Bright Air (25 page)

‘How do you feel?’ I asked.

‘All right, considering. How about you?’

I shrugged. ‘Stiff, sore.’

‘A bit of exercise’ll fix that. Let’s see your hands.’ She peered at them; the previous day’s swelling had reduced and she said they’d do. I found myself admiring her sturdiness; the dogged persistence that had irritated me yesterday now seemed rather admirable. I smiled at her and she said, ‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘We have to go on, you know—to the top if necessary.’

‘Yes, I know.’

She hesitated, then said, ‘This isn’t too difficult, just bloody hard work. Luce could have climbed it in her sleep. I was wondering if it was about speed, leaving her gear behind. She’d have been able to move much faster.’

‘True.’ But what would have been the point in that? It seemed more likely to me that she’d just stopped caring about safety.

I thought about that a good deal as I led the way off the centipedes’ ledge. My muscles were stiff and aching in strange places, my hands thick and clumsy and sore. I began traversing the flank of Winklestein’s twin spires, making for the horizontal Cheval Ridge beyond. The height, three hundred and fifty metres of sheer cliff below us, worried me, and I was being very careful about where I looked and what I allowed my mind to think. But at least there were plenty of cracks and bumps and other reasonable hand- and footholds on the weathered basalt, and I was making cautious progress until I came to a slab of smooth rock with no purchase on it at all. There was a promising crack on the far side, and I thought I could just reach it at maximum stretch. I tried, extending myself as far as possible, but couldn’t quite make it, and suddenly found myself flattened against a smooth rock face with only my right hand and foot properly engaged, a position I couldn’t hold for long. Terrified of developing sewing machine leg, I forced myself to spring the few centimetres across to the crack, in which I safely jammed my left fingers and toes. But now I saw that there was another smooth stretch ahead, and that I was in the same unstable position as before, with nothing for my right hand and foot to cling to. I was further from protection now, and vividly remembered those anchors pulling out on Frenchmans Cap. Heart pounding, I knew I only had a moment to get out of this, but couldn’t see how. Then a memory came into my mind, of a manoeuvre I’d seen Luce perform on that same climb in Tasmania. It was called a barn door, and involved turning your back to the rock face and swinging out, as if on a hinge, to grab whatever lay beyond with your free hand and foot. I could hardly believe it when I saw Luce do it, and knew I’d never have the nerve to try if I gave it any thought. So I didn’t think, I just swung, flinging
my right arm and leg desperately out into space and around to slam against the rock.

My fingertips and toes found something there, some minimal grip, though barely enough to support any weight. But the other problem was that, in twisting myself over, my rope had wrapped itself around my neck. I was now lying flat across a near-vertical surface, in danger of sliding off at any moment. If my anchors held I’d be strangled, if not I’d plunge three hundred and fifty metres into the drink.

‘Anna,’ I croaked. ‘Anna …’

I heard nothing but the cry of gulls and sigh of the wind.

‘Anna, help. I need you.’

Some loose stones clattered down from above, bouncing off my helmet. I was frozen, unable to look upwards. I felt the strength ebbing from my fingers, and gazed out at the bright air, waiting for it to happen. Then Anna came abseiling down beside me, at what I thought was a rather leisurely pace.

‘Having fun?’ she said. She clipped a rope onto my harness, then unfastened the one around my neck. ‘Come on, you’re wasting time.’

‘You saved my life.’

‘Don’t forget it.’

We were now faced with a vertical climb of about a hundred metres up the Black Tower, also called the Pillar of Porteus, an obstacle that took us until the early afternoon to pass. Ahead of us we saw the long Cheval Ridge leading to the base of the summit pinnacle, and beyond it we caught our first glimpse back to Lord Howe Island, looking very distant, with long white clouds trailing across the peak of Mount Gower. The sun was warm, and we lay on a grassy patch and stretched out to recover our strength. It was in that position that I heard the distant putter of an engine.

I wasn’t sure at first, and when I struggled to my feet the sound faded away. Apart from the area masked by the summit pinnacle, I had a 360-degree view all round over the ocean, but I could see nothing. I stood motionless, trying to blank out the cries of birds.

‘What is it?’

‘Shhh … I thought I heard a boat.’

I concentrated, and suddenly heard it again. It seemed to be coming from behind me—from the south, where we’d landed. Although we were surrounded by sheer drops, the view of the immediate area around the south end was hidden by the hump of Winklestein’s Steeple. Then, as I stared downward, a boat emerged around the point and into view. ‘There!’ I cried. ‘I think it’s Bob’s boat. He’s looking for us.’

It seemed so small, a tiny white speck. We were like people on the observation deck of the tallest skyscraper, looking down at the ant-like activity far below. We began shouting and waving our arms, hoping he might be scanning the peaks with his binoculars. Our throats were so dry that we quickly became hoarse, and then the boat slid out of sight beneath the lee of the eastern cliffs. We hoped it would do another circuit around the Pyramid, but perhaps it already had, for the next sighting we got was of it heading out across the sparkling sea, back to Lord Howe.

‘Oh fuck.’ I sagged.

‘Come on.’ Anna was pulling her backpack on again. ‘One last effort.’

We had discovered no further signs of Luce that morning, and I had pretty much given up hope of finding any answers to our quest. The summit pinnacle was a formidable cylinder of rock, like an ancient watchtower with a domed cap. To get to its base we inched across the Cheval Ridge, feet dangling over
five hundred metres of space on each side. Halfway across I paused to ease the strain in my arms, and looked down, first one side, then the other. Far below, beyond spinning seabirds, I saw the foam of breakers. I felt the suck of vertigo dragging on my feet and stomach. My head felt hot and swollen inside the helmet and I became dizzy.

‘Josh!’

I dragged my eyes away from the void and saw Luce on the ridge ahead of me. I cried out her name.

‘Josh? It’s me! Come on!’ I blinked. It was Anna, of course.

‘Yeah … coming.’ My throat was so parched I could barely speak, but I focused on the rock in front of me and began to move forward again.

I really can’t remember that last climb, only the feeling of relief when we finally crawled onto the summit, a dozen square metres in extent, covered with tufted grass. How had it got up there? The sheer bloody-minded persistence of living matter seemed astonishing. I lay down with a groan, and as if at a signal the sunlight faded and died, and a cold gust whipped across the quivering grass.

There was a small cairn of loose stones that the first climbers had piled together on the crown. Anna crawled towards it and began dragging it apart. She pulled out an old rum bottle, and handed me the messages that former climbers had left inside. The last one ended with a confident …
and now attempting to descend the North Ridge
. I hoped they’d made it. But there was nothing from Luce.

‘Nothing at all?’ I said. I don’t know what I’d expected, but the futility of what we’d done filled me with despair.

Anna gave a little yelp. I thought she’d been bitten by something, Ball’s Last Insult. But it wasn’t that. She’d turned
over another stone and pulled out a small candy-striped bag. I knew it well—I’d followed it with my eyes many times, bouncing around on Luce’s shapely rump. It was her chalk bag.

I got up and walked unsteadily to Anna and looked over her shoulder as she prised the thing open and drew out a slip of paper. She read it and then handed it to me. There were tears brimming in her eyes.

I recognised the handwriting, but not the quotation.

I wasn’t sure what the poem meant, but it seemed pretty obvious what Luce had intended. I just stood there for a long time without speaking, without really thinking, just surrendering to the earth, the water, and the bright air, to love and death.

A spatter of rain slapped my cheek. I turned and saw a grey mass of cloud advancing on us across the ocean from the south. Anna was sitting at my feet, hands tucked up into her armpits, absorbed in some private meditation of her own.

‘I think we’re in for a storm,’ I said.

She looked up at me, eyes puffy with tears, then out to sea. To the north Lord Howe was rapidly disappearing into grey cloud, the sun was gone and the wind was picking up, cold and harsh. She roused herself and I helped her to her feet, scooping Luce’s chalk bag into my pack.

‘Sure there’s nothing else?’

She shook her head, and I piled the rocks back into the semblance of a cairn.

We abseiled down the pinnacle a great deal faster than we’d gone up, then worked our way back along the Cheval Ridge, the wind now ripping alarmingly at us on our exposed perch. By the time we reached the Black Tower the southerly change had reached full force, scouring us with driving rain. Refreshing at first, it rapidly chilled us through and we decided we’d better find somewhere to shelter. We chose what seemed the least exposed flank and I began to lower myself down, cautiously now. I knew that more climbers are killed abseiling downwards than climbing up, and the rock was streaming with water. About twenty metres down I came to an overhang, beneath which was a relatively dry ledge. I called up to tell Anna, and a few minutes later we were both down there, huddled against the wind and gusting rain. I tried with limited success to rig up a water collection scoop with my nylon coat, and after a while managed to get us a drink and begin to fill our water bottles. Soaked and freezing, I sank back against the unyielding rock, feeling that this was certainly the most miserable situation I’d ever found myself in. I sneezed and shivered and began to laugh.

‘What’s funny?’ Anna said, through teeth clenched against the cold.

‘I was just thinking that my specialty was risk management.’

She gave a snort. ‘That was with the bank, was it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t like banks.’

‘Nobody does.’

‘But you left Luce to go and work for one.’

There was no real answer to that. Put so bluntly, it seemed preposterous.

‘Yes. I did a stupid thing.’ I’d never spoken about this to anyone, but what did it matter now, marooned on a crag in the middle of the ocean? ‘I slept with someone else, one weekend when Luce was away. It didn’t mean anything and I didn’t think it mattered, but it did. I couldn’t stand the thought of her finding out. So I left.’

It was more complicated of course—my restlessness, my doubts about us. But I felt a tremendous relief to tell someone this simple, shameful fact at last. The wind howled around us, and Anna said nothing for a while.

‘She was a first-year student of Marcus’s.’

I thought I’d misheard. ‘What?’

She repeated it, and I said, ‘You knew? I didn’t think anyone knew. How …?’

‘Marcus told us.’

‘Us?’

‘Well, Damien certainly, probably Curtis and Owen.’

‘My God … And Luce?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t say anything. She never mentioned it.’

I was astounded. ‘How did Marcus know? He wasn’t even there.’

‘He arranged it, Josh. He never forgave you for having Luce fall in love with you. He got the girl to do it.’

I think if I hadn’t been tied in I’d have slipped off the rock at that point. I thought of everything that had flowed from that betrayal, leading ultimately to Luce’s death. If I hadn’t left so abruptly, if I’d waited till the end of the academic year, say, and come to Lord Howe with Luce, and climbed with her on that fateful day …

As if she was listening to my thoughts, she said, ‘I had the impression that Marcus wanted to get rid of you. That he didn’t want you coming here with Luce.’

‘I feel terrible, Anna. So ashamed.’

‘That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?’ She put a cold hand around mine and squeezed it tight.

‘Me, maybe. But you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.’

‘Haven’t I?’ She hesitated.

‘Of course not. You were always her truest friend.’

‘Maybe not. She was very upset after you left for London, and finally came to tell me that she’d decided to withdraw from the course and take a year’s leave of absence, to go over to be with you. I persuaded her not to.’

‘Oh …’ I wiped water out of my eyes. ‘Well, that was sensible advice. She was so close to finishing her degree.’

‘No, it wasn’t that. I was jealous of you two. I was just the same as Marcus. I wanted to climb with her over here. I was being very selfish, and because of that she died.’

‘But you didn’t come.’

‘No. I met someone—a man.’ Another surprise. It wasn’t that Anna wasn’t attractive, but she had always seemed rather diffident around men, and her occasional dates and encounters never seemed to come to anything. ‘He wanted me to stay with him. It would have been difficult anyway coming over here so close to my end-of-year exams. I thought he was wonderful. When Luce and the others came over here I moved in with him and I felt I’d never been so happy. Then we got the terrible news. He helped me a lot, getting through the first shock—but I was inconsolable. I couldn’t think about anything else, and with the inquest and everything … I was obsessive, I suppose, pretty impossible to be around. Anyway, one day he told me that when we met he’d just split up with this other girl, and now he was going back to her. I didn’t eat for a week, and then one day I was standing at a bus stop, and I saw this truck coming and I just walked out in front
of it. It wasn’t a big decision or anything—I just did it. The poor driver … He almost managed to stop, but I was sent flying. I spent five weeks in hospital getting patched up, then two months as an in-patient in a private psychiatric clinic in Waverley.’