Bright Air (21 page)

‘Won’t make any difference. In any case, the board doesn’t meet for another month. I suggest you take some flowers with you tomorrow, and Bob will get you as close to the place where she fell as he can.’

Bob had been watching this exchange with a trace of wry amusement in his eyes, as if his father and I had been having the sort of tussle he’d been used to losing for years. He turned his head towards the door as his brother Harry came in. He was fresh out of the shower after a day leading a group through the rainforest in the southern uplands. He had the same brown outdoor complexion as his brother, but he seemed leaner and tougher. His dark hair was cut very short, and I thought he looked as if he might have been in the army.

His father said, ‘We were just explaining to Josh and Anna that there’s no possibility of them climbing up the cliffs where Lucy fell, Harry.’

‘You’re climbers too, are you?’ He looked me over as if assessing me. ‘No, Dad’s right. We’ve had a bit of rain recently and the cliffs are running with water. If you take a boat down there you’ll see a few good waterfalls. The view from the sea is fine anyway, if you’ve got binoculars.’

‘Exactly.’ Stanley shook his head to dismiss the topic.

Harry said, ‘You had any dealings with Marcus lately?’

He said it almost as if they were old mates, and I looked at him in surprise. ‘Yes, we saw him recently.’

‘How’s he doing these days?’

Muriel Kelso bustled in at that point, a very different character from her husband, and the atmosphere in the room immediately brightened. Her welcome was irresistibly warm, her face, haloed by fine silver curls, glowing as she hugged Anna and then, slightly to my embarrassment, myself. ‘My dears, how wonderful to see you both here. Are you comfortable in the cottage?’

It was almost as if she’d personally invited us to stay there, instead of Anna booking it on the internet. Her charm seduced us all, and even Stanley became more mellow. She was sure that our stay would help heal the wound of the loss of our dear friends, and she insisted that her family would move heaven and earth to make it so. She only wished she’d been able to persuade Lucy’s dear father to come and do the same. But I remembered Sophie Kalajzich’s assessment of her, and could see the tough old bird beneath the charm.

‘Who were you talking about when I interrupted?’ she asked.

‘Marcus,’ Harry said. ‘I wondered how his leg was doing. We heard he’d been sick again.’

This was news to me, and I was surprised they were still in touch. ‘He did look a bit frail when we saw him, but he didn’t mention being sick.’

‘Poor man,’ Muriel said. ‘A brilliant mind. I believe the accident affected him deeply.’

‘Did you know him well?’ I asked.

‘Well, yes, he’d been coming here for, what, eight or nine years before the accident. He’d become like one of the family really.’

Stanley grunted, and from the look on his face I guessed he didn’t quite share his wife’s enthusiasm.

I found it hard to get to sleep that night. It wasn’t the food that kept me awake, for Muriel had cooked her son’s trevally as perfectly as she’d managed everything else. Nor was it the wine we’d consumed, which was excellent and plentiful enough to have knocked me out. It might have had something to do with that muttonbird, still giving its baby cries, heart-rending in the night.

There was something I’d intended to do earlier, and had been deflected by Bob’s presence when we’d returned. I’d wanted to look again at the sheets of paper with the codes from Luce’s diary, while the log records I’d studied in Carmel’s office were still fresh in my mind. I got them out of my bag and sat up in bed to study them.

The first thing I noticed was that they all had an extra four numbers at the beginning of each string, which I soon realised was the date. Given that, and Carmel’s lucid explanation, the whole sequence became intelligible. It was the final entries that interested me, and here I did notice something odd, for there was a single entry for Thursday the twenty-eighth of September, the day on which Owen had taken over the reporting. It was the very last line in Luce’s diary, and it ran:

2809 1325 57J WE 23674 85849 149

I stared at it for a while, struck not only by the date, but also by how different it looked from all the other lines. Here, for example, was the previous reading, taken on the Wednesday:

2709 1508 57J WF 06588 04470 103

That was similar to all of the entries from the previous two weeks, when they’d moved from Roach Island down to the southern cliffs. For a start, the two groups of five digits—the eastings and northings readings—were quite different. Even
more significant, I thought, the WF symbol on every other reading on the list had become WE in that final entry. Could that have been a simple typo? I tried to remember what Carmel had said about the WF, and recalled that it identified the hundred-kilometre squares into which the UTM zone 57J was subdivided. If it wasn’t an error, the final entry must have been taken in a completely different grid square from all the rest. Wherever it was, it was big, for the final three digits showed that they were 149 metres above sea level.

I sat there staring at the numbers for a long time until they became a blur. I felt sure that Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy the dog would have instantly understood this vital clue, slamming down their ginger beers and rushing off to tell Uncle Quentin. But I hadn’t the faintest idea what to make of it.

I woke to the smells of toast and fresh coffee. Anna had been up since dawn, she told me, and I noticed a small bunch of flowers lying on the kitchen worktop. Muriel Kelso had given them to her, apparently, to take to the accident scene. In the light of a new day it seemed a thoughtful gesture, and I wondered if I’d misread the Kelsos, put off by Stanley’s domineering manner. Soon Bob tapped on the cabin door and gave our gear a quick squint—a backpack with a bottle of water and windcheaters, but no climbing equipment. We followed him down to the beach and along to the jetty where his boat was moored. It looked as if it was designed to take small groups out fishing or sightseeing, with a covered wheelhouse at the front and bench seating around the middle and stern.

Bob steered us out into the calm waters of the lagoon, turning the boat south to run parallel to the long beach, several kilometres of deserted golden sand. We passed the end of the airstrip and continued towards the foothills of the first of the two southern mountains, Mount Lidgbird. Here the reef closed in against the shore, and Bob turned us towards the passage between the lines of foaming surf that would take us out into open water. The swell out there was quite heavy after the calm of the lagoon, and we pitched and yawed as we got clear of the reef and turned south again beneath the increasingly formidable basalt cliffs of the mountains.

I know next to nothing about boats, and I was interested
to watch Bob and ask him how things worked—especially the GPS navigation equipment next to the wheel. He was pleased to demonstrate it, pointing out the features on the glowing map of the island on the screen and our position on it.

‘So, these figures show our position in degrees?’ I asked.

‘That’s right, degrees decimal. You can switch the readout to degrees, minutes and seconds if you want …’ he showed me, ‘or to UTM.’

‘Neat. What about the reverse? Can you put in a map reference and it’ll show you where it is?’

‘Yeah.’ He pointed ahead to a steep valley between the two mountains and handed me binoculars to look for waterfalls. I went back to join Anna and spoke quietly to her.

‘I need a couple of minutes alone in the wheelhouse. If we get the chance, see if you can keep him occupied out here.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Not sure yet. Are you all right?’ She looked grey.

‘This heaving up and down … I feel a bit sick.’

‘Concentrate on the mountains. Look out for waterfalls. See? Over there.’ There were several silver threads of water cascading down the immense black cliffs.

I stayed with her as we moved under the shadow of Mount Gower, its dark flank looming overhead as we approached the point of South Head. The sombre blackness of the basalt cliffs was oppressive, and as Bob throttled back the engine and turned the boat closer to the shore I realised that this must be the place.

He joined us and pointed to an area halfway up the sheer wall, where white birds flitted in and out of the shadows. ‘That’s where they were working. I put them ashore on that narrow beach over there.’

I scanned the cliffs with my camera, then with the binoculars, hoping to see some sign of the protection they
might have used to anchor themselves up there, but it was too dark and too high up to make out any details, and the image swayed with the movement of the boat. The idea of working unsecured in such a place seemed unthinkable, and I blurted out, ‘I can’t believe she wouldn’t have had a rope.’

He shrugged. ‘Yeah.’

‘Where did she come down?’

He pointed to a spot where waves broke against the base of the cliff, sending spume high up the rock face. ‘Reckon that was it. Don’t want to get any closer. The currents are treacherous down this southern tip of the island.’

Anna gave a little sob and reached into the bag for the flowers. She was looking very pale. She leaned over the side and dropped the blooms over. They drifted away, tiny white petals against the dark water. Then she suddenly gave a retch and ducked her head, being sick.

As Bob went to her, I backed away towards the wheel-house and began fiddling with the GPS controls. One thing I had managed to do the previous night was memorise the coordinates of Luce’s last entry, but first I had to convert the instrument to UTM readings.

‘What’re you up to?’

I stiffened at Bob’s voice at my shoulder. ‘Oh, sorry, just seeing if I can work this thing. How is she?’

‘She’ll feel better in a minute.’

I nodded, looked up and froze. ‘Holy shit!’

Ahead of us, glowing in the haze that obscured the southern horizon, I had seen for the first time what looked like the spire of a drowned cathedral rising out of the ocean depths.

When Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball, captain of HMS
Supply
and then aged thirty, discovered Lord Howe Island, he was
careful to do the right thing. He named it after Admiral Lord Richard ‘Black Dick’ Howe, First Lord of the Admiralty. Then he named its highest peak after Rear Admiral John Leveson-Gower, also an Admiralty Lord. The cluster of offshore islands to the north he called the Admiralty Islands, and even named a small island at the edge of the lagoon after his ship’s master, David Blackburn. He gave the second highest peak, rather coyly perhaps, his own middle name. But his surname he reserved for an extraordinary spike of rock lying off to the south. When I first saw it through the boat’s windshield I guessed it might be a kilometre away and perhaps eighty or a hundred metres high. Bob corrected me—it was twenty-three kilometres off and rose an astonishing five hundred and fifty-one metres, the tallest sea stack in the world, a third higher than Frenchmans Cap and one and a half times the height of the Empire State Building—my measures of terrifying altitude since my night on the mountain with Luce. There is a portrait of Henry Ball in the National Library of Australia, one of those little black-and-white Georgian silhouettes, with a rather dandyish quiff of hair standing up on his forehead and what might be either an arrogant or determined set to his lips and the push of his chin. I like to imagine his crew running to the rail as they caught sight of the amazing volcanic fang rearing out of the ocean in that remote place and crying, ‘Bleedin’ heck, what’s that?’ and Henry, studying this vision of Nature Sublime through his telescope, replying, ‘Gentlemen,
that
is Balls Pyramid.’

It shook me, I have to admit. Not just the thing itself, but also the absolute certainty that I knew its UTM coordinates. Later in the trip, in calmer water, Anna managed to distract Bob for a couple of minutes while I checked it out on his GPS set, but I already knew I was right.

‘Can we go and see it?’ I asked.

Bob shook his head dubiously. ‘Sea’s a bit rough out there, Josh.’

‘But it’s amazing. Can we at least try?’

He didn’t seem to want to make an issue of it, and said he’d detour that way.

I went to sit with Anna at the back, plastered with sun cream, as we bounced across the choppy sea, circling out towards the south. I felt a bit mean, for all she wanted was to get back onto dry land, but that couldn’t be helped. As our angle of view slowly shifted we saw that from its flank Balls Pyramid resembled a tall triangular sail, while from end-on it appeared to be a slender spire; so thin in fact that in one place the wind had punched a hole clean through. This ragged tooth was all that was left of a huge volcanic crater rim, and beneath the waves it continued down to the ocean floor, two thousand metres beneath us.

The sea wasn’t too rough, and once he’d resigned himself to taking us out there, Bob became determined to prove just how inaccessible it was. To begin with, there were the tips of lesser peaks around it, barely breaking the surface, that made it dangerous to approach. Then there was the impossibility of making a landing, there being nowhere a boat could safely moor against the vertical sides. And finally, the thing was too exposed, too sheer, its rock too eroded and crumbly, to safely climb.