Bright Air - Barry Maitland [48]
We came at last to a protest camp, deep in the forest. There were tents pitched in a stand of enormous trees, and a kind of ramshackle platform suspended high up between three of the eighty-metre giants (the tallest hardwoods in the world, we were assured, at least four hundred years old). Someone had been living up there for eight months in protest at the logging threat, and there was a general spirit of defiant enthusiasm, which I found hard to share. Maybe it was the melancholy damp gloom of the forest, but I found it all rather sad. So later when we all sat around a campfire with our hosts and Marcus began to hold forth about the world of money as the primary enemy of the world of nature, I began to feel apprehensive. Then he turned on me.
‘Well, what do you think, Josh?’ he said, in his knowing drawl. ‘This is real passion, wouldn’t you say?’
I was startled by the directness of the stab, as if to say that an MBA student wouldn’t know real passion from the back end of a dingo. Someone sniggered.
‘Yes, it is,’ I said. ‘But it seems a waste of time to me.’
I was holding Luce’s hand, and I felt a warning tightening of her fingers. The rest of the group went very quiet.
‘Really!’ Marcus’s eyes lit up. ‘And why is that, exactly?’
I sensed everyone waiting for my reply. ‘Well, as I understand it, the TV crews that used to film here in the early days have lost interest now, and the loggers have found another trail through the forest to bypass us.’
There was a tense stillness in the camp, made all the more pointed by the continued crackling of the fire.
‘I see. And what would a money man do?’
I didn’t really care. I was still full of the euphoria of the past days, and I was experiencing one of those moments when I felt I couldn’t lose. If I’d been playing poker I’d have gone for the pot. I let the silence hang for a moment, then said, ‘Well, aim at the money jugular, I reckon. The woodchips they take out of this forest are being loaded onto a Japanese ship in Great Oyster Bay at this moment. I’d go and firebomb it. That would stop the bastards.’
A stunned moment, then Curtis, bless him, gave a whoop and cried, ‘Yeah! You got it, Josh.’ Then everyone started talking at once.
I didn’t really mean it, I just wanted to call Marcus’s bluff, but somehow the preposterous notion connected with some mood of frustration in the camp and grew like a bushfire spreading. Even Damien and Anna were caught up in it, answering questions about how one might set about climbing the flank of a Japanese bulk carrier. I looked at Luce, wondering if I was in trouble, but her eyes were shining and she leaned close to my ear and whispered, ‘You naughty boy.’ We both knew what must have been going through Marcus’s head; he’d just been on TV with this mob, advocating stronger action.
In the end he didn’t have to speak, as more sober members of the camp calmed things down. They mentioned the T word, terrorists, and people pulled themselves together. No one wanted to be called that.
So now here I was, reluctantly agreeing to accompany Anna on her break-and-enter mission, if only because she had reminded me how exciting life had once seemed. After our bit of hardware shopping we went to a pub. She stuck to mineral water, but I felt I needed a couple of stiff drinks in order to go through with this. We had a meal in a very agreeable little restaurant, then watched a dire movie at the local cinema before driving out once more to Corcoran’s Farm Supplies. There were no headlights on the long straight road as we approached the place, and no signs of life within, although the yard around the building was ablaze with security lights. I parked on the shoulder just beyond the chain-link fence, manoeuvring the car into a stand of trees so that it wouldn’t be too obvious from the road. Then Anna loaded the tools into her belt and led the way to the fence, through which I cut an opening.
I had been worried about dogs, and was relieved that there didn’t seem to be any. I thought Anna was going to have trouble breaking through the doors with the equipment