by Tim Neilson
“Well, at least you stopped the burglary,” Anna admitted grudgingly. “Maybe your neighbourhood isn’t as gentrified as you thought,” she added to James.
“Or maybe the taxi driver who took me to the airport was a crook,” pondered James. “Anyway, there’s no way of finding out why it happened.”
Chapter 5
Discouragement
James was driving along a dead flat, straight stretch of the multi-lane dual carriageway between Melbourne and Geelong. He was passing through farmland uninterrupted by intersections, buildings, people or any other conceivable traffic hazard – a driver would scarcely notice the difference between travelling at 100 kilometres per hour and 120, or even 130. The invention of cruise control, he reflected, must have cost the government a fortune in reduced revenue from speeding fines. It’s hardly worthwhile keeping the speed limit so low, he thought.
The journey was a familiar one, and he was barely conscious of his surroundings, his mind disengaged from the task of driving. Inevitably his thoughts drifted to the purpose of his trip.
Of all the places that Cam had suggested they investigate, Geelong College would have to be, James thought, the least likely place to find what they wanted. When James contacted the school’s archivist, he confirmed that Burnet hadn’t bequeathed any papers to the school. Burnet’s fellow students in the boarding house more than 100 years ago had been mostly boisterous sports-minded sons of wealthy graziers, so it was unlikely that decades after leaving the school he would have shared his rarefied scientific ideas with any of them. And even if, unbeknown to historians, he had a continuing intellectual relationship with any of his old schoolmasters, it was quite likely that any such former mentor would have been dead by the time of the events in which Cam was interested. It was highly likely that there would be nothing more useful to Cam than the one detail of which the archivist was aware, ‘F.M. Burnet’ in faded gold lettering on an honour board listing him as Dux of the school in 1916.
However, James wanted to be able to tell Cam that he, Anna and Daniel had searched everywhere. When some old friends had organised a Friday night gathering in his old home town he decided to head down the highway an hour or so early and give the records at his and Burnet’s old school a perfunctory once-over.
As he drove south, the shallow pyramids of the You Yangs on the horizon to his right slipped behind the car. Soon it was time to turn onto the Geelong ring road. As the familiar sights presented themselves in turn, his mind drifted back to his school days. The cement works appeared on the skyline as he crested a ridge – in his mind he heard the distant echo of limestone being blasted at the quarry. Then it was down into the rich grasslands alongside the Barwon River, past the old Fyansford Hotel, the venerable sandstone of the pub now burdened with electric signs advertising the poker machines inside – that was something too recent and undesirable to evoke any sort of nostalgia. Soon he was up the hillside and into the suburban streets. He turned a couple of corners until there loomed before him the spectacle, so well-remembered, of ochre coloured brick walls, a spire and turrets, pale sandstone facings, and green playing fields ringed by trees. As a student he had taken it all for granted, but stories from Anna and Tina about the meagre facilities at their local high school, and similar anecdotes from Daniel and other friends, had made him realise how lucky he had been.
He pulled up at the side of the road.
The jumble of recollections jostling for primacy in his imagination were mostly sporting events or illicit escapades, but some comparatively mundane details also returned vividly from the past. In his mind, the electric bell buzzed again – students’ attention to the details of Latin grammar wavered at the promise of liberation from the classroom. He recalled Mr Keary turning around, hearing, as so often he had in real life, the interrogation, “James, what is the bell?” The class fell still, then joined gleefully with James’s response, chanting “The bell is a signal to the teacher that the lesson may soon come to an end if the teacher so wishes”. “That is correct,” Mr Keary would affirm with quiet satisfaction, and resume his exposition on future active indicative verbs of the first conjugation.
James wondered whether Burnet had felt restive when he heard the signal for the end of a lesson all those years ago. For Burnet it wouldn’t have been the electric buzzer, thought James. It would have been the clanging of the old ship’s bell hanging outside the staff common room. But then he corrected himself. It wasn’t until 1932 that the bell, liberated from the beached, abandoned hulk of the Otago from which it derived its inscription, had been given to the then Headmaster, Sir Frank Rolland. He deployed it to keep time on land as it had done at sea. Burnet had well and truly left the school by then.
James thought, irrelevantly, of how it had been assumed back in 1932, and indeed for decades afterwards, that the bell couldn’t have come from the ship named Otago that had been captained by the world-famous author Joseph Conrad. It was assumed that it must have been from another ship named Otago, otherwise someone would have known of the bell’s illustrious literary connection. It was only decades later, with the resources of the internet, that someone had worked out that the school was indeed in possession of Conrad’s bell. Somehow this truth had slipped into obscurity between the days when the Otago travelled the Pacific under the command of a Polish nobody called ‘Conrad’, and the much later time when Conrad was famous.
The connection between a dilapidated coal hulk nearing the end of its useful life and a newly emerging literary sensation had been lost.
James recalled the photograph of Chester Derwent and James ‘Jimmy’ Graham as young soldiers on Wikipedia. Without being conscious of his own preconceptions, he’d immediately thought of the two young men as the future founders of a corporate colossus bearing their names. But at the time the photo was taken no one could have possibly imagined them as being predestined for wealth and fame.
Had Derwent started out with the characteristics of a chief executive of a large, ruthless multinational? Maybe Derwent had been a young idealist who had hardened as his corporation grew. Probably, James mused, Derwent was the ‘realist’ and it was James Graham who had been the imaginative innovator with the instincts of a gambler. Perhaps Derwent had been lucky that ‘Jimmy’ was sufficiently persuasive to entice Derwent to go along with his dreaming.
Dreaming …
He realised that he’d been sitting in his parked car for several minutes. He got out and headed into the school grounds.
That following Sunday afternoon, Anna strolled up to him at their prearranged rendezvous, leant her bicycle against the table, and enquired about his search.
“Nothing,” said James.
“Disappointed?” Anna asked.
“No, not at all. I never expected to find anything there. But we should tick off everything on Cam’s list. I was going down that way anyway. Is this OK?” he asked, noting her Lycra attire and waving vaguely in reference to the outdoor table he had chosen in preference to the seating inside.
“I’m still hot from the ride,” she assured him. “It’ll do fine. Daylight saving only finished a few weeks ago, but I’m already tired of finishing work after dark and flitting home as quickly as possible. It’s good to be in the open air.”
They might be in the open air, James thought, but they were hardly immersed in raw nature. True, the ambience was dominated by the spectacle of distant trees more than by the faint sound of even more distant traffic, but the immediate view was distinctly artificial. He glanced at the AstroTurf and patched asphalt directly in front of the café. Slightly further on, visible in the middle distance through the open gates in the high brick wall surrounding the old convent, was a large carpark. Anna might soon revise her seating preferences when the shadow of the massive convent building deprived them of what little sun was slanting fitfully through the late autumn clouds. Still, no doubt she’d had some degree of relief from urban tedium during her ride along the bike path beside the river. James, enjoying the two-day
interlude in his own schedule of deadlines, sympathised with her wish to escape. No doubt she and Daniel needed a break from the hard slog of wrestling their paper into a suitable condition to run the gauntlet of peer review. Which reminded him …
“Where’s Daniel?” he asked as she returned from the serving area carrying a drink. Anna didn’t exactly sigh before replying, but when she did speak her tone was distinctly flat.
“He said he wanted to do a bit more work on the part of our paper dealing with fourth dimensional vector analysis,” she replied. “He promised he’ll be here by four.”
James wasn’t sure how to respond, but he didn’t need to as Anna continued, becoming more animated as she went on.
“I know the paper’s important,” she explained with exasperation, “and I know we need to get something published soon or our research output will start looking substandard, but I think he’s getting obsessive about it. Apart from anything else, I think he’s getting stale. I really think it would be more efficient in the long run if he took a break from it now. Can you say something to him?”
James stared back at her in surprise, and then grinned.
“Yes, you’re right,” she said wearily, “it’s sure to be useless, but if you can think of any way to give him some sense of proportion about things, give it a try, will you?”
James nodded. He assumed that Anna would be glad to leave the topic, and it didn’t make sense to start talking about Cam’s problem until Daniel arrived, so he reverted to the next most obvious subject matter.
“How’s Tina?” he asked. “I thought she might come along with you today,” he added.
There was a slight hesitancy about Anna’s reply.
“Alex didn’t want to,” she said. James wasn’t good at reading people, but he thought that the neutrality in her tone seemed deliberate rather than natural. Another conversational dead end, he thought. He cast about in his mind for something else, hopefully uncontroversial, to talk about. Anna, being far more intuitively perceptive than James, sensed his dilemma, smiled and began chatting inconsequentially about current events. So successful was she in keeping the small talk going that both of them were caught by surprise when Daniel appeared.
“Sorry I’m a bit late,” he ventured.
“What?” he asked Anna in the time-honoured fashion of the male member of a couple sensing some looming controversy.
“How did you get here,” asked Anna, in a tone more interrogatory than conversational, her eyes fixed on Daniel’s casual street clothes.
“I drove,” replied Daniel in a ‘so what’ tone, before almost instantly following up with, “Oh sorry, I forgot. When I looked at the clock,” he hastily continued, “it was almost four, and the only thing I thought about was that if I jumped in the car straightaway I’d be almost on time. I completely forgot about cycling.” He looked apologetic, clearly hoping to be forgiven for not being dressed and equipped to accompany Anna on her return journey.
James tried to think of an extremely subtle way to segue the conversation towards Daniel’s self-inflicted workload. But before he could come up with any opening line, Daniel, sensing that Anna was in two minds about whether to launch into an exasperated tirade in front of James, hurriedly changed the subject.
“I got an email from Cam,” he announced. “He’s abandoned that isotope project …”
“What?” exclaimed James.
“Yes. It’s rough on you having already wasted time looking for things …”
“It’s not that,” interjected James. “I was going down that way anyway and it didn’t take long to see that the school’s records were a dead end. It’s just that it’s so unlike Cam to just give in on something like that. Did he say why?”
“He says he’s found out that the legal problems were just too hard to overcome, and so he’d never actually get anywhere with it. It’s a shame for him,” Daniel added reflectively, “but it saves us a lot of trouble.” Anna gazed at him, surprised and clearly slightly perturbed, but before she could comment James persisted with his enquiries.
“Yes, but how does he know that it’s hopeless if he doesn’t even know what we might find? I can’t believe that Cam would …”
“Maybe he’s got some other project that he’s got more confidence in,” speculated Anna.
“Very probably,” Daniel agreed emphatically. “He didn’t say so, but it must be something like that. Anyway, it’s none of our business why he’s dropped it. He just has.”
Seeing that James was still looking disconcerted by the news, he added, “You can keep looking if you like. I’ll send you the email so you can see what he said.”
James didn’t feel inclined to keep trawling through reams of old papers for no reason, but he accepted the offer of a copy of the email.
“I don’t know anything about intellectual property law,” he admitted, before reminding Daniel that one of their mutual friends was an expert in that field. “I wouldn’t mind seeing what he thinks about Cam just giving up.”
Block. Evade. Retreat. Move sideways – fast! Tina’s eyes darted around, alternating her piercing gaze rapidly between the feet and arms of her assailant. He’s coming forwards. Back slightly further to make him reach, and … counterattack. Tina threw her fist forwards. Her attacker swerved, grabbed her arm and slung her to the ground.
The matting on the gymnasium floor softened her landing.
“You overcommitted again,” her instructor told her. “You’re learning how to be patient and wait for the opening, but you’ve still got to learn to stay calm when the opening comes along.”
Tina scrambled to her feet, annoyed with herself.
“That’s enough for this lesson,” the instructor concluded, turning to another student.
The large high windows in the hall seemed to suck out most of the light generated by the two inadequate electric globes hanging from the ceiling. Various thuds and murmurs created a fitful background noise as Tina moved towards the changing rooms. She paused, hesitating at the sight of Alex sauntering along the far wall, and wondered whether to initiate a conversation with him. He turned his head, gazed coldly at her, and walked on. She thought to herself, having reacted that way, he could not subsequently complain if she now left without speaking to him. With some subconscious relief that a decision had, in effect, been made for her, she turned.
“Is something wrong?” a friend asked, having noticed the silent interaction.
“Oh no,” Tina replied quickly, with defensive nonchalance. “He’s just disappointed that I had to mind a friend’s house so I couldn’t stay over at his place. He’ll get over it.”
Her friend opened her mouth but seemed to have second thoughts about what she was going to say, and contented herself with a simple “See you later”.
Chapter 6
Recalled to Duty
Rainwater surged along the gutters, bubbling over bumps in the cobblestones, swelling fitfully around tangled masses of leaves and sloshing down stormwater drains. James strode briskly, hunched beneath an umbrella and squinting occasionally as a reflection from a streetlight flared at him from a puddle. It was not unpleasantly cold, just a trifle inconveniently so, but James reflected morosely that for the next few months the weather was unlikely to be better and would usually be a lot worse. He sighed and wondered why Daniel had summoned him to Anna’s place. Something about the wording of Daniel’s message had made James doubt that it was purely a social occasion, but his enquiring response to Daniel’s text had prompted a somewhat evasive reply. He had decided not to pester Daniel by phone. If there were some reason for Daniel’s apparent secretiveness, no doubt it would be revealed. He scurried up steps to an upper-floor doorway, shook the water off his umbrella, knocked and entered.
James was by no means sensitive to atmosphere, so when he breezed into Anna’s living room he started by proffering casual, cheerful greetings. It was only when the responses were uniformly perfunctory that he took notice of the demeanour of the three occupa
nts of the room. Daniel’s preoccupied manner was nothing extraordinary, but he had a bothered air that wasn’t normally part of his distracted obsession with his work. Anna was radiating a smouldering indignation. James had seen her like that in the past, but only when she had just learned of some exploit by Tina that was unusually irresponsible even by Tina’s standards. But Tina didn’t seem to be striving to look innocent, as James would have expected her to be if she had been the cause of Anna’s mood. Rather, Tina was eagerly expectant and inquisitive, from which James inferred that she wasn’t fully aware of what Daniel and Anna were concerned about, but was hoping that it would lead to some kind of trouble – of the sort which Tina thought of as ‘fun’.
“What is it?” James asked.
“From Cam,” Daniel replied, handing over a couple of sheets of paper. “He’s taken a lot of trouble to disguise having sent it. It was delivered to one of my colleagues in Physics. When she opened it she found a sealed envelope inside with a note asking her to give it to me, and not to tell anyone else about it. Cam knows her, and knew she’d be able to keep a secret.”
James started reading:
Hi Daniel,
When I emailed you to drop the Burnet thing I meant it, but I wasn’t quite candid about the reason why. The legal problems are serious, but I always knew that getting over them was a long shot. Nothing’s actually happened to make them look any worse, but there’s something else as well.
There have been a few unpleasant things happen to me and some of the other people at my lab. Nothing really serious, but there’s no way of telling whether it will stay that way. At first I assumed it was just one of those lunatic groups on the fringe of the animal rights movement. Every now and then we get a spate of that sort of thing. But usually they start sending anonymous messages with threats and demands. This time I haven’t had anything like that. We tend to shrug off the animal rights stuff because if we gave in to that sort of thing we’d just about have to give up bioscience altogether. This is different. The people affected are all involved in the isotope project. I’m pretty sure that whoever is doing it intends me to work that much out.
