Bright Air - Barry Maitland [99]
‘Why did you tell them you weren’t there?’
He spread his hands. ‘I panicked, basically. Just couldn’t face the prospect of having to give an eyewitness account.’ But it didn’t sound like panic to me, more like risk management.
‘Josh,’ he said, ‘please calm her down. She’s got to get over this. I could get ten years for smuggling native wildlife and misleading the coroner, you know. Ten years.’
23
I returned to Potts Point feeling the need to unwind before going back to the hotel, and stopped at the pub around the corner. I felt exhausted after all that had happened recently, capped by that talk with Damien. Thinking about it, I remembered the feeling I’d had when I met him at Curtis and Owen’s funeral, as if I’d been worked over by a pro. Basically he’d fed back to me a more acceptable version of the scenario I had put to Bob on the boat. He’d confirmed what I’d suspected, but little else. The only time he’d seemed at all hesitant was when talking about Luce’s note. Perhaps I could have made more of that, but I wasn’t quite sure how. I had a couple of schooners of New and began to feel a little better. Between the thump of the music from upstairs and the footy commentary on the big TV, it occurred to me that I should try to trace the source of that verse of Luce’s. It certainly wasn’t what I’d have been tempted to write as my parting shot to a cruel world.
I couldn’t get any results for the first line on Google, so the next day I went out to the university library to see if I could track it down. It took me a couple of hours, but I found it eventually, a passage from the surviving fragments of a poem by an ancient Greek philosopher by the name of Empedocles, called On Nature, which made a kind of sense, although I couldn’t remember Luce ever showing an interest in the classics. But Empedocles would certainly have interested her. Apparently he was the first to propose a detailed explanation of the origins of species, and of the mechanisms by which a couple form an embryo. He was also a radical pacifist and vegetarian, believing that animal slaughter was murder, meat-eating the equivalent of cannibalism, and animal sacrifice a blasphemy. It was he who originated the idea that the world was made up of four elements—earth, water, air and fire. He suggested that two opposing forces operated on these elements: one, which he called philia, or love, to bind them together, and the other, neikos, or strife, to break them apart. So the passage Luce quoted was really about the basic physics of the world:
For with earth do we see earth,
with water water,
with air bright air,
with fire consuming fire,
with Love do we see Love,
Strife with dread Strife.
But Luce had altered the last line, changing Strife to Death. Was that a mistake, or deliberate?
Empedocles was a mystic, too, with lots of ideas about the transmigration of souls and the cycle of reincarnation through various natural forms, and the more I read, the more I was reminded of Marcus Fenn’s ramblings about Steiner. I also remembered him quoting Greek sources in that video of him at Oslo, and I thought he must have put Luce onto this.
I also discovered a rather disconcerting thing about Empedocles, concerning his death. It was said that he killed himself by climbing to the top of Mount Etna and throwing himself into the active crater, so that no one would find his body and people would think that he had been taken up to heaven as a god. When I read that I felt the hairs prickle on the back of my neck. The legend went on to say that the volcano coughed up one of his bronze sandals, revealing the deception. Another version had it that the volcano