Bright Air (8 page)

We walked on for a while, and then she said, ‘What did you think of Marcus?’

‘I don’t know … You all seemed rather overawed by him.’

‘He’s become more sombre since the accident, more angry. He used to be great fun. But he’s brilliant, Josh, the most inspiring person I’ve ever met. Look, I’ll show you.’

We had reached the door of the flat she shared with Anna, and she took me inside, where Anna was setting up an ironing board.

‘We were talking about Marcus,’ Luce explained to her. ‘I want to show Josh the Oslo tape.’

‘Fine.’ Anna turned to me. ‘We were debating in the car whether you made that up about The Fall. Marcus said no, but the others thought you were.’

‘What about you?’

She narrowed her eyes at me. ‘I think you told the truth. I can usually tell when people are lying.’

‘Clever you.’

Luce found the tape she wanted and we sat together on the sofa as the picture came on. The scene was a stage with a lectern, large letters on the wall behind proclaiming
OSLO ECOSOPHY SYMPOSIUM
. A lone figure took his place behind the microphone to some scattered applause. I recognised a younger Marcus, vigorous, bright-eyed. His speech was in English, but I can’t remember much of what he actually said, and what I can remember—something about the ancient Greek word for house,
oikos
, being the root for economy (stewardship of the household), ecology (knowledge of the household) and ecosophy (wisdom of the household)—didn’t sound very exciting. But his presentation was inspiring, riveting in fact, as became apparent from the murmurs of approval from the unseen audience, gradually building to bursts of spontaneous
clapping that punctuated his impassioned speech. The end was greeted with a huge wave of applause, and a second, rather elderly figure came striding onto the stage and grasped Marcus in a hug.

‘That’s Arne Naess,’ Luce said, in a tone that suggested Moses himself had appeared.

‘Who?’

‘Arne Naess—you must have heard of him.’

‘Sorry.’

Anna made a sort of clucking noise behind me, accompanied by a hiss of steam from her iron. ‘He’s just about the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, that’s all. He invented deep ecology.’

I hadn’t heard of that, either.

Luce said, ‘He’s also a great climber. The day after this he took Marcus onto the Troll Wall at Romsdalen. That is awesome.’

‘Looks a bit old for that.’

Anna butted in again. ‘His nephew, also called Arne Naess, led the first Norwegian Everest expedition. He’s married to Diana Ross.’

I turned and stared at her. ‘Now you are having me on.’

She shrugged, poker-faced, enjoying herself, and went on with her ironing.

When I left the flat I lingered with Luce on the doorstep, giving her a kiss, and was gratified by the response. Suddenly she was interested in me again, really interested it seemed, and I wondered if there was some quirk of wiring in her brain linking climbing and sex. I said, as if the idea had just popped into my head, ‘Hey, how about I come and help you babysit Owen’s kid?’ I imagined a quiet romantic evening, a sofa or even a bed, free of Anna, there being no privacy in the primitive flat that I was sharing at that time.

She looked at me in surprise. ‘You don’t want to do that.’

‘Yes I do. We can work on your statistics.’

She laughed. ‘All right. I’ll speak to Suzi.’ Then she slipped away, giving me a beautiful smile as she disappeared through the door.

Memories of those times came painfully back to me when I finally sat down on the terrace with a stiff whisky to read Detective Senior Constable Maddox’s weighty report. He had been sent out to Lord Howe on the third of October, the day following Luce’s disappearance, to support the sole police officer on the island, Constable Grant Campbell. Together they had examined the scene of the accident and taken statements from just about everyone who had had contact with Luce during her month there. There are some three hundred and thirty permanent residents on the island, and visitor numbers are restricted to about four hundred. At that time of the year, mid-spring, Maddox reckoned there were three hundred and twenty visitors, their numbers boosted a few days before by the arrival of a dozen yachts taking part in the annual Sydney to Lord Howe Island race.

Maddox paid closest attention, naturally enough, to those nearest to Luce, the group from Sydney, interviewing each of them several times. They began by expressing their shock at what had happened and their dismay at the loss of such a wonderful friend. Their accounts of the accident were consistent, and they described the relationships within the scientific study team as harmonious and Luce’s mood as happy. However, a shadow was cast over this rather bland and comforting story by some of the other people that the police spoke to. A young woman, Sophie Kalajzich, a temporary
resident on the island working as a waitress and cleaner on a twelve-month contract, had become friends with Luce, and described her as being withdrawn and depressed on occasions, especially towards the end of her stay. She also said that Luce had referred to some disagreement among the research team, and that she felt that Luce had seemed isolated and marginalised as the only woman in the group. She mentioned that Luce had been to see the island’s doctor several times. Dr Richard Passlow confirmed that he had seen her twice, treating her for diarrhoea, nausea and insomnia. He described her mood as subdued rather than depressed.

Faced with these comments, the others in her party modified their statements. Luce had seemed a bit down lately, Curtis said, and Owen agreed that she hadn’t been her usual cheerful self, though they denied there had been a disagreement with her. Curtis put it down to the time of the month. Finally Damien, no doubt sensing the way things were going, came out with the fact that she had broken up with her boyfriend shortly before coming on the trip, and he attributed her moodiness to that. Maddox had added a note in his report that the boyfriend, Joshua Ambler, had moved to the United Kingdom and he had been unable to contact him at the London address provided. But when Maddox bluntly asked them if Luce might have taken risks on those cliffs, or even deliberately jumped, they were all adamant that that was impossible.

As I read through these statements I felt I saw Luce emerge as if through a mist, vague and unfamiliar at first, then in sharper focus, a sadder, darker version of the woman I’d known. This glimpse of her, over the gap of four years, made me feel terrible, and for a while I pushed the report away and couldn’t go on with it.

My eyes strayed to the morning newspaper on the table at
my elbow, folded to an article on the sentencing of the double-murderer on the train. Rory had sent him down for thirty-four years. It struck me as an odd figure—why not a nice round thirty-five?—until I realised that the victims had been aged sixteen and eighteen. Also, the murderer was aged thirty-three and Rory sixty-seven. A methodical and precise man, our Rory. I wondered how he might calculate my guilt.

Mary came out onto the terrace, carrying a plate of savoury tidbits that she’d been experimenting with in the kitchen. As I tried a couple, she took in the coroner’s report and the whisky.

‘I thought you were a beer man, Josh. I never saw you drink Scotch until that day Anna came.’ She tilted her head so that she could read the title on the report. ‘Where did you get that?’

‘Anna and I persuaded Damien to get hold of it for us.’

‘Ah.’ Mary sat down facing me, a worried frown on her face. ‘If you need help I could always ask Rory, you know. I’m sure he could arrange for you to talk to the policeman who went out there, if it would make you feel any better. I think his name was mentioned in the press at the time.’

‘Thanks. Maybe later.’ It was a kind thought, but the last thing I wanted was to get Rory involved.

‘I wonder if this is such a good idea, Josh, raking over the past like this.’

I looked at her in surprise. ‘I thought you were for it.’

She gave me a sad smile. ‘I didn’t realise then that you’re still in love with her. You are, aren’t you, dear?’

I blinked at her, and remembered a crack my father had made one Christmas, that Mary was a witch, with the gift of second sight. I think she’d caught him out over something to do with Pam, while my mum was still alive.

She reached forward and squeezed my hand. ‘We’re all just ships that pass in the night, Josh. For a brief time we make friends, we fall in love, and then we’re alone again. We all have to cope with that.’

‘Sure.’ I shrugged, embarrassed by this bit of homespun wisdom. Four years before I would have said coping wasn’t a problem, but I seemed to be getting softer with time. ‘With a little help from these …’ She thought I was reaching for the whisky, but instead I grabbed a couple of her savouries. She laughed and clipped my ear as she went back to the kitchen.

I was drawn back to the report by a lie. In one of his statements Marcus, the leader of the team, had described Luce as being a ‘highly skilled but impetuous climber’. I supposed he’d said it as a precaution, as a first small step to protecting himself and the university against any future accusations of negligence. But it was a lie—Luce was never impetuous. That was the amazing thing about her, that she could do the most breathtaking things with such control and deliberation.

That got me thinking about Marcus again, the most enigmatic and, for me at least, the most perplexing of our circle. For although he was one of us, it was never quite possible to forget that he was also a member of staff, a senior lecturer and director of the university’s Conservation Biology Centre within the Department of Zoology, and tutor to Luce, Curtis and Owen. He elided the two roles, teacher and friend, in a way that I hadn’t seen before at university, allowing him to slip from one to the other, so it seemed to me, according to the circumstance. His social life seemed to revolve entirely around his tutorial students, with whom he would be viciously funny, putting down his academic colleagues and deriding the ways of the university—then he’d abruptly assert the authority of his position and turn on one of them with some scolding remark.

That wasn’t the only ambiguous thing about him; it was hard to be sure how old he was, dressing young, usually in black with his hair often pulled back in a ponytail. And then there was his sexuality, a continuing topic of discussion among us. He’d never been married, and though his manner seemed mildly camp he was reputed to have once got a female student pregnant. He seemed to exercise a hold over both male and female students that to me seemed sexual.

Luce disagreed with me about this of course, putting his charisma down to his brilliance and his standing in his field. There was that; after watching that video of him in Oslo I could imagine the impact he must have had on his students. None of my lecturers were inspiring, and the idea of any of us wanting to own a video of one of them giving a conference speech was laughable. We all needed our heroes, and his green credentials were impeccable. He’d done his doctoral and post-doc studies at Oxford and Caltech, and he had an endless store of anecdotes about the great figures he had drunk and argued with—Richard Sylvan on anarchy, cannibalism and deep green theory, and Peter Singer on animal liberation, as well as the mythical Norwegian Arne Naess, with whom he claimed to have debated the eight principles of deep ecology in a sauna in the Arctic forests before falling into a vodka- and heat-induced coma.

To add to this intriguing background, Marcus lived in a very strange house half buried into a rock face in the northern Sydney suburb of Castlecrag, to which we were occasionally invited to celebrate some triumph over the reactionary establishment where he worked. He was very generous with booze and other more exotic stimulants, and after that first bemused encounter with him it seemed quite natural that he should always be around, a magus with a droll wit and a savage
contempt for the university, the government, the country and pretty much everything else.

I set the coroner’s report aside and had a look for Marcus on Google. I found an old conference website that listed some of his publications, papers on the conservation biology of declining seabird populations, the distribution of certain species of invertebrates and the ecology of the doubleheader wrasse, whatever that was. But he wasn’t listed on the university’s website any more.

I did go babysitting with Luce, but the rewards weren’t quite as I’d anticipated. Suzi answered the door of their tiny flat, and my immediate impression was that Dracula had already paid a visit. She looked deathly pale, hair lank, nails bitten short, wearing a milk-stained overall. Owen, cradling the whimpering baby in the room beyond, looked robust and reasonably unscathed by comparison.

‘Oh,’ she whispered. ‘Is it that time already? Sorry, we’re running a bit late. Come in, please.’

Luce immediately took charge. ‘No worries, we’ll take care of everything. You just get yourselves ready. You haven’t met Josh, have you, Suzi? Don’t worry, I won’t let him touch Thomas without proper supervision.’

I took a limp hand and reflected a wan smile. From the sudden increase in baby-noise it seemed to me it was Thomas rather than me that was going to need supervision, and I was interested to see how Luce would deal with it. And she did a pretty good job, after Owen and Suzi had finally been hustled out the door, of calming the little beast. For about ten minutes. Then it started again. We followed every procedure that the exhausted parents had suggested—a bottle, change of nappy, expression of wind and vomit down the back of my shirt, singing, rocking, patting, tight swaddling, liquid Nurofen and a call to a 24-hour help line—until there was only one left. This was infallible, they’d said. It involved putting the baby in his
pram and going out into the night and walking the streets—on and on, without stopping. It worked all right, but it wasn’t what I’d had in mind for our evening together, though it was a kind of bonding, I suppose, of a rather different sort.

‘I feel so sorry for Suzi,’ Luce said. ‘She looks close to collapse. Her family are no help at all, and I think she’s pretty depressed.’