Bright Air - Barry Maitland [42]
We climbed up over the Blue Mountains and down onto the western plains beyond, reaching Orange in time for lunch before our appointment with Luce’s dad. I drove along the wide main street, recently beautified with new street furniture and trees, like every other country town we’d passed through, and found a wood-fired pizza café. She chose a cheese topping and I remembered that she’d been a vegetarian. I asked her if she still was and she said yes. Like Luce, who’d persuaded her that that was the way to go. It was strange to feel the traces of Luce still present in our lives, like footprints on the sand. Luce had had no luck in trying to convert me to vegetarianism, but she did get me to stop smoking, another mute footprint.
We found Corcoran’s Farm Supplies on the edge of town, housed in several large steel sheds surrounded by a car park dotted with piles of barbed wire, drainage pipes, fencing posts and water tanks. Inside, wide aisles displayed an extraordinary, and to me baffling, range of gadgets that the modern farmer apparently needs. While Anna spoke to the woman behind the counter I learned quite a lot. I had no idea what a calf puller ($59.95) was, for instance, until I saw the illustrative photo of an unfortunate beast with a metal arm stuck up its backside. Then there was the ute dog tether ($14.95), the drench gun ($129.00) and the lightning diverter ($40.12) to protect the energiser on one’s electric fence ($3,447.40 to power 160 kilometres of multiwire fence). I was studying the action of the footrot shears ($54.95) when Anna came to my side. ‘He’s here,’ she said, and picked up a castration ring applicator ($32.95) with rather too much relish for my liking. ‘This place could be a supermarket for the Spanish Inquisition,’ she said.
Luce’s father was a gaunt and weathered man. He gripped my hand briefly, drilling my face with his eyes (bright blue, like hers) for a moment before turning and leading us up to an office built above the counter. He was wearing moleskins and R.M. Williams Stockyard boots that clumped loudly on the timber stairs. We sat around a plain wooden desk and Anna repeated her story about the research project, and how there was some missing data that Luce might have recorded in her diary or other papers. I felt that her tone, polite but businesslike, was about right. He listened with an inscrutable look on his face, bottom lip thrust forward, and I wondered how this leathery old man could have been the father of such a vital and beautiful daughter.
‘So that research business is still goin’ on, is it?’
‘We’re just gathering the loose ends.’
‘That Fenn feller isn’t involved, is he? They haven’t taken him back at the university, have they?’
‘Oh no. He’s not involved any more.’
He grunted, then stooped to a cardboard box at his side, about the size of a shoebox, and lifted it onto the table.
‘This is what the coroner’s office sent me,’ he growled. ‘I haven’t thrown anything away. Couldn’t bring m’self to.’
It sounded like an opportunity to say something sympathetic about his loss, but Anna didn’t take it, so I mumbled a few words about how sorry we were. He ignored me, and I felt stupid.
‘May we look?’ Anna said, after a pause.
‘Go ahead.’
He didn’t move, so Anna stood up, reached for the box and slid it towards her. It was roughly sealed with packing tape. Mr Corcoran rummaged in a drawer in the desk and handed her a Stanley knife, with which she cut the tape and looked inside.
‘Her clothes and personal things came separately, did they?’ she asked gently. This was getting a bit too forensic for me.
He nodded. ‘They sent her suitcase back first with the things they didn’t need.’
Anna lifted out a mobile phone, an electronic notebook and a small address book. There was also a wallet from which Anna systematically unpacked Lucy’s driver’s licence, Medicare and credit cards, her university student card, and a small photo of me. Her father stared at it, then at me, and I gave him a weak, pained smile. This