Bright Air - Barry Maitland [100]
More confused than enlightened by this research, I returned to my room at the hotel. Luce’s chalk bag was lying on the desk, and I opened it and saw again the black insect curled up inside. The sight of it took me back to the pinnacle of Balls Pyramid, as the first fierce spots of rain had hit us. I pulled the insect out and disentangled it as best I could, and was surprised by its size—five inches, twelve centimetres, long. Its shiny black shell was tinged with red, and of its six legs, the rear pair were the biggest and most muscular. I had never seen anything like it; it seemed rather primitive and formidable, and I wondered what it was doing in Luce’s bag.
So later that morning I took it to the Australian Museum in the centre of the city, threading my way through a long crocodile of ankle-biters in school uniforms queuing up the steps and through the sandstone entrance. A helpful woman at the inquiry desk told me to take the lift to an office on an upper floor, where another woman, equally patient and attentive, scrutinised my grubby little specimen. I felt faintly ridiculous, like one of the schoolboys down below, showing his very interesting find.
‘Oh! I know what that is. Goodness. Was your grandfather a sailor or something?’
I looked perplexed.
‘I just thought … This is extinct, you see. Has been for years. Dryococelus australis—the phantom phasmid.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The Lord Howe Island Land Lobster. It’s a phasmid, a kind of stick insect. It was only ever found on Lord Howe Island, and it was killed off when rats got ashore from a grounded ship in 1918. We have quite a few specimens in our entomology collection. There’s one on display in Insects, down on level two. So, how did you come by it?’
‘Oh … long story. A friend found it. Bit like what you said, probably, left by some old relative.’ Old Uncle Marcus perhaps. ‘So it’s been extinct for a while?’
‘Oh yes. There’s a small island near Lord Howe where they found the last remains, but no live specimens unfortunately.’
‘That wouldn’t have been Balls Pyramid, would it?’
She beamed at me, clever boy. ‘That’s right! Some people landed there in the sixties, and found a few dead phasmids.’
I found their specimen on level two, in a glass case labelled RARE AND CURIOUS. Apparently it was extinct on Lord Howe by 1935. In 1966 three dead ones were found by the first climbers on Balls Pyramid. How they’d got there was a mystery, for the phasmid was wingless.
I walked out of the museum, crossed the street to Hyde Park and sat on a bench in the sun. Young office workers were lying on the grass, eating sandwiches and sunning themselves. I was thinking of the sentence in Luce’s draft final letter to me.
I feel like the last phasmid. so sad.
So she’d been thinking about the phasmid before she went out to Balls Pyramid on that final fatal day. Perhaps she had written the draft the day before, after they’d made their first landing there, maybe on the evening of the party. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that the group would have been much more interested in investigating the phasmid on Balls Pyramid than yet more gulls’ eggs. The rats had never reached the Pyramid, so no one could have been sure that these strange creatures hadn’t survived out there. What could be more intriguing to a bunch of young zoologists than the possibility of rediscovering something thought extinct for seventy years? And yet Damien hadn’t mentioned it.
If Luce found the dead phasmid on her final climb, did she keep it in her chalk bag with the note as another kind of veiled message? If so, it, like the poem, could surely only have been directed at Marcus. It upset me to think that her two final messages might have been intended for him. But what did they mean?
I was struggling with this when my phone played a little tune in my pocket. It was Anna, wondering if I’d spoken to Damien yet. I apologised