Bright Air - Barry Maitland [47]
There was a shout from above us, and we disentangled ourselves, had a little breakfast, and climbed out, Luce leading, as I should have let her do in the first place. The rain returned soon after, and I was spared any further tests of my overstretched climbing abilities. I had been transformed by my experience on Frenchmans Cap. I felt that Luce and I were true partners now, dizzyingly in love, constantly touching, looking at each other. The others were in high spirits after their successful climb, too, and I heard Anna say something about ‘the highest ever’. I said, ‘But what about the DNB? That was even more, wasn’t it?’ and she confessed with a laugh that they hadn’t actually done the full ascent, just a short section.
I suspected that the good humour of the group was partly due to the absence of Marcus, as if we were on holiday from an admired but dominant presence. He was waiting for us at the prearranged time when we made our way back to the highway, and immediately began to reassert his influence, starting with his own students. He had to use a light touch, for we were still full of the experiences we’d shared in our week away from him, but gradually he drew our attention back towards the things that interested him. These centred on an ongoing protest against logging in the Styx Valley forest, to which we now headed. An area of pristine wilderness, but lying just outside the protection of the Southwest National Park, it had become a focus of conflict between the logging industry and conservation groups. Marcus made it clear that fooling around climbing rocks was a fairly trivial activity alongside the struggle to save this corner of the planet in which he had apparently become vitally involved.
That was all right, and so long as he kept it general I found it rather amusing, from my position of absorbed preoccupation with Luce, to watch him use this to manipulate the group. But Marcus liked to make things personal. He really didn’t like how close Luce and I were now, so that she wasn’t giving him her undivided attention, and he started aiming barbed comments in my direction. This wasn’t entirely new; he’d poked fun before at the degree courses that Damien, Anna and I had chosen. In his scornful opinion, the law was venal, sociology was weak science, and commerce and business studies were beneath contempt. But now the comments became more personal. Money was the underlying poison that was destroying the environment, apparently, and doing an MBA was more or less equivalent to worshipping the devil. I tried to respond with humour, arguing that money was the greatest invention of all, without which civilisation and science would have been impossible, but it wasn’t really funny. When people like Marcus started lecturing me about the evils of capitalism I always heard at the back of my mind my father’s voice saying bloody wanker.
As we trudged through the Styx Valley forest with a cluster of activists, I began to feel a distinctly new antipathy towards Marcus. I disliked the way he basked in their deferential attention, bringing out just the right coded phrases and buzzwords to make them laugh and nod in eager agreement. Apparently he’d been interviewed on TV and radio in Hobart, and had been saying wise and supportive things about the protesters, calling for greater activism. I thought he was a hypocrite, remembering that in the past he’d been scathing about most of these groups, saying they confused ecological goals with principles of social equity, for instance, and suffered from the romantic delusion that Aborigines had possessed some idyllic empathy with the land.