That wasn’t the only ambiguous thing about him; it was hard to be sure how old he was, dressing young, usually in black with his hair often pulled back in a ponytail. And then there was his sexuality, a continuing topic of discussion among us. He’d never been married, and though his manner seemed mildly camp he was reputed to have once got a female student pregnant. He seemed to exercise a hold over both male and female students that to me seemed sexual.
Luce disagreed with me about this of course, putting his charisma down to his brilliance and his standing in his field. There was that; after watching that video of him in Oslo I could imagine the impact he must have had on his students. None of my lecturers were inspiring, and the idea of any of us wanting to own a video of one of them giving a conference speech was laughable. We all needed our heroes, and his green credentials were impeccable. He’d done his doctoral and post-doc studies at Oxford and Caltech, and he had an endless store of anecdotes about the great figures he had drunk and argued with-Richard Sylvan on anarchy, cannibalism and deep green theory, and Peter Singer on animal liberation, as well as the mythical Norwegian Arne Naess, with whom he claimed to have debated the eight principles of deep ecology in a sauna in the Arctic forests before falling into a vodka- and heat-induced coma.
To add to this intriguing background, Marcus lived in a very strange house half buried into a rock face in the northern Sydney suburb of Castlecrag, to which we were occasionally invited to celebrate some triumph over the reactionary establishment where he worked. He was very generous with booze and other more exotic stimulants, and after that first bemused encounter with him it seemed quite natural that he should always be around, a magus with a droll wit and a savage contempt for the university, the government, the country and pretty much everything else.
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.