Bright Air (10 page)

He was pissing me off now, so I said again, ‘Nothing.’

He smiled. ‘Right. Now, go and do some more climbing, and remember what I just told you—especially the way you’re handling that rope, otherwise you’ll end up hanging from the ankle upside down.’ Then he added, ‘I should know.’

The way he said it made me look at his face, and I saw a smile, and had the sudden vivid impression that he cared and that it was as if he’d been lecturing his own younger self. The trick of a good teacher, I suppose.

At the end of the day’s climbing I stood beside Damien watching the two women on a final pitch. We had gone well that afternoon, becoming much more effective as a pair, but nowhere near as intuitively understanding of each other’s moves as Anna and Luce. As always, I was captivated by the grace and speed of Luce’s ascent. Although, being smaller, her reach was less than the men’s, her strong slender fingers were able to grip narrow fissures and creases on which we could get no purchase. Her strength-to-weight ratio was about perfect, and she seemed to glide across the rock, as if she had some innate knowledge of its inflexions and could effortlessly match her body’s movements to them.

‘Climbs like a bloody angel, doesn’t she?’ Damien murmured at my side, and I realised he’d been watching me, engrossed in my study of Luce.

‘Yes, amazing. What’s she like in the lab?’

‘Marcus says she’s the best student he’s ever had.’

I encountered Marcus again when we’d descended to the valley floor. He was in the clearing, half crouched, half lying beside his square metre of dirt. I knew better than to try to rescue him this time.

‘Ah, the merchant banker. How did it go?’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘We’re climbing better together, Damien and I.’

‘Yes,’ he said absently, entering something in his notebook, as if we were an experiment he’d already disposed of. There was a field microscope and a magnifying glass lying beside his square metre, which I saw had been excavated to a depth of twenty centimetres or so. ‘How about you?’

‘Yes, I’ve been studying your patch of worthless nothing. This is what I’ve got so far.’

He showed me his book with its entries and calculations under a series of species headings. As he explained the scribbles I began to understand his point—that the area had been teeming with life: ants, lice, spiders, mites, and then increasingly minute specimens, their numbers meticulously totted up, amounting to a whole township, a city quarter of thousands of inhabitants. And then he outlined their mutually intersecting roles, their conflicts and alliances, right down to the personal narratives and dramas the debris scraped out of the shallow hole revealed. There were the fragments of a tiny marsupial vole that had died there, for example, and the traces of a nest of centipedes that had been eliminated by the fiercer ants.

He didn’t have to spell out the equation he was making, between money-value and life-value. It was a little demonstration, a masterclass, for me, the barbarian economist. I understood this, and even felt rather privileged to have had this
effort expended on me. But I also felt that the passion behind the message was not what it had once been, that I was maybe one dumb student too many.

That evening we retired to the Hibernian Hotel, a massive monument to coalminers’ thirst, built in 1910, and the largest building in the little village it occupied. There Marcus entertained us, while we wolfed down large steaks, with an erudite account of the improbable sexual practices of certain snakes and stick insects, but given the sleeping arrangements—we had four rooms, Luce with Anna, Curtis with Owen, me and Damien, and Marcus on his own—I saw little opportunity to investigate if they might be adapted to humans. Instead his flagrantly grotesque descriptions seemed designed to draw attention to my increasingly desperate longing for the girl on the other side of the table, who seemed oblivious to my surreptitiously yearning looks. However, as we started making our way towards the stairs, Anna came to my side and whispered, ‘Wanna swap?’

I looked at her in surprise. ‘Eh?’

‘Beds.’

‘Um … Did Luce …?’

She looked at me as if I was being a bit slow, and I quickly nodded, feeling a sudden agitation in my chest, a brightening in my gloomy mood.

She said, ‘Use the veranda. Marcus’ll be roaming around the corridor.’

The pub was on a street corner, with deep verandas around two sides, onto which all the bedrooms had shuttered doors. By the time I’d cleaned my teeth, Damien was already fast asleep, snoring softly. I turned the key in the veranda door and pushed it open with barely a squeak, and stepped out into the chilly night air. Down below in the street a group of locals was
spilling out of the bar, yelling cheerfully at each other as they made their way to their utes. I padded softly along the deck until I came to what I thought was Luce and Anna’s room. Now what? My bare feet were freezing and I had the sudden sickening thought that this was some kind of prank, a trick to maroon me out on the balcony all night. Then the door in front of me clicked open, and Anna slid out. Like me she was wearing a shell jacket over a T-shirt and pants. She grinned at me, gave me a quick peck on the cheek and padded off. I stared after her, then a voice whispered from the door, ‘Hurry up, I’m cold.’

Luce was wearing a coat, but nothing else. I stepped inside and took her in my arms, and decided that this was just about the best of the eight thousand-odd days I’d spent on the planet.

I think it was fairly apparent to the others over breakfast the next morning what had happened between Luce and me. I thought I was playing it pretty cool, but each in turn, coming down into the dining room, blinked at the pair of us, then grinned and winked, as if we had neon signs on our heads. I couldn’t read the signs with Anna and Damien, though, and as we carried our bags out to the cars I got a chance to speak to her.

‘You okay?’

‘Yes.’

‘I mean … good night?’

She gave me a patient smile and turned away, me none the wiser.

We returned to the Watagans and, in an unspoken agreement, Anna, Luce, Damien and I switched climbing partners, so that I spent the day climbing with Luce, a breathtaking experience. In the mid-afternoon we made our last ascent
together, me exhausted, and I staggered into her arms on the scrubby plateau at the top. She pulled me away from the edge, out of the line of sight of Damien and Anna making their way up below us, and I told her she was beautiful and that I loved her. She smiled and took my hand and led me back into an area of huge boulders and thick clumps of tall grass. We rounded an outcrop, searching for a place to settle, when we were suddenly presented with a sight that stopped us dead. Curtis and Owen were together in a sheltered nook, their climbing helmets and harnesses discarded on the ground nearby. Curtis was on his back, groaning, eyes closed, while Owen knelt over his midriff, head down.

My shoe sent a stone skittering noisily away and Owen opened his eyes, pushed himself marginally upright and stared at us. For a moment we were frozen, the four of us, then Owen said, ‘Aw, fuck.’

I muttered, ‘Sorry,’ and turned away, following Luce, already retreating around the outcrop.

I followed her back to the cliff edge, where Damien was standing now, pulling in the rope on which Anna was secured. I reached for Luce’s hand, feeling the tension in her, not sure what to say. Finally I whispered, ‘Things happen.’

She turned slowly and stared at me. ‘Poor Suzi.’

Anna called me the day after I’d visited the nursing home to arrange to discuss the report. We settled on Saturday afternoon at the hotel. I said it’d be private and convenient, but the truth was that I wanted Mary to have time to meet her, and tell me if she thought Anna was making too much of this.

It was another beautiful warm spring day, the air still, but Anna didn’t like the idea of working on the terrace where we
might be interrupted. Instead we moved in to Mary’s sitting room, Anna setting her stuff out on the table like someone preparing for a major presentation. As she was unpacking her bag Mary came in with a pot of coffee. They seemed genuinely pleased to see each other again, as if there had been some earlier bond of understanding or sympathy that they both remembered.

‘Josh has told me all about your trip to Christchurch,’ Mary said. ‘You poor thing. It must have been a terrible experience.’ I could see the appraising look in her eye. ‘I’m so sorry you’ve had to deal with all this, Anna. You were a good friend to them, flying out like that. And then to hear that terrible confession. You’re quite sure he wasn’t just confused or hallucinating? People say strange things when they’re drugged and in shock and as desperately ill as he was.’

‘I know, I’ve been wrestling with that ever since. It’s just that he was, briefly, so lucid.’

My aunt nodded sadly. ‘Well, you were there. Couldn’t you speak to someone about it, though? Perhaps the police officer who looked into the matter? We have a regular guest here—a good friend—who’s a Supreme Court judge, and I was saying to Josh that I’m sure he would pull a few strings to help you get the ear of the right person.’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ Anna said cautiously. ‘But I think we should try to be as clear as possible in our own minds before we go as far as that.’

‘Maybe that’s wise.’ Mary hesitated, unwilling to let it go. ‘Of course, the other aspect of this is, what happens if what Owen said was true? They’re all dead now—Lucy, Curtis and Owen. What good can it do? And think of the possible harm, the distress to Lucy’s family, for instance.’

‘But they aren’t all dead, Mary. There were two other people
in their group, Damien Stokes and Marcus Fenn. They’re very much alive.’

Mary looked shocked. ‘Oh, but surely you don’t imagine they …?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well …’ Mary stared at her, then turned to go, catching my eye with a look that I took to be a warning to be careful.

‘So, what did you come up with?’ Anna asked as I poured the coffee.

‘Not a lot.’ I’d wanted to avoid talking about how Luce had been depressed, but in the end it was all I had to say.

Anna looked at me pointedly. ‘Yes. They shifted their ground, didn’t they? And in the end Damien put the blame onto you.’

I took a deep breath. ‘Was he right, do you think? You saw her after I left, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, she was down. But she wasn’t suicidal. She was looking forward to going on the trip. I mean, she was really fired up about how important the work was, and about doing some climbing, and what a beautiful place it was. Something changed while she was out there. Despite all their protests that Luce wouldn’t have deliberately stepped off that cliff, Damien and the others planted the seed of the possibility. I think it was a smokescreen, in case Maddox found something that didn’t fit the picture of an accident.’

‘Could be.’

‘Anything else?’

I mentioned Marcus’s description of Luce as impetuous, another smokescreen.

Anna agreed, but was obviously disappointed by my lack of progress, so I asked, ‘What about you, then? What did you find?’

She unfolded several large handwritten tables and charts and spread them out. One was a timeline, tracing Luce’s movements on the island according to witness statements, and another was a chart showing the names and connections of all of the people referred to in the police report. A third was a large map of the island locating all the places mentioned. I was impressed. She’d obviously approached it in a methodical, scientific manner, making my casual observations look pretty thin. I put it down to a lack of mental challenge at the Walter Murchison Memorial Nursing Home.

‘They arrived on the first of September,’ she said, pointing to the timeline, ‘moving into the same cottage belonging to the Kelso family that Marcus had rented in previous years. During the first two weeks they worked on the accessible small islands off the north end of Lord Howe. Then, when Damien arrived to make up two climbing pairs, they tackled the more difficult cliffs at the south end, below Mount Gower. Each day Marcus would go out with them in Bob Kelso’s boat, and return for them in the evening. They all kept work diaries, which Marcus would compile, day by day, into the research log. The weather was generally good, although there were a number of stormy days, especially towards the end, when they couldn’t go out.

‘On Wednesday the twenty-seventh, the ocean-going yachts on the Sydney to Lord Howe race arrived at the island, and on the following evening the Kelsos, who are an important family on the island, threw a party for the yachties, to which Marcus and his team were invited. On the Friday they returned to Mount Gower for what was originally scheduled to be their last day in the field. However, a bad storm blew in on the Saturday, disrupting flights to the island, and because of time lost earlier Marcus decided that they would stay on for a few
more days to finish their work. The weather cleared on the Sunday, and on the Monday they lost Luce. The search and police interviews went on for another week.’

I had been following her finger as she traced this chain of events across the page. Seeing it laid out graphically like that made it easier to get a feel for the pattern. It struck me that there was a sort of congestion towards the end—the arrival of the yachts, the party, the bad weather, the delayed departure—disrupting the even repetition of the previous weeks.

When I mentioned this, Anna nodded and said, ‘Something else odd about those last few days …’ She pointed to the names written against each day, referring to witness sightings of Luce. ‘After that party on the Thursday night, the only people who mentioned seeing Luce again were the three other climbers, plus Marcus and Bob Kelso, whereas in the days before Thursday, lots of people saw her around—Sophie Kalajzich, Dr Passlow and his wife, the other Kelsos, the National Parks and Wildlife ranger, the people who ran the grocery store …’

‘What do you make of that?’

‘It’s like Luce withdrew, kept herself to herself, don’t you think? As if she wanted to be alone.’

I thought about it, then I said, ‘I just can’t get over the fact that she should never have been there at all on that Monday. They should all have been back in Sydney by then.’