Bright Air - Barry Maitland [112]
‘You can’t see them now, they come out at night, but Owen brought back these funny kind of stick insects from Lord Howe Island, that time that poor Luce died. He said he shouldn’t have, really, and we mustn’t tell anyone, especially Marcus or Damien. I really didn’t see why, but he was adamant. Only, there are quite a few of them now, and I don’t think I can look after them properly, and I don’t want them getting out—they’re big, you see, and I don’t know if they bite. They’re horrible things, they give me the creeps, and the thought of them getting onto Thomas or the baby … I almost called the pest exterminator, but Owen was so attached to them. I thought I should speak to you first. What do you think I should do?’
It was a good question. She had no idea how good. For a moment I pondered, the fate of perhaps the rarest creature on the planet in my hands. I decided that if I thought about it for a month I still wouldn’t know what was the right answer, so I just went with gut feeling. Luce had sacrificed her life for these horrible things, after all.
‘I know someone at the Australian Museum,’ I said, ‘who I’m sure will be delighted to arrange for them to be taken away.’
‘Just so long as we don’t get into trouble.’
Actually, it was more difficult than I’d anticipated. The nice lady at the museum thought I was playing some kind of practical joke on her, and became convinced I was from one of those candid camera TV shows. She kept peering over my shoulder, expecting a cameraman to burst in. In the end I had to tell her that Marcus had been instrumental in bringing them back from Lord Howe, and had given them to Owen to keep for him. She knew of Marcus’s reputation, and had read about his suicide, and she didn’t think that any TV show would be sick enough to exploit his death like that. I wasn’t so sure, but at least she was listening to me.
And so arrangements were made to give the phasmids a new home, where they would be nurtured, studied and eventually returned to their island. I was there when the team came to collect them, and watched them being teased and coaxed out of their bushes, awkward, archaic but also rather dignified in their survival. There were seven of them in all, and when they were all rounded up I looked at them and thought how bitterly ironic it was that a woman such as Luce should have died for such ugly little creatures. For a moment I felt angry at the grotesque imbalance, and then it occurred to me how much Luce would have appreciated it. You might say they were her bronze sandal.
26
I am sitting now with Anna on the hotel terrace with a glass of wine, looking out at the last glimmer of evening sunlight glowing on the far side of Elizabeth Bay after several days of storms. I look at her profile, the thoughtful honest eyes, the little vertical crease at the left edge of her mouth made by her lopsided grin, the small scar on her temple, and I remember the moment, a year ago, when I first caught sight of her standing there at the reception counter.
We have been discussing some changes she wants to make to our website. I say ‘our’ because I am a partner in this business now, the Harris Hotel, if a relatively dormant one, enabled by a favourable loan from the boutique investment company for which I now work, following Rory’s recommendation. He and Mary are the other sleeping partners, following their wedding, made remarkably boisterous by Rory’s ebullient friends from the legal fraternity. The other partner, and manager, licensee and driving force, is Anna, who bought her stake through the sale of her flat in Blacktown. She lives here now, in Mary’s old apartment upstairs, and I visit frequently, and often stay, increasingly for longer.
A