peaky.’

  She follows him to the back of the car where he pours thick black chocolate from a thermos and hands her a mug. Then he returns to the front seat to complete the grisly task of injecting the tiny joeys.

  Abby perches on the back of his station wagon and watches the unloading. Pete is standing in the trailer, hauling on whichever carcass is uppermost. Kevin is up there too, trying to reach for the matching hind leg to give extra strength to the pull. It’s hard work. As a body yanks free, they drag it from the stiffening clutch of waving legs and wrench it off the trailer, finally letting the body go on the lip of the pit where gravity takes over.

  Abby wants to look away, but the work is transfixing in its awkwardness. She remembers that night on the road when she first met Cameron and dragged his road-kill into the bushes. She remembers the clumsiness of manhandling that rump-heavy body, all hind legs; those thin front feet, useless for holding, the narrow cone of the chest. It is no easier for these men, grunting and panting at the cumbersome task of shifting their load into the pit.

  The worst of it is the loose slump of each body as it rolls from the tray. The clunk of bone on the edge of the trailer. The dull wallop of the body thudding into the pit, piling on top of the others. By the end of it, the men are blood-spattered. They stand aside as other loads arrive. Kevin lights a cigarette and wanders away, returning after a while to flick his glowing stub into the pit.

  After the bodies are off-loaded, the men stand in a cluster by the pit, drinking coffee, the flare of their cigarettes making patterns in the darkness like fireflies. They talk in low voices, occasional jokes punctuated by muted laughter. It seems incongruous that they can manage humour with death so close. Maybe that’s how they separate themselves from the mound of bodies that lies in the pit beside them.

  Abby is unable to join them. A chill has entered her, a deep shivering that doesn’t match the temperature of the night and all the thermal layers she is wearing. She feels nauseated and she wishes Quentin’s crew would appear.

  She empties her mug and walks to the edge of the pit, forcing herself to face her fear. In there, the jumble of dead kangaroos lies skewed and shadowy. There is no movement, no sound. A slim mist hovers, vapour from the mass of bodies not yet gone cold. It makes her tremble. It will be better, she decides, when the excavator has done its job and scattered a layer of dirt and clay so the burial is complete.

  She peers down into the tangle of corpses, sees a blown-open head, the grey mash of brains, blood-smeared. She knows she shouldn’t have looked. A tight ball is growing in her stomach. She drags herself away, stumbles back to the vet’s car. He tries to make conversation, but she can’t talk. The night seems to constrict around her, bands cinching her chest. She knows she is breathing too fast, too shallowly, but she can’t help it.

  ‘Are you all right?’ the vet asks.

  She waves a hand and blunders away from him, away from the pit and the cars and into the welcoming anonymity of darkness. The knot in her stomach is tightening. The staring eyes, that awful glassy absence. She fights with the nausea, snatching at nothing with her hands, clawing desperately to catch it all and squash it down.

  And now the visions are rising, suppressed memories unfurling, her mother’s death. She tries to lock it away, but the past is welling up, her head is filling with it.

  The air around her contracts and expands, sound contorting. And then she is staggering back towards the cars, ejecting vomit, gagging into clumps of yellow grass, her insides emptying, her head imploding, a great purging of everything that she is and where she has come from.

  When she can vomit no more, she slumps in the grass alongside the sour stench of her own gut contents. Someone places a coat over her. She hears a voice, hollow and distant. ‘Quentin will take her home. I think it’s all been too much for her.’

  The grass prickles her cheek. She closes her eyes and gives in to silence.

  39

  In Quentin’s car Abby huddles in the passenger seat, feeling sick and cold and small. Her supervisor is a dark sympathetic shadow beside her. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t ask her anything, and she is grateful. She is teetering on the lip of a personal abyss; to talk might tip her over the edge.

  They drive out of the reserve via a back gate. This is probably the way the shooters and other staff came in this afternoon. Quentin has a key. He doesn’t ask her to get out and unlock the gate. Instead he leaves her nestled in the car with the heater pumping while he steps out into the night and unhitches the chain. He slings back in, glances at her briefly, eyes sharp and concerned, then drives through the gateway and parks again to lock the gate.

  She wonders what he is thinking—probably judgemental thoughts. She recalls his comments when he asked her to attend the cull. If you can’t see the job through, you shouldn’t recommend it. She hasn’t seen the job through, and perhaps she doesn’t have what it takes to be a kangaroo ecologist. Perhaps she doesn’t have what it takes to be anything. All she wants to do is bundle herself into a cocoon and dissolve.

  They rumble along the gravel road in the darkness, and Abby stares blankly ahead, struggling against the deep chill in her bones. Her insides are shaking and her mouth still carries the rank taste of vomit. Back at the pit, the vet had helped her to her feet and given her a bottle of water to flush her mouth. But nothing could wash the sourness away. As he walked her to Quentin’s car, Abby was only vaguely aware of the shooters staring at her from their chummy cluster near the pit. She was too wasted to care, but now she wonders if that was disdain she read in their eyes, as well as disbelief. A question has been asked of her and she has failed. Now she must work through the consequences. Self-disappointment will come later, much later. The immediate fallout will be far worse; she can feel it churning in her guts. The vomiting episode was just the beginning; there is more to come.

  Quentin’s phone rings and he answers it quietly. He murmurs brief answers to the caller then glances at Abby. ‘It’s for you,’ he says. ‘It’s that journalist, Cameron Barlow. Do you want to speak to him? He sounds worried. It might help if you put him at ease.’

  He holds the phone out to her while he navigates a
curve in the road, and she takes it reluctantly, shrinks even lower as she presses it to her ear and says a small hello.

  ‘Abby. Are you okay? I’ve been so worried.’ The force of Cameron’s concern radiates from the phone.

  ‘I’m all right,’ she says softly, and her words feel empty.

  ‘I’ve been trying to get onto you all night. Your message bank will be full of my messages. Why didn’t you have your phone on?’

  To avoid speaking to you. She can’t say it, even though it’s the truth. ‘I forgot to turn it on this afternoon. Then it was better to leave it off . . .’

  ‘But the gate! The way those lunatics attacked your car!’

  So he was there. She had known he would be.

  ‘I couldn’t do anything,’ he says. ‘They turned into animals. Martin Tennant stirred them up. You wouldn’t believe the power of that man. He had them in a rage. Then you appeared, and they were madness let loose.’

  Abby gazes numbly out the window where pale fence posts, illuminated by the side-wash of the headlights, flash past, and dust swirls in a ghostly cloud behind the car.

  ‘So Quentin is taking you home?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll come and look after you. Don’t worry, I’ll sleep on the couch. I just don’t want you to be alone.’

  ‘No, don’t come.’ She doesn’t want him there. She needs to be alone, needs to crawl into her private cave.

  His answer is pained silence.

  ‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow,’ she says. ‘I promise.’

  ‘Okay.’ Hurt jangles in his voice. ‘But call me if you need me. Anytime.’

  At home, Abby is teary and distraught. Alone, she has no reason, no motivation to hold herself together, and the nausea comes sweeping back, emotions welling spontaneously and pouring out. She casts about her tiny house, pacing compulsively, looking for something that can’t be found—a way to escape from herself.