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Synopsis

Brian 'Bad' Phelan likes to live dangerously. While on holiday, he helps to bring a body out of a rocky, wave-swept cove. Curiously, the body bears striking similarities to that of a young woman he met years ago - who disappeared in a flooded French cave. Bad is compelled to investigate.

Excerpt

A Body Recovery

Riomaggiore Railway Station stood against a coastal cliff face and between two tunnels. The station's platform was covered in tourists, perched on their packs as though hoping to hatch them. The trains were on strike.

Bad's pack bristled with steel climbing equipment so couldn't be used as a cushion. He was tired--his room the night before had been above the rail line, where the trains, then running, had passed all night at twenty-minute intervals. He had slept finally, but his dreams were in Dolby and threatened monsters, trying to account for the funneling roar from the wings of their stages.

Bad was sleepy and homesick. The Cinque Terre's beautiful landscape chafed him--like clothes he hadn't tried before buying, chosen for him by someone else. His girlfriend had organized the trip, had sat, her laptop on the kitchen counter of their Sydney apartment, paging through tourist sites and timetables, while Bad tried to get comfortable in his untethered parts, between a padded plastic neck brace and the cast on his right leg.

Bad wondered where Gabrielle was now. He was following the itinerary they had planned. She had left him, but he stuck to their path. He put himself in her way, not because he wanted to hook up with her again but because he wanted to present an obstacle to her usual positive momentum.

They had parted ways a few days before, in Genoa, after squabbling their way through the first three weeks of the trip. Most of their arguments were about money, their budget. Gabrielle earned more than Bad, and, as she'd willingly admit, she liked to spoil herself. Bad resented being coaxed into spending more than he should and was only annoyed by her offers to treat him. But more than that, he resented the occasions on which she felt moved to reassure him that she respected his job. It was a statement he'd always hear followed by an unspoken but.

After what Gabrielle liked to call his "work-related accident," she had taken care of him. She'd helped him live on his insurance payout without dipping into their vacation fund. She'd put in time, energy, and resources. She believed she'd earned her right to try to make him "consider his options."

Gabrielle was a management consultant, her speciality human resources. She'd moved up to analysis and planning and now only had to deal with management, behind their own closed doors or in the big seminar room of her company--a room that looked out onto Circular Quay, its traffic like an executive toy in perpetual hypnotic motion. Because in the past she had "project-managed" restructuring and had had to talk to employees, Gabrielle knew how to represent change as challenge and setback as opportunity. When she and Bad got to Europe it became clear that she'd decided the vacation was his chance to take stock, since he hadn't begun to in his months laid up. She began to talk to Bad about his future. She wanted to make him see that while it was good to give part of life to work that was altruistic, there came a time when . . .

Her campaign reached full intensity at Bad's birthday dinner in Genoa. By the time coffee came, it was clear to Bad that Gabrielle had exhausted and excelled herself in laying out his options. She'd worked up the next five years of his life, twenty-nine to thirty-four, years he should invest in seeing just how far his brain and balls could take him in his own interest.

Gabrielle put down her coffee cup, folded her hands, and said, "Well--that's my pitch, Brian."

Bad said that his pitch was different--any vertical face too high to climb without a rope. Bad's favorite sports were caving and climbing, and he'd just spent a few days with his friend Gino at the Site Bernhard Gobbi in the Mercantour.

Gabrielle sighed. Despite the convivial-looking table, with its shot glasses of warm grappa, its coffee and tray of six sugars, she looked sour and out of sorts.

Bad picked up the smaller of her two presents and rattled it. He could see that the other present was a book, and he was already regarding it with polite tolerance and the faint sense of entrapment he'd always had at the sight of a flat package of a certain size under the drooping baubled pine trees of his childhood Christmases.

"Go on, then," she said.

The little package contained a Mamout, a knife with everything, except that on its handle, instead of a gold cross, was a woolly mammoth. Bad admired his Mamout, spread it into its full scintillating glory.

The other present was wrapped in sober blue and threaded with gold ringlet ribbons. Bad pulled at its knot with his teeth; he made a demonstration of eagerness and got the wrapper off.

The book was a hardback--The Great Beyond: Is Your Outlook a Closed Curtain? His girlfriend had given him a motivational book. On its cover a man and woman, shoulder to shoulder and touching only fraternally, were staring into a mirror, to one side of which was an open window and a landscape like a map.

Gabrielle said, "Brian, look, you're better than anyone I know at recognizing opportunities for adventure. But life isn't an Outward Bound course. And sure, there are dirty jobs someone has to do, but that someone doesn't always have to be you."

Bad thought of a man he knew, a miner for fifteen years and a mine rescue captain. He thought of the man's explanation of how he became a rescuer. "I'd been working underground for only a year when there was an explosion in the mine and some men were trapped," he'd told Bad. "Most of the guys around me couldn't get out of there fast enough. But for some reason I found myself going the other way, into the smoke."

Gabrielle was staring at him. "Brian, I don't want to see you hurt again," she said.

Bad gave the book a decisive little shake. "Right," he said. "This can be my--what do they call it?--my vade mecum." (They had visited a library of illuminated manuscripts in Florence and had admired the incunabula.) "This can go with me," Bad said. Then, "But perhaps you shouldn't."

On the path opposite Riomaggiore's station something was happening. A crowd coalesced, a crowd comprised of figures in suits or uniforms, some in high-visibility vests. The alert bustle gradually took on the appearance of an incident. Bad watched men in suits shake hands with men in uniforms. Several paramedics appeared with a stretcher they wheeled on the straight and carried around corners. People spoke into mobile phones and radios. The only thing the scene lacked was a baseline of rotating lights. But there were no good roads into four of the villages of the Cinque Terre, and the path on which the crowd had gathered was narrow. The path ran at the rear of houses whose walls were practically continuous with the cliff on which they perched, a cliff at one side of the cove one over from Riomaggiore's port. The path was narrow and, in places, cantilevered out from the cliff face.

(Bad had taken a walk around the headland the previous evening, in the company of a young Swiss woman he'd met in a bar. He'd had some hopes of her--of her bed and her room, which had to be quieter than his. But he was feeling too baffled and angry to turn on his charm. And, in the end, he'd done something that made her call him--in English--a "nanny," or possibly a "ninny." Bad hadn't liked the look of the path and had hesitated at the corner, taking hold of the Swiss girl by jamming his hand down the back waistband of her sweatpants. She didn't mistake his tackle for a pass--not for a moment. And she sneered at him when he thrust his head through the guardrail to inspect the bolts in the stone--fresh paint over bubbles of rust. She walked on, shaking her hips and shrugging her shoulders as if he still held her. He followed, and the path felt solid after all. The girl picked up her pace and went on her way. She left Bad standing for a time watching the swell roll into the narrow cove and turn white, then gray in its groin, a scummy stew the same color and texture as wet kapok.)

There was still no sign of a train, so Bad decided to investigate. He picked his way through roosting backpackers and clambered down from the platform. He stopped only a few feet short of the several uniforms and suits who were on the edge of the cliff opposite the cantilevered path. Bad let his gaze follow the direction of theirs.

The waves in the cove were high for the Mediterranean, a comparatively narrow and shallow body of water, whose waves were "fetch limited," never towering, like waves on an open ocean, but tricky, sometimes steep and close together. That morning the V of the cove was completely white, a white like oversugared meringue mix, neither a stiff foam nor fully liquid.

Bad saw a body heaved about behind a rock in the pitted cliff. For a few minutes he watched it, pushed down by waves coming and going, borne up against the roof of an embryonic sea cave, dropped and dragged, but never floating free of the rock at the cave's entrance. The force of the waves entering the cave had carried a corpse there--corpse or drowning person--and the backwash wasn't enough to carry it out again.

Bad edged closer to eavesdrop on only one side of a conversation--for distortions in the radio's transmitted voice robbed him of even the little he would be able to follow. He gathered that the locals were very reluctant to take a boat into the cove in that sea.

One man was clearly in charge--a police detective perhaps, a man in a good suit that hung poorly because he carried too much in his pockets. His hair was groomed in defiance of the elements, and the sea wind had only managed to unpick a few strands from its bonded surface. He kept looking out to sea, was perhaps waiting for a police launch.

Bad studied the sea: waves and reflection waves. Water piled against the cliff, rebounding from either wall and meeting in the middle, where it made an ugly scar. The waves produced a pattern ...

Copyright © 2003 by Elizabeth Knox

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