Barry Maitland: Bright Air

We have been discussing some changes she wants to make to our website. I say ‘our’ because I am a partner in this business now, the Harris Hotel, if a relatively dormant one, enabled by a favourable loan from the boutique investment company for which I now work, following Rory’s recommendation. He and Mary are the other sleeping partners, following their wedding, made remarkably boisterous by Rory’s ebullient friends from the legal fraternity. The other partner, and manager, licensee and driving force, is Anna, who bought her stake through the sale of her flat in Blacktown. She lives here now, in Mary’s old apartment upstairs, and I visit frequently, and often stay, increasingly for longer.

A seagull wheels in overhead. It doesn’t have long scarlet streamers in its tail, nor is it doing cartwheels in the up-draught. This one looks old and battered by the storms, and when it lands with a stagger on the top of the garden wall it sags, as if relieved to have left the ocean behind. I think I understand how it feels.

She stood panting on the narrow ledge, pressing herself back against the hard surface of the rock. At her feet the second rat lay crushed in the crack in which she had finally cornered it. Five days it had taken her, days of headlong pursuit, of lung-bursting effort and numbing strain. There had been times when she had almost given up, despairing of the impossible task, and at the end her quarry, as exhausted and defeated as herself, had stared up into her face and seemed to welcome its fate.

She raised the bloody stone with which she’d crushed it, and threw it out into the void. It was all she could manage, a final gesture. She was so exhausted, so dehydrated and weary, her body so depleted, that she could barely think or see.

Then she heard a voice, far below, calling her name. She tried to answer, but her throat was parched and no sound came. They had heard the stone, clattering down the cliff to the sea, and now they knew where she was. She waited, and gradually made out the sounds of their voices getting closer, calling to each other as they climbed. Curtis, she thought, and someone else, come to make amends. She wondered how they could face her now.

There had been a time, at the summit, on the very tip of this rocky spike, when she had given way to despair, when the thought of seeing them again had filled her with such hopeless disgust that she had decided to finish with it. How could she bring a child into such a world, where even the finest and the bravest could not be trusted or believed? She had stood on the edge of the pinnacle, arms outstretched, ready to step into the void. But it had been the child that had stopped her. It was a decision she could make only for herself, not for her child. And so she had gone on.

She looked down at a sudden sound and saw Curtis’s head appear five metres below her.

‘She’s here!’ he shouted, and gave her a cautious smile.

He clambered on up, pulling himself onto her ledge, a little to her right.

‘Jeez!’ he gasped, and began hammering an anchor into the rock. He clipped himself to it and called out, ‘On belay,’ then turned to her. ‘Goodness, are you all right? Where’s your gear, for God’s sake?’

She just stared at him, and his face flushed and he turned away to concentrate on the other climber coming up behind him. It was Damien, she realised. He paused when he came into view, staring straight up at her, and something in his face, a kind of grim emptiness held in place by willpower, chilled her. He worked his way up to her left side, and anchored himself, and said not a word.

She looked from one to the other, seeing the hesitation on Curtis’s side, the determination on Damien’s. Damien reached for her, but before his hand could touch her she had stepped forward, out into the bright air.