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By Root 653 0

of Science, majoring in biology, Anna sociology, and I’d hit on the one subject they had in common, statistics. It seemed the two of them were old friends who’d been to the same school, and I sensed Anna’s resignation that I was clearly more interested in her friend than her, as if this had happened many times before. But I didn’t pick up any hint of competition between them, and felt that the slight belligerence that began to surface in Anna’s manner was rather protective of her friend, as if she was used to fending off the attentions of unworthy males like myself. They both struck me as pretty fit, Anna slightly softer and slower than her friend, but still tanned and physically capable. I asked if they surfed or played a sport and Anna replied, with a touch of bravado, ‘Yes, we climb.’

‘Rock climbing?’

‘Yes.’

I sensed from the decisive, almost challenging way Anna said it that this might be a key test of our fledgling relationship.

‘Oh, great,’ I said boldly. ‘So do I.’

She looked deeply sceptical. ‘I haven’t seen you at the climbing club.’

‘No, I don’t belong. Actually, I’m a bit rusty. I’ve been thinking about joining.’

‘You should,’ Luce said. ‘We meet most Wednesday evenings at the gym.’

‘Where have you done your climbing?’ Anna demanded, obviously not at all convinced.

‘Oh, mostly in the Blue Mountains,’ I said airily. ‘A bit around Nowra.’ It wasn’t entirely bullshit; I’d done rock climbing as a sport at school, training on an indoor climbing wall and going on a couple of camps, one in the Blue Mountains where we did mainly bouldering and abseiling, and a longer one on the crags along the Shoalhaven River. ‘What about you?’

‘Yes, we’ve been to the Blue Mountains quite a lot,’ Luce said. ‘Diamond Falls? Bowens Creek?’

‘Ah, yes,’ I nodded. The names meant nothing to me.

‘Last year six of us spent a month climbing in California, at Yosemite and Tuolumne. That was fantastic, if you like granite.’ I found it hard to decipher her expression. She seemed amused, but whether she was just being friendly, or was thinking what a phoney I was, I couldn’t tell, but if it would have helped I’d have gladly told her I was besotted with granite. The mention of the California trip should have alerted me, but I went on nodding eagerly, captivated by that smile.

‘We did the DNB,’ Anna added, in a tone that sounded like a warning.

‘Really?’ I hadn’t a clue.

‘We’re planning to go to Nepal next.’

That did register. Wasn’t that where the Himalayas were? Wasn’t Everest somewhere around there? ‘Oh wow, that would be fantastic,’ I said.

Later, as I went back over this first meeting, unpicking every half-remembered phrase and gesture for its hidden meanings, I came to several preliminary conclusions. The first and most important concerned my chances with Lucy, or Luce as Anna called her. Were they gay? Was their double act some kind of game they played with dopes like me, attracted to Luce? I could believe it of Anna, protective of her friend and antagonistic to at least this male outsider. But all my experience of reading the signals given off by women told me that it wasn’t true of Luce. I was convinced that she was as warm and sincere and interested as she appeared to be.

That was my first conclusion. My second was that these two women were out of my class. Their accents had told me that straight away. I imagined that the school they’d both gone to had been one of the better Sydney private schools, that their fathers were city businessmen or doctors, and that swanning off to California for a month hadn’t been that big a deal. This wasn’t necessarily a problem, just something that set off some well-tuned early warning signals. It’s not that I was ashamed of my family, I told myself. In my heart I knew that Dad and Pam were good people, the best. And successful in business too. You may have seen their business, out on the Great Western Highway—bright and clean, with a five-metre wide meat pie tilted jauntily on the roof. Ambler’s Pies won the Best Aussie Meat Pie national award three times during their thirty years of trading,