Bright Air

by Barry Maitland

  There was a glimmer of light ahead, through the doorway to the study. Inside I could see Marcus’s throne, illuminated by the small table lamp.

  ‘Marcus?’

  We moved forward cautiously and more of the room came into view. It looked even more chaotic than before, with papers, books, mugs and plates scattered everywhere. As we stepped in a figure suddenly appeared at a door in the side wall, from an adjoining room I hadn’t seen before. I jumped back, startled by the mask over mouth and nose, the goggles, the white coat and gloves.

  ‘Hello?’ A man’s voice, muffled by the mask. Then he pulled off the gloves and tossed them aside, peeled off the mask and goggles, and we recognised Marcus, wearing a lab coat blotched with chemical stains and burns.

  ‘Oh, Marcus. Sorry, we knocked and called out, but the front door was open. We thought there’d been a burglary or something.’

  He looked at us in turn, frowning as if still preoccupied with whatever he’d been doing. ‘Um? No. I was just working.’ His voice sounded rough and croaky. ‘Didn’t hear you. What’s up?’

  ‘We wondered if we could have a word. We could come back if you’re in the middle of something.’

  ‘No, it’s all right. Clear a pew, will you? Want a drink? There’s some Scotch over there. Make mine a big one. Water?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  He turned back into the side room, obviously the source of the smells, which were very strong here. I found three grubby tumblers, and while I poured we heard the sound of Marcus coughing, clearing his throat and spitting, then the rush of water from a tap. He reappeared with a brimming beaker in his free hand, manoeuvring awkwardly with his stick around the obstacles, and I wondered what kind of safety risk he must be, handling chemicals. I took the beaker and slopped a little water into Anna’s and my drinks. Marcus pivoted himself down into his throne and shook his head at the water, gulping at the Scotch neat. The glow from the lamp at his elbow picked out his Adam’s apple, working like a piston in his corded throat as he swallowed greedily. His eyes seemed enlarged in his skull, the lowered lids more hooded.

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘It’s the same thing as we came about last time,’ I said. ‘We’ve been to Lord Howe Island.’

  His eyes snapped open. ‘Have you now?’

  ‘Yes. We know, Marcus.’

  ‘Know? Know what?’

  ‘About the eggs …’

  He made a baffled face. ‘Eggs?’

  I shook my head impatiently. ‘Yes, about you stealing rare eggs from the breeding grounds.’

  He just stared at me, impassive, and I thought, well, if we’re going to play poker.

  ‘And about other things.’

  I reached into my jacket pocket and brought out the phasmid, taped to a piece of card, and got up and put it in his lap without a word.

  He blinked with shock when he realised what it was.

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘It was in Luce’s chalk bag, on Balls Pyramid.’

  ‘You’ve been on Balls Pyramid?’

  ‘Yes. And we’ve talked to Bob Kelso and Damien. They’ve told us everything.’

  ‘Ah, then you do know.’ He stared sadly at the remains of the insect. ‘You do know.’

  He sucked in a deep breath and said, ‘You mustn’t blame them. It was all my fault. They only wanted to protect me. If only I’d told my friends that there could be no eggs this time, or else told Luce about it, as I told the others. But I was ashamed, you see. Shame.’ He gave a bitter smile. ‘It was the very first thing Adam and Eve experienced after the Fall, remember? After they’d tasted of the fruit of knowledge. The original human emotion. I could tell the others about the eggs, and persuade them it was all right—I could even persuade myself—but I couldn’t tell Luce. She was like my original self, long ago, before the compromises. Her faith in me was quite terrifying, you see. So she didn’t understand, and that was how the tragedy happened.’

  ‘Didn’t understand what? That you were a crook?’

  ‘Oh, Josh, really. The eggs were nothing. Those grey ternlets and Kermadec petrels are probably doomed anyway. They started their decline when we showed up on the scene, two hundred years ago. Don’t you get it yet? Didn’t Luce teach you anything? We are a curse, a plague upon the earth; we’re too many, too greedy and too smart. And we don’t want to die. We just don’t want to die. Which was why Luce had to. That’s what this was all about.’

  Now he’d lost me. He saw the puzzlement on our faces and said, ‘The phasmids.’

  I shook my head, and he said, ‘Didn’t Damien tell you about the phasmids?’

  ‘You wanted to sell them too,’ I guessed.

  He smiled. ‘Well, they certainly were a very desirable commodity—the rarest insect, the rarest invertebrate indeed, on the planet. Worth a great deal of money. My friend on the yacht was beside himself when he heard about it. The irony is that it was Luce who told him. She was chatting to him at the party, thinking he was just a pleasant, ignorant American visitor, interested in our native wildlife, and she mentioned the phasmid, and how there was a chance it still survived on Balls Pyramid. He tackled me about it soon after, insistent, very insistent, that we check it out, and I let slip that we were doing just that. I’m afraid I didn’t realise quite how ruthless a businessman he was. I had to do a lot of hard thinking, and was up half the night making preparations. And to make matters worse, Luce must have overheard something that evening, because she spoke to Damien later, and he was convinced she suspected that the rest of us were involved in something she didn’t know about. Didn’t he tell you all this?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I lied. ‘But I want to hear it from you, Marcus. I think Damien spared us some of the philosophy. We want to hear it all.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to fill up my glass.’

  I got up to do that for him and he continued with a sigh.

  ‘That first day on the Pyramid we were disappointed, but towards the end they did find insect droppings up among the melaleuca bushes on Gannet Green that seemed promising. The insects were nocturnal, so we decided to leave Curtis and Owen up there overnight to see if they could spot them with torches.

  ‘The next morning Damien, Luce and I were having an early breakfast together when Curtis came on the radio to tell me that they had been successful—they’d found and photographed half a dozen live specimens. Damien started talking about coming back later with a properly approved project to remove some of them for a breeding program at the university, and reintroduce them to Lord Howe when the rats were eradicated. But I noticed that Luce didn’t say much, watching my reaction carefully. I was sure that Damien had been right about her having suspicions, and I was in quite a bind. As soon as she left to get ready, I spoke to Damien and radioed Curtis to tell them what they had to do. They were very surprised, of course, but I insisted, and they had to agree.

  ‘Bob took us back out to the Pyramid, and Luce and Damien went ashore and climbed up to Gannet Green with food and hot drinks for the other two. Something about the way they were behaving made Luce suspicious, and she noticed Damien passing Curtis a pack I’d given him. When Curtis said that she and Damien should return to the boat while they cleared up their things, she sensed that something was wrong. She asked them what was going on, and said she wanted to look in the pack. They refused, but she grabbed it. They tried to stop her opening it, but she was too quick for them and pulled out the container inside. Curtis grabbed it and in the confusion it fell to the ground and burst open.’ He shrugged, took a sip of his drink and shuddered.

  ‘What was in it?’

  ‘Black rats,’ he said softly. ‘A large breeding pair. Harry Kelso had caught them in the traps he has set, and I persuaded him to let me have them. They jumped out and scuttled off into the rocks.’

  We both stared at him, stunned, imagining the scene.

  ‘But … why?’ Anna finally managed to gasp.

  But I thought I knew. ‘Supply and
demand,’ I suggested.

  He smiled, as at a satisfactory student. ‘The merchant banker is correct. My dealer friend didn’t just want some phasmids, he wanted all of the phasmids, the only ones. That was his demand, the last living phasmids on the planet. He wanted to corner the market. He didn’t want someone coming back later and finding more. He made it plain that life would be very uncomfortable for me if I didn’t oblige him. I really hadn’t seen that side of him before.’

  I tried to imagine Luce’s reaction as she watched those rats scuttling off among the rocks, trying to come to terms with the extent of the others’ treachery, Marcus’s most of all.

  ‘She wasn’t running away from the others,’ Anna said. ‘She was trying to catch the rats.’

  ‘Exactly. I was worried she’d have an accident, and I told them over the radio to try to reason with her, tell her the truth. But it was too late for that. Far too late.’

  I felt sick, still finding it hard to absorb the extent of Marcus’s fall from grace. ‘So there’s a breeding stock of phasmids somewhere in the States, is there?’

  ‘No, no. I’d already told Curtis and Owen to kill the ones they’d captured. I told my friend that we’d had no success, that it was plain that there were no phasmids left alive. Which was now in fact true.’

  Now we just gawped at him. The man was unbelievable. ‘You killed them all? You exterminated a whole species? In God’s name, why?’

  ‘So you didn’t really know the story. Well, no matter. I’ll tell you, then you can judge.’

  The rain was picking up again outside, pattering against the glass of the French windows.

  ‘The Lord Howe phasmid was a very special creature. I’d been studying it for years.’

  ‘How could you study it, if it was supposed to be extinct?’ I objected.

  ‘There were a number of records from the time when they were plentiful on the island, up until the arrival of the rats. People were clearly fascinated by them. They believed that the females could reproduce by parthenogenesis, cloning themselves without the aid of males. And they wrote of their longevity, how a favourite phasmid living tamely in a family garden, almost as a pet, would survive from generation to generation.

  ‘I also got hold of phasmid remains. Harry had found some on his treks across the island and made them available to me. I carried out tests to establish their age, and found they were extraordinarily old. I could see a good evolutionary reason for this. Imagine you are a very well-adapted creature, living on a tiny island, remote from the rest of the world and with no predators. How should you reproduce? If you do it the normal way, frantically breeding every spring, you risk overpopulating and upsetting the balance of your habitat. One response would then be to evolve a shorter and shorter life cycle, so as to restrict your numbers by speeding up the natural process of death. Or you could go the other way—you could restrict your breeding to cover the minimal replacement of accidental deaths, and extend each individual’s life span almost indefinitely. That’s what the phasmids had done. Over the millennia, they had evolved their own immortality gene. As long as their habitat remained unchanged, they could live pretty well forever, but as soon as the black rats arrived, they were doomed. They simply couldn’t breed their way out of extinction.’

  I said, ‘So your dealer wouldn’t have been able to breed them?’

  ‘Oh, that wasn’t the problem. I’m sure he could have created conditions favourable to faster breeding. No, the problem was what would happen when he discovered that he had the world’s sole supply of a creature with a built-in immortality gene. A rare insect is one thing, but this … Its value would have been beyond anything.

  ‘Did Luce not tell you about Arne Naess’s eight principles of deep ecology, the principles that must underlie any part that we may have in sustainable life on this planet?’

  ‘I think she did mention …’

  He shook his head. Bad student. ‘The fifth principle states that the flourishing of both human and non-human life requires a substantial decrease of human population. As I said, we are a plague, and our population is out of control. And we don’t want to die. Imagine the discovery of the immortality gene, and its transfer to the human genome. It would be a catastrophe, unimaginable …’

  He let that sink in for a moment, then he murmured, ‘That’s why the phasmids had to die.’ And then, almost a whisper, ‘That’s why Luce had to die.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What if she killed the rats? What if she and the phasmids survived out there, and she was rescued? What if she came back and told the world? We simply couldn’t risk it.’

  ‘So …’ I hesitated, knowing that we’d finally reached the cusp, the moment of truth, and that the next seconds would change our lives forever. ‘So, what did you do?’

  ‘On the fifth day, when the search had moved far out to sea, I sent Damien and Curtis out to the Pyramid in a Zodiac from my friend’s yacht. Owen didn’t have the stomach for it. I must say I didn’t blame him. They found her eventually.’

  ‘She was alive?’

  He nodded. ‘Weak, but alive.’

  ‘What did they do?’

  He gazed sombrely at me. ‘I’m sorry, Josh.’

  The room erupted in noise. Through a singing in my ears I heard Anna wailing, and another voice, my own, screaming, You bastards! You fucking bastards! She was pregnant! and Marcus’s startled face as I lunged for him and tried to smash my fist into his face. We tumbled and fell, struggling, in a heap on the floor. At some point the singing in my ears faded, and I found myself sitting astride Marcus, his terrified face staring up at me. I got off him and staggered to my feet. My right hand felt as if I’d broken a bone.

  Anna went and crouched over him.

  ‘Have I killed him?’ I panted.

  ‘No, of course not.’

  I heard him groan as she helped him sit upright.

  ‘Damien,’ I said. ‘I’m going to get Damien.’

  ‘I’ll come too.’ She came running after me, leaving Marcus sprawled against the legs of his throne.

  We ran blindly out into the night, got into the car, and somehow manoeuvred the winding lanes at speed, out onto the main road. At some point, I’m not sure where, we stopped at traffic lights, and I said, ‘Fuck. What if Marcus makes a run for it?’

  We weren’t really thinking clearly, adrenaline buzzing wildly. Anna said, ‘I’ll go back, make sure he doesn’t.’

  ‘I’ll turn around.’

  ‘No, there’s a cab over there. You go on. Should we call the police?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘Not yet.’

  She jumped out of the car, the lights turned green, I took off and I saw the cab driving away without her. But all I could think about was getting to Damien.

  24

  As I crossed the Harbour Bridge I looked up at the glittering ramparts around Circular Quay, wondering if Damien was sitting up there on one of those bright ledges with his newly pregnant wife, sipping champagne. And I had a blinding image of myself bursting in on them, and hurling him off, out into the night.

  I parked some way beyond his entrance and walked back, breathing deeply, trying to calm myself, and reached the glass doors just behind two couples, chatting cheerfully together. One of the men spoke loudly into the speaker, and I heard Damien’s name. Then the door clicked open and I was following them in. They oohed and aahed in the lobby just as Mary and I had done. Another pale figure was plying through the water in the pool overhead. I went on to the lift and pressed the button, and they all piled in behind me.

  I noticed that they were eyeing me dubiously as they got into the lift, and I supposed I must look a bit dishevelled. I said, sounding unnaturally jolly, ‘Twenty-eight, yes? Damien and …’ I suddenly couldn’t remember her name. My head was spinning.

  ‘Lauren, yes,’ the one who’d spoken into the entry phone said. ‘Are you feeling all right?’

  I wiped a hand through my hair and tucked the half of my shirt that had co
me out back into my trousers. ‘Yes, yes, fine.’ The lift was accelerating skyward.

  ‘Quite a surprise!’ I said. They looked blank. ‘About the baby?’

  ‘Baby? What baby?’

  ‘Well—Lauren’s baby.’

  The women both squealed. ‘Lauren’s pregnant? So that’s what this is all about! She sounded so mysterious on the phone!’

  ‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘You didn’t know? I’ve spoiled the surprise. Don’t let on, will you?’

  The lift sighed to a halt and everyone spilled out to greet the waiting Lauren, who kissed them all in turn and then stared at me with a puzzled half-smile.

  ‘Josh?’

  ‘Hi, Lauren,’ I said, conscious of the others waiting to see how this was going to go. ‘I need to have a word with Damien. It’s extremely urgent.’

  ‘Well … but he’s not here. Someone called, his friend. He needed Damien urgently too. He left fifteen minutes ago. Is this the same thing? What on earth is going on?’

  ‘Which friend was that, Lauren?’ I said, and I realised that the tone of my voice was alarming her.

  ‘Marcus, Marcus Fenn. Damien said he had to go over there right away, to help him, some kind of emergency. What—’ But I had turned away and was thumping the lift button. The doors slid open and I jumped in.

  Something had happened on the Harbour Bridge, an accident of some kind, and all the northbound traffic was being forced into one single lane. I swore and beat my hand in frustration on the wheel and the minutes ticked by as we slowly edged forward. I tried phoning Anna but got only her answering service. At last I was past the obstacle and speeding on through North Sydney towards Castlecrag. When I finally turned down into The Citadel I saw a small BMW standing outside Marcus’s house. I pulled up beyond it and as I flung open my door I heard a woman’s scream. I ran to the top of the entrance drive and saw the front door of the house crash open and Anna come tumbling out, silhouetted against the light. A second figure followed—Damien, but a Damien possessed, roaring like an enraged animal. He brought her down with a flying tackle and I leaped towards them, lost my footing on the slippery moss, and crashed on top of them. We struggled for a moment, then Damien disentangled himself and stumbled upright. For a second he stared down at me, eyes wild, open mouth gasping for breath, then turned and ran back into the house, slamming the door shut behind him.