Bright Air Read online

  ‘The room was warm and after a while my attention drifted. I felt exhausted by it all, the journey, the emotion, and the knowledge of how it was going to end. It was almost like a physical thing, like gravity, the drag of death on life.’

  Anna hesitated, glancing at me, and I nodded encouragingly.

  ‘Anyway, I got up and stretched and walked around, and when I glanced at him again I was amazed to see that his eyes were open, looking straight up at me. I spoke to him, told him who I was, and how Suzi would be there to see him soon, and he listened and seemed to understand. His mouth made a smile and then he said in a whisper, Tell her I love her.

  ‘I wanted to hold his hand or something, but there was nothing of him that I could touch. Tears filled my eyes. He must have registered this because his lips moved again. He said, No regrets. You remember how we used to say that?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘I repeated it back to him, No regrets. They felt pretty hollow now, those stupid words. He closed his eyes and I thought he was gone, but the machines were still pumping away. Then, after a long while, his lids flicked open again and his eyes were wide and bright. Only one, he said. I asked him what that was, thinking he’d say something about his children, but instead he said, Luce.

  ‘I wasn’t sure if I’d misheard, and I repeated, Luce? Yes, he said. I thought I saw her on the mountain, just before I fell. Snow dazzle … But what if I do meet her again? What can I say? I didn’t know how to answer. He gave a sigh and said, We killed her, you know.

  ‘I thought he was getting confused, and I said, No, Owen, it was an accident, like this, the same as you. No, no, he said. That’s what we told everyone, but it wasn’t true. He was staring straight into my eyes and he seemed quite coherent. It didn’t happen that way, Anna. You see, he knew my name, he knew who I was.’

  ‘He actually said “We killed her”?’ I asked, incredulous. The story made my skin creep, even though I simply couldn’t believe it. I sensed myself edging away from it, something that I really didn’t want to hear.

  ‘Yes, exactly as I’ve told you. I started to tell him he was wrong, but he just closed his eyes and gave another big sigh and said, Forgive me, Luce. He didn’t speak or open his eyes again. At about two in the morning the machines let off an alarm, and the nurses made me leave. He died soon after.’

  We sat in silence for a while. Lights were coming on in the windows across the bay, and I said, feeling how incongruous the words were, ‘I have to switch on the hotel lights, Anna. Hang on, I’ll be back in a minute.’

  As I went around the house I thought about what she’d said. It was awful, surely too awful to be taken seriously. Yet Anna clearly did. I tried to imagine what it must have been like to listen to Owen’s words, and then to dwell on them all through the following traumatic days. No, Anna wasn’t now the same girl I’d known as a student. Thinking about the way she’d handled this, I realised how much she’d changed in those four years. There had been no trace of melodrama in her telling of it. She seemed so much more serious, more deliberate—more adult, I supposed.

  I returned to the terrace with the bottle of wine and refilled her glass.

  ‘Who else have you told about this, Anna?’

  ‘No one. I’ve been wrestling with it for the past ten days, quietly going mad.’

  ‘I can imagine. You haven’t spoken to Damien, or Marcus?’

  She shook her head, but didn’t elaborate. ‘The other day I remembered your aunt saying you were coming back, and I had to come into town today, and I thought, if you were here, I’d mention it to you.’

  I thought it odd, not only her not talking to Damien but also not phoning the hotel to make sure I’d be in, as if she were so reluctant to share this that she had left it in the hands of fate.

  ‘I’m glad you did, Anna. Look, he was delirious, surely. His brain would have been scrambled by the fall—how far did they fall anyway?’

  ‘About forty metres.’

  ‘There you are then.’

  ‘Into snow. No, his brain was about the only bit of him that they didn’t seem too worried about. And he really did sound clear-headed, just for those few minutes.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean he wasn’t hallucinating. He’d have been stuffed full of drugs, massively traumatised, on the point of death.’

  ‘I’ve tried to convince myself of that, but you weren’t there, Josh. You didn’t hear the certainty in his voice.’

  I decided to try another tack. ‘There was an inquest into Luce’s death, wasn’t there? Did you attend?’

  ‘Yes, every day.’

  ‘Was there any suggestion of doubt? Any hint of foul play?’

  ‘No. But they never found a body, and the rest of the group all told the same story, so there was no reason to doubt it.’

  Curtis, Owen and Damien, the three who’d been climbing with Luce, and the organiser of the trip, Marcus Fenn. That was about all I knew of what had happened, that and the place—Lord Howe Island, out in the Pacific, five hundred kilometres off the New South Wales coast. Of the six of us who used to climb together, Anna and I were the missing pair. I wondered if she felt as guilty about that as I did. But then, she had no reason to.

  ‘It’s preposterous, Anna, to suggest that they would have deliberately done anything to Luce.’

  ‘I know …’ She shook her head helplessly. ‘How much do you know about her accident?’

  ‘Not a lot. Mary sent me a newspaper cutting.’

  ‘I remember she came to the service.’

  ‘Oh, yes, that’s right. She told me about it, how so many people were there.’ But not me. Not me.

  Anna reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a blue plastic folder. She handed it to me. ‘I kept some cuttings.’

  ‘Ah.’ I stared down at the file but didn’t open it. It only weighed a few grams, but it felt much more, and I understood why she looked so tired.

  ‘Have a look—not now. Read it and maybe we can talk again.’

  ‘All right, but I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. I mean, you just have to remember how we all were, Anna. There’s no way …’

  We swapped phone numbers and she got to her feet and began to make for the door. I followed, thinking that the hotel felt strangely quiet. It was as if the place were under a spell.

  I opened the front door for her, and she turned and gave me a little smile, sad and wistful. ‘I’m sorry, Josh. I had to tell someone.’

  ‘Oh sure, of course. I’m very glad you did.’ But that wasn’t true.

  We walked together across the forecourt of the hotel, what had once been a front garden but was now brick-paved to provide a few parking spaces for guests. Cars hummed past in the street, their headlights on in the fading twilight.

  At the pavement she glanced back at the hotel. ‘This is a wonderful place, isn’t it? We all came here once, didn’t we? Your aunt gave us lunch.’

  ‘Yes, I remember.’ The memory tugged at me, a warm and happy day, and on an impulse, as she turned to go, I added, ‘Look, apart from this business, Anna, we should catch up, have a drink or a meal or something.’

  She nodded without much enthusiasm, and I realised that she must have been as reluctant as I to make this contact, to cross that chasm back to the past.

  2

  Anna was right, it was a fine old building, though it seemed somewhat forbidding now as I returned to the front door, its upper floor balconies dark like empty eye sockets. Mary had carefully researched its story, and had a summary printed in little pamphlets she gave to guests. She had also had a number of old photographs illustrating its history enlarged and framed and hung along the hall, and I paused over these now as a distraction, hesitating to approach the file that Anna had left for me.

  The first picture was of the architect, an elderly man with a white beard in the Edwardian style, and I imagined him deciding to let rip on this final grand commission, for he chose an extravagant version of the Federation Queen Anne style that was
already going out of fashion at the time. The house’s two storeys were a pattern book of wall finishes—shingles, roughcast render and tuck-pointed brickwork—and its roof was embellished with extravagant chimneys, attic windows and ridge tiles. It had oriel windows, bay windows and dormer windows, and its many balconies were draped with ornamental brackets and posts elaborated with curvilinear Art Nouveau decoration.

  It was in fact a wonderful tour de force, and deserved the spacious leafy surroundings it had once enjoyed, and which were apparent in the second picture, taken almost a hundred years ago. It showed the building newly completed as The Moorings, the home of a broker and financier and his large family, who were all posed outside the front. They looked immensely pleased with their grand new house in the best residential suburb of the inner city, on the ridge of Potts Point, high above the boats in the bays of Sydney Harbour all around, but I knew that disturbances were on their way. Within a year, Kingsclere, the first Manhattan-style apartment building in Sydney, was being erected nearby in Macleay Street, and the character of the leafy suburb would begin to change forever. And a couple of years after that the war in Europe would be under way. I wondered how many of those teenage boys, ranged in ascending height next to their father, ended up on the Western Front.

  But it was the Depression that did for the owners of The Moorings, apparently, and they had departed by the time of the third picture, taken at the start of the Second World War. The house had clearly gone downhill, turned into bed-sits for dockyard workers and navy people, and its decline continued into the 1960s, when it was photographed by Gordon Harris, newly arrived in Australia and armed with a small inheritance and some experience in the hotel trade in Inverness. The Moorings became the Harris Hotel, and almost immediately Gordon met and married my Aunt Mary. There was a picture of them both outside the hotel soon after their wedding, and it was clear that Gordon, something of a dreamer, had made a very astute choice in the practical and hard-working woman at his side. Together they turned the place into a refuge for visitors to Sydney, its reputation passed on by word of mouth between naval administrators visiting HMAS Kuttabul at the end of the point, lawyers attending the Family and Supreme courts, and country politicians with business in state parliament. When Gordon died, Mary just kept on going. The final photograph showed her at the front door, the house now shouldered by much taller, blunter neighbours, inner-city apartment blocks that overshadowed the remnants of its old gardens.

  It had always had a magical, enveloping character in my mind, a true sanctuary, and it was the first place I’d thought of when I returned to Sydney. But, for all its sheltering homeliness, it couldn’t keep out the world, nor, it seemed, my own past.

  There was some roast beef in the kitchen fridge, and I carved a few slices and made myself a sandwich. I took it to Mary’s sitting room, leaving the door slightly ajar so that I could hear anyone coming into the hotel. Helping myself to another Scotch from her bottle, I sat down in one of her plump armchairs with the folder on my knee. I didn’t want to open it because I could guess what would confront me, but eventually I had no choice. I turned over the flap and there it was, a picture of Luce. Even though I’d anticipated the effect, it still punched the breath out of me. As I stared at that familiar face, a happier version of the one I’d said goodbye to, a detached part of my mind coolly told me that I’d avoided this moment for four years, taken every kind of evasive action to put it off. In the matter of Luce’s death I hadn’t even got past stage one of grieving. I was still in denial.

  Perhaps it was the same with all the deaths I’d experienced—Grandpa’s, Uncle Gordon’s, Mum’s—all numbed, blanked out, never really confronted. But Luce was different, the first really important relationship in my life not framed by family ties, but freely chosen, miraculously given, then tossed aside.

  The picture was an enlarged photocopy from a newspaper report, captioned Climbing tragedy: young scientist named. I think they’d got the picture from her father, taken probably at the time of her twenty-first birthday, for she was wearing a gold locket that had belonged to her mother and which he gave her on that day. She had a slightly cheesy smile as if for a special photo occasion, and the corners of her eyes were creased with love. And so alive, so brimming with life. I couldn’t bear it and quickly turned the page.

  To be met by the same picture again, smaller this time, with the accompanying report below.

  Police today released the name of the young woman missing on Lord Howe Island after a climbing accident and now presumed dead. Lucy Corcoran, 22, was a member of a university scientific field-study team surveying seabird breeding colonies on the steep cliffs below Mount Gower at the south end of the idyllic island. The team leader, biologist Dr Marcus Fenn, described how Corcoran, a very experienced climber, had become separated from her companions on the afternoon of Monday 2 October, before falling to the ocean, a hundred metres below where they were working. Islanders were joined yesterday by crews from boats in the Sydney to Lord Howe yacht race, recently arrived at the island, in searching for Lucy’s body. However, local fishermen say that strong currents around the island, as well as recent shark activity, make it increasingly unlikely that her remains will be recovered. A police officer from Sydney has arrived on the island to assist local police in preparing a report for the NSW Coroner. The university has issued a statement expressing deep regret and announcing that it will hold its own investigation into the circumstances of Miss Corcoran’s accident.

  Recent shark activity … Didn’t that seem a bit gratuitous? How would her family have felt, reading that? And what did it mean, had become separated from her companions?

  I read on, through several other pages of photocopied press cuttings, from the first tentative report of an accident to the summary of the coroner’s findings six months later. Much of it was repetitive, some contradictory, but as I read I also began to recall things Luce had told me about the expedition at the time. I remembered her explaining that birds migrating down the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand really only had two islands available on which to rest, feed, mate and breed—Lord Howe and Norfolk. They were thus the focus of intense bird activity, and important centres for scientific study. Marcus Fenn had led teams to Lord Howe in previous Septembers as part of an ongoing research program, mostly comprising honours and postgraduate students from the zoology courses he taught at the university. In that particular year he had the unusual circumstance that three of the students in his honours tutorial group—Luce, Curtis and Owen—were Alpine-grade climbers, and he had decided to use them to extend the study into areas that had previously been inaccessible, on the southern cliffs. The fourth climber, Damien, who was doing a joint science/law degree, had joined them for the final two weeks of the four-week field trip, so as to make up two climbing pairs.

  From what I could gather from the press accounts, as well as some notes Anna had included from the inquest she’d attended, the accident had happened on the final day of the expedition. Damien had been sick that morning and stayed behind, while Marcus Fenn and the three other climbers were taken by a local fisherman, Bob Kelso, on his small boat to the foot of the southern cliffs below Mount Gower, where they had been studying a colony of masked boobies and other seabirds. The climbers were put ashore and began to scale the cliffs, while Marcus returned with Bob Kelso to the main settlement of Lord Howe, at the north end of the island, where the scientists were renting a cottage. At about two o’clock that afternoon Marcus received a radio message from Curtis, saying there had been an accident. He later described how the climbers had been working on a rocky shelf a hundred metres up the cliff, where the birds were nesting. The shelf appeared stable and safe, and they had worked on recording details of the colony with their body harnesses unattached to the climbing ropes, because of the risk of snagging and disturbing the nests. After lunch Luce moved off on her own to check some nests further across the cliff face. She had rounded a stone outcrop, out of sight of the other two, when they hea
rd a cry, followed by the sound of falling scree. Hurrying over to the place, they discovered that a section of the shelf appeared to have collapsed, sending Luce down into the ocean below. There was no sign of her in the water or on the rocks.

  A slight noise disturbed me, and I sat abruptly upright, conscious that I had no idea how long I’d been sitting there.

  ‘Josh? Are you all right?’

  I blinked, and saw Mary register the empty glass at my elbow, the half-empty bottle beside it, and the folder on my knee.

  ‘What is the matter, dear? Are you upset?’

  ‘Oh … no. It’s all right.’ I took a deep breath and closed the folder.

  She looked closely at me, then slowly sat down in the armchair on the other side of the fireplace. ‘What’s happened?’

  Mary’s sister, my mother, died when I was ten, and I think there is perhaps some residual confusion in my mind between the two of them. From photographs it’s apparent that they did look very alike, although not twins—Mary was the elder by fourteen months—and I transferred some of my feelings for my mother onto my aunt. More death-denial, I suppose. At any rate, this transference was not entirely one-sided, and on occasions such as this Mary was quite capable of assuming a maternal role.

  ‘Come on, tell me.’

  So I sighed and told her about Anna’s visit, and about Curtis and Owen’s deaths.

  ‘Those two climbers in New Zealand? Oh, Josh, I read about them, but I didn’t make the connection. I met them, didn’t I? They came here once.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Oh, you poor thing. No wonder you’re upset. That’s shocking, especially after …’ Her eyes dropped to the folder on my knee, and a small interrogative furrow formed on her brow.