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?’
‘Yes, I’ve been studying your patch of worthless nothing. This is what I’ve got so far.’
He showed me his book with its entries and calculations under a series of species headings. As he explained the scribbles I began to understand his point-that the area had been teeming with life: ants, lice, spiders, mites, and then increasingly minute specimens, their numbers meticulously totted up, amounting to a whole township, a city quarter of thousands of inhabitants. And then he outlined their mutually intersecting roles, their conflicts and alliances, right down to the personal narratives and dramas the debris scraped out of the shallow hole revealed. There were the fragments of a tiny marsupial vole that had died there, for example, and the traces of a nest of centipedes that had been eliminated by the fiercer ants.
He didn’t have to spell out the equation he was making, between money-value and life-value. It was a little demonstration, a masterclass, for me, the barbarian economist. I understood this, and even felt rather privileged to have had this effort expended on me. But I also felt that the passion behind the message was not what it had once been, that I was maybe one dumb student too many.
That evening we retired to the Hibernian Hotel, a massive monument to coalminers’ thirst, built in 1910, and the largest building in the little village it occupied. There Marcus entertained us, while we wolfed down large steaks, with an erudite account of the improbable sexual practices of certain snakes and stick insects, but given the sleeping arrangements-we had four rooms, Luce with Anna, Curtis with Owen, me and Damien, and Marcus on his own-I saw little opportunity to investigate if they might be adapted to humans. Instead his flagrantly grotesque descriptions seemed designed to draw attention to my increasingly desperate longing for the girl on the other side of the table, who seemed oblivious to my surreptitiously yearning looks. However, as we started making our way towards the stairs, Anna came to my side and whispered, ‘Wanna swap?’
I looked at her in surprise. ‘Eh?’
‘Beds.’
‘Um … Did Luce …?’
She looked at me as if I was being a bit slow, and I quickly nodded, feeling a sudden agitation in my chest, a brightening in my gloomy mood.
She said, ‘Use the veranda. Marcus’ll be roaming around the corridor.’
The pub was on a street corner, with deep verandas around two sides, onto which all the bedrooms had shuttered doors. By the time I’d cleaned my teeth, Damien was already fast asleep, snoring softly. I turned the key in the veranda door and pushed it open with barely a squeak, and stepped out into the chilly night air. Down below in the street a group of locals was spilling out of the bar, yelling cheerfully at each other as they made their way to their utes. I padded softly along the deck until I came to what I thought was Luce and Anna’s room. Now what? My bare feet were freezing and I had the sudden sickening thought that this was some kind of prank, a trick to maroon me out on the balcony all night. Then the door in front of me clicked open, and Anna slid out. Like me she was wearing a shell jacket over a T-shirt and pants. She grinned at me, gave me a quick peck on the cheek and padded off. I stared after her, then a voice whispered from the door, ‘Hurry up, I’m cold.’