Bright Air Read online

  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.

  7

  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.’

  ‘Did they plan this?’

  ‘No, it all happened very fast. One day Owen turned up with this pretty first-year arts student on his arm and a goofy grin on his face, and the next she was pregnant and they were putting a brave face on it, rushing to get married. Owen’s devoted to them, crazy about the baby, but it’s easier for him. He has his coursework and his climbing as a relief, whereas she gave up uni and has nothing else but this twenty-four hours a day.’

  Then she said, ‘Would you like to do a bit of climbing with me? I practise on the sea cliffs at Clovelly and Coogee. There’s some good bouldering, and one or two stiffer climbs, if you’re interested.’

  And so it became a regular thing, over the following weeks, going out along the coast with Luce, and sometimes Anna too, getting tactful help from the most brilliant climber I’d ever come across, and mixing more frequently with the other members of their group. We even babysat for Owen and Suzi a few more times, and I developed a grudging affection for little Thomas, who seemed to be suffering so much. Owen doted on his child; I thought of him as the quintessential scientist, peering thoughtfully at the kid through his glasses, and it seemed ironic that it had been he, rather than Damien with his multiple dates, or Curtis the wild-haired party animal, who had got himself a pregnant girlfriend.

  One evening at the pub the others made plans to head out of the city for a weekend climbing in the Watagans National Park north of Sydney, and I found myself included in the arrangements, as if this was now a natural assumption. We set off early the next Saturday morning in two cars up the F3 freeway, me in the back of Marcus’s with Curtis and Owen, and the girls with Damien in a four-wheel drive he’d borrowed from his parents. Marcus’s driving was as erratic as his veering walk, and we were thrown about a bit on the ancient cracked leather seats. He revealed that one of his many areas of interest was old pubs, in one of which, a grandly verandaed Federation hotel in the Hunter Valley coalfields, he had booked us rooms.

  We turned off the freeway into the bush, and as the road turned into a dirt track, winding higher and higher into thick forest, I became apprehensive. This was the first real climbing that I’d done with them all, and I hoped I was up to it. I wasn’t much comforted by Curtis and Owen’s assurances that, although we were heading for the largest crag in the park, the climbing would be moderate and the routes short at around only twenty metres. What was twenty metres, after all, compared with six hundred on the DNB? The equivalent of a six- or seven-storey building, that was all. I felt my palms go sweaty, and wondered if it wouldn’t be better to be a non-participant like Marcus, and spend the day with him drinking in the bar of the Hibernian Hotel. Curtis added that unfortunately most of the climbs had been assisted with permanent bolts fixed into the rock, which seemed an excellent idea to me but not to the others, who tended to be purists on this question. Moreover, many of the bolts weren’t the modern stainless steel sort glued into place, he said, but old mild steel types hammered into lead, and liable to pull out without warning. Also, I should be wary of the sandstone rock face itself, which could be a bit crumbly. I said thanks.

  We reached the car park in thick bush at the base of the crag and tumbled out of the cars, taking in big lungfuls of the fresh forest air, the others loud and cheerful at the prospect of the day ahead. It seemed that Marcus wasn’t going to spend the time in the bar after all, but had brought a folding seat and table as well as a bag of gear, including a camera with tripod and assorted zoology field equipment. We got these out of the boot and set them up for him, then changed our shoes, strapped on our harnesses and helmets, and shared out the wedges, carabiners and slings that would secure us and our ropes to the rock face as we climbed. Then we took the track up the slope to the base of the cliff. Along the way we disturbed a wallaby, as black as the fire-charred tree ferns in the bush around us. It hurtled away down the hill, weaving and bounding among the rocks.

  We came to the crag, and the others selected the pitch, three parallel routes to the top of a cliff creased with cracks and wrinkles like an ancient petrified brown face. I had hoped I might climb with Luce, but it quickly became apparent that I was to be paired with Damien, which I saw made sense, for we were about the same weight and strength.

  He said he’d lead for the first half of the climb, and I took my stance as his second at the foot of the crag, paying out his rope while he worked his way steadily upward. After five metres or so he jammed a wedge into a crack in the rock, and clipped his rope to it as an anchor in case he fell. Then he continued across what looked like a difficult section with few apparent handholds, until he reached a ledge on which he found a steel bolt that he used as a second anchor and tied himself to it. Then he called down to me, ‘On belay,’ the signal to let go of his rope. I released the belay brake at my waist and shouted up, ‘Belay off,’ and he began to haul up the rope until I felt it tug at the carabiner on my harness to which I’d tied its end with my much-practised retraced figure-eight and stopper knot. Up above, Damien was feeding the rope through his belaying plate, then shouted ‘On belay,’ again. I called out, ‘Climbing,’ then dug my hands into the chalk bag hanging in the small of my back and stretched for the first hold.

  By the time I reached the first anchor, I was breathing hard and sweat was trickling down my back. I’d grazed my cheek and scraped my fingertips on the hard granular rock. But I was moving all right. I eased the wedge out of the crack and clipped it to my belt, then looked up at the smooth bulge above me. From here it swelled out much more than I’d realised from the ground, like a pregnant belly, and I couldn’t see Damien at the end of the rope that stretched up across it. For a moment I was at a loss, unable to read the surface for places to grip, but then I noticed the traces of chalk where he’d placed his hands, and I stretched out across the warm rock to the first. There was a small indentation, and I pressed my fingers in a
nd shifted my weight upwards.

  ‘You all right?’ Damien asked as I finally hauled myself up onto the ledge beside him.

  ‘Sure,’ I panted. Even after such a short climb, my hands and shoulders were aching, with tension as much as effort.

  ‘Let’s keep going then.’

  I looked across the cliff at the others, Owen leading Curtis on their second pitch, and Luce beyond them already nearing the top of her climb. I glanced down and caught a glimpse of Marcus in his camp chair, watching us through a pair of binoculars, and felt myself sway. I turned back and gazed up at the cliff rising above us, and my heart sank. Climbing isn’t just about stamina and technique, it’s also about reading the rock face and understanding its possibilities. With time and experience this becomes second nature, matching your body’s abilities to the subtle variations in the rock’s surface. I didn’t have that experience. There were no chalk marks to follow now, and my mind went blank. I thought I’d have to ask Damien, but I felt his eyes on me, waiting, and I guessed that might be a mistake.

  Then I noticed a series of shallow depressions leading up to the left, followed by a thin vertical crack. I knew that if I stopped to think about it I’d never go, so I abruptly tied onto the anchor, took the gear he offered me to hang on the rack around my waist and set off.

  The important thing was to maintain momentum, I thought; momentum and focus. And not to look down. This wasn’t like the gym—I was suspended in an airy void, with no well-designed grips thoughtfully placed by human hand and no safety rope ready to support me from above. If I made a mistake now, I would fall twice the distance that I was above Damien before the rope caught me, assuming that the bolt held. If it didn’t, that was me gone.

  Arms aching, I reached the base of the crack and fumbled a small wedge into it. I tugged, it held, and I hooked on and breathed a sigh of relief. After that the going became easier, and I finally scrambled over the lip and rolled onto the broad flat rock at the top of the pitch, heart pounding.

  As I waited for Damien to follow me I gazed out over the treetops to the hazy horizon, then looked down. The snapping whoop of a whipbird sounded far below. I felt the nauseating tug of the void, the familiar weakening in my knees and stomach as if it were literally sucking at my insides. But I had made it, and a sense of relief flooded through me.

  Perhaps the shot of adrenaline cleared my brain, for as I pulled in Damien’s rope a very obvious thought occurred to me. For most purposes you climb in pairs, one supporting the other with the safety rope, but without me—and without Marcus—they had been five. Later I learned that there had been a sixth during the previous year, but he hadn’t fitted in with the group and had moved on. When I came along they must have been looking for someone to even the numbers. It was a sobering thought. Was that all that Luce had seen in me? You could tell, just by watching them, that the other pairs, Luce and Anna, Curtis and Owen, understood exactly what their partners were going to do without a word being spoken. Damien and I, however, clearly had a relationship to work out. We abseiled back down to the foot of the cliff and moved on to another route, neither commenting on the other’s performance.

  Again he took the first pitch, and as I waited for him to move off I looked up and saw the dark shadow of a substantial overhang, a ‘roof’, halfway up the cliff. Damien climbed to about five metres below it and anchored himself on a shallow ledge. I followed.

  There was little room to manoeuvre on the ledge, and the roof above us now projected alarmingly.

  He repeated his earlier question, expressionless. ‘You all right?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Luce and I had practised on overhangs on the cliffs at Clovelly, but I hadn’t attempted hauling myself over an obstacle like this before. I set off cautiously to the base of the shelf, then stretched out beneath it, clinging to the surface like a bat. If I lost my grip now I’d drop clean past Damien to bounce on the cliff face beneath him. As I reached one hand out to the lip of the roof I felt one foot lose its purchase, then the other slipped away, and in a moment I was swinging on my fingertips, dangling helplessly. The momentum of my fall took me out and then back, and I arched my back, straining every muscle, and brought one foot up over the ledge, and hauled myself over. It wasn’t the most elegant of moves, but it got me there.

  I was shaking with effort as I reached the next belay point, and collapsed back against the rock for a moment, catching my breath. Down below I saw the glint of Marcus’s binoculars. Though he was roped, I was pleased to see that Damien wasn’t too smooth on his manoeuvre over the shelf, and his face was red, his beard bristling and gleaming with sweat, by the time he stood beside me, breathing heavily. I asked if he wanted me to lead the final pitch to the top, which looked straightforward enough, but he shook his head impatiently, annoyed with himself I think, and set off without taking a break. He should have done, though. He’d gone barely a couple of metres before he made a mistake with his footing and began to slide. He scrambled to correct his balance but couldn’t, and now he was falling. I caught him, hauling his rope tight before any damage was done, and he clambered back onto my ledge.

  ‘Aah …’ He stood gasping for breath, face turned up to the sky, then muttered, ‘Thanks, mate.’

  After he’d recovered a little he set off again, much more cautiously, and I followed without further incident. I felt pretty good.

  Later we returned to the foot of the crag for some lunch. I was the first to get out of my gear, and went down to the cars to get the esky with our sandwiches and cold drinks from the boot of the Jag. There was no sign of Marcus by his chair and bag of equipment, and I wondered where he might have got to. I went over there, peering around, and noticed his stick lying at the top of a steep bank leading down to a dark pool in a stream. Then I saw his foot, almost invisible beneath an overhanging bush.

  I scrambled halfway down the slope and dropped to my knees and made out his prone body, face almost in the water. The bush tore at my arms as I grabbed hold of his leg and desperately tried to haul him back up the bank. The earth was damp and slippery, his body awkward, and I slipped and struggled to get him to the top when I became aware of his muffled cursing. I was relieved that he was conscious until I realised that he was cursing me. I fell backwards and we sat facing each other in astonishment, covered in dirt and wet leaves. He was still cursing me when the others arrived.

  They hauled him to his feet and brushed him down, while I recovered his stick, still not sure what was going on. Finally, grasping a stiff shot of whisky in a plastic cup, he told us that he’d discovered what he believed to be the entrance to a platypus burrow, hidden behind a tangle of roots on the opposite bank of the pool. From his pocket he produced a tiny triple-cusped tooth which he’d found at the waterline, which he said had belonged to an infant platypus, discarded at the time of its leaving the breeding burrow. My rescue efforts caused much predictable amusement, and I had to put up with a good deal of ribbing while we ate lunch.

  Afterwards, as the others moved away, Marcus waved me over and proceeded to give me a detailed critique of everything that was wrong with my climbing technique. He was quite merciless and I felt humiliated as I stood there, staring at the ground. It was all no doubt absolutely true and invaluable, but I found it hard to absorb those quiet, relentless words. Then, when he had finished, he asked me to help him up, and led me to a clearing nearby. I didn’t notice anything at first, but then I made out a small area in the middle that had been demarcated by plastic strips driven edge-on into the soil.

  ‘A square metre of forest floor,’ he said. ‘What do you see?’

  I shrugged. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing. And what would it be worth?’

  I looked blank, not sure what this game was all about.

  ‘Come on, Mr Merchant Banker. What would this fetch on the market? What’s its dollar value, would you say?’

  He was pissing me off now, so I said again, ‘Nothing.’

  He smiled. ‘Right. Now, go and
do some more climbing, and remember what I just told you—especially the way you’re handling that rope, otherwise you’ll end up hanging from the ankle upside down.’ Then he added, ‘I should know.’

  The way he said it made me look at his face, and I saw a smile, and had the sudden vivid impression that he cared and that it was as if he’d been lecturing his own younger self. The trick of a good teacher, I suppose.

  At the end of the day’s climbing I stood beside Damien watching the two women on a final pitch. We had gone well that afternoon, becoming much more effective as a pair, but nowhere near as intuitively understanding of each other’s moves as Anna and Luce. As always, I was captivated by the grace and speed of Luce’s ascent. Although, being smaller, her reach was less than the men’s, her strong slender fingers were able to grip narrow fissures and creases on which we could get no purchase. Her strength-to-weight ratio was about perfect, and she seemed to glide across the rock, as if she had some innate knowledge of its inflexions and could effortlessly match her body’s movements to them.

  ‘Climbs like a bloody angel, doesn’t she?’ Damien murmured at my side, and I realised he’d been watching me, engrossed in my study of Luce.

  ‘Yes, amazing. What’s she like in the lab?’

  ‘Marcus says she’s the best student he’s ever had.’

  I encountered Marcus again when we’d descended to the valley floor. He was in the clearing, half crouched, half lying beside his square metre of dirt. I knew better than to try to rescue him this time.

  ‘Ah, the merchant banker. How did it go?’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘We’re climbing better together, Damien and I.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said absently, entering something in his notebook, as if we were an experiment he’d already disposed of. There was a field microscope and a magnifying glass lying beside his square metre, which I saw had been excavated to a depth of twenty centimetres or so. ‘How about you?’