Bright Air Part 9

He nodded. 'They sent her suitcase back first with the things they didn't need.'

Anna lifted out a mobile phone, an electronic notebook and a small address book. There was also a wallet from which Anna systematically unpacked Lucy's driver's licence, Medicare and credit cards, her university student card, and a small photo of me. Her father stared at it, then at me, and I gave him a weak, pained smile. This was awful, staring at her things spread out on the table, things scuffed and worn by her fingers.

'No diary,' Anna said.

I pointed at the electronic notebook. 'What about that?'

'Maybe.' Anna turned it over. It looked old, battered and scratched. There was a loop attached, and I could imagine Luce carrying it clipped to her climbing harness. Anna found the switch and pushed it to ON, but the screen remained stubbornly blank. 'Looks dead,' Anna said, and I winced. 'I wonder ...' she ploughed on, turning to Corcoran. 'Maybe we could take this to someone who could fix it. See if they can make it work?'

He stared at her for a moment, then shook his head. 'I reckon not. Could be personal stuff in there Lucy would prefer left alone.'

'It could be exactly what we're looking for,' Anna insisted. 'I can a.s.sure you that only Josh and I would see it, and we'd keep any personal things strictly confidential, and return it to you.'

He shook his head, unmoved.

Anna seemed about to argue, then shrugged and put it back in the box. She flicked through the address book and put that back, too, and then the wallet and mobile phone. A blue envelope I hadn't noticed before remained lying on the desk. Anna picked it up and read the name written on the front. 'It's to you,' she said, and looked at me. She handed it over. I stared at it, then at her father, and put it in my pocket.

When we got back to the car, Anna banged the car door in frustration. 'Personal stuff. That's exactly the point. The police probably never got into it. There's no other reference to it in the report. And I know someone I'm pretty sure could get it open.'

'Not much we can do, Anna. It's his prerogative.'

She turned to me and said, 'Aren't you going to read her letter?'

'Later.' I started the engine and we moved off. As we circled to the car park exit I glanced back at the building and saw Corcoran's face at the upstairs window, staring down at us.

When we reached the town centre I said, 'Want a coffee or something before we head back?'

She shrugged, and I pulled into a parking s.p.a.ce outside a different cafe. While we waited for our coffees I reluctantly got Luce's letter out of my pocket.

It was clearly a draft, undated and with words and phrases crossed out.

Dear Josh,I can't tell you how hard it is to write to you to you this. I feel this. I feel like the last phasmid like the last phasmid. so sad. There are so many things I want to tell to you, and no words to say them with though I've tried so many times though I've tried so many times. But today when I was climbing something made me think of Frenchmans Cap. The wind, I think. It broke my heart It broke my heart. How brave we were then??? You said I was a hedgehog and you a fox, and now I have one big thing to tell you.

That was all.

Anna was looking at me with concern in her eyes. I handed it to her without a word, because my throat was so tight it hurt to swallow.

She read, then looked up and said, 'There was something she wanted to tell you.'

Yes, I thought: that she didn't love me any more or that she still did; that I was a b.a.s.t.a.r.d or that she wished me well.

'The fox knows many things,' Anna said, 'but the hedgehog knows one big thing. What was it?'

'Maybe that she was going to kill herself,' I said. 'That's why the police held onto it, don't you think? Because it sounds like a suicide note.'

Anna reached out her hand and gripped mine. 'No, Josh, I'll never believe that.'

'Well, we'll never know.'

'Unless it's in that b.l.o.o.d.y diary.'

The waitress brought our coffees and then Anna said, 'We were brave at Frenchmans Cap, weren't we? Fearless.'

'Not exactly. I was terrified.'

'But we did it. We had the nerve to do it, just us. I sometimes think I haven't got the nerve to do anything like that any more.'

'd.a.m.n right.'

We sipped our coffees in silence, and then she said, 'I want that diary, Josh.'

I stared at her.

She said, 'What's the roof of Corcoran's shed compared to Frenchmans Cap?'

So we found a hardware barn on the edge of town, a huge place with a vast car park scattered with utes and four-wheel drives. Though inexperienced in this field, we thought we did a pretty good job of equipping ourselves, emerging with a pair of sheet-metal shears, a crowbar, a torch, a builder's leather tool belt, bolt cutters, a big screwdriver, a long length of rope and a box of disposable latex gloves.

As we got back into the car with our loot, Anna said, 'What is a phasmid, anyway?'

'I have no idea.'

10.

After the Watagans I went on a number of weekend climbing trips with Luce and her friends around the Sydney area. I was still doing the bouldering and gym work, and was gradually becoming more proficient and more confident with heights. Then, towards the end of the year, we decided to take a climbing trip to Tasmania as soon as exams were finished. I think Marcus had something to do with the decision, because he had some business to do there at the University of Tasmania. So we made arrangements to fly to Hobart, and hire a van to drive out to the FranklinGordon Wild Rivers National Park in western Tasmania. Our goal was Frenchmans Cap.

Just getting there was quite an effort-a two-day hike from the Queenstown road, where we had left Marcus and the van to return to his meetings in Hobart. We hauled our thirty-kilogram packs over the Franklin Hills, from which we should have got our first distant view of Frenchmans Cap, but were disappointed to find the whole horizon obscured by low cloud. This was a wet part of the world, where rain falls three hundred days in the year, and we knew that our climbing would depend on getting a spell of decent weather. We descended to the plain of the Loddon River, a notorious bog of b.u.t.ton gra.s.s, ponds and mud, as Curtis discovered when he stepped off the trail and sank to his waist. A fine drizzle set in as we plodded through the marshland, and we no longer said much. After crossing over the pa.s.s on the far side and descending to the hut on Lake Vera, we'd been going for over ten hours and were exhausted. We were the only people at the hut that night, and after a hot meal and change of clothes we fell fast asleep.

The rain was heavier the next morning, uncomfortably so at first, then more alarmingly as the track led along an exposed ridge and the wind picked up, las.h.i.+ng us as we laboured under our heavy packs. At one point Anna lurched against me, blown sideways by the stinging wind, and I had to catch and steady her to stop her falling down the scree slope. Again we should have had a sighting of Frenchmans Cap from there, but could see nothing until we approached the Tahune hut, almost at its base, when the peak suddenly loomed out of the cloud, huge and scary. I had been told that these were the highest cliffs in Australia, four hundred metres of sheer white quartzite, but the immensity of the climb hadn't hit me until then, and I felt queasy all that evening, guiltily hoping that the rain would keep falling.

But it didn't. The next morning was cloudy but dry, becoming brighter as the day went on. We decided to limber up on some of the shorter routes on the north-west wall, an array of pinnacles and b.u.t.tresses on the lower side of the mountain. I was paired with Luce, and after a slightly shaky start I began to get a feel for the hard, crystalline rock surface, and gain a little confidence.

The skies kept clearing until by evening there wasn't a cloud to be seen, and the others decided that the following day would probably offer the best chance to attack the long routes on the high cliffs on the other side of Frenchmans Cap, which would need a whole day's climbing. There was a lot of debate over maps and diagrams about which route we should try, and in the end we decided to go for the east face. They selected three parallel routes, just as at the Watagans, except that now the climbs would be three hundred and eighty metres long instead of twenty. Luce and I would take the middle one, rated 20 on the Australian scale, 5.10d on the American, and much tougher and longer than anything I'd attempted before.

We set off early the next morning for the hour's hike to the base of the east face, then we split up into our pairs. Luce and I climbed to the top of a gra.s.sy ramp, where we roped up and Luce set off to lead the first pitch. We had planned to take the climb in seven pitches in all, with Luce to lead most of them, establis.h.i.+ng the belay anchors at the end of each pitch. These were long stages for me, forty or fifty metres each in length, and my heart was thumping when I finally heard Luce's cry, from far above, 'On belay.' I set off, focusing on the glittery surface immediately above me, making steady progress until I joined her in the lee of a jutting prow of rock. I was breathing heavily, my arms and legs shaky, but I'd made it, and I grinned and turned to see the view, already a broad panorama across the national park although we'd barely begun. While I rested, Luce described the next stage, pointing out the features I needed to recognise up to the next belay point, fifty metres above our heads.

We continued in this way, stage by stage, through the day. Our climbing styles were very different, Luce free and confident, swinging out into s.p.a.ce on the end of a sling, while I stuck as close to the wall as I could. Anyone studying us would have wondered what a natural climber like her was doing with a dunce like me, but at least, slowly and doggedly, I was getting there. At each belay point the views became more breathtaking, and the sense of being suspended on a vast white vertical surface more intoxicating. By the time I climbed up to join Luce at the head of the fifth pitch we were three-quarters of the way to the top, and I was finally confident that I was going to make it, weak as my body felt, and terrifying as the void beneath me looked. She said something about leading the next pitch again, but I felt it was time I showed some initiative, and I waved her aside and moved to the first hold. She spoke again, but there was a singing in my ears and I didn't hear her properly. It was late afternoon now, and the wind was sharper up there, and cold. She repeated something about a tricky corner about fifteen metres above us, and I nodded and set off, muttering to myself, 'Balance and rhythm, focus and momentum ...'

When I came to the tricky corner I suddenly realised what she'd meant. I looked down, and saw that it was bottomless. I had to step from one face to the other across a thousand feet of void-the height of the Empire State Building. I hesitated, trying to clear the giddiness from my head, and then my legs began to shake violently. They call this 'sewing machine leg' or 'disco leg', when your weight concentrated on the edges of your feet causes the leg muscles to spasm and convulse uncontrollably. Afterwards Luce told me that as soon as she saw it she knew I was going to fall. I urged myself to move forward, but I simply couldn't. For a breathless moment I was suspended there, and then, gripped by sick panic, I felt my feet give way, my fingers drag across the rock, and my body topple backwards off the wall.

Once I realised that I was gone, that there was absolutely nothing I could do, my terror faded. In a kind of appalled calm I watched the cliff face accelerating past me and then jerk to a violent stop as my rope caught in the highest of the three wedges I'd driven in on my way up. But the brutal force of gravity wasn't going to give me up so easily, and with a sickening ping ping the wedge flew out of its crack and I continued down, moving faster. The rope snagged the next wedge and it too failed- the wedge flew out of its crack and I continued down, moving faster. The rope snagged the next wedge and it too failed-ping-and the next-ping. All my protection was gone now, ripped out of the rock by the accelerating momentum of my fall and I was tumbling free, past Luce who was desperately trying to haul my rope through her belay brake. Too late Too late, I thought, the belay anchors will go and then she'll be pulled off too. We're going to die together on Frenchmans Cap. the belay anchors will go and then she'll be pulled off too. We're going to die together on Frenchmans Cap.

But the belay anchors, solidly implanted in the rock by Luce, didn't give way. My rope jarred abruptly tight and I bounced and spun and smacked my head against the rock, and finally was still, dangling fifteen metres below her. I'd dropped the height of a ten-storey building.

I hung there, dazed and shocked, and gradually became aware of distant shouts. Then I made out Luce's voice. 'Josh? Are you all right?'

I opened my eyes, groggily trying to orientate myself, and saw a distant haze of dull green. It took me a moment to realise that I was staring at the tree canopy far below. I was hanging upside down.

'Jos.h.!.+' Luce called again.

I called back, 'Yes, I'm here.'

'Are you hurt?'

'Not much.' Blood was running into my eyes from a cut on my cheek where I'd hit the rock face, but my bones seemed intact.

'Can you climb up?'

My first thought was, how? Even if I could get myself the right way up, we weren't carrying Jumars for climbing the slender ropes. Then I remembered I had a prusik loop somewhere in my gear, though I wasn't sure if I'd be able to remember how to use the b.l.o.o.d.y thing. It took a while to twist myself upright while the others shouted questions and advice to each other. Should they try to get help? But the mobile phones didn't work. Should they try to lower me to the ground? Three hundred metres? I thought, no way. So I rigged up the ascender and began to inch my way painfully up the rope.

The evening sun had set the forest ablaze in golden light and purple shadow when Luce finally hauled me onto her ledge, and I thought how cruel of nature, indifferent to my fate, to put on such a show at a time like this. The others wanted to lower ropes and haul me up, but Luce was worried about the condition I was in, shaking with cold and shock, and also about the approach of darkness.

'We'll spend the night here,' she said.

'Sleep together?' I stammered through chattering teeth. 'Is that all you think about?'-for it was true that our lovemaking had taken on a certain intensity of late. She laughed, and began shouting instructions up to the others. One of them, Owen I think, had abseiled part-way down and about twenty metres away to the left, and Luce gave him a list of things we needed, as we'd come up with the minimum of kit. He climbed back up to the top and a couple of them set off on the summit walking track back down to the hut to fetch them for us.

I looked at the narrow ledge we were on, only a few centimetres wide, and wondered how the h.e.l.l we were going to sleep on that-like bats perhaps, hanging upside down with our toes jammed into cracks. But Luce was placing wedges and flexible friends into the rock all around us, and lacing rope between them to form a sort of cradle. When she was satisfied, she perched beside me and held my hand, and we watched the great shadow of the mountain creep out across the wilderness. The dark was absolute by the time the backpack came b.u.mping down the cliff on the end of a line-a sleeping bag, thick jumpers, a flask of hot soup, water, a couple of packs of dry rations, a first-aid kit and a torch. With them we built our nest safe inside Luce's rope cobweb, had a meal, then zipped ourselves inside the bag and fell deeply asleep.

We woke to a gleam of golden light. It was the dawn sun, rising directly in front of us. We were pressed very close, our bodies warm despite the chill wind on our faces.

'My nose is freezing,' I whispered.

'Mine too.' She turned her head and we rubbed our noses together like Eskimos, then lay there watching the world beneath us take shape in the gathering light. Small glinting lakes appeared through the dark forest, and crags, like the stumps of ancient teeth, caught fire in the morning sun. I felt enveloped by the natural world, in a way I never had before. When I thought about it, I was amazed to realise how totally insulated my life had been from this world until I'd started climbing with Luce. Nature to me had been no more than a marginal risk of hurricanes or floods that could be managed with a range of financial instruments. I had only ever seen true wilderness through the filter of a TV screen or an aeroplane window. And now I was about as fully exposed to it as one could be, suspended in a gossamer net high up a mountain face in bright air. Credit derivatives and hedging positions weren't going to be much use to me here. For the first time I felt I understood about Luce. The wilderness absorbed her utterly; she studied it, experienced it, loved it. It was the one big thing this hedgehog knew. She'd often told me about it, its beauty and its tragedy-the decimation of its forests, the poisoning of its rivers, the murder of its species-but to me it had been just another rather boring greenie lecture. Now I felt I understood. Climbing was her way of addressing it, risking herself against it, gripping it close like a lover.

There was a shout from above us, and we disentangled ourselves, had a little breakfast, and climbed out, Luce leading, as I should have let her do in the first place. The rain returned soon after, and I was spared any further tests of my overstretched climbing abilities. I had been transformed by my experience on Frenchmans Cap. I felt that Luce and I were true partners now, dizzyingly in love, constantly touching, looking at each other. The others were in high spirits after their successful climb, too, and I heard Anna say something about 'the highest ever'. I said, 'But what about the DNB? That was even more, wasn't it?' and she confessed with a laugh that they hadn't actually done the full ascent, just a short section.

I suspected that the good humour of the group was partly due to the absence of Marcus, as if we were on holiday from an admired but dominant presence. He was waiting for us at the prearranged time when we made our way back to the highway, and immediately began to rea.s.sert his influence, starting with his own students. He had to use a light touch, for we were still full of the experiences we'd shared in our week away from him, but gradually he drew our attention back towards the things that interested him. These centred on an ongoing protest against logging in the Styx Valley forest, to which we now headed. An area of pristine wilderness, but lying just outside the protection of the Southwest National Park, it had become a focus of conflict between the logging industry and conservation groups. Marcus made it clear that fooling around climbing rocks was a fairly trivial activity alongside the struggle to save this corner of the planet in which he had apparently become vitally involved.

That was all right, and so long as he kept it general I found it rather amusing, from my position of absorbed preoccupation with Luce, to watch him use this to manipulate the group. But Marcus liked to make things personal. He really didn't like how close Luce and I were now, so that she wasn't giving him her undivided attention, and he started aiming barbed comments in my direction. This wasn't entirely new; he'd poked fun before at the degree courses that Damien, Anna and I had chosen. In his scornful opinion, the law was venal, sociology was weak science, and commerce and business studies were beneath contempt. But now the comments became more personal. Money was the underlying poison that was destroying the environment, apparently, and doing an MBA was more or less equivalent to wors.h.i.+pping the devil. I tried to respond with humour, arguing that money was the greatest invention of all, without which civilisation and science would have been impossible, but it wasn't really funny. When people like Marcus started lecturing me about the evils of capitalism I always heard at the back of my mind my father's voice saying b.l.o.o.d.y w.a.n.ker b.l.o.o.d.y w.a.n.ker.

As we trudged through the Styx Valley forest with a cl.u.s.ter of activists, I began to feel a distinctly new antipathy towards Marcus. I disliked the way he basked in their deferential attention, bringing out just the right coded phrases and buzzwords to make them laugh and nod in eager agreement. Apparently he'd been interviewed on TV and radio in Hobart, and had been saying wise and supportive things about the protesters, calling for greater activism. I thought he was a hypocrite, remembering that in the past he'd been scathing about most of these groups, saying they confused ecological goals with principles of social equity, for instance, and suffered from the romantic delusion that Aborigines had possessed some idyllic empathy with the land.

We came at last to a protest camp, deep in the forest. There were tents pitched in a stand of enormous trees, and a kind of ramshackle platform suspended high up between three of the eighty-metre giants (the tallest hardwoods in the world, we were a.s.sured, at least four hundred years old). Someone had been living up there for eight months in protest at the logging threat, and there was a general spirit of defiant enthusiasm, which I found hard to share. Maybe it was the melancholy damp gloom of the forest, but I found it all rather sad. So later when we all sat around a campfire with our hosts and Marcus began to hold forth about the world of money as the primary enemy of the world of nature, I began to feel apprehensive. Then he turned on me.

'Well, what do you think, Josh?' he said, in his knowing drawl. 'This is real real pa.s.sion, wouldn't you say?' pa.s.sion, wouldn't you say?'

I was startled by the directness of the stab, as if to say that an MBA student wouldn't know real pa.s.sion from the back end of a dingo. Someone sn.i.g.g.e.red.

'Yes, it is,' I said. 'But it seems a waste of time to me.'

I was holding Luce's hand, and I felt a warning tightening of her fingers. The rest of the group went very quiet.

'Really!' Marcus's eyes lit up. 'And why is that, exactly?'

I sensed everyone waiting for my reply. 'Well, as I understand it, the TV crews that used to film here in the early days have lost interest now, and the loggers have found another trail through the forest to bypa.s.s us.'

There was a tense stillness in the camp, made all the more pointed by the continued crackling of the fire.

'I see. And what would a money money man do?' man do?'

I didn't really care. I was still full of the euphoria of the past days, and I was experiencing one of those moments when I felt I couldn't lose. If I'd been playing poker I'd have gone for the pot. I let the silence hang for a moment, then said, 'Well, aim at the money jugular, I reckon. The woodchips they take out of this forest are being loaded onto a j.a.panese s.h.i.+p in Great Oyster Bay at this moment. I'd go and firebomb it. That would stop the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds.'

A stunned moment, then Curtis, bless him, gave a whoop and cried, 'Yeah! You got it, Josh.' Then everyone started talking at once.

I didn't really mean it, I just wanted to call Marcus's bluff, but somehow the preposterous notion connected with some mood of frustration in the camp and grew like a bushfire spreading. Even Damien and Anna were caught up in it, answering questions about how one might set about climbing the flank of a j.a.panese bulk carrier. I looked at Luce, wondering if I was in trouble, but her eyes were s.h.i.+ning and she leaned close to my ear and whispered, 'You naughty boy.' We both knew what must have been going through Marcus's head; he'd just been on TV with this mob, advocating stronger action.

In the end he didn't have to speak, as more sober members of the camp calmed things down. They mentioned the T word, terrorists terrorists, and people pulled themselves together. No one wanted to be called that.

So now here I was, reluctantly agreeing to accompany Anna on her break-and-enter mission, if only because she had reminded me how exciting life had once seemed. After our bit of hardware shopping we went to a pub. She stuck to mineral water, but I felt I needed a couple of stiff drinks in order to go through with this. We had a meal in a very agreeable little restaurant, then watched a dire movie at the local cinema before driving out once more to Corcoran's Farm Supplies. There were no headlights on the long straight road as we approached the place, and no signs of life within, although the yard around the building was ablaze with security lights. I parked on the shoulder just beyond the chain-link fence, manoeuvring the car into a stand of trees so that it wouldn't be too obvious from the road. Then Anna loaded the tools into her belt and led the way to the fence, through which I cut an opening.

I had been worried about dogs, and was relieved that there didn't seem to be any. I thought Anna was going to have trouble breaking through the doors with the equipment we'd brought, but that wasn't her plan. Instead she led the way to the rear of the sheds, keeping to the shadows of the yard perimeter. There was a large steel rack built against the back wall, holding fencing posts and other stuff, and forming a convenient platform to get halfway up the wall. She rang my mobile with hers, so that we could be in constant touch with each other, and told me to return to the front of the yard to watch the road. Then she hitched her heavy belt and reached for the frame.

'h.e.l.l.'

'What's wrong?' I hissed.

'b.l.o.o.d.y jeans. I can't climb in these. I didn't come prepared for this.' So she took off her jeans and handed them to me, and set off again. From the top of the racking she took hold of a square metal rainwater downpipe and began hauling herself up. I got a flash of frivolously polka-dotted panties disappearing over the eaves, then I jogged back to the front fence.

From there I could see Anna's dark shape move along the roof, and I guided her over the phone until she was directly above the office, with its window at which I'd caught that last glimpse of Corcoran's face.

'What now?' I whispered.

'There's a skylight ...' She was panting, her breathing harsh in my ear.

I heard a splintering crack, and watched her outline disappear into the dark shadow of the roof. At the same time a blue light started to flash at the front of the building and an alarm began to shriek.

How long would it take? I supposed it would be a matter of luck-there could be a police car cruising on the highway nearby, or a security guard patrolling the industrial estate two minutes up the road. I bit my lip and clenched my fists as the minutes ticked by. What the h.e.l.l was she doing?

Then I saw headlights on the road, coming fast towards us. When I tried to warn Anna, the noise of the alarm coming through the phone obliterated my words. I shrank back behind a big plastic water tank as the headlights swept across the yard and came to a stop at the gates. Someone moved into the beam. Whoever it was had a key, because the gates swung open and the vehicle, a white ute, lurched forward to the main doors. When the driver got out again the lights caught him, and I recognised the lanky figure of Luce's father. He transferred something to his left hand, a stick perhaps ... no, a gun. I stopped breathing. He was carrying a rifle or a shotgun.

He unlocked the big front door and rolled it partially open, then stepped inside. The alarm abruptly stopped. Ears ringing still, I spoke softly into the phone. 'Anna, can you hear me? Corcoran's arrived. He's in the building. He's got a gun.'

I didn't know if she'd heard because she didn't answer, but I did see the office window swing open, and the thin grey lines of a rope snake down the wall. Anna followed, giving me palpitations as she struggled through the tight opening, then slid down the rope. She tugged one end of it and it fell to her feet, where she scooped it up and started running towards me at the gap in the fence. A dog I hadn't noticed before in the back of Corcoran's ute began barking furiously, and Anna half turned her head towards it, and at the same time her belt with its load of tools slid down her hips and became tangled with her legs, and she crashed to the ground. Behind her I saw Corcoran reappear at the main door, and I raced over to Anna, grabbed her and the belt and hauled them both towards the fence. There was a shout as we tumbled through, and then a loud bang. Shredded leaves and twigs pattered down on us as we reached the car and hurtled off into the night.

'Wow,' I finally said, as darkness enveloped us. 'You all right?'

'Yes.' She was panting, vibrating like a plucked string. 'I couldn't find it at first. He'd hidden it behind the filing cabinet.'

'But you got it?'

'Yes.'

'What else?'