Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
I must look unimpressed because he laughs and that’s when I see it: there is something remarkable after all. It’s his smile and that laugh, the warmth of it.
“Can I explain over a coffee?”
“I don’t have coffee. I don’t have a kitchen.”
He peers up the hill at the worksite. “Incredible spot you’ve got here. What do you plan on doing with it?”
“Just?… you know-house, garden.”
“Can I take a look at the aspect from up there?”
I don’t answer, wondering how I will get rid of this guy.
“Purely for appreciation,” he says. “I love it here. I’m from New York, I’m studying the decline in your snow gums. You’re wondering why, of course: I like to travel, I try to take on projects all over the world. It’s taken me fifteen years to get here to the
Eucalyptus pauciflora and they don’t disappoint.” He is gazing around at the rainbow snow gums, happy, it seems, to chat away without much response from me. I guess he remembers his manners because he offers a hand and says, “Hank Jones, professor of biology at NYU, I’m leading a research project into adapting plants to climate change, specifically swapping genetic modules between cells to create more drought tolerance. But as I’m starting to see, drought is not the only problem here, there’s a wood-boring beetle using the drought’s dryness to dig more deeply into the gums. The trees are dealing with a double-pronged attack.”
The hand is still outstretched, waiting for me. Reluctantly I shake it. I really just want to get back to watering my slab.
I turn and head up the hill, letting him follow me. “It’s triple,” I tell him over my shoulder.
“What’s the third?”
“Fire.”
“Ah. Of course.”
At the top he steps up onto the cement and takes in the view. In every direction are sloping hills and valleys, some covered in thick bush, some rocky outcrops glistening in the sunlight, and on the higher mountains in the distance is snow. I can feel how moved he is by it in the quality of his silence. Some of my impatience eases. I feel proud, suddenly, of this place I’m to make my home.
Unlike the rest of our surroundings, the stretch of hill we stand on is bare of vegetation, but for three enormous eucalypts.
“You could do a wildflower meadow,” he says suddenly. He’s jumped down onto the grass and is walking across the hill. “It’s perfect here.” I don’t even know if he’s talking to me but he is rapt by this idea. “Craspedias and
Stylidiums,
Gentianellas,
Leucochrysum,
Ranunculus,
Brachyscome,
Euphrasia
-these mountains were underwater,” he says abruptly, glancing at me with astonishment as though I have told him this fact instead of him me. “Hundreds of millions of years ago. And during the Ice Age there were glaciers all over it, which means that geologically speaking it’s very interesting, the rocks are incredibly old and there’s evidence that the unusual variety of botanical families found here date all the way back to Gondwana, which is why you can find species here that resemble flora of the northern hemispheres. Do you know how lucky you are that this is yours? You could do
Prostanthera cuneata, and
Grevillea, and
Myrtus, they would all thrive in each other’s company and the light is perfect…” He has barely remembered to breathe, he is so excited, and as he smiles at me with the delight of this, with the plants he has imagined and brought to life around him, I start to see what he sees. Not the plants specifically-I have no idea what any of those names mean-but I see the hill we stand on covered in color. He has painted it for me.
I walk over to the caravan and flick on the kettle for a cuppa.
I try to keep this memory in the forefront of my mind. I try to recall in as much detail as I can those first days and weeks and months of discov
ering that we were both in love with the same place, the same mountains, the same small patch of land-and by extension each other. He could see how to turn the land I’d bought into a home. I would build the house and, improbably, this man from across the world would plant the garden, and together we would create a life.
To find him now, to figure out why he left Shearwater without telling me, to ask him what on earth is going on-and to make sure he’s okay-I need a girl who can swim out to retrieve a radio. If Hank isn’t here, then I have come for nothing, and I need to get off this drowning island.
Fen lives on the beach, they’ve told me. So I am making the trip down the hill for the second time when I hear a noise and turn to see a flash of pale hair among the tussocks.
“Could that be a rare golden shag I see hiding in the grass?”
Orly stands up with an eye roll. “No such thing as a golden shag.”
“No shit. What are you doing?”
“Following you.”
“Why?”
“Dad said I have to leave you alone.”
“This isn’t doing a very good job of that.” I turn and keep walking, but every now and then I hear him behind me, and eventually I call, “Either walk with me or go home, this is annoying.”
He hurries to my side, a little skip in his step. “You’re a bit grumpy, huh?”
“Am I?”
“A bit. How come?”
I think about it. There are several current reasons that seem obvious enough, but I try to think back to before all of this and ponder whether I’ve always been grumpy. “I think I’ve been pissed off for a while,” I admit, though pissed off is not the right way to describe the state of me over the last year.
“How come?”
All I can think to say is, “I built a house.”