Bright Air

by Barry Maitland

  ‘Has Bob Kelso spoken to you?’

  ‘Indeed. He told me about your little adventure. Pretty impressive, actually. He said you got to the top of Balls Pyramid. Amazing. You must be in better shape than I thought. Anna too.’ He grinned. ‘Bob phoned me as soon as he’d put you on the plane back. The poor bloke was worried. It wasn’t his fault. He just got caught up in something he wished he hadn’t.’

  I didn’t say anything, watching his face, his body language.

  ‘He said you found a note.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  ‘I haven’t got it here.’

  ‘Well, what did it say?’

  ‘I’d rather hear your side of the story, Damien.’

  He looked rather pained. ‘You don’t have to be like that, Josh. From what Bob said you’d pretty much worked it out anyway.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘About the eggs, right? It was true. Marcus had been collecting eggs for sale to dealers for some time apparently.’ He saw the look on my face. ‘I know! It sounds incredible, Marcus of all people. The thing was that, brilliant scientist as he no doubt was, he was pretty hopeless at getting research money. He was arrogant, he thought the review process demeaning, and he’d managed to offend or personally insult just about every one of his peers at one time or another. As a result he wasn’t very successful with his grant applications. So he decided to supplement his research money by selling eggs. The way he put it to us, his birds were helping him save their necks by making a small contribution. He insisted the numbers were small, and made no difference to the breeding populations.’

  ‘When did he explain this to you?’

  ‘After we agreed to be part of his team. As he described it, it didn’t seem like such a big deal. Marcus was the expert, and if he said it was okay, well, we thought it must be all right. It was a matter of loyalty as much as anything else.’

  ‘Yes.’ That did sound right. They were all very loyal to Marcus, their hip priest.

  ‘Are you telling me that Luce was in on this?’

  ‘No. I doubt whether she would have agreed to it, but Marcus never took the chance. He thought she was very special, you know. Full of the ideals that had driven him, and she trusted him implicitly. And that was the problem. She had no idea. Marcus asked me to be her climbing partner and help her do the scientific stuff and keep her out of harm’s way, while the other two did the collecting. We thought it was all a bit of a lark.’

  I felt that old nauseous reflux of jealousy. He had to stay close to her, distract her, amuse her.

  ‘Why didn’t Marcus just leave her out of the team?’

  ‘He couldn’t. She was mad keen to go, she was the brightest student, the best climber. He just couldn’t.’

  ‘But she found out what was going on?’

  ‘I think she began to get a hint of something almost as soon as they arrived on the island. It’s hard to keep secrets when you’re all living together—a whisper, a nudge, a conversation that stops suddenly when you walk into the room. But she couldn’t be sure, not until the yachts arrived. Marcus wasn’t a very good actor. He got pretty anxious as the time got closer. There were some heated phone calls. The dealer was putting pressure on him. Marcus began to get very agitated during the party at the Kelsos’ for the yacht crews when he saw Luce talking to the guy. He got me to butt in and try to get her away, but it wasn’t easy. Apparently Luce had overheard him talking to Marcus about Kermadec petrel eggs, which was a bit of a giveaway, because they can only be found on Balls Pyramid, and our visit there was supposed to be a secret. She wanted to know what was going on, and I tried to fob her off. But I was a bit drunk and stupid, while she was sober and sharp as a needle. I don’t know exactly what she imagined, but she stormed off. I’m not sure what happened after that, but the next morning she didn’t say much, and watched everything we were doing like a hawk.’

  ‘So what happened the next day?’

  ‘Bob took us out to Balls Pyramid as planned, and we climbed up to Gannet Green. I was supposed to lead Luce round to the west flank, out of sight of Curtis and Owen, who were after a colony of petrels they’d spotted on the east. At first she seemed to go along with it, but then I turned to say something to her and she was gone. I scrambled back the way we’d come, and when I looked over the ridge I saw her, climbing down to where the other two were crouching among the melaleuca bushes. I called out, and they looked up and saw her. She started shouting at them … I couldn’t hear what they were saying. There were gulls wheeling and screaming all around us, and the wind was whistling in the rocks. Then Luce suddenly took off, racing up to the ridge, I don’t know why. Curtis was on the radio, to Marcus I assume, and then he and Owen set off after her. I followed, but I couldn’t keep up. Eventually I gave up and just waited until Curtis and Owen came back down. They said they’d lost her.’

  ‘They didn’t try to hurt her? You’re sure that wasn’t why she ran?’

  ‘God, no, Josh. Nothing like that.’

  We sat in silence for a while.

  Disgust, I decided, was what had driven Luce off like that. Disgust with the friends who had so comprehensively deceived her; disgust with the teacher who had opened her eyes to the truth and then perverted it with his corruption and greed; disgust with her species that couldn’t help destroying everything it touched, even on that lonely unspoilt place. And disgust, surely, with the lover who had left her with that little worm in her belly.

  ‘Please,’ Damien said at last, ‘please don’t make more of this than there is. In the final analysis it was a tragic accident. She stormed off, refused to come back down, and got caught by the weather on a dangerously exposed place.’

  I suppose it was what I wanted to hear, the best that could be made of it.

  ‘Of course, Curtis and Owen were stricken with guilt. That’s why Owen said what he did to Anna.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So …’ He leaned forward in his seat, watching me carefully. ‘The note.’

  ‘It was a poem, of despair,’ I said. But was it really?

  ‘What, a suicide note?’

  ‘Not in so many words.’

  ‘Where did you find it?’

  ‘At the summit.’

  ‘You’re kidding! She got to the top? That’s eighteen hundred feet! Well, you know—you climbed it. But there were two of you. How would you describe it?’

  ‘Tough,’ I said. ‘I really don’t know how she managed it.’ I didn’t mention that she’d abandoned her climbing gear. It had been heroic really, the climb of her life, like Lynn Hill on El Capitan.

  I took a swallow of my Scotch. It burned. ‘I’ll speak to Marcus.’

  ‘Please don’t,’ Damien said quickly. ‘Marcus is a mess right now. You’ve seen him, haven’t you? He can’t tell you anything more. It was a tragic accident, and everyone involved has paid dearly for it.’

  Sitting in that beautiful apartment overlooking Circular Quay, sipping a ten-year-old malt, I felt that wasn’t quite the way for Damien to put it. He saw the mistake register on my face and quickly added, ‘Think of Curtis and Owen’s families, for God’s sake. Do you really want to brand those two as murderers? They were your friends.’

  ‘I know.’

  He leaned even closer across the gap towards me, as if wanting to physically bridge the rift between us. ‘I do appreciate you coming here to talk about this, Josh, and letting me explain. We were mates once; I hope we still can be. I know you’re a level-headed bloke. But it’s worried me, having Anna involved. She’s inclined to be a bit hysterical, when it comes to this subject. Did she tell you she went for me at the inquest? After one of the sessions, when Curtis said I wasn’t at the scene when the accident happened, she flew at me, said I should have been there. She was a very disturbed young woman, believe me.’

  ‘Why did you tell them you weren’t there?’

  He spread his hands. ‘I panicked, basically. Just couldn’t face the pro
spect of having to give an eyewitness account.’ But it didn’t sound like panic to me, more like risk management.

  ‘Josh,’ he said, ‘please calm her down. She’s got to get over this. I could get ten years for smuggling native wildlife and misleading the coroner, you know. Ten years.’

  23

  I returned to Potts Point feeling the need to unwind before going back to the hotel, and stopped at the pub around the corner. I felt exhausted after all that had happened recently, capped by that talk with Damien. Thinking about it, I remembered the feeling I’d had when I met him at Curtis and Owen’s funeral, as if I’d been worked over by a pro. Basically he’d fed back to me a more acceptable version of the scenario I had put to Bob on the boat. He’d confirmed what I’d suspected, but little else. The only time he’d seemed at all hesitant was when talking about Luce’s note. Perhaps I could have made more of that, but I wasn’t quite sure how. I had a couple of schooners of New and began to feel a little better. Between the thump of the music from upstairs and the footy commentary on the big TV, it occurred to me that I should try to trace the source of that verse of Luce’s. It certainly wasn’t what I’d have been tempted to write as my parting shot to a cruel world.

  I couldn’t get any results for the first line on Google, so the next day I went out to the university library to see if I could track it down. It took me a couple of hours, but I found it eventually, a passage from the surviving fragments of a poem by an ancient Greek philosopher by the name of Empedocles, called On Nature, which made a kind of sense, although I couldn’t remember Luce ever showing an interest in the classics. But Empedocles would certainly have interested her. Apparently he was the first to propose a detailed explanation of the origins of species, and of the mechanisms by which a couple form an embryo. He was also a radical pacifist and vegetarian, believing that animal slaughter was murder, meat-eating the equivalent of cannibalism, and animal sacrifice a blasphemy. It was he who originated the idea that the world was made up of four elements—earth, water, air and fire. He suggested that two opposing forces operated on these elements: one, which he called philia, or love, to bind them together, and the other, neikos, or strife, to break them apart. So the passage Luce quoted was really about the basic physics of the world:

  For with earth do we see earth,

  with water water,

  with air bright air,

  with fire consuming fire,

  with Love do we see Love,

  Strife with dread Strife.

  But Luce had altered the last line, changing Strife to Death. Was that a mistake, or deliberate?

  Empedocles was a mystic, too, with lots of ideas about the transmigration of souls and the cycle of reincarnation through various natural forms, and the more I read, the more I was reminded of Marcus Fenn’s ramblings about Steiner. I also remembered him quoting Greek sources in that video of him at Oslo, and I thought he must have put Luce onto this.

  I also discovered a rather disconcerting thing about Empedocles, concerning his death. It was said that he killed himself by climbing to the top of Mount Etna and throwing himself into the active crater, so that no one would find his body and people would think that he had been taken up to heaven as a god. When I read that I felt the hairs prickle on the back of my neck. The legend went on to say that the volcano coughed up one of his bronze sandals, revealing the deception. Another version had it that the volcano erupted when he jumped in, sending him flying up to the moon, where he still wanders around, living on dew. I thought of the moon guiding us out of the lagoon that night at Lord Howe.

  More confused than enlightened by this research, I returned to my room at the hotel. Luce’s chalk bag was lying on the desk, and I opened it and saw again the black insect curled up inside. The sight of it took me back to the pinnacle of Balls Pyramid, as the first fierce spots of rain had hit us. I pulled the insect out and disentangled it as best I could, and was surprised by its size—five inches, twelve centimetres, long. Its shiny black shell was tinged with red, and of its six legs, the rear pair were the biggest and most muscular. I had never seen anything like it; it seemed rather primitive and formidable, and I wondered what it was doing in Luce’s bag.

  So later that morning I took it to the Australian Museum in the centre of the city, threading my way through a long crocodile of ankle-biters in school uniforms queuing up the steps and through the sandstone entrance. A helpful woman at the inquiry desk told me to take the lift to an office on an upper floor, where another woman, equally patient and attentive, scrutinised my grubby little specimen. I felt faintly ridiculous, like one of the schoolboys down below, showing his very interesting find.

  ‘Oh! I know what that is. Goodness. Was your grandfather a sailor or something?’

  I looked perplexed.

  ‘I just thought … This is extinct, you see. Has been for years. Dryococelus australis—the phantom phasmid.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The Lord Howe Island Land Lobster. It’s a phasmid, a kind of stick insect. It was only ever found on Lord Howe Island, and it was killed off when rats got ashore from a grounded ship in 1918. We have quite a few specimens in our entomology collection. There’s one on display in Insects, down on level two. So, how did you come by it?’

  ‘Oh … long story. A friend found it. Bit like what you said, probably, left by some old relative.’ Old Uncle Marcus perhaps. ‘So it’s been extinct for a while?’

  ‘Oh yes. There’s a small island near Lord Howe where they found the last remains, but no live specimens unfortunately.’

  ‘That wouldn’t have been Balls Pyramid, would it?’

  She beamed at me, clever boy. ‘That’s right! Some people landed there in the sixties, and found a few dead phasmids.’

  I found their specimen on level two, in a glass case labelled RARE AND CURIOUS. Apparently it was extinct on Lord Howe by 1935. In 1966 three dead ones were found by the first climbers on Balls Pyramid. How they’d got there was a mystery, for the phasmid was wingless.

  I walked out of the museum, crossed the street to Hyde Park and sat on a bench in the sun. Young office workers were lying on the grass, eating sandwiches and sunning themselves. I was thinking of the sentence in Luce’s draft final letter to me.

  I feel like the last phasmid. so sad.

  So she’d been thinking about the phasmid before she went out to Balls Pyramid on that final fatal day. Perhaps she had written the draft the day before, after they’d made their first landing there, maybe on the evening of the party. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that the group would have been much more interested in investigating the phasmid on Balls Pyramid than yet more gulls’ eggs. The rats had never reached the Pyramid, so no one could have been sure that these strange creatures hadn’t survived out there. What could be more intriguing to a bunch of young zoologists than the possibility of rediscovering something thought extinct for seventy years? And yet Damien hadn’t mentioned it.

  If Luce found the dead phasmid on her final climb, did she keep it in her chalk bag with the note as another kind of veiled message? If so, it, like the poem, could surely only have been directed at Marcus. It upset me to think that her two final messages might have been intended for him. But what did they mean?

  I was struggling with this when my phone played a little tune in my pocket. It was Anna, wondering if I’d spoken to Damien yet. I apologised for not getting back to her sooner, and told her about my talk with him.

  ‘Mm …’ I could imagine her eyebrows furrowed in concentration as she thought about it. ‘It does sound right, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You’re not sure? It’s pretty close to what you thought, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose that’s what bothers me. He already knew all about our trip—Bob had called him.’

  ‘Oh. But still …’

  Then I told her about the poem and the land lobster, and the way they seemed to refer back to Marcus.

  ‘Damien was particul
arly keen that we shouldn’t talk to Marcus again. Too upsetting for the poor bloke.’

  ‘You want to go anyway?’

  ‘Yes. He also wanted me to get you to back off. You’re too hysterical, apparently.’

  ‘Hysterical? Me?’

  ‘Yes. He said you attacked him at the inquest.’

  ‘Oh, that. It was a bad time for me, Josh. I told you.’

  ‘Yes. So, you want to go out to Castlecrag tonight? We could grab a bite to eat first.’

  I picked her up from her flat that evening at six, and we had a pizza on our way through town. There was a sudden shower and the traffic slowed and became more congested, headlights and wipers on. By the time we reached Castlecrag the light was fading beneath the heavy clouds. I turned off into the winding laneways of the Griffins’ estate, and came to a stop outside the house in The Citadel.

  It seemed to be in total darkness and I thought we were wasting our time, but then Anna noticed a glimmer of light from a small side window. I parked on the verge further down the street where it was slightly wider, and we hurried back through the rain towards the rugged stone bunker, brooding beneath its dripping canopy of foliage. I almost slipped in the pitch-dark defile of the entry pathway, treacherous with wet moss, then rapped the knocker on the heavy front door, which swung open of its own accord. A sigh seemed to come out of the house, like a gasp of its own breath, heavy with the odours of damp and mould and sour age, which made the hairs prickle on the back of my neck.

  ‘Marcus?’ I called out. ‘Dr Fenn?’

  There was no reply, and we stepped tentatively over the threshold and I ran my fingers across the cold wall feeling for a switch. I found it finally and switched the light on, a rather dim, low-watt bulb in a heavy shade. Directly beneath it we saw papers scattered across the floor, as if there had been a robbery. We stepped cautiously across them to the sitting room, with its obstacle course of heavy furniture. There didn’t seem to be any obvious signs of disturbance here, but the building’s breath was more pungent, a cocktail of strange odours—burnt sulphur, ammonia, bad eggs, the vapour of concentrated acid. They were the remembered smells of the school chemistry lab.