Bright Air - Barry Maitland [7]
Perhaps it was the same with all the deaths I’d experienced—Grandpa’s, Uncle Gordon’s, Mum’s—all numbed, blanked out, never really confronted. But Luce was different, the first really important relationship in my life not framed by family ties, but freely chosen, miraculously given, then tossed aside.
The picture was an enlarged photocopy from a newspaper report, captioned Climbing tragedy: young scientist named. I think they’d got the picture from her father, taken probably at the time of her twenty-first birthday, for she was wearing a gold locket that had belonged to her mother and which he gave her on that day. She had a slightly cheesy smile as if for a special photo occasion, and the corners of her eyes were creased with love. And so alive, so brimming with life. I couldn’t bear it and quickly turned the page.
To be met by the same picture again, smaller this time, with the accompanying report below.
Police today released the name of the young woman missing on Lord Howe Island after a climbing accident and now presumed dead. Lucy Corcoran, 22, was a member of a university scientific field-study team surveying seabird breeding colonies on the steep cliffs below Mount Gower at the south end of the idyllic island. The team leader, biologist Dr Marcus Fenn, described how Corcoran, a very experienced climber, had become separated from her companions on the afternoon of Monday 2 October, before falling to the ocean, a hundred metres below where they were working. Islanders were joined yesterday by crews from boats in the Sydney to Lord Howe yacht race, recently arrived at the island, in searching for Lucy’s body. However, local fishermen say that strong currents around the island, as well as recent shark activity, make it increasingly unlikely that her remains will be recovered. A police officer from Sydney has arrived on the island to assist local police in preparing a report for the NSW Coroner. The university has issued a statement expressing deep regret and announcing that it will hold its own investigation into the circumstances of Miss Corcoran’s accident.
Recent shark activity … Didn’t that seem a bit gratuitous? How would her family have felt, reading that? And what did it mean, had become separated from her companions?
I read on, through several other pages of photocopied press cuttings, from the first tentative report of an accident to the summary of the coroner’s findings six months later. Much of it was repetitive, some contradictory, but as I read I also began to recall things Luce had told me about the expedition at the time. I remembered her explaining that birds migrating down the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand really only had two islands available on which to rest, feed, mate and breed—Lord Howe and Norfolk. They were thus the focus of intense bird activity, and important centres for scientific study. Marcus Fenn had led teams to Lord Howe in previous Septembers as part of an ongoing research program, mostly comprising honours and postgraduate students from the zoology courses he taught at the university. In that particular year he had the unusual circumstance that three of the students in his honours tutorial group—Luce, Curtis and Owen—were Alpine-grade climbers, and he had decided to use them to extend the study into areas that had previously been inaccessible, on the southern cliffs. The fourth climber, Damien, who was doing a joint science/law degree, had joined them for the final two weeks of the four-week field trip, so