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 reassert 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 worshipping 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 bloody wanker.
As we trudged through the Styx Valley forest with a cluster 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 assured, 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 passion, 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 passion from the back end of a dingo. Someone sniggered.
‘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 bypass 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 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 Japanese ship in Great Oyster Bay at this moment. I’d go and firebomb it. That would stop the bastards.’
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 Japanese bulk carrier. I looked at Luce, wondering if I was in trouble, but her eyes were shining 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, 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.