Bright Air - Barry Maitland [26]
To add to this intriguing background, Marcus lived in a very strange house half buried into a rock face in the northern Sydney suburb of Castlecrag, to which we were occasionally invited to celebrate some triumph over the reactionary establishment where he worked. He was very generous with booze and other more exotic stimulants, and after that first bemused encounter with him it seemed quite natural that he should always be around, a magus with a droll wit and a savage contempt for the university, the government, the country and pretty much everything else.
I set the coroner’s report aside and had a look for Marcus on Google. I found an old conference website that listed some of his publications, papers on the conservation biology of declining seabird populations, the distribution of certain species of invertebrates and the ecology of the doubleheader wrasse, whatever that was. But he wasn’t listed on the university’s website any more.
7
I did go babysitting with Luce, but the rewards weren’t quite as I’d anticipated. Suzi answered the door of their tiny flat, and my immediate impression was that Dracula had already paid a visit. She looked deathly pale, hair lank, nails bitten short, wearing a milk-stained overall. Owen, cradling the whimpering baby in the room beyond, looked robust and reasonably unscathed by comparison.
‘Oh,’ she whispered. ‘Is it that time already? Sorry, we’re running a bit late. Come in, please.’
Luce immediately took charge. ‘No worries, we’ll take care of everything. You just get yourselves ready. You haven’t met Josh, have you, Suzi? Don’t worry, I won’t let him touch Thomas without proper supervision.’
I took a limp hand and reflected a wan smile. From the sudden increase in baby-noise it seemed to me it was Thomas rather than me that was going to need supervision, and I was interested to see how Luce would deal with it. And she did a pretty good job, after Owen and Suzi had finally been hustled out the door, of calming the little beast. For about ten minutes. Then it started again. We followed every procedure that the exhausted parents had suggested—a bottle, change of nappy, expression of wind and vomit down the back of my shirt, singing, rocking, patting, tight swaddling, liquid Nurofen and a call to a 24-hour help line—until there was only one left. This was infallible, they’d said. It involved putting the baby in his pram and going out into the night and walking the streets—on and on, without stopping. It worked all right, but it wasn’t what I’d had in mind for our evening together, though it was a kind of bonding, I suppose, of a rather different sort.
‘I feel so sorry for Suzi,’ Luce said. ‘She looks close to collapse. Her family are no help at all, and I think she’s pretty depressed.’
‘Did they plan this?’
‘No, it all happened very fast. One day Owen turned up with this pretty first-year arts student on his arm and a goofy grin on his face, and the next she was pregnant and they were putting a brave face on it, rushing to get married. Owen’s devoted to them, crazy about the baby, but it’s easier for him. He has his coursework and his climbing as a relief, whereas she gave up uni and has nothing else but this twenty-four hours a day.’
Then she said, ‘Would you like to do a bit of climbing with me? I practise on the sea cliffs at Clovelly and Coogee. There’s some good bouldering, and one or two stiffer climbs, if you’re interested.’
And so it became a regular thing, over the following weeks,