Bright Air (5 page)

‘So, what, you want me to tell you about it?’ He glanced pointedly at his watch.

‘We’d like to get hold of the police report to the coroner. The full report. That way we can understand exactly how it unfolded.’

He looked startled. ‘Really? Well, I suppose you could apply—’

‘We don’t have a direct interest,’ Anna broke in. ‘I mean as far as the coroner’s concerned. I understand the Coroners Act provides that an interested person can apply to the registrar of the local court for a copy of all or part of the coroner’s file, but they have to show sufficient cause.’

This sudden display of homework, delivered in a low rapid voice, was rather jarring, and undermined my attempt to sound casual. ‘I don’t think we’d be successful,’ she went on. ‘But you could get it. You’re a lawyer.’

‘Commercial lawyer,’ he murmured, frowning at a coaster on the table between us.

‘Still, you must know people who know people. Your father-in-law’s very highly regarded, I believe. I’m sure you could get a copy for us.’

He looked from one to the other of us. ‘Is that really necessary? I can show you newspaper cuttings I kept …’

‘We’ve seen the cuttings,’ Anna persisted. ‘We’d like more detail.’

He took a deep breath, thinking, raised his glass to his lips, placed it carefully back on the table, then said, ‘All right, I’ll see what I can do. I can’t promise, but I’ll do my best. Okay?’

‘Thanks, Damien,’ I beamed, surprised.

‘And now I really must get back. Great to talk to you both again. You look as if you’re working too hard, Anna. Maybe you should do a bit of climbing with Josh, now he’s back. I’ll be in touch.’

We watched him leave, and I took a deep breath. Anna gave me a tight, expressionless look and said, ‘Now I’d like a vodka tonic. You?’

‘Yeah, me too.’

I made to get up, but she waved me down. ‘I’ll get them.’

When she returned with the drinks I said, ‘Sounds like you’ve been doing research, about the Coroner’s Court.’

‘One of our residents worked there for thirty years. She filled me in.’

‘So, did he pass the test?’

‘What do you think?’

I shrugged. ‘He was reluctant, but that’s understandable. Yes, I think he passed. You?’

She sipped her drink, staring into the far corner of the bar, then said, ‘No. I didn’t think he passed at all. I bet he finds it’s impossible to get hold of that report.’

The hotel became busy again that week and into the next, and I put in a lot of time helping Mary with the daily routine, filling the hours in between with overdue maintenance work. I cleaned out the gutters and repaired a section of uneven paving in the small garden below the terrace at the back, and as the days passed and I heard nothing I began to think that the whole thing had fizzled out. But I still had Anna’s file of cuttings, with their photos of Luce and the others, and when I went up to my attic room at night it was impossible not to turn them over, again and again.

I first set eyes on her at a summer wedding on a beach. It takes a lot of organising to have a wedding on a Sydney beach, and friends and relatives had been out there since early morning, roping off the designated area, raking the sand, setting up flowers. I didn’t really know the couple, but had agreed to accompany my then girlfriend. Unfortunately our relationship had unravelled in the interval between the invitation and the event, so that things were a little tense by the time we arrived at what we both agreed would be our last outing together.

Everyone was dressed up for the occasion, the men of the wedding party in their fancy shirts and ties, the women in elegant gowns and hairdos, but everyone was barefoot on the sand, the celebrant included, and this gave everything a rather startled air, as if someone had played a practical joke. One of the bridesmaids particularly caught my eye, a slender girl with
flowers in her short bobbed blonde hair. She stood very erect and was self-contained while everyone around her twittered and fussed. When she smiled her face came tremendously alive, and I thought from the economy and poise of her movements that she might be a dancer or an athlete.

After the ceremony we retrieved our shoes and went to the reception at the nearby surf club. At some point I found myself queuing at the bar next to one of the other bridesmaids, a raven-haired girl who struck me as rather shy. In fact it was only as I remembered this that I realised that my first contact with them wasn’t with Luce, as I’d imagined, but there in that queue with Anna. She didn’t seem keen to talk at first, but there was a crush at the bar and I was chatty, and she gradually became more open. We were both at the university, although we hadn’t met before, and with the academic year about to start she told me the subjects she was taking. I showed more interest in her than I really felt, because I realised she was a friend of the blonde girl I’d noticed—whose name, she told me, was Lucy, or rather Luce. By the time I’d given her the three flutes of champagne she wanted she was quite animated and seemed enthusiastic about the idea of meeting up again. I suppose this was the first small betrayal in our story, my misleading Anna into thinking I was interested in her rather than her friend.

The following day, feeling a little bored, I checked the timetables for the subjects she’d mentioned, and two days later stood outside one of the large lecture theatres for an introductory lecture in STAT 303, a subject I’d taken two years before. There had just been a torrential late summer downpour, and the air was thickly humid, the trees dripping, students peeling off steaming rainwear. The girls were late, and the mob outside
the auditorium had mostly moved inside by the time they came running along the concourse. I jogged up beside them as they joined the end of the queue, and called out, ‘Anna! Hi.’

She turned and gave a bright smile of recognition and introduced me to Luce. I’d meant to be very casual and indifferent, but up close I found her smile even more compelling than before. I think I blinked rather stupidly, and then we were climbing up the stairs and into the back of the theatre, which was packed. The two girls squatted on a step of the side aisle, and I followed suit immediately behind them. Luce’s hair was drawn up in a simple ponytail, while the back of Anna’s head looked rather untidy, as if she’d had a go at cutting it herself. From where we were it was difficult to see the lecturer’s podium, far below us. He strolled in ten minutes late—this was the Faculty of Management, after all—turned his back on the audience and proceeded to mutter inaudibly at the formula he began to scrawl across the board.

‘What?’ Anna hissed to Luce. ‘What did he say?’

‘I’ve no idea.’ Luce shrugged with a movement of her head that revealed the most beautiful ear I’d ever seen.

I leaned closer, mesmerised, and whispered into it, ‘That’s the two-mean hypothesis test for large samples.’

She turned and our eyes met, just centimetres apart, and that was it, I think, at least as far as I was concerned.

‘Is it?’

‘Yes, here.’ I wrote the formula on my pad, tore the page off and handed it to her.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and gave me the most wonderful smile, as if I’d written her a brilliant sonnet.

At the end of the lecture we got up, stiff from sitting on the concrete floor, and Anna said to Luce, ‘Well, I didn’t understand a bloody word of that.’

I said, ‘If you’re interested I’ve got the notes. I already did this course.’

Anna regarded me suspiciously. I think she’d already guessed what I was up to. ‘Why, did you fail?’

‘No, I got an HD. I thought this was something else.’

Luce smiled. ‘You sound like just the person we need.’

I thought so too.

We went to a coffee shop and chatted. Luce was doing a Bachelor of Science, majoring in biology, Anna sociology, and I’d hit on the one subject they had in common, statistics. It seemed the two of them were old friends who’d been to the same school, and I sensed Anna’s resignation that I was clearly more interested in her friend than her, as if this had happened many times before. But I didn’t pick up any hint of competition between them, and felt that the slight belligerence that began to surface in Anna’s manner was rather protective of her friend, as if she was used to fending off the attentions of unworthy males like myself. They both struck me as pretty fit, Anna slightly softer and slower than her friend, but still tanned and physically capable. I asked if they surfed or played a sport and Anna replied, with a touch of bravado, ‘Yes, we climb.’

‘Rock climbing?’

‘Yes.’

I sensed from the decisive, almost challenging way Anna said it that this might be a key test of our fledgling relationship.

‘Oh, great,’ I said boldly. ‘So do I.’

She looked deeply sceptical. ‘I haven’t seen you at the climbing club.’

‘No, I don’t belong. Actually, I’m a bit rusty. I’ve been thinking about joining.’

‘You should,’ Luce said. ‘We meet most Wednesday evenings at the gym.’

‘Where have you done your climbing?’ Anna demanded, obviously not at all convinced.

‘Oh, mostly in the Blue Mountains,’ I said airily. ‘A bit around Nowra.’ It wasn’t entirely bullshit; I’d done rock climbing as a sport at school, training on an indoor climbing wall and going on a couple of camps, one in the Blue Mountains where we did mainly bouldering and abseiling, and a longer one on the crags along the Shoalhaven River. ‘What about you?’

‘Yes, we’ve been to the Blue Mountains quite a lot,’ Luce said. ‘Diamond Falls? Bowens Creek?’

‘Ah, yes,’ I nodded. The names meant nothing to me.

‘Last year six of us spent a month climbing in California, at Yosemite and Tuolumne. That was fantastic, if you like granite.’ I found it hard to decipher her expression. She seemed amused, but whether she was just being friendly, or was thinking what a phoney I was, I couldn’t tell, but if it would have helped I’d have gladly told her I was besotted with granite. The mention of the California trip should have alerted me, but I went on nodding eagerly, captivated by that smile.

‘We did the DNB,’ Anna added, in a tone that sounded like a warning.

‘Really?’ I hadn’t a clue.

‘We’re planning to go to Nepal next.’

That did register. Wasn’t that where the Himalayas were? Wasn’t Everest somewhere around there? ‘Oh wow, that would be fantastic,’ I said.

Later, as I went back over this first meeting, unpicking every half-remembered phrase and gesture for its hidden meanings, I came to several preliminary conclusions. The first and most important concerned my chances with Lucy, or Luce as Anna called her. Were they gay? Was their double act some kind of game they played with dopes like me, attracted
to Luce? I could believe it of Anna, protective of her friend and antagonistic to at least this male outsider. But all my experience of reading the signals given off by women told me that it wasn’t true of Luce. I was convinced that she was as warm and sincere and
interested
as she appeared to be.

That was my first conclusion. My second was that these two women were out of my class. Their accents had told me that straight away. I imagined that the school they’d both gone to had been one of the better Sydney private schools, that their fathers were city businessmen or doctors, and that swanning off to California for a month hadn’t been that big a deal. This wasn’t necessarily a problem, just something that set off some well-tuned early warning signals. It’s not that I was ashamed of my family, I told myself. In my heart I knew that Dad and Pam were good people, the best. And successful in business too. You may have seen their business, out on the Great Western Highway—bright and clean, with a five-metre wide meat pie tilted jauntily on the roof. Ambler’s Pies won the Best Aussie Meat Pie national award three times during their thirty years of trading, and I know from extensive market research that they deserved it. My childhood memories all revolve around the central tableau of Dad labouring over the big stainless-steel table rolling and folding the dough, rolling and folding, to make that special flaky pastry which is so accurately depicted at gigantic scale on the roof, and of Mum in the kitchen nearby preparing her special rich beef recipes for which she was known to every truckie and rep on the highway. Just before she died, Mum passed on those recipes to Pam, the help they’d taken on when Mum first fell ill, and in due course Dad sealed the business partnership by marrying her. It all seemed very straightforward and admirable to me. And yet, the first time any of my new friends at university asked
me what my parents did, I fudged it, mumbling something about hospitality and tourism, and later mentioning the Potts Point hotel as if it was theirs, rather than my Aunt Mary’s.

The third conclusion came to me as soon as I looked up
Yosemite climbing
on Google. It seemed the DNB was climbers’ shorthand for the Direct Northern Buttress of Yosemite’s Cathedral Rocks, a six-hundred-metre granite cliff described bluntly as ‘hard, with some scary loose flake in the middle’. The pictures looked absolutely terrifying to me, even without the scary loose flake. I decided that Anna had been exaggerating in order to frighten me off. Of course they hadn’t climbed
that
.

So I turned up at the climbing wall the following Wednesday evening and Luce seemed pleased to see me, in an underplayed, almost shy sort of way that I stored away for future contemplation. She introduced me to some of their friends, including Damien, Curtis and Owen, then to the club secretary, who gave me a questionnaire to fill in and signed me up. Anna pretty much ignored me.

It didn’t take long for me to realise that I was seriously out of my league. Apart from my lack of recent practice, my gear was all wrong, my thick-soled shoes clumsy and my shorts hampering my movements. As I struggled painfully up the easiest routes I watched the rest of them racing up ahead of me. The only good thing was that, clambering to keep up, struggling not to look like a total idiot, I didn’t have time to worry about my fear of heights, which had been a recurring problem on the school climbing camps.

After a while I collapsed, humiliated, on a bench. My arms and fingers had lost all strength and I was soaked in sweat. Luce came and sat beside me, looking as if she’d used up no energy at all.